

UNKNOWABLE
A Story of the Jokka


by M. C. A. Hogarth


Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 M.C.A. Hogarth

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"Take me to the fair!" Ekkuli said. With predictable drama, it draped itself over my desk with the back of one hand pressed to its sloped forehead, scattering tablets, tools and beads.
"I'm in the middle of something," I said. "Why not ask Nashada?"
"Because Nashada is out working, which you well know," Ekkuli replied. It reached up and traced my jaw with a single finger. "Take me!"
I laughed. "A three-person House is cozy enough. What reason would we have to go to a Transactions fair?"
"It will be colorful and full of intriguing strangers," Ekkuli said. "Give me enough time and I'll tease stories out of every corner. Please, Tañel? I want to do something different today."
I was suspicious; I adored Ekkuli but the eperu was as enigmatic as truedark, and it was hard to know its real reasons for anything. No doubt it really did want me to take it to the fair... but I couldn't be sure why. Such uncertainty is an invitation to get bitten on the nose, as clay-keepers like Ekkuli do not shy from truths, even the fanged ones. Perhaps especially the fanged ones. The last time it had teased me into something, I had ended up abandoning everything I knew, leaving the House I'd lived and worked in all my life with nothing more than what I could pack on a rikka.
Then again, the last time it had teased me into something, I had ended up here: Head of my own Household and surrounded by the two people I loved best in all the world….
Ekkuli reached up and tugged at a lock of my pale mane. "Please, Tañel. We will have fun."
 How could I say 'no' to those long red lashes? "As long as we're back before Nashada comes home."
Ekkuli licked the underside of my jaw. "You won't regret it."

***

The last Transactions Fair I attended was in het Kabbanil, in that old life, before Ekkuli opened my eyes and I ran away with it and my lover Nashada. The three of us had wandered south until we drifted to a stop in het Uren, and here we'd put down a Stone and started House Imeted. We had the necessary prerequisites: a breeder to be Head of Household and at least one other Jokkad to be a member. With my jewelry-making, Nashada's beast-handling and Ekkuli as our clay-keeper we made enough to pay rent on our small property and buy what comforts we liked.
We established here a season ago. Uren is no Kabbanil--not so sophisticated, nor so many people, and certainly no ruins hinting at glorious ages now passed. But we wanted someplace a little less sophisticated. Het Uren might not look kindly on unspeakable stories, but in Uren such stories only cause Ekkuli to complain that no one will pay money for the unspeakable. In het Kabbanil, such stories get you Broken from your House and exiled.
So I was surprised by het Uren's Fair. My only exposure to Transactions Fairs had led me to expect a straight-forward auction of permanent and short-term contracts. Such fairs were the primary vehicle for the trade of Jokka between Houses. Het Uren, however, blended the contract transactions that gave the fair its name with other kinds of sales: goods, food, entertainment. Trade caravans from other towns were haphazardly arranged near the auction stages, their sails painted with each caravan leader's particular mark. Eperu and emodo in their best clothes and jewels wandered from booth to booth. Beast-handlers displayed their skittish, sharp-clawed rikka to cautious farmers. I even caught glimpses of the final aspect of the sacred Trinity through the crowd: a naked anadi there, lounging on the raised bed of a wagon, another female leaning against the body of an eperu guardian.
I knew now why Ekkuli had evinced interest in the fair. It would be chasing stories through these crowds all five days.
