Pigeons. Lift up my nose, no ceiling, no rafters between us. Close my eyes and see rumblysoft pigeon dark, juicy wing-beats filling the air with dust and grain, fluffy little under-feathers drift down. Much talking, much shifty-shuffly on their nests, restless with me. Close their pretty eyes like drops of blood, they see me, too.
Down here, hoho, down here all sorts of shifty-shuffly going on. Very crowded room, so many people trying to take other people’s clothes off. Boy backs toward the bed, one hand holding Nyateneri’s hand, other trying to open Lal’s shirt. Lal helps him, breaks fingernail, swears. Boy’s legs tangle all up with bed legs, he sits down. Lukassa kneels on bed behind him, laughing. Nyateneri turns, looks at me. We talk.
Do not. Do not.
Must.
Will not hold. Cannot hold.
I know. Must. Help me.
Window open almost wide enough. Tree goes crick-sish, one thin branch points up to pigeons’ nice little bedroom. Nyateneri. Help me. Lal reaches out, draws her down.
ROSSETH
Lal has dimples in both shoulders. Lal’s collarbones are as proud and velvety as the spring antlers of a young sintu. The back of Lal’s neck makes me cry as she bends her head down to me.
Lukassa smells of fresh, fresh melons and peppers and spice-apples on market stalls. Her breasts are softer and more pointed than Nyateneri’s breasts, and the insides of her forearms are transparent, truly—I can almost see little blue fish sculling serenely in and out between her veins. Putting her hand on me, she finds Lal’s hand there already. She turns her head and smiles, so simply.
Nyateneri. I cannot see Nyateneri. Her hands move on me, too, and she bites my mouth until blood comes, but I cannot see her face.
NYATENERI
No. No. I cannot let this happen, cannot. For everyone’s sake, all sakes, no. But such sweetness—such friendliness. When was the last time anyone kissed you as that boy does— kissed you, not your bow or your dagger, the things you can do, the things you know? When did hands caress you as wisely as Lal’s hands, or with such welcome as Lukassa’s? And you are so tired, and so lonely, and everything has been so long.
I cannot be letting this happen. It will not hold—he knows. I try to push Rosseth from me—but it is not Rosseth, it is Lukassa catching my aching hand and drawing it into herself, over herself, over Lal as though she were dressing her in my touch. The river-surge of Lal’s belly against my mouth; the dear clumsiness of Lukassa’s knee bumping me somewhere, Lal’s broken fingernail scratching my hip. No, no, it will not hold. Lukassa. Lukassa’s hair on me. No.
LAL
Someone’s hands are under me, someone’s mouth is on each breast. My eyes are wide open, but all I can see is someone’s hair. Rosseth breathes my name; Lukassa whimpers, oh, oh, oh, oh, each soft cry a burning blessing against the scar on the inside of my thigh. I start to tell her who put it there, but someone else is murmuring, “Lal” into my mouth, kissing the old agony to oblivion. I put my arms around everyone I can reach, throwing all my doors and windows wide to let the wild comfort enter.
THE FOX
Almost wide enough—maybe wide enough? Maybe for a little, little fox with soft fur? Along the wall, hurry, front paws on the ledge—nose, whiskers, ears can fit through. Hello, pigeons.
One quick look back, no one sees me. Hard to see Nyateneri, all those legs. Crying, laughing, poor bed thumps and grunts, last bottle breaks on the floor. Too noisy for a fox, much more peaceful somewhere else. Squeeze down small, push very hard—one paw, two paws, one shoulder, now head, now other shoulder—and here’s one whole fox on nice broad tree branch, laughing, so clever in the moonlight. There is a Fox in the moon.
If Nyateneri called me, come back. Might come back.
Moon-Fox: Too late. Too late. Nothing holds. Go see pigeons.
Nyateneri’s voice: joy, pain, despair, who cares? Not for me, no call for me. I run up the moonlight to the roof, toward lovely fluffy window, lovely bloodrustle that wants me there.
ROSSETH
It must be Lukassa. I cannot see her face—the bedside candle has long since been kicked over to smother in tallow—but the smell is Lukassa’s, and the hair in my mouth, and the small, sharp teeth set in my wrist. Not right, not right, it should be Nyateneri—Nyateneri’s wounded hand guiding me oh unbelievable, Nyateneri’s long legs folding me in, keeping me fast. But everything is moonshadow and wine bottles, except for this, and Nyateneri has slipped from me, though I can smell her so close, as though my head were still in her lap and a few feet away those two men, a few minutes dead. And I can hear Lal laughing, low and beautiful—if I reach one hand to my left, so, I can feel that laughter on my palm. Between this finger and that, Lal’s whisper: “Rosseth, boy, so strong in me, so kind, so lovely in me. Rosseth, Rosseth, yes, like that, yes please, my dear, my dear.” The name Karsh gave me, the name I have always hated, so beautiful, my name. If I could hide in the way she says my name and never come out again.
But I am not in her, not in any way, even in this dancing darkness. It is Lukassa welcoming me—Lukassa arching back to kiss me, who never speaks to me, giving me her breath for mine—Lukassa’s buttocks searing my incredulous hands. Too stupid even to bumble my way into the woman I most desire, how can I possibly be joining and joying two others at once? There are legends about such men, but I am only Rosseth—no knight, but only Rosseth the stable boy, such wits as he had flown to the moon, leaving his imbecile body tossing in this bed like a toy boat on the wild Bay of Byrnarik, that I have never seen. Someone was going to take me there, someone was going to take me to play all day on Byrnarik Bay bay bay, where Lukassa is taking me now. It was a song. There was a song.
