skin and general heat of the zona demanded that clothes be removed.
They ducked under a low sandstone archway to enter one of many parna rooms where, with large boulders and close-knit foliage that surrounded the smaller vents, steam accumulated with concentrated purpose. Ravno briefly explored the limited amount he could see inside the parna, while Keba found a thoroughly polished rock to sit upon. The room was strangely quiet, except for the breath of the vent and the sound of dripping water and of his feet shifting on the wet, scratchy rocks. He settled on a similar stone that had been sat on thousands of times before. He sat to her second and their knees almost touched as a right angle. So close but he could still hardly see her—though the steam lessened at times when the wind came through. One of her hands held her other elbow and her head tilted back. Keba breathed in deeply through her nose and into her stomach. The motion brought her eyelids closed as streamlets of steamlets ran the course of her body.
Ravno also closed his eyes and breathed in and exhaled. He opened his eyes and closed them again. He was conscious of how his arms lay in neutral repose on his legs. He wondered if it was odd to be so conscious of such things. Then he closed his eyes purposefully and switched with Keba. Her eyes were closed and her heart seemed closed too. But an avid feeling stirred within and her lids opened and blinked at the heat of the steam. Ravno watched as her eyes lay straight ahead and she looked at him through her peripheral.
What an experience to look at yourself with such lust! Ravno tried his best to stay steady and still. He focused on his breathing. In through the nose and down to the stomach, out from the chest and out from the nose. He felt the hard stone against the bottoms of his thighs, his feet and toes on stone, but smoother stone here beside the vent. He lingered as her eyes lingered, lashes lowering or locked, their focuses coalescing. It felt like he had interlocked fingers at the bottom of his skull, ice-cold fingers that locked and squeezed and pulled apart. He wandered the twists of his neck and shoulders with her eyes, and his flat chest, even flatter than hers, and his lengthening penis and his considerate and calloused hands…. He lost his place in the process and opened his eyes to the heavy grey air and the sunbeams that shuddered through airborne water molecules. He lost his place and wondered, Is it her or me, from whose eyes do I now see?
Ravno’s head rolled to the side and he saw his hand but it was her hand reach over and gather his fingers and hold them tight. And the fingers turned to icicles and shattered—the ones at the base of his skull—and he turned his own head to look over to his hand, which was held tightly by her hand. Everything glistened. He had to hold his eyes closed and open again to focus. He was conscious of how incredibly clear his nostrils were, with the steam that flowed in and out.
Later, after he cooled and the blood flowed less urgently between his legs, they wrung out their soaked clothes and put them on at the dock. They stood side by side and watched a scarlet-throated hummingbird flit between clusters of foxglove. Ravno’s mind riveted on the fierceness he had sensed in her before, when he had inhabited her body. He reached over and turned her to face him and opened her capa, roughly and all at once.
‘Rav, no!’ Her defensive reaction and the way she clutched her bunched capa at her chest snapped his mind back with sudden clarity. The regret and tenderness didn’t last long as his shame carried its own bout of defense and he backed up nervously.
‘I uh, I didn’t, I thought, weren’t you…?’ Ravno stuttered helplessly.
‘Jebati makian. What are you thinking? You can wait here for the boto. I’m taking the long way around.’
He looked at her, stunned, unaccustomed to her anger. She seemed taller and stronger. Even so, he couldn’t bear the thought of her sledging her way through the forest alone. She would come upon the Sunberry Trench, and the Duat no less, and upon the inevitable chill that hid in folds of darkness.
‘K wait. Seriously, don’t go that way. I’ll go, you stay here. This is ridiculous.’
She spun on him from halfway up the black steps.
‘Makian, get off the dock if you mean it.’ She spat the words like the side-to-side movements of the hummingbird and her throat turned scarlet—spectacular he could see even that in the failing light. He stared at her resolute yet hesitant feet on the basalt.
His mind scrambled, How did this happen so quickly? How do I make it stop?
He blurted out, ‘Did you know your fearless leader, Dabi, got a letter from your enemies and she went to join the Eleven on Santulita?’
Keba didn’t capture any of the small amount of genuine concern that laced his tone. But she caught his attack and turned to finish the stairs.
