Mercy, Chapter 6: Original Work
Sep. 21st, 2011 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiChapters 1-5 on AO3
Chapter 6
Our Journey, Day 8
For three days, we had crossed a terrain of steep, coastal hillsides, often with a mere depression in the rock for a trail. The scrabbling took a toll on Chi'anové. His legs ached and sweat clung around his eyes, his frustration compounded by hurt pride: he was a skilled rock climber; aside from Jana, climbing was his prime element. But now that his health was defeating him, no one saw his talent. Again, he was misjudged--or so he thought. In fact, Nyra noted his poise, and seeing how he struggled when he ought to have outstripped us alerted her to his illness. I didn't tell him that; he chafed under her attention.
But she asked me about it as we gathered kindling, and I explained what I could: that sickness was building up inside him and he needed a machine to cleanse it.
The idea filled her with pity and revulsion. "If he were of our folk, we'd let him die. We don't hold with machines to stave off death."
I nodded. "'Let die.'" It was one of the most famous Kiri precepts, the admonition not to cling to things beyond their time. "But if he were one of you, he would never have been a Walker."
"That's so." Nyra cracked a stick hard across her knee. "Thus, he wouldn't be ill."
Now that she understood Chi'anové's situation, she held us to a straiter schedule, and much of the time we lost rock scampering, we found again marching from the long dawn to dusk.
***
The steep slopes plagued Lastri'nom too, for different reasons. Noting how we eyed his slipping and sliding, he stated tersely that his balance was impaired. "It just means I need to be careful," he said. "I don't require any consideration."
As for me, my shoulder ached less with the frequent failing of my arms for balance; released from a single, rigid gait, it was mending a little.
***
Our Journey, Day 9
"By the Lady!" exclaimed Nyra. "It wasn't like this six years ago." Having arced back up into the trees, we came down again toward the seashore, to a spot Nyra assured us would be excellent sea scavenging.
The path had apparently not always been a thread between high grasses and thorns thick with spider's webs. Once out of the grasses, we scuffed the dirt of a washed-out cliff face overlooking a beach many meters below. Fixing my eyes on my feet, I inched down the rocks until we reached a vertical drop of just over a meter to the beach. I jumped it without bending my knees enough, thereby twisting my ankle but not severely. The pain began to fade as soon as I took a step. It took longer to shake the heightened awareness of my own vulnerability: one misstep and I'd become dead weight to my companions. I was pleased to see Chi'anové leap down with greater grace.
He decided to wait against the cliff side while the rest of us followed Nyra out on the beach: Pig Bones Cove, she called it, because she had once found a half-decayed pig that had apparently fallen to its death. I found it telling that, though she described it as a well-used scavenging ground, the only name she had for it was one she had invented, another sign of the social fracturing caused by the plague.
My feet took some training to manage the pebbles. The size of my fist, they slipped like marbles. Up on the bigger rocks, my steps grew surer, though the slick seaweed out near the surf proved treacherous. Lastri'nom fell once but with irritation pronounced himself unhurt. Nyra unpacked her baskets and sped gazelle-like (sea bird-like?) out to the deep pools, where she began to harvest I couldn't see what. The rest of us let our foreignness be our excuse to remain spectators.
As we wandered, my eyes opened. Until I saw that beach, I'd hadn't realized how long I'd kept them closed. The rocks had the form of frozen waves, like gray sand edged by salt-white breakers. Here water engraves the rock with its likeness just as the wind the desert. I paused over a boulder composed of many small stones cemented by sand. The stones, dull green and purple, reminded me of a necklace 'Hasha received from my grandmother, one I used to wear dressing up as a child. Turning around to face the cliffs, I saw up the beach a fallen tree, sandblasted white: a giant leg bone. A pig bone? A symbol in a tongue I could not interpret. I looked back to the ocean, standing stable on these big, flat rocks, which were safe like an island when the sea is not too near.
