Sixteen

B U T T E R F L Y

 

“Tell me something, Neythan.”

Neythan suspected that’s where it began. But then he couldn’t be sure. Funny thing memory, will of its own. Even now he wasn’t exactly sure what Arianna had meant to speak of that night. Looking back, the sense of something ulterior, beneath the surface, beneath the words, had always lingered. They’d sat with their feet dangling on the lip of the Great Dry Lake that Master Johann had shown them as children when they first came to Ilysia. They’d stayed there for a long time, chatting, staring into the jagged shadow the crater spread beneath them. A warm starless night, benign sky above, still forest behind. How different Arianna had seemed; strangely coy, nervous even, almost a different person. Tell me something, she’d said; her voice soft, insistent, opening to some foreign part of her Neythan had never seen before, his admittance a privilege. Tell me something you have never told anyone before. And that thought, that sense of privilege, of a secret between them, tugged at him, made him want to prolong the spell, play along, and so he answered.

“I dream sometimes.”

Arianna had regarded him suspiciously, waiting for the joke to spill. “Dream?” Her nose wrinkled like a rabbit’s. “Everybody dreams.”

“The same dream,” Neythan clarified.

“Hm. And what is it you dream of?”

“Of night,” Neythan said slowly. “Of flames… of blood. And someone there in the dark, dying. Someone I don’t want to die.”

Arianna had studied him, fiddling her tongue at the back of her front teeth in that considered way of hers, emerald eyes atwinkle, fronds of dark hair askew. “And you’ve told no one?”

Neythan shook his head.

“Why not?”

Neythan shrugged with another shake of the head.

A corner of Arianna’s mouth twitched to a half-smile.

“What?” Neythan said.

“I’m trying to imagine what Master Johann would say.”

“About my not telling?”

“About your dream.”

Neythan shrugged again, a thought he’d already considered. “He’d say it’s my sha.”

Arianna nodded. “He’d say it’s trying to teach you.”

“Teach me… Teach me what?”

“Helplessness.” The answer was quick and, though she said it quietly, emphatic, like something she’d known a long time, like wisdom. “That there are things you cannot do. Things you cannot stop, or control.”

“You almost sound like him.”

Arianna shrugged and glanced up at the night. “And he’d be right too, Neythan,” she continued, speaking to the sky. “There are things we cannot control, can’t wield, even of our own selves, no matter how many disciplines we are taught.”

“What things?”

“Things like the mind… What is in it. What it chooses to want. Even when you don’t want it to want what it does…” She continued to stare into the muted constellations above where puffs of cloud were now gathering to block out the moon. “Do you ever wonder, Neythan?” She turned to look at him now, eyes narrowed, accusing, pleading, it was difficult to tell which. “Do you ever wonder what it would be to simply go where you please, do what you want?”

Neythan hesitated. The words seemed prickly, hot to the touch. “Go where?” he said, holding the question at arm’s length. “Do what?”

“Anything,” she said. “Anywhere.”

“But the teachings…”

“Never mind the teachings.”

Neythan balked but tried not to let it show, tried not to disturb the spell, this quickened nameless something, fickle as a perched butterfly, lingering in the space between them. “The teachings,” he repeated quietly. “The creed… it is what guides us… what makes us. It is who we are.”

“What do you know of who we are? You do not know who you are. Or who I am. And neither do I. They – the tutors – they make us fearful of knowing. But why ought we be frightened, Neythan?” Her voice lowered. She moved closer, whispering, as if the woods might hear. “Why ought we fear the things we want?”

He’d hesitated then, a growing habit of the exchange, the two of them treading carefully into where these flighty words of theirs had ushered them. He gazed at her face, the large jade eyes almost luminous, their whites curious and glowing. The dainty nose and small expressive mouth and her dark hair, usually tied into a single braid, now loose and unfettered and falling messily. And she seemed so timid, so unlike herself; innocent, fragile. And so, after a long pause, almost experimentally, just to see if the words could be said, he answered. “Perhaps you’re right.” And it was these words Neythan had come to both regret and cherish the most.

Another smile had shivered on Arianna’s lips then, like a skittish bird – disbelieving, grateful – and Neythan saw that his agreement had freed her somehow, had affirmed what she had not allowed herself to believe before. A secret, some private madness he, by agreeing, had saved her from. She leant forward. The space between his face and hers – precarious and bewitching and agitated, like the air before a storm – closed. She neared, eyes flitting nervously – to his nose, his ear, his cheek, his eye, his forehead, his lips… A twig snapped behind them. Neythan turned around. Nothing. No one. Too dark to see. He turned back but it was too late, the spell broken, the butterfly unnerved. Arianna was running away to the safety of the thickets, away into the milky blue night.

