30. Annani
ANNANI
" G ood morning, Mother." Alena dropped a kiss on Annani's cheek and took a pastry from the tray Oridu had set in front of her. "Are you ready to go?"
"Almost. I want to finish my tea. Would you sit with me for a few moments?"
"Of course." Alena sat on the chair Ogidu pulled out for her. "It's not like I'm in a rush to go anywhere. Orion took E.T. to Geraldine, and I know she won't release them until after dinner."
"Would you like some tea, Mistress Alena?" Oridu asked.
"Yes, please."
He returned a moment later with a teacup and saucer, placed it in front of her, and poured her tea.
"Thank you." Alena took a sip and then put the cup down. "I have a brilliant idea."
Annani tilted her head. "If you say so yourself."
"I do. Transcribing the stories you are telling the five takes me forever because I'm not proficient enough in the old tongue, and there is no application that can do that either.
I thought of asking William to create an app that would turn your speech into text in the language but developing it would have taken forever.
Then I realized that we don't need to transcribe the stories at all.
We can turn the recordings into audiobooks.
People will love listening to them told in your voice. "
Annani lowered her teacup. "Most clan members do not know enough of the old language to understand what I am saying. The idea was to later translate the stories into English."
Alena leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest. "They need to learn it, right?
We need to preserve the original language, and now that we have the former harem ladies living with us, we can actually arrange classes.
I thought about it when Tamira told me that the island language is so different from the original that she sometimes has trouble understanding the enclosure women.
Mostly, it's about the way they pronounce the words.
They have a different accent, and some words were taken from different languages. "
"That eventually happens to all tongues.
" Annani refilled her teacup. "There is a drift.
I like your idea, but I do not tell the stories with the intention of them being turned into audiobooks.
There are many breaks, other voices, us talking with the medical staff, and a hundred other interruptions. "
"They'll need some editing, of course. I just think that people will love hearing history in your own voice, even with some of the pauses and the laughter retained. I'll have to edit out some of your digressions, though, or people will lose the main thread of the story."
"I do not digress."
Alena lifted a brow. "You sometimes provide three generations of context per anecdote, Mother.
It's wonderful, but some of it will need to be trimmed.
Other than that, you're a very good storyteller.
You pause in all the right places, creating suspense, you change your tone to emphasize the mood you want to convey, and your voice is just so beautiful to listen to. "
That would serve double duty. It would encourage people to learn their ancestors' language and save Alena the trouble of transcribing everything. Annani had so many stories to tell that they would have filled shelves upon shelves of journals.
Besides, if any of the five males in the clinic woke up with no memory of their past, the way Ell-rom had woken, then the stories would help them reconstruct at least some of it. Hopefully, they would wake up long before she exhausted everything she had to tell them.
"You have my blessing, Alena. But before you edit all of them, I want to listen to one."
"We have a deal."
The ride to the clinic was short, and Annani spent it the way she had spent every one of those morning rides for the past five days, composing herself for what she would and would not find upon arrival and planning what stories she would tell them today.
Yesterday, she had told them about Khiann and his shenanigans with Esag. The truth was that she had not known half of those stories and had only learned them recently from Esag.
Khiann had not always been the serious young god she had courted and married. During the short time they had together, Khiann had told her about his boyhood and about his father's house, but he had not told her about all the trouble that he and Esag had gotten into when they were younger.
Today she would talk about their courtship. If he could hear her, wherever his soul was drifting while his body was rebuilding itself, he would be warmed by those stories, and perhaps they would help him find his way back to her.
Some parts she would have to keep to herself, of course. Those were her favorite memories, but they were private, and the audience for her storytelling included her daughter, the medical staff, and Khiann's guards, if they could hear her.
When they arrived at the clinic, Bridget was not in her office, so they continued down the stairs to the converted operating room.
Julian looked up from a monitor and smiled, and Gertrude waved from the far bed where she was changing an IV bag. Bridget finished checking one of her patients and walked up to them.
"Good morning, Clan Mother. Alena."
"Good morning, Bridget. Any news since yesterday?"
The doctor smiled. "Every hour brings more healing. You can see for yourself."
She could, and that was the miracle and the torment of it.
The five bodies were filling in.
A week ago, they had been skeletons wearing skin, so reduced that she had not been able to look at them without her stomach turning over.
Now there was flesh climbing back onto the bones, visibly, measurably, muscle knitting itself over ribs and forearms, and faces rising up out of skulls.
No human body could have done that in a week, and still it was excruciatingly slow.
She had waited five thousand years, and somehow this last stretch was the hardest, because he was so near.
"I believe it is safe to hold his hand now," Bridget said. "Gently, of course."
Annani turned to her. "Which one?"
