Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 5 to Firstclaw 8, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Nettik worked the fill port from outside at the gray end of the morning, and she heard all of it through the wall without seeing any of it.
The cap.
The pail tipped.
A boy’s voice telling the gravel one, and going away, and coming back.
This pod had been built for people nobody planned to visit.
Fill port under the outer skin at knee height, tank behind the wall, a sunken bath in the floor draining into the ground.
Soldiers had designed it, and refugees had used it, and every line of it assumed whoever was inside might be contagious, might be dangerous, and was in any case somebody a stranger would rather not walk in on.
Six weeks on a dead cell had turned all of it into furniture.
Last night the cell had taken a dim energy crystal, and now the walls hummed, and she lay on the cot and listened to the tank take its first full load since the pod came down.
Four pails.
The pump swallowed each one like something that had been thirsty a long time.
Four, the boy told the gravel, and didn’t come back.
She got down onto the boards, still warm and still faintly surprising, and began the sequence.
She’d been taught it as a child, before she’d been taught anything else worth keeping, and she remembered the teaching.
The order of the feet.
The turn of the hips.
Where the spine sat, when to breathe and when to hold.
Knowing it and doing it weren’t the same thing, and that was the whole problem.
Lowering into the first position brought the weakness up through both legs before the line was set.
Hold.
The thighs started at three.
She shifted before they went, rested, began again.
Four seconds.
Rest.
Again.
Four.
The floor warm under her palms, the way no floor had been since she woke.
Four again, and then she lay on the boards and looked at the ceiling.
Four was what she’d had last night.
Four wasn’t less.
Her body was going to be a problem.
She’d commanded warships that gave her less trouble.
+++
At the turn of the morning, she took the chest out of the ring and lifted the first lid.
Half a sachet.
Three vials, sealed.
The other half of box one.
She’d left it that way on purpose two nights ago, because a fifth of the water couldn’t have carried more.
But the seal on the sachet was broken, and a broken seal is a clock.
A sachet sealed against air is sealed because air does something to it, and the lid said nothing about how long an opened box keeps.
Days, a season, or gone already, and she wouldn’t find out until she was in the water.
And tonight, for the first time, she had the water.
A full tank, heated by the pod itself, the whole volume the lid had asked for, and she’d had to cheat.
Tonight, then.
She was working the dose against a full tank, half a sachet and three vials in a volume she’d never been able to test, when the light at the door changed.
+++
Vaelith came in.
Sothran took the outside corner, his back to the doorframe, where he could see the gravel and the room at once, pale gold going russet at the roots and the light flat on it.
Neither had been at this door since the night Vaelith carried her back to it.
He crouched by the cot and put a hand out, and waited, as he had two days ago, until she lifted her chin into it.
The cold came off him before he touched her.
She was ready for it this time, and logged it anyway.
Scalp.
The bone around the eye.
The pulse at the throat and the pulse at the wrist, and a long time over the last.
Close to, the black mark under his left eye was the only thing on his face that didn’t keep still while he worked.
Then he took the left hand out from under the blanket, where she’d put it when the door opened, which had been a mistake.
Turned it over, looked at the nail, set two fingers either side of the joint, and moved it the width of a grain.
“That wants draining.
I will do it now if you permit it.”
Yes.
The draining took a heated needle and a count of ten, and hurt considerably less than the getting of it had.
He dressed the finger, tied it off, and didn’t once ask how it had happened.
Three explanations had been ready and graded since yesterday, and all three stayed where they were.
Then he sat back on his heels and didn’t go.
“I want to ask you something about your memory.
Not what you remember.
What you do not.”
The hand went still on the band.
He waited, and didn’t fill the waiting, which was its own small competence.
“Your childhood.”
No.
“Your parents.”
No.
“Where you were raised.”
“Your education.”
Yes.
That stopped him, and he took a moment with it.
“What did you study?”
Nothing specific.
“But you remember how.”
That answer took longer than the others, because there was a safe version and a true one, and for once they were close enough to touch.
Knowledge.
Not memories.
Vaelith read it twice.
“Say that again a different way.”
I know what I know.
I do not know learning any of it.
His eyes stayed on the band a beat after he’d finished reading.
She’d seen that on an intelligence officer once, the moment a source said something too exact to have been rehearsed.
“Your position.”
No.
“Your work.”
No.
“Anybody you were close to.”
No.
“Do you remember arriving here?”
No.
“Do you remember the people who came with you?”
The hand paused on that one, and not for the reason he’d assume.
Ten.
I was told the number.
I do not know why they are mine.
The answer didn’t come at once, and when it came, it came carefully, a man stepping around something rather than through it.
“They are your sentinels.
That is all that needs saying today.”
She filed it and moved on, because it answered what she’d asked.
“I have treated head injuries in the field,” Vaelith said.
“I am not a healer.
I have seen enough of them to know what I am looking at.”
The eyes went to the band and came back.
“You remember everything I have told you.
You remember yesterday.
What I told you about the water, you gave back to me word for word the next day, and you could give it to me now.” Flat, and in order.
“But ask about anything before the injury, and there is nothing.
And you have just told me you kept the knowing and lost the learning, which is a distinction I would not have got out of most men in a month.”
Aeryn sat still and let him arrive.
“That is retrograde amnesia.”
The words landed without weight, because she knew what they meant.
He watched her not need them explained, and they both understood what that proved: whatever she’d been taught had come through whole, and only the life had gone.
Neither of them said so.
“Then I will give you what I would give anybody in your position, and you will not find it impressive.”
The list came out in the order he’d plainly used before, on men flat on their backs in field camps.
“You are in Thinblood, on the Ninth.
Today is the fifth of Firstclaw.