"What now?" I asked, dizzied by the throng, by the new smells, the colors. I had become accustomed to the quiet of het Uren and the warm silences of our little Household.
"Now, I go wander," Ekkuli said, squeezing my arm. We will meet for lunch."
"I came to accompany you!" I said.
"You'll find something to do." It grinned at me mischievously before slipping into the crowd.
For this, it had dragged me away from the commission I'd been working on. I shook my head.
But as usual, Ekkuli had its wisdom. Soon enough I found myself in the middle of several sprightly bargaining sessions with the eperu of the trade caravans, and I came away the better for it with exotic gems and a few slim cylinders of precious metal. Most of our jewelry is threaded with hide or braided silk, our ornaments glass, beautiful pebbles, polished bone. Metal and gems are both rarities, which is why a House awards its most valued member of a particular sex a metal ring. Few Jokka can afford to buy an entire piece of jewelry made of metal and gems but if I added a metal spiral here or a polished garnet there to existing items, I could make them all more valuable without pricing them out of het Uren's market.
Thus replete with satisfaction I meandered through the fair, gathering ideas for new jewelry from the wares on display from het Serean and het Narel, perfectly content until I reached the end of the trader's row.
All fairs have pens. The sale of empty-minded anadi is the reason the fairs came into being, even if other kinds of contracts came to be sold there as well. One cannot trust an adult with the mind of a baby to remain where you left her... thus the pen, discreetly tucked behind the auction stage so as not to upset passers-by.
I should have walked past--as I told Ekkuli earlier, our House doesn't need more members, and even if it did we certainly didn't need any females. Anadi are fragile. They require special treatment, special rooms, cool waters... they should have a jarana, an anadi guardian to do nothing but care for them. And their minds are such an ephemeral beauty, gone so swiftly.
But I walked to the pen anyway and rested my palms on the topmost slat. The females paid me no mind... most of them were sleeping. But my eyes grazed the slope of their backs, the petite curl of their hands, the length of their untrammeled manes.
"Looking for something in particular?" someone asked, stepping up beside me.
"No," I said, because I didn't know why I was here.
The Jokkad standing beside me was eperu. "There are some fine sales to be made this season, some unusual anadi," it said. "The journey was long, but the landscape seemed to intrigue them."
I had never thought of the journey such anadi take to reach a fair. "Doesn't the ride damage their minds?" I asked.
"Not if you're careful," the eperu replied. "A lot of water, someone to supervise the sails for maximum shade during the day... it works well. Not perfectly, but well."
Not perfectly. What did that translate to, I wondered? A forgotten face? A word just out of reach? The light blown out on a few memories, shrouding them in a permanent dark?
"Ah, there you are, ke emodo!" Ekkuli said behind me. It smiled at the eperu beside me and said, "I've been looking all over for him. He's overdue!"
The eperu grinned at Ekkuli and allowed it to draw me from the pen and my dismaying thoughts.
"We shouldn't have come here," I said to Ekkuli, numb.
It relieved me of the bags I'd forgotten in my arms. "Are you sure? These look full to me. Perhaps what you mean is that you shouldn't have come here in particular."
I glared at it. "Now is not the time--"
As usual, the metal-hardness in Ekkuli popped out just when I expected soft. "Now is exactly the time, Tañel. Or were you never going to face your ambivalence about anadi again?"
"There will be a better day," I said. "Even clay-keepers can be wrong.".
"I doubt it," Ekkuli said.

