Chapter 12 Nasrin #2
“The spinners require darkness,” Gahn Thaleo said after a moment. His hand was still on my arm. “We could not extend the lanterns down here.”
“If they like pitch blackness, maybe there isn’t much point in me going any further,” I said, shoving away an unexpected niggle of disappointment. “I won’t be able to see them.”
“You will,” he disagreed.
“How?”
“You’ll see.”
I pressed my lips together, my teeth biting at them from the inside.
Gahn Thaleo was nothing but the velvet whisper of a silhouette before me.
I couldn’t even tell where the walls were down here.
We could be in a claustrophobic bit of tunnel or a wide-open cave for all I knew. And all he’d said was, “You’ll see.”
He was asking me to trust him.
Rebellion seemed the only reasonable response to his request. How could I possibly trust him, after everything he’d done?
I almost said as much. But the words caught in my throat as his hand began a delectably slow slide down my arm, the calloused pads of his fingers tracing the veins of my wrist. When he reached my hand, he closed his fingers around it.
“I can show you,” he said. A new, husky quality had entered his voice. My breath quickened. I didn’t feel cold anymore.
“OK.”
The reply was out of my mouth before I could call it back. I was really about to let this man lead me alone into absolute darkness. He moved, and so did I.
Just like that evening by the mountain pool, he held my hand so delicately.
But this time, my hand wasn’t clenched in a fist inside his.
He held my hand somewhat flat and aloft, at the height of my own ribcage, like a male ballet dancer would hold a ballerina’s on stage.
I only realized he was holding my left hand with his own left hand when his free right hand settled on my shoulder.
“Careful,” he said again, steering me gently around something unseen.
“Is that what you are?” My voice was a hushed squeak. “Careful?” If I didn’t distract myself with some kind of conversation, I knew I was in danger of combusting under the terribly powerful feeling of Gahn Thaleo holding me in the dark. His hand swallowed my entire shoulder.
“I believe so,” he said. “Would you not describe me thus?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied honestly. “It’s part of the reason I’m here with you now. To learn more about you, I guess.”
It was a risk, telling him that. There was the chance he’d clam up, clamp down, and push me away. But his hands remained warm and so steady on me.
“I want to learn more about you, too.”
That drew me up short. “But…What happened to, ‘I don’t want anything at all?’”
“I said I try not to want anything,” he reminded me. Then, a grating note of irritation. “Apparently, I am not nearly as successful as I should like.”
He was bothered by his own curiosity about me. He looked at the desire as something to be conquered, and he was failing. He didn’t want to want to be down here in the dark with me right now. But he was here anyway, because for some reason, he couldn’t seem to help himself.
I found that utterly fascinating. And a little depressing, if I were honest.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s the point of not wanting things?”
He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn’t answer. But then, just when we’d been down here so long that my poor eyes started hallucinating the soft glow of light up ahead, he spoke.
“When I was a cub, after the deaths of my parents, my uncle, the great Gahn Seerak, took a blade from his back and drew the sharp edge of it down the length of my face.”
Shocked, I stumbled, and would have stopped walking entirely if it weren’t for Gahn Thaleo’s ceaseless support. His hands never left me, warm and heavy, guiding me through the darkness. Like he was guiding me into his own past.
“That’s horrible,” I choked out, once I’d regained my footing and the power of my own voice.
“It was a valuable lesson,” he said without emotion. “I am immensely grateful to him for it.”
“You’re grateful that your uncle sliced open your face as a child?” I questioned. “You’re grateful he gave you that scar? My God, Thaleo! Why didn’t one of the healers see to you?!”
Emotion, along with my madly beating heart, clawed its way up my throat. Anger. Loads of it. Pulsing like poison in me, for the bleeding child he’d once been.
All at once, and for the very first time, I could see him that way. As a child. Something I’d never been able to picture before. A small, uncertain-but-stoic little boy, with black blood coursing down his face, one brilliant eye closed against the onslaught.
“I am,” he said evenly.
“And what sort of lesson was he trying to teach you?” I practically spat.
My limbs felt hot with the need to do something.
Rage looking for an outlet. I could be quite protective of my friends – I often felt that way about Fiona, or about Zaria and the children Wanda and Vanda.