He quickly said, ‘She went before the last quarter started. Yerek had asked her to come on the fifth day’s waning.’
Keba breathed out shortly and set her jaw. After her head ducked out of sight it was as if she had never been there at all.
An aberration
The front section of Ravno’s brain felt unusually empty—incredibly immaterial. He sat with his feet dangling off the dock and let the first boto emerge and regress into the foggy canal without him. He gently bit his teeth along the delicate skin inside his bottom lip. He sat on his hands, savored the rough spruce pain on his knuckles, then let his hands rest on his legs—less conscious of them this time.
She wanted me in the parna. She wanted me to be closer. But he knew Keba disliked part of him. While she ate him with her eyes through the steam, she had been restrained. Was that why she didn’t come at him with equal appetite? But it was there inside her I felt it, he thought. She wants to be closer. She wanted to.
But she wasn’t. Apathetic grey crows watched her follow an unworn trail through mid-island forest and bush. Her capa, still unclasped, flapped sadly in its wetness. Her small nose brought in forest air loudly and her eyebrows were tense, unlike languid slugs on the damp ground. Keba remembered that Dabi had been reading a piece of paper at the last meeting.
Makian, he’s right. Who’s to say what it was? But all those details that he knew…. She decided to at least check with Dabi, or maybe Jasmin knew about it. A growing distaste irritated her tongue. Everything had been so good. Had he been nervous? But she recalled with disgust how rough he had been as he madly ripped her capa open even after the moments they shared in the parna.
Keba walked firmly through the fractured forest and Ravno boarded the next boto that came through drapes of moisture-rich air. He tightened his dimples to acknowledge the grebets and sat facing forward. His damp cloth and skirt darkened the sugar pine that wafted faintly sweet smells in the briny evening. He paddled along and numbly followed their rhythm. Ghosts boarded then went ashore as they drew closer to Duat Canal. Ravno got out and stayed on the dock at the center of Lurruna, to wait for the last length to Mara. The next boto docked and he spotted that girl again—the same girl? Unmistakably, with her round lips of silk. She got up from the bow, stepped over the saxboard and up onto the dock with her hair like brackets around her wily eyes. As Ravno approached the boto he wanted to look straight at her into those eyes but couldn’t resist a switch with her instead. As his eyes fell into place, he found her looking steadfast and forward to the basalt steps as she passed him; though, she watched him from the side of her vision and he was surprised to feel her attraction. He paused after he switched back, stunned at the edge of the spruce planks before the boto.
‘Ready?’
Ravno looked over to the expectant navita, whose question snapped him out of his reverie.
‘Oh, I’m not… I forgot….’ His feet turned his mind that turned his body around and back up the steps and away from the departing craft. The navita, Bapor’s only saudara, burly and robust, glanced back in time to see the woman turn around to the boy with the sea-crushed hair. Then his paddle dug fast, through the dark waters to Mara.
‘Cahaya, I’m Ravno.’ The girl’s long fingers closed around his cold hand like lianas on cottonwood. The somber gradation of her high cheekbones darke
ned around lurid eyes that were locked on his. The middle of his chest started to burn and he could feel his heart beat in his weakened stomach. He swallowed.
‘Cahaya Ravno, I am Sircy. I have seen you before, around the island.’
She didn’t smile and her face was still as she spoke. Though when she spoke it was like a song—not light and fairy-like but full and dark as if crafted deep in a solitary wood. He wanted her to speak again but he wasn’t sure what to say next. The sliver of moon hid somewhere else in its rotation and wouldn’t show itself again until the night was old; twilight faded quickly and Sircy’s eyes became darker. Ravno feared she understood what he was feeling, perhaps even better than he understood himself. He wished he was back in the parna with Keba’s hand in his with the warmth of the steam all around them.
‘I live close by here. Are you cold, Ravno?’
He couldn’t argue. His body gave small spasms that made his arm shake within the grasp of her spiny fingers. They arrived at her pack in the dark, with shimmers of winged beetles overshadowed by Notou’s dim outline against the starry brilliance. Inside, she took off his capa, skirt, and cloth and wrapped him in a coarse hemp blanket. He sat on a mound of leaves and watched her as she put dried herbs and