He watched Rialus touch a spoonful of the stuff to his lips. Unimpressed, he said, “Perhaps your stomach is too weak for this, like the rest of you.”
The female to his left said, “There’s only one part of him that’s even the slightest bit hard.”
“There is a great deal about my race you still must learn,” Calrach said. “Another year or so, and you’ll be Numrek yourself. And proud of it.” He guffawed at the absurdity of this, and then switched gears. “Rialus, tell me, do you think Hanish Mein honors us? We Numrek, I mean. We chosen ones. Does he insult us?”
Rialus said, “I am not sure what you mean.”
“Does he insult us?”
Calrach had a habit of doing this-repeating the last thing he said as if to demonstrate that all possible answers, meanings, interpretations were contained in the words themselves, if only Rialus would look more carefully.
Rialus asked, “What taste of insult have you felt?”
Calrach shrugged, tossed a hand about, scratched his cheek forcefully enough to tear away a few scraps of peeling skin. “Not a taste, so much. A smell, though. There is a smell I don’t like. My grandfather used to speak of such a smell. It came from the Lothan, before they turned on us and drove us from their world. We used to be their personal army. You know that, don’t you? We were their allies for many generations, but they used us foully in the end. If I have one wish, Rialus, it’s to one day return to the Other Lands and bring the Lothan a new smell. You understand me.”
Rialus hated it when he said that. He did so often, especially on occasions when Rialus did not understand him in the slightest. There was no use pushing it, however. Calrach had an orbital pattern of discourse that one had to adjust to. He would come back to the point later if it was something that mattered to him.
Then the drums sounded, announcing the arrival of the main course. The evening was to feature a dish Rialus had not tried before, an event that always troubled him. The entire table before them suddenly rose, lifted above their seated heads by servants at each corner. It passed over Rialus, casting him in shadow. The young woman to his right grasped him across the bicep and purred something in his ear, an expression of anticipatory pleasure. By the time the first table cleared him the next table was being lowered into place.
Before him lay a delicacy the Numrek called tilvhecki. It was about the size of a mature pig, and looked like a bloated skin sack, translucent enough to reveal its contents as some sort of gaseous, multihued offal. Calrach, in talking about the pleasure awaiting them, explained that the look of it was in keeping with the truth. Tilvhecki was the name they had for lamb. During their exile in the Ice Fields they’d had no sheep with them and therefore had been deprived of this dish for some time. It was made with the usual Numrek elements of fermentation and putrification. It began weeks prior when the meat and internal organs of a young lamb were left for several days exposed to the open air. The meat was not cooked just then, but it was basted in blood juices and spices and wine. When the thing was thriving with maggots it was shoved into the skin sack, sewn tight and left to ferment. It was eventually cooked, and placed as it was now before them, steaming hot.
Calrach himself sliced the package open. With the first touch of the knife point, the contents gushed for freedom. The sight of the soft, mottled flesh surging out of the slit started a gag low in Rialus’s belly. The scent, when it smacked his face, carried a physical force that was like falling forward into a latrine. Rialus would have spilled his insides on the spot, except that he had already perfected mouth breathing. He bypassed his nose entirely and played air about on his tongue with shallow breaths.
Calrach’s facial muscles twitched and pulled, exposing his irregular array of teeth. A grin, perhaps. “Tell me, Neptos, do you think us vile?”
Rialus, answering as he knew he must, said that of course he did not think them vile. Happy to hear it, one of the women smacked a ladleful of the tilvhecki onto a platter for him. The other one shouted something to the group. The entire room turned toward him and waited for him to try the course. Rialus began to beg off on account of being stuffed already. Filled to the gills. Could not eat another mouthful. He pantomimed physical expressions of all these things, but nobody paid the slightest attention to his protests.
“Eat! Eat! Eat of it!” somebody yelled. The chant caught on. Within a few repetitions every mouth in the place screamed it at him. Many leaned in close to him, their breath striking his face like gusts of putrid wind. “Eat! Eat! Eat of it!”
Eventually, hating himself as much as the Numrek, Rialus lifted the spoon to his mouth and tipped the clump of meaty pungency onto his tongue. This was met with roars of laughter. Rialus sat immobile, his jaw tense, the morsel a dead weight in his mouth. Another Numrek, the chieftain’s brother, came up behind him. He slapped two great hands on him, one across the crown of his head, the other on his chin. He worked the man’s jaw into a chewing motion. This, too, was a mirth the party found almost unbearable to behold. They fell about the place, rolling among the cushions as if they had never witnessed anything so amusing.
After all this died down, the chieftain chose to speak a few moments of business with the liaison. He pitched his voice in a manner that, although just as loud and boisterous as ever, somehow told the others to look away and speak among themselves. “So, Rialus Neptos, hear now the message you will take to Hanish Mein. And prepare yourself. This may not please him. We too want some quota. Understand?”
Rialus was not at all sure that he did. He was still licking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to scrub the taste of the tilvhecki off it.
Calrach repeated, “Lothan Aklun gets quota; Numrek should get quota.”
That was about as far as his logic on the matter likely went. Rialus almost asked him why he wanted more slaves. They had enough to take care of all their needs already. He feared the possibilities of the answer, though. Instead, he said, “Honorable Calrach, I’m sure this cannot be. You’ve more than received adequate payment for your services. Hanish will not like that you ask for this.”
Calrach put on his affronted expression, one that he had taken to using in imitation of Rialus himself. “It’s only one thing I ask,” he said, looking back to Rialus. “Only one thing. Who can refuse one thing?” Then, looking down at the cluttered table, he added with a slight change in his tone, “At least, it’s one thing until I think of another.”
This, apparently, was again open to the public and humorous enough to pass as a Numrek joke. Rialus felt a hand slap his back. He sat, smarting from the blow, as the beasts around him heaved with merriment. Once again, Rialus Neptos, the butt of other men’s jokes. This could not go on. There simply had to be a way for him to better this life. There had to, had to, had to, had to be a way. He would find it or die trying. How he hated Hanish Mein, the smug, ungrateful whelp. And Maeander…He should not even consider Maeander. There were no words-not even in his new language-to fully express his loathing. He swore to himself that one day both brothers would regret stirring the ire of Rialus Neptos.
CHAPTER
Aliver observed stone become living tissue with a muted sort of acceptance, as if just the fact that he was watching it made such amazing things mundanely possible. There was no terror. No confusion. From a place that felt removed from his true body he watched granite boulders stretch into vaguely anthropomorphic beings. They each stood on two pillarlike legs, swung limbs from shoulder joints, turned heads with black-holed eyes toward him. They moved with a slow, stiff-jointed fluidity. They approached him like some strange undertakers of rock and earth, come to clean his corpse, to dispose of him. For that was what this meant, right? He was dying here in the far south, sucked dry by the sun, defeated. He was as parched as the sand beneath him, and now the rock beings of the earth had come to claim him. He wondered why nobody had explained this to him before. There was no mention of it in any spiritual lore he had ever heard.