84 - Dear friends into old age

My dear Chevenga:

You may take as given the exclamation I’m sure you are sick of hearing. I made it, of course. And am appalled at the clues I missed.

As a friend, and even as a neighbouring King, I am heaving a huge sigh of relief that you apparently have a healer who makes you listen to him.

I would much rather be playing m’rik with you than mourning you and missing you while you go on to the next life, believe me.

If we could have known what questions to ask, who you ‘are’ would have given us the answer but, as always, hindsight is, of course, easy. Now we all have a chance to discover who you are without this Gods-curse on your head.

Gods-curse... feh... yourself-curse is more the truth.

That is my guess on the whole business. But I admit I am guessing. Hold hard to that healer, know that I have assigned my priests to pray for you, and if there is something—anything—more I can do to help, you need only speak a word and I will clear a space in the mess just for you. I send you that which accompanies this letter as the promise of a much more substantial gift expressing my wish for long life, as soon as I can prepare it.

Klaimera sends her greetings, as usual, along with the words, ‘I’d slap him silly for hiding that from me!’ that you must also receive from almost everyone you have slept with been close to.

My deepest and fondest regards,

Az

Astalaz son of Astyardk, Blessed Hand of Parshahask, Soul of Gold, etc.

[With the letter was a small jeweled silver figurine of a mamoka, which, since they can live longer than people, are a symbol of long life to Lakans.]

†

When Surya was done with me I went straight back to bed. I must have been half-dreaming, because I had accepted as inevitable and natural that the words “suicidal madman” had been carven into the keystone of the Hearthstone Independent under my name, when Tawaen came in and said, “Dad?” He had our pair of far-lookers hanging around his neck. “There’s this huge white thing coming up the road to Terera, you think I should tell Krero?”

“Huge white thing?” Maybe I’d woken out of one dream into another. Maybe it was a prank; my spawn are well and deservedly known for that. “What sort of huge white thing?”

“It has legs, and it’s walking on them, and it’s really really really big.” Right then Krero came in. “Cheng? If you aren’t too flattened, there’s something you want to see.”

I went out with them onto the roof, barely in time; the procession with the huge white thing was just disappearing behind the lip of the valley. On the wind I heard a faint crash of cymbals. “It looks like a mamoka, doesn’t it?” I said. “Except it’s the wrong colour… maybe painted white? Or draped with white cloth?” I wished I was in the air; more than one flying student had descended over Terera to get a better look.

“Whatever it is,” Krero said through his teeth, “if it hasn’t to do with you, I’ll eat my sword.”

He was right, of course. By the time the procession came up over the lip, a goodly number of Tererans, about three-quarters of them children, had joined it, whooping and dancing to the rhythm; among the thirty or so Lakans marching with it, only ten or so of them armed, were drummers and cymbal and zinarh-players. Where the road turns towards Assembly Palace, they left it to take the path to the Hearthstone Independent.

It was indeed a mamoka, but its fur all over was pure white, its shoulders like mountain-peaks, its trunk like a tree-branch coated with snow. It was dressed in lavish Lakan style, with the thousands of chips of mirror on the head and back-cloths sparkling in the sun, and ribbons waving in the wind; the colours were the Yeoli green and blue, though. Its mahu walked at its head with the jeweled drivers’ stick—even that was blue and green—in his one hand, and the snow-white trunk delicately wrapped around the other wrist. As they drew closer, the dancers came out, sinuously spinning and bending their mostly-naked lithe brown bodies, flashing their lengthened gilded fingernails.

To watch them took me right back to Tardengk and the Palace of Kraj, for a heady moment. “Dad,” said Tawaen, “I think you should get dressed.”

I ran in, dressed a little formally, and met the procession outside. It was headed now by an envoy who wore Astalaz’s livery. He stopped up short, raising his hand, the mamoka’s mahu and the mamoka halted. The music cut off, the dancers disappeared into their veils, and the Tererans all shushed each other.

Now it was close, I saw the mamoka’s thick fur had been carefully washed and brushed, every fingerwidth from the tip of its trunk to the tip of its tail, and even its eyelashes were white, over huge pink-lined eyes that themselves were a deep pink-red.

The envoy, who was far more fancily dressed than I, went down on one knee, and when he stood and let me see his face again, I remembered it: he was the same one who’d been in charge of me while I’d been a fosterling. With a typically Lakan flourish, he handed me a letter. Two or three of the Tererans were writers, I realized, when they sidled closer with noteboards as I was breaking the seal, which was Astalaz’s.

My dear Chevenga:

You must recall, I sent you that first miniscule gift merely as a promise of better. I decided to wait until you moved back to Yeola-e yourself before sending that greater gift, for the sake of the creature himself, requiring him to accustom himself to but one new home instead of two in quick succession. I hope you’ll forgive me out of compassion for him.

Of course, I know you are an animal lover, and I understand that the more of an animal to love there is, the happier such a person will be. I know also that you have, shall we say, a special relationship with mamokal.

And of course there is the reason I mentioned in my first letter. As you know, we Lakans believe that the colour white has the power to enhance wishes. So I knew what I must give you.

With him I send the full staff that is necessary to care for him, including his mahu. They are all experts in the care and feeding of mamokal. All of them have been asked, and all are willing either to stay in Yeola-e to care for him indefinitely, at Laka’s expense, or return to Laka once they have trained Yeoli replacements, at your discretion.

I give him with my heartfelt wish, as strong as any wish I could ever have, that you live long, and you and he remain dear friends into old age.

