i.
i'm a satellite heart, lost in the dark
i'm spun out so far, you stop, i start
.
“So what is your opinion of our kumani?” Shahzadeh asks one night, pressing a tabard of mulled wine into Cleo’s hand. They’d come upon a village large enough to have an actual inn, or what Cleo figured served as their equivalent, with enough space for a small tavern underneath the rooms.
Cleo had never been happier to see a real bed.
“Kumani?” she repeats clumsily, with an uncertain sip of her wine. To her delight, it’s much sweeter than the drink they pass around the fire at night, and she thinks that she could actually get used to this. “You mean Damiyr?” She’d heard the others call him that, in what snippets she could catch of their conversations, and had assumed that it meant something akin to captain.
“Yes. It is hard to meet a person that does not already have their opinion.” Shahzadeh’s eyes are dancing with amusement, something Cleo is given to understand as the default state of them. “So what is yours?”
“He is…” Cleo wants to say rude, but it feels equally rude of herself to say it; she glances surreptitiously—because he always seems to sense her stare, much to her chagrin—over at Damiyr, across the room, sipping his own mug. “He’s very… brusque.”
Shahzadeh looks confused, and it takes Cleo a moment to realize it’s because she doesn’t understand the word.
“Very serious,” she supplies instead. “He doesn’t smile very much, does he?”
Shahzadeh laughs. “Not if he can help it. That’s our mysterious kumani.”
“Mysterious?”
“I suppose he just likes to be… quiet about himself. He speaks to you more than I’ve seen him speak to any stranger—I think it’s only because there are few of us who speak your tongue.”
“It’s only to order me around,” Cleo mutters darkly, “or to tell me what I’m doing wrong.”
“He’s a hard master, I know,” Shahzadeh says, wrinkling her nose. “He has no remorse. But it’s not because of unkindness, I promise you.”
“He could’ve fooled me.”
Shahzadeh looks at her thoughtfully, her eyes heavy-lidded and a smile playing on the corners of her lips. Just when Cleo feels the silence grow protracted, Tabazin comes up behind Shahzadeh and snakes her arms around the woman’s middle, asking a low question in their language.
Shahzadeh laughs and replies in a mash of lilting sounds, so quickly that Cleo can’t find the end of one word and beginning of another, even if she could speak their tongue.
“She asks if I am harassing you,” Shahzadeh translates for her, leaning back in Tabazin’s embrace. “I said that you would know very well if I am harassing you. Besides,” she adds wryly, “I think kumani-samar would not appreciate it much if I did.”
She smiles in a way that makes Cleo doubt that she got the complete translation—but Cleo finds that talking to Shahzadeh usually makes her feel that way, like there is some nuance that the other woman finds delight in hanging just out of her reach. Judging by the severity of Damiyr’s frowns around Shahzadeh, Cleo guesses that he feels the same.
“I don’t think he really cares that much,” Cleo says, leaving off about me in fear of the weakness in it, a weakness Shahzadeh would surely pick up on.
“Our kumani has ways of fooling us,” Shahzadeh says conspiratorially. “For your safety, I recommend you do not assume too much of him.”
She leaves with Tabazin then, slinging her arm around the other woman’s waist, and Cleo feels her eyes drawn to Damiyr—to her surprise, the subject of their conversation is staring right at her, and Cleo turns away quickly, flustered, covering her embarrassment with a long swig of her drink.
The sweetness is almost sickly on her tongue, and she tells herself that Shahzadeh is wrong.
She’s nothing much more than a nuisance to him.
.
ii.
and i don't blame you dear
for running like you did all these years
i would do the same, you'd best believe
and the highway signs say we're close
but i don't read those things anymore
i never trusted my own eyes
.
The more time they spend in the desert, the more villages and towns they pass through, the more Cleo feels her otherness begin to wear on her. It’s lonely, listening to the others laugh and joke in their language, to imagine them trading stories over the campfire that she can’t understand. It’s frustrating, to hear their conversations with the villagers, to not know whether they exchange simple pleasantries or clues about her father until Damiyr or Shahzadeh see fit to translate. She doesn’t suspect them of withholding anything about her father from her, but she is so desperate for information, any information, that she wants to scream.
