The First Binding, page 61
I ran my tongue against the back of my teeth, thinking on what he said. “What’s the hidden meaning?”
He waggled a finger in admonishment. “That is cheating.”
“Technically, it’s asking. A philosopher I know told me to try doing that more often.”
Vathin twisted and lunged, a cupped hand snapping out to cuff me.
I moved away just in time to have his hand sail harmlessly through part of my hair. I grinned and stuck out my tongue.
“Stories have grains of truths hidden within them. The problem is many pieces and things are lost to time and translation, especially when told over distance and traded through different languages. But there are always kernels to find. The wise one knows how to do so.”
I fixed him with a look. “So, wise one, do you know?”
He mirrored my earlier expression, tongue peeking between his teeth. “I know one thing and that is that I am no wise man.” His face told me that he’d said that more to find a way to not answer me, if anything to irritate me.
He succeeded.
Nearby, Jaseem had lit one of many fires.
I thought of the story and then fished through my pack until I found one of the candles I’d gotten from the merchant. I walked over to the fire and lit it, bringing it back, hands cupping the gentle flame to keep it from snuffing out.
When I returned to Vathin, I decided to change the topic. “Do you think it’s true?”
“Mhm? What is?” Vathin shifted in the grass, folding some of his robes under him to help create a thin cushion of sorts.
“Brahm the Wanderer. Any of it. That he’s still out there wandering as a man but not a man, and certainly not the god.”
“All stories are true from a certain point of view. But, I know you want a clearer answer than that. To be honest, I don’t. But I’d like to think so. I’ve often thought that might be the most important part of belief and stories, choosing to believe the pieces we want. Otherwise, what good and fun are they?”
He had a point, but I had asked for another reason. Once, I hadn’t believed in the kinds of magic and monsters stories held. Then I paid the price for my ignorance. I never wanted that to be the case again.
So maybe Brahm the Wanderer was real. And if he was, I meant to find him.
I thought on that until I could think no more. The candle and the flame occupied my mind all the while and I fed it my thoughts on Brahm and the story. They filled me until my mind weighed more than stone. I went to bed dreaming of chasing after Brahm.
FIFTY-SIX
TRICKS BY MOONLIGHT
The first set of days passed and we all grew more comfortable with one another. Laki finally spoke more than a few sentences with me, usually questions about myself, never really letting anything slip concerning her own life. And I never pried.
Lixin and I developed a solid-enough method of talking to one another, which involved pantomime and simple words in the Trader’s Tongue. He shared with me a series of slow and gentle flowing exercises, all stretches that carried the motions of the wind within them. At first, I thought it nothing more than something to keep him active and his joints healthy in his age. After a short time though, I realized it was more than that.
The movements lent me another sort of clarity as I enacted them. A mental freedom that turned my mind almost as soft and shifting as the exercises themselves. I found myself slipping easier into the folds of the mind as I practiced with him, and that going through the old image exercises Mahrab taught me was now easier. More so, I could change and hold different ideas blindingly fast compared to before. A piece of my mind that came with the hard-won logic of living on Keshum’s streets began to fade. I no longer worried about the reality of things when in this lucid mindset brought on by Lixin’s training.
I simply thought.
And my mind brought the scene to life inside the folds.
Vathin and I continued our philosophy discussions. He took every chance to ask me about anything he could think of, and then poke holes wherever he could in my logic. His was a different kind of training that stretched my mind in how I looked at things and people in the world. I didn’t know it then, but I would come to greatly appreciate it later in life, especially once I began to truly see the shape of the bindings and how they worked. But back then, the discussions were tiring, yet admittedly, fun.
We used them to sling mild barbs at one another when we could.
I practiced my swordsmanship with the stick Vathin had whittled for me. I helped a wagon get unstuck. I trained on the folds, and when nights came, I relit my candle and focused on the flame like Mahrab had taught me.
The journey became a blur. I trained in every regard, not knowing what else to do, waiting for evenings to come in the hopes of a story.
Lixin had none he could properly articulate, and Laki had gone quiet on any subject close to a story since sharing what she had about the Fhaalds. That left Vathin, who usually resorted to stories I’d already heard, but I appreciated someone else saying them.
I didn’t have the heart to tell any myself.
Sometimes there is a simple comfort in old stories told again, especially from someone else’s mouth. It’s like a favorite meal served in a new way. It tastes the same, but there is a pleasure in the different presentation.
That night, though, Vathin decided to tell us a piece of another story that stays in my memory to this day.
I’d lit my candle in preparation, holding it in its tin base, letting the glow cast itself over Vathin’s face.
“This is a story about a woman, fairer than any, and the young man who chased her around the world. But he could never pry her from her sun, her first and true love. In truth, her only love. And this he knew. But he chased her all the same. Some say he still does, and that you can hear his calls some nights. Howling her name through the skies, a name no one but he can hear and make out.”
