Plum Wine
By the time Lill had gotten rid of Halza, Mikhi had come in the house to ask about something, and Vanu emerged from the bedroom with his shirt back on. Lill felt a swoop of disappointment in his belly when he saw it.
“What did Halza want?” Vanu asked.
Vanu shook his head. “No, I’m not. It’s all right. I can’t drink that stuff of Tirtu’s, and he knows it.”
“Oh. Should I not go? I don’t need to go.”
“Of course you should go. You’ll enjoy yourself.”
“Da will be fine at home with us,” said Mikhi.
“He’s not worried about me,” Vanu scoffed, and tousled Mikhi’s hair.
So Lill went to Halza’s tumbledown house that evening. He brought a bundle of cheese biscuits, still warm from the fire, tied up in a napkin.
“Susami made them,” he explained as he unwrapped the bundle on Halza’s table. “They’re very good.”
“Oh, I love these things,” said Padunu, falling upon them.
“Pad!” Halza wailed, lunging across the table to stop him. “Have some decency! At least let me be the first to taste them.”
“Ugh, you have some decency. I was doing the most taxing divination for Lord Faru all afternoon, and his swinish sons left me mere scraps for my dinner. I’m famished.”
Tirtu moved over to make room for Lill on the mismatched cushions of the seating platform. The first bottle of plum wine had already been broached. Tirtu and Padunu had cups made of ram’s horns that held a large volume of wine and couldn’t be set down until you had emptied them.
“I’m not much of a drinker,” said Lill, hoping another ram’s horn wasn’t about to be produced for him. He was a bit worried about this wine that Vanu hadn’t been willing to drink.
“We didn’t think you were,” said Halza, getting down a quite ordinary wooden cup with a flat bottom from a shelf, “but you’ll like this stuff of Tirtu’s. I’ve never tasted anything like it.” He snatched the napkin of biscuits away from Padunu, who was trying to sneak two at once.
Tirtu filled the ordinary cup, and Lill summoned his resolve and sipped it. To his surprise, the wine was delicious, sweet and floral but also deep and herby.
“Mmm! It tastes like the woods in spring,” he remarked appreciatively.
“How poetic,” said Padunu. “It does indeed.”
“It’s stronger than you think, though,” said Tirtu, knocking back the remaining contents of his ram’s horn.
Of course. Vanu hadn’t said that he disliked Tirtu’s wine but that he couldn’t drink it.
In fact, he’d said back on the day after the wedding that he didn’t drink wine at all because he used to drink too much.
Lill hadn’t really understood that at the time, but it was a weakness—a pretty significant one—that the Lion of the Summer Pass had just handed over, when he absolutely needn’t have.
He could have kept that a secret indefinitely, if he was careful.
Lill swallowed another mouthful of the sweet herbal wine. Why did he find Vanu still so hard to understand, after two weeks almost constantly in his company?
“A bit like you, eh?” said Halza, nudging Lill in the ribs with his elbow.
It took Lill a moment to pick back up the thread of the conversation. The wine, Halza was talking about the wine.
“No one is fooled by his comely exterior anymore,” said Padunu. “Stop that, Halza, I’m hungry—just because you’re in love with her doesn’t mean you should get to eat all her biscuits!”
“I should have told you Vanu made them,” said Lill, snaking a hand across the table to snatch a biscuit for himself.
“I wish you had,” said Padunu sulkily.
The sky was growing very dark outside, and Halza lit another lamp.
He had a cup the same size as Lill’s, but he had refilled it already more than once.
Padunu and Tirtu nursed their ram’s horns, draining and refilling them and getting drunker and drunker.
They opened a second bottle of wine. Lill sipped his cup slowly, but by and by it was empty, and he did not protest when Halza offered to refill it for him.
They were grilling Halza about his lack of progress in learning hand language.
So far he had only mastered counting to ten, the sign for “marry,” which was also the sign for “person you’re married to,” and Susami’s name-sign, which he had been eager to learn even though Lill had pointed out that it wouldn’t help him talk to her, because you didn’t sign people’s own names at them.
“You’re lucky Lill is so honest,” Tirtu mused. “He could be teaching you to say ‘Which way to the privy, it’s urgent’ and tell you it means ‘I love you.’ But he would never.”
Lill looked at Tirtu and thought that was a remarkable statement. If it suited his ends, he certainly would do something like that. But he couldn’t see how it would, so in fact everything he had been teaching Halza had been strictly accurate.
