Chapter 3: Strange Trees in the Bottom of the Moon

Part One

Sione drew beautifully. Her quill could plot tales of ancient battles, burn stories as old as Kharke into paper as new and as fresh as innovation. She was in her room, the fourth in a line of rooms along a narrow corridor, drawing. The canvas that she was working on was clearly new. It had only a few black, brave strokes on it making a faint resemblance of a frozen fragment of time. The picture grew as she worked, but she worked around the bold figure, filling in the background and that made the picture very incomplete.

Sione rested her head back on the chair, apparently done for the day. Her thoughts turned from memories to the stuffy and closed air around her. The room could use more windows. Maybe she could tell An...

She heard a door being opened, and harsh footsteps coming towards the room. A door behind her was opened, and then slammed shut and bolted. Concentrating silently, Sione could make out the soft sounds of crying. Her eyes, which had been closed until then shifted open.

It was the boy. Zhrom. Sione's eyes slowly closed again, and her grip on the quill tightened a bit. One of these days, Andori was going suffer more than a little punishment at her hands. As the crying in the other room slowly intensified and waned, Sione found out a convenient axiom that spurred her into action.

There is no time as good as the time that you have in your hands.

She opened the door and walked out, but as she reached her front door, Andori walked in, carrying Anaka in his hands. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the green in Sione's eyes.

When Sione became angry, the entire room became angry with her. She was a pretty short figure, and she had the quality to blend into the background that had made her all but invisible for the last few full moons or so when Anaka and Zhrom were training. But something told Andori that that was about to change, and change soon.

Andori could see that she was trying hard to control her anger. The holy emerald aura that had begun to enliven the room was slowly - very slowly - dissipating. After a few thimbles during which Andori was about as mortally afraid for his life as he could get, the aura vanished completely, but the fire in her eyes remained.

"What happened?" she asked, but she didn't speak. A complicated movement of her fingers which Andori had trouble following as her anger increased the fervor of her fingers told him the two words.

"An accident," Andori said, but he didn't meet Sione's eyes. She glared at him for a little while more, and then made a motion with her fingers from which Andori understood that the matter would be discussed later - thoroughly.

She told Andori to carry Anaka to her room. When he'd rested Anaka on her bed, Sione returned with a huge hardy leather bag which Andori knew to contain the various herbs, potions, and other tools of her trade - things that made her a very formidable healer. She ordered Andori to get out of the room and then undressed Anaka, quickly and ably checking her body for the injuries that the bruises had caused.

Anaka had a large red wound across her waist, and that would be the one that would cause her the most pain in the moons to come. She had a lot of other injuries too, in varying degrees of severity - one, which was obviously a thrust from a staff right into her left breast and which had caused it to slightly swell up, another which had shaved off some skin and even some flesh from her right arm. What worried Sione the most was the blow to the head. It was, luckily, a glancing blow, but it had enough of a force behind it to split her brains twice over. Whoever had done this, Sione realized, had both been furious and extremely trained. The blows - all of them - had been to extremely weak regions in the girl's body, and all of them had been executed to perfection. If Sione had been a warrior, she would have marveled at the neat symmetry of the blows and the way it had been orchestrated to such an extent of precision.

But she was not.

Instead, she felt a savage disgust at the way the little girl's body - her beautiful body - had been mutilated. She quickly tended to the wounds, placing her healing herbs on all of them, and bandaging her head with a thin plaster that wouldn't be tight, but would still soak the blood in. She took a bottle of 'asmeida and made Anaka inhale a drop. The child must sleep, and she would need lots of it to heal her wounds. She opened the door and went outside the room to see Andori pacing outside. Sione was still furious with him, so she went to her room leaving just a silent instruction with her fingers that Andori was not to disturb her, Anaka, or for that matter, Zhrom.

She had to think. Healing was always difficult. Sometimes, a lot depended on the Gods - however hard a healer might try or however proficient he might be, life always had its share of death. Something about Anaka's injuries though, told Sione that not only would she survive, but in some ways, her recovery would make her stronger. Certainly, she was blessed by the Gods - if the blow to the head had been a little to the right, she would have died that very instant. Sione still wanted to know a lot of things about that blow, the least of all who did it, but she had more important things to do. Healing does not come instinctively - it requires practice, study, and thought. She took a pen and a paper and started to write everything down - Anaka's injuries and what she planned to do about them.

There were many healing herbs in Kharke. From the all-purpose remedy Strawroot to exotic and hardly ever used potions and ointments. Stuff more potent than most healers would dare to use, and as magical and as old as Kharke itself.