***

"You are restless tonight," Nashada said. "Is there a truedark clay you want to attend that you haven't told me about?"
"That's not funny," I said.
He laughed and rolled onto me, his chest against my back, pressing me onto the sheets. "There. Now you won't be able to twitch. Just don't drum your fingers and we'll be fine."
"I am not restless," I said, flexing my toe-claws. Nashada snickered into my mane and I sighed. "Much."
"Should we go attend Ekkuli's clay?" Nashada asked. "You want to go somewhere. I can feel it in your bones... they're going to walk off without your body if you don't go somewhere with them." When I didn't reply he licked my ear to the tuft, tickling. "Let's go."
"No," I said.
"At least tell me what's wrong," he said. He licked my ear again. "Tell me or I'll tickle it out of you!"
I couldn't help it... I laughed. That was one of the reasons I had come to love Nashada, despite myself. I needed people to make me laugh. "Anything but the ear. I can't take the ear."
"Talk," Nashada demanded, rolling off me and pushing his nose against my arm.
"Ekkuli insisted on going to the fair," I said and stopped. Even after all this time, I had a hard time speaking confidences. I forced it out. "I saw the pen."
Nashada grew quieter, his green eyes considering. "The pens bother you."
"The pens should bother everyone!" I said.
"What alternative would you suggest?" he asked. When I didn't respond, he said, "The mind-death comes for us all, setasha... even the eperu if they're not careful. It's part of who we are. It's what makes our lives so precious."
"Easily said for you," I replied. "You did not watch your lover reduced to drooling vacancy in the harness."
That silenced him, as I'd intended it to. He slid off the bed and left... no doubt off to a cheldzan somewhere in het Uren's more populated areas to drink tea, gossip and play jenadha. I turned my back to the door and curled up in the sheets with my acrid memories. I loved Nashada and Ekkuli both, but didn't everyone remember their first romance? And mine had ended in tragedy. It was Ekkuli guessing the substance of that tragedy that had first attracted and repelled me.
The wick fell into the oil, dousing the only flame that lit our sleeproom. Silver and shadow striped our bed, patterned the mussed sheets. The strands of my tail visible in my eye's corner looked drained, no longer blond but a sulky gray. Everything seemed colorless. I dressed without grace: pants, pulled on. Long cloth clipped over them. Vest tied on with tassels. And then I let myself out into the evening streets and gave my feet license to move me.
They moved me, as I should have known they would, to the anadi.
I had forgotten that anadi are most active after nightfall--I never had regular congress with them. Not counting my illicit affair, of course. When I arrived at the edge of the pen I could see them moving and they glimmered, precious, past the veil of night: silver gleam in their eyes, pale electrum glow over their softly scaled bodies.
Oh, they were beautiful. I dropped my trembling head into my arms, resting it against the topmost bar of the pen.
"You came back."
I looked up and found an exquisite sliver of star and shadow standing in front of me, and I felt a quiver of excitement and revulsion. Bad enough to have been perverted enough to love Ekkuli, a neuter, rather than another emodo like myself or Nashada. But to feel this twinge for an anadi? Was I hopelessly corrupted?
"You have that look," she continued in a voice clear and light, like pale tea. "I don't see it often. Why are you here, if we upset you so?"
"Why are you talking to me?" I managed hoarsely. "What good will it do?"
"I don't know," she said. "But no one talks to me, and I miss that."
"You were something else before you Turned?"
She blinked a few times, lashes glowing. "No. I have always been anadi. That doesn't mean I was born without a mind to enjoy conversation." She ran her fingers along my arm, as if checking me for warmth and life. "Sometimes I think other Jokka turn from the anadi before we lose our minds. They don't want to invest their hearts in someone who will not remember them in ten years, twenty. I suppose I understand."
"But it upsets you," I said.
"Of course," she replied without rancor. "Wouldn't it upset you?"
"I never think of such things," I said, which was the absolute truth. It's why I needed Ekkuli so badly.
"How nice to never need to," she said, withdrawing her hand.
And I--I captured it and didn't remember deciding to do so. "Wait. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be thoughtless."
"I'm used to it," she said with the flick of a tail that is the most tired of shrugs among the Jokka. "You too will pass through my life, like all the others."
Because it was true, because it shamed me, I let her go... let her melt back into the mystery and tangle that was the lot of our females. Because it was true and it shamed me, I went home to an empty bed, and while Ekkuli entertained the Jokka of het Uren with its wondrous stories, set out stone by stone in the sands, and Nashada cast pebbles in games of chance and laughed and drank without me, I curled up in a large and empty bed and slept... and perhaps rubbed my itching teeth and the tears that stopped up in them.

