We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (21 page)

“But that’s not—” I gulp against a new surge of bile. “That’s not possible. I’d remember.”

The doors in the room open and two guards drag Rai inside. He fights them, my brother does, but they’re much stronger. They strap him down and reach for a cap.

Colonel Kepuha says, “No, you won’t remember. You never do.”

Remembering Turinam

N.A. Ratnayake

Outside, the sun was setting. Salai’s journey had started in the cold peaks of the Dorhal Mountains, at the Temple of Heremi, built where the River Khem found its source. He had descended with the Khem to the west, into the secluded valley-basin sandwiched between the curve of the Dorhal range and the Western Sea. Salai had grown nervous as he approached the the Rytari checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain pass. Brown-skinned Turians like Salai were easy to spot among the Rytari and were often stopped. But the soldiers had noted Salai’s simple robe, the orange sash at his waist, and the single small pack on his back, and waved him on without so much as a word.

Salai had left the Khem the previous day and tracked north of the river, down from the irrigated, tea-growing communes of the foothills into the lower, rolling hills of farmland that made up the northern part of the valley. It was late summer. The grass was dry and a deep reddish brown, replaced in patches by swaths of yellow and green where Turians grew acres of corn, squash, lentils, and beans.

After three days on foot, the end of Salai’s journey was at last in sight. His pack was lighter than when he had started, since he had been slowly eating the food carefully packed within and drinking measured amounts of water. He took a careful sip to wet his dry mouth and throat and looked to the south.

Salai could see the main town of Turinam straddling the Khem in the middle of the valley. Turinam had served as the independent center of Turian commerce, culture, and government in the valley for generations. Now it flew a Rytari flag and served as the regional capitol for the Lord Governor, who reported directly to the Rytari Senate.

On the far side of the town, Salai could see the new Rytari settlements, as easy to spot against the backdrop of Turinam as his own skin was to the Rytari. Built haphazardly, with an eye towards haste, the structures paid no heed to Turian custom or the traditions that had kept the land and people in a sustainable cycle for generations. This river valley being the latest addition to a vast empire, there was plenty of land to be had—or reallocated.

Rytari kept moving in. Every month, a transport airship arrived in Turinam from the Rytari-conquered city-state of Aish, on the other side of the Dorhal Mountains. Each landing would bring more settlers, escorted by soldiers and carrying new machinery. The airship would stay a week, then depart with Turian grains, beans, lentils and tea, as well as fish from the village of Korasca, where the Khem met the Western Sea.

The new settlers had an insatiable need for fields to be leveled, domiciles to be built, and machine shops to be outfitted to repair their technology. Last month the Governor had ordered the construction of a new railway from Turinam to Aish, planning to bore straight through the Dorhal range. Most Turians were skeptical that anyone could accomplish this, even the Rytari with their machines. But it meant jobs, and the settlers kept moving in.

At the top of the hill, surrounded by fallow fields and ill-used, simple equipment, Salai paused to remember a part of his childhood. Though it had been almost fifteen years since he had been to this place, and he was now a young man instead of a boy, it still caused a familiar twinge of home. He approached and entered the small farmhouse without knocking. A woman dressed in a healer’s robe looked up from the wood stove in the corner. A brown, fired-clay pot simmered with a substance to which Salai attributed the pungent odor of the room. The woman looked Salai up and down and, recognizing the sash tied at Salai’s waist, raised her eyebrows.

“Auyashti, brother. You are in the Heremitian Anushasan, by your sash.” She looked somewhat older than he. Her face, while still smooth, bore the signs of having seen long hours of work for a long time.

“Auyashti, sister. You must be Jaeda of the Altharian Anushasan?” She nodded, but said nothing. Salai continued, “I received your letter, but it was difficult to leave Heremi until three days ago. I am here now, and I hope I am not too late.”

Jaeda’s expression was difficult to read. She gestured to the door leading out of the kitchen into a small room beyond and turned back to her pungent stew—a professional at work, who saw little benefit to small talk. Salai watched her for a few moments and then stepped through the door to which she had pointed.

