The Siren Queen and the Singing Drum

Par 1 / ?

The day of  begins with shouting, even among the harpyr. “A kitesh rose!”

It’s too much to hope that the half-dead might be quiet, Maasha complains to himself as he blinks awake.

It’s early Firemoot, both suns fully risen in the sky and all three waning moons setting somewhere to the southwest. Maasha can feel them as surely as he can feel the sweat sticking his shirt to his back and the hot pain in his knees and hips. He rolls off of the pile of rugs he’d made a palette of in the dilapidated ailing house the harpyr of Tourin-gre-multa have made into a squatter’s haven. Some enterprising Ibur had thought to make a place for the harpyr to convalesce some fifty years ago and built the ailing house out of white stone, its doors and shutters painted bright blue, a modest three stories of cool, hollow-walls and open rooms. But she neglected to cull those she took in and caused an outbreak of the walking hunger that nearly overwhelmed the city. Now the district surrounding it is inhabited only by the lowest castes of the city. And the harpyr.

He stumbles down the hall and grabs a hold of Orala before she can pass him by. She’s quick on her crutches. He signs to her, What is happening?

“A kitesh rose out of the western flats— they’ve never surfaced there before! Word is, it brought up a tomb.”

That wakes him up. Half the city will be out scouring the cracked, stinging salt flats, certainly all of its poor, hoping to make themselves as rich as kings. If the stories are true, if he’s got enough luck, the leavings of ancient Reh’shals will litter the place where the great wyrm broke through the earth in its blind quest for food. Gems the size of a fist, indigo-dyed cloth so fine six layers are still transparent, scrolls of histories the schools will pay through the nose for.

Maasha limps after Orala as fast as his swollen joints will carry him. It’s childsplay to figure out which ox-drawn carts are headed to the salt flats outside the city and Maasha swings himself up onto the back of one without a sound. He smiles and waves at Orala as he passes her by.

The salt flats gleam under the late morning sun with a great welt of dark earth carved out of them when the kites emerged. The wound is swarmed with white-swathed bodies, nearly a thousand people milling about like insects as they hunt for their fortunes.

By midday Maasha gives up his hunt. Whatever treasures were in the ruins brought to the surface of the flats are already secreted way and the minor boons picked over by the swarm. The suns have left the greyed, scaling skin that runs down the right side of his body feeling tender and raw and he knows that when he gets back to the squat the harpyr scars will be that much closer to black. Feeling faint and hungry he hides himself in another oxcart, this one full of crates of digging supplies. The red flowers painted along its sideboards shine as it meanders back toward the dancing smudge of Tourin on the horizon.

The painted flowers conjure up the image of a slow river that Maasha is sure he’s never seen before. One with deep red blossoms on its surface and candles floating down its currents and women singing for the harvest without knowing that fever will take them all before the season is out.

With his stomach growling he can’t bring himself to feel much for the owners of his transport— they may have been unsuccessful but they already own so much. Not that Maasha knows what he would do with shovels and picks. Probably trade them for food or go to work digging graves. That would be if the undertakers of Tourin didn’t assume all Harpyr ate the dead– he isn’t privy to most assumptions made about his kind, but it wouldn’t surprise him if ghoulish cannibalism is among them.

His stomach growls. If they’re rich they must have brought food with them somewhere. He slips under the tarp that’s strewn across some of the crates, lifting it just enough to wiggle beneath it on his belly. The key is not to be noticed and he is the breath of invisibility.

There’s nothing resembling food beneath the tarp even by Maasha’s broad definition of the edible. Not even he can eat gold. Tablets inlaid with it shine even hidden from the sun. He can hardly breathe, suddenly convinced now that he’s seen what prompted the owners of the red flower cart to leave so early in the day, with so much treasure hunting still left to do.

For a long stretch Maasha does nothing but stare in the shaded dim, sweating onto wood beneath him. That he will steal some of the treasure isn’t in question. The decision comes down to what and how.

The moonsong that’s been humming all day is what makes him turn his head and spy his prize, a swell of sensation as noon slips by and the moons settle onto the eastern horizon. It’s habit to turn toward Itemiel’s wives, to acknowledge their descent in the sky court–only here, sweating under the tarp among treasures his eyes fall on what he must steal and it is more beautiful than any star queen he could imagine. It’s a shell, round and lens-shaped like the physicians’ spectacles, but Maasha can’t identify what creature it might have belonged to. The shell is braced with sandbags to keep it from teetering around the interior of the wagon. It smells faintly of the sea but it is too round to belong to an oyster and besides that, no oyster has ever been so large or had strange holes around its closed rim. No oyster Maasha’s ever seen has been so pale and inlaid with pretty silver markings.

