El and Onine (11 page)

“I cannot take it all away, little Pchi. But you
will feel some relief when night arrives.”

Night had arrived and I was still waiting. My throat
was hoarse from the cries of pain I couldn’t suppress during my torture. The
serum she’d given me made me feel lightheaded and fuzzy, but my body ached from
the burning liquid. I tried to lie down on the bed of silks but even a soft
touch was too much for my raw skin. I went out into the garden to greet Bendo
and my fractal goddess. Luna reigned full in the sky and shone so brightly she
seemed in competition with the sleeping eye. I stood between the cabbages with my
goat, keeping her warm pelt away. I wanted to pet her but even my calloused palms
hurt.

I don’t know how much time past before I heard Tal
out in the field. The wheat rustled first and then his step shuffled the soil.
When he came over the wall into my yard, I felt the greatest sense of relief
and sorrow too.

“El,” he said. “You’re okay. I’m so glad you’re
okay.”

He didn’t reach for me or try to touch me but stood
a few paces away as though he wanted to keep himself in the shadows.

“Where were you?” I asked. “I looked for you.”

“I was assigned to help in the silo.” He wasn’t
telling the truth. “I saw her take you. I knew it was coming.”

“It’s official now. I’ve been assigned.”

He looked away when he said, “To Tiro?”

“Yes,” I said. “The master will come for me on the
third moonscape.”

“It must be this way for now.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe he thought so. “This way?
How can it be this way?”

“For now,” he said.

“What’s changed? You were so against it. You
promised Minosh you’d save me—you promised me you’d keep them from taking
me—from hurting me.” I lost myself and crumbled to the ground in tears.
The pain of the liquid haunted me still, that scalding bath I was forced to lie
in while under the hot rays of the eye. I couldn’t do anything but wail in the
darkness of my garden.

Tal kept his distance and repeated himself with a
voice I barely recognized. “It must be this way for now.” He spoke in hushed
tones, uncertain of his words. “But don’t give in to it.”

I thought he acted strangely because he found me
repulsive. I assumed my appearance had changed with my submersion in the hot
liquid. I certainly felt as though my skin had peeled off my bones and melted
in the bath. Ashamed, I pulled the silk covering around me and pressed it up
against my face to hide it.

“Don’t cover yourself,” he said.

I felt exposed, as if he could read my mind and his command
made me angry. “You promised Minosh,” I said. “You told her you’d keep me
safe.”

“The pain will pass,” he said. “I promise.”

I was so frustrated I couldn’t suppress my tears. I
wanted him to hold me, despite the pain, and so I moved toward him, but he kept
backing away deeper into the shadows.

“How do you know about the pain?” I asked.

“Sweet El,” he said. “I-I-I must go …”

He turned and left, lost among the stalks of wheat,
but I was certain he whispered “clay-born goddess” when he went.

Our meeting was so terribly strange and different
that I’d forgotten to give him Em’s message. I was reluctant to chase after
him, but I’d given her my word and so I ran into the field, leaving Bendo bleating
for my return.

It took me some time to find him in the darkness. He
seemed to vanish in the stalks. Bright, beautiful Luna couldn’t guide me, she’d
shrunk back into the black sky, tucked between a row of clouds. I wandered in
the darkness, hoping to hear his step on the path or smell his smoky skin on
the air. I couldn’t catch a trace of either one, but finally found him several
stretches from the shanty. He wasn’t alone. I heard her voice before I saw
them. Em had found him despite my help. I went unnoticed in the stalks of
wheat, as audience to their hushed whispers. I didn’t want to turn back—to
leave them alone. I hid myself a few rows over from where they were and
listened.

“A youngling?”

“Yes.” She hadn’t given up her tears and fought to
speak despite them.

“What did the council do?”

“They forced it out of me,” she said. “They gave me
some kind of drink to destroy the seed.”

“Good,” he said.

“I didn’t want to take it,” she said. “So I faked
it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t ingest the drink.”

“You didn’t take the emetic?”

“I only pretended to and when I vomited, it was
merely grains and milk.”

“They didn’t know the difference?”

“How could they?”

“They’ll know soon enough,” he said. “You can’t hide
this from them. You must destroy it.”

“But how could you want that? Didn’t our attempts
mean anything to you?”

“No,” he said.

I felt a pang of guilt when I heard him confess
their union meant nothing to him.

“I’m sorry, but they’ve decided we’re not meant to
procreate and we can’t go against Kyprian rule.”

“Why not?” She pleaded. “How can they give us this
and then take it away?”

“My life is not my own,” he said coldly.

That didn’t sound like the Tal I knew.

“I won’t give up,” she said. “Please don’t go.”

“I have to,” he said. “I can’t stay out here with
you any longer. I must get inside.”

“Please don’t give up.” Her pleas were heartbreaking
even for me. “Please, Tal.”

Either he stepped away and she pushed forward, or
she ran toward him and he stepped back, but his voice turned forceful when he
told her to stay where she was. “Don’t touch me,” he said. “You mustn’t.”

“No,” he shouted with a voice that came from
somewhere else. I heard the struggle without seeing it and Em was silent. Not a
scream, or a sigh, or a sob. “No,” he whispered over and over again. “No.”

I wanted to comfort him but was too frightened to
reveal myself. I couldn’t know what happened and when I heard him walk away through
the stalks, far past my hiding spot between the tall blades of wheat, I searched
for Em. I assumed she passed out on the ground and he left her, but I was wrong.
When I found the spot where they’d been standing, nothing was left but a pile
of ash.

