In the thirty-first year of the reign of Turikuang, in the Heinto Era, the nokudai (spirits of the woods) were most avaricious. When Sovereign Turikuang went on a hunting expedition into the deep wood, he left his silver jewelry at home in the palace. Silver jewelry had fallen out of fashion at the time. But it was silver that warded off the nokudai at night. Sovereign Turikuang and eleven men of his hunting party were carried off that night by the gashagumo (dog men.) The sole survivor was named Kitsang. He returned to the city of Heinto and spoke of the gashagumo, twice as tall as a normal man with the hair and teeth of a wolf. Thus the successor of Turikuang, Turiluang, took interest in recording accounts of the nokudai, who have walked the earth since the Time Before Time.
-Ancient Histories of Yu
Sang Lamdak, Xheng Yu Xi
Cadas smiled. He almost never smiled.
He was putting the finishing touches on his diagram of a rat skeleton that he’d started sketching the other night. It was a fortunate find in the otherwise animal-poor city, where most of his subjects were the same boring black flies, house spiders, fruit flies, and the occasional seagull, all of them living and too busy to sit still and pose for him.
He labeled the skeleton’s anatomy in Myrenthian, Qardish, and even Xhengyon. Hiricho had been teaching him how to speak and write the language for the past two moons that they’d been staying in the restaurant’s cellar. In exchange, Cadas promised to fulfill his allotted chores without complaint.
Those had been slipping lately. Cadas knew, but he didn’t care. On days when he felt bored or otherwise uninspired to write in the Compendium, he didn’t mind doing chores, but with his new lessons in Xhengyon to occupy his time and creativity, those days were becoming fewer and farther between. The Compendium was more important than whatever chores he had.
He looked up to find Hiricho was in the room with him; he was taking inventory of the wine bottles in the cellar on a tiny piece of heavily scribbled scratch paper.
“Look,” Cadas said in Xhengyon, returning his eyes to the Compendium’s newest page.
“Wow,” Hiricho replied. “You’ve got a real talent for that! If I didn’t know better, I’d say you should have gone to the university on the mainland, too. You could have studied classical art or medicine.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
Cadas wasn’t sure what he meant, or didn’t mean. He didn’t care to find out. “When do we do more lessons?”
“I’m not sure, friend. The entrance examination on the mainland is just a moon away now. I need to get out of this place as soon as my parents will let me or I might never get to study at the university. If they’re going to let me leave, I need to do a lot of preparation work for them.”
All that talking and Cadas still didn’t feel like his question had been answered. He didn’t understand why people sometimes talked and talked at great length and yet said so little. He was about to ask again when a noise upstairs distracted him.
Hiricho’s mother appeared at the top of the stairs. “Hiri?” she called down to him.
“Yes, mother?”
“Your father and I need to talk to you.” She pointed sharply at Cadas. “You.” He learned to respond to that name in her presence or else she and his own mother would get angry. “You, too. Upstairs.”
It was early morning, but one could hardly tell in such a cramped city with such obstructed views. Morning gilded only certain corners of the luckiest buildings while the rest still languished in the shadows. Buildings everywhere, people, people everywhere. He hated it here.
Everyone was assembled in the kitchen upstairs—Hiricho, his parents, Cadas, and every other member of the Lars family. Cadas saw that his mother was already sheened with sweat; she never seemed to stop working and always seemed to be in a rush to do something around the restaurant, even when no one was looking.
“We need to talk,” said Hiricho’s mother. His father stood there with his head down and his hands folded. “Hiri, we know you’ve been wanting to go to the university for a couple of years now.”
“And you said that I couldn't because you wanted to expand the restaurant and you still needed my help,” said Hiricho. “I’ve brought in six times the manpower—”
She raised one hand at chest level, with her forefinger raised ever so slightly, and somehow it stopped Hiricho from saying anything else. It must have meant she was angry or annoyed by him and he didn’t want to be hit, Cadas guessed. “We have more help now, yes. We pay the Lars family as a whole how much we paid for your food, your books, your clothes, and so on. We don’t lose any money. But this only works if they can fill your place. So far, they can’t.”
“Sorry to stab the conversation,” said Cadas’s mother in her fumbling, broken Xhengyon. “Why say you this? We cook. We clean. We inventory report.”
