Be What You Are #4
The downstairs of the building was all one big room, earthen-floored and barn-like, with some tools and half-finished projects suggesting it was being used as a workshop.
“Yet another example of why it’s better up here in the mountains, hey?” Khatu leaned back against a workbench and grinned at Lill and Mikhi. In answer to their blank looks, he elaborated: “We let people become men, but in the lowlands they only let them become women. Obviously not as good!”
“Go fuck your stupid head!” Mikhi burst out with surprising vehemence. “Obviously why?”
“I mean … ” Khatu looked comically cowed. “Men have more power than women? So … better in that way.”
She huffed. “It’s better to be what you are.” She appealed to Lill. “Isn’t it?”
He felt as if he’d been called on in a class when he didn’t know the answer, didn’t even know what subject they were studying—something that had only ever happened to him in bad dreams.
“Probably,” he ventured. Certainly Khatu’s claim that it was better in all circumstances to be a man rang false, though at one time Lill would have accepted it as obvious. “What about you?”
“What about me what?” said Mikhi. “I’m a woman.”
“You do wear trousers a lot,” Khatu pointed out.
“You think that means I’m a warrior soul?” She scoffed. “It doesn’t. I’m a woman who likes to wear trousers.”
She said it like it was an easy thing, like it wasn’t a question that had hung over her life. It probably wasn’t. She’d been adopted by Vanu when she was still a little girl and grown up with that accepting love that …
Where had that thought come from? What did Lill know about Vanu’s love?
“All right, you want to learn to make arrows too, Lill?” said Khatu. “You’ve come to the right teacher!”
They sat on the stumps that served as stools at the workbench, and Khatu took obvious pleasure in showing them how to trim their feathers and affix the bronze arrowheads. It wasn’t that different from the technique Lill knew, but he listened patiently to Khatu’s instructions.
They chatted about different styles of bows and the merits of the long arrows of Akramarra versus the short arrows of the Steppes.
The arrows they were making were somewhere between the two extremes, a length that struck Lill as a comfortable compromise.
Khatu and Mikhi retold a ludicrous story about the time Khatu had taken one of Tirtu’s pigs out looking for truffles in the forest. Not only had they failed to find truffles, but Khatu had lost the pig altogether, and his father’s wrath when they returned without it had been terrible—yet also somehow, in Khatu and Mikhi’s telling, highly amusing.
Lill realized that they were taking it for granted that he knew they left the stronghold sometimes.
He kept hoping that some part of the pig story would touch casually on the location of the secret exit, but it never did, and the point at which he might have said, “By the way, how do you go out onto the mountain?” seemed to have passed.
They probably thought that Vanu had already told him.
Khatu didn’t seem at all bothered by Lill’s presence; on the contrary, he seemed genuinely to consider it a bonus, giving him a new audience for his hilarious truffle-hunting story.
Lill had to conclude that Mikhi was right when she’d said Khatu wasn’t interested in winning her hand, or however they would have described it up here.
Whether Vanu was right to want them to have a chaperone—well, that was a different question.
Khatu was a foolish and impulsive young man, and Mikhi was a young woman, quite pretty, coming of age under very sheltered circumstances.
On the whole, Lill thought Vanu was wise not to want them to be alone together.
He found himself thinking again of Susami.
She couldn’t even come out to make arrows and idle conversation with Khatu.
She couldn’t play hide and seek with Lill—she would probably think it improper, and he wouldn’t risk it anyway.
But she must be lonely. He wished there was something he could do to help.
Vanu would surely like that, for him to think of something.
“Come in,” Arsha said, holding the door open.
He waved Lill casually through to the courtyard, as if he didn’t know that he was welcoming him into a world he had been barred from for six cold, hungry months. Lill thought that he probably did know.
“Is this where you live?” Lill asked, looking around him. He thought it would be a good idea to seem impressed, and that was easy. It was a grand and beautiful house.
“Yes. It’s my patron’s house. He’s away right now, but expected back in a couple of days. You can stay until he arrives. I’ll tell you about the job.”
The courtyard was green with hanging plants, a fountain trickling softly into a tiled basin in the middle of it.
Doorways opened off it, leading to shadowed inner rooms. The idea of staying here for days was bliss, as far as Lill was concerned.
But something about what Arsha had said made him curious.
“Is it you hiring me, or your patron?”
Arsha gave him a shrewd look. “Both. It’s both. We want the same thing.”