Worse, she is desperate for belonging, and that’s something she doesn’t think even learning their language could ever correct.
But it’s a start.
“Can you teach me how to speak Nerahati?” she asks, willing the uncertainty from her voice so all that’s left is stubbornness.
Damiyr considers her from atop his horse, two or three hands taller than hers. It makes her feel even smaller.
Then he pulls down the keffiyah that covers his face. “Arim.”
Behind her, Arim starts in surprise, then clumsily urges his horse forward to Damiyr’s side, asking him a quiet, earnest question in their tongue. She doesn’t know if she could even place Arim’s voice, since he speaks so unobtrusively or not at all, at least when she’s around. Usually, he is busy listening intently or writing on his parchments at a lightning pace, and so Cleo takes him to be some sort of scribe or record-keeper.
They speak some more in their language, for long enough that it feels like Damiyr had ignored her request completely, and was moving on to some other problem he actually felt like handling.
Cleo opens her mouth to interrupt when he beats her to it.
“Arim will teach you,” he says. Beside him, Arim has his head down, almost sheepishly, glancing at her out of the corner of his eyes.
Cleo hesitates. “Only if he wants to.”
Damiyr raises his eyebrows, almost in amusement, and looks over at Arim. “You’ve made her nervous, Arim.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Cleo,” Arim says, with hardly any trace of Damiyr and Shahzadeh’s accents. “I didn’t mean to—that is, I would be very happy to teach you.”
Cleo almost doesn’t know how to react; she knows her mouth is wide open in amazement, but she can’t seem to close it. “You spoke my language this whole time?”
“Yes. I’ve studied for many years.” He looks about to say more, but presses his lips together shyly instead.
“Arim studied at our university in the capital, sponsored by the king himself. He speaks a great number of languages,” Damiyr supplies, and then, a little more quietly: “He would be a much better teacher than I.”
“Thank you!” she says, unable to contain her smile. Arim smiles back, albeit with reserve. “Thank you.”
.
.
.
Arim does turn out to be an excellent teacher, patient and kind. As they ride, he teaches her the basics of sentences structure and verb conjugation; she is surprised to find out that in their tongue the object comes before everything else instead of at the end, so that she feels a little backwards when he asks her to translate sentences into her language or his. He makes her translate a lot, very easy things, so that she must sound like a child first learning to talk to their ears—but in a way, she is.
He makes her repeat everything he says too, sometimes more than once, and points to things and has her name them, their color, what they’re doing or how they look. Vocabulary is the hardest thing for her to remember, but Arim is surprisingly organized with his lessons, teaching her in groups, so that she’ll learn Animals and Future Tense in one day, then Clothing and Past Tense the next. He never gives her more than she can handle.
At first, he hesitates to say more to her than necessary, but as she learns the language, she turns around and asks him questions with the new words she’s learned, and he replies in kind. She does that with the others too, and learns that Barzayn loves to eat almost as much as he loves his wife, and that Tabazin has seven siblings and a pet manul, which Arim described as a wild, long-haired cat.
The time passes more quickly under Arim’s tutelage, and she feels herself learning a lot, even if it still isn’t nearly enough to follow the entirety of their conversations between themselves; she has to concentrate hard to pick out distinct words, though their individual accents can sometimes make it difficult to pick out anything at all, especially when they speak rapidly. At that point, she usually has to give up.
But they try to include her as much as they can, even Damiyr. He quizzes her too, using the words she’d recently learned to engage her in conversation, asking her questions about the day or what she thinks of a village they’d passed through.
Sometimes he even smiles.
.
.
.
“Why did you be a soldier?” she asks Arim one day, in stilted Nerahati, but it’s a question that’s been nagging at her for a while. He is the opposite how she imagines a soldier, soft-spoken and bookish and unassuming. When she imagines a soldier—well, she imagines someone more like Damiyr.
