THE FINDER OF NAMES *** There was a throbbing silence—more sensation than sound: a pressure in his ears, thumping…thumping…thumping. He opened his mouth, to ask for light, to ask about the noise and what name it bore. Was it a drummer? Was it some signal he should recognize? Something distinct to Elül and, thus, as intriguing as the city itself? But there was a knot in his throat and his words—when they came—were nothing but the sigh of wordless breath. Cold. Someone—a stranger with his face—asked him a question. His voice was soft, like the lisp of sand across a wooden floor. “Who…?” He could not answer. His breath was glass, lodged in his throat. “Who…?” There was no answer: nothing there at all. He tasted blood, where glassy, frozen words tore at the meat of his throat. He spat blood… …and then red, quivering gore. The throbbing silence clapped with the sudden, hollow pop of gunshots, followed by the thud of pellets tearing through flesh. Hej screamed— —and the dream shattered around him, thrusting him into warm, humid darkness, the scent of sweat and sand, and the comforting solidity of Inahm (deep in his own dreams) beside him. The throbbing silence in his dreams had been the beating of his heart and the pulse of blood through the hollows of his ears. Sweat clung to his forehead. His tongue was heavy with the taste of bile, of salt, of gore from the dream. He wanted to spit. He held the impulse, swallowed against the urge to vomit, and drew a shuddering breath. “Hej…” A sleep-tousled sound: Inahm awakened but groggy. “I’m sorry,” he said. His own words shook. He flinched at the touch of Inahm’s hand to the sweaty meat of his shoulder. “I did not mean to wake you.” “It’s okay. The dream. It’s returned?” “The stranger. The darkness. It is the same dream. I know what it means, Inahm. I know—” but a shudder forestalled the rest of his statement. He’d pushed himself upright, as if thrusting himself from the black and cloying dream, and now—upright—he hugged his knees to his chest, clasping interlaced fingers on his shins. Inahm sat up beside him, one arm sliding over his shoulders. “It’s only a dream, Hej…it’s normal.” “That isn’t my name any more,” he said. “I was Hej before I killed a man.” “You were the Orchid.” There was a smile in Inahm’s words, a lullaby-trill in the depths of his voice. It was how the Watchmen guardians talked, between roads, where Ůtef and Elül reached for one another across miles and miles of sand and rock. “Not any more,” he said. “You are the Hawk.” “No, Inahm…Hej was the Hawk; he was given that name by your relatives in the desert, your beautiful cousins with eyes like yours and strong hands more fit for killing than my own. The Hawk belongs to them, but we are in Elül, now…and I have killed a man. I cannot have a name if I have done this!” “I was there, Hej…I know what you did. I know what you had to do. Is it a crime to kill an enemy?” Tears broke, hot and furious, down the slope of his cheeks. Hair, damp with sweat, tickled his back, his brow, the sides of his face, and Inahm’s hand touched the heat of those tears, and wiped it away. Even here, in darkness—and without the familiar night light of Ůtef through the curtained window—he knew that Inham held true to his oath as brother and co-husband, and touched the salt of those tears to his tongue. “That enemy was a man, Inahm; that is why the dream has come to me for three nights in a row. I have no name. I am a ghost.” “You’re scaring me, Hej.” “I am sorry.” “So what do we do?” “There is an onion grown in red soil.” “The Finder of Names. Borá’s ancestors come from a place with red soil, with iron in the ground.” “Yes.” He closed his eyes, the sight of Borá filling the darkness. He conjured her smile, the way in which she touched him fondly, on the neck, on the shoulder, or threw flower petals at him, teasing him. And he heard her voice: You’re so big…you’re not graceful…you need flower petals to make you pretty. And always, there’d been laughter with such a declaration—her laughter and Lÿsti’s laughter: co-wives in love with a husband who danced poorly. “There are men,” Inahm said. “I’ve heard of them. They bear the same title. Finder of Names.” Not-Hej opened his eyes and Borá vanished. “Here?” “Here,” Inahm said. “Can you take me to them?” There was warmth: the soft press of Inahm’s lips to his forehead. A kiss. “Yes,” Inahm said. “I can take you to them. Now, if you’d like…if you need me to.” “No. Tomorrow. You should rest.” “Tomorrow, then. Come. Lay down. I’ll hold you.” “I cannot sleep.” “Lay down, Hej…let me hold you.” Inahm stretched upon the soft, pallet. Gentle insistence lived in the urging caress of his hands. “You may not have a name, but you still have me, and two wives who love you. This