Someone’s hand is on my back, my hip, caressing, insistent, pushing hard, then yielding as I yield, moving with me on Byrnarik Bay. Lal’s voice, a sudden shrill whisper, the way her sword must sound springing from its cane lair. “Rosseth? Rosseth?”
NYATENERI
In the end, it was my hair that betrayed me, as I really might have expected. Rosseth’s hair is all tight curls— mine is as coarse and shaggy as his, but fatally straight beyond any deception. Once Lal’s fingers clenched in my hair, it would have been all over even if, by some chance, the magic had held together.
Which it did not. It is a most curious sensation to feel even the smallest enchantment leaving you. I do not mean to be insulting when I say that it is not like anything you can imagine. It is like nothing I can imagine, even now, and I have known it three times in my life. Poets and hedge-wizards mutter of the passing of great wings, of a sense of being abandoned by a god after having been used and exalted almost beyond bearing. This is nonsense. The way it is… do you know how it is when a bubble bursts on your wrist, leaving nothing behind but a little cold gasp, already gone out of the skin’s memory by the time the slogging mind even begins to realize—yes? So. Nothing more.
Perhaps, then, you also understand that the person under a spell can only know it by the way it affects other people. For all the nine years that I was Nyateneri, daughter of Lomadis, daughter of Tyrrin, it was never once a woman who looked back at me from any shiny helmet or any muddy stock-pond. The breasts that tormented and emboldened Rosseth; the soft skin, the curved, supple mouth, the rounded grace of carriage—all that was always a trick, the only one I knew that might gull for a while those who meant to kill me. I was disguised—disguised well enough to travel and live with real women on terms of daily intimacy without arousing the slightest suspicion—but I was not transformed, neither in fact nor in my own sense of myself. There was never a moment in those eleven years when I believed that I was truly Nyateneri.
And even so. Even so, in that overburdened bed, with Lal all around me, with Lukassa’s hand prowling between us and my hand at last finding Rosseth, with the greedy, glorious astonishment of their three bodies answering itself in mine—whose name was real, whose gender was forever? It was Rosseth’s innocent desire that had brought mine growling out of a long, long winter sleep; who was it, then, who wanted his mouth no less because of Lal’s rich mouth, his hands no less because of once-dead Lukassa’s tremulous caresses? Was it I—a man, as we say—or Nyateneri, the woman who never existed? All I know is that I kissed them all, woke to their kisses, no more or less as Nyateneri than as the man who was not Rosseth when Lal cried out and buried her hands in his hair. There were no census-takers in that bed that night, no border patrols.
LAL
For one moment—no longer than the instant it takes for me to yank Nyateneri’s head back by the hair, hard, and stare through the shivering dark into that strange, familiar face above me—for that moment I am Lal-Alone again, cold and empty and ready to kill. Not because the woman in bed with me has turned out to be a man, but because the man has deceived me, and I cannot, cannot, allow myself to be deceived—day or night, bed or back alley; it is the only sin I recognize. My sword-cane is propped in a corner—oh, naked, foolish Lal!—but my fingers have crooked and bunched themselves for a slash that will crumple Nyateneri’s windpipe, when the soft cry comes: “He taught me, the Man Who Laughs!” And I let both hands drop, and Nyateneri laughs himself, herself, and kisses me like a blow and moves slowly in me. And I scream.
Something is happening in the dovecote overhead: vaguely protesting burbles, fretful noises as though the birds were jumping on and off their perches. What can the drovers, the sailor, the holy couple imagine must be going on in here? What would that sly fat man think if he crept up the stairs, flung open the door and saw us now, this minute, tumbling over each other like a moonlight circus, all naked rope-dancers and slippery beasts? What would I think, if Lukassa’s mouth and throat were not a sweet curtain across my mind, if I were not suddenly, suddenly about to do my own dance, Lal’s dance, up there, high up there in the night-blooming night, up there above the pigeons, Lal’s dance on no rope at all, nothing under me but the love of three strangers, who will not let me fall?
THE FOX
Up there in the rafters, three left, what does he want? Three tricky pigeons, just out of reach, yes, make attics and attics full of pigeons—why such roaring, such waking of poor tired everybody? Fat innkeeper shouts, swears, bangs in and out of rooms, slams through cupboards, looks under floors, under beds—in beds, even. Dogs in the courtyard, the stable, on the stairs, sniffing and yelping, just like fat innkeeper. Boy Rosseth runs here, runs there, two and three places at once, looking guilty and happy. Boy Tikat helps—that is a worry, this one knows too much about too much. Should have let him starve, kind fox.
Days and days, all for a few bony little pigeons. Nyateneri, Lal, Lukassa, they go on riding out, riding back, never a thought for someone hiding all the hot day in the fields, shivering all night in a hollow log. No chance even to take man-shape, not with boy Tikat here. Northern Barrens is better than this. Convent is better, except for nasty food.
This one morning. All cloudy, a thin mist, cold gray sweat. I strike off toward the mountains, trotting only, looking for birds, rabbits, maybe a kumbii—big juicy red mole-thing, my size almost. No kumbii, nothing nice, nothing but the smell of a storm coming, and one stupid lizard, falls over its own feet when it sees me. Bad to eat lizards, poison your eyes, make your teeth fall out. I eat half.
My fur hisses. Storm is rolling up from the east, green and black, all squirming with lightning. Frogs growing restless in the little slow creeks—maybe a pretty frog for me? Two frogs, even? I go softly along creek bank, just to see. A dog howls.
No dog I know. Bays again, closer—big, running hard. And still no smell of him, no taste in my whiskers, no shiver in my blood that says dog, dog. Morning yet, but too misty now to see more than trees, stones, the ribs of a falling-down fence. But I hear his breath.