***

The following day I retreated into my work. Nashada and Ekkuli walked broad circles to avoid me, which suited me fine. They did the same the next day, and while I attempted to feel guilt over not taking Ekkuli to the fair I couldn't quite muster the energy. I finished the commission I'd taken for a navel chain and moved on to the dangles to which I wanted to apply my new metal and gems. The work became me, and I let it douse the world beyond my oil lamp's edges.
I vaguely recall Ekkuli slipping in to ask for shell to buy something that had caught its fancy at the fair and giving it leave to spend carefully, to at least try to haggle. Neither it nor Nashada could handle shell, which is why I held our House's purse.
My work became a puzzle. The metal I shaped into spirals and delicate chains seemed perfect for one ornament and then hideous the next. So vexing was it that I barely noted the hours, staggering into the den with little idea how late it was.
"Ah, he wakes!"
I stood at the arch into my work-room, rubbing bleary eyes. "I wasn't sleeping."
"You might as well have been," Nashada said. He grinned. "Come on, stretch out. You've been crouched over that desk for hours."
Hours! And he was right... it was after dinner. I dropped onto the floor pillows and stretched aching arms. "Where's Ekkuli?"
"I don't know, where did you leave it?" Nashada said, grinning.
I yawned. "That's not funny. You know it gets into trouble."
"Honestly, I don't know," Nashada said. "I thought you would... you were the last person to see it."
We looked at one another. I sat up.
"It's probably fine," Nashada said, the words reluctantly escaping his mouth.
I stood and turned for the door--
"We're home," Ekkuli said. "And we're hungry! Is there dinner?"
Behind it stood the anadi, and even with light to make more of her star and shadow I knew her.
"What is she doing here?" I said.
"She's the thing I wanted," Ekkuli said, tossing me a pouch. Stunned, I caught it in numb hands. "And I bargained her price down, just like you said I should. I saved almost a third what they wanted for her!" It preened.
Nashada stood and headed for the door.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Anywhere but here," he said, and vanished.
I looked at the anadi, struggling to maintain some hold on my sanity. Was this what it felt like for the Brightness to destroy your mind? Was it this slippery feeling, as if everything was falling out of reach? "There's a bed in the other room," I said to her. She had skin the color of black plums, so abyssal-beautiful I briefly lost my chain of thought at the sight of it. "You'll be more comfortable there."
She studied me, then dipped her head once and padded into the next room. I rounded on Ekkuli and balled my fists, then spread them, then just turned away and grabbed at my mane.
It slid its arms around my waist and pressed its chest to my back. "Don't be angry with me," it said. "She remembered you. She liked you. I liked her. I didn't want her to go home with someone else."
"What are we going to do with her, Ekkuli?" I asked, all my anger draining into the spaces between my broken thoughts. "We have no facilities to breed anadi."
"Are the anadi only for breeding?" Ekkuli asked, breath warm on my shoulder-blade.
"That is how the anadi earn shell for their Houses," I said.
"That is how emodo use anadi to earn shell for their Houses," Ekkuli corrected. "I suspect anadi would have it differently if they are still aware enough to make the choice."
"That is the issue, isn't it?" I asked. "How long will it be before there is no choice? And then we will have to breed her, or sell her." I closed my eyes, and defeat sucked the strength from my spine. I drooped. "You have brought tragedy into our House, Ekkuli."
"Is that what it is?" Ekkuli asked. "Or is that what you will make of it?"
Before I could lash out, the eperu slid from my grasp... back into the eve, behind Nashada. They left me in different ways, my beloveds: Nashada fled my outburts; Ekkuli abandoned me to angry contemplation. They both avoided me in dire moods and oh I wanted to sink into this one... but there was still unfinished business. I walked to the sleep-room arch and stood in it, looking into the dark.
"Will you sell me?"
Her clear, light voice did not tremble. She sounded so calm. I twitched my ears toward the sound and managed to find the gleam of her eyes.
"As we have just bought you, that would be embarrassing," I said, forcing the words out.
"But practical," she said. "I would not blame you for it."
I sighed and rubbed my forehead.
"I can't see you.... "
For the first time she sounded tentative--incomplete in herself. So I approached the bed and sat on its edge, and after a moment a warm arm laid along my leg.
"I'm sorry to have caused you trouble. I would have stopped your eperu had I known you had not approved."
"You? Stop Ekkuli? No one stops Ekkuli," I said with a sigh. "Don't fool yourself on that."
Her voice smiled for her. "It is a truth-speaker, I suppose."
"You suppose rightly," I said. We were silent. "What's your name?"
"Anaia," she said.
"Anaia," I repeated. "Strange name."
"I am a strange anadi," she said.
"How is that?" I asked, though I knew better than to follow this road.
Perhaps she sensed my ambivalence, for she did not answer immediately. Then, "I have been anadi since I was born. But I do not resent my lot."
"Never?" I asked.
"No," she said. The puff of her sigh against my body was warm, even through my pants. "I feel regret for how I must be treated, but I do not resent it. I have seen my fellows go to their mind-deaths." Quiet, then. I waited in her silence. "I wish that grief on no Jokkad."
"I loved an anadi," I said. "She had only just Turned. I loved her past her Turning until she ended in the harness." I halted, breathless. Such a confession to a stranger, one that had cost Ekkuli and Nashada so much more time to elicit. But Anaia only nodded, a motion I felt in the dark, heard as her body shifted on the bed.
"I will try to disappear," she said. "So you will not miss me when I am gone."
I left her in my bed. Where Ekkuli and Nashada slept I didn't know, but I hid in my work-room and pretended to rest there. Pretense was all it was.

