Life Among Penguins * “In the south, I met men who are penguins, or penguins that are men. I do not know what they are! —Hieronymus: Explorations * “Let it die,” she said. Atticus flinched at the sound of Iila’s voice; a musical lilt colored her words with a doodle of some emotion he could scarcely fathom. “Die?” he asked, unsure of what meaning she applied to the word itself, or the it in need of dying. Among her people, death was a multifarious thing and never the same from one reference to another. In local logic, there was death at the end of life—but not in the act of dying itself; it lived, as well, in the motion of the moon, and in the color of an egg, moments before hatching. There was death in a sentence, broken in the middle; and in the shape of a woman’s black and featherless hat, removed in the last moments before swimming. There was death—Atticus knew—in the telling of a joke after sunset, or in the squawk of a limerick in the presence of an uncle gone bald, or beardless. Death was many things: everything, and nothing at all. It was never an ending, though—sometimes—it loaned its name to the opposite of life. “When you walk on the ice at night,” Iila said, as if he hadn’t asked a question at all—or perhaps because of the question. “What moon do you see?” There were many moons, Atticus knew, all contained in the single, orb that graced the night with a crescent or a half-globe, and on nights sacred to some—and fearful to others—its fullness, like an unblinking, silvery eye. The moon—tonight—was full. “I see Luna…” he said. “The same as you do.” She nodded. She brushed snow from her long, full skirts, crumpled and billowed from her bent-knee stillness on the ice. “You’re a sniper,” she said. “A conservationist. It’s taken more than a few generations, but we’ve learned to trust you.” She shrugged, caressing some secret thought deep inside. She shifted on the ice, the sash at her waist, as yellow (against her black skirts) as mustard powder; but tonight, its warmer color was stolen and tinged faintly blue, in the light of the moon. In the distance—perched on its cliff—the city of Ischer loomed. Iila sat, like a lotus-monk, listening to the crash of waves against the jagged, rocky shore. It was too dangerous to swim, and so she simply listened to the sea, and—Atticus thought—dreamed a little. “None of us were born when you freed our people from your zoos and your circuses, but those times—so long gone—still mark us. In a way, I suppose, it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a racial memory of those zoos and those circuses that have inspired your job as a conservationist and a sniper.” A gust of wind cut across her face: strands of ebony hair clawed at her cheek and across the face-mask she’d applied so meticulously. She brushed the hair aside, tucking it back. She touched the contours of the mask: its long curving beak riding down the natural slope of her nose. A single sequin—blue—gleamed at the outside border of her left eye-hole, and Atticus marveled at the way in which it caught moonlight and night-shadow. Atticus nodded. He’d seen her people in the northern cities—resigned to their ghettoes for reasons he could scarcely fathom. The young among them were sullen and tempestuous and, according to bigoted rumor, always at the root of some outrageous larceny. Boys, he’d seen, tattooed masks onto their faces, or cut them in with the tips of heated knives. They scarcely wore their beaked masks of paper and paint, or their silken capes. And when they did, it was with bravado and militant intent with daggers sheathed at their waists. “Maybe,” he admitted, shrugging. A wind tore itself from the crests of distant waves and cut across the ice, across the crags, and through his coat, buttoned to the neck against flecks of wind-carried snow. The night was clear. Moonlight--Luna-light—settled silvery blue on patches of snow and naked, glinting ice. He’d never really thought of why he’d become a sniper, protecting her kind from the ravages of seals. He’d simply accepted his choice as little more than an option (one among many) he’d chosen for the manner in which it fit his tastes. She shrugged. “Ziran,” she said. “He sees a different moon, and from what I know of human men, you see that same moon. I cannot see it, and I don’t understand what it is. I am his wife, but that is something I cannot share with him. You can, and I envy you for that. This different moon, I don’t know what you call it, but it isn’t Luna and maybe among humans, there is no other name. “But my husband…I’ve seen him with you, and I’ve seen you with him. Your eyes are like his: they tell me everything. And so you should ask him about the moon, you should learn his name for it. Maybe tonight, or on another night, you should go and see it with him. You should also think of why you’re a sniper, so far from your own city.” She cocked her head to one side, the extravagance of her tricorner hat, throwing shadows across her brow. “You should ask yourself if the moon you see and the moon my husband sees is the real reason for your life among us.” She closed her eyes. Atticus felt a chill. It had nothing to do with the wind, the ice, or the snow. He hugged himself, as if to squeeze warmth back into his torso. The moon: he knew at least a dozen of its names and their associate meanings. He