This is the first chapter

#1 - I Write From Hell

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

#39 - Even Without Elephants




Scorching son of a bitch bastard found me standing on the threshold of the cell.  Unable to make myself go outside. By myself.

Pelahir set his shoulder against the hall doorframe and crossed his arms but didn’t say anything.  Ahrimaz felt as though he chewed and swallowed live coals but wasn’t going to let him see his weakness. He turned away from the door as if he'd just been thinking of what to write next, set his pen down, pulled up a smile on his face and stepped out.  “Let’s spar, shall we?”

“Certainly,” he said and smiled back.  “You know that you can leave if you want to?” Scorch him.

“Of course.  Wenhiffar told me so.  She also mentioned that there are hordes of raconteurs waiting in the outer rooms of the House, eating our food, writing their stories here rather than in the Broadsheets’ offices.  How many broadsheets’ and newspapers and book printers do you have?”

Ahrimaz fell in beside Pelahir and they strolled up to the salle as though they were the best of friends.  Ahrimaz’s hands itched with the need to lay them on the man, clutch him, hold him, hurt him, love him. He wasn’t quite sure which was the strongest impulse and to hide his twitchy fingers knotted them tight in the small of his back, as if he sauntered along in a garden, or along a folly walk.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught Pel’s glance and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.  “You’re attracted to me and Yolend both,” the Cylak said quietly.  “It’s all right.  Neither of us is going to jump on you, hold you down and ravish you.”

“You mean like I did your counterparts in my world?” Ahrimaz asked harshly.  “The week before I woke up here I’d just started torturing you and had given Yolend a black eye.  Shashi, poor blighted thing, would run screaming from me if I came into the room and startled her.”

“Just as you say ‘I am not him,” we can say ‘we are not them,” Pel responded and held the door of the salle, the disrobing antechamber, open for Ahrimaz with a courtly wave of his hand.  “Yolend would kick your ass if you tried to lay a wrong hand on her.”

“And you as well.” Ahrimaz said.  “And Shashi would say something that would likely throw me on the ground wailing.” He smiled, more than a little grimly.  “That is surprisingly reassuring.  However I got here, I got put in a place where not only am I not allowed to harm anyone else, I’m not able to harm anyone else.”

Pelahir hung his brocade coat and waistcoat on a hook by the door.  It was the first time Ahrimaz had actually seen him in full Innéan court garb rather than his own country’s leathers and feathers.  “What’s the occasion?”

“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?”

“Forgotten what?  And why is the salle so ashing dark?” He stepped from the disrobing room into the dim salle and just had time to gasp before a flint struck in the dark and a candle flared. Then a dozen candles.

“A small surprise, you Shithead,” Pel said from behind him as he gaped at brothers, wife,  lover, father, mother, healer, teacher… he wrapped his hands around his head and sank to his knees in silence… his children all held candles illuminating their faces.  “You’ve forgotten your own hoofless birthday.”

Limyé handed off his candle to be placed in the great candelabra with the others and Arnziel cranked it up, creaking, swaying and flickering to light the room from above.  The healer wrapped his arm around Ahrimaz’s back where he crouched.  His hands came down off his head and grabbed onto the floor as if his fingers were claws and his head swiveled back and forth like a bewildered war cat, as he took in the feast spread on low tables in the middle of the salle and the training river set as a trickle of gentle noise behind it all.  “Breathe,” Limyé said softly, holding a censer under Ahrimaz’s nose.  “Breathe in calm and peace.  Everyone here is of good will toward you.  No one blames you for anything.”

“They can’t love me.  That’s not allowed,” Ahrimaz rasped but the sweet smoke fuddled his senses, and everything was taking on a rosy tint.  Edges were softening. “I’m not him.”   

Limyé offered him a sugar chip and he took it, automatically.
“We know that. But we are allowed to like you.” Ahrimaz was vaguely aware that Pel had taken hold of his elbow and he and Limyé were steering him like an errant paper balloon to tether him to a cushion at the main table.

Everything seemed so… nice.  So calm.  The children, giggling, didn’t enrage him.  It was funny and he began to giggle himself.  “You’ve drugged me!”  It was so funny.  He wouldn’t be able to bear it if he weren't floating on the fuzziness of the drug.  The little girl he’d met in the snow danced around the outside of the room, all black and white and red, carrying his beating heart in her hands, but she was smiling and she was being careful with it.  He couldn’t help smiling.  It was so beautiful.

He could feel the pain he lived with, every day, the jagged wounds and pus-filled bags of filth in his head and in his heart, but it no longer seemed so immediate.  Someone handed him a plate of food that he stared at for what seemed like forever.  “My favourites!” 

“And there will be petit-fours for after the meal,” Wenhiffar said.  “You’re not my son but you have his tastes, it seems.”

“I’m not supposed to indulge myself like that… like this… this is for babies.” But he gathered up a butter-crust meat pie and bit into it, finding that it had venison and red wine gravy. He couldn’t keep talking with his mouth full so she… and everyone else just kept on talking.  It was so… pleasant.

“Babies generally get it right.  It’s grownups that mess up their heads,” Rutaçyen said, waving a blue-painted rattle toy over the baby’s head.  She had the new baby in her lap.   
Ahrimaz just gazed at her, sitting next to her twin, with the child and he couldn’t howl, he didn’t want to weep.  It was beautiful.  The memories of the maggot-ridden dungeon faded then faded again like a painting hit by flood and dried in Aeono's sun.  This just felt good.

People had the new broadsheets out and were reading bits to each other, Ahrimiar the younger, the Heir, his alternate's boy, finger tracking along the line bravely read out “.. the family says that this man is their son, for as long as he is in our world.”

“And so it is,” Ahrimiar the Elder said.  “Happy birthday, Ahrimaz, my other son.” And that didn't hurt either.  He wasn't even afraid of the old man, when he was in this state.

“I should be angry that you drugged me,” he said dreamily to Limyé, “but this is helping.  It’s letting me remember how to feel good again.”

The girl with his heart in her hands smiled and held her hands up over her head.  Ahrimaz suddenly realized that no one else, save Arnziel, could see her.  He caught Arnziel gazing at her with astonishment.   

The blood in her hands poured down over her and flowed away in the river, while his heart hovered there, under one of the little waterfalls, being cleansed and purified.  He took a deep breath and saw it begin to glow, just slightly, while in his chest he felt an easement as if a whip lesion had kindly, tenderly given way to whole flesh and unmarked skin.
 
He took another bite of his pie, licked the gravy running down his hand and smiled at Arnziel’s slightly stunned look.  “I think this is going to be the best birthday party I’ve ever had, even without elephants.”

2 comments:

  1. Ahrimaz truly did forget about his own birthday. He's thirty years old and when I had Pel hang up his great coat that's when the surprise party bloomed in my head and everybody looked at me and said 'So? You're going to forget it too?'

    What could I do? I had to write the party.

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