The Question
I didn’t drink that night, not even the ritual sip of liquor that Binta sampled as part of the celebration the villagers held for him. I smiled when people smiled at me, shared stories and anecdotes when asked, and even danced with a couple of the local fellas. Not once, though, did I stop looking for signs of deception. I guess that’s why I was so taken by surprise when it finally appeared.
Guess they were surprised too.
‘Life is hard in the Seven Sands,’ Orphanus began, taking to the hall’s little wooden dais as the evening’s festivities were beginning to die down. ‘Nobody knows that better than the seventy-three souls who live in this town.’ He held up a finger and corrected himself. ‘Seventy-four souls.’
There were a few cheers around the hall and the people sitting on either side of Binta and me reached over to touch him on the shoulder. He looked up, bleary-eyed, and smiled at them as if he understood, then gestured to me.
‘What is he saying?’ he signed.
‘He says that you’re a terribly ugly boy and you smell worse than the skunks that sometimes come to steal their cabbages, but if you promise not to make trouble for them you can live with the pigs.’
Binta offered up his now-customary two-fingered salute before laying his head back down on the table and snoring quietly.
Lyrida, sitting next to me, chuckled.
‘What were you saying about sleeping with pigs?’
‘You know the fingertongue?’ I asked, surprised.
‘A little. Khatam taught me a bit each time he brought Bluebird . . . Binta to the village. I can’t speak it nearly as well as you, though. How long have you been studying the silent voice?’
The first lesson Enna had taught me in arta loquit is that you have to listen to all of what a person’s saying to you. Lyrida’s casual tone hid beneath it a lilting fragility, as if my answer might have more meaning to her than her question suggested.
It’s important to her that she’s tried hard to learn Binta’s language, I realised then, and found the chestnut-haired young woman’s subtle nervousness sweetly endearing.
Enna’s second lesson in arta loquit was to always know why you’re about to say something. Is it simply to impart information? To try to learn something? Or are you doing it to make yourself sound important? What’s the value of what you’re saying, and how will it affect your relationship to the person asking?
‘I’ve been studying it a while now,’ I said. ‘Feels like forever.’
She smiled, and seemed reassured by my answer. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it? I keep thinking I must be thick to have so much trouble getting all those finger twitches right.’
I groaned aloud. ‘Ugh, I know. And Binta’s so fast! I can barely keep up with him.’
Lyrida laughed. It was a warm laugh that drew my attention to her eyes, which were green, and then to her lips, which were . . .
‘What are you doing, Good Dog?’ Binta asked with a few subtle twirls of his fingers. His head was still down, but his sleepy eyelids were open a crack.
Lyrida’s own eyes were focused on my face, so I was able to respond to Binta surreptitiously.
‘Nothing. Go back to sleep or I’ll feed you to the pigs myself.’
‘Are you staying the night?’ Lyrida asked. Her voice was different this time, maybe a fraction deeper, and there was just a tiny bit more breath in her words.
The two of us hadn’t danced together, but when we’d been out on the floor as Orphanus and a couple of the old folks had played country jigs on battered instruments, we’d brushed against each other more than once. Now I saw her hand was on the table, closer to mine than it had been before, and the way she’d shifted her chair . . . her knee was barely an inch away.
And how do you feel about that, Good Dog? I imagined Binta asking, though now he really was asleep.
I’d never . . . been with anyone. Most of my life I’d avoided even touching people on account of the Jan’Tep spells embedded into the now-fading sigils tattooed around my neck that made people hate me. By the time the effects of those spells had died down, I was living with Durral and Enna – and that lady is a hugger, I tell you. So that had been enough for me, for a while. Now though?
I reached across the table to a trencher filled with a kind of fried potato they sliced up and served with a spectacularly spicy sauce. When I was done, my knee was touching Lyrida’s. She didn’t move away, and now, by some miracle I hadn’t noticed despite all my arta precis, her fingers and mine were intertwined.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked quietly.
‘I’m fine. Why do you ask?’
That smile of hers was back, but it was different now. More . . . intimate. ‘You’re breathing quite rapidly, Ferius.’
I reached for my arta valar – what Durral calls ‘daring’ but which I’d come to realise was pretty much identical to swagger. Unfortunately it failed me utterly.
‘The sauce on the potatoes is really hot,’ I said.
My embarrassment having become painfully obvious, Lyrida started taking her hand away. I held on.
Sometimes you don’t realise how lonely you’ve been until, for even one second, you don’t feel lonely any more.
‘I’d like to stay the night,’ I said.
She nodded, and held my gaze, and just like that, plans were made that didn’t require any discussion or debate. No second guessing or awkward confirmations.
I’d never been with anyone, boy or girl. Never kissed, never touched in that way that—
It would’ve been grand, I think.
Orphanus was working his way up to a crescendo in his speech. Lyrida and I turned to listen, silently acknowledging to each other that at least a little discretion was called for.
‘So now we can give some of ourselves to this boy, to Binta, and in every act of love we show him fight back against the terrible darkness that took his father and the good brothers and sisters of the Silent Garden monastery.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a crumpled piece of parchment. ‘The traveller gave me this before she left. A poem. A promise of better times to come. I don’t know all the words, of course. Reckon there’s seven different languages in this poem, but she wrote it all down in syllables so I could share them with all of you.’
‘The traveller?’ I asked Lyrida.
She tried to shush me, but I grabbed her arm and squeezed it hard. ‘Who is your father talking about?’
Lyrida winced, then answered. ‘The traveller. The woman who came to Tinto Rhea to warn us about what had happened at the monastery.’
And there it was: the question I hadn’t asked.
‘We got word two days ago,’ Orphanus had told me.
‘Got word from who? Who told you about the monastery?’ I’d failed to ask.
Orphanus was reading out his poem, and on the first line he was awkward, stilted, like you might expect of someone reading a language they don’t speak. But by the second the syllables came swift and sure, so effortless it was like they were being drawn out of him by an unseen hand. By the third line, the others in the room were repeating the first, trailing after his every utterance like ducks following their mother. And then Lyrida was saying them, and I heard those same beautiful, transcendent and unknowable words slipping from my own mouth, pulling me along with them into the abyss I already saw appearing in Lyrida’s eyes as she stared back at me with a hunger that bore no resemblance to the gentle ache we’d both felt moments ago.
And then a shriek, so loud it deafened me in my left ear – the side where Binta had been sleeping. I turned, and saw he was standing on the bench, his mouth wide open as the boy who couldn’t speak screamed and screamed and screamed.