Quibble, 83. Quandary
Quibble's perplexity about people grows as she reaches the ruinous outskirts of the Divided City.
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83. Quandary @Quibble
So we parted ways with Sah-uhn-say-luht, a man of bewildering contradictions – a killer out for justice, an honest trickster, a softhearted brute. And again, as with Vega, I was left to contemplate how I had been so wrong about him yet so sure I was right.
In my mind, Luht had been a villain. But his appearance of villainy was, after all, pure happenstance. I recalled thinking, when Nuah told the Aht how Vega zeroed him and stole him from family and tribe, that a villain could be someone you don’t know well enough. I had believed the lesson learned. It was unsettling, now, to realize I might never learn it, fully and finally. People were such messes, labyrinths, quandaries. Could it be that within them lay no quiddities, no essences, no intrinsic truths?
Yet at the same time, Quibble, I reflected, you can’t reserve judgment about them. When we stand on different sides of things and when lives hang in the balance, we must act. If we’ve misjudged those who stand against us, then we’ve misjudged them – and that’s that. We can change afterwards, but we can’t take back what we did. So, we live with the mistake.
Miles of desert moved beneath me as I puzzled this out. At dawn, we camped in the eastern lee of a high dune beneath a dilapidated structure – a giant, twisted husk of stone and deeply rusted iron. The tower’s western side lay half-buried where wind had pushed sand up against it, and I suspected much of the tower was underground, buried long ago. Even so, what was exposed rose overhead higher than any man-made edifice I’d ever seen – higher than the walls of the Dazed monastery, higher than the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. Looking up at it from its base made me a bit dizzy.
“Here?” I said when Lurah halted us. “It could fall down and bury us!”
“It’s stood like this for thousands of years,” Alnasl pointed out.
“Before we reach the glass of Ahnk-nuh-qah-say,” Lurah told me, “higher ruins than this will rise above us.”
“The towers of the city itself make this seem but a trifle,” Alnasl added.
For all my trepidation, I was glad to be out of the sun. My skin was a deep red, peeling badly. It felt raw, roughening, sometimes like it was on fire. Over my back, especially, it felt shriveled, stretched taut. I was now in greater agony than I had been in the Sen-an-dah on the last day I led the helpless, figure-blind vision in search of the Aht. That was only five days ago. I’d hardly recovered during my sojourn in the box canyon, and despite the precaution I took to tent my cloak over my head against sunlight with a long stick, two days of travel had brought my sunburn roaring back to life.
Exhausted, sleepless, I lay in the ruins’ dim interior, gritting my teeth against the pain. Twice, I managed to doze, but each time I woke after what could only have been a few minutes, and the second time, I began to cry aloud. Strangely, for surely Lurah was wearier than Alnasl, my crying woke her while he slept on. She came to me.
“Nightmares?” she asked.
“Sunburn. Oh, kindness, Lurah!”
“Let me see.”
I stiffly got to my feet, just as stiffly disrobed. My thin, tattered shift felt coarse on my skin, and when I dropped it to the sand and stood naked, a chill spread over me and goose pimples rose. Lurah stood back and appraised me.
“Oh, Quibble! Why did you not tell me it was this bad? Lie down just as you are, and wait for me. I will only be gone a minute.”
She returned holding a ceramic jar with a tight-fitting lid, which I recognized as a gift of one of the Aht – he had been a teenage boy with unusually light skin, though not as light as mine, who wore spectacles like Gienah’s and cocked his head as he looked at me. I had accepted the jar without asking him what it was. Lurah opened it, dipped her fingertips inside, and brought out a pale cream. She began to rub it across my back, and almost at once, my skin cooled and the pain began to ebb.
“I thought you knew what it was, since Halim-aht-itzil has albinism, too,” Lurah remarked as she doused my shoulders and neck, where the burn was worst.
“I’ve never seen a Far with it,” I said. “All Ones are albino. I just assumed we’re the only people like that. Is that why Hnefn’s skin is so pale?”
“No. He is Sqoh by birth. The Sqoh live farther north than any other Far. Theirs is not a desert land. It snows there. The lore of the Qahlif says the Sqoh grew pale to blend in with snow and hunt with stealth. I do not know if I believe that. But it appears Hnefn at least is a stealthy hunter.”
“He fooled me! When he stopped Luht from fighting you, he looked heroic – ‘the knight in shining armor,’ as the scrivener says. But if it’s true he plotted to marry Asreh, there’s something I don’t understand. His name now is Sehlim-sah-aht-ri-hnefn. So isn’t he already married to a Sehlim?”
“Yes,” Lurah said. “What is unusual about that?”
“Two wives?”
“Or two husbands, or even three.”
“Doesn’t that get very complicated? I mean, the names, just for a start!”
Lurah chuckled. “It does not work like that. You only hear two family names in a betrothal, where there may also be two tribal names. Turn over, please, let me coat your chest. There is always a primary spouse, most often the first. Far do not own things, not many anyway – just personal effects. The family owns everything. So, in polygamy, it is rare for great disputes to arise about property. But it can get complicated, I guess, when it comes to other matters.”
“Love. Intimacy. Sex.”
“And children. Who is whose? That is why the law of the Isleh bans polygamy in the case of a woman with multiple husbands. Their families descend father to son. All other Far tribes are matrilineal. Nufra-qahlif-nah-qehl has two husbands – or had. One died. Qehlim—” Lurah fell silent a second. “—knew not which of the two men fathered him. They both treated him like a son. There. You can coat your legs. Be sparing. There is little of the ointment left. You must use the rest tomorrow.”