Then, as I faced the tide, time shifted. The world dimmed. Crok, crok, came a noise from above. The Old Woman of Death has cast her tiles, I thought, while some part of my mind remembered Nyra identifying the raven's call.
I was near to Glin and Tanez, though it seemed I had been far. We crouched together around the fissures leading down into the pool. Fish darted fast as flies. Anemone, I catalogued, snail, mussel, urchin, crab. What were those ribbed things called? Chiton. I dusted off the word.
"Here's the map." Tanez gazed into the pool. "Here's the city."
Glin laid a hand on his shoulder.
He didn't notice. "You can always tell it by the black--no, not black, light enough to stumble. Always in the twilight, in the morning and the evening and the night." Shadow shrouded the pool, all gray, brown, sand, rock shapes. In a whisper: "Here's the forest."
I could see it, an ancient wood, waterlogged, the stagnant lapping of an old flood, trees submerged, branches drooping. Crumbling habitations too--the streets rivers, water slushing through the windows.
Glin's mind was pulling back. This was her method, as a Walker, of protecting herself from Jana. When it resolved into its traps, she shut her eyes, she withdrew. But Tanez (and I) looked deep with a sad, quiet wonder.
He reached out to the swaying branches. When his hand touched the sky--water--it shattered into black and white.
"Tanez." Lastri'nom--who had not been there--interposed between Tanez and me, taking his shoulders and turning him from the tide pool. "Compose yourself."
Tanez stared at him, unseeing.
Glin removed Lastri'nom's hands and got Tanez to his feet. An arm around him, she led him back up the beach. I watched their figures recede with a kind of double vision, with a separate and simultaneous sight still sunk in that shadow world.
"Ad Yoq." His voice was softer for me than for Tanez. He put one firm hand on my shoulder.
Supported by a lifetime of auto-response, I faced him. "Yes?"
"Wake up."
As if a rain had passed, the sky grew lighter. "He saw something from Jana."
"It's not from Jana; it's from his mother, this predilection..." He fell silent, our eyes both trailing out to Nyra, lithe amid the foam.
There was no violence to these waves; they swished in and out with a froth like beer. How easily one can walk out of the tide though it rolls with the planet. Gravity, I reminded myself, is startlingly weak. "She was a mystic."
"She was an addict. She took some Kiri drug--what, I wonder, did they call it? No, it's gone; it doesn't matter. It distorted her processing of sensory input. She overdosed when he was fifteen."
I made myself focus on Lastri'nom's words. He has two modes, I thought, and I need to be in the other one. "But he doesn't take it." I knew this to be true.
"But he learned her habit of mind. Call it mystical if you like, but remember it only represents a feeling."
"I wonder if Jana doesn't as well?"
He didn't like this line of questioning. "Yes, it does, all to easily. That's why every Walker needs discipline in conjecturing about Jana. It will show us what we want to see. We must look without wanting to see its nature." He rose and went down the rocks to get space from me and all of us.
His words sparked something old in me. What was it? One of the sayings of Clan Founder Sham'taht: You never deserve what you ask for. The only things given are given unasked. When I was younger, I'd called that saying stupid. Now, I suspected it struck the truth: the truth of Jana, of me, of thought itself perhaps.
I followed Glin and Tanez. They had settled on the pebbled beach beside Chi'anové.
Tanez asked him something softly.
"I have never been at the forest," replied Chi'anové a little roughly, gloves dangling from one hand.
"What is the forest?" I asked, sitting next to them.
"It's just a place he constructs."
"No," said Tanez. "It is a place."
"The difference being?" I asked.
"It is a place."
Glin squeezed his hand. In that corner of the mind that we dismiss in the face of duty, I wished she wouldn't. Her warmth, her comfort were not for me (you never deserve what you ask for) and, in this moment, they were almost lost on him (who didn't ask). Inside him, many forces crossed, and he riveted her like a waterfall making rainbows.
He rubbed his eyes. "I can't ask the right question. The more I see, the more it slips away."