The shell calls to him and he wiggles his way toward it on his elbows, not lifting his head off the floor of the card more than the inches he needs to breathe easily. He needs to touch it. Any jostling he makes is easily disguised by the rough road and even if he knew his movement would expose him as a stowaway he’d still worm closer to the shell. It’s stillness makes a noise of its own. He must have it. Once he gets his hands on it, he will worry about getting out.

In defiance of the suns, it is cool under his palm. Maasha’s skin breaks into goosebumps.

__

At noon the drum is blistering hot under Maasha’s hands. What he would give for a proper rain shower with thick clouds to ease the anger of the suns.

This won’t be a year where the wet season, when it eventually comes, sees the suns set. Tracking the constant patterns of the suns and moons is one of the few lessons he’s picked up from the scholars so keen to waste their money on him— for some reason these men of learning struggle with it but Maasha can feel the shifting of the skies in the roots of his hair and his nail beds. He knows this wet season will see both suns with the same certainty he knows that three months from this very moment all three moons will be dark for the first time in half a century.

A callus on the side of his left hand splits, bringing him back to the present where the turtle drum is still singing like rain, ringing through the bazaar. The fire of a raw, open wound is hotter than the suns could manage to make anything.

That’s when he sees the Vediam girl. He stares at her as she passes. His palm bleeds green on hot metal. The drum takes no notice of either and goes on making its music with the help of his hands.

Vediam. It’s a word he knows to associate with the tattoos she wears— it’s said in cities and among wanderers alike with more venom than harpyr. It always struck him as amusing that anyone might be more feared than the walking, starving corpses with their shrieking, that anyone might be more reviled than those who survived the plague that made them into harpyr. Watching the girl pass him by he feels nothing but grief.

Unlike cybash (an inferior instrument by all accounts no matter if its sound travels farther in crowds) there’s no dissonance when his hands stop mid-air, the drum hums a euphonic note into the hard packed  dirt and Maasha’s bones. He scrambles to his feet to snatch the glimmering sotii from the ground in front of him and sling the drum across his back.

He’s lost sight of her but he doesn’t doubt he will find her again. Leaving off the linen shawl (it is more for the comfort of others than himself) he limps into the stream of bodies and the crowd gives him a wide berth. He could stretch his hands out to either side and not come close to touching another person, even though crushing away from him means, for some, inching along the hot sides of the buildings lining the street or crashing into fruit carts.

Maasha stoops to pick up a few fallen turshi from one such cart, dusting them off on the sheet slung about his shoulders as a cloak. They’re still a deep green. He’d seen a child bite into an unripe turshi once— she’d bled from the gums for weeks and been left with a hole in her tongue and that’s to say nothing of the sickness it’d put in her bowels. Maasha’s stomach growls and he takes a bite without hesitation, his eyes stinging at the burning sour flavor. It’s not the worst thing he’s eaten to stave off hunger and unlike most of this city’s poor it won’t do much more to him than make his eyes water.

Zivah knows she must look the wide-eyed idiot. Wandering through a busy market, head bent low, but eyes slide past her with ease. There are none here who care for who she is.

She takes a sharp turn down a dark alley, seeks shelter in the shade of two tall buildings and breathes. She is tired and her throat is parched and near cracking for all that it was a flash flood which sent her careening through the desert. A tiredness has seeped into her bones, suffusing her with exhaustion and not a little bit of fear.

She does not speak for fear her voice will draw attention. In the flats, her voice was cause for beatings. She has never learned to control the layered quality of it. Her head tips itself back into the hot mud brick building. Scalp burning against the scrape of rough hewn material. It is only another small pain, to be catalogued with the rest. The bruise purpling the left side of her face, the split in her lip welling blood once more.

The tightness in her ribs and the ache in her belly. What skills has she to offer a city such as this, she has no weaponry to fend for herself, no money, and no voice with which to speak without fear of drawing attention to the marking on her skull and down her shoulders.

It is in this way that she sees the boy following her. The harpyr. There were two amongst her tribe much like him. Left to do the filthy work, beaten like dogs. One had taught Zivah letters as a girl. A kindness which she knew, she would never have been afforded otherwise.

Aquamarine eyes squint into the light, a headache has already begun pounding a staccato beat at the base of her skull.

Though she tries to modulate the volume of her voice, there is little she can do to control the layered quality of it when she says, “Why do you follow me?”

