Xenocultivars, page 12
Then she flicked her hand and tossed the seed into my lap. I didn’t scramble to catch it — I’d always had slower reflexes than her. I poked at the seed cautiously. Its shape reminded me of an ox, ready to gore.
“My name,” she said, and from her tone of voice I knew that this would be her true name, given only to the closest of the close: to lovers, friends, and family. “Sulyom,” she said, “the seed of the water caltrop in Angwari.” Then, abruptly, with the kind of segue characteristic of her: “In Hlautara, there’s no name for the seed, is there? It’s just called a seed, or maybe even a fruit, and the plant is called something like a water nut. In Angwari, it’s the same word as the iron caltrops you’d throw in front of the enemy’s horses in wartime.”
“Ah. Battle spikes.” I nodded, feeling painfully monolingual. I wanted to learn Angwari, if only to share a secret language with my beloved; would that be an unsuitable motivation? But we were scrambling to finish our studies with Teacher Mirta, and she barely left us any time to ourselves. Teacher Mirta’s approach to magic was purely geometric, an interplay of forces and barriers, with no chants or even words. It was fascinating and unique, entirely unlike anything we could learn at the state academies, but we struggled to keep up.
Sulyom fished out another caltrop and tossed it into my lap. I watched the muscles move under her skin as her thick arm whipped back and forth. “Back in Angwarya, we made flour from them. It’s great in difficult times, when you can’t get much else.” She nodded at the expanses of caltrop plants covering the water further out, their leaves forming a pattern that only resolved from close up, merged into a blanket of green from a distance. “There’s always plenty to go around.”
I stopped rowing and secured the oars. I ran my fingers along the seeds in my lap, careful not to prick myself. “I’m sure people could use it all up if they put their minds to it.”
“Iliar, don’t be so defeatist,” Sulyom said. I hadn’t told her my true name — she simply blurted it out. Now we both knew each other’s true names. With magic, sometimes details like that bled through, unplanned, between people who were close. And we were inseparable.
Until the war, that is; but at that point, the war was nothing but a faint murmur in the halls of power, little more than drafts of plans to move units to the border regions.
* * *
SULYOM
I stopped cutting my hair to show my grief. Iliar had been taken from me to the front lines, so long ago. Would she ever return?
My hair frustrated me. I wanted to rip it all out. Before, I’d shave it off every once in a while. Kept it short the rest of the time, too. But then I thought — if Iliar returns somehow, she will be able to see my curls. I wanted to show her this, a part of me she had yet to know. My blonde curls were so different from her glossy black hair, which fell almost straight down.
The army took her and left me here with Teacher Mirta. She insisted that she needed at least one student with her, to draw water from the well, to feed the animals. She could draw water from the well and feed the animals just fine. I knew she wanted to keep me because I was the angry one. If soldiers of one army or another showed up, I would fight them. I would fight them and I would win. Or at least hold them back long enough for us to make a run for it.
Yet I was in the hinterlands and Iliar was serving in the healer corps, probably seeing action more days than not. The world was unfair, and I didn’t know how I could fight the entire world all at once.
I’d wanted to go with Iliar, but Teacher Mirta had held me back. I pushed the anger down inside me. All I did these days was push my anger down. All I did. Push it down and get to work. There was plenty of work still.
The front lines were far, and my training went on uninterrupted. It was only my thoughts that drifted, always. Even now, my hands shook and I dropped the glass tray. Teacher Mirta’s family heirloom, filled with cups of herbal tinctures, her work in progress. I scrambled to pick up the pieces. I cut myself and the concentrated tinctures scalded my hands. I gritted my teeth. I was bleeding onto my teacher’s keepsake rug. My stomach spasmed. How much worse could I make this?
Teacher Mirta found me standing above the ruin of her labors, blood dripping from both of my hands, one palm involuntarily closing over the shards I’d gathered. I expected punishment — she wasn’t cruel, but she was cold. I took a step back, almost losing my balance.
