99 - Five years just looking

“One, one cup only, for me!” Krasila crisply ordered. In her grey-walled parlour, the smells of stone, iron and ancient cook-smoke overlaid by the aroma of the meal we’d just had, we settled on her wood-wrought furniture, the arm-rests polished only by hands, the only padding a thickness or two of wear-shined leather, and loose sheepskins. Her wine-cups were simple too, rustic ceramic in the old Chavinel style, with running whorls and meanders. They went well with the wicker-basketed clay flasks Tyirya had fetched the wine in; maybe that’s what he had been thinking. His bright, curio-bedecked parlour came back in a flash in my mind.

Krasila looked away, I surreptitiously topped her up, and she pretended not to notice as she quaffed. When she’d had what I estimated was about two, she actually leaned back on her own couch, her bony old form cradled on sheepskins.

“Well,” said Esora-e, a touch loosened by his own quaffing. “What are we going to talk about?”

“The wars we’ve fought, of course!” I said. “Swap tales of our greatest deeds.”

We did that for a while. She and Tyirya were old enough to have fought as marines against Kranaj’s grandfather’s Enchians when they’d taken Asinanai, and had helped liberate it in 1509. She’d retired from the field to devote herself entirely to teaching in 1525. Remembering that Esora-e’s farewell letter had been dated 1523, I wondered if she’d quit to avoid being stationed in a Chavineli unit in the same army as him, but didn’t ask.

“This is terrible. I have classes to teach tomorrow.” Was that a trace of a drunken slur I’d heard, from her whose diction was usually sharp as a sword-stroke?

“We’ll help you, shadow-grandma,” I said, topping her up again.

“I’m ineb… inbre… ibne… inibne… drunk.”

“Aaaaaahhhhhhh ka,” I said. “That’s the Niah word for it. Same means splatted on the ground after you’ve fallen out of the sky. Hey, you’re more so than I, I have to catch up. Shadow-granddad, please…” He topped my cup to the brim.

“Sssso,” she said. “Why?”

“Why what?” Esora-e and Tyirya were letting me do more than my share of the talking, I noticed, when things got deep, understandably.

“Why d’you three come’n bother me?”

“I told you last time I was here, shadow-grandma, and it’s the same with all of us—”

“Disssshturb me. Throw my life upside-down.”

“If the room looks upside down, you must be—repeat after me—inebriated.”

“In… inerb… inbred… inurbed,” struggled Esora-e. She glared at him in suspicion he was mocking her but let up before he noticed.

“Tha’ wash th’word I was looking for. One… only one… thank All-Shpirit I’m not having more ’n one.”

“Of course,” said Tyirya. “Eeerrbrinated.”

“Eeeebeeriated,” said Esora-e, and we were all laughing helplessly.

“You. You fool,” she said to Tyirya. “You could always make me laugh.”

“He came here to get you drunk and thus overcome your reservations,” I said.

“I did not!” my shadow-grandfather snapped, mortified. “He lies!”

“Oh?” Who’d ever have thought that Krasila Mangu could look at a man with languid, half-lidded eyes? “You wanted to overcome my reshervations, onsh.” Tyirya stared, amazed. “There,”—she stabbed out a vaguely-aimed finger towards Esora-e—“is the proof, you old sheep-diddler.”

I was happy to sit back and watch this, but Esora-e felt he must rescue one, or perhaps both. “No, no, mama. We came back to steal back my papers.”

“Lies! All lies!” I snapped, as if mortified.

She waved her hand towards his old bedroom. “They’re yours. Take ’em.”

“I did want that, once, yes, ’tis true,” Tyirya said musingly.

“Wha…? The papersss… or me?”

“He thinks that just because they all ssshhay ‘Dear Papa,’” Esora-e said, “he can read them.”

A fit of giggles seized me. “Let me, ha ha, let me show you, hahahaha, how it’s done… Ahh… em… urk… uhhhh… gack… stutter… hahahahaha!”

“Actually, your mother found that endearing,” Esora-e said.

“Do I look like him when I do it? ‘So, Karani, I.... I -I-I-I-I-I-I-aiiigghhhhh.....’ hahahaha…”

“Youths,” Krasila snorted. “All lust-juices.”

“What!? You know what I’m talking about?? You read them all, too??”

“All!?” Esora-e gasped. “Shhchevenga, I thought you just read the one bit!”

“It would be a very bad idea for me to want you, Tyirya,” she said archly. “Only one, boy, one!”

“I did only read the bit; I want to read the rest,” I said as I topped her up. Esora-e made a bit of a ‘gurk’ noise, perhaps as Tennunga had.