This isn’t easy for her to translate into their language, but Arim seems to sense as much, because he switches to hers, smiling kindly.
“Damiyr-samar and I were friends from childhood,” he says.
“Really?” She isn’t so surprised to find out they were childhood friends; she’s more taken aback by the notion that Damiyr was ever a child at all. In her imagination, Damiyr sprang to life fully-formed and scowling.
He nods. “My mother was a scribe in the royal employ—now she’s a librarian in the king’s library. But I met Damiyr-samar when we were nine years old—he scared me very much,” he adds with a soft chuckle, looking ahead at Damiyr’s back.
Cleo follows his gaze, watching the sway of movement Damiyr makes with his horse as they plod through the sand, three or four horse lengths ahead of her. When they traveled through the desert like this, they all tended to make a loose ring with Damiyr at the head and, ever since she began her language lessons, with her and Arim at the back, left to their own devices.
“So you followed him into the cavalry?” she prompts.
“My mother worked for the royal household, but I have two sisters and our father is gone. So she didn’t have the means to send me to the university like I wanted—like I wanted very much.” Arim’s voice is solemn now, but in it Cleo can hear the palpable love he has for his mother, his family, and now— “Damiyr-samar convinced the king to sponsor me, so that she didn’t have to pay for my tuition. Not a single hirmam.”
“Oh.” Cleo doesn’t know what else to say.
“In return for sponsorship, one must serve two years in the king’s army, but I—” he stops, looking sheepish again. “I stayed on longer. I don’t mind, because few others can translate and write as I can, and I’m not doing anything that I wouldn’t be happy to do outside the cavalry.”
“So that’s why you joined.”
“That’s why I joined. I owe very much to Damiyr-samar.”
She falls quiet for a moment, gaze falling on Damiyr again, on the slope of his shoulders, the metallic glint of the scimitar hooked in his belt in the evening sun, the flutter of the ends of his red keffiyah in the breeze. He looks the same as he had yesterday, as all the days before, and yet Cleo can’t seem to reconcile any of it anymore.
“Of course, he won’t let me repay him.” Arim laughs, shaking his head. Then he points very suddenly at a bird streaking through the sky, and says, in Nerahati, “What’s that?”
“Qarayyid,” Cleo says, but her eyes fall immediately back on Damiyr.
.
iii.
hold on to me as we go
as we roll down this unfamiliar road
and although this wave is stringing us along
just know you're not alone
cause i'm gonna make this place your home
.
They’re in another inn, on the outskirts of some village called Hefiyyah. This one has a communal sleeping area, with rows of beds on either wall, leaving Cleo to uncertainly observe the complete lack of separation between the sexes. In all of their previous inns, they’d split the rooms down the middle, with the men taking one room and the women, including her, taking another.
In her lessons with Arim, she’d learned that the Nerahati had very few gendered words. Even though they translate mallaha as king for her, because the current mallaha was male, they don’t have a concept of kings versus queens; the mallaha is the mallaha whether the position holder is male or female, just like the mallada, the ruler’s consort, could be either sex. They only impose gender on a word with a conditioner, avar for male and adhar for female, and very few of them ever bother to mark the difference unless it was somehow relevant.
And in the Nerahati’s eyes, gender is very rarely relevant.
Now, as she stands watching the men and women of their company fall with relief into their beds, mixed together with all the inn’s other patrons, Cleo has to wonder if they’d split the rooms as they did before solely for her benefit.
It’s a strange feeling. She’d already realized that they were moving at a much slower pace than the soldiers were capable of only because of her and her inferior stamina, that they always stopped for breaks whenever she was feeling particularly worn out, without any mention of it at all.
She’d almost told them, once or twice, not to hold back on her account—but the pace felt challenging enough for her already, and she isn’t too proud to accept her limits.