***

She did just as she promised, for the days unwound and I barely saw her. How she accomplished this magic I couldn't guess, for our House was not a large one. Perhaps Ekkuli saw to her needs--with the ripening of the season, Nashada was too busy with farm-beasts on the fields to tend to an anadi. And I... I could not bear to come near her.
I expected Ekkuli to chide me over my behavior, but it did not. As the days passed, my guilt at last moved me to ask it why.
"Why what?" it asked, ears perfectly unmoving, nonchalant.
"Why haven't you... taken me to task? About her?"
It glanced at me from beneath those sultry lashes, and I remembered once again the truth-teller who'd stolen my breath on a warm evening. "You don't need me to tell you this truth, Tañel. Your very gait is graceless with shame."
I flushed white. "Ekkuli--"
"Remember only this," it said, touching my mouth to silence me. "It's a waste to fear what cannot be known."
"And what unknowable thing am I fearing?" I asked.
It smiled, fetching, mysterious. But it was only a veil, like the ones it wore to its clays, over something more tired. Before I could ask, a voice interrupted us.
"Ekkul--oh."
I looked past Ekkuli's shoulder to find Anaia, surprised by the sight of me into stillness. I glanced at the eperu, whose eyes did not hold the challenge I expected, but sorrow.
Anaia held a brush in one hand. It was not hard to guess why she'd sought Ekkuli.
"Do you need help?" I asked.
"I--ke Ekkuli usually... "
"I'll brush your hair today," I said, and was rewarded by the flutter of a smile on Ekkuli's face. Bravely, then, I went to Anaia. "Where are you comfortable?"
"It doesn't matter," she said as Ekkuli slipped out, silent as shadows. "Wherever you like."
So I led her to my work-room, which threatened less than the sleep-room, and set her at my feet on a cushion. I had rarely seen her in daylight, and her mane and tail were a glossy blonde paler than my own and striking against her plum-black skin. Whorls of silvery gold traced distracting patterns on her body.
She was wearing clothes. One of Ekkuli's thin shifts, the ones it wore beneath heavier tunics.
"Aren't you warm?" I asked past the fear that seized my trembling limbs. Heat endangered the anadi... it was why they went naked.
"No," she said.
Still shaking, I started to brush her hair.
"Is this your work?" she asked, eyes on my desk. "You make jewelry."
"Yes," I said. The frustrating metal and gems remained unused, for I had not yet found satisfying uses for them.
"I love jewelry," she said with a little sigh. "Such colors. And so smooth to the touch. Cool. And the sounds... "
"Sounds?" I asked, bemused.
She nodded, pulling at the tresses in my palm. "Good jewelry is musical. The sounds when you move in it soothe the ear. I have seen it gentle unhappy anadi, when the sounds are sweet enough."
What an amazing thought. "And... textures. And temperatures. Those matter? You discern them?"
She smiled, from her voice. "It is nice to play with something that has a variety of feels to it. That goes from cool to warm, from soft to rough to pebbled to sharp." She twisted then to look up at me, and her eyes were the color of tawny opals. "Surely you know these things? Others speak of your success."
"What others?" I asked, astonished.
"The others at the clays Ekkuli gives."
"It--you--" I stopped, aghast.
"It only takes me to the clays it gives at night," Anaia said. "When it is cool. I can read the stories.... "
It was the wistfulness in the last words that unraveled the tightening knot in my chest. So few pleasures she would know in her life. How could I take any away merely to prolong it? She would lose her understanding of stories soon enough.
"Would you like to see the beads?"
She clasped my knees in her hands with all the hope that she guarded so fiercely in her gaze. "Might I?"
I spread them out before her: gems and bones and tiny rocks, metal spirals and carved horn, drops of glass and engraved wooden discs. Half-finished pieces as well to her great delight. And as she touched and examined each in turn, she set them down in places different than I'd set them, until I noticed that she was sorting them into piles.
"Why do you put the red glass with the horn?" I asked.
"Because they feel good together," she said.
I rolled them between my fingers, together. She was right.
I asked her about all her other choices after that. If we missed supper, no one commented.