My deepest and fondest regards,

Az

Astalaz son of Astyardk, Blessed Hand, etc.

“It’s a gift from the King of Laka,” I said, to everyone in earshot, making all the Yeolis exclaim in amazement.

“Oh my little pro-great noble God!” cried Skorsas. “Where are we going to put it? We’d have to knock down a wall just to get it into the courtyard!”

I’d never thought of myself as an animal lover, in truth, but when I thought of the menagerie that lived in the Hearthstone, I could see how I could be justly accused of it.

Akaznakir lived in the stable rather than the house proper, but could be counted a member of the household; likewise Niku’s horse Egashu, whom I think she kept only because he’d been a gift from me during the war. As a proper Aitzas, of course, Skorsas had learned horsemanship and now kept three white Arkan destriers; I suspect he built the Independent stable as big as it was for that reason.

You always pick up a mutt or two in war if you throw them bones instead of chasing them off, and so I’d been adopted by a sleek black retriever with a fine spring in his step in the Lakan war, though he was getting on in years now, and a smaller black with white on her paws who would have licked every wound that I had incessantly until it healed, if I and Kaninjer had let her, in the Arkan war. Shaina and Etana had three dogs already, and then there was the greathound that had been a gift from Avritha, the tiny golden long-hair that had been a gift from Stevahn, and Kaninjer’s brindle.

A big house must have cats, of course, and so my family had given Skorsas and Niku four or five out of the Hearthstone Dependent to guard the Hearthstone Independent from mice as soon as it was finished. Then there was the flame-red golden-eyed huntress Ilesias Mahid had given me as a kitten, in return for the kitten I’d given him, and the two white blue-eyed long-hairs that Minis had given me, to remember the Marble Palace by, whom Skorsas lovingly brushed every day.

But my favourite, though I’d never tell the others, was the wing-cat Megan and Shkai’ra had given me after the Arkan war. Feral ones are easy to come by in Brahvniki, if you can find an eyrie of kittens and so tame them from young; but white ones with tails, ears, paws and noses of blue-black can only be bought, and not for a low price, from a very few breeders. Blue Wing was a fickle beast, and so clumsy that it was sometimes hard to believe he was a cat; if something fell off a shelf and smashed in the night, we always knew who the culprit was, no matter how innocently he blinked his blue eyes the next morning. But when he wrapped his velvet wings around my neck, or came flying with us, I loved him like no other.

There were the parrots, with their dazzling colours, messy habits and extensive vocabularies. Now someone had let Kvas out again, it seemed; curious, he alighted on the white mamoka’s head, a patch of brilliant scarlet against sparkle-studded blue and green silk. I dreaded what might happen, but the mamoka merely blinked sagely. “Shut up, stupid bird!” Kvas commented, as he often did, in a Vae Arahi accent.

After my misadventure with the scarf-snake supposedly sent by Ucust of Tiritsa in the war, he’d given me another that was clear of all sickness as soon as he’d joined us, so I still had her, too. And of course, at least in summer, there were always birds with broken wings or baby rabbits without mothers that our children wanted to nurse back to health, turtles, worms, fireflies to flash in the night and tadpoles in jars that they wanted to see grow legs. Some parents would banish all such from the house, but I didn’t, which made me, it seems, an animal lover.

But now I had an animal as I had never imagined having. “All-Spirit,” I gasped, “what do we do?”

“Feed everyone in Terera filet mamoka?” Krero suggested. I pointedly read him the part of the letter in which Astalaz hoped the mamoka and I would grow old as dear friends. “Ehh, I guess not.”

“That’s a lot of kakr to shovel,” Niku said thoughtfully.

“And a lot of… whatever it eats… to go in the other end,” Skorsas observed. “I wonder how pricey it is?”

The mahu had been talking gently to the beast and I’d caught the word “J’vengka” in it; now he stepped forward and said to me, “If it please you, semangkraskae, his name is Mingkrangt.” Lakan for ‘longevity’; it was something, having the whole world know.

“Chevenga,” said one of the writers, “this must be a great lift to your spirits, after yesterday... what is in your heart about what you revealed to the Committee?” I pretended not to hear and turned my back on him.

The massive creature let me caress his shining trunk with my hand, the fur on it like silk velvet, or the softest fur of a white rabbit. Its tip sniffed me, and felt my hand with two big fleshy but prehensile tips, as thorough and delicate as a blind person’s fingers; from the war, I knew the strength that trunk had in it, easily able to snatch up a warrior and smash him against the ground.

Either the Lakans sensed our consternation, or had known to expect it. “For now he needs only his log and his tether chain, until we can build an enclosure for him,” the mahu said. They tethered him and took off all his trappings before coming in to eat, drink, rest and soak, and then they regaled me with tales of the journey; the border-crossing had been tricky, until they’d told the Yeoli guards that mamokal mean long life, and then they’d instantly been cleared. So many ways, it was something, having the whole world know. Poor Mingkrangt, stuck outside; if he could have fit in the hot-tub, or through the door, I’d have invited him in, too.

What I ended up doing, ultimately, was founding a menagerie in Terera that was open to the people, with Mingkrangt as the centerpiece; around him, it was easy to increase the collection, as people from all over began to donate wondrous creatures as soon as they heard. I kept on his Lakan staff, they were so loving and devoted, but visited him often myself, so that eventually his mahu and I were the only people he’d allow to ride his neck, though he’ll take other people on his back if one of us is on his neck. Since so few Yeolis will even venture to attempt to pronounce “Mingkrangt,” he came simply to be known locally as the mamoka semanakraseyeni.