She looked me over. I noticed she’d paled. She was very light-skinned, from the northern mountains, but now she seemed even lighter, as if the blood flowing out from me had flown out of her, too. Even her hair seemed, all of a sudden, brittle as glass.
“I will not punish you,” she said evenly. “I will teach you something else. You need to learn the lesson of stillness and calm. Even when your soul aches, you must know when to remain still, and how to hold still, for as long as it takes.” She gazed into my eyes. I averted my head — a clumsy attempt at hiding my turmoil. “You will spend a fortnight as a plant — a plant of your choice. This will be your lesson.” She paused.
I considered it. She’d mentioned this exercise before. I missed Iliar so much I could claw off my skin, but there was no way of getting her back. We weren’t in any immediate danger ourselves. I might as well learn something in the meanwhile. I nodded.
“Most of my previous students who needed this exercise chose a tree.” Teacher Mirta paused again. “The ritual involves swallowing the plant’s seed.”
She did not know my true name. But I would reveal it to her, just for this.
Pain came easy to me.
* * *
ILIAR
When I saw the stray guinea pig running to hide under a rotting pile of wood, I knew all was lost. Teacher Mirta had always kept the guinea pigs in a large shed, carefully under lock and key.
To find my way back to Teacher Mirta’s house, to my beloved Sulyom, I had wandered through a landscape of lack and deprivation; what the war had not destroyed, the marauding armies had taken for food. Most of the guinea pigs had probably warmed errant soldiers’ stomachs.
The closest household was Aunt Karisa’s. When she heard me approach, she came to the fence and leaned against it, her body trembling. “I saw the soldiers,” she muttered. “They came for the mage and took her. Poor Mirta,” she said in such a tone as to brook no confusion about the fate of my teacher.
My body was beginning to take on Aunt Karisa’s trembling in sympathetic resonance. “What happened to her student?” I asked.
“Oh, that youngster? About your age? A boy or a girl? I could never figure it out.”
“A girl,” I told her as firmly as I could manage. Sulyom was somewhere in between, but her body was her own business, not a village auntie’s — and she’d always considered herself a girl, grew up as a girl, lived as a girl.
“All right then,” she grumbled, “no need to take offense. My eyes are not what they used to be.”
I wanted to shake her; some of Sulyom’s vehemence that had rubbed off on me. “Yes, but — where is she?”
She shook her head, her blue-printed headscarf slipping. “I don’t know. I hadn’t seen her in weeks when the soldiers came. I was wondering where she’d gone... Some of the youngsters from the village ran away to join the army, so I figured...” She shook her head again, then brushed a thin brown strand of hair that’d escaped from under the scarf behind her ear with unsteady fingers. “That’s all I know, my dear.”
I’d held myself together through all the battles, through the assault on the ramparts of Samur, but now I struggled not to drop to my knees. I’d come all this way for Sulyom, my boots turning to rags, walked across endless lands for Sulyom — all for nothing?
* * *
SULYOM
Teacher Mirta would make me swallow the caltrop, I knew. I craved it. I craved it like I craved the pain that stabbed at me every time I moved my fingers. I wanted to turn against the whole world. I could not, so I turned against myself. The pain could take the possibility of thought away.
Teacher Mirta cleaned and treated my wounds and chemical burns, and bandaged everything carefully. She applied gentle wisps of magic, belying her hard nature.
“I can’t heal your hands faster,” she said, turning her small pale head to the side like a bird. “Your body struggles against it. You’ll have to wait until after your shapechange.”
I’d wanted to run away. This was the next best thing.
I dreamt about the ritual the night before the date we had set. The caltrop going down my throat. It felt as if it were one of the iron caltrops laid out to delay marching armies. A weapon. It tore up my mouth, my throat, and I could feel it slicing through my innards. I was splitting open, with a nonsensically large wound in keeping with the logic of the dream. I reached into it and turned myself inside out. My damaged hands grabbed my damaged flesh and twisted, until what had been inside was on the outside, and what had been hidden inside me all along was a shining gleaming crystal, glowing with sunlight —
I woke with a startle. My chest hurt. Teacher Mirta was sitting at the foot of my bed.