heard terrible, monstrous entreaty in Iila’s voice as she invoked her husband’s moon, and its nature. She saw with terrible clarity how it was his moon as well; she’d just said as much, obliquely and with deft subtlety. If she shuddered at the idea, she didn’t let it show. “You share an incomprehensible moon with my husband,” she said, her voice tight and small: almost a whisper. “Let something good come of that.” She touched her stomach and the gesture was an absent, unthinking one. “If necessary,” she said. “I’ll grant a single concession.” She was asking, he knew, for a violation, and though he wanted the same thing, its implications froze his blood and left fear in the cavern of his chest. There were rules among humans and among those who were flightless birds, though human was a word that defined them as well. There were punishments for the contravention of those rules; none, Atticus knew, applied to him, but for Ziran… Dear gods! Was Iila truly asking for that kind of a risk? “Let it die,” she said, quietly and in a different, musical way than before. She stepped to her feet, brushed flecks of blown snow from her skirts. She nodded toward the gleaming lights of Ischer, perched on its cliff. “It’s late,” she said. “We should return. Ziran would worry for both of us if he returned home to our absence.” * * * There were more than a thousand names for the moon: the most important of them were enumerated in The Book of Endless Nights. Few knew all of them, though there were—Ziran said—monks who could count them, name them, and read their meanings on obscure holy nights. There was Felur’halal: the waxing crescent moon at one hour past midnight. On clear, winter nights, Uub cast its full, silvery-blue radiance onto snow drifts and bulbous ice sculptures at the fringes of hot springs. Hrusaha’ab was the full moon on the night of a child’s tenth birthday, and Obro was the invisible new moon above the heads of lovers. Thiba-aa was the gibbous moon above the head of a father with the egg of his first-born, nested between his feet. There were other moons: Ibi and Dalhalda—obscure moons of disputed significance. Vitteth and Chithat were blue moons in summer and in spring. There were song moons and funeral moons: a prodigious wealth of moons, all contained in a single, dust-smudged orb known only as Luna among men of the primate-human breed. There was the mysterious moon—the one Iila couldn’t see: the one she couldn’t understand. It was apocryphal to The Book of Endless Nights, and in thinking about it, Atticus wondered how to learn of its meanings, its mysteries, and his own relationship to it. The topic was a delicate one, if Iila’s subtle unrest was any indication, and he wondered how to ask Ziran about her observations and what she saw in their eyes when they were together. The day had been a long and tiring one. “I will visit my sister,” Iila said, quietly that morning. “I’ll be back, tomorrow.” Atticus made his duty rounds, searching for any sign of sea lion marauders; he found nothing—to his relief—and as sunset darkened into night, he found himself thinking of moons, of the moon Iila told him to explore (more than a week ago) with her husband, with Ziran. Atticus adjusted his scarf and hugged himself against the pervasive chill. No one in the city of Ischer felt the need for heat, though Ziran and Iila made allowances for Atticus. They’d installed a small stove in his room, but now, Atticus sat in the parlor with Ziran. There was light: dim, and derived from bioluminescent algae, grown in ornate, hanging lanterns. A single candle burned in its golden-hued nich: a conceit, Ziran maintained, to Iila’s faith. She worshipped the ancient and atavistic sun-bird. He was—according to legend—the forefather of the avian people: the snow-birds of the south, the desert birds, and every other breed of avian-derived humans. The lone candle—never extinguished—was where the sun-bird rested in the darkness of night. Iila was always careful to whisper prayers to the sun-bird, as she transferred its flame from the nub of a candle, to a fresh, white taper. The sun-bird’s wavering candle light was a comfort now…an illusion of warmth, Atticus thought, though Iila might say that its warmth was palpable and very, very real. “I want to show you something,” Ziran said, quietly. He sat on a woven cushion, facing Atticus, across a serving of flavored brine: harshness to the primate-human tongue, but a cherished, local specialty. Atticus nodded, smiling faintly. He watched as Ziran stepped to his feet and crossed the parlor; he moved, Atticus thought, like a dancer, like a hunter, like—Atticus grinned a the thought—like a bird in flight, or a water-bird, piercing its way through frigid waves. He walked on naked feet, toes spreading to catch his weight. As always, Ziran wore the extravagance of white trousers, fringed at the ankles with a crenellated filigree of bleached silk. His tunic and vest were, likewise, white and vaguely pearlescent. He’d removed his green cumberbund, his mask, and his tricorne hat. Such plumage was unnecessary now: a throwback, Ziran maintained, to the olden, the darker days… In the cities of primate-humans, habits were different, and at home…back there…Atticus had never seen an avian without his mask. Ziran returned, carrying an ancient and worn