“A dove of peace!” Francour sneered down at the people in the courtyard. “My father will make war against them until the mountains crumble!”
The Solognians laughed. One of them drew his sword, making as if to chop the bird in half in midair, as a final insult to Enth.
But, something over a trimeter from the shining dove, an obstruction in the air caused it to rebound back, almost out of the swordsman’s hand. The others, all of the armed krilla cavalry of the Solognian army and Francour’s minions, flew close to see what the problem was. Angelo clapped his hands, and the semblance fell away. In the place of the tiny bird flew a full-grown, silver-scaled dragon. It smiled, showing rows of sharp, white teeth. The krilla screamed in panic, scattered and streaked away over the horizon.
“Stop!” Francour bellowed, as his steed raced away, wings frantically flapping, no longer under his control. His voice receded into the distance. “It’s only an illusion! Halt!”
Andoria wheeled lazily on the air, and flew after them at her leisure. She liked to play with her prey a while. Angelo was glad he did not have to watch. Francour might survive, or he might not. The wizard turned to bow to the regente.
“They will not return, your serenity,” he said.
The interrupted wedding feast became a celebration for all the defenders. Musicians suddenly remembered how to tune their instruments, and everyone donned their long-neglected finery. Somehow, sweetmeats, good fruit, and cheeses sprang up from the very earth. To their astonishment and pleasure, Angelo’s apprentices were praised and toasted with good wine that almost magically appeared from cellars, sheds, and haystacks.
“Don’t let it go to your heads,” the court wizard admonished their glowing faces. “You’ll be back learning basic skills tomorrow morning, without fail.”
His stern words didn’t diminish his pupils’ joy in the slightest. Nor should it, he thought, expansively. Ah, he was proud of them.
The dancing and gaiety went on until the shadow of the dragon overspread the courtyard. The merrymakers screamed and huddled together in terror. The music died away.
“She will not harm you!” Angelo called. “Do not fear!”
Andoria circled the castle until Angelo pointed down the curving pathway toward the inlaid circle at the top of the road from the valley. The dragon flew to it and backwinged the air, waiting.
“I must go to her,” he told Zoraida.
“I will come with you,” she said.
“Not without me, your serenity!” Rafello said, horrified. “That’s a dragon!”
“She is our savior,” Zoraida said, taking Angelo’s arm. “I owe her the gratitude of all my realm.”
Andoria dropped a glowing blue egg into Angelo’s hand. The dragonstone.
“Your apprentice gave me this,” she said. “He makes his way back. A faithful boy.”
“I thank you, great one,” Angelo said, bowing. He held the sphere up to her. “Take this back, my friend. Your debt is more than paid.”
“Keep it,” said the dragon, a glint in her ruby eyes. “That was fun. I must return to my eggs. The imp I left caring for them will be … impatient.”
“That is their nature,” the wizard said, gravely. He bowed deeply. “Farewell, my friend.”
“We will see one another soon,” Andoria said. “Bring a sheep. In fact, bring two.”
“I shall!” Angelo laughed, feeling at ease for the first time in more than ten days.
“Not a real magician, eh?” the regente asked, leading them back along the winding white path to the castle. Rafello fell in behind them, his big shoulders at ease for once.
Angelo smiled.
“I … give the illusion of one, in any case.”
A Bitter Thing
written by
N.R.M. Roshak
illustrated by
Jazmen Richardson
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
N.R.M. Roshak lives in Ottawa, Canada, with a spouse, a young child, an elderly cat, and a revolving menagerie that currently includes a pet slug and a cannibalistic brine shrimp. The author writes:
“I grew up reading my father’s extensive SF/F collection, from Asimov to Zelazny. I loved science, but even more, I loved imagining myself into alien points of view: what would it be like to be human-but-not, or human-but-other? I had planned to study science at university, until I read Thomas Nagel’s famous paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ which argues that we can never know what it’s like to be a bat, only what it’s like to be a human having bat experiences. To a longtime imaginer of self-as-other, this was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I plunged into the argument, only realizing once I held a philosophy-and-math degree that I greatly prefer imagining to arguing.
“I’m often asked what one can do with a degree in philosophy and math, other than philosophy of math. For me, the answer was a career in IT. After many years wrangling data and databases, and a few wrangling a small child, I’ve returned to imagining. I may never know what it is like to be a bat, a telepath, or an alien; but there’s much to be learned in the imagining, to explore what it means to be human by imagining what it is to be partly or wholly inhuman.”
The author cordially invites you to visit http://nrmroshak.com.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Jazmen Richardson was born in 1998 in Auburn, New York. Living in the middle of nowhere most of her life, her imagination was able to roam through the fields surrounding her home.
Jazmen has been drawing and creating stories since she could walk and hold a pencil. Whether they made sense to the viewer or not at the time, each story’s characters were as real to her as another family member.
Though her family is full of creative hearts, she is the first to pursue it as a career.
After graduating a year early from high school to pursue an artistic mentorship, Jazmen was able to attend Ringling College of Art and Design of Sarasota, Florida to study illustration and the business of art and design.