* * *
This was a time before castes and kingdoms. A time when the free folk of the world wandered and moved as they would. There were the first people, then the second, the Ruma. Singers and tellers of tales. These second people made their ways through trades of their voices. And the people who came after? They toiled with their hearts, minds, and hands. They took to shaping the world after Brahm, but all without the bindings, until they too came to learn those. Though this was before the Ashram, when people had to learn the bindings on their own.
There was no code of conduct among binders, so arguments arose, some ending in violent clashes that shook mountains, carved new fissures in the world, and formed rivers in their wake. A terrible time for some. A hard time.
This was a time when demons and darker things still walked the earth, doing as they were wont to do.
In this time, a young man named Kohlri set out on an adventure. Bored of his life of meager means and lesser dreams, he wanted for something more. At first, all he could hope for was to become a carpenter like his father. To marry the local beauty, though even that seemed a far-fetched thing for him. So he set his gaze on the wider world and wandered it in the hope it would bring him something greater than what he’d come to know.
He traveled wide and far, eventually coming by an old man on the road.
The robed man looked bedraggled and starved, huddling tight within his cloak.
So Kohlri knelt by him, knowing how to treat elders in need of help. He offered the man food and water, then asked if there was anything else he could do for the man, telling him there was a limit to what he could spare.
“Thank you. You’ve given more than most and many.” The old man pressed his hands together for a gesture of added thanks. “But perhaps I can ask something else of you, and in return, give you something back.”
Kohlri, unsure of what the old man could offer, let his curiosity take hold of him. “What else do you wish to ask of me? I have little to my name, and what pieces of precious I have I brought with me. My shoes are nearly worn through from my time on the road, and my clothes are threadbare; I’ll need a change soon. What food I have is enough to get me to the next village, maybe not. I have little else but my walking cane.”
The old man wrapped his cloak even tighter around himself. “Not so much as that. I’d very much like a partner, someone young to keep me safe, and keep me steady. I could use your arm as much to help me up as keep danger at bay. You should be able to manage that. You and your cane.”
“You want an escort?” Kohlri didn’t know how the man had gotten so far without one if he needed one now. “And what will you give me in return?” He would have helped the man anyway, truth be told, but now that the man had offered, Kohlri felt it wise to seek compensation.
The old man’s eyes shone and he spoke two words of power, hands moving. Earth shifted and rolled under his command. A mound formed under the man, raising him higher than Kohlri before it crumbled beneath the elderly fellow.
Kohlri caught him and eased the man to the ground. “What was that?”
The old man coughed and dusted himself clean. “One of the bindings made and left to man by Brahm. I confess, I don’t know many, and I certainly don’t know them all. There are too many for any one man to know, I wager, but I know a few. If you stick with me, I can teach you. I’d very much like to pass these on. All those years of life to learn them, and when I die, they’ll go with me unless someone is willing to take them on.”
Kohlri had spent his life wanting something more, had traveled as far from home as he could go to find it. And now he had.
Power.
The means with which to shape the world, and with it, maybe reshape his own life as well. Kohlri saw the true calling he’d been looking for and pledged himself at the feet of the old man, naming him his rishi—teacher.
Together, the two of them walked to the next town, and then the next. They traveled, traded, talked, and trained. They wandered ever wayward, chasing the sun and the moon. Walking end to end. In time, Kohlri grew to be a fine binder, growing in power greater than the man who’d trained him.
His mind was young and he’d learned the bindings early—before age took its toll on him. The folds of his mind were conditioned hard and well so as not to fall apart with the passing of years.
Kohlri found work easy in the world, making money wherever he went, his rishi in tow. They lived an easy life, but never were ones to sit still. Kohlri wondered what life waited for him back home, a place so far away and long buried in memory now. But whenever he thought of it, he could see no hope in the idea. He’d outgrown the place, and the Kohlri who once called it home could never again see it as such. It was somewhere and something too strange to him—too small.
So Kohlri sought bigger and greater things still. And what he could desire, he set to with a will. He challenged other binders to duels that redrew the face of some lands. He took up work for money to defend villagers from bandits, and sometimes, some say he turned bandit himself. Other times he went to war, full and hard, fighting for whatever cause took his heart.
Yet in all this, Kohlri’s heart hung heavy and empty. Its rooms hadn’t all been filled by magic and power, by wandering the wider world, or by war and fighting. All the lands under the skies traveled and searched, and yet he couldn’t fill such small a thing inside him.
So what was he to do?
Then, as life often does, the answer was shown to him. Though he didn’t know it for what it was.
On a lone night after a long wearying battle, Kohlri returned to his rishi and their most recent home under the stars.
“It’s going to storm tonight, Rishi.”
“Yes, it will. Then, like it does, it will pass. They always do. And with it, we will see a different beauty.”
“Beauty?”
“Oh, yes. All things have their beauty for those that can see them. The storm. The stars. The night sky. The moon. All of them. And they have their place as much as the morning sun, clouds, and lines of trees along the top of our world.”
Kohlri didn’t know then what his teacher meant, so instead he set to quietly making a hovel for them, using the bindings to do so.
