Tess of the Road

  “Are you hungry? You’re working hard.”

  She held her hand as close as she dared and soon felt a snuffle of hot breath as it cautiously approached her again. A rough tongue, like autumn leaves, swept the cheese into an unseen mouth. Tess laughed in amazement.

  Seraphina, who’d taken her merry time sauntering across the basement, was now banging on the door and shouting, “It’s Seraphina! You’ve locked me in….No, Tessie isn’t here. You must have been mistaken. I always read in the cellar. Just open up, would you?”

  It seemed an eternity, waiting helplessly while the quigutl groaned and grunted its agony, but Seraphina returned with a second lamp and some expensive Porphyrian olive oil, and then with a pot of steaming water and some thick woolen bandages, lunessas, like Mama used for her monthlies when she wasn’t pregnant.

  The quigutl jabbered urgently and Seraphina nodded.

  “Take it by turns rubbing the egg with oil and applying a warm compress to the skin around the opening. Watch the blood—it’s poisonous,” said Seraphina. “Also, hand me back my book. Thank you.”

  Seraphina settled in to squint at her book. The toil fell to Tess, but she didn’t begrudge a minute of it. She calmly wiped blood off the egg, wrung out the bandages, dabbed and stanched. There was a piercing smell, like hot, metallic sewage, that made her stomach turn, but she got around this by imagining herself a battlefield surgeon, or a heroic farmer saving sheep…scaly, stinky, snappy sheep.

  The quigutl would occasionally chirrup, and Seraphina would translate without looking up: “More to the right with that compress,” or “Now press on its belly just below the sternum.”

  “What’s a sternum?” cried Tess, afraid of getting it wrong.

  Seraphina indicated her own, and Tess dived in, perhaps too enthusiastically. The quigutl screamed, but that was the final push. The egg popped out, glistening with oil and quigutl blood.

  The shell was stony gray and lightly pitted. Tess wiped it clean with her apron, realizing too late that this would leave some difficult-to-explain stains. The quigutl lay on its side, exhausted, its ribs rising and falling rapidly.

  “Any more eggs in there?” Tessie asked.

  The quigutl shook its weary head.

  Tessie felt weary, too, but also exhilarated. She was almost sorry it was over.

  “I’m Tessie,” said Tess, resisting the urge to hold out a hand for the quigutl to shake. That surely wasn’t how quigs greeted each other. “What’s your name?”

  The creature swiveled an eye cone at her, as if it couldn’t believe she was still talking.

  Tess stood up reluctantly, untying her filthy apron and wadding it into a ball. She had taken up one lamp, and Seraphina the other, when the quigutl raised its heavy head once more and spoke.

  Tessie glanced at Seraphina, her face lit eerily from below. “What did it say?”

  “That’s its name,” said her sister. “I can’t translate it. It’s just a name.”

  “Say it again?” Tessie asked the quigutl softly, hating to impose upon its exhaustion.

  The quigutl enunciated: “Pathka. Fthuma tikith pa Anathuthia kiushth.”

  “It’s called Paska,” said Seraphina, converting its hard-mouth sounds into softer human phonemes. She paused, chewing the inside of her cheek, as if the rest were harder to translate, then said, “And it commends you to the great snake…Anassussia?”

  “Anathuthia,” the little quigutl corrected her.

  Seraphina shrugged it off. “I have no idea what kind of bizarre reptilian benediction that’s supposed to be, but there you go.”

  “Thank you,” said Tess, who knew it was a gift, anyway. She smiled at Pathka, and the quigutl twitched its head spines in such a way that she knew, without understanding how, that it was smiling back.

  “Thank you for helping me escape,” said older, male Pathka in the loft of the goat barn, once they’d eaten their meager supper. “That’s the second time you’ve named my life.”

  “I what your what?” asked Tess, pausing with her dusty blanket half out of her satchel.

  “Name is a nuanced verb in Quootla, sorry,” said Pathka. “I mean, that’s the second time you saved my life.”

  “Were they going to kill you?” Tess asked, appalled.