She has been working in digital art for two years now, and is moving toward a specialty in oil painting.
Jazmen concurrently works convention-like events striving to make connections with other artists and improve herself and her work. She may be quiet, but there is nothing more gratifying than meeting new faces and experiencing stories other than her own.
A Bitter Thing
“But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.” —Shakespeare,
As You Like It (V.ii.20)
I should have known that something was wrong when I found Teese in the backyard, staring at the sky. It was sunset and the horizon was a particular shade of pale teal. At first I thought Teese was just admiring the sunset, but then I realized he was trembling all over. His eyes were wide, and irregular patterns swept over his skin, his chromatophores opening and closing at random, static snow sprinkling his skin.
I touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Above us, the sky darkened toward night. Teese shook himself like a dog, blinked, looked at me. “That sunset,” he said. “We don’t … these colors … this doesn’t happen on our world.”
“You don’t have sunsets?” As I understood it, sunsets should happen anywhere there was dust in the air.
“No, no,” he said. “Of course, we have sunsets, Ami, but they tend more toward the red side of the spectrum. Your planet is so rich in blues. These colors, they’re not very common on my world. I suppose I was surprised by my reaction to seeing that particular shade of blue spread across the sky.” He smiled down at me. “Anyway, it’s all changed now. Fleeting as a sunset, isn’t that the expression?”
Teese was back to his usual smooth articulateness, so I wrote it off as his being momentarily overcome by the Earth’s breathtaking beauty. In retrospect, that was pretty arrogant and ant
hropocentric of me. But at the time, I thought: who wouldn’t be struck dumb by my amazing planet?
That night, Teese stared deep into my eyes as we made love, and trembled, just a bit. Static flared across his cheeks as he came. His heart-shaped pupils flared wide, drinking me in, and he murmured “I could stare into your eyes forever.”
So, of course, I thought we were all right. We were all right. However unlikely, however improbable, what could it be but love?
The next warning sign came weeks later, when Teese painted the linen closet blue. He moved out all the towels and sheets, took out the shelves, painted the walls (and the ceiling, and the back of the door) greenish-blue, and perched on a stool in the middle of the closet. He called it his “meditation closet,” jokingly, and said that he went in there to relax. At first it was for minutes at a time, then slowly his “meditation time” grew to hours.
“The things your people do with color are amazing to me,” he said. “So many colors, and you put them everywhere.”
“What, you don’t have paint where you come from?”
“Of course we have paint,” he said. “But we use it for art. No one would think to put gallons of blue and green in cans for people to take home and spread all over their house. It would cost …” He paused. Interstellar currency conversions were impossible, finding correspondences of value almost as difficult. “Many years of my salary, I think, to paint just this closet.”
“Well, that makes sense. If you went to an art supply store here and got your paint in little tiny tubes, it would cost a lot more here, too.”
“And the colors,” he continued. “I think I have told you that most of our colors are in reds and browns and oranges. Even in paintings, we don’t have so many shades of blue.”
“That’s weird,” I said. “I mean, you can see just as many shades of blue, right?”
“Yes, but …” He considered. “Ami, I think that you have so much blue that you don’t see how it surrounds you. You can make a painting with a blue sky and blue water, and use one hundred different shades of blue, and everyone sees it as normal and right. But think of another color that you don’t have in such abundance, like purple. Imagine a painting with nothing but one hundred shades of purple.”
His words triggered a memory. “I actually had a painting like that once,” I admitted. “I found it in the trash in college. It had a purple sky and a purple-black sea and two really badly painted white seagulls. It was so awful that I had to keep it.”
Amusement fluttered across his skin. “Tacky, right? Well, that’s what most of my people would think of your sea and sky paintings. But I love it. I love to be surrounded by blue.”
“Meditating?”
He waved an arm noncommittally. “Ommmm,” he said, brown fractals of laughter flashing across his skin.
Then Teese bought one of those fancy multicolor LED light bulbs, tuned it to the exact shade of the walls, and didn’t come out for a day.
He was in the closet when I left for work, and still there when I got home. I tapped on the door—no answer. I told myself to give him his space and went about fixing dinner, even though it was his turn to cook. Teese’s diet was similar enough to ours that we could cook for each other, though there was a long list of vegetables he was better off without. I knocked on the door when dinner was ready and called his name. No answer. I ate without him.
Later, I pressed my ear against the door but heard only my own heartbeat against the wood. It was dark by then, and blue light seeped out from under the door.
Finally, I eased the door open a crack and peeked in. Teese was sprawled on the floor next to the upturned stool, eyes vacant, skin utterly blank.
I yelled his name, shook him, even slapped his face. My fingers trembled as I pressed them urgently into his skin. I remembered that Teese had two hearts, but I couldn’t remember where they were, or how to find his pulse. There was no one I could call, no doctor or ambulance who could help him. I was alone with Teese, and Teese was gone, sick, maybe dying.