will not change. So come on…lay down. Rest.” * At sunrise, Inahm brewed tea, poured it, thought a dream and blew it (softly) into the steaming cups. He’d learned the habit from Lÿsti: blowing dreams into tea. “I will still call you Hej…is this okay?” Not-Hej nodded, numb from the bad dream and thankful for the good one swimming in the depths of the dark, steaming brew. “Yes.” “Good.” They drank tea in silence: broke flat-bread with their hands and spread honey-paste and thickened cream onto it. Elül was a rich city, larger than Ůtef, and wetter. There were more flowers here, for honey…grasses, just south of the sea’s lip, for milk-cows. There were other milks, too…from other grass-eating animals. Goats and horses, and buffalo with great, curved horns like enormous, flattened braids. The city was a wonder, shocking in the decadent tastes offered in its markets. Not-Hej, faithful in his love of Ůtef, marveled at the budding love he felt for this place: his new home, he thought, as nameless men were shunned in Ůtef. “These Finders of Names,” Inahm began, cradling the warmth of his mug in both hands. “They’ll give you a new name…or find your old one?” Not-Hej nodded. “I know where one of them lives. We’ll go and speak to him.” Implacable resolution lent unquestionable firmness to Inahm’s words. He’d decided. There was no changing his mind. Not-Hej nodded, closed his eyes, and tried to taste the good dream Inahm had breathed into the tea. * Mór was the longest street in Elül, and at its head-end (by the sea) the city’s clock-tower turned, its single, black face following the course of the sun. “There are five clock towers in Elül,” Inahm had said on the day of their arrival. “All of them move in time with the day’s hour.” He’d spoken as if rotating towers were the most common thing in the world. There were gears beneath the tower, powered by springs each as fat as the torso of a horse. It took, Inahm said, an army to wind them. No one ever saw the gears (each as large as a flattened house) but there were times on Mór street, when tea in cups shook with the vibrations of the tower’s slow movement. Now, sunlight filtered through uneven cloud, and veils of silvery, diffuse fog. The city smelled of salt and fish, and in places of sun-warmed tomatoes and spices, hot oil, cured fish, cured meat, and an acrid, pungent stink born in the innards of horses. Food stalls stretched the length of Mór, like welcome intrusions between book-sellers and the shops of haberdashers, cordwainers, watchmakers and apothecaries selling medicinals, leeches, and wound-curing maggots. Artisans hawked their paintings, their carvings, their songs, under the chortling coo of dragons perched on eaves and in trees. They watched the street below, staring down onto the tops of heads, and on diners’ plates left unattended at café tables before barefoot busboys arrived to whisk them away and wipe the tables. Dragons were common here: diminutive bat-winged harbingers of luck and an amorous woman’s beguiling flirtation. As small as crows, they dined on the copious insects at home in the trees lining Mór and earthworms in the garden plots tucked in one courtyard, another, or another. In spring (two moths gone now) they gorged themselves on fat, yellow caterpillars. There were temples along the flanks of Mór Street, dedicated to gods who were painted sticks or stones balanced in accordance to some precarious reason, gods who looked like men with the faces of birds, or gods who were women, cows, or grinning she-foxes with seven silvery tails. Elül carried an extravagance of gods from different places, and some of them were onions…. * “Ůtef,” the old man said, seated on a cushion centered within a circle of ruddy, black soil. “It is a fine city; it is small, but it has its wonders. The underground river. The lightening factories. Yes. A fine city.” There might have been a lot to say to the old man: of the Road North, and of the Road guardians in their strange, ramshackle village alive with arcane technologies and extravagant tents. There might have been nothing to say at all, not even of the dalliance Hej shared with Inahm in the heat of a day before he lost his name. He’d followed Inahm the length of Mór Street and through an alley, opening into a field. He’d followed Inahm through the field, and through a stand of trees, until the scent of onion-growth announced a parcel of land green with onions like an ocean of succulent, aromatic grasses. The small house of a Finder stood amid onion-stalks and industrious bees sipping nectar from the diminutive, clumped blossoms. The house was simple, a shrine to an onion grown in red soil. It was Inahm who’d spoken at length to the old Finder’s guardian son, and after a while, the