“I had some seeds saved from last year. I made them into a powder,” she said. Then, quietly: “Not everything needs to be violent, you know.”
I knew. I’d come all the way from Angwarya to study with someone who wasn’t part of the great academies. Those mages with their elaborate ranks, their willingness to go to war, their saber-rattling — it disgusted me and I feared it. Teacher Mirta lived out here to avoid people, but also to avoid fighting.
I didn’t want to fight because I knew I would be good at it.
* * *
ILIAR
I wandered around the back — the hothouses all destroyed, the plantings ripped out or eaten by wild animals once the protective enchantments had faded. I couldn’t feel anyone’s presence, only an odd vibration; maybe the aftershocks of a fight? Sulyom would have fought if she’d been taken by force, of that I was certain.
I tried to expand my senses. Everything ought to have been clear, now that the battles had subsided, but I still couldn’t get an impression of either Sulyom or Teacher Mirta. I would have felt their passing through our bonds, death reverberated stronger and farther than almost anything; so they had to be alive. But I knew little beyond that, and I suspected not only because Mirta had warded herself well from our stray thoughts. Where were they? What had happened? Our neighbor had insisted that Sulyom had vanished long before Teacher Mirta was taken. Where could she have gone? Would she have left of her own accord? I hoped desperately that she hadn’t run away to find me while I was already on my way back.
In Sanabrou, there was a prison for mages, I knew, warded so tight that not the faintest impression of magic could escape. If Teacher Mirta had been taken there, that would explain why I could not find a trace of her. But what of Sulyom? Some imprint of her lingered still, even if it slipped further away from my attention the more I tried to focus on it. Yet I could not find where she had gone — it was as if she had vanished, dissolved in the heavy late-summer air.
I walked through Teacher Mirta’s small domain. The lake beyond the plant beds was entirely overgrown with water caltrops. It was little more than a pond, really — not even an oxbow lake, maybe a remainder of one. Here, on the edge of the wetlands, it was hard to tell how everything had formed.
Yet I was sure the caltrops had not been there when I had left; they could be found all over the backwaters, but not in our teacher’s own backyard. Despite all Teacher Mirta’s misgivings about symbolism and words, I still felt a tinge of inspiration. I could make use of a caltrop to lead me to Sulyom. I had certainly acquired more skill with location spells while I’d been running from one battle to another, desperately searching for wounded people to heal. It wasn’t the abstract interplay of forces Teacher Mirta had taught me — the battle-learned magic had a solidity to it, symbols like little chunks of power. A sulyom could take me to Sulyom. Even if not instantaneously, I didn’t have enough raw power for that; but I could always just walk, once I had an idea where to go.
I took off my trousers, but put my boots back on — stepping onto a caltrop with bare feet would be most unwelcome. I pulled the hem of my tunic between my legs and tied it to my belt. I wobbled closer to the lake, unsteady on uneven ground. I waded into the water —
An odd pressure, then a sharp pain. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, then I swore. The sole of my right boot had split open, the water and the walking and the odd caltrop embedded in the muck altogether proving too much for it.
I hopped backwards on one leg, lost my balance, and slipped, falling with a loud splosh. Another caltrop wedged itself in my cheek. I grimaced, grabbed it and shoved it into the side pouch clipped to my belt, but one of its tips broke off and lodged in the flesh of my palm.
This, at least, was one trial I could overcome. I stood, favoring my left leg, and closed my eyes to better direct my magic. There was an odd moment of hesitation, as if the universe itself was holding its breath. Then the fragment popped out, and the skin pulled together with that uneasy and all-too-familiar sensation of flesh moving as if under its own will.
