Nico Morel
NICO HEARD TALIS SPEAKING in the other room, even
though Matarh had gone to the square to get bread.
Matarh had kissed him
and told him to nap for a bit, saying that she’d be back before
supper. But he hadn’t been able to sleep, not with the sounds of
the people in the street just outside the shutters of his window,
not with the sun peeking through the cracks between the boards. He
was too old for naps now anyway. Those were for children, and he
was becoming a young man. Matarh had told him that,
too.
Nico threw the covers
aside and padded softly across the room. He leaned forward just
enough that he could see past the edge of the scarred, warped door
that never closed tightly—making sure he didn’t touch it, since he
knew the hinges would screech a rusty alarm. Through the crack
between door and jamb, he could see Talis. He was bent over the
table that Matarh used to prepare meals. A shallow bowl was sitting
on the table, and Nico squinted in an effort to see it better:
incised animals danced along the rim, and the bowl had the same hue
as the weathered bronze statue of Henri VI in Oldtown Square.
Matarh didn’t have a metal bowl, at least none that Nico had ever
noticed; the animals carved into it were strange, too: a bird with
a head like a snake’s; a scaled lizard with a long snout full of
snarled teeth. Talis poured water from Matarh’s pitcher into the
bowl, then untied a leather pouch from his belt and shook a
reddish, fine powder onto his palm. He dusted the powder into the
water as if he were salting food. He gestured with his hand over
the bowl as if smoothing something away, then spoke words in the
strange language that he sometimes spoke when he was dreaming at
night, cuddled with Nico’s matarh in their bed.
A light seemed to
glow inside the bowl, illuminating Talis’ face a sickly
yellow-green. Talis stared into the glowing bowl, his mouth open,
his head leaning closer and closer as if he were falling asleep,
though his eyes were wide. Nico didn’t know how long Talis stared
into the bowl—far longer than the breath Nico tried to hold. As he
watched, Nico thought he could feel a chill, as if the bowl were
sending a winter’s breath out from it, frigid enough that Nico
shivered. The feeling became stronger, and the breath Nico drew in
seemed to pull that cold inside with it, though somehow it felt
almost hot inside him. It made him want to breathe it back out,
like he could spit frozen fire.
In the other room,
Talis’ head nodded ever closer. When his face appeared to be about
to touch the rim of the bowl, the glow vanished as suddenly as it
had come, and Talis gasped as though drawing breath for the first
time.
Nico gasped, too,
involuntarily, as the cold and fire inside him vanished at the same
moment. He started to pull his head back from the door, but Talis’
voice stopped him. “Nico. Son.”
He peered back in.
Talis was staring at him, a smile creasing the lines of his olive
face. There were more wrinkles there, lately, and Talis’ hair was
beginning to be salted with gray. He groaned when he stood up too
fast and his joints sometimes creaked, even though Matarh said that
Talis was the same age as her. “It’s fine, Son. I’m not angry with
you.” Talis’ accent seemed stronger than usual. He gestured to
Nico, and Nico could see a smear of the red dust still on his palm.
He sighed as if he were tired and needed to sleep. “Come here.”
Nico hesitated. “Don’t worry; come here.”
Nico pushed open the
door—the hinge, as he knew it would, protesting loudly—and went to
Talis. The man picked him up (yes, he grunted with the effort) and
put him on a chair next to the table so he could see the bowl.
“Nico, this is a special bowl I brought with me from the country
where I used to live,” he said. “See . . . there’s water in it.” He
stirred the water with a fingertip. The water seemed entirely
ordinary now.
“Is the bowl special
because it can make water glow?” Nico asked.
Talis continued to
smile, but the way his eyebrows lowered over his eyes made the
smile look somehow wrong in his face. Nico could see his own face
staring back from the brown-black pupils of Talis’ eyes. There were
deep folds at the corner of those eyes. “Ah, so you saw that, did
you?”
Nico nodded. “Was
that magic?” he asked. “I know you’re not a téni because you never
go to temple with Matarh and me. Are you a Numetodo?”
“No,” he said. “I’m
not a Numetodo, nor a téni of the Faith. What you saw wasn’t magic,
Nico. It was just the sunlight coming in the window and reflecting
from the water in the bowl, that’s all. I saw it, too—so bright it
seemed like there was a tiny sun under the water. I liked the way
it looked, and so I watched it for a while.”
Nico nodded, but he
remembered the red dust and the strange, grassy color of the light
and the way it had bathed Talis’ face, as if a hand of light were
stroking him. He remember the cold fire. He didn’t mention any of
that, though. It seemed best not to, though he wasn’t certain
why.
“I love you, Nico,”
Talis continued. He knelt on the floor next to Nico’s chair, so
that their faces were the same height. His hands were on Nico’s
shoulders. “I love Serafina . . . your matarh . . . too. And the
best thing she’s ever given me, the thing that has made me the most
happy, is you. Did you know that?”
Nico nodded again.
Talis’ fingers were tight around his arms, so tight he couldn’t
move. Talis’ face was very near his, and he could smell the bacon
and honeyed tea on the man’s breath, and also a faint spiciness
that he couldn’t identify at all. “Good,” Talis said. “Now listen,
there’s no need to mention the bowl or the sunlight to your matarh.
I thought that one day I might give your matarh the bowl as a gift,
and I want it to be a surprise, and you don’t want to spoil that,
do you?”
Nico shook his head
at that, and Talis grinned widely, as if he’d told himself a joke
inside that Nico hadn’t heard. “Excellent,” he said. “Now, let me
finish washing the bowl—that’s what I was starting to do when you
saw me. That’s why I put the water in it.” Talis released Nico;
Nico rubbed at his shoulders with his hands as Talis picked up the
bowl, swirled the water inside it ostentatiously, then opened the
window shutters to dump it into the flowered windowbox. Talis wiped
the bowl with his linen bashta, and Nico heard the ring of metal.
He watched as Talis put the bowl into the pack that he kept under
the bed that he and Nico’s matarh shared, then put the pack back
underneath the straw-filled mattress.
“There,” Talis said
as he straightened again. “It’ll be our little secret, eh, Nico?”
He winked at Nico.
It would be their
secret. Yes.
Nico liked
secrets.