The Language of Love #2
They left Tirtu’s house and took the path toward the gate. Tirtu was carrying a stack of cushions.
“Do you cook?” Lill asked Halza.
“Me? Of course not!”
“Oh. Lord Vanu cooks. Or at least, he made these cake things for dinner the other night. Plasinta, they were called. With mushrooms inside, and some with sweet cheese. They were very nice.”
Tirtu gave a kind of wincing laugh. “Did he? Did he. He’s the Lion of the Summer Pass, you know—you can’t tell him it’s beneath his dignity to be making dumplings or, or giving his hostages, uh, uh—I mean, you can throw out hints, and he’s a smart man, he knows what you’re getting at, but he ignores you, he always has. ” He gave Lill an apologetic look.
“I don’t mind,” said Lill, since he couldn’t see a reason not to. “The plasinta were good.”
This was good too, actually. He was gathering intelligence about his husband, and a clearer picture was emerging. It was very useful. Surely not what Vanu had intended by sending him out here. He wondered what Tirtu had been about to say that Vanu gave hostages. Something embarrassing?
They arrived at the house by the gate. It was bigger than Lill had expected, and the “few repairs” that it needed looked like they would involve rebuilding half the roof.
Like Faru’s hall, it looked only half habitable, though at one time it must have been a handsome building, rivalling Vanu’s house, with an upper storey and glass in all the surviving windows.
Halza led the way inside and began showing Lill around like a proud householder.
“That’s the kitchen where the roof’s caved in, so just leave those things by the door. I’m going to sleep upstairs here for the time being.”
Lill followed Halza upstairs and looked into three separate bedchambers opening off the landing.
“Are you planning on starting a family?” he asked jokingly.
Halza did not laugh. Lill turned to look at him and found him standing in the doorway to the largest of the three chambers with a fixed, faraway look in his eyes.
“All right, I’m headed back to my place!” Tirtu called from downstairs. “I’ll leave the two of you to catch up. Come back when you’re ready to eat, Halu!” He went out, whistling.
“What about your fiancée down the mountain?” said Lill, looking at Halza.
“What?”
“Aren’t you betrothed to a girl in Radush? But you’re planning on staying here and marrying … Susami, I’m guessing?” It had to be Susami.
“I’m not—I’m. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
The Sukiyan rhetoricians had a name for that kind of thing, when you said something that didn’t follow in the least from what had been said before. Lill couldn’t remember the term, but Halza probably didn’t know it either.
“I can believe that,” Lill said dryly. “So you do plan to break your engagement, then.”
He thought that was the important thing here.
Some girl down the mountain was waiting for Halza to come back and marry her.
He’d given his word. Keeping your word was the third of the Twenty-One Martial Virtues.
Not that Halza would care about those, but surely temple servants had something similar?
“Do you know what it’s like to be in love, Lill? I—I mean—” Halza seemed to decide there was something inappropriate about the question he’d just asked.
“No,” said Lill, before Halza could begin apologizing, which would be absurd. “Of course not.”
Halza give him a sad look that made Lill want to squirm.
“I barely knew myself until I saw her. Oh, I’d read of it, of course, and I thought I felt something for Auxshna, my mother’s neighbour’s daughter—but when I saw Susami …
I couldn’t leave her behind here, Lill, even if they would let me go.
But I don’t delude myself that I could take her away with me, either, not if her father wants to keep her here.
So my plan is this: I’ll settle here, earn his trust, and win her hand.
We can live together here until … well, until we can find a way to leave together.
I want to give her a life away from this place, somewhere she can be free … You know she is deaf?”
“Yes, of course. You are learning hand language?” Lill signed.
Halza stared at him in bafflement.
“Hand language,” Lill repeated aloud. “Have you begun learning?”
“How would I … what is it?”
“It’s how Susami and her family talk. Did you not know that? What did you think—that you were going to marry her and not talk to her?”
Halza got that faraway look again. “We’ll communicate in the language of love.”
“I don’t know what that is. It doesn’t sound like a real thing.”
Now Halza was giving him a pitying look, which Lill thought was grossly unfair. Halza was clearly the one to be pitied here. He had completely lost touch with reality.
“I think you should learn her language,” Lill said doggedly.
“But how? Wait, you know it?”
“I’m learning it. My husband speaks it, so … obviously.” He shrugged. Was that the first time he’d used the phrase “my husband” in conversation? “We don’t know the ‘language of love.’”