 

“If you’re not careful you’ll turn to salt, you know,” Caleb said.

Neythan glanced up from the deep, shadowed tunnel of the well he’d been staring into. Nearly four years had passed since that night he’d sat with Arianna at the crater, feeling known by her in a way he’d not been known before or since, like there was some fleshless umbilical thing between them, pulling from inside, a secret bond. More than Brotherhood. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before…

“What were you thinking of just then?” Caleb said. “It was like you were a world away.”

Neythan blinked, smiled thinly, then tossed the rope-tethered pot down the pit again to draw more water for the animals. “Did Filani say how long she would be?” he said. “Or who these friends of hers are?”

“Cousins, I think she said. Or a cousin.”

“A cousin…” Neythan tugged on the rope, pulling it taut against the mooring post by the well to check its bind. They’d been here for close to an hour now, waiting at the edge of the township for Filani to return. “… in a Sumerian town? I thought Súnamites did not like to settle away from their homelands.”

Caleb scoffed. “Sayings and proverbs. Rarely trust them, especially that one. When we reach Hanesda you’ll find plenty of Súnamites. There, you find many of any and everything that can be found.”

“You don’t speak fondly of the place.”

“Should I?”

Neythan shrugged. “You’re a merchant. They call it the merchant’s home.”

“Like I said, not all that is said can be counted true.”

“No,” Neythan said. “I suppose not.”

Caleb watched as Neythan’s gaze grew still again.

“Who is she?”

Neythan started, looked at him. “What? Who?”

“This girl you hunt… She is your decree?”

Neythan tugged at the rope, bobbing the vessel beneath to tip and collect its water.

“Come now, Neythan. I have told you the story of my cause.”

“Little of it.”

“I’ve told more of it than you have of your own.”

“Only whilst you were in your cups, aided by the sourwine.”

“Even so. I have told.”

Neythan pulled on the cord and began to yank the vessel from the water. He grunted. “There is nothing to tell.”

Caleb laughed. “Well of course there isn’t. We journey halfway across the Sovereignty in pursuit of her for mere sport. Half-starve ourselves on the way for the same reason… I may no longer be of the Brotherhood, Neythan, but we are still covenanted you and I, in words as binding as blood. You know what binds me in my part, I ought to know what binds you in yours.”

Neythan, straining, pulled the vessel to the lip of the well. He looked at Caleb and nodded at it.

“Ah, sorry.” Caleb came and reached across to hold the pot’s handle as Neythan let go of the rope to grip the pot’s other side. They heaved it over the well’s ledge together, then set it down against the nearby trough, allowing the water to pour in as the mules and horse drank.

“So,” Caleb resumed. “Is she your decree?”

Neythan let out a long slow breath. “She is a rogue,” he said. “A betrayer.”

Caleb’s eyebrows hopped up on his long forehead. “She is Shedaím?”

Neythan didn’t answer.

“Strange of them to have sent you, one so young, after a heretic. And alone.”

“I was not sent,” Neythan said, already regretting the conversation.

Caleb frowned, then gestured for further explanation.

Neythan sighed heavily. “We were sent out… a decree to fulfil… She turned on us.”

“Us? How many of you were there?”

“We were three.”

“Three? All Brothers? For a single decree?”

Neythan started lowering the pot once more into the well.

“Where is the third?”

“Dead. She slew him.”

That stopped Caleb. He shifted. Paused. Then spoke again. “Why?”

The pot touched and bobbed against the well’s water, bouncing softly along the rope. Neythan removed one hand and looked at Caleb. “That is what I intend to ask her… Perhaps the last thing I will ask her, before I require at her hand the blood she’s taken from the Brotherhood.”

Others arrived at the well, a few shepherd boys settling a flock at the bottom of the low footworn slope beneath and walking the shallow incline to draw water, a group of young girls coming out from the town with buckets, a large company of men coming in from the country.

“What do you imagine will be the answer?”

“What?”

“Why she did it.”

“How should I know?”

“You above all others can know. You, the others of your sharím, you will have spent every day since you were children together. You will be like family.”

“Yet she saw fit to kill one of us.”