***

Anaia found work with House Imeted then. She rose when her body moved her, ate a slow breakfast and then joined me to fashion jewelry that felt right, that made music when worn. My fears that her activities would tax her drained away as she returned each day to her labors unchanged. And sooth, to sit on a cushion with a needle in a cool stone room wasn't so bad a thing for a female. Indeed, after a time I began to wonder how I'd been able to hold her apart with such terror. The mind-death came to anadi under great strain--heat, pregnancy, exhaustion, storms of emotion. How could any of those visit her here? She was safe. The one thing in my life that needed protection was guarded.
Which is how my world shattered entire when a frenzied messenger arrived on the doorstep of House Imeted, telling me that Nashada had been struck by a crazed rikka and now lay near death on the fields of het Uren.
"Go to the clay-keeper's field in the town's center," I said to the messenger, fighting panic. "Tell ke Ekkuli to meet me at Nashada's side."
The messenger fled and I began to shut the door, careless of pouch, clothes, mussed hair. Anaia stopped me by shoving her hip in the door.
"I'm coming," she said.
"No--"
"I'm coming," she said, jerking a floppy hat onto her head.
"I won't lose two of you in a day!" I cried, but she flattened her ears and wriggled out of the door.
"I'm coming," she said a third time, and I could not waste the time to argue. I ran, heedless of my own safety, through the mild warmth of spring. If the afternoon held beauty, if the breeze had been scented with the perfume of new flowers, I knew not. I only knew that Nashada, my funny, irreverent Nashada, was too strong, too new to die so soon.
The group of anxious beast-handlers and farmers clustered near an abandoned plow betrayed Nashada's body. I scattered them with my abrupt arrival, falling to my knees at his side and plucking his hand from the dirt. My frantic eyes cataloged his scrapes and scratches, halted on the gash on his thigh, poorly bandaged but no longer bleeding. The soil beneath his leg was dark and wet, and the air stank of blood.
Anaia knelt at Nashada's other side, took his other hand.
"Nashada," I said, squeezing his hand. "Setasha. It's Tañel. Wake up."
His eyes remained shut. I looked up. "Is there no healer in het Uren?"
"Only an herbalist," one of the farmers said. "Who has gone out of town to gather its plants."
"We need to get him out of the sun," I said. "Even an eperu will bake when exposed."
The watchers grunted, but helped me gather him from the ground. One of them held his leg straight and walked carefully alongside me off the field, back to town, back to the House with its cool stone walls and dark shelter. I saw nothing of the landscape, of the Jokka who followed, barely even noticed when Ekkuli replaced the Jokkad at Nashada's leg. But I counted the interminable steps to keep from panicking, to keep from counting instead the stuttering breaths of my beloved.
Once delivered to his own bed, the others left. The three of us tended him through the dark hours and into the dawn and out again. He did not die, and we hoped, and when he opened his eyes I cried out in relief.
"Nashada!" Ekkuli and Anaia joined me as I took his hand, held it to my breast. "We were so worried."
"Thirsty," Nashada said.
"I'll get water." Anaia scrambled to her feet.
"Where am I?" Nashada asked.
"Home," I said. "We took you back as soon as we got there."
"Home," he said, green eyes distant. He looked at me. "Thank you."
"Don't be silly," I said, laughing, breathless. "Did you expect us to leave you there?"
His brows furrowed. "Yes?" Before I could fashion a reply or even stop staring, he continued, "Do I know you?"
I dropped his hand so abruptly it startled us both. "Nashada?"
He closed his eyes.
I stood, wobbled. Almost fell, but it was Anaia who held me up. Anaia who helped me to a cushion in my work-room, who steadied me.
Anaia who held me when the first startled tears leaked from my teeth and I began to cry in shock.
A little later, Ekkuli joined us.
"Is it... is it... "
"He remembers nothing," Ekkuli said. "Not even his name."
Anaia let out a little sigh.
"How could this have happened?" I asked. "How... is it permanent?"
Ekkuli's tail flicked in a tired shrug. "Perhaps," it said. "The mind-death has fierce claws. You know that as well as I do."
"But Nashada... he was young. Strong. Male!"
"And surely you know, as well as I do, that the mind-death is not the province of anadi alone," Ekkuli said sharply. "We all have our time, Tañel, but that's the only certain thing."
"He wasn't supposed to go!" I said.
"We all go," Ekkuli said with a touch of fang, then covered its face. Its shoulders rose and fell in a long, shivery sigh. Then it said, "I'm sorry."
I drew it into my arms, and silent Anaia too.
"I feel guilty," she said in a little voice.
"Don't," I said, and tucked my head against theirs.