valise. Mementoes, Atticus discovered. There was a heliotype of Ziran as a baby with white, downy hair: held on his mother’s lap, pale against her black skirt, and the billowed sleeves of her equally-black blouse, buttoned (with pearls) nearly to her chin. She wore a black mask, its beak sloping down over her nose. It was, Atticus saw, etched with faint, curving lines. Ziran’s father stood resplendent in white, his tricorne hat, embellished with a plume as large, and as fluffy as the feather of an ostrich. There was something of Ziran in his father’s shape: in his height and in his stance, in the way in which he filled his tunic and pants and wore a filigree of silk around his bare ankles. There were fragments of an eggshell, wrapped in crushed purple velvet. Ziran smiled, fingering the white shards. “It took a full day, my mother says, for me to peck my way out. She said I was meticulous…painstaking.” “You were born here?” Atticus asked. “In Ischer?” Ziran shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was born in Yorkton. My father helped to build the Yorkton Bay Bridge.” An incomprehensible emotion crept into Ziran’s voice; an expression of troubled abstraction masked the keen, angular set of his features. “He never crossed the bridge, when it was done.” Yorkton, Atticus knew, was the last city to accept Emancipation; though largely built by avian labor, none could make use of what the city offered. “I’m sorry,” Atticus said. He could think of nothing else. “Why?” Ziran asked. “You were born in Kane: a far better city than Yorkton will ever be. Kane was the first of the cities to abolish the zoos and the circuses. We didn’t have to live in cages if we lived in Kane.” “I’m sorry, nonetheless,” Atticus said. “Don’t be.” Ziran smiled. “Your great grandparents were children when all of that happened. You have nothing to apologize for. You live here after all; you help us in ways we desperately need.” Shooting sea lion raiders and diffusing their flechette mines, traps, and ice snares. It was the least, Atticus figured, that any primate human could do. There were other heliotypes: fading portraits of men in tricorne hats and extravagant, beaked masks…and women in black, all of them elegant and solemn, buttoned with pearls: some wore plumes, and others—modern for their day—wore steep, conical hats and miters and beak-masks of unusual length: stork masks, Atticus thought…Ibis masks…and penguin faces, etched with a profusion of complicated designs. There was a fragment of bone, etched with arcane symbols. There was a bracelet, wooden, and stained as dark as blood gone dry. There was a book, ancient and sweet with the smell of oxidation; its pages were brown and fragile and on its cover (torn and brittle) Atticus read its title. The Book of Endless Nights. And below it, in the ornate slant of italic script, the author’s name: Hahek Ta. “I studied this book as a child,” Ziran said. “I wanted to be a philosopher poet, an enumerator. Things changed,” he shrugged, touching the book as if reading with his fingertips. “And now, I don’t write…I process krill, instead.” “The moons,” Atticus said. “You remember most of them?” Ziran nodded. “I remember them all…the ones Hahek Ta enumerated. There are others, and I know them too.” Atticus nodded. “Iila told me about them.” “Yes,” Ziran said. “It is why she visits her sister. She says we share a moon.” “She’s told me the same.” “Do we?” “I don’t know.” What followed were difficult and intimate questions: a soft interrogation and softer responses, until in the late, late hours, Ziran touched Atticus on the shoulder, the arm, the wrist. Atticus closed his eyes, uncertain of the feelings alight in his blood. “There are things that can and cannot be,” Ziran said. “I know.” “There is a favor that Iila would ask, if it was her place…a favor I might ask, as well.” “A favor?” Atticus asked. Ziran drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and nodded. * * * Snowfall marked Iila’s return: a fortuitous snow. In the local tongue, it was called uzei: the dry, powdery snow that blows away, quickly. There was hezh: blizzard snow in hard, stinging flakes, and there was hli: children’s snow, wet and easily packed. Children’s snow was the stuff of forts and igloos, or the stuff pressed firm between cupped palms, and thrown at a friend, or a red-painted target. There were more than two-hundred different snows, but Atticus knew only a handful of them. He’d worked through the day: keeping watch as was his occupation, and so he didn’t see Iila upon her return. Ziran worked as well, taking an extra shift—and thus—swimming extra laps around the floating racks trailing cold-water kelp and muscles in frigid currents. The extra work, Ziran explained, was necessary, now. He’d spoken quietly, as if abashed and focused only on what needed to be said, and how. There might have been gratitude in his voice, something soft and friendly in his gaze, but Atticus was unsure. Perhaps, he thought, it was his own awareness of the thing they shared, now. —A fragile transgression. —A secret. He walked with Iila now. A soft wind played across the tundra, sweeping uzei into drifts and breaking those drifts into cloudy whispers, like something spilled and evaporating across the ice. “I don’t need the details,” Iila said, quietly, stepping gingerly across hard-packed