Bridget smiled. "All five of them. You can do so in turns. Perhaps the tactile sensation will bring some flicker of recognition. You are fated mates. Your bodies should sing to each other."
Annani's eyes drifted to the one in the middle. "I will start with him."
"Of course." Bridget's tone and smile indicated that she had expected that answer.
"But first, I shall take a look at each face." Annani began her circuit.
She did it every day, giving each one equal attention in honor of the principle Alena had established.
The others had no one to pray over them, so they would all be Khiann until proven otherwise.
These four males had gone into the dark with her mate — guards, companions, maybe even friends — and whatever they had been to him, they had been beside him for five thousand years, which was more than she could say for herself.
The faces were no longer interchangeable. Features were beginning to emerge, still undefined, still unfinished, but starting to take shape, and she searched for the one whose features were the most like Khiann's.
The first had a jaw that was a little too square. It was a good strong face, but it was not his.
The second had a brow that was a little flatter than Khiann's.
She stood over him for a long moment, giving her subconscious every chance to object, but it stayed silent, and her mind insisted that this could not be Khiann because Khiann's brow had a more pronounced arch.
She had traced it enough times to remember its shape perfectly.
She moved down the row, skipping the middle bed because she wanted to keep him for last, and started on the other end.
The third male was slighter than the others, his frame narrow through the shoulders even as the muscle returned, and Khiann had not been narrow anywhere. He had been tall and broad.
The fourth she lingered over, because his was the face that had troubled her on other days, close enough in its proportions to be an option, but now she could see that the cheekbones rising under his skin were a little too wide, and Khiann's had been higher.
None of it was proof. She reminded herself of that at every bed.
Alena had warned her about wishful thinking, about a longing that could sculpt what it wanted from unfinished clay.
None of them had regrown hair yet, which was strange.
Ell-rom and Morelle had not been found bald.
They had long tufts of hair that had to be sheared, and Morelle had been self-conscious about her missing hair when she had woken up.
Luckily, the godly genes that promoted rapid healing also promoted rapid hair growth, and Morelle's hair was now reaching past her shoulders.
With a sigh, Annani walked over to the one she had saved for last and stood beside it.
The pull had been there from the first night.
It was irrational, the placement determined by nothing more than where the Guardians had set the chests down. And yet, every day her feet had brought her here last, and her heart beat differently here, but she had not allowed herself to believe it was he until now.
The brow was arching, not flat and not heavy.
It was the exact long curve she could have drawn with her eyes closed.
The cheekbones were climbing high, higher than any of the other four, sitting in the face precisely where they sat in the portraits that hung in her house and the little figurines that Esag had carved of his childhood friend.
The emerging face still did not look like him, but it had to be him by simple process of elimination. The others looked even less like her Khiann.
The mouth was still deflated, the lips thin and sunken where they had been full.
It was the part of him that she knew best of all because she had kissed it hundreds of times.
He was the first male she had ever kissed, and if the Fates had not cruelly taken him away from her, he would have been the last.
She closed her eyes and used her imagination to inflate the lips and fill the hollows of the cheeks. The face she constructed behind her closed lids was unmistakably Khiann's.
Annani opened her eyes and looked at the unfinished face, still not completely his.
It could be her mind playing tricks on her.
Five thousand years of longing was a sculptor with no scruples, and she had no proof. All she had was that the other four had become less likely, one ruled-out feature at a time, and this one had become more. She trusted her gut above all.
Plastic scraped softly against the floor behind her, and when she turned, she saw Julian positioning the white chair she usually sat in for her storytelling right next to Khiann's bed.
He didn't say or ask anything. He just placed it there, met her eyes for a moment, and inclined his head, and in that small gesture she read his acceptance of the declaration she hadn't made yet.
This one. This is the one I have been waiting for.
"Thank you, Julian," she said.
"My pleasure, Clan Mother." He smiled, then turned around and returned to his monitors.
Annani sat down, arranged her skirt, and looked at the hand lying on the blanket beside her. It had a little flesh on it now, and she reached out and took it.
She held it so lightly. The skin felt surprisingly warm, impossibly alive, and she cradled his hand between both of hers with the care she would give a hatchling.
The converted operating room, the monitors, the whole world faded away as she touched her husband, her Khiann, for the first time in five thousand years.
Her eyes burned, and for once she did not try to stop the tears.
Somewhere behind her, she heard Alena's and Bridget's footsteps retreating together, then Julian's and Gertrude's. Then she heard the double doors swing closed behind them.
The only sounds remaining were the hums of the monitors and the other medical equipment, as well as the barely perceptible breathing of five males in stasis.
Still holding Khiann's hand, she rose to her feet and leaned over the arching brow, the high cheekbones, and the mouth that was not ready yet.
"Hello, my love."