“I’ve kept and dusted ’em for thirty year... never set out t’read ’em but caught words as I moved ’em.” Tyirya refilled Esora-e’s cup fast, and he emptied it equally fast.

“Every word true. Lousy shit as a wife… lousy shit as a mother… barely capable as a war teacher.” She bent up as if to rise, and failed.

“That’s not true!” Esora-e said, in horror.

She looked at him as sharply as if she’d been sober. “No?”

“No; you’re maybe a little harsh, but you produce good warriors,” said Tyirya.

“You produced him,” I said, pointing my thumb at Esora-e.

“Harsssh’s a whetsshtone, my da always said.” She settled down again.

“You had a da?” said Esora-e.

She thrust her cup at me. “Only one, Tennunga-shhpawn!” I poured it full.

“What was he like?” Esora-e asked, like someone nervous in a fight making a first tentative feint.

“Beat my ma to death in the privassshy of the housh and curshed near did me too. Warrior like a rod.”

I heard the metallic tinkling of the coals of the cook-fire as they died, and someone laughing down in the street, distantly, in the ocean-deep silence that fell. “Wha….at?” Esora-e finally whispered.

“Had a brain-bursht, the Haian sshaid, an’I looked after’im the lasht five year of hish life. Gave me time to heal the bruisshes.”

Tyirya seized his cup and drank with a desperation he hadn’t all evening. “Ahh, Tyiri...” she said, almost with a purr in her voice. “I couldn’t tell you this shit!”

I knew what I must be: Surya. “Now you can,” I said. She held out her cup, gesturing with one finger of her other hand, and I poured.

“Easssy to hate. Toooooo eashy, to hate. Never good enough. Lasssht five years was even longer than the first ten. I did my best. He couldn’t talk.”

“Did he beat her to death slowly or all at once?” I asked.

“Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e!!”

“Secrets kill, Esora-e. Think about it.” His mouth clamped shut.

“Broke her left arm and ribs firssht. Shaid’t was a training accident at the school. She agreed. I sat in the baby cage in their school. Baby cage… ha… Concussion often ’nough that the Haian started asking questions. Nothing for a while then.”

Her brown eyes, black now that we were down to lamplight, stared off into air as if seeing what she remembered happening again before her. “I was clumsy. Always bruised. Falling over my own feet. Hitting my own head. Clumsy. A poor student. One only!” I poured her more, but only a little.

I wasn’t sure what put the question into my mind, but remembering what Surya had said, that he didn’t always know why he felt inclined to do what he did, in healing, I asked it. “Did he use his wristlets?”

“Lassst time... said she was looking wrong at him. He had… had… to beat th’…wrongness out of her eyes. Tears on her face... but ssshtone-faced. Not a concussion… not that time. I thought I’d killed him.”

I had a feeling she was back in two different times at once. “You thought you’d killed him?”

“He was beating me. Yesh, with the wrisshlets. I pushed back... he got up from the matting and then fell down again… turning blue… I ran for the healer. Couldn’t get a Haian… wouldn’t matter.” She was stone-faced herself, with no trace of tears.

“He never talked again. Five year, jussht looking… looking… he died in his shleep.”

“I don’t blame you, shadow-grandma,” I said.

“Oh no, I was good,” she said. “I did the right thing. I nursed him through lung fever, more ’n once. Our house was the storage shed… shhhtorage now… this school. Aw, kyash… I’ve ssshpilled my guts. He always said I would. Mama fell off a cliff called Da.”

“You did right spilling your guts, shadow-grandma,” I said gently. “That was his story, that she fell off a cliff?”

“Shpill my gutsh... betray him. Never good enough not to.”

“Tell the truth about him.” She blinked and squinted at me, as if at a person speaking a foreign tongue. “He didn’t have the right to be protected from truth by you.”

“Everyone knew he was a kyash-eater. Everyone knew. No one saw. He was my da.”

“How old were you then?”

“Fifteen.”

I glanced at Esora-e, and then at Tyirya, both of whom looked stone-cold sober, though that was impossible. “We came to hear this, shadow-grandma,” I said. “Even if we didn’t know that’s what we were coming for. It was to hear this.”

“I still sit for him... in the grove. And for her. I don’t know which I love or hate more.” I held out my arms to her. She pushed away her cup, hard enough that a tongue of wine sloshed out and spilled on the wooden table. “No more drink,” she hissed. “None. Ever. Too much.” She wormed awkwardly and softly at once into my arms, and I tightened them. In a moment her wiry body went stone-heavy with laxness, her head lolled on my shoulder, and she was snoring with a faint whistling through her lips.

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