189 - It is as it should be

Inside it was pitch-dark, and the air so thick with that intoxicating smell I wondered if I would have to be carried out. Somewhere very deep within and below, water thumped and gurgled, hugely. I shook off the idea—made more vivid by whatever I was breathing—that it was the stomach-rumblings of a giant sea creature whose mouth I had just entered.

I felt my way in with my feet, threading my way between rocks on a path of sand, until it widened. I lay down, on my back. Closing my eyes made no difference, either to the darkness or my state of mind, but I did. I slowed and deepened my breaths.

Light… distant… it grows like the end of a tunnel, as if this cave led into daylight. I thought I was lying down, but I am sitting at an elegant polished table, on a marble terrace more clean-lined than the Arkan style, by the edge of a brilliant blue sea. Tea-cups so fine the sunlight shines softly through them sit on it. A man sits across from me, young and smiling personably. I know him from somewhere. “Good to see you again, Chevenga,” he says, in inland-accented Yeoli.

“I am sorry,” I say. “You are familiar to me, but I can’t recall from where, or I’d greet you with your name.”

“Let me make it easier.” He alters, becoming Niah, his pareo black, white and red. “You need to tell the A-niah I said this: Eh sah si kampa. The message for you alone is: Mi en min araham.”

I had nothing to write on or with. I had to memorize. Eh sah si kampa eh sah si kampa eh sah si kampa… Mi en min araham, mi en min araham… I graved the words on my memory as with a chisel. The smell made it easier to imagine carving them in stone so I could read them back.

“Who should I say gives me this message?”

“They’ll know.” He smiles, lifting a tea-cup in one delicate hand. His teeth are a shark’s, row upon row of tiny triangular blades. He is Lord Friend. Si kampa, I remember Niku saying, Niah for Shininao. But if ‘mi en min araham’ is for me alone, who do I get to translate it?

He fades, and I find myself tumbling in water, as if the wave that was the second-last tester’s soul outside the cave got the better of me and I am being ground along the bottom by it. Then it calms, and I swim. I don’t know how deep I am, a man-length, a thousand man-lengths, but it doesn’t matter; somehow I can breathe, and know I can.

Vast shapes swim around me. I open my eyes. They are a black blacker than the water but have the green sparkle of the sea around them so I catch parts of their shapes. The smiling snout of a dolphin, the stickle-back of some huge fish, the tentacle of a giant squid… Crowds of jellyfish glowing brilliant blue and red and green pulse past me.

I feel the smooth swoosh of skin that turns into slime like a fish’s side, then hard current from a powerful tail. The creature turns in the water, and seizes me in human arms, that press me to human breasts, and we are moving through the water faster than any person can swim, as if we are flying, the water pressing on my face as the air did when Niku dove us down.

Her hair wreathing all around my head, the sea-woman kisses me with a cool salty tongue, making my manhood swell against her scales. “Narianty,” she says. “Narianty,” I repeat. Her laughter is a silver trail of bubbles.

“Ta saho zalo msah.”

I ran it over in my head. Narianty ta saho zalo msah… First was en sah si kampa then Mi en min araham.

“Ta saho zalo msah.” She laughs again. “Tai!” That I understand: “yes.” “Aeen omore!” Something about love… she tickles me, then muscles all down her go rocklike as she speeds us, whipping her tail up and down like a dolphin. Her immense strength turns me to fire with wanting her. We burst up out of the surface of the sea like a whale breaching, but don’t splash massively back down again; we keep rising as if we are on a moyawa, her tail propelling us through air now.

We are higher than Niku took me, and I feel she is coming to her limit of how high she can go when her huge hands wrap around my shoulders, and she flings me straight upwards, higher, then plunges down, leaving me.

“I will not fall, any more than I did on the moyawa,” I tell myself, knowing that if I will and believe it so, it will be. Below I can see nothing, not land or sea, as if the vault of the sky were not only above but below me, and all around; one can fall only relative to earth, so if there is none, it doesn’t matter. I float, still and wingless.

There are words, though. Vai... moy… sala. “Vai moy sala, vai moy sala, vaimoy sala…”

I thought the sky was insubstantial until Niku told me, while we were flying, that it has substance and you must understand that to fly. Now that substance cracks open like rock beneath me and there is a fountain of lava, spitting and surging eye-burning orange. “Vaimoy sala!” I say, so as not to forget the words out of astonishment.

I feel its heat on my skin as from fire. Heat rising under me is floating me downwards. I land in the top branches of a tree as wide as a city. Its roots run all through the Earthsphere and are what holds it together, I think. It is as lush and deep a green as all the trees on Niah-lur-ana, and from it blooms all their flowers, and ones I know from home; every type of flower on the Earthsphere is here, which makes sense. I fall gently in a sea of petals, that heap up around me as I find myself lying softly on sand.

