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Word had spread from house to house while I was away from the village, and by the time I returned, a small crowd had formed beside the rope bridge, watching for Taherah’s strange visitor to return. I was accustomed to being a stranger, having spent so long away from my people, but their stares gave me pause. Khalim had looked at me in much the same way, when first we met, with guileless, wide-eyed curiosity. You’re a long way from home, he had said, and now I was even farther. My chest ached, and I considered turning back to the forest, but I pressed on.

The river-folk were a tall people, but I was half again as broad as the young farmers, with blue spirals tattooed on my paler skin. Dressed in the borrowed clothing of Hamilcar’s crew, I was a strange sight indeed—and I had arrived on horseback, with news of the faraway city that none of them had ever seen. They looked at me without judgment, but I felt heat rise to my face nonetheless. 

Sala broke away from the group and met me halfway across the bridge. He offered to help carry the burden of the deer, but I refused. I had brought it this far.

“We have enough food for a single traveler,” Sala told me, echoing Taherah’s words from early that morning. “You need not have gone to all this trouble.”

“I’m happy to do it,” I said. A sudden fear struck me as I adjusted the weight of the carcass, and I asked, “Is it not permitted to hunt the deer?” I knew little of their gods and the commandments they might have given. Khalim had eaten no flesh, but that was a peculiarity of his own. 

Sala smiled and shook his head. “Not at all. But you are a guest. I would not have it said that Nagara treats its guests so poorly.”

I assured him that I would say no such thing. “I only wanted to repay your hospitality,” I said.

“Then we shall hold a feast in your honor,” said Sala, “and in honor of Khalim.”

Sala believed Khalim was dead. Taherah was the only one to whom I had told the long tale, and she was not among those gathered by the bridge. Would she tell them, when the wound of her loss had begun to heal? Would she cast me as a madman in her retelling, a fanatic who beat his fists uselessly against the barrier between life and death, surely to call down the wrath of every god who took notice of him? I hoped not, but I could not convince her otherwise, if that was how she perceived me. It was only through careful focus and determination—delusion, perhaps—that I did not see myself the same way. 

Two gray-haired women took the deer from me without so much as asking, lifting it from my shoulders and taking it away to be butchered. My part in this was done, and I was to get out of the way. 

I returned to Bran, tethered outside Taherah’s door, and cared for him in the way that Aysulu had taught me, so long ago. I brushed his coat from his ears to his tail, and checked his hooves for stones and his iron shoes for damage. We had traveled for so long in lands with no horses, and the metal was wearing down, and the leather of his harness was deteriorating from use and humidity, cracking at the joints and the places where my hands wore it down. It would be some months before I could find a proper replacement. 

Bran was healthy enough, and he’d had a feast of his own of the tall green grass that grew around Taherah’s house. A small pile of rice stalks lay beside the path, at the far reach of his tether, and a small girl in a sky-blue dress left another handful, watching Bran and me with huge, dark eyes. I beckoned her closer, my hand on Bran’s neck, but she turned and ran into the second house on the left side of the path. 

In Taherah’s house, the rhythm of her loom continued at a frantic pace, as though weaving could drive out grief by force and speed. Though she would leave it if I entered, and feed me if I asked, I knew I would not truly be welcome. Perhaps she would feel differently by evening, or perhaps I would find a different place to sleep. I intended to depart soon; in the morning if I could be ready. 

I would not become ready to leave Nagara by waiting outside Taherah’s door. As the air filled with the smell of smoke and spices, I went to find Sala again. When I found him, directing several adolescents in the placement of a long table. The earth had turned to mud, and had only just begun to dry after half a day of sun, and finding stable ground was a delicate matter.

I asked if I could help, but I arrived just as the table thudded to the ground, rocked once, and was still. 

“No need,” Sala told me. “There will be more things to carry later. You traveled for many days to reach us. You should rest.”

It had been several weeks—or, from another view, it had been more than two years—but I did not correct him. Instead, I said, “If you have the time, I would like to hear all that you remember about Khalim.”

Sala paused, and a troubled frown creased his heavy brow. He was solidly built, his arms thickened and knotted by years at the forge, though he reported his hammer had lain all but still for the past several months. Nagara’s meager supply of iron came, by way of desert caravans and river boats, from the mines of Phyreios. The villagers used very little, only enough for the heads of their plows and the blades of their hunting knives. They forged no weapons of war. 