Maasha is in the process of winding the linen back about his head– now that he’s found her he doesn’t need to clear a path to see her– when she rounds on him and when she speaks he drops his arms to his sides. He stares, yellowed eyes wide for the span of the seconds it takes to understand the sound that unfolds from her mouth.

And for the first time that he can remember he takes a breath to try to speak to another person. No sound comes out of his throat but a rushed sigh and the attempt makes his chest ache.

He closes his mouth so fast his teeth click.

He points to her tattoos and follows with a series of gestures— there are guards three streets up; they won’t like you— without thinking she’ll comprehend them. Not even the men who study him every few months have managed to work out any of his signs beyond “Pay me” and “I’m leaving now”. They don’t like seeing the latter and are prone toward ignoring it.

Still, he repeats it slower like it’ll help, pulling an angry face when he gestures toward his chest to indicate the guards, making the sign for “nearby” several times. That’s not getting at the reason, that he knows they’re more likely to avoid her if he’s nearby. And why he cares is even further beyond him or anything he might be able to put into sign. The hand language the other harpyr have developed with him has no gestures to mean I know what it is to be alone and You don’t deserve what they’ll do to you for your blood.

Without such signs he can only tell her there are guards three streets up and hope that she doesn’t assume he’s lost his mind.

Zivah thinks she should be concerned, that the boy approaching her, slowly winding a scarf around himself, is harpyr. She understands, even if only peripherally, that those like him are treated unfairly. Still, she cannot help but be leary. If she has captured his attention then she will have captured other attention as well. …

She knows not where the fear stems from, she has never ventured into a city before. Her tribe rarely left the salt flats, and yet…

Her fingers rest against the stone behind her back, splay wide, palms pressed flat and eyes too pale to belong to a Vediam-Neliv widen.

Is there some common language shared by the harpyr? She understands some of the gestures used, but– “You are warning me?” And her head tilts to the side, eyes narrowing at the boys gesticulation. Anyone else might think he suffered from seizures, that the pointed articulations of his hands were little more than spasms. The focused look on his face told another story, Zivah had long since learned that such concentration often indicated seriousness in matters.

Maasha nods with enthusiasm— she’s got the gist of it, thank the wives for small mercies.

With his eyes shaded beneath the scarf he can see the heavy, sharp lines tattooed at crossways over her face and the ink that caps her fingertips before creeping up her forearms. No family that he’s seen in Tourin wears anything quite like them but, then, this girl is Vediam.

Low voiced, she tilted her head toward her previous trajectory down the alley, “Why should you care who takes interest in me?” Her mouth forms the syllables strangely, as if tongue and teeth were not in harmony with the quality of her voice.

He chews his lip, knowing he can’t give her an answer that would satisfy himself, and shoots out a hand to take hers. (His left— he isn’t foolish enough to go reaching out to anyone with his right hand. The only time he tried they’d thought he was trying to spread the plague and he’d barely escaped having the clawed, scaled mess of it cut off.)

Never in his life has Maasha considered how many words he didn’t have or wanted to impart his broken way of speaking on another person through sheer will power.

He points at the flower in the center of her palm then the discolored side of his face and lets her go to sign at her again— first pointing first to his eyes then gesturing between them with his thumb and smallest finger extended, ending the phrase by pressing his hands together at the heels off his palms, fingers open, and shaking them twice.

We are the same.

She recoils only because his sudden movement startles her. His skin is cold against her.

Stepping back out of her space he says it again, slower. It’s not what he means but getting close to the truth is better than saying nothing and her walking into surer danger.

Zivah is certain of very few things. That if the Gods do exist, if they ever did, then they care very little for people like her. The other is that, even without their interference, there is something in her which cannot be angry or fearful of another person’s kindness. Not when she has never had fear of harpyr.

“You mean we are both reviled by all,” she lets her hand drop back to her side. “I cannot return to my tribe.” Palm slides across the short strands of her hair, nails scraping at her scalp, catching and tearing free a scab along her hairline, blood blossoms to the surface and she heaves a heavy sort of sound.

“And where shall I go, iku’ri?” Once more she leaned heavily against the wall.

He shakes his head, frustrated. Because he isn’t used to being spoken to this much at one time; usually it is simply at or over. Because he’s not given that question a single thought since she caught his eye on the street corner. It’s well past midday now and time is short; it won’t be long until the changing of the guard and that will bring them through this street en masse.

He folds his arms and frowns at her for a long moment then tries, With me, a fluid, arching movement bringing his hand toward his body that ends in tapping the heels of his palms together at his sternum. Come with me.