Chapter Twenty-One

Tamara massaged her temples, breathing deeply, concentrating on the rhythm of the rise and fall of her chest.

“Why are they giving me so much trouble?” she asked herself, trying not to focus on the negative energy she could feel herself exuding. “Where can I improve my own actions to make the whole situation better?”

She felt like she was in a self-help program.

The main problem had come when the boy randomly turned up in the kitchen during Mond’s mathematics lesson one room over. Tamara had been demonstrating a few simple derivative equations when she heard the pantry door open and close. She handed the chalk and slate to Mond and told her to continue working on the example problems while she went to investigate the origin of the noise.

What she found in the kitchen nearly made her vomit. The boy, wearing nothing but the drool-encrusted blanket he’d been sleeping with for the past three weeks wrapped precariously around him, was sticking his head into the pantry, covering his face with confectioner’s sugar and rubbing unpeeled banana mush all over his body. When he heard her come in, he looked up and grinned stupidly, his dark yellow and disgusting, his eyes red and swollen. He laughed a low and slow laugh, and began slapping his arms, making the pasty substance fly off him in little chunks.

Tamara had nearly kicked him right there, wishing she had the stomach to just kill the boy and be done with it. And the visual of his soiled face and revolting garb would have been enough to push her over the edge in that moment, but then Mond walked into the room.

“Boy? Is that you? I can hear you. What are you doing?” she asked. She ran to him and put out her hand, wiping the tips of her fingers against his coated chest. “What happened to you?” she gasped. “Why... what is that smell?”

Tamara had successfully kept them from seeing each other for the past two weeks, and as such, she had stopped really caring about the boy’s hygiene or appearance, as it had all been a façade for Mond’s sake anyway.

Mond turned like lightning to look up at Tamara. Her startling milky eyes didn’t meet Tamara’s but the fury and hatred clearly visible on her face frightened Tamara. She envisioned the past few months of mother-daughter bonding attempts slipping away, as if down a bottomless pipe.

“Fix it,” Mond ordered. “Make him better.”

“It looks like he hasn’t been taking his medicine correctly, Mond,” Tamara said. “I didn’t realize—”

“You’re lying,” Mond said, her voice high, with a texture like gravel tossed on cement. “You’ve kept him from me so I wouldn’t see, and those medicines are making him like this. Fix it. Now.”

Tamara, speechless, and feeling practically breathless as well, caught off her guard by the ferocity of Mond’s words and the harsh expression on her face, stood stupidly slouching and still.

“Fix it!” Mond yelled. Her voice was unnaturally loud, even for an adult male four or five times her size, and Tamara thought he saw a flash of red glint across her eyes.

Tamara grabbed the boy’s arms, coating the palms of her hands in crusty banana paste. She began pulling him towards the stairs, planning on throwing him into a hot bath and soaking his blanket in a tub for a day or so, and he fought her every step. He mumbled and growled incoherently; Tamara felt like she was pulling teeth from the mouth of a loud and confused buffalo. Mond followed them both up the stairs and tended to the boy as Tamara struggled to set up the water. Tamara tried to protest, tried to hide the boy’s nakedness from Mond, even though she had sightless eyes, but Mond gave her a look that had a hint of death and suffering, and Tamara instinctually fled from it.

The cleaning of both blanket and boy took several hours, and when he was finally back into a bed with clean linens and Tamara and Mond were ready to return to the math lesson, Mond was beyond her ability to pay attention. She spent the rest of the light of day asking Tamara questions about the medications the boy was taking and why Tamara insisted he take them.

“They help him with his headaches,” Tamara kept saying. “They were hurting him so badly, and I remember when his mother had a similar issue, so I asked a doctor and he told me that these pills would help.”

“Why was he so messy, then? What about them makes him be so... dirty?”

“That has nothing to do with his medicine, Mond,” Tamara said. Not that the girl had calmed down, she seemed more amenable to believing what Tamara had to say. “That’s just how he is. He’s not like you and me. He’s more like a... like an animal or a monster.”

Mond looked crushed when Tamara said this. Her face slowly fell until every emotion but concern and despair had left it. Her eyes, though nondescript in and of themselves, were much more expressive than any other eyes Tamara had seen. Sometimes Tamara saw feelings deep within them that she could not understand.

“A... monster?” Mond asked. “What does that mean? How can he be anything different than I am?”

“You’re a smart girl, Mond,” Tamara said. “Think about the differences between him and you. He doesn’t take these classes with you because he’s not as intelligent. He gets sick more easily than you do and is not as talented or as good looking as you are.”

“I don’t think he’s bad looking,” Mond said. “That’s not any way to judge someone objectively.”

“You can’t see him, Mond. You can’t know what he looks like. He’s hideous, like a dog or a horse, not a human like you and I.”