Glin barked a laugh. "'I have thought one becomes asymptotic,'" she quoted.
As easily as that, she regrounded us in our daily realities. Tanez smiled, and for a moment, I loved Glin unreservedly.
"The Walker is the Stander," I observed.
Glin smiled tiredly. "It seems so."
"What the hell are you talking about?" said Chi'anové tiredly, playing the license Vunizh question formation for all that it was worth.
"It's an ancient Leddie story," I said. "A Walker--I mean someone going by foot--"
"Yes."
"--meets a Stander by the seashore--"
"And they talk nonsense," said Glin, suddenly jovial.
"And the Stander asks the Walker to tell someone--we don't know who--that he has a question--"
"Or 'she,'" said Glin.
"Yes, of course," I said. "Their gender isn't given. He or she has a question for him, the Answerer--his gender is given. The Walker asks what the question is, and the Stander won't say. Ultimately, it turns out he doesn't--or she doesn't--know the question but has to ask it anyway. But the Walker isn't headed to see the Answerer after all."
"That is nonsense," said Chi'anové.
Though I'm half Leddie, I've rarely enjoyed Leddie stories, but The Stander's Question is by far my favorite. The Stander's severe need to ask the unaskable, the Walker's whimsy in response: these hold a mirror to the mind, its paradox in dialogue, thus:
Walker. (laughing) Tell me, what happens when you have to do a thing you can’t do?
Stander. I have thought about that for a very long time.
Walker. You have an answer?
Stander. I have thought one becomes asymptotic, approaching infinity.
Walker. Come now! What does that have to do with life?
Stander. I don’t know! That’s why I have to question.
This is the truth. These Walkers--these Jana Walkers, all of us--we take the Stander's part. We think and question. We stand and wait for the unapproaching Answerer, suspending our untellable, inconceivable utterance as if the universe turned upon this mission. Who, then, is the real Walker, the vagabond "not on my way to see anyone," as the final line in the dialogue reveals? The one not asking for anything? Who, with those words, completes--?
Who completes?
Nyra? Nyra on the ocean.
Chapter 6
Our Journey, Day 8
For three days, we had crossed a terrain of steep, coastal hillsides, often with a mere depression in the rock for a trail. The scrabbling took a toll on Chi'anové. His legs ached and sweat clung around his eyes, his frustration compounded by hurt pride: he was a skilled rock climber; aside from Jana, climbing was his prime element. But now that his health was defeating him, no one saw his talent. Again, he was misjudged--or so he thought. In fact, Nyra noted his poise, and seeing how he struggled when he ought to have outstripped us alerted her to his illness. I didn't tell him that; he chafed under her attention.
But she asked me about it as we gathered kindling, and I explained what I could: that sickness was building up inside him and he needed a machine to cleanse it.
The idea filled her with pity and revulsion. "If he were of our folk, we'd let him die. We don't hold with machines to stave off death."
I nodded. "'Let die.'" It was one of the most famous Kiri precepts, the admonition not to cling to things beyond their time. "But if he were one of you, he would never have been a Walker."
"That's so." Nyra cracked a stick hard across her knee. "Thus, he wouldn't be ill."
Now that she understood Chi'anové's situation, she held us to a straiter schedule, and much of the time we lost rock scampering, we found again marching from the long dawn to dusk.
***
The steep slopes plagued Lastri'nom too, for different reasons. Noting how we eyed his slipping and sliding, he stated tersely that his balance was impaired. "It just means I need to be careful," he said. "I don't require any consideration."
As for me, my shoulder ached less with the frequent failing of my arms for balance; released from a single, rigid gait, it was mending a little.
***
Our Journey, Day 9
"By the Lady!" exclaimed Nyra. "It wasn't like this six years ago." Having arced back up into the trees, we came down again toward the seashore, to a spot Nyra assured us would be excellent sea scavenging.