young, bearded man nodded gravely, threw a wary glance at Not-Hej, standing on naked feet at the threshold of the house. He nodded again, gesturing them in. “So,” the red-robed Finder said. “You’ve lost your name, eh?” He was an old man: strong and wiry. Not-Hej nodded. “You have a family? Someone to claim you, to remember the name you no longer carry?” Not-Hej nodded. “Wives,” he said. “Borá, my first wife, born—like myself—in Ůtef, and Lÿsti, the first wife of my co-husband and cherished brother, born like my co-husband and cherished brother in this city, though her blood is more southern than mine. And there is my co-husband, my cherished brother-mate. Inahm. Beside me. Now.” The old man glanced at Inahm. “You will speak for him?” “To speak for him is my happy honor.” The old man smiled, nodded, and skewered Not-Hej with a thick, rheumy gaze. “And your name before you lost it?” “Hej. Only son of Mhir and Toráž of Ůtef.” “And what does your brother-husband call you?” “He calls me Hej. But I am not Hej, not anymore.” “And why is this?” Not-Hej told the story: of the Roads and the desert in between, of the shape they’d nearly trampled and crushed with their horses and their carriage: a heap, at first, and then a wounded man when they looked more closely. He spoke the warrior watchers in their strange village. He spoke of Inahm’s distant cousins, with eyes like his and skin as dark. He closed his eyes at the worst of it, clenching his fists in his lap. He said nothing of the bitter medicines an old woman dabbed beneath his tongue, to quell the sickness pitching in his stomach and spewing from his mouth. He said nothing of the flies that came after— “Kását?” the old Finder said, when Not-Hej was finished. “You lost your name because you killed a Kását. A young warrior-scout?” “Not at first. The dreams have only come for the three most recent nights of my sleeping.” “The same dream?” “The stranger with my face. Last night…He asked me my name and I could not answer him. He walked away.” “This is difficult,” the old man said, small in the volume of his loose, red robes. “But not impossible. The Kását do not have the ability to take your name when you kill them. Only your family can do this, your brother-husband, your wives…and the people whose racial blood you share…and because a Kását has done so….” The old man’s words trailed into perturbed silence; a withering, dark, and introspective expression masked his features. He sat—like Inahm and like Not-Hej—on crossed legs. He stroked the red-tinged soil around him, as if reading with his fingers, or listening to the roots of distant onions. The light was silvery, hazy, and indistinct. It filtered through windows cut into the south-facing wall of the small, bare house. His robes glared red and lively in that light. Not-Hej sat with hands at rest on his knees, gaze downcast: focused—as was common—where his ankles touched, back to back. He felt Inahm beside him, close. Warm. Comforting. In another place, he might have reached for Inahm’s hand, and the comforting strength of Inahm’s touch. Now, he remained alone and drawn into himself, his back hunched slightly, as if in protection of his gut. The old man inhaled, shifting deep within his flowing, red robes. “You know of Sárátás, the Kását brül whose hordes drove us from Ůtōrō,” he said. It was not a question, despite the ambiguity of his tone. “It happened on a sacred day and we were unprepared. We left many of our brothers and our sisters behind. We left Finders of Names, the wealth of our people. “Sárátás—even by Kását standards was an apocryphal man. He claimed his title without the backing of a father or a brother. He was, therefore, grá brül…the most violent of pretenders. He was the first. Now every Kását leader is grá brül. They follow his precedent.” A wave of dismissal punctuated the old man’s words. “But this is nothing, in light of what you have revealed. Dead history. Nothing more. But you, Hej-who-have-lost-your-name, are a Finder of another sort. Ironic in that you are not an onion at all…not like the oldest Finders. But you have found lost Ůtōrō blood, flowing through the veins of a Kását scout, killed between roads. The Kását have mixed with those we could not bring with us, and now they seek to spread beyond the lands they have taken from us.” A chill found its way down Not-Hej’s back; goose bumps stood on the flanks of his arms. He’d heard the old stories and the grim acknowledgments that there might be Ůtōrō blood intermingled—now—in Kását family lines. Not everyone had escaped. There were those, he knew, who sought to stand against the Kását hordes. There were women, he knew, kidnapped in raids for service in the rape temples. Though he never dismissed such stories, such