  “Eventually,” said Pathka. “Perhaps not literally. I don’t know how long I could have kept pushing against them, or when I might’ve decided my convictions weren’t worth the fight.”

  Tess shook out the blanket, spread it, and lay down, folding one side over herself and leaving a lip for Pathka to lie on. He curled up next to her like a hot, spiky dog.

  “So I saved your life that time in the cellar?” Tess mused, staring into the dark. She knew she’d saved Pathka’s life, in fact, but wanted to hear that she’d done one good thing as a child. Surely, if you were capable of one good thing, you couldn’t have been born bad.

  Pathka was in her face, his scaly snout bumped up against her nose. “Don’t doubt it. That last egg was too big for me to pass; I could tell it would be, even as its shell was forming. I nested alone because I thought I might die, and I didn’t want to give Karpeth the satisfaction.”

  “Karpeth?” asked Tess, wanting to pull away from Pathka’s fetid breath.

  “My sibling,” said Pathka, backing off. “Karpeth was a…what do you call someone who thinks deeply and can’t stop talking about it?”

  “A priest?” said Tess, mystified. “A philosopher? Dragons and naturalists also—”

  “Philothopher,” said Pathka, seeming satisfied with the Goreddi word. “We don’t have a separate word for that; quigutl used to be enough. We were all philothophers once, but things have changed. We are adrift, and the thinnest breeze may blow us where it will.”

  Tess recognized that last sentence as a line from Dozerius, and smiled to herself. She and Pathka had both loved stories when they were young; she’d traded Dozerius tales for the old quigutl myths about great serpents beneath the earth.

  “Karpeth’s ideas have proved to be sticky; they cling to my brethren like a second set of scales. When the war ended and the Ardmagar Comonot made it legal for us to sell our devices in the Southlands, Karpeth decided this was our chance. We could accumulate money and become more like the saar,” said Pathka, pushing himself away from Tess’s side restlessly.

  He began pacing the loft. “We would be ruthless, logical, dominating, miserly. Hoarding. No mercy for the weak. Thus did the saar achieve greatness while we crawled in the shadows, eating garbage.

  “But look at me: small for my age, never the strongest. My mind and heart were mighty, though; I argued well against my sibling, and there were those who agreed with me.

  “Karpeth ambushed me and got me with eggs, knowing it might kill me to lay them.”

  “Saints’ bones!” cried Tess, appalled that her friend had endured a violent ravaging—by a sibling, no less—and was speaking about it matter-of-factly, as if it were nothing unusual.

  “I wouldn’t have minded dying,” said Pathka, misinterpreting Tess’s horror, “but ko would have invited everyone to watch and fthep me in judgment.”

  Pathka demonstrated fthep with a stinging tail-whip to Tess’s leg.

  “Did Karpeth come to Trowebridge?” Tess asked.

  “Karpeth is dead,” said Pathka, in a tone that forbade follow-up questions. “Ko ideas endure, however, and when I push against them, I get worse than a mere fthep.”

  “Why would they chain you up and force you to stay?” asked Tess. “Wouldn’t it have been more agreeable to everyone if you’d left?”

  “That,” said Pathka, “is a story for another time. I’d much rather hear what you’ve been up to these last six years than relive all my worst memories of Trowebridge in one evening.” Pathka shook himself like a dog and then burrowed his snout in her armpit. “I w
as right: you had a baby. Don’t deny it; I have the keenest olfaction in nature.”

  “You can’t really smell baby under my arm,” said Tess, forcing levity into her tone, pushing back against the familiar leaden feeling creeping into her gut.

  “It’s your mammary tissue,” Pathka explained. “It changes when—”

  “Fine. Stop,” said Tess. Suddenly there were tears burgeoning in her eyes. She wrapped her arms around her head as if to physically hold them in.

  She dared not cry. Three years of pushed-down grief had accumulated pressure, like water behind a dam, and she couldn’t release just a trickle. It would gush uncontrollably, split her up the middle, and kill her, like trying to pass a too-big egg.

  Pathka sniffed her head anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

  “Sorry,” said Tess. “Sorry. I—hold on. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” said Pathka hastily. “I don’t smell young child on you. I hadn’t considered the implications of that. You don’t have to tell the story if it hurts you.”