The path had apparently not always been a thread between high grasses and thorns thick with spider's webs. Once out of the grasses, we scuffed the dirt of a washed-out cliff face overlooking a beach many meters below. Fixing my eyes on my feet, I inched down the rocks until we reached a vertical drop of just over a meter to the beach. I jumped it without bending my knees enough, thereby twisting my ankle but not severely. The pain began to fade as soon as I took a step. It took longer to shake the heightened awareness of my own vulnerability: one misstep and I'd become dead weight to my companions. I was pleased to see Chi'anové leap down with greater grace.
He decided to wait against the cliff side while the rest of us followed Nyra out on the beach: Pig Bones Cove, she called it, because she had once found a half-decayed pig that had apparently fallen to its death. I found it telling that, though she described it as a well-used scavenging ground, the only name she had for it was one she had invented, another sign of the social fracturing caused by the plague.
My feet took some training to manage the pebbles. The size of my fist, they slipped like marbles. Up on the bigger rocks, my steps grew surer, though the slick seaweed out near the surf proved treacherous. Lastri'nom fell once but with irritation pronounced himself unhurt. Nyra unpacked her baskets and sped gazelle-like (sea bird-like?) out to the deep pools, where she began to harvest I couldn't see what. The rest of us let our foreignness be our excuse to remain spectators.
As we wandered, my eyes opened. Until I saw that beach, I'd hadn't realized how long I'd kept them closed. The rocks had the form of frozen waves, like gray sand edged by salt-white breakers. Here water engraves the rock with its likeness just as the wind the desert. I paused over a boulder composed of many small stones cemented by sand. The stones, dull green and purple, reminded me of a necklace 'Hasha received from my grandmother, one I used to wear dressing up as a child. Turning around to face the cliffs, I saw up the beach a fallen tree, sandblasted white: a giant leg bone. A pig bone? A symbol in a tongue I could not interpret. I looked back to the ocean, standing stable on these big, flat rocks, which were safe like an island when the sea is not too near.
Then, as I faced the tide, time shifted. The world dimmed. Crok, crok, came a noise from above. The Old Woman of Death has cast her tiles, I thought, while some part of my mind remembered Nyra identifying the raven's call.
I was near to Glin and Tanez, though it seemed I had been far. We crouched together around the fissures leading down into the pool. Fish darted fast as flies. Anemone, I catalogued, snail, mussel, urchin, crab. What were those ribbed things called? Chiton. I dusted off the word.
"Here's the map." Tanez gazed into the pool. "Here's the city."
Glin laid a hand on his shoulder.
He didn't notice. "You can always tell it by the black--no, not black, light enough to stumble. Always in the twilight, in the morning and the evening and the night." Shadow shrouded the pool, all gray, brown, sand, rock shapes. In a whisper: "Here's the forest."
I could see it, an ancient wood, waterlogged, the stagnant lapping of an old flood, trees submerged, branches drooping. Crumbling habitations too--the streets rivers, water slushing through the windows.
Glin's mind was pulling back. This was her method, as a Walker, of protecting herself from Jana. When it resolved into its traps, she shut her eyes, she withdrew. But Tanez (and I) looked deep with a sad, quiet wonder.
He reached out to the swaying branches. When his hand touched the sky--water--it shattered into black and white.
"Tanez." Lastri'nom--who had not been there--interposed between Tanez and me, taking his shoulders and turning him from the tide pool. "Compose yourself."
Tanez stared at him, unseeing.
Glin removed Lastri'nom's hands and got Tanez to his feet. An arm around him, she led him back up the beach. I watched their figures recede with a kind of double vision, with a separate and simultaneous sight still sunk in that shadow world.
"Ad Yoq." His voice was softer for me than for Tanez. He put one firm hand on my shoulder.
Supported by a lifetime of auto-response, I faced him. "Yes?"
"Wake up."
As if a rain had passed, the sky grew lighter. "He saw something from Jana."
"It's not from Jana; it's from his mother, this predilection..." He fell silent, our eyes both trailing out to Nyra, lithe amid the foam.