I opened my eyes and walked back to the grass where I could sit, hoping nothing would sting or bite me. I could heal my foot, but I’d need to find a new pair of boots — inanimate objects were much harder for me to fix. At least I’d had enough presence of mind to preserve a caltrop.
The two healings were small but finicky, and left me hungry and lightheaded. I’d left my backpack in the remains of my former room. I wondered if I should go back inside. Someone had ransacked the house while I was out on the front lines — had they been looking for something valuable, or just some dried fruit and meat stashed away somewhere? I hadn’t left much for people to find, and even the supplies in my backpack were beginning to dwindle.
I couldn’t take the time to eat. I had to know. I took the caltrop out of my pouch, held it delicately between three fingers, and focused on the sensation at my fingertips; the hardness and potential for violence coiled within the seed. Closed my eyes again, tracing lines of influence and belonging.
My eyes popped open of their own accord. The trail led nowhere. It was as if Sulyom were right there, standing in front of me. What was I doing wrong?
I threw the caltrop back into the lake, my eyes smarting with sudden tears.
* * *
SULYOM
This, then, was the punishment: I couldn’t remember the change. The change I’d craved. The chance to get out of my flesh. Just one faint memory of Teacher Mirta peeling apart the muscles of my limbs, thread by thread. Nothing else was left.
Just the water, just my width and breadth, weighing down and floating. Held up.
I wasn’t motionless; I wasn’t paralyzed. But movement was slow. Sensation was slow. Thinking was slow. Above me was sunlight on air, below me water, my bulk separating it from the sun. Fish scurried out from underneath me, escaping the lack of brightness and oxygen.
One day I thought: Trees can support humanlike thought much better, Teacher Mirta had said.
Another day I thought: I should have chosen a tree.
Another day: Then again, we both enjoy a challenge, she had said, faintly amused.
Another day: How much time yet to a fortnight?
Then I didn’t think about time anymore. It was hard to produce thought. I didn’t force it. I grew, expanded. I would grow seed. Cover the pond, the struggling fish; I hadn’t considered the fish, but it wasn’t as if I could expand any slower. There was only the pattern of sunlight on leaves, rain and darkness on leaves, my weight held up by the water. Roots were hard to figure out, but I knew from what remained of my human memories that my leafy rosettes would eventually detach from the roots remaining in the soil, and I would swim on the surface. It felt strange now. But it wouldn’t happen in a fortnight.
I gradually eased into the days and into my new existence. The pain not so acute, the pain in the soul. The lesson, being learned, deep in the body.
* * *
ILIAR
I shook out the bedspread, then fell on top of it. I had to find Sulyom, but first, I had to get some rest, and the next day I could rethink my approach. The war had taught me how to fall asleep anytime, anyplace.
I woke from a dreamless night with a shock, as if something had pricked me. I searched around, patted down my bed. Something dropped to the floor. The water caltrop I’d picked from the lake? Hadn’t I thrown it back into the water?
I gasped, suddenly reminded of the changing ritual Teacher Mirta had always brought up whenever one of us apprentices had grown sloppy and unguarded in our haste, our eagerness to learn. I will turn you into a tree yet. I learned much from my time as a tree at your age. We joked behind her back that it’d turned her heartless, and we were sure she’d heard, but she never showed any sign that she did. She was such a grouch, but she wasn’t mean-spirited.
Yet Sulyom had not been turned into a tree: a blanket of water caltrops, rather.
All the stray magical impressions I’d discarded earlier fit into place. This made sense, the kind of symbolic sense I’d learned to handle after I’d left here. I’d only ever felt lonely, out of my depth; but maybe I’d acquired some independence, too.
After the wave of relief, a sudden fear took my breath — the change so sharp that I almost choked on the air.
The water caltrop was an annual plant, not a perennial. And the season was ending.
* * *
SULYOM
Large animals arrived. People arrived. I couldn’t distinguish between the two with my new senses, and my human magic was somewhere out of reach. All my anger was someplace else. My fast snappy thoughts, someplace else. The torrent of magic at my control, someplace else.