***

Not long after we retrieved Nashada, he grew feverish, beyond the aid of any of the medicinals the herbalist gave us after examining him. I abandoned my work and Ekkuli its clays. With Anaia's intermittent help the two of us kept vigil at his side as he raved and slept.
During one of those long vigils, as I leaned against the wall and stared at his restless body, I wondered what I would do if he woke from this fever. Despite my attempts to forget, I intimately recalled the symptoms that had preceded my old lover's degradation. Nashada would wake. Perhaps he would have spells of memory, of awareness. They would fade, suddenly and without warning. He would forget himself, us, his work. He would wander aimlessly, and if left without chaperone lose himself in town. He would spend his days nervous and agitated, knowing that he'd lost something and not being sure what it was--wanting to occupy himself and unable to concentrate long enough to do anything. It would frustrate him. He would grow angry. The herbalist would return and suggest that we sedate him, and then he would spend the days sleeping, barely eating... dwindling despite our efforts to the bodily death his mind had left him to.
I would never hear him laugh again. Never have him tease me out of my moods. Never feel the nip of his teeth in love or challenge. His body would remain before me, an endless, empty reminder of what we'd had, but he would be gone. And I would have to maintain him, for anything else would be a cruelty to his animal flesh and a dishonor to what we had shared.
Part of me wished he would die instead.
I often wept at his bedside, swallowing my bitter tears. I would need the practice.

***

I was listlessly washing dishes when Ekkuli called, hoarse and shocked, "He's awake!"
My eyes closed. My head drooped. I forced myself to turn and walk into the room. Ekkuli was testing the heat of Nashada's wrist in its hand while he watched through eyes half-lidded with fatigue. He looked so very like the emodo I had fallen in love with. I cupped his cheek and fought my tears.
He made a sound. A tiny one. Almost--yes, a snort. "Not dead yet."
I stood very still. "Nashada?"
"Yes?" He wiggled his fingers in Ekkuli's. "Stop clutching... not going anywhere."
We both stared at him.
"Do you know where you are?" Ekkuli asked.
He snorted again. "Home. In bed. With two... long-faced nurses." He eyed us both. "Why so sad--Anaia!" He took a long breath. "She's not...!"
We both started laughing then, great gasping laughs.
"Not funny!" he exclaimed.
I would have scooped him into my arms right then and squeezed him until he squeaked, but his voice was drenched with exhaustion and he looked frail and underfed. My embrace could wait... not long, but it could wait. I contented myself by lapping his forehead in a sloppy kiss, my tongue still burnt with tears.

***

"Soon there will be another fair," Ekkuli said as it dressed itself for its late-night clays.
I stretched. Nashada was out drinking tea and gaming; Anaia was engrossed in my work-room, moving beads around on a board. It had become routine--was routine, again.
"You are waiting for me to say something," I said. "Like 'has it been that long?' Or maybe, 'the fair! I haven't thought about it at all!'"
It laughed, gay and wicked all at once. "Perhaps," the eperu said and folded its mantle over its scarlet mane. "Have you noticed the time?"
"No," I said honestly.
"So you haven't thought about the fair," it pressed.
"Not a bit," I said, amused, allowing it its fun.
"Will you go?" Ekkuli asked, eyes glimmering. "Will you buy another anadi?"
"I don't know," I said. Then smiled. "Maybe."
Ekkuli grinned. "You are not the Jokkad you were, Tañel."
"No," I agreed. "And you are going to be late."
I stood at the door and watched as its shape blended into the dark, into the enigma of the colors of night-blue skies. Leaning on the frame, I let out a long breath. So hard now, to watch all of them go. To trust them to come back. No doubt Ekkuli felt triumph over what it felt was my spirit's change; I let it assume it had won its victory. The truth was that I had not stopped fearing at all, only that the scope of my fears had expanded. Now, rather than fearing for one… I feared for them all. There was no certainty left, only the unknowable future.
Once I had acknowledged that, though, it had seemed senseless not to follow that road to its end and the sweeter things there. If I was to lose them all, then I would make use of the time I had.
Anaia joined me, arms sliding around my waist. She leaned her cheek on my chest and I looped an arm over her shoulders. When even wishful thoughts could not discern Ekkuli from the vespertine dark, I sighed and turned from the door, gathering Anaia fully into my arms.
"You understand," I said into her mane. After a pause, I felt her nod against my chin and throat.
She drew away from me and said, "Come see my latest dangle."
And I did.

***

About the author:

M.C.A. Hogarth has been many things--a web database architect, product manager, technical writer and massage therapist--but is currently a parent, artist, writer and anthropologist to aliens. You can find a reading list of stories about the Jokka (and other aliens) at her writing page, organized by chronology.

Discover other titles by M.C.A. Hogarth at Smashwords.com


Connect with Me Online:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/mcahogarth

Website: http:/www.stardancer.org

My blog: http://haikujaguar.livejournal.com
