A Place To Bloom

The Right Moment

When I was with her, I felt as though I could be who I truly wanted to be, and I liked that feeling.

The Terrible Sun hadn't yet conquered the courtyard, but there was a beachhead in the grass runners that wove across the ground. Up on the ramparts, men took cover in the shade of the towers where one of Commander Gaedi's men was giving some recruits an orientation. Towards the rear, half-native children laughed while chasing chickens through a patch of vines that covered the ground until an old Na'uhui woman shooed them off.

Inside the medical ward, John's body lay motionless on a cot.

The old doctor slumped over, pulling her fingers through John's hair. She had to be at least eighty. She had a pronounced hunch in her back at her right shoulder, and her joints were swollen. She wore an undyed cotton loincloth around her waist and several sprigs of herbs and talismans around her neck along with one of those necklaces of giant wooden beads like the one Miyani wore when she went out. Her ancient, dark-green hand lifted a bead, turned one face of it to the side, and pulled out a small, brass cylinder with curved glass on each end.

She turned to the girl and addressed her in a gravelly voice. "ʃʊsi zeŋæse mɪʃa."

gædi bi'asʌ stood beside me. Her white hair wrapped around her crown in a single braid. The Commander barely came up to my chest, and she was taller than the venerable woman.

The girl returned with a brass horn-thing with a large ball at one end. She pointed the horn end towards the old woman and held the ball end while turning a crank. What started as a slow, laborious grinding accelerated through the musical scale and brought with it a faint beam of light. She turned the crank faster and faster, and the light grew until a small circle of daylight shone on the side of John's head.

The old woman pulled his hair to the side and peered through her looking glass. At last, she stood and turned.

The girl stopped turning the crank, and the light died down. She breathed in and exhaled hard, shaking her arm and rolling it around in a circle. Her yellow eyes found me and she smiled for a split-second, then left.

"pʊ ʃo'ibisu gʊ'æki."

Gaedi and I leaned in close.

"mewa gʊ'oða ɣemaðavize ʃa ya'uðeði dædaxaze ŋayi. fæ kado ðope ʒʌgʌ ʃa tætæ poyi 'æki."

I shook my head. "How can possible?"

The old woman explained. "'uŋi tætæ kubu weŋo ŋa gʊʒa'e ʃa ba gʊmewa. kʊde ðopexe ʒʌgʌ ʃa xʌgu vida mobodi. vetude puyo."

"No," I switched back to Herali. "That can't be."

The ancient doctor turned to Gaedi, who waved it off and pulled me aside, looking up into my face. "We need to tell Miyani."

"I'll tell her," I said.

Miyani was out shooting at some trainees while Renou and Ta'o observed. God, this was going to hurt. What if it happened again? I didn't want to imagine that round face of hers when I told her how John died.

I couldn't deal with that. Not right now.

I needed to take my mind off that until she got back, so I climbed through the stairs in one of the towers leading up to the rampart, slowly, didn't trip this time, and came out onto a stone walkway six feet wide. The courtyard was below on my right, and on my left, beyond black alligator-infested waters, was the open plain surrounded by Jungle. Ahead, a group of recruits gathered in another stone tower with a shingled roof that ended at a tall pole where a black flag with a white crescent moon lifted slowly in the breeze.