Lurah left the jar by my side and rose. She was turning away when I said, “Sah?”
“Yes, Qeht?”
“How did you know about Luht?”
“Know what?”
“Well, that you could trust him, if that’s what you did. We could’ve ridden on.”
“I did not know, Quibble. Surely I did not trust him. But I believed.”
“Believed? In what? Kindness?”
“In him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor should you, I guess. It will take some time to explain. I will tell you tonight. It is the tale of a journey in Ayn-qesh, so it is fitting I tell it as we travel.”
“I’d never have thought it of such a man,” I told Lurah once she finished her tale. “But I don’t quite get Luht’s joke. What made the Qahlif-nah so clever?”
“She knew us as well as we knew ourselves. She guessed what we would steal.”
“But how did she know you’d steal anything?”
“We were uhn-say,” Lurah said.
“When Far are made uhn-say,” Alnasl explained, “they may take some lore, since knowledge is unfettered by say. Before they depart, uhn-say go to a ri. They hear the ri’s wisdom or a story, or perhaps they have a scroll copied. During the visit, uhn-say steal something useful, something easy for the ri to replace. If the ri catches them, they give it up. But if they take it and leave with it unnoticed, they keep it. If the ri discovers a theft afterwards, he doesn’t send a sah after the uhn-say.”
I laughed. “What a game!”
“It’s a test,” Alnasl corrected me. “The uhn-say find out if they can live without a law. They are proving to themselves they can. So, the ri humor them. If you’re uhn-say, getting away with theft may be getting away with your life.”
“Certainly it is so among the Qohl,” said Lurah.
“A bloody people,” Alnasl remarked. “I didn’t know you became Qohl.”
“Sah-uhn-say-lurah,” said the sah. “That is the Qohl style. We make no mention of family or tribe. We put the word ‘uhn-say’ in our names. Most uhn-say are ashamed of it, but the Qohl wear the word like armor.”
“Well you might,” the vision said, “for you have little else.”
“We have each other.”
The moon was up, waning gibbous. Telling the tale had indeed taken a while. By now, we’d been riding for a few hours. Our course at first undulated gently among the dunes. Then they grew taller, longer, and we made detours northeast and southeast in a more parabolic course. Nearing the desert’s eastern edge, we had come into the midst of Iron Trees, as Zeros called the decaying cities of the Ancient. Edifices, some erect, many toppled, grew more numerous all the time. They seemed as haunted as the say-uhn-qah by which we’d camped on the first night of the journey. Ayn-qesh was desolate, but this was truly a desolation, not merely empty and lifeless but abandoned.
Alnasl and Lurah steered with the stars, consulting the sah’s chart by the light of the amber glass. From the top of an especially tall dune, practically a mountain of sand, up which we’d ridden to get our bearings, we saw a glow on the eastern horizon.
“Moonlight reflecting off the gossamer-glass,” the vision said.
“Can it irradiate us at this distance?” the sah asked.
“We’re safe. Closer in, the rubble around the city should shield us. Tomorrow night, we must trek into the perimeter, where the ruins are most dangerous. If we make headway, by dawn the next day we’ll be near the glass, and then we’ll need shelter. We can’t camp where the glass sees us. If just one ray of reflected daylight hits us full, that close, it’ll sicken us. Then, going on would be suicide. Sorry, Lurah.”
“It is well behind me,” she said.
We journeyed on. The moon sank westward, and dawn approached. The edifices of the Ancient were all around us now. We saw the Divided City’s light only once more, at sunrise on the third study at the hottest. As we rounded a massive pile of rubble, day broke and in the east, between us and the sun, the glass glinted like the spark of Fear. It was almost blinding.
“Back!” Alnasl cried, spurring the gray mare. “Back to the shade!”
We camped that day under an overhanging stone shelf in the rubble heap which afforded us shade only until mid-afternoon. Lurah decided the animals had traveled far enough and we must let them go while there was still some chance they could find their way back to water and vegetation. As we unburdened them, she let first the horses and then the camel drink as much water as they wanted.
“We’re running low,” I objected.
“This is im,” she said. “They have as much right to water as we have – more, for they have borne us here.”
As Sehlim-sehl ate the last meal I would give him, I said ef-suhl. He understood perfectly: he nuzzled my chest. Then we pointed our companions west, slapped their rumps. “May you who are water find the sea!” Lurah called out as they trotted off. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
We emptied our packs and discussed which of the Aht’s gifts to carry onward. A lot of things were useless to us. We put them in the sandstorm tent and cached it under the stone shelf. Alnasl assured us night in the Divided City was warm – “Warmer than you’d wish!” – and there was no need to haul wood for fires. At dusk, we shouldered our packs, struck camp, and again rounded the rubble heap.
Eastward, before us, lay masses upon masses of rubble. Here and there, far apart, rose towers that had survived the collapses of their neighbors, now monstrous cairns of stone from the tops and sides of which protruded gnarled, rusted iron like the stalks of wilted flowers. Even as we stared at the ruins in the fading light, a tower in the distance away to the south fell, crashing down in a billowing cloud of dust, and the sound of its demise reached us like faint thunder.
Fear gripped me, stole my breath. I tightened my grip on the yinman glass in my cloak pocket, made myself breathe deeply and steadily. We have each other, I told myself again and again, like a mantra, as we walked into the ruins.
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