None of this was true, but Tamara knew she was dancing on a taught string now, and the only way she could safely herd Mond back to her side of the field was to make the boy an untouchable, therefore taking the merit out of everything he said or did.

“I haven’t seen him with my eyes,” Mond said thoughtfully, “but I think I know what he looks like. It’s like I’ve felt his presence so often that I’ve assigned a visual component...”

She continued to talk, to theorize about her relationship with the boy and what it was based on, what her blindness subtracted from or added to it and what his abstractness, as she called it, subtracted from or added to it.

But Tamara stopped paying attention. She was caught up in the fear that bubbled under the surface as Mond described the boy. They had grown closer than she had seen or guessed. How much did Mond know about him, and how much did he know about her? How much had they interacted; was it to the point where nothing she said to Mond was safe from his ears? If they were passing secrets back and forth, Tamara could never be sure of her bond with Mond, because she would never be able to know if the boy was coming between them. She would have to do a lot of deconstructive work to get Mond to pull loyalty away from him.

Tamara hadn’t imagined there would be so much politics in raising children. Mond was only six-years-old. How was it possible she was already so complex?

“It’s not enough to say I haven’t seen him, you see,” she was saying when Tamara tuned back in. “I haven’t seen him like you have, perhaps, but I know he is not a ‘monster,’ as you say he is.”

“Have you considered the possibility that he is a master of deception?” Tamara suggested, choosing her words closely. “That he can imitate a creature deserving of your sympathy so thoroughly as to fool you into caring about him in the way that you do?”

Mond seemed to chew on this for a moment before speaking again. “If that is the case, how have you managed to remain undeceived?”

The question took Tamara by surprise. It wasn’t as though she hid her dislike for the boy — to do so would have been nearly impossible, not to mention very taxing on her emotions — but she had hoped that Mond would connect it with necessity, with the monster she had been portraying him as.

“I... it’s hard sometimes,” Tamara lied. “I find myself overly empathetic, too, on some days. But then I remember that he killed his mother, my sister, and I strike those feelings from my heart.”

How many times had she driven that point home? How many times had she called him a murderer? It made her feel like some sort of activist every time she said it, and the feeling never got old.

“How did your sister die?” Mond asked for the first time.

Again, Tamara found herself having to sift through her thoughts to find the correct ones to say out loud. “It was a slow... a slow, painful process,” she said. “Over the months that she was pregnant with the boy, he sapped her first of all her energy, youth, and life, until, in the third month, she was bedridden entirely, and then he attacked her brain, draining her personality and intellect until she was an empty shell, broken, a shattered image of the woman she had once been.”

“How do you know that it was his fault?” Mond asked. “Maybe your sister was unfit to carry a baby. Do you have any conclusive proof that another baby would have behaved differently?”

Tamara felt as though she had been slapped in the face. In the long time since her sister’s death, no one had ever come close to insulting her memory, and aside from the boy’s mere existence, nothing had dredged up the pain from those nine long months. Mond, just then, had done worse damage in one short sentence than anyone else had done in four years.

“My sister was not ‘unfit’ for anything,” Tamara said, keeping her calm. “The doctors couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand it, and she couldn’t understand it. There was nothing wrong with my sister that would cause her body to do that to itself naturally.”

Mond looked thoughtful. “Maybe you’re deceived by some force, Tamara, just as you suggest I am deceived by the boy. Maybe your sister deceived you.”

______________

Again, more stuff I'm going to have to fix later, like my changed tense in the middle there. Also, unpublished here was Tamara's recitation of a Sociology textbook.

Chapter Twenty

“That’s a town, isn’t it?” Tess asked, pointing to the large dark line on the horizon, silhouetted by the breaking dawn.

“It is indeed,” Guido said, stretching his wings. “That will be the town of Rachel. They have a flourishing textile economy, and one of the largest libraries in this country.”

Martha was stuffing a blanket back into her pack and Gus was struggling to retie his own. They had slept the night on the edge of the woods, where the unshielded trees had given them the first cold wind they’d ever felt. The whole company was shaken from having spent the night huddled together in fits of shivers.

“How far do you think it is, Guido?” Gen asked.

“If we start immediately, we should be there before noon, I wouldn’t wonder.”

They each took a breakfast to eat while they walked, and then shouldered their packs and started out. Martha and Gus had gotten beyond complaining and taking rests every half hour, but the group’s traveling days were shortened by at least two hours, as their stamina was still abnormally low.