Now, I felt that way about Gahn Thaleo. The man who very staunchly insisted he was not my friend.
I wanted to reach into the past. And punch his uncle in the face.
“A necessary one,” Gahn Thaleo insisted.
“A lesson on endurance. A lesson on the selfish nature of pain; the pointlessness of acknowledging it and of trying to end it. There is no pain but the pain of your people.” He said that last bit like it was a vow, or a mantra, something he’d repeated to himself often over the years.
I had no doubt it was a quote from Gahn Seerak.
“He knew I would be Gahn one day. He wanted me strong.”
“Strong, or scarred?” I bit out. My eyes burned. Tears. I blinked furiously. This drew attention to the contrast of the darkness of my closed eyes and the air ahead. There was definitely dim, bluish light filtering in from somewhere now. I wasn’t imagining it.
“I do not believe those are mutually exclusive things,” he said.
And he sounded so fucking blasé about it all.
Like he was telling me that his uncle had once taken him fishing and told him about the meaning of life.
Instead of enacting what I saw as a horrifying act of abuse against him. Just a child!
“This scar is a reminder,” he went on. “A reminder of what it means to be a true Gahn to my people. I will want nothing for myself. I will act only as a conduit for the survival of my tribe. The day I was victor of the baklok was the day I disappeared.”
“But you didn’t disappear,” I objected. I squeezed his hand, and felt a resulting tremor of surprise go through his fingers. “You’re right here. Right here with me.”
A trembling quietness. Then, a low, nearly wondering reply of, “So I am.”
This is why he is the way he is, I thought, grim realization dawning. This is why he lied and lured Gahn Errok into the taklok. This is why he doesn’t show a lick of emotion.
Those emotions were still there inside him.
I was more and more certain of it with every interaction we had, every word we shared.
But he’d learned to bury his feelings so deep it felt foreign, even for him, to examine or experience them.
His uncle may have physically only cut his face, but he really cut him into two people that day.
The feeling, hurting Thaleo. And the coldly efficient Gahn he now presented to the world.
Which one did he think was real?
When you wear a mask that long…
Does it become who you are?
I didn’t think I was ready to ask. Gahn Thaleo led me around a sharp corner, and the dim blue light suddenly brightened.
I gasped as we entered a glittering cavern, thousands of points of illumination multiplying on the glittering angles of the gem-like walls.
There was water here, crystal-clear and appearing nearly fluorescent as it took on the strange blue light, as well as glittering amethyst- and sapphire-like stalagmites and stalactites.
“What is that?” I asked, tilting my head back to try to understand what was making all this light. Some kind of bioluminescent algae? But no, the points of light were moving.
“The spinners,” Gahn Thaleo replied. And when one of those lights flew right by my face, jolting me with delight, I realized what I was looking at.
The spinners were basically bugs. Something akin to a firefly, perhaps, but instead of only the back end being lit-up, their butterfly-like wings also glowed, alight with extraordinarily detailed patterns.
“Their wings!” I said, in awe of the intricacies of the glowing patterns now that I’d noticed them.
“Each one is entirely different,” he said.
“Like snowflakes!” I said, laughing as another flew right by my face.
“No,” he said, and I could practically feel the confused frown in his voice. “Snowflakes do not differ from each other that much. I have experienced snow in the heights of the mountains. Some may be a little larger or wetter than others, but ultimately, all snowflakes are the same.”
“No, they aren’t,” I said. “When you use magnifying tools to analyze them, you can see their crystalline structures. They are all unique.”
He seemed to consider this for a time. As he did so, I watched the spinners. Some of them were fluttering around the cave. Others appeared to be hard at work spinning spidery webs.
“Do they catch prey in those webs?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “They subsist off the minerals in the water and on the walls of the cave. Their larvae eat the thread until they can fly and feed themselves from the walls or the pools. The patterns of the web always corresponds to the patterns on the wings of the spinner that made it.”
“Really?” I swung my head to look at him, only then noticing he was still holding onto me and was standing very close. He had bent down a little, ostensibly to avoid cracking his skull on a precariously close stalactite, and his face was barely a breath from my own.
“That’s, um, amazing,” I whispered.
“As is what you’ve told me about the snowflakes. I wonder if they are the same here as they are on your world.”
