Ariah (14 page)

“
I would do it,” Dirva said, “but I know nothing about medicine. You were taught all of Semadran medicine; you must have been taught this.”

“
Just because I was taught something don’t mean I’ll use it. Pa sure as hell taught you loyalty, and it don’t seem to me that ever stuck.”

“
This is not about me!”

“
All I know is you’re the only one who’s not been here, and you’re the only one saying this is the way it should happen.”

Dirva was as angry as I have ever seen him, before or since. He opened his mouth to respond, but Nuri reached back and took his hand. “Falynn,” Nuri said, “I am saying this is the way it should happen, too.”

“
His life, his choice,” Dirva’s mother said from the back of the room.

Falynn’s face swung around to her. “What?”

“
You heard me. You do it, Fal, or I will.” Her voice was iron; her voice had within it a deep and fiery protectiveness for this old man who was her husband’s husband. “Go tell your pa this is what’s happening. Tell him to make his peace with it. Nuri, let’s you and I have a chat about logistics, yeah?”

Nuri smiled. “Oh, Switch,” he said, “I do so love your pragmatism.”

“
Oh, Nuri,” she said sitting next to him, “I do so love it when you make these announcements of yours.” When Sorcha and I left, Dirva and his mother were discussing funeral plans and wills with Nuri. It was, somehow, sweet and macabre at the same time.

* * *

Nuri died in the early afternoon on the 13th of Fourthmonth-Last, 6572 IC. Spring had settled over the City, and that time of day was hot, but not yet blistering. The time of day had been chosen for its warmth and the golden light in which the City basks then. The day itself was chosen because the Pet was full and close; the moon the previous evening had been a thin white ring. The days after a ring night—a night where the Pet is closest to Aerdh, hovering between us and the dusty craters of the Moon—those days are known to heighten magic.

I was there that day, but I was not present for the death. I walked Sorcha to the door and sat outside on the stoop. Nuri was not my family. Bearing witness to his death felt an intrusion. Not long after I sat down, Liro arrived. “You’re still here?” he asked.

“
Yes.”

Liro sat next to me. “You’re here for Sorcha, aren’t you?”

“
I am.”

He patted my shoulder. “Good. Good. You mind if I sketch you? It’s a heavy day. I need something to take my mind off it.”

“
You want to sketch me?”

“
I do.”

“
It would be an honor.”

“
It’ll be a sketch,” he said, pulling a pad of paper and a pencil from his shirt. We sat there for hours. I watched the golden light turn pink, then red, then lilac. The air cooled. The streets were as loud as they always were, but the day felt quiet anyway. And Liro sketched; the whole time, he sketched. He produced a dozen or more drawings of me on that stoop, my back bowed, my chin resting on my knees. You can see the depth of my worry in those sketches.

Just before dusk, Sorcha burst through the door. His face was streaked with tears. He ran for the street and caught me by the hand as he passed by, dragging me with him. He said nothing the entire walk back. The others in the squat house knew what the day would bring, and they had enough respect to have cleared out when we got there. He led me up the stairs, his hand clasping mine so tight it hurt, and pulled me into the bed. He wept for hours. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to. I felt everything, every shard of loss. He wept for hours, and I held him while he wept.

* * *

Sorcha told me much later how it happened. Falynn refused. Nothing could move him. The already-bad blood between him and Dirva grew poisonous after that. It was Dirva’s mother who brought Nuri the peace he’d asked for. She consulted with Falynn’s teacher, who gave her herbs and instructions. They were Semadran herbs culled from magical plants grown by the City’s blue elves, and their properties had been heightened by the proximity of the Pet. The instructions were for her to brew the old man two cups of tea: one to soothe him and ease him into sleep, and the other to gently stop his heart.

Sorcha told me Nuri asked to speak with each family member alone. They went into his room one after another, and Dirva went in last and had the most time with him. Then, Nuri asked the family to come in. He wanted to see them together. Dirva’s father, weeping, crawled into the bed with him. Dirva’s mother brewed the tea, and Dirva held the cup steady to help his da drink it. And then they waited. Sorcha said it didn’t take long, and that it was quiet and peaceful, but that it was still hard anyway. Falynn was the first to speak the red elvish mourning words. Sorcha repeated them and left immediately after.

I don’t know how long Liro had to wait before Dirva came out of that apartment. I don’t know what he was like in the days to follow. Dirva never spoke of it to me. I knew him well, though, and there were times in the years after where the unfathomable well of loss he carried from this threatened to drag me under. All I know was that Dirva stayed with Liro in the days immediately after, and that it was Liro who slowly coaxed him back from the jaws of grief. Dirva had Liro, he had no one else, and it was then that I began to understand that the things we need from others make their own kind of sense, have their own logic, create their own legitimacy regardless of what we’ve been taught. If he hadn’t had Liro, I am not sure Dirva would have been able to patch himself back together.

I am grateful for this, but in the years since, I cannot help but wonder at the sacrifice it required of Liro. It is not easy to hold someone through their grief. It is hard to see someone you love in pain, in irreparable pain. It takes an extraordinary type of kindness, a rare patience, to let the loss run its course. We always want to help, but there are times when there is no help, and the pressure to take help only makes things harder on the ones trapped in mourning. I don’t know what transpired between them. I don’t. But I do know that Dirva left him without explanation, reappeared without warning, and that there was nothing for Liro to do but offer himself up. I never knew Liro well, but he seemed to me a very bright man. Like anyone who scraped a childhood by on the street and survived to adulthood, he had a watchfulness about him and an uncannily honed feel for other people. Liro knew the moment Dirva set foot in the City what he would need, and what he would take, and Liro let him take it anyway.

