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.
These figures of moving stone surrounded him, crowding in close. They slipped slivers of their limbs beneath him and lifted him into the air. His weight shared among a number of them, they walked with him suspended above the earth. It was a feeling similar to floating. His head lolled back and for a time he watched the motion of an upside-down world. He thought that they might have been speaking, but again he could not say for sure. There was something passing between them, but it was more like exhaled breaths than any language he knew.
He had no idea how long or how far they carried him. He did understand that the earth spun beneath him. He saw the sun pass by above, watched stars flare to life and careen away, but he did not ponder such things as the passing of time or meaning of movement. It was not an experience measured in passing moments. Rather, one instant of time flowed so smoothly into the next that there was constancy to it all. There were no future and present and past. All of these things were the same. He forgot who he was. He felt no burdens whatsoever. His life and all the pressures he lived with had no substance. This, more than anything else from his introduction to his saviors, would haunt him afterward, a promise dangling at the far side of life.
When he awoke to true consciousness again it was with the aid of another’s prodding. Somebody spoke his name, his first name and then that of his family line. The voice asked him if he would wake now and explain himself. He had come to them-why? He felt a pressure on his sternum, a force strong enough to push a moaning breath up and out of his mouth. He opened his eyes.
Above him was a night sky. A black ceiling beneath which a gauze of high cloud rippled, rimmed in by the lip of a bowl of pale red stone. He wanted to take in the world around him and to figure out where he was. This might be death, after all. He sat up with slow effort. Somebody sat just beside him, cross-legged and still. It was, at first glance, a humanlike shape, worn and aged, carved of stone and perhaps so ancient that ages and ages of windblown sand had smoothed its features and pocked depressions into weaknesses, causing bits and pieces to drop away over time. The eyes were smooth and had about them the slightest indication of color, as if they had once been brightly painted and a trace residue of brilliance remained. The statue was near enough to touch, and Aliver flexed his fingers with the latent desire to do so.