“I’ve never understood why you don’t know more hand language, Tirtu,” said Padunu. “Being Vanu’s tiktik as you are.”
“His what? Me? No, no, I’m just the pig man, Shaman. I just happened to be the one by Lord Vanu’s side when we—” Abruptly Tirtu was wiping away a tear. “D’you think he’d call me that, really? His tiktik?”
“What’s that mean?” Halza appealed to Lill.
“His right-hand man. And you are for sure, Tirtu. No doubt.”
Tirtu sniffed emotionally. “I don’t know.
He deserves better. But about the hand language—I’ve picked up some of the signs, just from watching, you know.
But I never really tried them out. I’m all thumbs, probably couldn’t make them properly.
Besides, I don’t need to—he’s got Mikhi to interpret for him, and he hears just fine.
And he can talk—I understand him perfectly well when he does. ”
“He talks better than he thinks he does,” said Lill, leaning back against the cushions behind him, trying to prevent himself picking up his wine cup again. The colours of the room glowed bright and a little shiny in the lamplight. “He’s shy about it.”
“Nonsense!” Tirtu protested loyally. “Lord Vanu? Never.”
Lill laughed. “He is, though.”
“I don’t know if I’ve heard him speak,” said Halza.
“Oh, you must have,” said Padunu.
“I don’t think I know what his voice sounds like, though.”
“Just sort of … ” Tirtu’s powers of description failed him at the first hurdle.
“Broken,” Lill supplied. “Kind of like this.”
“Earth’s tits! That’s it exactly.”
“Doesn’t use pronouns. Saves breath.”
Tirtu and Padunu whooped with laughter.
“Quite painful to talk like that,” said Lill in his ordinary voice, rubbing his throat. “Not doing it anymore.”
“Have a drink,” Halza suggested, offering his cup.
“Uh. Sure.” He would have the tiniest sip. Or, well, a relatively small sip. He put the cup firmly back on the table after the second swig.
“Is it easier in the lowlands for a woman to leave her husband?” Tirtu asked suddenly, reaching for the open wine bottle.
Padunu smacked the table with his palm. “What are you talking about?”
“Divorce. Is it easier in the lowlands?”
“It’s impossible in the lowlands! They don’t allow it!”
“Pad,” Halza intervened soothingly, “why are you shouting at him?”
“Because—because—why didn’t he know that?”
“I just didn’t! I thought—I don’t know. How can they not have divorce? What if a husband doesn’t want his wife anymore?”
“He gets a new one! And another, and another! He can have as many as he wants!”
“He can also divorce a wife he doesn’t want, Pad. That is allowed. It’s just that the wife can’t ask for a divorce herself.”
“Here in the mountains”—Padunu was jabbing his finger at the table for some reason, and growing red in the face—“you may have one husband or one wife or one … ” He waved a hand at Lill.
“ … whatever you are—and no more! But, if both parties wish to dissolve the marriage, they can. They do it the same way as getting married in the first place. There’s a ritual, and they go their separate ways.
” He sat back as though he had proved some sort of point.
“That’s very interesting, Pad,” said Halza placatingly. “Have you ever been married?”
“I? Married? I’m a shaman!”
“Ah,” said Lill, pleased to find he had something to contribute to the conversation, “so your Order is celibate.”
“No, no, no. Shamans don’t have orders, we’re not like Zashian priests. But yes, we are supposed to remain celibate.”
“Supposed to,” said Tirtu, looking up from his ram’s horn with a sudden leer.
“Shut up!” Padunu barked.
“He didn’t say anything,” Halza protested.
“He said ‘supposed to.’” Lill felt it was important to clarify this.
“Don’t you want to know why I said that?” Tirtu asked, his expression looking more and more like a demon in a wall-painting.
“I’m sure he doesn’t. I’m sure neither of them does.”
“Don’t you want to know why he’s holed up in Umtúshta with the rest of us, when he wasn’t in Lord Vanu’s service or Lord Faru’s when we were walled in?”
“This is my home.” Padunu was jabbing the table again. “I have every right to be here.”
“But why do you want to be here?” Tirtu turned back to Lill and Halza. “Don’t you want to know?”
“I do,” said Lill. “I really do.” He really did.
Padunu threw out his arms and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Fine. Fine. Yes. I did, I broke my oath, I besmirched myself—and it wasn’t. Even. Nice. I didn’t like her. I did it to save my life.”
Lill took another swig of his wine. “It doesn’t usually do that. Does it?”
Tirtu shouted with laughter. “We’re doing it wrong, Na Riru, we’re doing it wrong!”