The room was dim, being lit only by a candle burning on the writing table set against the far wall, where a window looked out at the Dorhal Mountains fading into the last deep purple throes of dusk. A shelf on the side wall was triple-stacked with books, and a wooden bed frame held up a pallet against the near wall. On the pallet, Salai could make out the crumpled figure of an old man. The old man’s breathing was slow and deliberate—occasionally an unnerving rattle betrayed how laboriously the air filled and exited the lungs.

“Jaeda?” the old man asked. His voice was faint, but it did not waver. “No more of the samahin. I would rather have a hastier death than any life lengthened by this taste in my mouth.” The old man’s words were appropriately clipped and cadenced, his sentences adhering to flawless Rytari spoken grammar. Each syllable was distinct, cold, and efficient—interlocking with its partners like the metal links in a chain stretched taut.

The younger pulled back his hood and spoke—though in a different tongue. Salai’s voice rose and fell, lilting and flowing like a stream through a forest on a summer day. The old man started at the sound of this language, and was silent for several moments after the younger man stopped speaking.

“Salai,” he finally said.

“Grandfather.”

“I do not know from whence you learned these words, and I do not want to know. My life is near an end, and you would be wise to take care of yours.”

Salai spoke again, new beautiful syllables weaving in with the old.

The old man’s response startled Salai with its forcefulness. “Stop,” Grandfather snapped, which reduced him to a fit of coughing for a few minutes. “Salai. I am overjoyed to hear your voice. But if you still love me at all, do not speak Turian to me. I will not speak to you if you say another word in Turian. They will kill you.”

Salai said nothing for a moment and waited in the room. The old man didn’t move. Salai opened his mouth to speak again, and his next words were in Rytari—though his sentences were less structured than Grandfather’s.

“There are no soldiers here. The new settlements are across the river. The Rytari will not hear us. Those words I spoke… I do not know Turian. I was only quoting what I memorized from a book I found at Heremi.”

“Not among those left in the library, I presume?”

“No. I was put in charge of restoring the shelves in the lower chamber of the library. When I tore out one of the shelves, I found the book. It is old, and in pieces. The cover is gone, so I don’t know the title. It had both Turian and Rytari writing.”

“I recognize the words. It is the work of Azdara, a Heremitian philosopher. How did you know how to sing the Turian glyphs?”

“You taught me, Grandfather.”

Grandfather said nothing, but tried to sit up slowly. Salai saw him struggling and moved closer to help him lift his body a little higher into a new position. When he was stable, Salai moved to the writing table and sat down in the chair. He turned it around to look at Grandfather, who spoke. “I do not recall ever doing such a thing in your early schooling. I could not have. Your generation is forbidden from even hearing Turian, let alone learning it. It is a capital offense.”

“It was not in my formal schooling. You sang me a song about the Turian alphabet when I was a child.” Grandfather paused, and Salai could see him straining his memory. A slow realization broke on his face and then a look of puzzled wonder.

“Salai,” he said, “That was over twenty years ago. You were no more than two years old.”

“I know. But I remember. I have used my required study of meditative practices to focus on the unearthing of memories.”

There was a light tap at the door. Salai glanced at the door, then at the bed. Grandfather nodded and raised his voice. “Come in, Jaeda.” The added energy of his speech caused more coughing. Jaeda entered and placed a steaming bowl of the pungent stew and a cup of tea on the side table next to the bed. Grandfather reached for the tea first and sipped it, soothing the cough in his throat.

Jaeda turned to Salai. “I doubt you want the samahin, since you are in good health. There are rice, beans, and lentils in your grandfather’s pantry, fresh produce on the table, and I have brought in more water. As you are not ill, you are welcome to cook them yourself.” She then turned her head to address them both. “I bid you good night, brothers.”

“Good night, sister,” both men responded in unison. Jaeda left, and Grandfather began eating. Salai watched and waited. He wasn’t hungry.

“So,” said Grandfather between bites. “You are now a Heremitian scholar. What do you study, Salai?”

“You should know, Grandfather. You were at Heremi, before you left.”