  She needed to say something, though, or the story would squat between them like a malevolent toad, poisoning the very air. Maybe it would be a relief to tell someone like Pathka. Surely he wouldn’t judge her. She didn’t want to feel anything while she told it, however, which was a challenge.

  She racked her brains, composing an official, unsentimental version. The only way through was to judge herself. She said, “I was stupid.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Pathka, patting her foot.

  Tess took a deep breath of goat-tinged air. “Foolish, then. After the war, I started sneaking out to St. Bert’s and attending natural philosophy lectures. Your old World Serpent stories drove me to it, in part.” Another deep breath. “I wanted to know more about them and other wonders the world might hold.” And she’d been bored, and mad at her mother. There was no point going into all that.

  “See?” cried Pathka. “You wanted to learn the laws of nature. Not stupid!”

  Tess smiled wistfully at his innocent faith in her, but didn’t refute him. If she paused, she’d lose her momentum. “I met a boy, William of Affle, and—”

  What could she say about Will that wouldn’t hurt? He was handsome, and he took care of me?

  No.

  He promised he’d marry me?

  Double no.

  We were going to travel together in search of the World Serpents someday?

  Ha.

  Pathka offered an interpretation: “You loved him, like princesses loved Dozerius.”

  Tess considered. She was still so angry that he’d left, so humiliated and mortified, that she couldn’t quite remember feeling love. She probably had. It didn’t matter.

  “I loved him, and I did everything my mother ever told me not to do.”

  “How else were you to determine it couldn’t be done?” said Pathka reasonably.

  “Y-yes,” said Tess. That wasn’t exactly what had happened with Will, but it gave the story a clean logic and put the blame squarely where it belonged. “I was the cat curiosity would kill, Seraphina used to say. Anyway, not listening to your mother leads to pregnancy, I learned.”

  Flippancy wasn’t helping; tears threatened again. She puffed her breath like Chessey the midwife had advised during childbirth.

  “The body wants what it wants,” said Pathka sagely.

  That irritated her. Her good judgment had not been overcome by bodily lusts; Pathka was misunderstanding. Arguing meant delving deeper into the story, however, and…She couldn’t. It was time to fold up this memory and wedge it into the darkest corner of her mind, out of sight.

  “I threw my future away,” she said curtly, summing up. That was the whole story, the real story. “Jeanne got to be ‘eldest’ and marry a duke. I had to wait on her at court.”

  Tess launched into an account of Jeanne’s courtship and wedding, which she could tell with humor, at least. Pathka listened raptly, squawking sympathy at Tess’s humiliations, flailing his tail in excitement when she punched Jacomo in the nose.

  “There,” cried Pathka, as if he’d been waiting for it. “You’re still yourself after all.”

  “What, a priest-puncher?” she said.

  “No, no.” Pathka head-butted her ribs. “I feared that your misfortunes had cured you of your taste for adventure, that you’d decided to live a small, circumscribed life, like the penitent Julithima Rotha.”

  Julissima Rossa had been one of the pirate Dozerius’s lovers. Guilt had driven her to give up adventuring, and then, when Dozerius wouldn’t leave her in peace, she’d taken her own life, the gleaming knife pressed to her ebony breast.

  Tess had found that description terribly romantic as a child, but she hadn’t thought about the story in years. She wouldn’t die that beautifully; she always did everything the wrong way.

  “Surely you ran away to go adventuring, like we always spoke of,” Pathka was insisting.

  Tess emitted a bitter laugh. “Pathka, dear, I can no more go adventuring than I can fly. It was one thing to dream of it when I was little and didn’t know better. Now that I have more sense of what’s possible”—and how bad the results can be—“there’s no way. Even in the Dozerius stories, women never hare off on adventures by themselves. It’s too dangerous.”

  Pathka cocked his head to one side. “Julithima Rotha fought alongside—”

  “Julissima Rossa killed herself!” cried Tess. “Julissima Rossa proves the rule: women plus adventure equals disaster.”

