The Signal #2
Khatu was leaning heavily on a stick and dragging one foot.
Lill looked uninjured but dead tired. He smiled when he saw Vanu, and it took Vanu’s breath away how beautiful he looked, trudging through the patchy light of the forest, relieved and happy to be back.
Vanu covered the distance between them in a couple of strides, batting aside greenery, and gathered Lill up.
Lill tightened his arms around Vanu’s neck and let himself be lifted off his feet.
“You should help Khatu, not me,” he muttered as he rested his forehead on Vanu’s shoulder.
“Can do both.” Vanu scooped Lill up and offered his free shoulder to Khatu.
“Lord Vanu, I’m in your debt,” said Khatu fervently, clutching Vanu’s arm. “Lill told me you led everyone down here to rescue me—and Otoni and Da. I never expected such a thing. I’m your man forever, my lord—I was already, but … Your boy bride’s a bee-fucker, did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
Lill was nearly asleep on Vanu’s shoulder by the time they covered the short distance to the mouth of the cave.
“Didn’t kill the dog,” he murmured as Khatu was embracing his mother and the dog was dancing excitedly between them.
Why you’d kill a dog, especially a well-bred hunter like that, Vanu couldn’t imagine. But Lill said it as if he hoped Vanu would be pleased, so Vanu kissed the top of his head and hugged him closer.
Lill didn’t remember much of the return journey to Umtúshta; Vanu carried him most of the way through the caves, and Lill—shamefully and incredibly—slept. He woke later in the day in his own bed, ravenously hungry, to find a bowl with bread and cheese waiting for him on the table next to the bed.
He sat up and stretched and shook out his hair.
The house was quiet as usual. He pulled the bowl into his lap and stuffed a corner of bread hungrily into his mouth.
He remembered Halza on that first day outside the fortress walls, frantically wondering how they survived in Umtúshta without provisions from outside.
He smiled at the thought. It seemed as though he’d never eaten so well as since he’d lived here.
The bowl in his lap was the wooden one that Vanu had carved for him.
Lill touched the letters on the interior.
You have a home with me forever. He could read the words now, having learned enough of Hawa writing.
He still found them frightening, the generosity of them, the impossibility of repaying anything like that.
Just not assassinating someone wasn’t enough to pay him back for offering a lifetime of safety. And Lill had only made the decision not to assassinate Vanu the other day. He felt a cold, shrinking horror when he thought of it.
The rest of the day, the atmosphere in Umtúshta was strange, but not in an unpleasant way.
Faru was still lying ill in the cave above Sakka, and Padunu and Otoni, who seemed to have the most medical knowledge of anyone in the village, agreed that he would need to stay there for at least a few days before they could think of bringing him back up through the tunnels.
There was regular traffic back and forth from Umtúshta to the mountainside.
Lill caught Vanu whistling the tune to Barda and Khatu’s rude mnemonic song as he came out of the round hut in the garden.
Padunu, Halza, and Tirtu were bustling around setting up a house for Otoni, while Mikhi and Atari showed Nomi around the village.
In the evening, Lill sat in the great house drinking beer with Khatu and Barda, who reclined by the fire with their injured legs propped up.
The friendly dog lay between them, with her head on her forepaws.
She had followed Lill around much of the afternoon, but seemed finally to have accepted that he wasn’t looking for a pet and attached herself to Barda and Khatu instead.
Lill felt bittersweet about it and couldn’t quite say why.
“Earth’s tits, brother, you should’ve seen it,” said Khatu for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. “The way little Lill here took down those bastards from Dukka—I’ve never seen anything like it!”
“You’ve seen much better,” Lill scoffed. “You’ve seen Vanu fight.”
“Eh, not much, and not for three years. Anyway, it’s different. No offence meant, but Lord Vanu looks like a fighter. You look more like a … ”
“Girl.” Lill sipped his beer. “You can say it.”
“Vision of hotness,” Barda supplied. “He can’t say it, not now that he’s going to be married.”
“You and Otoni?” Lill seized the change of subject gratefully.
“I haven’t asked her yet. But … yeah. If she wants to. I never faced up to it before—I never had to—but I’ve never not wanted to marry her.”
That was a bit incoherent, Lill thought, but then, as he was realizing, these things were. “What about your father?” he asked.