ice. “But Ziran’s moon. He has shown you what it is to know it, and even to see it?” Atticus nodded, wordlessly, hugging himself against the night’s brisk and exuberant chill. Powdery snow, in irregular patches, crunched underfoot. He said nothing of the night of her absence, of Ziran’s surprising, fever-warmth or the stunned realizations that came as his fingertips met Ziran’s arms, his chest, his neck...as he met Ziran in ways proscribed by local law. He said nothing of the whispered entreaties, and—afterward—tears falling hot and silent from Ziran’s eyes. “This cannot happen again,” Ziran said, quietly and in a tone of howling desolation. Atticus nodded, pressed his cheek to Ziran’s one final time, and dressed quickly, wordlessly, and with devastating finality. This cannot happen again. “We will not speak of this,” Ziran said. He dressed quickly, keeping his gaze away from the tiny vial drawn from the valise, buried beneath family mementoes. He’d fingered it, gently, and explained its purpose. Empty, it centered the night, providing reason—or at least an excuse—for a single transgression, of sighs, whimpers, and at words of sacred amazement. Full, it held a different meaning and announced—perhaps—the arrival of a child. They shared silence, and a walk, afterward: Atticus bundled in his winter garb, and Ziran in his standard, extravagant regalia, his bicorne hat cocked rakishly to one side. He walked with naked feet, heedless to the snow underfoot, the ice. His beak, carved from wood as thin as paper, gleamed with delicate pearlescence. Now, Atticus walked with Iila, lost in the silence of memory. Iila, resplendent in her long, black skirt, extravagant bicorne hat and curve-beaked mask, kept to herself as well. She’d insisted on walking with Atticus, tonight. She’d insisted on approaching the rocky shore and turning her back to the sea so that she might see the waning moon veiled behind clouds. “The moon is shy tonight,” she said. “It hides.” There was wonder in her voice. Atticus held onto his silence. Iila touched his hand and the warmth of her fingers was a jarring thing: an unexpected comfort. Atticus found her gaze, shadowed in the eyeholes of her mask. She smiled. Softly. “There will be a child,” she said. “You have helped to ensure this.” “Ziran loves you, more deeply than his flesh may say.” Iila nodded: the gesture was subtle. “He cherishes me. He respects me. He’s as good a husband as I might ask for…or parents were wise in making the arrangement. But he loves you, and your feelings are the same. I can read your eyes. A wife knows these things. In another world—one fairer that ours—he’d have you, and I’d have someone else. We have only this world, Atticus, and so I am content with the way things are.” There were things to say, perhaps: acknowledgements and promises, or empty, ritualistic words. But Atticus could say nothing. He felt too much: a muddle screaming and echoing behind and beneath all of his conscious thoughts. He maintained his silence, listening to distant, distant waves crashing on a rocky shore. A darker patch of cloud-vapor moved across the moon. “Do you believe in synchronicity?” Iila asked. Atticus shrugged. “I’ve never thought of it,” he said. “This moon,” Iila said. “Three quarters full and waning, obscured by clouds. It is called hbayem. It is the secret moon.” “Hbayem…” Atticus said, tasting the strange name. “I’ve never heard of it.” “You’re getting cold,” Iila said. “So, lets return home. Ziran should be back when we get there. If he is…when he is…ask him to read to you from The Book of Endless Nights. Ask him to read to you of Hbayem.” Atticus nodded. Sudden, liquid warmth streaked his cheeks, calling his attention to the lump in his throat. He wiped at the tears with his fingertips, and nodded. “I will,” he said, quietly. the end *** Stories seem to creep out of my mind at the weirdest times. I first discovered this little tale while visiting with Corey (CoreyBlack) last weekend. It simply oozed out of the recesses of my mind, and I knew that I simply had to write it. I had no clue as to who the characters were or what they would ultimately do. I only knew that the first line of the story was: "Let it die," a line I'd given to Corey (and others) as a challenge. The only requirement of that challenge was to begin a story with the sentence: "Let it die," she said. (If anyone is interested in this little writing exercise, feel free to write a tale [and post it here if you want,] beginning with: "Let it die," she said.) As a result of that little exercise inflicted on others, I took that challenge myself, and this story is the end result. I suspect there will be other stories in this universe...though I have to admit that this isn't the first story in this particular reality. When I wrote Songs of Wrath and Valor I had no idea that there were..."penguin people" in the southern hemisphere of that world, nor did I know that the the philosopher/historian/naturalist Hieronymus had encountered such people. Ah...fiction-writing...it's such a strange and surprising discipline! As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and hopefully, you've enjoyed this short little tale that proved far more challenging to write than its length implies. Fiction-writing is like that: the shortest stories often take the longest to write!