"The Cord"

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

The beast wanted out.

Kadrimani did not let it.

The man circled once and charged in, shoulders driving him forward, the canyon way when a fight was to be finished. Kadrimani broke the line and struck him in the ribs. The man folded and kept coming.

Let me, the beast said.

"Not yet."

The scar over his chest pulled, heat rising under the skin, a coiled pressure inside him like an animal wanting out. He held it. He always held it. He hit the same ribs again and heard something give.

The dust came up around them in a red cloud, thick enough to taste.

Then, the man got a hand on his throat.

The grip closed, and the beast surged, and for the length of one breath his hold on it broke---and the threads came. They leaked from the seam of the scar, thin dark lines of shadow and breath unspooling against his dark skin, reaching for the hand at his throat the way roots reach for water. The contrast made them visible: dark on dark, and the crowd along the rim went quiet all at once.

He pulled it back.

He shut the scar. The threads snapped into him. His fist was already moving---compact, dense, shaped by vertical living---so he let it finish, and the man went down into the dust.

The man did not look at the fist. On his knees, one hand at his bruised throat, he looked at Kadrimani's chest. At the seam. At the place the dark had come from. Then he scrambled back and put the length of the pit between them, and he kept his eyes on that seam, and he did not get up to finish.

He had stopped fighting a man and started watching a monster.

Kadrimani had won.

He had won the way he always won.

He climbed out of the pit.

The red dust caught in the grooves of his knuckles---scars from climbing, from being marked by rock since boyhood. The dust had a way of living there, settling into old lines the way water finds the lowest place. He did not wipe it clean. He never did. It was canyon-speak: I have been climbing since I was small. I will climb until I bleed.

Guleimani was waiting at the rim.

He looked down at Kadrimani---at the red dust in the scars on his knuckles, at the way his shoulders rose thick from years of holding things---and his own shoulders seemed to collapse slightly under the weight of looking.

His brother wore the gurza caped, not sleeved---the garment thrown back off both arms, the way a man wore it when he wanted his hands free and wanted the room to know it. He had their father's height and their mother's breadth, and the same angular jaw Kadrimani saw in still water, but the dust had been washed off him seasons ago---scrubbed away by compound life, by councils, by the work of holding a bloodline together with his hands. He looked like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had forgotten how to set it down. The wool he wore was charcoal. Dagul, smoked over resin-wood for weeks until the grey went deep and even. A noble's colour. It was not the undyed white a fighting man wore. Guleimani had dressed for the Scorpion's men at the gate tonight, not for his brother coming up out of a pit. Kadrimani read it in the time it took to find his feet on the ledge. He read most things that way. It cost less than asking.

Guleimani took his arm.

He took it too hard---fingers clamping above the wrist, thumb into the muscle, the grip of a man taught only one way to hold on to a thing. It was not far off the fight Kadrimani had just left. The same language, lower.

Under the grip, the memory-cord bit into his wrist. His fingers found it without asking. The first knot. He had tied it at nine seasons old, the morning the beast came into him to stay. Three hours screaming in the drywash below the compound. No one came. That was what the knot was for. His fingers left it.

"You're bleeding," Guleimani said.

"It's his."

"Good." A beat. "You didn't have to fight tonight."

"I wanted to hit something."

"You always want to hit something."

"Yes."

Guleimani did not let go. He looked at the gate across the yard, not at his brother. "The Scorpion's men will be there to watch you leave. Don't---" He stopped. Went at it from another side. "The contracts hold while you're gone. The alliance holds. Daufari holds. None of it is yours to carry out there. That part's mine. You only have to---"

He stopped again.

He pushed a bundle into Kadrimani's chest instead of finding the end of it. Rolled tight, tied twice. Packed by his own hands---Kadrimani could tell; the knots were his brother's, too tight, doubled where one would hold. Dried meat. A second blade. A waterskin, boiled leather, small in the hand and heavier than its size promised. Chosen on purpose. In the canyon, a man said with water what he could not say with his mouth.

"The Delta girl will be at the wall," Guleimani said. "Your betrothed. The marriage seals all of it---the alliance, the trade, the peace on the Blood-Dust Road." He looked at Kadrimani's face then, and his own was close to pleading. "Come back someone she can look at without flinching."

No one has ever looked at me without flinching, Kadrimani did not say. Not her. Not the Scorpion's men. Not since nine.

"I'll come back," he said.

"That is not what I said, Kad."

"I. Will. Come back."

Guleimani let go. Where his fingers had been, the skin had gone white.

Kadrimani looked at the bundle, then at his brother's face. His own eyes were so dark they gave nothing back---a canyon trait, a flat gaze that made people uncomfortable. Guleimani looked away first, as people always did.

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

He went down the Blood-Dust Road at first light with the taste of the fight still in his mouth.

The canyon fell away behind him in red steps. He had climbed those steps his whole life. His hands knew every ledge of Daufari. Other men knew faces that well; he knew rock. He did not look back. Ahead the land flattened and paled and gave up its walls, and he walked out onto ground with nothing to hold and nothing to climb. A canyon man wants purchase. The flat gave none.

The beast was still hot from the pit. It paced under the scar all that first day, wanting the fight back. He gave it nothing. By dark, it had gone to sulking, and he made a cold camp off the road and slept badly. He sat at the edge of the fire with his hand pressed to his chest. The night wind moved through the tight coils of hair he kept in a crest on top---shaved close on the sides, nothing for an enemy to grab. Old habit. The beast did not fight with hair-holds.

By the third day, he had fallen in with a caravan going north---salt-traders, a Savanna family, a few other Given bound for the same wall. They let him walk at the back. No one told him to.

One of them tried, the second morning. A Savanna boy, younger, not yet afraid of the right things. He fell into step and nodded at the scar down Kadrimani's chest. "That from a beast?"