I dragged him out into the hallway, slowly. Teese doesn’t have any bones to speak of. He’s all head and muscled limbs. Normally he holds himself upright on four powerfully muscled limbs and uses the other two like arms. Passed out, he was a tangle of heavy rubber hoses filled with wet cement. I had to pull the blanket off the bed, roll him onto the blanket, and drag the blanket out of the closet with Teese on it.
I stood over him in the hallway and felt terribly alone.
I had met Teese at a party I hadn’t planned to go to. At the last minute I’d let myself be swayed by the rumors that one of them would be there. A so-called hexie. Their ship had landed months ago, and while the VIPs on board were busy hammering out intergalactic trade deals, most of the ship’s crew were just sailors who wanted to get off the ship, get drunk, and maybe get to know some locals. They’d been showing up by ones and twos at bars and clubs and parties all over town. I’d seen the hexies in the news, heard about their appearances at bars and parties, but never met one in person. And like everyone else, I was curious.
I saw him the moment I stepped in the door: big head held up above the crowd, two long and flexible arms gesticulating, one of them holding a drink. His eyes swept the room, scanned over me, and snapped back. From there, it was like a romance novel, of the kind I’d always found tedious and unrealistic. Our gazes locked. He stopped midsentence, handed his drink to someone without looking, and started pushing his way across the room to me. My heart hammered in my chest. Of course, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but why was he staring at me?
He stopped in front of me and took my hand, coiling his powerful armtip around my fingers as gently as I’d cradle a moth.
“I am Teese,” he said. “Forgive me for being so direct, but I have never seen eyes as beautiful as yours before.”
Hackneyed words, but they sounded fresh coming from his lipless mouth.
“I’m Ami,” I stammered. “And I’ve never seen anything like you either.”
Orange and brown checks rippled across his face. Later I would learn that this meant interest, arousal, excitement. I let him lead me to a quiet corner.
We talked. He told me about the ship, the long watches tending to the cryo boxes, the vastness of interstellar space. I told him about my job at the CITGO station and my apartment and the time my cat died.
“When I look at you,” he said, “I feel things that I’ve never felt before.”
What else could I do? I took him home, and he stayed.
Now I was alone in my hallway with Teese unconscious. I stepped around his arms and closed the linen closet, and sat down on the ground next to him. Soft blue light leaked out from under the closet door. I turned on the hall light and turned off the closet light, for lack of anything more constructive to do. Then I sat back down on the ground beside Teese and wondered what to do next. Smelling salts probably wouldn’t help an alien from another planet, had I even had any on hand.
I could sprinkle water on his face, but I had no idea if that would work on him. I could pinch him.
I could sit next to him and stare at his open, blank eyes and wish I’d thought to ask him for a way to contact his ship.
I could search his things for a way to contact his ship, but I didn’t want to go there if I could avoid it. Teese had been living with me for two months, which is both a long time and not long at all, and as far as I could tell, he’d never gone through my closet or papers while I was at work. I owed him the same respect.
Teese stirred sluggishly on the floor next to me.
I leaned over him. “Teese?”
His eyes focused on me. “Ohhh, Ami,” he said, half moaning. And then his skin was suddenly, completely covered in violently red spots. Across his face, all up and down his arms, from the dome of his head to his armtips, he was covered with hexagonal measles that shifted and spun.
Te
ese’s emotions showed on his skin, but I had never seen this one before, never seen such a violent and complete display.
I laid a gentle finger on his cheek, trying to pin one of the oscillating spots under my fingertip. “Teese,” I said. “I don’t know this one.”
Teese looked at me for a long moment before replying.
“Shame, Ami,” he said. “It is shame.”
Teese’s people feel emotions the moment they see them. If I’d been one of Teese’s people, I would’ve been flooded with shame the moment I saw the red blotches on his skin, and a paler echo would have bloomed on my own skin. It’s beyond empathy: it’s instant and direct and irresistible. If I’d been a hexie, I would have said: “Why are we ashamed?” while my skin and emotions thrummed in synchrony with his.
But I wasn’t, and so I could only ask, “What are you ashamed of?”
Teese sighed, a sound I had taught him to make. “I spent too long meditating,” he finally said.
“Did you forget to eat?”
“Hm. I suppose I did, but I don’t think that’s why.… You shouldn’t have had to drag me out of the closet.”
“I think we’re doing something a little beyond gay here,” I quipped, then wished I hadn’t as gray puzzlement dusted itself over the shame blotching his skin. “Never mind, bad joke. But if it wasn’t hunger, why did you pass out, or whatever that was? Teese, are you sick?”
“No, no,” he said. “You don’t need to worry, Ami. I’m fine.” He sighed again. “It was … I was … I just don’t know how to explain it.”
“Try,” I urged him. Partly because I was worried and scared, and partly because, as we talked, the shame was slowly fading from his skin, supplanted by the dark-orange fractal trees Teese sported whenever he was thinking hard.
“Well,” he said. “I was … I was looking at the walls and I got … too much blue.”
“Too much blue?” I said.