My name is Vaelith Draveth.
The man at your corner is Sothran Ashkar.
Both of us are your sentinels; there are eight more, and they come back inside the month.” He left that to stand a moment.
“You will forget none of it, which is the whole of the good news.
Say it back to yourself before you sleep anyway.”
How long before it comes back.
“I am not going to answer that.”
The band came up sharply.
“Not because it is unkind.
Because I would be making it up.” He met the look without shifting.
“Ask me in a season, and I will have something.
Ask me five days in and anything I say is a guess dressed as a comfort, and you would spend the month measuring yourself against it.”
Then tell me what you know about me.
“No.”
Which stopped her.
“Not this week.” A finding again, not negotiable, and he wasn’t pretending it was.
“You have a bleed behind your eye that has not moved, a body that cannot cross this room, and a head doing repairs.
Emptying a life into that in an afternoon is how you get a patient who stops sleeping and stops mending.
I have seen it done kindly, and seen what it costs.”
I am not a man in a bed with nothing to do.
“No.
You are a woman in a bed with nothing to do, which is worse, because you will do it in your head instead and I will not be able to see it.”
Listen.
That got a wait.
Three men come out of the Raw in twenty days.
Five more in twenty-eight.
I do not know what any of them will want from me, and I cannot stand up.
That is not a memory I am chasing.
Writing it took a long time, and the letters wobbled at the end, and she let him see the wobble, because it was the only honest argument she had left.
“That is a better reason than most people manage,” he said.
“And it is still a great deal of talking for a woman whose hand I have just opened.”
Then give me conditions.
“Give me yours.”
All of it.
No summary, no conclusions.
Facts in the order they happened.
Mark what you saw against what you were told, and say so when you do not know.
Vaelith read it through once and nodded.
That was the whole of his reaction, and it was the thing worth having out of the afternoon.
Four days ago he’d gone still over a woman working a band she’d never been shown.
Today she’d put conditions on him, and he’d read them and nodded and asked nothing.
He wasn’t going to ask, this week or next year.
Every strange thing about her had somewhere to go now, and he’d put it there himself.
“Agreed.
Not tonight.”
The band came up, and he put a hand out flat before she had a letter down.
“It is nearly dark, that hand will keep you awake as it is, and I am not starting a thing like this with a woman who has been upright since the boy’s first pail.” Then he was on his feet.
“Tomorrow, after he has been.
I will sit where I am sitting now, and you will ask, and I will answer, on your terms, for as long as you can hold the band.”
How long is that.
“Shorter than you think, and it is the hand and not me being careful with you.” The corner of his mouth moved and thought better of it.
On anybody else she’d have called it a smile he’d decided against.
“You will run out before I do, and be annoyed about it, and we will do the same again the day after.”
And before that.
The house, the years, all of it.
“The week after that, if you are still asking.
Not before, and I will not be argued out of it.”
Aeryn would’ve given a subordinate the same answer, which was the irritating part, and it wasn’t the whole of what she took away.
There’d been two things in that refusal, and he’d given her one.
The medicine was real, and he meant it.
Under it was a man deciding what was his to say about the House of Veyra, which had thrown ten men onto this rock along with her, and he’d been one of the ten.
He is not protecting my sleep.
Not only.
She let it stand, because a source guarding something will show you what, eventually, if you keep asking easy questions.
He got as far as the doorway before the band came up, slower than it should have, because the hand was dressed and because she hadn’t asked anybody on this world for anything since she woke and had no practiced shape for it.
Do you have a mirror.
Vaelith read it, and whatever he’d been braced for, it wasn’t that.
For a moment the scale lines along his jaw stood out sharper, the way a man’s face goes when he’s been caught off guard and won’t admit it.
“No.
The Long Count has one.
I will ask her.”
+++
Sothran didn’t follow him down the path.
He came to the doorway instead, and stopped in it, his back to the frame, and came no further.
Even from there she could feel the heat off him, the way it had come off him the morning she woke, when she’d taken it for temper.
“Boy’s on my water.”
I needed the tank filled.
“That’s ours.
Mine and the Snake’s.” His jaw worked.
“Fire’s talking.
Two of us here, and you pay a child out of your own line.”
That is not my problem.
“It’s mine.”
I need the tank full every day at a fixed hour.
Four pails.
In front of everybody.
Until the paths open.
“I’d have carried it.
Said nothing to anybody.”
Which was true, and she could see it was true, off a man who’d already spent six weeks proving it.
I am not going to rely on a man who put me into a wall.
Sothran didn’t move.
The heat stayed where it was.
Then he went, fast, without another word and without looking at her, and the gravel took him all the way down to the village wall.
+++
What she’d written was true, and it wasn’t the whole truth, and she’d known that before the first letter went down.
The wall was the sharpest thing on the table, and she’d used it, and she’d use it again tomorrow if tomorrow needed it.
That wasn’t the reason.
The reason was that she wasn’t going to depend on anybody, in this village or out of it, for water or heat or food or a hand under her arm.
Not on the man who’d put her into a wall, and not on the one who hadn’t.
That hadn’t started on this rock.
It had started on a ship’s bridge, with people she’d trusted with the whole of her life, and it had finished there.
Vaelith had refused, carefully and on principle, to say how long it would be before her memories came back.
There was something almost funny in that, and the funny part didn’t go anywhere good.
The refusal had been honest, and there was nothing to guess at.
No pieces waiting to surface, no faces arriving out of order, no season in which a childhood came back to her, because the woman whose childhood it was had died on a warm floor, and everything this village was about to spend years patiently waiting for was never going to happen.
And I will have to keep not remembering, on purpose, for the rest of my life.