24th Saun, 714
T
With a sigh, Pharan leaned back into the shadow of the twisted acacia tree he had picked for the dappled shade it cast down the flank of the hill. Around him, the strands of his tangle snaked along the high, yellowed grass marking the transition of the hot lands to the north and Athart’s more fertile grounds to the south. He felt dizzy. Light-headed from the heat, his own crude, curious prodding of the ephemeral skeins coiling around him; the sudden shifts from one emotion to another. He rubbed his temple. Jaene had advised against doing too much too early. Her voice ringing in the back of his head, he spread his fingers. A sudden wave of apathy mixed into his exhaustion. It was almost enough to make him topple over. The emotion came with odd, analytical clarity. For a moment, he believed to see all of it. Understand all of it. The underlying lethargy. The quiet. The spindly threads which seemed to keep the rest of the tangle in a deadlock. Before he could fully grasp the thought, it passed. He considered rolling to the side. Maybe sleep. Maybe do nothing at all.
The dead lizard landed before him without warning.
His concentration broke. The tangle, pulsing with an insipid gray-blue, vanished from sight. He blinked slowly at the tall figure stepping out from the undergrowth, surprised by the sudden appearance, but too numb to move. “Done with bird watching?”, he asked, lifting one hand to shield his eyes against the torrid sun.
“You said you were hungry.” A thin layer of dirt covered his mentor’s pale turquoise skin, smudged in placed where she had made her way through the undergrowth.
“I asked if it was possible to knot away hunger.” His gaze fell on the lizard. It was a small, scrawny thing, all tails and legs and thick, leathery skin. “I didn’t ask for… whatever this is.”
The Half-Eídisi eyed him. “You can’t knot hunger because hunger isn’t an emotion. Unless it is hunger for knowledge. Or revenge. Or any of the thousand other things people crave. And then it’s no different from any other desire.” Jaene bent down to pick up her kill when he made no move to do so himself. “Hunger, physical hunger, isn’t an emotion. It’s a feeling. A reaction of your body to tell you to go out and eat something. You could make yourself more content, ease the portion of your mind that makes you worried about not having eaten in a while—but that isn’t quite the same.”
Pharan straightened. “I am not hungry,” he said again, watching as she slipped a knife from her belt to gut the lizard groin to breast. He must have seen her dress a hundred kills at this point—fish and birds and mammals; all taken apart with the same methodical ease. She had the sure hand of an experienced hunter and yet was none. She was a researcher divining the innards in search for some higher, cosmic truth. In all the years, he had never quite figured out what she was actually looking for.
“It’s not particularly clever, lying to someone who can suss out your cravings if they want to”, Jaene remarked without looking up. “I can see that poultry shaped void right there, nestled in your pattern.” She pointed her knife vaguely in his direction.
He didn’t bother to bring up his tangle to confirm—or deny—her claim. The last time he had tried to read the tapestry he had bled from the nose for half a break straight. Jaene had only laughed—a sound that seemed too soft for a woman as hard as her. Not for the first time, he felt like one of the birds he had seen her dissect for her studies; his inner workings bared to the world, ready to be described for a treatise or other. He wondered if he gave her odd moments of clarity too.
Sensing her eyes on him he shot her a dour glare.
“Look who’s in a mood again.” Jaene’s tone was casual as she dumped a hand of gray guts into the shallow hole she had dug into the sun-baked soil. “All the judgment, all the time. And yet I am not the one with the strong desire for eating my distant relatives.”
Something more primal than anger reared its head to stand against apathy. Pharan forced himself to sit up. “I told in the past—your people got that wrong.”
“My people?”
“All people,” he corrected. It wasn’t right, either. There were just no words for saying ‘all but us’ without sounding like a sullen child. He had tried.
Down the slope, his mentor wrestled a dry branch from a nearby bush. There was a soft, crunching noise as she shoved the stick down the lizards’ slack maw. Although he couldn’t tell way, the sound made his stomach revolt.
“I am the last person to tell anyone to blindly believe what they are told,” Jaene said as she pushed up the hill once more. “Make your own observations. Research. Be clever--but do something. Learn from people who know more than you. Ignorance is a poor advisor.”
“You don’t have any proof for your story,” Pharan said with a calmness he didn’t know he had in him. He had pushed to his feet to do his share for their evening meal and search the shrubbery for firewood.
“Neither do you. Not until you step before Delroth and ask him if he had the hand in your people’s making and he denies it.”
Pharan opened his mouth only to close it again. They had led the same discussion before. The same argument. He felt a dozen sharp answers hurl through his mind, but without a jota of anger, a little self-righteous fury they all sounded stale. He shook his head. “Don’t do that,” he said, irritated, but still eerily calm.
“Do what?”
“You know what.”
Jaene cast him a long look, then merely shrugged. The scorn and anger he had been denied flooded back into his pattern without warning. Pharan staggered. He took a few short breaths, trying to clear his head, trying not to hyperventilate as he crouched among the desiccated flora. By the time his hands had stopped shaking, Jaene had gathered stones and small boulders to encircle a stretch of balding soil. Wordlessly he dropped the branches and twigs into the makeshift fireplace.
The scent of roasted reptile mixed with the scents of burning wood and warmed earth. Before he left Athart, he hadn’t known how different various woods could smell when set ablaze. Now the fragrant smell of the smoldering jungle woods reminded him of home. He couldn’t even have said why. At home, servants, slaves, had done all the cooking.
Night had fallen by the time they had finished eating. With no salt, no spices, the flavor of the meat resembled particularly gamy quail. More than once he had meant to ask Jaene if it was the first time she had caught and eaten the type of lizard she had put down for the two of them. If she had known. But he couldn’t bring himself to. A comfortable silence had settled between them. Jaene was sitting by the fire, writing down her observations of the day in a thick, leather-bound notebook the way she did every evening. Sometimes she showed him what she had written. Mostly, she didn’t.
At the fringe of the camp, Pharan slouched where the light of the fire gave abruptly into darkness. He had his eyes closed. A breeze, cool after the day’s heat threatened to make him shiver, but he paid it no mind. He concentrated on his breathing, the rhythmic drumming of his heart the way Jaene had shown him long ago. The world shrank down to the small, private space that was his mind and the whirlwind of thoughts and impressions ghosting through it.
It took him a while to sense the presence before him.
He opened his eyes.
“Do you want to try?” Jaene had sat down between him and the fire, hands resting in her lap, her back straight. She never slouched.
“Try?”, he questioned.
“Manipulating my tangle.” Jaene tilted her head to the side. The book with her notes was laying on the ground beside her, the heavy covers closed. He noticed she was watching him.
“What if I did it already? In the past?”, he posed, shifting into a more upright position.
“You didn’t.”
The certainty of her words made him want to pull up his shoulders. Releasing his breath, he tried to watch her with the same sort of cool detachment she observed him.
Jaene pursed her lips as if he had said something funny.
For a long moment, they watched each other. A trill passed. Two. Three. Finally, Jaene inclined her head. “There is one thing you have to remember: influencing other people’s emotions is harder than influencing your own—you need to establish a connection before you can do any work. The person who gave me my spark would do it by talking. All the time. Constantly. I prefer to look into people’s eyes. Works just as well. That said… some people find it far easier when touching the one they want to read.”
Jaene paused, any trace of amusement fading for calm professionalism. “Now… show me what you have learned those past breaks.”