***

For two moonscapes, as I bathed in searing hot
liquid beneath the eye, I thought of Em. I hadn’t seen her in the cart on the
way to the Temple and Bee was gone too. My world seemed to shrink at a rapid
pace. Each arrival at the Temple took me away from the fire pits, away from
Tal, through the courtyard, past the cylinders of fire, around the silo of
liquid luster and water pumps and into the forest of white gold trees, up the glimmering
path to the hall of stones high on the hill. The beacon of my torture made me
sick to see by the third rise of the eye.

“Your final trial,” Saturnia’s sister said. “Your
new beginning.”

Her words were more and more cryptic and I’d come to
rely on her to soothe my physical pain, though not my mental anguish. I was desperate
to speak of Em but didn’t know how.

When I returned from the Bathing Temple on that
final night, before I suffered my real torture, I felt utterly exhausted. Tiro
would come for me at the rise of the eye, but for much more than my sitting
quietly in the back of his cart to ride to the Temple. He’d have other places
to take me, I was sure of it, and grosser tasks for me to do. I sat on the pile
of silks and replayed Em’s scene over and over in my mind. Would I feel pain
too?

I was grateful when Bendo’s bleats broke my train of
thought, drawing me out to see Luna and bask in her blue light. When my goat’s calls
turned to groans, I knew she was in pain. I found her between the cabbage rows and
kneeled down beside her.

“What is it, sweet Bendo?” Her gray coat looked dark
in the blue light and I reached out to pet her with my calloused hand. “You
look frightened,” I said. “Are you scared too?”

She wore the sorrow of life on her face. I lay down
beside her on the cold ground, stroking her soft pelt. The heat of her sticky
blood rushed to meet my hand and I jerked it away. I held my palm up to Luna’s
light and watched the blood run down the pad of my hand and inside my arm. I’d
never seen blood—so dark, so thick. It dripped onto the soil that
nourished the cabbage seeds. I rubbed the bloodstains into the dirt with disbelief.

“El.” I hadn’t heard Tal’s step this time and when
he reached down to pick me up from the ground, my body tightened.

“Tal?”

He pulled me close to him and carried me into the
warmth of the shanty. Once inside, he placed me on the bed of silks without breaking
our embrace.

“I saw you in the wheat field with her,” I said.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“She touched me—never mind, it wasn’t me.”

“But—”

“We’ve got to leave,” he said.

“What about Bendo?”

“We’ll have to leave her.”

“But she’s hurt,” I said. “I saw blood.”

“We don’t have time. The eye will be up soon.”

The flashbacks of my pain in the burning liquid
beneath the eye were so vivid I winced at the reminder.

“Tiro will be here,” he said. “You can’t escape once
they’ve come.”

“Who?”

“Never mind,” he said.

“I feel … sleepy.”

I thought Tal’s voice grew smaller, farther away,
and the sound of Bendo’s bleats multiplied, as they faded too. I reached for
Tal and felt him close, though it looked as if he was on the other side of the
shanty. He glowed in the blue light that shone through the lattice.

“Where will we …” I asked with barely a voice.

He hushed me and told me I was safe with him. I
couldn’t keep my eyes open. I tried to watch Tal as he rummaged in the
cupboards of my shanty, putting things into a sack and then taking things out.
He kept looking over at me but then I fell away and everything went dark.

I saw a bright spark in the blackness, and then
another, and another, and then ten and one hundred and then thousands of sparks
in the darkness. They weren’t sparks of light, but sparks of life. Living
beings—sapients past, present and future—a galaxy of lives revealed
itself to me in the darkness and my body sizzled under the pressure of each
fire. My cold skin went warm and then hot until it was afire too. My sapient shell
melted and burned away, as the underside of my skin turned golden like theirs. I
was one of them—I was Kyprian. I clung to my sublimity, even as it
slipped away and my coldness returned. My senses tingled first and the tip of
my tongue tickled with the taste of sweetness, and when I opened my eyes, a
fire raged in front of me.

“Welcome back,” Tal said.

My bed of silks was gone. I lay on the ground and
had to wiggle my stiff body awake to sit up.

“Let me help you.” Tal reached out and helped me to
sit up, leaning me against a hard surface. My head was swollen and numb and my
senses fuzzy. The brightness of the fire pit in front of me made me disoriented
and the smell of smoke was strong.

“You felt cold,” he said. “The fire’s to warm you
up.”

I looked at Tal sitting across from me. He was on
the other side of the fire and I thought he’d reached directly through the
flames to help me sit up. He looked different but I couldn’t say how. Perhaps
he looked more beautiful than I remembered—and bigger.

“Where am I?”

“You’re safe,” he said.

We were far from the shanties and even farther from
the Bathing Temple and its Venusian bathers.

“The outer sands,” he said. “We’re in a cavern on
their edge. You’re safe.”

I wondered how I could be safe in the outer sands. “Will
I see Minosh?”

He didn’t answer and I wasn’t certain I’d said it
aloud.

“How’d I get here?” I’d never been beyond the golden
forest or the wheat field behind my garden.

“I carried you.”

I was confused. “But how’d you get here?”

“I walked.”

I thought it was impossible to go past the edge of
the fields. No sapient had ever traveled beyond the stalks. Venusian, maybe,
but no sapient. “But what about the wall of fire and rings of lava and acidic
rains and chasms—”

“El,” he said. “You should rest.”

“How can I rest?” I couldn’t hide the panic in my
voice. “How will we survive in the outer sands? What about Bendo? The blood?”

As though crossing through the fire, Tal came
forward and sat beside me. He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me to
him. I melted in that embrace.

“It won’t be long now,” he said. “You are strong.”

“What am I to do?”

I thought he whispered “choose” but I couldn’t be
certain.