grim probabilities, he never thought—even in his wildest nightmares—that he would shoot a pellet into the skull of a Kását/Ůtōrō demi-cousin and spill the contents of his head onto desert sand. The idea threw nausea into the pit of his stomach. “It is no crime to kill a man in defense of your home…even if he is of your own blood. Your dream was in error, and your name is here. You brought it with you and placed it in my care.” The old man raised his hand to his mouth, exhaled onto his palm, closing his fist around the whiff of his breath. The gesture held the dramatic flourish of magic for a child. The old man smiled, his gaze cloudy and wet. His eyes, once brilliant, were pale with cataracts. His smile was warm, childlike…eternal in its youth. He extended his closed fist, and opened it, bare inches from Not-Hej’s face. He opened his fingers, releasing the eye-burning scent of an onion, sliced at the root. Hej blinked, a flutter of laughter bubbling in his throat. Tears broke, hot and comforting, on his cheeks. He closed his eyes, tightly, aware of Inahm at his side, blinking and sniffing in burning irritation. The air was heavy with onion-irritant There was darkness as Hej (Not-Hej?) clenched his eyes shut. The burning scent intensified, stung the nostrils, and faded. There was silence. And then… …a sound: Inahm muttering half-words embedded in the obscuring thickness of a gasp. Hej opened his eyes. He sat on a floor of red-tinged dirt with Inahm beside him. There was no old man in red robes: only an onion, it’s flower stalk as tall as a child and its globe of blossoms nearly larger than a big man’s fist. Hej smiled at Inahm’s amazement, reached to his side and clasped Inahm’s hand. “What?” Inahm asked. “Just happened?” Hej shrugged. “You saw an old man in red robes,” he said. “Yes.” Hej smiled. “He was never here. Sometimes an onion will show you what you need to see in order to be at peace.” “I—” words faltered into questioning silence. “When my people left Ůtōrō, long, long, and longer ago…we could not take everyone. Some of us, especially the Keepers of Names, had to stay behind. We could not dig them up. When we came North, we planted what Keepers we were able to bring with us…but none of them are as old as those we left behind. They are still there, if the Kását have not killed and eaten them; still there, talking to each other, through their roots and their pollen. This is how he knew of others left behind, of others now a part of Kását bloodlines. Other Finders saw them, and talked about this tragedy through their roots.” “He….” And again, faltering silence. “Yes,” Hej smiled. “You should see the look on your face. One would think you’d never seen an onion before.” “I—havent…I mean…I saw a man; he talked to us.” For the first time in a week, Hej laughed. “It is all right, Inahm…you have shown me things I have never seen before. Towers that move. So much grass and so many trees with dragons in them! These are wonders for me.” “How does that compare to this?” He swept a gesture toward the healthy onion stalk, blooming at the center of the room, spear-like leaves (like fat and succulent blades of grass) arrayed like the spokes of a crown. “It is the same.” “How?” Hej shrugged. “We share. I show you this. You show me that. Do you understand?” “No.” Hej stepped to his feet. “We will talk more,” he said, extending a hand to Inahm as Inahm stepped to his feet. For a moment, there was silence, a pause, a suspension as thick as jelly in the air. It broke, as Hej bowed toward the onion, whispered something into cupped hands, and blew the words (secret and silent) onto the white, globular clump of diminutive, white flowers. “We will go to our rooms, now,” Hej said, quietly. “And I will brew tea and whisper dreams into is as you did this morning. I will tell you about him”—and he gestured to the riotous growth of onion, centering the room with its floor of red dirt. “And, later—perhaps—we can take evening meal at a café, and watch the clock tower turn.” Inahm nodded, confusion broken and fading on his face. A smile warmed his features. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like that, Hej…I’d like that a lot.” His name— —right there! Inahm had spoken it. And for the first time in more than a week, it sounded so, perfectly right. THE END * As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you’re all on the verge of a fantastic week. As many of you may already know, The Finder of Names is a direct follow-up to the tale begun earlier in my gallery. It started with a series of photos of a single onion-husk lit with variously-colored LEDs, and developed into the story, Between Roads. For anyone interested, parts one and two of Between Roads can be read HERE, and HERE.