“The same, as in, entirely different?”
“Precisely.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
He studied me. “You know much about it.”
This drew a laugh from me. “Not really. It’s something we’re all told as children.”
That killed my laughter. Because I’d spent my childhood being told about how special snowflakes were. Meanwhile, Gahn Thaleo had been told not to feel anything while he bled.
He’d been told to disappear.
“But I know you are some sort of scholar,” he pressed, as if I’d done myself some disservice by brushing off my knowledge of snowflakes.
“That’s true,” I admitted. “We all are. We all studied different things.”
“What did you make a study of?”
“Poetry,” I said. “I was writing my PhD dissertation on the poetry of diaspora populations in Australia, with a focus on how the shift in climate or natural geography during immigration comes through in literature.”
“Po-et-ry.” He said it in English, just as I had. If there was a Sea Sand or Deep Sky equivalent for the word, I didn’t know it. And I supposed he didn’t, either, because the next moment he asked, “What is it?”
“It’s a type of literature. It’s…It’s a way of using words in an artistic fashion, often adhering to specific forms or poetic principles, in order to express an image or a feeling or an experience.
Some poems tell epic stories about heroes.
There are oral traditions of poetry as well.
Laments, and poems of grief. Or love poems.”
“Love poems,” he repeated, sounding entirely mystified.
“Yeah. Those were Baba’s – my father’s – favourites. He used to write them for my mother.”
“Give me an example.”
I remembered many of Baba’s poems, the lines milling about in my head like unmoored ghosts.
The sun doesn’t rise until you awaken, love,
I see your face, and the light comes in.
But trying to speak any of the words aloud felt like trying to swallow a stone. I shook my head and cleared my throat. “Just, like, things he felt about her. How beautiful she was. How much he loved her. That sort of thing. He’d put his feelings into beautiful words.”
Gahn Thaleo gazed away from me, into the depths of the spinner-lit cave. I didn’t think he had an answer to an idea as foreign as the one I’d just described – using words, and poignant ones at that, to express your feelings.
I wanted to bring his eyes back to me.
“What were your parents like?”
“I remember little of them,” he replied. “My father was Gahn Seerak’s brother. He and my mother both perished in a landslide when I was very young. My uncle assumed guardianship over me after that.”
“And what…” I paused, then steeled myself, knowing that if I didn’t ask now, I might never get another chance. “What made him give you that scar?”
His sight stars did come back to me then. As brilliant as the glow of the spinners lighting up the cave.
“I told you,” he said. “It was a lesson that-”
“No, I understand that,” I cut in. “I mean, what made him do it in the first place? Why did he think you needed to learn that lesson at all?”
I didn’t want to ask something like, “What did you do to make him react that way?” because that would be abhorrent victim blaming. But I remembered something that Linnet had said. That Gahn Thaleo hadn’t smiled since he got that scar.
Which meant he had smiled, once. Maybe all the time.
Gahn Thaleo released his hold on me. In an affectless voice, he said, “It was the day after we’d burned my parents upon their funeral pyre. I asked him to hold me in his arms. The way a parent might.”
Stunned to the point of nausea, I almost wished I hadn’t asked.
A grieving child, bereft of his parents, had asked for affection. Had wanted love. And had received the cut of a blade instead.
“Thaleo,” I whispered, my voice thick with gathering tears.
He hasn’t been touched since then.
He hadn’t been touched in fucking decades.
“A foolish request,” he added softly, as if his childhood need for a hug after the deaths of his parents required some kind of justification or deflection. Like I would judge him for it.
And I had judged him, hadn’t I? This entire fucking time, riding the high horse of my human morals, I’d judged him. He had lied and done wrong, certainly. But I’d never understood why until now.
I wished I could say my hands moved of their own accord, but they didn’t.
I was entirely in control as I raised them, trembling, to his waist. The muscles of his abdomen lurched, cording beneath my touch, as did his back as I slid my hands behind.
He was so big I couldn’t even get my arms fully around him, but I did my best. Then, I pressed my cheek – damp – against his skin.
My ear was flat against his chest. I listened intently to his heartbeat, learning the heavy, alien rhythm of it.
He might not have known what poetry was. But this was close enough.