"It is one."

The boy waited for more. There was no more. By midday, he had found somewhere else to walk, and he stayed there.

That was how it went. Kadrimani read it in the small things. The half-step people took near the fire. The way the pack-beasts pinned their ears when he passed the picket line. Canyon animals knew a skein by the smell. So did people. They did not have to be told what he was. His scar told them.

At night, the beast pressed the seam from the inside, slow, testing. Let me. He laid his palm flat over the scar and held it until the pressing stopped.

"Not yet."

On the fifth day, the beast stopped sulking and started pointing.

He was walking, and it turned in him, and it leaned---north, past the road's northward bend, off it, toward the flat white edge of the world where nothing lived. He felt it as a pull along one side of the scar, steady as a rope finding its anchor. He set his steps back to the road. The lean stayed. It wanted him to go straight at the salt.

He did not know what was in the salt. The beast did not tell him.

The Savanna grandmother watched him across the fire that night. She was old and past fear the way the very old get, and she looked at his chest a long while. Then she made a sign over her own---two fingers, a short line. A ward. She did it gently, the way one banks a fire away from a sleeping child. Kadrimani thanked her for the warmth and moved his bedroll to the far side of camp before anyone had to ask him to.

On the seventh night, he woke because one side of him was cold.

The threads were out. They had come while he slept, out of the scar the way they had come in the pit, and they lay across the sand around him in a thin dark fan, reaching, still reaching, north---and he lay still and watched them in the low firelight, these parts of himself he had not called and could not fully call home, stretched away from his body toward a thing he could not see, and on his side of the fire not one person was asleep, every bedroll had been drawn back in the dark while he dreamed, quietly, so that he woke alone inside a ring of bare sand with his own shadow climbing out of his chest toward the north.

He drew the threads in. It took a long time.

No one had woken him. No one had moved at all. His hand found the cord at his wrist, and the first knot, and left it. He sat up with his back to a rock the rest of that night, just as he had learned to sit as a boy in the drywash, and he watched the dark north, because the beast would not stop watching it, and out past the fire the pull went on, patient, like a hand laid flat on the far side of a wall.

On the eighth day, a thread escaped while he ate.

He was sitting apart from the caravan, his back to a rock, a strip of dried meat in his hand. The beast had been quiet all morning. He let his attention drift. The thread came out of the scar at the base of his throat, and it curled over his collarbone and reached, and the Savanna boy who had asked about the scar---saw it.

He did not scream. He froze, his hand halfway to his waterskin, and he stared at the thread the way a man stared at a snake on his bedroll.

Kadrimani clamped the scar shut. The thread snapped back into him so fast it burned.

The boy did not move.

Kadrimani finished his meat, stood, and walked to the far side of the caravan. He did not look back. That night, no one sat near his fire.

By the ninth day, he could not hold it down all the way.

The threads leaked in daylight now---a flicker of dark at the seam that he clamped shut before the caravan could catch it, but they came more often, and holding them cost him, so that by the ninth evening he walked with his fist pressed to his chest and his breath short, the beast pushing against him steady as a tide, no longer testing, no longer asking. The closer the wall came the harder it pushed. Toward, always toward, north and down. By dark, it strained in him like a thing that had heard its own name called from a long way off and could not answer and could not stop trying to.

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

The wall came up on the tenth day, out of the salt-haze. Rammed red earth and black stone, long and low, banners at its corners. The salt was dry the way the canyon was dry. It was the only thing out here he knew.

As they came up on the gate, the beast surged so hard it took him half off his feet. The scar split along its seam and the threads poured out of him in a rush he could not stop, dark and wide and fast, fanning at the wall and the salt beyond it, straining north with a force that bent him double and drove the air out of his chest, so that he went down to one knee in the salt in front of the whole caravan with his own beast climbing out of him toward a thing buried on the far side of that stone.

He got it back.

He did not know how. He shut the scar by main strength, folded over his own chest, and pulled the beast in thread by thread while the salt bit his knee and the caravan gave him the widest berth of all ten days. When he could breathe, he stood. His legs held. Barely.

A man was watching him from the gate.

He had come out through the opening and stood a little apart, and he watched Kadrimani gather himself off the salt. Canyon-built---compact like Kadrimani, but aged thin, the thick muscle burned away until only the dense bone remained. An old skein warrior, or what was left of one after the beast had been taken out. Nothing at all in his face. He wore a seru, the undyed linen wrap of a canyon warrior, torn open at the chest so the scar showed---a dead seam from throat to navel, ridged and grey and still. Around one bare wrist, a memory-cord thick with knots he would never untie. His skin had gone grey. His eyes were flat. The scar was a door that would not open again.

But it was the stillness that caught Kadrimani. A canyon man never stood that still---not on a ledge, not in a doorway, not even in sleep. The cliffs taught one to sway, to shift, to keep the blood moving. This man had stopped. The beast inside Kadrimani, spent and quiet and still straining toward the wall, went utterly motionless. It had been calling toward something in the salt for ten days. It did not call toward this.

The man looked at the seam of Kadrimani's chest, still settling.

"You're the skein," he said.

Kadrimani said nothing.

"I felt you coming two days out." The voice was level, unhurried, without weight---the voice of a man who had stopped needing anything from anyone a long time ago. "So did it." He moved his head a fraction toward the wall, the salt, the north. "The beast has been waiting for you."

He stepped aside from the gate.

Kadrimani hesitantly walked toward it. The beast leaned ahead of him again under the shut scar, spent and quiet and still reaching---toward the wall, toward the salt, toward the thing it had heard for ten days that he had not.

Something on the far side of that wall had been waiting for him.

It was the first thing in his life that ever had.