“So, there was nothing? No sign? No hint that might point to–”

“You think I haven’t thought of all this? Haven’t wondered? You think every day, every hour, all this has not come to me? She killed my friend, Caleb. Butchered him. Carved his throat like a lamb before a banquet. Listened to his gags, listened to him choking on his own blood as he died, slow, and in pain… Family?” He laughed sourly. His jaw bobbed, as if to continue, but he stopped and shook his head instead. He turned to the well, tugged the rope to dunk the pot, then yanked again, put one foot against the ledge and gripped the cord two-handed, bracing to draw it out.

Caleb watched silently, letting Neythan settle as he pulled the pot to the top of the well. He reached across and helped lift it out and over, then stepped back as Neythan put it once more to the trough for the beasts to drink.

“What kind of girl was she, this Arianna?”

Neythan glanced sidelong at Caleb, irked by his persistence, but saw no malice there. He sighed again and looked out over the empty land leading to the town gates.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She was always… different, I suppose.”

“In what way?”

Neythan shrugged. He sat down on the ledge of the well, thought about it. “I don’t know… For the rest of us, the disciplines, the training, it took all our strength to master. Eleven years… there was rarely a day we ended without sweat and exhaustion. But it never seemed like that with her. It was as if everything to her was a kind of game, to be made light of… I remember one time, the tutors and Master Johann take us down the mount, half a day’s walk from the village. They want to teach us a new weapon. The shentak, it is called. You carry two of them, blades, like daggers sort of, but the hilt is curved, doubles from either side of the handle, around your knuckles and down your arm to the elbow…” He lifted his hand to demonstrate and looked at Caleb. The old man nodded knowingly. “Of course. You will know it… So you know then that the thing with it is the blades move, they swing, are weighted in the handle so you can sort of feel, after a while, the way they will swing. Not easy to master.

“So Hamir and Master Johann have brought us all this way so our sha will be clear and still, undistracted by the village and its people, so we can remain there for a few days or weeks to learn it. We can’t have been much older than twelve or thirteen years at the time… Well. By nightfall of the second day Arianna is wielding these things as if born to. The rest of us are still just trying to make sure we don’t chop off our own arms. Meanwhile she’s telling Master Johann, ‘let’s go back, I’m missing Yulaan’s sweetsoup.’”

He turned back to face Caleb. The little old man smiled a little, which seemed strange, until Neythan realized it was he who had been smiling, at the memory, and that Caleb was simply smiling back. Neythan shed the smirk like something dirty.

The approaching girls from the town had come near the well, giggling bashfully, glancing at Neythan. There were three of them, sisters by the look, ages close together. Neythan stepped back and handed over the rope. The eldest took it with a grateful nod and began to carefully let it down as Neythan stepped away to stand by Caleb.

“There was sometimes something else with her,” Neythan said. “A sadness… or fear.”

“What was she afraid of?”

“I don’t know… It never really made sense.”

Neither spoke for a while. Neythan glanced over to the town gate where Filani, less than an hour before, had wandered in on her mule to search for her cousin. He glanced back at the well and the girls drawing their water and the men coming in from the country. Neythan could hear the soft clink of metal on them as they moved. One or two acknowledged him with a nod as they sat tiredly down at the other side of the well. Neythan nodded back.

He looked at Caleb. The little man was frowning in thought.

“What?”

“You say she was afraid.”

“So?”

“It can be a fearful thing, to discover the sins of your father.”

Neythan eyed him with a frown of his own. “What are you talking about?”

“A father, a mother, they are all a child knows of the world. But one day perhaps that child grows, learns things, sees things. When young, the sins of a father, to a child, are not sins, they are the right acts, but when older, they see them as they are. They see their father as they are. It can be a fearful thing.”

Neythan didn’t answer.

Caleb stepped closer. “For you, me, her, our father has been the Brotherhood. We come to it as children. It teaches us, tells us what is to be thought, what is to be believed.”

Neythan shook his head. “No.”

“A man imagines the world to be whatever he has seen of it and nothing more. But a man can be wrong. Like you were wrong, before you discovered the Watcher.”

“No, that’s not the same. You’re twisting things.”

“Perhaps she discovered things too, Neythan, about the Brotherhood. Perhaps that night, she wanted to escape.”

“You would defend her?”

“Perhaps your friend woke to discover her fleeing. Perhaps she panicked.”

“You would defend her, because you hate the order.”

“And ought I to love it? After it betrayed me?”

“You don’t know what was or wasn’t done. Yet you want me to hate the order as you do.”

“I want you to think, Neythan.”

