Chapter Five #3
jaw together,” Zaria continued. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, well, I. . .
.”
He paused. A hiss of
falling sand spread around them.
“Aye?” Zaria asked,
curious.
“Nothing. Never
mind.”
He had almost told
her that he’d never spoken at such a length before. His hired instructors would
only stay for morning lessons, the servants of his tower were instructed not to
look him in the eye, and his uncle was often away for days at a time, lecturing
at colleges or petitioning for membership to various councils. Even when he was
around others, Isaac was always expected to listen more than he was expected to
talk. It was no exaggeration to say that his time with Zaria might genuinely be
the longest singular time he had ever spoken with anyone.
But, of course, he
didn’t say that. He was growing wise to the fact that she would use such an admission against him. The teasing would never stop.
And she was still
his enemy.
He couldn’t forget
that.
He tugged on his
restraints again, trying to harden himself.
“Oh, come on,” Zaria
said. “Say it.”
“No.”
“I wanna hear it,
squire.”
“I’m not your
squire.”
There was another
silence. The sound of their shuffling footsteps filled the valley of dunes.
Just when Isaac was about to concentrate on the horizon again, he heard a
change in Zaria’s step. Before he could react, she clapped him on the back with
a furry hand, squeezing deep into his shoulder. He nearly lost his balance.
“Alright,” Zaria
said. “I understand the problem.”
Isaac attempted to
wriggle from her grasp, filled with annoyance and some other very
unidentifiable feeling. Her grip was strong. She was tall enough that he could
stand completely in her shadow.
“You know,” she
continued, “I was thinkin’ we’d be all the better for airing our tensions, as
it were. Squabbling’s a good way to know where things stand, even if one of us
pulls a knife.”
“One of us?” Isaac
asked.
“It don’t matter
who.”
“Oh, it very much
matters who that was.”
“Look,” she said,
shaking him by the shoulder. He teetered and wobbled through his step. “I’m
wise to your perspective. There is a great—how’d you say—imbalance to our
grievances, against one another. I aim to rectify it.”
He looked up,
meeting her eye over the length of her snout. “Does that mean you’ll untie me?”
“Don’t be daft.”
He looked away,
grimacing. He tried to walk ahead of her, making for a small mountain of dunes.
Her hand pulled him back.
“However,” Zaria
said, “I realize that you require catharsis. You’re coiled like a duck’s cock.
You need to let it out. All of it. Your thoughts, your woes. Release the
frustration.”
Isaac was not sure
where this was going. “Let what out?”
“Everything.”
“What do you mean,
everything?”
“Squire,” she said,
very seriously. “I want you to insult me.”
He was flummoxed.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
He looked up at her,
confused.
“Go on, then,” she
said, shrugging off the hood of her shawl. Her ears perked up into the morning
air, and the dark line of her snout curled with a smile. “Do your worst.”
He kept walking
through the sand, twisting to the side, stumbling, blinking, his hair falling
loose to his face, feeling dwarfed in her shadow. It was the same feeling of
being barked a question and not knowing the answer.
“Come on,” Zaria
said, grinning. “I’m an easy target.”
He blinked again. He
saw the scar on her nose. He saw the poleaxe rising behind her back, held
diagonal in its sheath. He noted the injuries still weeping beneath her vest,
the pieces of scavenged leather, the belts crossing her figure. He saw her
breasts bouncing beneath a thin strip of cloth.
“Lookin’ at
something?”
He turned away,
sharply. “No. I refuse.”
“What’d you mean,
refuse?”
“I mean,” Isaac
said, shrugging away her hand and stepping to the side, “that I won’t play your
game. I won’t insult you. Clearly, you’re trying to bait me again.”
“Squire, I assure
you—”
“I’m not your
squire!”
Zaria looked down at
him, her smile creeping wider.
“Don’t laugh at me,”
he said.
She broke into a snicker.
“Your games are
childish,” Isaac said. “Completely undignified. I’d expect more graceful
conversation from the mouth of a privy.”
“Was that an
insult?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“You compared me to
a toilet.”
“Yes, but—”
She mimed the sound
of a fart.
“Shut up!”
The hyena reared her
head back, cracking up into open laughter. The dunes echoed with her voice. It
was deep and rough and lilting.
