12 More than growing things #2
Lyric picks up her toolbox and follows as she carries the bucket farther into the orchard.
When they reach a thickly-clustered-together grove of trees, some old, some young, with a pond in the center, she says, “Those,” gesturing with her chin.
But a flash of movement distracts him, and he turns in time to catch huge eyes disappearing behind a tree.
A slender hand emerges from the shadows, thick green scales covering a skinny, twiggy arm. The chimera holds a peach, broken open where the claws punctured the fuzzy skin of the fruit. “Aharté?”
Heart pounding, Lyric crouches. “Lyric Aharté.”
The scaled hand drops the sticky peach into his palm. He brings the peach to his mouth. It smells delicious, tart instead of richly sweet as he’s used to.
“Don’t make a mess, little trash chimera-girl,” Bowna says.
Setka slinks back against the tree, hiding from the hostility in Bowna’s tone, so Lyric ignores the gardener, ignores his own disquiet, training his attention on the little creature. “Thanks given for the peach. It looks tasty. Does Setka have a peach to eat?”
The chimera nods, he thinks, her slit-pupiled eyes gleaming in the shadows.
“Join Lyric to eat?” he offers, reeling slightly at his own boldness.
“Bah,” Bowna says. “Gardeners have to work, if priests do not.” They listen to Bowna crunch along the path until the only sound is breezy leaves and a humming like crickets.
Lyric makes an effort to smile. “Will Setka come out?”
The chimera hesitates.
“This priest would like to thank Setka for aid rendered,” he says gently. “Lyric and Iriset arrived in danger, and Setka helped. Lyric is grateful.”
Setka makes a strange clicking-hissing noise that sounds like demurring.
So Lyric says, “It is wrong for Bowna to call Setka trash. Setka is a living creature, and all life is beloved by Aharté.” It isn’t a lie.
Despite the apostasy that created Setka, she lives, and so her design must be acceptable to Silence, even before Holy Design exists in the crater city.
(Interesting, isn’t it, how Lyric shifts his thinking to accommodate what he wants to be true.
Convincing himself is the first step in convincing the world.) “Lyric has seen wonders in this garden, and would love to see one more, if Setka is willing.”
“Frightening,” Setka whispers.
“This priest has met Setka under the full sun and will not flinch.”
Slowly Setka emerges from the shadow.
She is as he recalls: head-to-toe greenish scales, but for a few bruised yellow patches of skin.
Long spines curling over her skull instead of hair, sharp scaled features, huge reptilian eyes, no ears, barely existing lips, her little secondary arms fused by an extra bone from the elbow to ribs.
She’s still wearing a little capelet over her shoulders and a scrap of a pleated skirt at her hips.
Her feet are powerful looking, most of her weight to the fore, with dull black claws dug into the leaf litter.
Instead of staring, Lyric takes a bite of his peach, giving himself time.
He keeps crouched, and she shuffles to kneel beside him.
When she bites, she shows triangular alliraptor teeth layered over one another in a way that looks painful.
Her hands are very human but for the scales and claws.
She holds her secondary arms tight against her body, as if to make them less noticeable.
Lyric cannot imagine a purpose in creating something like this.
A thump alerts him to her tail. It is as long as she is tall, thick and scaled and crooked near the tip in a way that seems wrong even on a body so very wrong to begin with.
It was broken and left unhealed, or she was born with it improperly formed.
Lyric has no idea, and it all fills him with a simmering anger.
Worst of all, she seems young.
They eat their peaches in silence. Setka devours hers in two bites, pit and all. When Lyric has stripped the flesh from his, he tentatively offers the pit. Setka giggles, covering her mouth.
Lyric takes that as a win. He sets the pit against the root of the nearest tree like an offering. “How old is Setka?”
“Twelve or thirteen, maybe.”
Nodding very carefully, Lyric asks, “And how long has Setka been in the Moon-Eater’s garden?”
The chimera thumps her tail. It’s too large for her scrawny frame. “A few months. The Moon-Eater said Setka is safe here until the Night of Chimeras, which is very generous. Most people don’t want a chimera in the gardens. But the Moon-Eater is kind to things like Setka.”
“People,” Lyric corrects, almost against his will.
Setka bares all her teeth in an apologetic grimace. She scrubs her cheeks, where the scales look too dry. Lyric wishes he had oil or lotion for her. “Where is Setka’s family?”
“The others in the nest did not survive. Only this chimera was strong enough for hunting and experimentation.”