“Your most important duties are in the kitchen,” said Hiricho’s mother. “My husband and I can handle the serving duties if you can cover the cooking. But you still aren’t getting the spices right.”
“We are from the land where the spices from!” Cadas’s mother still struggled with the linguistic rules of Xhengyon. She fanned her red face with her hand, switching back to their native Myrenthian. “Did she say we can’t get the spices right? They’re our spices, gods damn it! Mother Moon, help us.”
“You may know the spices,” Hiricho’s mother went on, “but you don’t know our recipes well enough. We’ve been making this food the same way for three generations. My grandmother, my father, and me. I have one customer, a sailor, who is a hundred years old. He knows how the food is supposed to taste. If the traditions are abandoned, there are plenty of other restaurants in Sang Lamdak where people will go.”
“What can we do? What will make it better?”
“We’ll teach you all again from scratch. That, and your boy needs to keep up better with his chores.” She pointed a finger at Cadas. “I’ve found that he hasn’t been doing them at all in the past quarter moon.” Cadas’s mom glared straight at him. “And you, Hiricho. You need to stop giving him private lessons. They should be paying for something like that. You have your own work to do.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Hiricho scoffed. “Mother, I’m just helping him understand us. All I—” But she raised her hand slightly again and he stopped talking.
“We’ve all reached an understanding, then. If we can’t solve these problems, Hiricho, you won’t be going anywhere. And that is final. And to you, Lars family: if I have to keep Hiricho on, then we will not be able to afford to keep you on as well.” She walked away, and her husband gave a slight bow before following after her.
Hiricho sighed deeply, rubbed his eyes, messed up his own hair, and then walked toward the rack of iron pots and pans hanging from the kitchen wall. He grabbed a skillet and twirled it in his hand. “All right,” he said, “let’s start back at the beginning.”
***
As the days wore on, stricter pressure about chores forced Cadas to develop a new strategy for avoiding punishment. He attached a bell to the cellar door, saying that it comforted him to know the bell was there when he slept at night. Whenever he heard the bell, it meant that someone was about to come down to the cellar, and when that happened, he knew to close his Compendium, hide it, and then make himself look busy as quickly as possible.
He would rush to make it look like he’d been taking inventory, sweeping, gathering the family’s dirty laundry, rolling wine barrels to the bottom of the stairs to be brought up, and so forth. It worked every time. So much so that his mother sometimes praised him and, on one occasion, even Hiricho’s mother said, “Keep it up.”
A quarter moon had passed since their group meeting. Cadas stayed vigilant in order to stay out of trouble; in his downtime, he pored over a Xhengyon encyclopedia of animals that he’d taken from a book stand the other night. His mother hadn’t said anything, and neither had the bookseller, so he figured it must have been all right for him to take it.
He assimilated the new information into his Compendium, combining it with what he’d already learned from Qardish sources and his own observation. He found the similarities and differences between them fascinating; Qardish books often had detailed animal illustrations, and they were good for fitting different animals into their appropriate categories, but Xhengyon books were much more individualistic about each animal, yet mathematical at the same time. This bird had a wingspan this big; this insect laid eggs at this time of year, and this many.
Then one morning the bell rang on the cellar door. Cadas knew how long it took, on average, to descend the stairs—enough time for him to close the Compendium, stuff it in a cramped, cobwebbed closet, and then run to the barrels of wine or sacks of grain and pretend to be in the middle of a chore.
This time he managed to close the Compendium and open the closet door by the time his mother appeared behind him.
“What are you doing?!” she hissed at him. She spoke like she was unhappy, but her voice wasn’t loud, so Cadas was unsure. He didn’t know how to answer her.
His brother and his two cousins came stomping down the stairs behind her. They scanned the Xhengyon labels on the wine barrels and started passing them to each other, rolling them hurriedly up the stairs.
His mother grabbed him by the shoulder. He hated when she did that. “Look at me!” she said. “You only rolled out two wine barrels yesterday! We have customers waiting upstairs who are very angry! I told the restaurant owner that you would shape up, and you’re making fools of us all!” Cadas looked away and said nothing. He tried to break free of her grasp. “Oh, no you don’t. You’re going to have to face some consequences for this disobedience. You’re jeopardizing the lives of your entire family! Do you understand that?!”