It had taken them two days of traveling to make it out of the forest. The traveling was quiet, except for Gus choosing random intervals at which to ask Guido for a trivial piece of information about There—”How long are each of the four seasons,” “Is it true there are babies and old people?” “What is ‘school’?” — and Ben questioning the edibility of the new, strange plants they found along the path. Tess had been particularly silent, keeping mostly to herself and avoiding contact with anyone but Ben. Ben supposed her timidity had something to do with the scathing look Gus often had on his face when he looked at her or spoke about her or to her. Ben wanted to chastise him for this, but under the circumstances, he didn’t think picking a fight would help matters any, not to mention he didn’t understand Tess himself anymore. It was if she had grown an extra pair of arms, or worse, like she’d been hiding them throughout all the years he’d known her.

“Guido,” Gus said, breaking the travelers’ tired silence, “could you explain... yesterday you said something briefly about ‘marriage.’ What is it?”

Guido often flew about Ben and Tess’ head, but for this early mornings, when his wings were still wet with dew from the night before, he was perched on top of Ben’s pack, bobbing along in the rhythm of Ben’s walk, clutching the clasp with his feet. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

“You said it’s between two adults who’ve decided to live together and share lives,” Gus said, still looking straight ahead, a look of concentration on his face. “But how is that different from lashing?”

“Lashing doesn’t exist outside of Medias,” Guido said. “You see, lashing is the marriage of Medians. Outside of Medias, when two adults decide to become married, it’s because they’re in love with each other, because they want to start a family together, or because they each have something to personally gain from a union with the other. In a lash, you become like siblings, almost like twins, just born from different families. In a marriage, you become husband and wife, which is a different bond completely. You support one another, are interested in what the other is interested in, and often you buy each other arbitrary gifts to annually celebrate something so asinine as the passing of time.”

Gus and Martha looked at each other. “Wait,” Martha said, “if lashing doesn’t exist outside of Medias, does that mean that Gus and I aren’t technically related anymore? Does that mean we won’t be allowed to live in the same home?”

Ben felt his face grow hot. So, not only had he failed to mention to them that they would most likely never return to the only home they could ever remember having, and not only had he convinced Gus, through Tess, that he could never leave their side for fear for Ben’s life, but he had now surreptitiously torn Gus and Martha asunder. He could see the looks of both terror and longing in their eyes, and immediately wished he could turn all of them back and run back to Medias. He knew what it felt like to be denied a closeness that felt deserved and necessary. He looked over at Tess, and he saw deep worry carved into her features as well.

“You can always just tell people that you’re brother and sister. No one can prove otherwise, can they?” Guido said.

But somehow, all four children knew it wouldn’t be the same. Just the name, the societal recognition of a bond... it meant something and without it, the relationship felt more distant.

Ben felt Tess tug lightly on the sleeve of his shirt. He looked over at her to see, through a mask of indifference in her features, a glint of... happiness? in her eyes. He furrowed his brow, and she blushed and looked back down at her feet.

Then he understood. If lashing didn’t exist, and if time really did move by with a recognizable pace, then it no longer mattered that he and she were separate. No one would tell them that there wasn’t a chance anymore that they could ever be together. No one could say that since it hadn’t already happened, it was bound to never happen. They could pretend to everyone here that they were related, and no one would try to keep them apart, like people had been doing all their lives.

The town of Rachel was getting ever closer, and since the sun had long since pulled its heft over the horizon line, Ben could better make out the details of the town’s appearance. That is, he could have, if there had been any details to make out. All he could see was a massive granite wall, probably tens of feet tall.

“Is Rachel a warring village?” Martha asked. “Why does it need such strong protection?”

“It’s customary to build fortifications around a town,” Guido said dismissively, nibbling on some piece of something stuck to his wing tip. “It’s a precaution, but still, it is likely to prove necessary or at least helpful in the future.”

“Do towns often battle each other, then?” Gus asked.

“I wouldn’t say ‘often,’” Guido said. “But warfare is not an unseen presence in most towns, Rachel least of all.”

“We aren’t,” Ben said with some hesitation, “we aren’t walking into a battlefield, are we?”

“Unless one has cropped up in the past few weeks that I’ve been gone, no, I don’t believe we are.”

No one spoke. Ben thought he heard Gus gulp anxiously. Ben examined the wall as they got closer and closer, just a few hundred yards off now. He searched for archers’ turrets or any guards, or even a gate, things he’d seen in the few books he’d read in Medias, the ones that showed large towns and settlements in There, without much description, only pictures and a few labels. But the walls faces were completely bare except for a large banner hanging over the top with a deep green insignia that, at this distance, looked like a rounded maple leaf or a poorly drawn hand with only three fingers.

“Is there an entrance on this side of the town, or are we going to have to walk around a bit to find one?”

Guido croaked shortly. “Oh, we’ll be able to enter from whatever direction we approach, don’t worry about that.”

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As I publish more of these excerpts, I'm realizing that there are times when I forgot a few details that I was waiting to divulge, and now I'm screwed because parts of my story aren't going to match other parts.

Forgive me. Bitte.