Neythan turned away from him, back to the well. He was about to turn back and suggest, just to change the subject, that they go into the town to find their own shelter, when he glimpsed him. The cocoa-complexioned face, those long oval solemn eyes, bronzed skin, wispy long black hair, and that one thin long scar trailing from beneath his eye to under his jaw – the man who’d taught Neythan to read, who’d welcomed him to the village in Ilysia as a child, standing amongst the men who were not herdsmen. Neythan stared. The man’s name dropped like a query from his lips.

“Jaleem?”

The man looked up, turning toward him, expressionless, his blank black gaze coming to rest on him and then, in that slowed and still moment, firing some unlooked-for instinct of alarm in Neythan. Jaleem’s long arm lifted, pointing.

“There,” he said. “That is him. He is the one.”

The other men turned to regard Jaleem, and then turned again, following his outstretched arm and pointed finger, to see Neythan. Then there was a lull, a brief fragment of time in which they looked at Neythan and Neythan simply looked back. Then one of the men reached beneath his sheepskin coat, breaking the lull. The men began to slowly come forward, like hunters to prey, drawing swords, axes and maces as they approached Neythan.

“Get the beasts, Caleb.”

“What is this?”

“I don’t know.” Neythan drew his sword. “Get the beasts.”

The girls squealed at the sight of drawn blades, buckets of water upended as they began to flee.

Caleb backed away and started to quickly untether the horse and mules. The first man saw and stepped closer, his stance coiled and low, shoulders hunched, scrawny under the bulk of the sheepskin.

He lunged forward, his blade swinging toward Neythan’s leg.

Neythan stepped back, hopped, and stamped down hard as the man’s sword passed beneath his foot. The blade clanged to the ground as the man stumbled forward.

Neythan swivelled his hips, lifted a knee. Crunch of bone. The man’s head caromed backward as he twisted and splayed to the ground.

Now everyone was shouting, the shepherds running into the town. Sheep panicked, bleating and hopping around the well. A dog somewhere barked.

The second man rushed in, burly and heavy-handed, swinging a mace from overhead. Neythan sidestepped and spun, swinging his sword as he pivoted. The blade sliced across the man’s cheek beneath the eye, sending him back into the next onrusher, hands clutching his bloodied face.

Neythan stepped in and shoved again. Both men went down.

Neythan turned to parry a sword from behind. Clang of metal. Swords locked. The blade bit at Neythan’s shoulder and drew blood. Neythan threw an elbow, freed an arm, then followed with a kick to the gut. He watched the man stagger back and hit the well’s ledge, legs and feet kicking upwards at the impact as he fell heels up and headlong into the hole.

Caleb shouted from the saddle of his mule, holding the reins of the horse and other mule beside him, each animal now untethered. There were at least ten attackers, and more, seeing the chaos, now running in from the sloping plain beyond the well. Jaleem was nowhere to be seen. Neythan turned and sprinted toward his horse, waving Caleb to flee. An arrow whistled at his ear as he ran.

“Come on!” Caleb screamed.

Neythan leapt, one foot into the stirrup, swinging his other leg over. An arrow thudded into the horse’s rear. The horse whinnied vengefully and started with Neythan barely in the saddle, hanging on sideways. The other mule was already down, two shafts sticking out from its neck, its mouth wide and panting.

“Into the town,” Neythan shouted ahead to Caleb. “We will lose them there.”

“No. They don’t have horses. We’ll go to the country.”

Neythan, still side-hung on the horse, tried to pull himself up, yanking on the reins for leverage. He pulled on the bit and twisted the horse’s head, curving its way back to the well, the horse already limping from the shaft.

A man caught up and leapt onto the other side, clawing at Neythan, trying to pull him off.

The horse sagged. Neythan’s foot was tangled. The other attackers swarmed around, one coming from the other side to hack at him.

Neythan heaved his weight and hit the man on the other side of the horse, jabbing his knuckles into the eye. The man hung on, old hand, fidgeting in his belt for a blade. Neythan reached for his own and tugged it free as the one on foot came near.

He parried as the horse swung around again, hiding him from the onrusher. Turned back to find the hanger-on with dagger raised. Then a fleshy thud and grunt and the man turned rigid before slumping from the horse’s limping flank. Neythan glanced over the saddle to find Caleb opposite on the mule with his bow at the ready, having shot the attacker.

“Hurry up! I’m always waiting for you.”

Neythan kicked his heel up over the horse’s back, hauled himself into the saddle, parrying again as another ran in swinging at the horse to hamstring her. Then they were galloping away, Caleb on the mule, Neythan on horseback, as the men chased and harried. Neythan looked over his shoulder and saw Jaleem behind the men, still as a tree and watching calmly as the others gave chase.