CHAPTER 9

The weeks after Nuri’s death were steeped in uncertainty. Nuri’s death was an orderly thing, but for those of us left behind it had in its wake a terrible chaos. It is a hard thing for a family to grieve together. Grief marks itself on a person in unique ways, and it grows so total that a person can’t always see past it. One can’t always remember that your mother, your spouse, your sister are grieving the same loss in a different way. Sorcha spent little time with his family in the two or three weeks immediately subsequent to his da’s death. He clung to me like a life raft. I think it was because with me, Sorcha was able to fall into it. He was able to feel the loss. It was not shared with me, and because it wasn’t shared, he could begin to understand what it meant for him. At Prynn’s insistence, he kept playing the morning sets, but he spent the rest of the day in his room with his head on my shoulder telling me stories about Nuri. Anything he could remember about him—things he’d seen himself, things the rest had told him about, the small private moments and the big, grand ones. I have never seen him smoke more pipeherb before or since. I have never smoked more before or since.

The physicality of our relationship had diminished since the fateful day he kissed me, but it came back. There were moments where Sorcha wanted to forget, wanted the ache of loss gone, and wanted me to banish it. There are times I wish I could have given him what he wanted, but I couldn’t, and I was kept stoned enough that the gifts were at bay. Sorcha was not shy about it. “Kiss me,” he’d say. We often sat on the bed with our backs to the wall, side by side, our bodies balanced against each other from shoulder to knee, but there were times when Sorcha would sling himself across me, crouched and ready. And then he’d ask.

“
I can’t.”

“
You could.”

“
Sorcha, I can’t.” It hurt to turn him down, but probably not as much as it hurt him to be turned down. He’d sigh, and then he’d settle against me, curled up in my lap like a child, determined to get something out of me. It struck me more than once that the intimacy we had then—with his face tucked into my bare neck and my arms wrapped tight around him—was something deeper and more telling than sex would have been. I knew I was toeing the line, that this was something no one back home would have approved of, but I still wouldn’t kiss him. I held him and stroked his hair instead. We took to sleeping mostly naked under the same blanket. We’d start the night apart, but by morning he was curled against me, and I had an arm around him. It began to feel natural.

I knew the physical comfort I gave him helped, but if I am honest, there came a point where it helped me, too. By that time, I was no longer sure why I was in the City. I suspected that Dirva would never forgive me, and if he didn’t, there seemed no real reason to stay there. I felt, then, that I perhaps should have been trying to scrape together the cash to get back to Rabatha on my own. More than once I resolved to do it, to find some form of gainful employment, but Sorcha was there, and Sorcha was broken, and after the day’s first pipe I had no motivation anyway.

If I am honest, there was more than one moment where I wondered what held me back from him. I seemed trapped there in the City for good, and if I was trapped there, and I was part of this nahsiyya gang where there were so few rules and no one batted an eye, perhaps Sorcha was right, and I could. But I couldn’t. Maybe if I had been told with some finality that Dirva would have no more dealings with me I could have crossed that line, but until he said it, there was still a sliver of a chance I’d return to a place where I needed to be Semadran again, and it seemed prudent not to get ahead of myself.

What I mean to say is that I had no idea where I would be, or who I would be, day to day. I waited for Dirva, and I grew bitter about the waiting. I planned to get back to Rabatha with Dirva, and at the same time made plans for a lifetime in the City with his brother. It was maddening. Sometimes at night Sorcha would wake me while he rolled over. He slept fitfully then. When I woke at night, I was sober, and all of this came crashing down on me. I lay there, drawing in panicked, shallow breaths, so frozen by the choices ahead that I could not think. Sorcha and his insistent grief served to anchor me in the present. He was an escape.

* * *

While we were cloistered in his room, the days began to run together. Time slid by; spring turned to summer, and then it was my birthday. I was thirty-five, and I was faced with the cold realization that even if Dirva relented, the training was over. He no longer had any obligation to me. The day of my thirty-fifth birthday occurred nearly three months after Nuri’s death. When I turned thirty-five, I had not worn Semadran clothes in over half a year. I had not spoken my mother tongue in at least three months. I felt thoroughly nahsiyya, like a true member of the Natives. Every member is expected to make a contribution, and by then, I was making mine: I taught the Natives how to read. I sharpened their Qin and Inalan so they could get better rates in the markets. These skills were sorely needed; even Sorcha was illiterate. Certainly, the ability to sign their own names made navigating the Qin court system much simpler for Cadlah. She was able to get them out twice as fast, usually before they’d been beaten. I had, in fact, earned the highest level of praise one can aspire to in a community of vagrants: I was considered useful. I had begun to feel I belonged there. A nagging need to return to the Empire remained, but mostly because I missed my parents and worried about them. Little else about my life before seemed to matter.

Two days after my thirty-fifth birthday, Dirva came to the squat house. Sorcha had not recovered from the loss of Nuri, but three months was enough time for him to begin breaking out of his shell. We had been out. He had dragged me to see some sets in the musicians’ district played by satyrs recently arrived in town. The entire musicians’ district in the City swarms these—word gets out, and the musicians flock. They take bets on the songs the satyr will play, and whether or not what they sing actually resembles language. I still found the satyrs deeply unsettling, but I went with him because he wanted me there. Dirva was in the squat house when we came through the door. He and Cadlah sat next to each other on the floor, each with a cup or red elvish tea in hand. When I saw him, I swear my heart stopped beating. I could not breathe. I felt at once a tremendous burst of happiness and a deep shock. I realized when I saw him there that I had fully believed I would never see him again. Sorcha saw the effect he had on me, and he took my hand.