The cave… the A-niah… I felt the sense of them, the weight of the crowd’s anticipation, and saw a faint reflected flickering on stone above. Like a dream… the words will go, I have to remember them… I ran them nine or ten times over in my mind before I tried to move, to make sure. Was my body still there? Did I know up from down? I had been moving, I knew, from the sand stuck to parts of me that weren’t against it.

Carefully, every feeling of motion so vivid it reverberated, I lifted my head, then went through the rest of getting up one movement at a time, most cautious as I stood upright. My mind full of water and sky and molten rock, and the words intoned over and over so I wouldn’t forget them, I wanted to lean against something on which I had a good grip. I walked to the cave mouth, willing myself not to stagger. I remembered what Niku had said, that there were two hand-grips. I found them, cool and polished, worn into the rock by the hands of all those who had done this before. There was something between my fingers: a flower. Someone was there, holding both his hands out; I gave it to him, and put my hands in the grips. The A-niah had raised a second fire close to the cave mouth, perhaps to light my way back. The crowd of dark firelit faces swam in my sight, silently waiting, then turned ghostly blue as the fire did, hissing.

“I went… elsewhere,” I said, finding myself suddenly breathless. “The young man with shark’s teeth in black, white and red… your Lord Friend.” There were a few gasps from those who understood Enchian, then gasps all around as my words were translated. “Everything they said was in Niah, so I understand almost none of it… Eh sah si kampa, was his message to you.” They let out a strange sound, somewhere between a sign and a moan, and many spoke words that sounded like they came from a ritual, and made hand signs. “Then I was in the sea... and there was a merwoman. The words she gave me were, Narianty ta saho zalo msah,” then “aeen omore.” There was such silence, it was as if they’d all stopped breathing. “She threw me up into the sky, and the words there were Vai moy sala.”

Riahla nar sept Daeka sat down hard on the ground, as if she’d been struck a head-blow; several others did likewise. I glanced at Niku. She had the same grin as she’d had the first time we were alone after I’d defeated Riji. She raised her fist in the victory sign. The Oracle lifted her staff. “And how did you come back here?” she asked me.

I described, as best I could, the lava, the tree and the flowers. As if offering evidence in a court, the apprentice showed everyone the flower. Several people were staring at my hair; reaching up I found another flower twined in it. But it was a dream… a vision… not real… how…?

“Chevenga.” Breicia: she said it sharply, as if calling a warrior to attention, then spoke a string of Niah words in an impassive voice, watching my face closely as she did. I thought I heard “kampa” and “fahkad,” which meant something similar to the Arkan fik, I knew from hearing Niku curse. It couldn’t be, I decided, not in the midst of a sacred rite. She waited for my answer.

“Speaker to Armies, I know hardly any Niah… not enough that I understood that,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “Will you repeat it in Enchian?”

“Nar! Nar!” those who knew Enchian exclaimed to her: no, don’t!

Breicia, it turned out, spoke no Enchian. She said something to me stiffly in Niah. “She apologizes to you,” a man interpreted for her. “She just cursed you using the worst blasphemies in our tongue, to see if you understood.”

Still ringing with the vision too much to have even thoughts of anger, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Tell her, what I don’t understand, I can’t be offended by, so you needn’t apologize.”

The Oracle signed to the man who carried her. He lifted her so her eyes were level with mine. “What the Gods said to you was this,” she intoned.

“Lord Friend said, ‘I am your friend,’ but it means close-friend, heart-friend.” How true that is, I thought. “It is the way he introduces himself. Ama Kalandris said something every Niah knows, since it is part of our story of how the world came to be, and a hundred other stories of the Sea. She said this first to the first Rojhai, who led us here on the first wings. ‘Don’t fear. It is as it should be.’”

“Things are going as they ought to.” She raised her chin in the Niah chalk-sign. Meaning, Niku did the right thing telling me, and they will do the right thing if they make us all family, and share the secret of the wing. No wonder Niku’s grin.

“Then, aeen omore, it is either I love all of you, or we all love one person, you—without other words with it, I cannot tell.” Good either way, it seemed.

Riahla was still sitting, but now in tears, that seemed to be of relief; many other faces shone wet in the firelight too, and other people were beginning to leap in excitement. She and the Oracle exchanged some words, and I heard a distinct tone of ‘I told you so’ from the Oracle. The other Speakers to Sea came close, and she took their hands, and they intoned something formally. Niku told me later it was the withdrawal of all objections.

“Come,” the Oracle said. I let go the grips in the rock, and stepped out of the cave-mouth, and Niku was beside me, holding my hand hard, her body singing with excitement. I realized: some of the words I had told them had not been translated to me. “Love,” I whispered, “What does vaimoy sala mean?”

“You’ll find out soon,” she said, her thrilled grin showing her teeth bright in the firelight. Someone somewhere close began beating a huge drum.

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