But now she realizes that someone had taken very careful consideration of her feelings. That they were still taking very careful consideration of her feelings, and that’s the strange part.
She also realizes that they’re missing Damiyr; he hasn’t come back from the common room yet, though it’s deep enough into the night to warrant it.
Pulling her boots back on, she slips from the sleeping area and finds him sitting in front of the waning fire, a mug dangling by the rim in his fingers. He looks up when she enters, though she doesn’t remember making a sound.
“Cleo,” he says, with that same, thick Nerahati accent that gives her name at least two extra syllables. He is without his keffiyah, in just his riding pants and qamis, rolled up to the elbow; his skin glows brown and gold in the light of the fire.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks, trying not to sound sheepish. In hindsight, she’s not sure why she decided to seek him out, now of all times.
He blithely tilts his head to the side, blinking. “I haven’t tried yet.”
Smartass. She shoots him a withering glare as she sits down on the low cushion next to his, tucking her knees against her chest.
“Do these arrangements bother you?” he asks, before she can open her mouth in retort. “This is the only hostel in this area—it has no private rooms.”
“Do you always get private rooms for me?” she asks. Her voice sounds very tiny to her ears.
He raises his eyebrows. “I… assumed it would bother you, to share a room with men.”
The confirmation does nothing to slake her uneasiness, knowing that Damiyr goes through such trouble for the sake of her comfort. Not many people would do that for her, especially people who generally consider her a burden; it’s her fault that they have to move so slowly, that, in all likelihood, they stop at hostels and inns in the first place, that he’s forced to teach a foreign merchant’s daughter how to do simple things like ride a horse and wield a knife and build a fire, things that must come as easily to him as breathing.
She’s not ashamed of her inability to do the things she was never taught, she tells herself. She’s not ashamed of the comfortable life her parents worked hard to give her, though she never quite realized how comfortable it was until she came to Nerahati.
And yet… and yet. She picks at a stray thread on her sleeve.
“I don’t mind,” she says, even though she does, just a little. But it’s a small thing that she can bear if it makes Damiyr’s life a little easier. She thinks it might even be a small thing she could grow accustomed to, given the chance; she’s grown accustomed to many things here.
She’s grown fond of them, even.
When she looks up, Damiyr is considering her very gravely, eyes amber in the firelight, and even though she’s so often subject to his stare, there’s something about it now, so close, that undoes her just a little. She pulls at the loose thread again, nearly unraveling all the stitching on her sleeve, and he puts his hand over hers, so gently, but the contact feels like she’s jumped into a frigid winter lake.
“Do you mind?” he asks softly, but he’s looking at his hand covering hers.
He’s not talking about the sleeping arrangements. Cleo traces with her eyes the curving lines of the hallah on his collarbone, before they disappear into the collar of his qamis, and tries to quell the shaking of her hands.
“I don’t. I—” Her tongue feels too big for her mouth. She swallows. “I don’t mind at all.”
He nods, very slowly, and shifts, setting his mug on the floor with a heavy clank so that he can take her hand in both of his. Cleo holds her breath without quite realizing.
“I’m glad,” he says, grasping her sleeve and smoothing out the hem where it bunched in her anxious attentions. He yanks the stray thread until it breaks, and it’s like her sleeve was newly mended. “My wish—my hope is that you enjoy our company.”
“I do.” That, she has no doubt of.
His eyes implore hers, as if searching for the lie. But after a moment, he releases her hand, almost reluctantly, and brings himself to his feet. It happens quickly, but Cleo is almost certain she sees the specter of a smile tug at the corners of his lips, before he holds out his hand for her to take, to help her up.
“That is all I can ask,” he says.
His grip is sure and strong. Cleo feels lighter than she has in days as he lifts her to her feet. “It’s good to know you can ask instead of demand.”
Now, she is absolutely certain that he smiles, lopsided and roguish and so very, distractingly handsome.
And she knows that fond isn’t quite enough, either.
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smithereens2014-04-24 04:21 pm