“We don’t know that Da’s going to live,” said Barda after a moment, with a bluntness that surprised Lill.
“Even if he does,” said Khatu. “Blue Heaven grant that he does—but it’s like Barda said. How did you put it, brother?”
“There’s more to our family’s honour than what Da wants.”
Khatu nodded. “And the way I see it, if Otoni has my kid, it’s part of the family too, and I’ve got to consider what’s best for it. What do you say?”
Lill looked up from his cup, surprised to be asked for an opinion. “I think … ” Nobody considered what was best for a child when family honour was at stake. Did they? Nobody in his own family had. “You’ll be a good father, Khatu.”
Barda laughed, and Khatu kicked him with his good leg. The dog lifted her head and barked reprovingly at them.
“Are you gonna name her, Lill?” Barda scratched the base of the dog’s fluffy ears.
“If you want. How about … Jin?” Lill suggested unimaginatively. “It means ‘friend’ in my native language.”
“It suits her,” said Khatu.
“Perfect,” said Barda. “Jin,” he cooed at the dog. “Friend Jin, you’re a good dog.”
“If you and Otoni marry,” said Lill, “will we get to do another bride hunt?”
“I guess we will.” Khatu looked a little daunted by the prospect.
“Another one without the bride’s actual family being involved,” said Barda.
“Padunu will have a conniption,” said Lill.
Barda laughed and raised his cup. “I’ll drink to that.”
Lill had been looking forward to bedtime all day. At intervals he felt himself strangely conscious of his own body under his clothing, and the sight of Vanu seemed to do new and disconcerting things to him.
And he was also dreading bedtime, dreading being alone with Vanu, because he didn’t know how to do any of this.
Now that he was no longer hiding from himself, now that he had destroyed his armour and cracked himself down the middle by realizing he was in love with Vanu—what was he supposed to do?
He’d been too exhausted that morning, after the long slog up the mountain with Khatu, to be bothered by this; it had been easy to nestle into Vanu’s arms like he belonged there.
Now that he’d slept and his mind was working again, he wasn’t sure that he could face Vanu without curling up into a ball the way he had done on the side of the trail above Dukka.
As it turned out, he came home from drinking with the Gukhártu brothers to find that Vanu was still out down the mountain.
He felt completely desolate and also weak with relief and angry with himself for the relief and disgusted with himself for the desolation, and he stood on the cupboards between Vanu’s stairs and his own for a quarter of an hour trying to decide which bed to lie down in.
Finally he went up his own stairs and changed into his nightshirt and went to bed in his own bed, more or less at random.
Vanu was back when Lill woke late the next morning. He was sitting out on the balcony, and he didn’t immediately notice when Lill opened the door from his room, so that Lill had a moment to stand there observing and unobserved.
It was strange, Lill thought, how Vanu’s resting face looked stern, because his smile was so much truer a reflection of the kind of man he was.
Just now, he looked more stern that usual—grave, almost sad.
He was sitting up straight, not leaning back against the cushions, and looking out over the yard with a fixity that suggested he wasn’t really seeing it.
Lill rattled the balcony door so as not to reveal that he’d been standing there silently.
Vanu looked up, and all the sternness melted from his face as he smiled.
He tossed something that he’d been holding—a writing tablet—down onto the table and got up and came to the doorway.
With Lill standing on the step, they were at eye level.
Vanu took Lill’s face between his hands and kissed him: slow, soft kisses as if Lill was something breakable and precious.
Lill clutched Vanu’s shoulders and struggled against the feeling that he should pull away because he didn’t deserve to be kissed like this.
“Hardly saw you yesterday. Missed you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“No, I mean … I don’t know what I mean.” He meant, Kiss me some more.
Vanu took his hands and drew him out onto the balcony.
There was yogurt with honey for breakfast; Vanu had already eaten, but he filled a bowl for Lill.
He picked up the writing tablet—it was a lowland-style hinged tablet, not one Lill had seen around the house before—and took it into his room, then came back to sit beside Lill.
He tucked a strand of Lill’s hair gently behind Lill’s ear.
“Um … I guess Khatu told you all about how he escaped and I met up with his pursuers outside of Dukka. There was some violence … ”
“He said you killed one of them and injured two others,” Vanu signed.
“They’d drawn their swords,” Lill said hastily. “It was a fight, not … ” Not like the other times he’d killed people.