53 - The Lament, De Jale Doina

Kyrus looked up at the night sky from his bedsack, watching the moving star that he now knew was a flying machine.  It flashed and then got very dim.  He blinked and wondered if it had just gone out of his line of sight or if it had just turned so it wasn’t so bright.  The zon had explained that while it was dark on the planet, that was because they had their backs to the sun, and it was still shining on things outside the shadow.

It made more sense when he and Werfas had run through the idea with a lamp and asking the bees and his dragonflies to fly in the patterns around them, in his bedroom in the Sunrise Loggia.  He shook his head, and closed his eyes, but didn’t lower his face.  He was deliberately not thinking about the fact that Werfas had hooked both their birds to lead them off to the night flock.

It wasn’t good to sleep too near the army birds.  They’d come to see you as edible, for some reason. Kyrus had laid out their bedsacks in their unit, together, but in the lee of a tiny rise in the ground. A lonely tuft of grass or two provided some illusion of privacy, even in the middle of an ‘on march’ camp.  Neither he nor Werfas were slated for any watch rounds tonight. The First Shining Claw was the unit behind the Rasheem guarding da and step-da... they were bedded down further up the road.

Probably around that campfire.  Since they weren’t actively at war quite yet, rather hoping to prevent one, their campfires were clearly visible strung around the oasis.  The fatwood fires burned pink, pale green and dark blue, obscured now and again by someone rising and walking in front of the flames. There was some drinking and over on the other side of the oasis they were already singing doina, to a strummed guitar. If the Amirs let them stay up later, the droning cimpoi, made from bird bladders, would come out, when the doina would become the laments - de Jale. It seemed that mildly drunken soldiers of Lainz were like that, singing their melancholy.

Werfas came back, beating dust off his pants.  “All handed over to the birdmasters, and no damage to anybody.”

“Good.  Those monsters are nothing like the riding birds we had on the way down here.”

“Nope. I’m glad you learned to ride on ours.  After the war, it was only the most tractable ones we managed to keep.”

“Like my da.”

Werfas sank down on his bedroll, knees up, arms wrapped around.  “Just shut up.  I thought you were over that kind of bitter by now.”

Kyrus shrugged.  Thinking about possibly sleeping with Werfas, all afternoon, had cracked open part of himself that he thought he’d gotten over. He turned his face away from Werfas, ear on his shoulder, as if looking over at their campfire.

“You never talk about what your life was like before you came to get war-trained.” Werfas said quietly.  “You did good to get your ma into the hospice, when you thought she was dying.  I figured out some things.”

“What if I don’t want to,” Kyrus snapped.  “What if it's so different from your ‘oh you’re not sick or going to pass illness around, or get anybody pregnant so go play Milar' that you don’t want to know?” He bit his lip. “It wasn’t all bad.”

He turned his head back toward Werfas and sighed.  “I suppose if I tell anyone I should tell my wing-brother... but you get to tell me all about your scars.  The ones you never talk about.”

In the dark and veiled it was almost impossible to see if Werfas was affected. But Ky heard him suck his breath in.  The singer over at the other fire had switched to a raucous love song and someone had pulled out a fife.

“That’s... fair, I suppose,” Werfas said, finally.  He put out one hand and laid it on Ky’s shoulder.

Kyrus twitched but not hard enough to throw it off.  It felt too good, it felt too bad, because Werfas was a boy, it felt warm, it felt... friendly.  Not controlling.  Maybe that was the difference. He held still and his trembling slowed down.  When did I start trembling?

“You know... the old man who I found as a long-term lover... Oltarios?  He was the one who saved me, really.” He was tumbled back into the memories of running with the other Basin rat-boys, “There were... the knife fights where the other guy'd try to cut, slash your looks," in the dark he laid a finger across his forehead, down his nose and cheeks "...so high rankers wouldn’t choose you, pay you.  An' your own flock... we did look out for each other, but it always depended on who had money that hour, or that day.  It would never last a full week, you’d be back on the slick the second the cash ran out, or you’d get so behind you’d drown in dust.” 

The Basin rat slang echoed distantly on his tongue.  He shrugged. “Who d'ja owe, who owed'ja, could'ja swap your body in exchange for mercy or for forgiveness of a debt or to save somebody's ass so they owed'ja.  And clients who wanted you only in the dark so they could pretend they were curviili with a girl, even when they dracului’d the shit out of you.”   

He drew in a deep breath.  “Sorry... slang... fakking a girl...” He shook, whole body trembling despite anything he could do.  Werfas put his arm around him and it was as though he held him down, held him together.

“I get it.  You don’t need to translate, wingbrother.” But Werfas spoke softly, as if to not startle him, interrupt the flow of things.

“And people got sick all the time. You got sick and couldn’t work... ma... she worked, even when she wasn’t right in the head.  We figure it was a couple of things.  She was zardukar training, but found something too big, too complex for her and tried to decode it by herself.  That... was the start of her decoupling from time for a long time.  And that Basserus... he kept putting out killing code, not realizing that with so few of us to start, everybody’s related somehow to everybody else in Lainz so he messed her... and me, some... we got really sick the year His Radiance’s Heir was killed.  It could have been helped along by Basserus.  We don’t know.”

“Then the babies died... my siblings.  Neither of them could breathe very well, and we couldn’t afford good filters on the window or the door.  That really sent ma off the edge.  That was when Oltarios picked me out of the flower-tender line... that was the scam.  We boys had baskets of flowers advertising that we tended earthan plants... huh.  Men would come look... then ‘hire’ a boy.  Oltarios actually had me tending his plants... as well as the sex.”  His shaking was easing and Kyrus sat up slightly but didn't pull away from Werfas.

“It... sounds like he was more honest than most.”

“Yeah.  I could have told you all this in half the time if you understood Basin cant.”

“He taught you how to read, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.  Rebel man.  Teach the illiterates to read.  Secret classes in the back room.  He was lucky he got reported for being a man lover instead of a teacher.  They’d have put him in a bottomless cage with only one way out, for being a teacher.”

They sat together quietly, and Kyrus found himself leaning against Wer’s knees, arm around him.  “It’s only bad because I grew up with the idea that it’s bad.  I... liked some of it.  The sex I mean.  It was the control stuff that I hated.”

“Are you hating yourself because some of that sex felt good?”

Kyrus had to quit panting then, just hold his breath for a moment, then breath in, gustily.  “I... guess.”

He turned to look Werfas in the eyes, as shadowed as they were.  “I guess I’m afraid I’ll be like da and not like girls anymore if I do this with you.”

“Um.  It doesn’t work that way, you know.”

“No, I DON’T know.  Sorry.  I shouldn’t raise my voice.  I... don’t look at men that way because I taught myself not to.” He could feel himself blushing with shame.  “But there was... a lot... that I liked.  It felt good.” He could feel Werfas nod, but before he could say anything that would just throw them flat over into the bedsacks, Kyrus kept right on.  “I opened up.  I told.  Your turn.”