  Pathka was silent, as if pondering her vehemence. “Why did you leave home, then?”

  “Because these boots seemed to demand it,” Tess joked weakly. “I barely had a plan, beyond escaping my family and avoiding the convent.”

  “You were on your way to somewhere,” Pathka pressed. “You can’t walk away without also walking toward.”

  Tess snorted. “Assuming I could get anywhere without being ravaged, robbed, and left for dead in the weeds, I suppose…I had some notion to head south, to Ninys.”

  Pathka bounced excitedly, barely able to contain himself. “I’m going south! The world brought you to me for a reason. I wasn’t meant to go alone; no quigutl should have to be forever alone.”

  “You’re going where?” asked Tess, baffled.

  “Back to the beginning, back to the wellspring of my people, to Anathuthia!” cried Pathka. “Anathuthia, Anathuthia, Anathuthia!”

  Tess sat up. Beams of moonlight cut through chinks in the planked wall, and Pathka danced in and out of them, flashing and slashing like some ancient spirit, a creature out of myth.

  “You don’t mean…,” said Tess through a laugh.

  Pathka stopped dancing and grabbed her face. His padded ventral hands felt hot against her cheeks. “The World Serpent. The one beneath our continent, the one who will restore us to ourselves. I dreamed she was under a field of waving wheat, the Ninysh high plains.”

  “Do quigutl dream?” asked Tess. The great dragons didn’t.

  “Only when we’re alone. We don’t dream all together in a nest—and yet I did,” said Pathka. “That’s why this is important: because it’s impossible.”

  No, it was merely eccentric. A woman walking the roads alone was impossible. If she traveled with Pathka, though, she wouldn’t be alone.

  “Think it over,” said Pathka as Tess lay down again. He turned in a tight circle and lay beside her with his tail in her face. “You suggested finding the World Serpents a long time ago. This dream means Anathuthia is ready to be found.”

  Tess had indeed been keen to search, before Will had run off with her future and all her courage and enthusiasm. Tess laid a hand on Pathka’s ridged spine, her bones leaden with weariness. “Sleep, friend. Let’s decide in the morning.”

  It wasn’t the only decision she was p
utting off till then.

  Pathka rested his chin on her ankle and soon began to snore.

  * * *

  There is no snore quite like a quigutl’s. The greater dragons snore, of course, but they rumble so deeply that the sound is more tactile than auditory. Quigutl snore in chords, like sad, deflating accordions with several jammed keys, a tune to keep teeth on edge and make skin crawl.

  Seraphina could have identified the exact notes; Tess, alas, had to suffer in ignorance.

  Not at first, however. She was so exhausted that she slept through the wheezing—to say nothing of Pathka’s gnarled feet in her face, his spiky head upon her leg, and his body temperature like a portable furnace.

  Once she’d slept enough to take the edge off her exhaustion, the snoring woke her, and sleep fled. She mulled over Pathka’s words. You’re still yourself after all, he’d said, as if he’d worried that she’d become something else in the years since they’d last seen each other.

  Of course she had. One didn’t fall as hard as she’d fallen and come out the same. When she was little—when Pathka had known her—she’d still had hope that maybe, if she tried, she could be good enough to see the Golden House and dwell forever with Allsaints and Jeanne. That maybe her mother—or anyone, really—would be proud of her someday, moved to say, She wasn’t the sweet one, or the smart one, but she contrived to be worthy in her own way.

  Punching a priest had not been worthy, or good, or even entirely reasonable, so what had Pathka gleaned? That she was as childish and impulsive as she’d always been? That she still stupidly aspired to be like Dozerius, answering the world with her fists?

  Dozerius hadn’t always punched his way out of trouble, though. He could be wily when he had to be, or suave, or sneaky. Dozerius’s chief virtue was resourcefulness. There’s never just one trick to try, comrades, he used to say.

  Tess rolled over, abandoning the blanket to Pathka. She didn’t want to be Tess anymore; Tess was nothing but trouble. Why couldn’t she be Dozerius instead? It didn’t seem so childish an aspiration, here in the wee hours. It certainly beat dying.