Sione knew about all of them, but healing doesn't work by the quality of the medicine alone. The ability of the healer, the disposition of the Gods, the strength of the patient all played a complicated role in determining the outcome of the jigsaw. More often than not, plotting a course of action and abiding by it even in times of distress and strife - even when the tides of the illness seems to turn against you - could be what saves the ill. Keeping a calm head when you balance lives in your hand requires a strength that few people have. Sione was a little relieved that the injuries weren't worse.

She wasn't very sure she could handle the soreness that came with responsibility - not after...

She sighed and got back to the paper. She outlined a gentle recovery for Anaka that ensured that her body wasn't strained in any way at all.

And then she thought about Bareita. It was still hard to think about her: a numbing pain that seemed out of place in the soft room enveloped her. Sighing, Sione thanked the Stones, they would never allow her to forget, but they will never allow her to weep. Sione was seventeen when she met Bahruti. It seemed like eons ago - it was eons ago, if not in time, in the way mortals looked at it. The sharp lines on his face had blurred until he was a pretty memory. She loved Bahruti - or so she thought, but she knew she loved Bareita. The instant a barely half ekk child landed on a straw mat, a sweet relief after agony, she knew she loved her. Bareita was her girl child. The first, if the Gods hadn't striven against it, of many.

Bahruti was married. His wife found out. Sione took the easy way out - ran away and became what the Gods wanted her to become - a Healer.

It was not at Azaho that she lost her daughter. Azaho was the comfort after the storm. After the unbroken rains of the Initiate training, she had planned to settle with her child in a village very much like Anaka's Umriel.

Sione blamed the Gods. She sighed again because she knew who Anaka will find to blame.

Lunch and dinner that moon in the house was as quiet as a desert; nobody spoke - Zhrom didn't come until Andori went and called him, and when he did, his eyes were blurred and he barely ate. Andori had told Sione what had happened, and when he finished, Sione had wished that she hadn't asked.

The next day, Sione asked Zhrom to be her helper. It was a bit difficult to tell the boy what she wanted and finally she had to order Andori into the room and ask him to translate, but the boy - and Andori for the matter - was clearly surprised. Sione didn't ask for a reply, she started ordering him about. The healing was not going to be that difficult, but Sione wanted him to toil a bit. The first errand was to get some herbs from the forest. Surprisingly, the boy seemed to know a lot about it - even through the faltered communication between them, he seemed to understand what was required, and he ran away quickly, and for the first time in two moons, he had something of a twinkle in his eyes.

Sione smiled as she watched him go. The best way to an early death was through inaction. She touched Anaka on her forehead; Sione was a little worried that she hadn't opened her eyes until now. She had checked and rechecked the wound on her head - it was a shallow blow, not strong enough to cause any lasting injury. And yet, Anaka was still seemingly sleeping.

It was the night of the third moon that Anaka stirred. She was naked on the bed on her back, and Sione was slowly massaging her back with a knotted cloth that oozed out something that was very cold. Sione watched her as her eyes flickered open. She helped her to a bowl of water, and Anaka lapped it up lazily, with a sleepy smile. She quickly went back to sleep, but Sione smiled and finished the rest of the massage and slowly pulled a blanket over her.

The next moon, Anaka joined them for dinner. She couldn't walk yet, and she didn't seem inclined to talk much. Sione had difficulty understanding what Anaka was thinking, but it was clear that she was physically recovering. Andori carried her to dinner, and Sione spoon-fed her the rich cereal. Without any complaints, without any sort of reaction at all, Anaka ate every spoon.

It was a passivity that Sione found bothersome. That, and the fact that despite Andori's orders Zhrom had refused to come to the table.

When Sione knocked on Zhrom's room, it was a dead man that opened the door. There was something in the boy's eyes that Sione didn't understand, but the situation was painfully familiar. She could talk sense into him, but it would be up to him to listen.

"Do you know about Anaka?" she began, both her hands forming syllables as quiet as the room.

It took a while for Zhrom to reply. She didn't know if it was because he didn't understand her, or because of his hazy eyes. As Andori had told her, the boy was incredibly intelligent. And capable. And what she could observe now, really compassionate.

But also very stupid.

"Yes," Zhrom replied, though his affirmative didn't qualify even as a grunt.

Sione couldn't hide a smile. The boy was even more like Andori that even he realized. The words would have to be few, and direct.

She moved closer and whispered into his ear, "Talk to her."

And she went away before Zhrom was startled enough out of his trance to realize that she had spoken.

She had spoken!

And yet, Andori had said... Zhrom tried to remember exactly what his whispers were that had ordered him to Sione the last moon. What Andori said was something like "She doesn't speak."

She doesn't speak, but she could when she chose to. It was another one of the enigmatic speech constructs that Andori indulged in and Zhrom had a feeling the reason behind all of them was just the childish pleasure of concealment.

But Zhrom did realize that Sione didn't choose to speak to just about anyone. The thought made him smile a bit, and then it made him determined.