“Zaria,” Isaac said.
She continued to
laugh.
“Zaria!”
She shook her head,
trying to clamp it down. “Yes, squire?”
“Fine!” Isaac
shouted, much louder than he expected. “Fine! You know what? I will
insult you! I do have grievances to air! Gods, do I ever!”
She tried to fight
her grin.
“First of all, and
this is no small matter, but you have an utterly boorish snore! It
sounds like a sawmill! It’s worse than my uncle, and I used to hear him from
the top of the tower! Gods above, I thought the wyrms would find it a mating
call!”
Zaria scratched the
ridge of her snout. “Sorry, love. Broke my nose a year back. Never healed
proper.”
“And by the grace of
Ivtarr,” Isaac continued, “you smell! You have an utterly egregious
odor! It’s on every breeze I feel, every breath I take! I would rather bathe in
sewage and entrails than rub against you again!”
Her tail began to
wag.
“And do you know
what I honestly despise the most? What I can’t find it in me to forgive, above
all else?”
“Oh, I’m all ears.”
“Grammar!” he
yelled. “Your grasp of sentence structure is atrocious! You slaughter
intransitive verbs like a scythe through a field! Every word you speak is an
affront to language itself! If my hands were not tied, I would beat you
over the head with grammar books until a proper dialect was caved
into your fucking skull!”
Zaria reared her
head to the sky, breaking into open, cackling laughter. There were whoops and
chitters and loud animal snorts. The dunes seemed to shimmer with the noise.
Isaac walked beside her, growling, his fists clenched beneath the rope, wanting
to feel like something more than a barking dog on a leash.
By now, they were
marching up a gentle slope of sand, nestled in the wide valley between two
enormous dunes. There was no cover for hundreds of feet in any direction. Zaria
didn’t seem to notice the exposure, laughing as she was.
“On my word, Isaac,”
she said, clapping him on the back again, “I’ll make a proper man of you yet.”
“I am quite fine how
I am.”
The morning sun
began to catch her face as they ascended the slope. “You know, might be, when
our adventure is over, I’ll show you some fine taverns near the shrubland.”
“Thank you,” Isaac
said, “but no.”
“Oh, it’d be my
pleasure to ply you with drink.”
“I’m quite sure it
would, you mangy beast.” He frowned. “You common brute.”
She slapped a hand
to her chest, as if his words had pierced her heart.
“That’s not funny!”
he yelled, getting mad again. “You are not funny! None of this, in any way, is
supposed to be—”
They both stopped.
In the distance, a
colossal skull rose from the sand. It was so spectacularly massive, so
gargantuan in comparison to the empty land around it, that the dunes seemed to
become the size of wrinkled skin. The fleshless skull tilted up towards the sky
like a man drowning in water, its animal maw half-submerged in the sand. Isaac
could only imagine how far the rest of the skeleton had sunk below the earth.
Various holes and gaps ran along its snout and cranial plate, and he wasn’t
sure which of the openings were eyes, nasal cavities, or simply damage brought
by centuries of time. Whatever they were, the gaps in the skull were all
cavernous in size, and the bone itself had been bleached a chalky white by the
desert sun.
“Well,” Zaria said.
“Fuck me, that’s ominous.”
Isaac didn’t move.
He almost couldn’t breathe.
This was it. The
tomb.
He was really here.
Somewhere, deep in
the earth, perhaps right where he was standing, his father lay trapped,
clutched in the grasp of an ancient necromancer. He wanted to believe he could
feel the man’s presence, as if he could sense the last
of his family through the stone and sand, the last bits of distance that
remained between them. It wouldn’t be true. All he could feel was the wind and
the sun and a sense of awe.
Zaria snorted. “Now
I understand why my fellows always stood clear of this place. It spooks the
fur, I’ll admit.” She glanced at him. “You ready?”
He nodded, silent.
For a moment, she
seemed ready to continue their jest, to keep up the game between them, but he turned
his head to look at her, and the expression on his face stopped her cold. She
grew sober in an instant. The hyena blinked, closed her mouth, and straightened
her back, her poleaxe glinting in the sun.
Isaac took a deep
breath, making his way down the dune.
In the distance, the
skull of a colossus leered toward the sky, as if begging to scream.