Grandfather stopped eating briefly and looked up, a strange expression on his face. “It is true that I was at Heremi. You were not even born—times have changed. With what does the anushasan occupy itself these days, now that the temple is run by a Rytari chancellor?”

Salai continued. “I don’t think much has changed. We study the same long tradition of subjects that have been contemplated at Heremi for centuries.”

Grandfather countered gruffly. “Ah, I see. So, languages? You study the languages of those states not yet absorbed into the Republic, so as to enable the Rytari to trade with and spy on them. And of course you study the Rytari language itself. History? No doubt solely the history of the Rytar Republic, and its version of the story of all other peoples. And translation? No doubt you translate Rytari books into other languages for dissemination.”

Salai tensed at the tone in Grandfather’s voice. “And we apply the laws of mathematics and physics to design new machines or improve existing ones.”

“And in so doing you become a part of their machine. Your studies are not pure.”

As he resumed eating, Grandfather muttered something that sounded suspiciously like a curse from the tone and inflection. Salai paused and breathed, reminding himself of the benefits of a calm mind.

“What do you mean pure, Grandfather?”

“Theoretical. Abstract. Without an immediate application, and no obvious concrete return.”

Salai glanced down at the old man incredulously, looking to see if it were possible that his grandfather could be joking. It was hard to read faces in the candlelight. “But to what end, Grandfather? What did the Heremitians do with that knowledge, if it had no application?”

Grandfather snorted angrily. “Even if there were no Rytari flag flying over Heremi, your words would stamp that temple as an arm of the Rytari state just as clearly. For generations, the Heremitian Anushasan were the keepers of what our Turian culture considered to be the highest questions: the exploration of identity—the unending search for who we are and the nature of our place in the web of existence.”

“But Grandfather, what is that worth?”

“Here you are beside my deathbed, seeking answers to something unresolved inside. Perhaps I should be asking that question of you.”

The two men were silent. Salai didn’t know what to say, and retreated from the debate to think. Outside, dusk had faded into night. Salai listened for Jaeda in the other room, but the house had gone quiet.

“It’s hasn’t been half an hour, Grandfather, and we are back to our endless semantics,” Salai said. “I came for you. And I came for… knowIedge. Ever since I found that book… I want to know about the fall of Turinam. And I want to hear the story in Turian.”

“No,” Grandfather said. “Clearly you have studied the history in Rytari. There is no point in going back to old wounds. It would be inefficient. And why in Turian? You said yourself that you do not even know the language.”

“I have trained my memory, Grandfather. I will remember it until I can write it down. And then I will keep it until I can translate it. You are one of the last of our people who remembers that day, who can tell it from how our people saw it. Tell me of the people who were there, which ones you loved and why. Tell me of your friends who died and of the part of who we are that died with them.”

Salai felt uncomfortable making such a plea—emotions always made him feel as if he were not in control. But he saw that he had made an impression on Grandfather’s thinking, and that gears were turning in the old head, so he waited.

“It is hard,” Grandfather finally said slowly. “I have not talked or thought about that day in decades, except in my nightmares. And I am ashamed to say that after all these years of being denied my own language, even in my own home, I find it easier to think in Rytari. Huh! Here is a dying man, Salai, who cannot think in his own native tongue.”

Grandfather simply breathed for a few minutes, and Salai didn’t say anything. Their eyes met, and two hardened visages for a moment let go of their stubbornness. It was Grandfather who broke his gaze first as he began, in a voice that was soft and strong and sad.

“For days we had been watching the siege of Aish, on the eastern side of the Dorhal Mountains. We saw Rytar’s legions of armored soldiers, some on foot and some riding mechanical beasts, and in the distance their artillery lining the horizon. Aish fought bravely, but they fell like corn stalks before the scythe against… against the mautkatai.”

The inflection and tone of the word made Salai shiver in the warm night. “What are the… those things?”

“Mautkatai are a horrid form of mechanized infantry, Salai—brainless machines that are sent in waves before the living Rytari soldiers in order to soften the enemy. They are as big as a man, and, how shall I say it, unwind when released.”