“Have to put away the Compendium,” Cadas muttered. He hid his treasured book in its proper place in the closet, on a high shelf to protect it from flooding or pests skittering on the floor.
The bell on the cellar door rang again. Hiricho’s mother said something in a loud, screeching voice, Xhengyon slang that Cadas couldn’t translate fast enough. The door slammed shut again and the bell jingled.
“Nice going,” said Ikraos. “Until now, we weren’t sure if they’d evict us. You’ve done a fine job of making their decision for them!”
“What did she say?” Cadas asked.
His brother scoffed. “You don’t have to translate her words to understand what she was saying! Simpleton...”
Cadas stood there on the edge of their flurried activity and struggled to comprehend what his brother meant. How could someone understand what someone else was saying if they didn’t know the words? It didn’t make any sense. But he was beginning to think that trouble was brewing here in Sang Lamdak. It grew harder by the day to meet the demands placed on him—and his own demands were so few. All he wanted was some more privacy and some decent sunlight by which to write more in his Compendium, once this storm had blown over like all the others.
***
His night was restless. There was shouting, slamming upstairs that he could hear over the general commotion of the city. Every once in a while, it roused him from sleep on his thin cot on the floor, but sometime in the middle of the night, he drifted off to a more solid sleep.
It was light that woke him up. It must have been morning. Orange dawn spilled across his face and he felt that much warmer for it. His mother usually woke up the family well before sunrise, so he waited for her prodding and shaking to rouse him. Nothing happened.
Cadas rolled over in bed and, through the tiny window near the ceiling, saw the moonlit city still shrouded mostly in darkness. Something was wrong. The light didn’t seem like a dream, and yet it must have been.
But as his eyes opened and he sat up on the cold cellar floor, he saw his own faint shadow dancing on the wall, cast against an orange glow.
He turned around. His mother was burning a fire in a metallic bowl. She tore at something fragile and dropped the shreds into the fire and he suddenly realized that she was burning the Compendium.
“NO!” Cadas shrieked. His mother flinched and nearly fell onto her back. She took the eviscerated book, ripped out the remaining used pages, and stuffed them into the flames. He jumped to his feet and sprinted toward her.
She raised her hands between them. “It’s done! It’s all done. Now we won’t have this problem anymore. Now you can finally focus on—Cadas, what are you doing? Cadas, stop that this instant! Cadas!”
He plunged his hands into the fire to try to salvage whatever scraps he could. He screamed. His hands bled and blistered.
His mother tore him from the remnants of his work, his precious work, years of work in Qarda and moons of solid work here in Xheng Yu Xi, his treasured work, the one thing that kept him going and kept the wheels of his brain turning through all the change and upheaval, the war, their new home in Qarda, their new home in Sang Lamdak, all those meticulous diagrams that he’d sometimes spend a quarter moon each completing, his entire Xhengyon dictionary, all of the reminders he wrote to himself to tweak his everyday behavior and avoid his mother’s wrath, and how he’d slept through the worst of it, the worst thing she’d ever done to him or could do, worse than killing him, but now she pulled him from the fire and poured a pitcher of cool water over his hands and he screamed all the while.
He was vaguely aware of the silhouettes of his family, of Hiricho and his parents, at the fringes of the room. He had never cared less. All that remained of his life’s work was black smoke and white ashes. He may as well have been dead. For the first time in his life, he truly saw no possible way for him to continue living.
He screamed like this until his screams dried up and stopped coming entirely. He shoved and swung at his mother when she tried to touch him or move him, and his siblings, too. This went on for some time; then there truly was daylight outside, not an illusion this time, and the fire that destroyed the Compendium was smoldering into oblivion.
His mother shoved him into the closet while his cousins rolled more wine barrels toward the stairs. He balled his hands into fists and swung at her, but she blocked and evaded him. He clawed at her face—a tiny scratch. It didn’t make him feel any better.
She said something about leaving him in the closet until he could act “civilized.” Then she closed and latched the closet door so he could not open it from the inside and he was trapped. He didn’t care. He slumped to the floor and had nothing left to look forward to except the day when he went to sleep and never woke up again, like that wise king back in Qarda.