“Experimentation,” he says flatly.
“It is the purpose of chimeras.” She says it looking away from Lyric—something, shame perhaps, belying the words.
“But Setka lives in the garden, with no family.”
“Many father-seeds were donated to this one’s designer, and Father worked hard to redesign Setka when the other designs failed again and again.
Father said the inaccuracies of design were compounded in every iteration.
” She reaches back and touches her tail, skimming her claws along the ridged scales, eventually pulling the end around into her lap.
She strokes the crooked part with a soft smile.
“Made some things worse when Father tried to fix them.”
Lyric knows that at the end of the Apostate Age, when the Holy Syr and Maimeri the Great unraveled the Moon-Eater and established Aharté’s Holy Design, they destroyed all designs that were not self-sustaining.
Monsters, chimeras, unbalanced architecture, disastrous flora.
The cloud whales were the first to go, with their impossible bulk.
There were people, too, who required constant aid to alleviate the pressure of gravity on their misdesigned limbs or to keep their hearts beating.
But some were so well designed they lived.
Their traits sometimes faded immediately, but through the generations some qualities continued on, cropping up here and there: cat-eyes like Iriset’s dead rebel, or spine scales, extrasensory hearing, and even feathers reminiscent of those in Irsu River’s hair.
A chimera like Setka might survive initially, but would she be able to reproduce?
Should that even be the basic marker of allowance?
Lyric clenches his jaw for a moment, then breathes out slowly. He asks, “Where is Setka’s father now?”
“At home,” she says immediately. “Setka ran away when Father said there would be no more experiments. No more improvements. So Father would…”
Lyric waits, though he doesn’t want to hear.
“Reclaim parts,” she says softly.
It’s as bad as he expected. He can’t look at her. It’s one thing to be born into a body and use it, but someone did this to her, created her for experiments, and when she wasn’t what they wanted, they intended to strip her for parts.
“Don’t be sad, Lyric Aharté.” Setka’s hand pats the air over his knee as if she believes she’s not allowed to touch.
“Setka is more suited to the gardens! This fruit does not tangle in Setka’s system!
No firemoth can burn these hands, and scales are better than leather gloves!
” She wiggles her fingers, the claws glinting.
“Setka sounds like a very good gardener,” he says quietly.
“Only for two more nights,” she answers, her whole face turning down.
“After the Night of Chimeras,” Lyric says impulsively, “Setka should become a priest.”
Her alliraptor eyes widen even further. “What does a priest do?”
Lyric opens his mouth, then sighs heavily. He is not impulsive for a reason. “Does Setka know the way to the crater?”
She nods eagerly. “There is already a shrine gate there! Will Lyric make Setka a priest there?”
Torn between amusement and surprise that there’s a shrine already, he says, “Ah, if Setka shows the way, Lyric will attempt to explain.”
The chimera bounces to her feet, nearly stumbling, and dashes away.
The gateway shrine is a simple white wooden gate, absolutely filled with glass bubbles. Three people are already there, one in the process of setting a pink glass bubble with an inner star, while the others kneel around the rim, chatting calmly.
When Lyric arrives, all three shy away from Setka, but Lyric puts a hand on her shoulder and she smiles.
She’s nearly as tall as him, and standing in the sun like this, she seems both more monstrous and guileless.
Exactly what she’s supposed to be. Lyric takes comfort in that.
Setka lives, therefore she is meant to live under Aharté’s will.
“Lyric Aharté,” says a woman with eyes as amethyst purple as sand verbena.
He nods, trying not to look too grim.
“Is Lyric Aharté a god?” asks the person holding the pink bubble.
“No, but Lyric serves a god,” he says firmly. The sun is high, and the moon is barely visible on the eastern horizon. It’s warm, but a constant breeze cools this spread of rock garden. “Listen, and if all want to know Aharté better, follow.”
“The chimera,” starts the person with the bubble.
“Is welcome,” Lyric says firmly. “If people are turned away by Setka’s presence alone, such people are not ready for Aharté’s blessings.”
Though Setka’s claws twitch uncertainly and her heavy tail swings in the dust of the rock garden, she nods.
Lyric looks at all three of the others, meeting their eyes.
It’s difficult for him, the rudeness of eye contact instilled in him from before he could speak, but he manages.
He’s not the Vertex Seal here, he is the only representative of Silence, and Lyric wonders for the first time if eye contact like this is dangerous only because of the honesty it compels. Or mimics.