Elder Race(16)

My readouts suggest that last night’s excesses didn’t make much of a dent in my emotional balance, which is always the problem with such things. It’s not as though the whole business of depression is a zero-sum game, after all. But for now I can function again, and bleed-over should be minimal. I will just keep myself calm and avoid unnecessary provocation.

I return to Lyn and Esha at their camp. They are looking at me, and I scan their faces for things like pity or disgust, just to get that out of the way. Instead, they seem oddly impressed, and I realise that I’ve found another hole in my understanding. Theirs is not an overtly emotional culture. There are strict rules about intimacy and formality. What does it mean, for a grown person to have a full-on emotional meltdown? What does it mean when that adult is of a peculiar status such as mine? I have absolutely no idea, but apparently it is . . . creditable, in some way. Perhaps it is a luxury accorded only to certain social roles, either the powerful or extreme outsiders. Perhaps I have some secondary function as a lightning rod for tantrums, so that other people can maintain face.

*

Watacha has wooden walls, and was probably built to house perhaps a thousand people, up on a hill long cleared of trees and with the best view possible of the surrounding land, given that everything is cloaked in trees. The various little forest feudalities have small populations and no field agriculture at all, instead cultivating the forest itself so that hard lines between nature and the work of human hands are often hard to discern. The hill is thronging with tents and makeshift shelters, evidence of some serious population displacement, demonic or otherwise. I do still wonder if they might be giving personhood to some natural force, a pestilence or crop disease, or even a political schism. The way their languages work, with their multitude of qualifiers, means that I have difficulty telling metaphors from literal reports. Nothing is ever simply itself, in their speech.

Lyn’s rank signifiers get us admitted. Inside the walls, the city is crowded and the armed women who met us at the gate have to shove and elbow their way through the streets. I have to mute my olfactory senses after a while, because the stench of too many people and not enough water becomes intolerable. This place will be rife with disease soon, if it isn’t already.

We are met not by Elhevesse Regent but by a woman of close to Lyn’s age, sitting on a carved wooden throne too large for her. She is Jerevesse Third Daughter. The language she speaks is related to Lyn’s, strangely accented and peppered with loan words from several other language groups, so that I have to work hard to translate what she says. My internal lexicons do their best to fill in gaps, but the dialect is unfamiliar, and so I am always an exchange behind as the women address each other.

I am watching Lyn, and she takes being met by this Third Daughter hard. At first I think we all thought that Elhevesse just doesn’t take any of us seriously, but no. Elhevesse took a number of soldiers west into the forest five days ago, to confront the demon. Since then, no word has come from them.

Lyn just stands there, digesting the news. She stands very straight and her face is very calm, and Jerevesse sits regally enough, and her face, too, is very calm, and Esha stands somewhat back and looks down so that her face, calm or not, is in shadow. And I suddenly see, as though a book had opened, all the little tells that show just how emotional they are being. The child-queen Third Daughter’s steepled fingers are white with the pressure they exert on one another. Lyn’s fists are clenched into knotted balls with a tension entirely absent from her face. We are just a few days too late and everything has been lost. This, then, was the plan, but nobody consulted the queen of Watacha about it, and now there is no army, just a great number of hungry, sick, frightened people.

“Who have you brought, though?” Jerevesse says. “Who stands like a shadow at your back?”

I think she means Esha at first, but of course she means me.

Lyn rallies at this. She has no army, but she has a magician. She names me for the Third Daughter, and I am somewhat alarmed at the weight our host gives to this pronouncement.

“He can defeat the demon?”

“In my great-grandmother’s time his powers cast down Ulmoth and destroyed his monstrous followers. He is the last of the ancient race of makers,” Lyn says, glancing at me with such hope and wonder that I almost look over my shoulder to see what superman she has seen there. My readouts spike: probably I should be flattered, but my natural, suppressed reaction to all this is to feel sick about it. I put up a hand to forestall any more, but it is too late.

“This is a great matter,” Jerevesse says. “My people have been days knowing only defeat.”

“Then let us bring victory,” Lyn says immediately. She has lit up, because she is being taken seriously, but the only reason is me, and I am not . . . I am not . . .

I am impassive. I am clinical. What a fascinating folk ritual, yes. Worthy of a footnote when I return to the outpost. “Primitive Beliefs and the Negative Results Thereof,” a monograph by Nyr Illim Tevitch, anthropologist second class.





Lynesse


LOOKING ON THE SORCERER’S impassive features, Lyn envied him his calm. She would trade a night of agony and weeping for being able to face up to failure while the sun shone. And yes, she had crept back to spy on him, with her new sword in hand in case there was a beast. She had seen his mask come off. There was a story she had been told as a child, about a magician who lived for a hundred years, and every dawn he was handsome and unlined as a youth of four Storm-seasons, but (as his unwary bride discovered) each night he aged all of his years, all at once, becoming a wizened, stick-limbed horrible thing. Nyrgoth Elder did not age, for all that he had seen out his centuries. Instead, what came on him at night was what she could only assume to be a lifetime’s dread and fear and anguish, all the little emotions that little people had to battle, but which a sorcerer, it seemed, could just put aside for later. She felt horribly guilty for violating his trust, bitterly envious of this new demonstration of his power. It was not a magic spoken of in stories, and yet right then it seemed more useful than any casting of the lightning or commanding of monsters.