Month: June 2017

beruthielthequeen:

misbehavingmaiar:

He let her pray uninterrupted, though he could provide no solace for her longing, and no answer to her devotion. To refuse her reverence would have been an act of incredible disrespect; the orisons were older than his inheritance of them, and the language a comfort to one far from home. 

When she’d finished, he lowered his hand and traced an eye on her forehead, acknowledging and consecrating what had been offered. “Fire carries thy words to the dark, and the dark keeps them,” he intoned, and turned his palm upward to help her rise.  

“You have a lovely voice, anâkali, and you speak a lovely tongue,” he said in the Umbarim vernacular. “I came here to enjoy the silence, but what you have given me is unexpected, and much sweeter; a reminder of times past. What may I call you? And what is your tribe?”

Her long, thin fingers rested briefly within the grasp of his larger, broader hand as he lifted her; she felt the strength of that hand, felt the power which thrummed beneath the flesh like the promise of a fire beneath banked ashes. He could have broken her, perhaps. He could have burned her. And yet his voice, when he spoke now to her in a dialect so blessedly familiar she felt something catch beneath her breastbone and then give way all at once in a sweet rush of heat, was kind.

The eye he had traced upon her skin seemed almost to burn there, graven in lines of fire on her skin. She felt the memory of his touch as a physical presence, and when she should have cowered from him – he was the Zigûr, he was so far above her in so many ways that she ought never dare to lift her eyes to his face! – the glare of that third eye upon her brow instead made her toss her head upon an arching neck like the proud Umbarim horses her husband stabled.

“My mother called me….” she began, but broke off. She had set aside that name, when she had come here. She had given up her right to it when she had come here, the right to bear the name her mother had named her. But what irony! She had given up that name, she who had, after all, been named Tamar… tamar, which is smith, which is another name for the god who stood up in flesh before her. It had not been a dangerous name, it was Adunâyê, it was a pretty word… but she had known, and her mother had known.

She shook her head. “I left that name in An-Karagmir, buried in the sands of the Dune Sea.” A space of silence opened as she looked at him, great and fiery and leonine and yet with something almost gentle in his eyes as he looked back at her. A kirinki sang, in that stillness; its piping song was so bright and high almost she could not hear it. “In this place, I took the name Berúthiel, my lord the Zigûr. My mother was of the Blue Wind tribe of the Free People.”

The shockingness of her direct address to him struck her then, and coupled to it was the realization that she had fallen to do him obeisance. Any might have seen! Would they have recognized what she did, the foreignness of her appeals to him? Would they have known it for the old, old ways of a conquered folk, preserved still in her? She knew not, and she feared to. In this place, her life was not her own to order. Her fate rested in the hands of a man who valued her as he valued his horses, his hunting dogs. Expensive, yes. Extravagant, perhaps. But ultimately, of little individual meaning.

Her gaze dropped. “Forgive the presumption of my speech, oh my lord.”

“I am sorry to hear it. But who here has not buried a name? Or many? It is the price of a long life.” 

He saw the darting fear in her eyes, the tension of her jaw, as if she were a thief with her hands in a fig stall, and leaned close to her ear with a low voice, “you needn’t worry. No one passes this way that might see you, and if there were, they would see only a devotee of the Temple addressing her priest. Your past is safe. And your words are hardly presumptuous! It was I who asked,” he smiled warmly. 

His thumb ran over the top of her hand absently in the quiet lull of their conversation, and as they did, he realized she wore the signs of a married woman, and he withdrew his touch with a polite apology in her mother-tongue. 

“You were inhabiting that osprey when I came in,” he digressed, squinting through the sun-drenched lattice above the garden, its dappled cover of bougainvillea revealing glimpses of a bleached sky dotted with seabirds. “That is a rare talent amongst Men… but not unheard of in the women of the Free People. Was this also a gift from your mother? A great blessing, if so; one that ought to make you a wisewoman, a matriarch. It is a pity they do not have such customs in the West.”  

Tilting his heavy gold-crowned head in appraisal of the solemn Umbarim woman, so far from her home and so purposefully drab in all the colorful splendor of Armenelos, he shuttered his eyes in a slow, feline blink. “There are many ways the West does not suit you, Lady Beruthiel. The name you’ve chosen is not an auspicious one… you are not happy here.” There was no question in his statement. He knew. 

“I would make no demands of you– but if you care to indulge a fellow…. let us say, unwilling émigré, it would be my pleasure to hear your tale.”