“I’m not sure what I can tell you that couldn’t be better told by Taherah,” Sala said, “but I will say what I can. I offered to marry her, after her husband died, and raise the child as my own, but she refused me as she did all the others. It was nearly six summers before Khalim spoke at all, and then, only to his mother—we all thought the plague had affected his mind while Taherah carried him, but it wasn’t that at all. He did not speak because he was listening.”

He showed me his arm, where faint white scarring dappled his skin from his elbow to his wrist. “I was burned down to the bone,” he explained. “It was an accident. Red-hot iron. Thanks to Khalim, this is all that remains; this, and the memory. He was nine, I think. By then, he was talking to anyone, but he was always quiet.”

I thanked him, and he left for the storehouse, to fetch sacks of last year’s rice for the feast. Though I stood still and had undergone no exertion, my pulse raced and my chest tightened. The desire to flee the village, and warn the others that something terrible was about to occur so they could escape as well, flooded my vision, and I could see nothing but the road up the hill. 

I closed my eyes and covered them with one hand, and I breathed in the heavy, pungent air until my heart had slowed to near its usual pace. I had a better grasp on my fear, but yet it remained, as though a weapon that had wounded me had left a fragment of metal behind. 

It was only as I opened my eyes again, and was surprised to find flooded fields and small houses with heavy, overhanging roofs instead of tents and a wooden palisade, that I understood what had happened to me. I had helped with the preparations for a feast two years ago, on the side of the Iron Mountain, after my companions and I had driven away the tribe of reavers the Ascended had sent to smash our defenses and remove us from their sight. We had celebrated into the night, until an earthquake passed through the mountain and signaled the beginning of the end, and the god Torr spoke through Khalim for the first time. Standing here, in the center of a village six months’ journey from that place, I feared the arrival of another calamity.

I could keep the memory from creeping into the present, now that I had identified it, but it remained in my mind like a shadow over the sun, dark and untouchable. 

In an effort to turn my thoughts elsewhere, I entered the largest building in the village, from whence smoke and the smell of cooking meat poured into the wet air and across the fields. It was twice as large as Taherah’s house, and it stood away from the river—the last house on the way into the forest. 

Heat washed over me as I entered the curtained door. Inside, the shadowed figures of four women and two men moved in a faint haze of smoke. A low, wide fire smoldered underneath a huge ceramic basin. The meat I had brought could only be a small part of what bubbled tantalizingly within. It was enough food to feed a town twice the size of Nagara. 

Hunger overtook my chagrin at the relative insignificance of my offering, and I asked what I could do to help, and so I spent the next hour standing beside a steaming clay oven, adding and removing discs of flat bread as they baked. Soon, my sweat-drenched arms were streaked with flour and ash.

The woman who handed me the dough had once been the village midwife, she told me, though she had passed on the title to another woman five years ago. Khalim, being a young man, had not been permitted to work with her except in the most dire of circumstances, when mother or child were certain to die without his help. She told me a story that Khalim had told me, that night  on the mountain, of a baby born breathless and blue that he had restored to life. He had called it the greatest thing he had ever done. 

That story gave rise to another, as a young woman beside the cooking pot told of an ox with a broken leg that Khalim had restored, and one of the men added a tale of his small son falling out of a tree. The people of Nagara remembered Khalim as a healer, and nothing else. How could they do otherwise, when he shared so little of his own thoughts? 

I sat beside Taherah as the feast was served in the late afternoon, when the sun turned the fields to liquid amber and a cool wind promised more rain. She ate little, and she kept her head bowed. 

“Will you be leaving, then?” she asked. 

I nodded. “Soon. Perhaps tomorrow. I have a long journey ahead of me.”

She considered that for a long moment, and then said, “Do you remember what you promised me, yesterday evening?” 

“That I will tell him that you love him,” I said, “that he did the best he could, and that you are sorry for not sparing him.” I remembered it well. I would carry it with me as long as I lived.

“You would be welcome, if ever you were to return to Nagara,” she told me.

I knew that already, just as I knew that I would never see her again.

Back to Chapter XXVII: Nagara in Sunlight

Forward to Chapter XXIX: Caravanserai

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It’s always nice to write about weather I’m not having. I hope you’re safe and warm, and as always, thank you for reading.