Halza made a sad noise that Lill ignored. “So you could teach me the, uh, the hand thing, then. Could you?”
Lill considered that. Halza would be in his debt if he did that, and though he couldn’t yet see a way that could be useful, that didn’t mean something wouldn’t come up.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I could.”
Halza nodded. “Good. I suppose it doesn’t take long. It’s just gestures, after all.”
“It’s a whole language. Anything you can say in Zashian or Akra or any other language, you can say in hand language.”
“Oh.” Halza looked as if he didn’t believe that. “That reminds me—have you figured out yet how they get things in and out of the fortress? Has Lord Vanu told you?”
“No,” Lill admitted. “But I haven’t asked.”
“I have,” said Halza proudly. “Figured it out, I mean. Well, sort of. Barda told me about it. There’s magic involved.”
“There’s what?”
“Oh, it’s nothing forbidden! I’m very familiar with the prohibitions against sorcery—I memorized them when I was studying for my exams. It’s just a charm to summon a thick fog, they all know it.
They have an accomplice on the other side of the wall—I think he may also be compelled by magic, which I’m less sure is entirely permissible, but Barda wasn’t quite clear about that—anyway, on moonless nights, they raise the fog and give a signal, the cry of a certain kind of owl, though to my mind it sounds more like a toad croaking, and their man on the outside comes to the wall and brings whatever they’ve requested and hoists it over. ”
“By magic?”
“No, with a rope.”
“And Barda told you this.”
“He’s said he’ll teach me the charm.”
“Barda, whose brother told you he was going to cook you and eat you.”
“Well, that wasn’t true,” said Halza, looking puzzled, as if he couldn’t see any connection. “They’re obviously not short of meat—there was fresh venison at your wedding.”
“Yes, do you suppose their accomplice hoisted a whole deer over the wall, or butchered it first on the other side?”
“I don’t know, but … Wait, are you suggesting you don’t think Barda was telling me the truth?”
“I am. I don’t.”
Halza chewed his lower lip. “When you mention it, there was something about the way he said it … I suppose the part about the charm and the fog—certainly the spell to make the accomplice help them, even at the time I didn’t think that sounded very likely.
I suppose they just wait for a dark night, and they’ve bribed the man on the other side. ”
“I don’t think they have a man on the other side. Hoisting all that stuff over the wall—deer carcasses and firewood and sacks of grain and all that stuff you wanted for the wedding—we’d have noticed that going on. So would the guards.”
“But what do you think the truth is, then?”
“There’s a way out. Nobody’s hauling anything over the wall, and they’re doing their own shopping down the mountain when it suits them.
Someone went out and shot that deer—probably one of the Gukhártu brothers, because it’s not the season for hunting deer, and the rest of these people have more sense. ”
Halza was giving him an odd look. “Lill … these are our people now. Your marriage to Lord Vanu has made you one of them, and my marriage will do the same. You can’t talk about them as if they’re these people anymore. They’re your people.”
The urge to recoil from this nonsense and set Halza straight was so strong that Lill had to clench his jaw to keep his expression neutral.
“The prayers I said at the wedding struck me so powerfully,” Halza went on piously. “When they speak of the bride going into the husband’s house and becoming one with him, it’s—”
“I don’t remember much of that,” said Lill sourly. “I was not myself, if you recall.”
Halza winced. “I am sorry about that. I hope—well, I trust it won’t be an ill omen for your marriage. I’m sure it won’t. You seem, well, happy—for you.”
“Yes, of course,” said Lill, instead of inquiring into what that meant.
Who would have predicted that Halza would go insane in this particular way? Lill certainly wouldn’t have expected it. But clearly Halza could not be trusted in the slightest.
Coming out of Halza’s house a short while later, after making an excuse about being expected at home, Lill ran into Barda himself, doing what could only be described as skulking.
“Lill! I heard you were about.” Barda was all smiles as he fell into step beside Lill. “Surviving married life so far, hey?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Barda looked him up and down in an extremely pointed way.
“Well, you can walk. He must be going easy on you.” He leered.
I said “No” once, and he’s barely touched me since. Impossible to imagine Barda believing that.
“We’re friends, you and I, right?” Barda went on.
Lill looked at him incredulously.
“Yeah, yeah—there was some awkwardness—”
“You tied me up and hung me off a tree branch, threw me through a window—not that it was your idea to do that—you were going to follow your father’s orders and kill me.”
“I wasn’t!”
“Oh. Because we’re friends?”
“Exactly! You remember our first conversation?”