On the seventh moon after her beating, Anaka learnt to lean on Hjgio's staff and walk about - finally ridding herself of Andori's arms - arms that she had grown to hate. That night, she heard the knock on her door. She glanced up from her bed. Through a window that she'd forced open earlier, flickers of white light kept the darkness company.

She knew it was Zhrom. She knew it because she had caught him stealing looks at her as she hobbled on the staff all through that moon. Every time during the last few moons when they had been left together - accidentally, and sometimes not so - Zhrom had started to speak. But Anaka had watched silently as he'd gulped in more mouthfuls than he had. She knew that it had to end, and soon. A smile came across her face as she thought about what was coming. Her grip on the staff tightened a bit.

In the dim light, Zhrom was tall. Taller than her now, because she had a staff for support.

"Come in," she said.

She moved aside to let him in, and Zhrom slowly - hesitantly - made his way into the room. It was when his back was to Anaka that her staff became more than a prop.

It swept through fluidly - though the strength behind it was less, a measure of cold fury in Anaka's eyes more than made up for any lost might. It caught him with a soft thud right between his legs. As Anaka heard him yelp out, she thought that at least in some things, Andori was right. Between his legs, a man does hide more than his honor.

As Zhrom lay on the floor, crumpled up and groaning, Anaka walked up and spoke softly in his ear, her voice light but threatening.

"That was because you didn't do this to me earlier," she said, and Zhrom could make out her smile in the moonlight.

"Now get out."

Anaka recovered. After that Zhrom recovered too.

Quickly.

Without voice, without fancy or fair, Time spent its way through Azaho as rain falls on sodden mountains. Moons past moons washed away and dimmed and brightened feelings - of remorse wrapped up between love, of hatred between respect, of love between protectiveness. It didn't make out any winners among them - Time rarely does - but it did make some of them weaker, some stronger, and some remained as still as a stone on water.

Andori spent the time teaching them about Kharke. The first lesson was the sign language that Sione used to talk. Andori referred to it as "the code," a language used among and seldom shared outside the cult of Healers. The language was, like everything Sione seemed to do, intricate. To Anaka, it was a craft to master. To Zhrom however, it was an art to enjoy.

Zhrom had read once that thought didn't come easily to man. The definitive quality that separated man from other creatures was the ability to talk. To communicate. In other words, men cannot think without a language. What followed, logically, was that the more complex the language, the more complex thoughts you were able to form.

The language that Sione used seemed to be above the rules of speech and it made Zhrom realize that it many ways, it made him think better. Within a few moons, he had mastered the basics and slowly started helping Anaka with its intricacies. Andori didn't teach them exhaustively - he didn't dwell on any lesson, he jumped from one topic to another and only taught them the very foundation of everything. He left it to his students to learn more.

Zhrom did learn more. Sione brought him ekks and ekks of books to read and smiled and once even laughed when she saw Zhrom's pleasure in them. And as he taught Anaka, they seemed to forget what had happened between them. Zhrom and Anaka never mentioned the incident, and when it happened to come up, Anaka quickly changed the topic. Sione, who often watched them together couldn't make out what they felt towards each other. Anaka seemed to bear no grudge towards him at all. Zhrom's feelings she couldn't fathom at all - he hid them under a mask as thick as Andori's whispers.

But they learnt.

Andori, and after they had become proficient in the code, Sione, taught them one subject after the other. Zhrom was the enthusiastic learner, and Anaka listened in though she was more interested about history and mathematics than about art and painting and medicine. But of all the knowledge that they gained, perhaps it was the subtle intensity of Sione and the dry humor of Andori, the unspoken music in her language and the efficient strokes of his tongue and the quiet proficiency that their teachers displayed that made a lasting impression on them.

Zhrom, and Anaka were blessed, but not only by the gods.

When Anaka ironed her injuries out, they sparred. Zhrom didn't hold back this time. Blows were traded, staffs gave way to bare arms and punches and kicks took the place of thrusts and parries. Anaka was thrown all around the field - Zhrom pressed in his advantage at every opportunity he got but Anaka learnt to yield and Zhrom learnt the limits of his patience.

Andori would watch them spar, and on many days, Sione would join him. They had become so good that Andori would take them on - together. It was these sessions that Sione enjoyed, for one does not often see Andori beaten.

She didn't see Andori beaten, of course, but she knew she would. Anaka and Zhrom were good enemies, but they were better friends. When they paired up, they moved on Andori like lightning on fire. Andori could match Anaka's speed and exceed it, he could beat Zhrom in a test of strength, but when they came up to him together, Andori couldn't do both forever. And yet, moon after moon for more than a whole full moon, he kept driving them and himself towards spars which were more furious than the one before.

Until, one day Sione watched Andori come in with a limp into her room.

"They beat me," he said, but he was smiling.