Then came the storm, and Kohlri found a gentle peace in listening to the thunder and the gentle susurrus of rain. It felt much like the tumult inside him had been given voice and shared with the world. It heard him. And it replied.
But like his teacher said, the storm broke. The clouds vanished. And with it, the noise of the crying world. So another came to fill the void, and in doing so, worked its way through the hollow spaces of Kohlri’s heart and filled them as well.
She sang a song silver brilliant and clear as the moon on a cloudless night. Her voice called to him and everything inside his heart.
So Kohlri left his bed that night.
But his rishi told him not to. “Don’t go. Don’t look at her. Don’t listen.”
“But why, Rishi?”
He gave his student and friend a pained look. “Because it will hurt. And you will be smitten—in love. And then it will hurt more. Because your heart will break.”
But Kohlri had a wolf’s appetite in all things, from war to kingdoms to claim. And now that something had set his heart afire, he had a hunger for love as well. “I’ll be fine. I’ve traveled the world and no paths can weary me or my feet. I’ve learned all the bindings I could, and none can dull the folds of my mind. War? I’ve won that too. What’s love in the face of that?”
His rishi was as patient as he was wise. When he spoke, it was but a whisper, one gone unheard by Kohlri. Well, it reached his ears, but didn’t sit and settle in his mind, and certainly not his heart.
“Love is the one thing that can break any man. And it will break you too, if you don’t take care. For her heart already belongs to another. She’s set in his ways and to follow him, just as he chases her the same. The two are never to meet, and that is why she wanders with us. But, once in a while on rarest of the days, the two meet and embrace. And will bring us a midnight in which they wander further still. Until that time, she is ours. But she will never be yours.”
Kohlri didn’t listen, something he regrets to this day, according to the story.
He left the hovel and saw her.
Silver bright she shone, all of moonlit glow. Hair darker than any night sky. Her eyes held all the sparkle and promise of the stars. She wore nothing and held all the curves of the world in her shape and form. And she sang as clear and enrapturing as she looked. When she fixed her gaze on Kohlri, he froze, heart and mind.
“Oh.” Her voice was soft as morning wind through the trees. “I didn’t know you could hear me. I’m sorry.”
Kohlri found his wits seconds later. “No, it’s I who am sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. To stop your singing.”
She smiled and said nothing.
And now Kohlri began to see the shape of love, though he didn’t know it. His heart beat in a way it never had in the midst of duels, or travel, hunger-pain, storm and rain, or in the heat of war. His heart felt larger than it ever had, hammered harder than before. It felt colder and hotter than he ever thought it could. And the hollowness in it grew more apparent to him than ever, but now he had a thought of what that space could come to hold.
“My name is Kohlri.”
Her smile widened. “I know. I’ve watched you wander. I’ve heard your calls in the night when you think no one is listening. I’ve heard your anger and your hurt. And I’ve heard the hollowness ringing in your heart.”
He took a step forward, and she took one back in perfect tandem. “Is that why you’re here?”
Another smile, but no words.
“Because if that’s what you seek, then it’s yours. Take it.” Kohlri pulled at the collar of his shirt, baring his breast.
“For tonight,” she replied. “But then you’ll take it back in the morning, and I, mine. That is the way of things. And a love for a night never lasts.”
But Kohlri did not want to hear this thing. He took another step, and she, one away. “I’ve been looking all my life for a thing I didn’t know, couldn’t find, but now I think I do and have. Will you prove me right?”
Her smile turned, sinking sadly. “Follow me. Look for me. And maybe one day you’ll find out. But not tonight.”
At that, Kohlri’s heart grew cold, but he pushed it from his mind. He clung to the little hope his heart could hold. She told him to do two things, and among all that he had done, he could do those as well. “I’ll follow you forever. I’ll look. I’ll call for you. I’ll be there for and on that day.”
“And tonight?” The woman smiled again, but it was one that held no warm joy.
“What can I give you tonight to make you stay awhile? To hear one more song?”
“Just ask it of me, and sing one in return.”
So he did.
She answered him and sang her song, setting his heart alight. And in turn, he sang one back, a thing of howling pain and loneliness. A call for all he wanted and did not know.
And then, when it was over, she bid him farewell.
“Wait, before you leave. Will you give me your name?”
“Shaandi. Remember it. Sing it when you see me next.”
“I will,” said Kohlri, and then she left.
With that, the storm in his heart returned, and the world answered in reply. The storm came, and Kohlri returned to the hovel. Now he understood what his rishi had meant. And he would only come to learn it better as time went by.
* * *
The story ended and everyone’s breath sat still.
It was Laki who broke the silence, though. “Did he find her again? Shaandi? Did Kohlri find her? Did they fall in love?”
Vathin gave her a strained smile. “Only one of them did. But, like the story says, he still looks for her out there every day. He still makes his cries and sings his songs that only she can hear. But, his heart’s been broken forevermore. Yet, he holds to the honest fool’s hope in love.”
The moon had come up overhead tonight. No clouds to hide her glow behind themselves.
Vathin leaned back and looked at it.