There was no violence to these waves; they swished in and out with a froth like beer. How easily one can walk out of the tide though it rolls with the planet. Gravity, I reminded myself, is startlingly weak. "She was a mystic."
"She was an addict. She took some Kiri drug--what, I wonder, did they call it? No, it's gone; it doesn't matter. It distorted her processing of sensory input. She overdosed when he was fifteen."
I made myself focus on Lastri'nom's words. He has two modes, I thought, and I need to be in the other one. "But he doesn't take it." I knew this to be true.
"But he learned her habit of mind. Call it mystical if you like, but remember it only represents a feeling."
"I wonder if Jana doesn't as well?"
He didn't like this line of questioning. "Yes, it does, all to easily. That's why every Walker needs discipline in conjecturing about Jana. It will show us what we want to see. We must look without wanting to see its nature." He rose and went down the rocks to get space from me and all of us.
His words sparked something old in me. What was it? One of the sayings of Clan Founder Sham'taht: You never deserve what you ask for. The only things given are given unasked. When I was younger, I'd called that saying stupid. Now, I suspected it struck the truth: the truth of Jana, of me, of thought itself perhaps.
I followed Glin and Tanez. They had settled on the pebbled beach beside Chi'anové.
Tanez asked him something softly.
"I have never been at the forest," replied Chi'anové a little roughly, gloves dangling from one hand.
"What is the forest?" I asked, sitting next to them.
"It's just a place he constructs."
"No," said Tanez. "It is a place."
"The difference being?" I asked.
"It is a place."
Glin squeezed his hand. In that corner of the mind that we dismiss in the face of duty, I wished she wouldn't. Her warmth, her comfort were not for me (you never deserve what you ask for) and, in this moment, they were almost lost on him (who didn't ask). Inside him, many forces crossed, and he riveted her like a waterfall making rainbows.
He rubbed his eyes. "I can't ask the right question. The more I see, the more it slips away."
Glin barked a laugh. "'I have thought one becomes asymptotic,'" she quoted.
As easily as that, she regrounded us in our daily realities. Tanez smiled, and for a moment, I loved Glin unreservedly.
"The Walker is the Stander," I observed.
Glin smiled tiredly. "It seems so."
"What the hell are you talking about?" said Chi'anové tiredly, playing the license Vunizh question formation for all that it was worth.
"It's an ancient Leddie story," I said. "A Walker--I mean someone going by foot--"
"Yes."
"--meets a Stander by the seashore--"
"And they talk nonsense," said Glin, suddenly jovial.
"And the Stander asks the Walker to tell someone--we don't know who--that he has a question--"
"Or 'she,'" said Glin.
"Yes, of course," I said. "Their gender isn't given. He or she has a question for him, the Answerer--his gender is given. The Walker asks what the question is, and the Stander won't say. Ultimately, it turns out he doesn't--or she doesn't--know the question but has to ask it anyway. But the Walker isn't headed to see the Answerer after all."
"That is nonsense," said Chi'anové.
Though I'm half Leddie, I've rarely enjoyed Leddie stories, but The Stander's Question is by far my favorite. The Stander's severe need to ask the unaskable, the Walker's whimsy in response: these hold a mirror to the mind, its paradox in dialogue, thus:
Walker. (laughing) Tell me, what happens when you have to do a thing you can’t do?
Stander. I have thought about that for a very long time.
Walker. You have an answer?
Stander. I have thought one becomes asymptotic, approaching infinity.
Walker. Come now! What does that have to do with life?
Stander. I don’t know! That’s why I have to question.
This is the truth. These Walkers--these Jana Walkers, all of us--we take the Stander's part. We think and question. We stand and wait for the unapproaching Answerer, suspending our untellable, inconceivable utterance as if the universe turned upon this mission. Who, then, is the real Walker, the vagabond "not on my way to see anyone," as the final line in the dialogue reveals? The one not asking for anything? Who, with those words, completes--?
Who completes?
Nyra? Nyra on the ocean.
