That night, the fifth since leaving Magda’s Oasis, they camped on a red rock and sand butte made maze-like with its patches of prickly pear and squat Jumping Cholla trees.
Esperidi was grateful for how the day’s exertions had wearied her. She hadn’t the energy to question the possible madness of what she’d undertaken. The rigors of the trail pulled that acquiescence out of her. She traveled with a wagon that could carry a lot more water than she could fit on her back or in her skin. Facts like those weighed more than any amount of philosophical speculation in the desert.
Once Kunsei set up a lean-to for her, she scarcely noticed or remembered the transition between sprawling onto her buffalo fur pad and sinking down into the world below…
… until she gasped as if she’d suddenly broken water. A moment of still mind elapsed before she realized she’d been roused from dreamless sleep. Still acclimating to life outside the Arjena hill cave that had sheltered her for almost two years, she groped at her unfamiliar surroundings, uncomprehending.
Then she stiffened when she noticed a humanlike shadow hovering over her.
“Come quick!” The voice belonged to Ashangtu. “It’s Tohbin. He’s collapsed by the fire pit. Snake bite. I did what I could, but—”
Esperidi beat the sleep dust from her mind with a violent head shake and rose unsteadily. Feeling utterly unprepared for this crisis, she let Ashangtu lead her to where Tohbin’s recumbent form sprawled beside the ashes of their dinner fire. His supine body was so placid it seemed the vehicle of a soul at peace, but his breathing was shallow and labored. He twitched at times as if his limbs rebelled against his torpid state.
Ashangtu had knifed a hole in his tight leggings and tore the hide enough to expose a sluggishly seeping wound. The woman knelt and grazed her fingers over the dark, mottled splotch on his right shin. She’d removed the dark bandana from his head and tied it above that red affliction.
“A war rages inside him,” she hissed, “and the man has not chosen a side!”
Esperidi perceived at once what Ashangtu meant. Tohbin’s spirit had forsaken his ravaged body. His timbre was barely audible to her inner senses. She and Ashangtu faced his existential trial alone.
“I gave him some of Magda’s antivenin,” Ashangtu said. “I always bring some along when I have to travel the desert.” When Esperidi stared at her, alerted by a trembling timbre of deception, she added, as if the confession had been wrenched from her: “I burned most of it first, all right? I cut, sucked, and burned. I can manipulate the timbres of fire with some delicacy at times, you know.”
Esperidi nodded absently. Extending her percipience, she perceived that Ashangtu had indeed stemmed the blood flow and cleared the infection. A scab was already beginning to form over the two punctures.
But Tohbin did not appear convalescent. The skin around his clenched jaw and wrinkled brow was slack. His breathing was weak and erratic.
“Convince him his life is worth reclaiming,” Ashangtu said, “and he’s got a chance.”
Esperidi’s attention was wrenched away from Tohbin as the weight of Ashangtu’s expectation hit her. She gaped at the other woman. “I’m not a Singing Chieftess!”
“The body is the creation of the spirit, right? Isn’t that what the Sophrynes say?”
Esperidi trembled, but the force of her companion’s personality worked on her like coercion. And she could not deny the raw appeal of Tohbin’s suffering.
As if she needed to convince herself that she’d done everything she could, Ashangtu began to ramble. “I felt warm energies working there. It tickled my fingertips like a hundred tiny ants were moving over his skin or little spiders were weaving webs over it.”
Esperidi made another noncommittal nod. She had experienced healing energies in this way—an ethereal tickle akin to tiny spiders scrambling across her flesh.
For the love of all Sorsajna! A test was upon her, and she was so unready…
He needs Shiya-coqui, not me!
But Esperidi’s mentor was not here, and Tohbin would not survive her inadequacies and self-doubt. Her training was all that stood between him and the void.
She had traveled in dreams and waking trances. Towards the end of her short apprenticeship, she’d divided her practice, more or less equally, between the two environments. Her facility for entering the Sophryne state was not what intimidated her.
The fundamental question was how. How would she appeal to Tohbin, even granting that she could find him? Should she let compassion guide her? Should she strive for aloofness and not let her efforts to save the man become derailed by emotional investment?
Recalling a stray remark that Ashangtu had made about that young man at the Oasis, Illatan, and his singing, she said, “Tamborly can be helpful, even without instruments. Will you sing something for me? It might help me to surrender. At any rate… it would be a comfort.”
Ashangtu straightened and balked. “I’ve not much of a voice, particularly for soothing. Nothing like Ilatan.” But, almost without transition, she added, “Oh, very well! But I never claimed to be a Tamborlin, so no complaints!”
Esperidi closed her eyes with a slight smile. “None!” Then, she stretched herself out beside Tohbin as Ashangtu began a low croon.
If I am the one who must
be the wind’s bride
The one in whom Sun and Moon
both confide
The woman’s singing was rough. It poured through channels paved with the gravel and grit of stoic endurance. But Esperidi found her voice utterly appropriate for a night of old fragile hopes broken and new ones scarcely finding their feet.
Will they call me their savior,
or will they greet me with scorn?
Will I fulfill the great promise
for which I was born?
Esperidi’s inner being slowly unwound. It was a physical, tangible thing. Suddenly, she was more in touch with herself, more attuned to her internal movements: the longings and necessities that had brought her to this time and place.
I love the fire that hides in the heart of the camouflage. But I love the camouflage, too.
The road is uncertain
No maps have been drawn
The fire in my eyes can be
frightful to look upon
Esperidi’s inner doubts began to dissolve. She could focus on the source of her power and forget the personal attachments that bound her to the man she sought to save.
And who’s there to meet me in
those most-secret places?
What bodies can abide
all those high, airy spaces?
Nearing a state of consciousness akin to the gates of slumber, Esperidi suddenly stirred. “That’s not from Old Ophia! That’s a Sophryne song written to evoke the voice of Shai-win! They called her Bride of the Winds. How did you—?”
Ashangtu thrust the woman’s head back down. “You’re not the only one who’s delved into the mysteries, you know. What else did I have to occupy myself with, anyway? Now, do you want your lullaby or not?”
She’s right: I cannot afford delays, Esperidi thought, and she nodded tightly.
For a while, she mouthed some of the melody Ashangtu sang. Its timbre evoked a seed borne on the wind. Her subtle body began to rise, but her fear was only temporary. Soon, mortal concerns were left behind in the body’s domain. Esperidi felt a loving presence, a beautiful echo of music from beyond the farthest horizon. Compassion and fierce love tangibly manifested like cupped hands supporting her.
It occurred to her that, in a certain sense, she was meeting her soul for the first time. It was strong, certain, invincible as child’s laughter.
Her exhilaration, however, made it harder to focus. The thought of enclosing herself in her surroundings, losing herself within them, was seductive. That fantasy plunged her into the inner heart of Ophia, and for a moment, she stared through a screen of warm topaz towards a remote sun, feeling its caress.
The poem attributed to Shai-win echoed in her inner mind. She was, indeed, groping forward with her hands in the fertile dark. Her essence and the light she sought were indistinguishable. The one could not exist without the other. Sorsajna needed her, depended on her, as much as she needed it. Breathing and focusing on how she’d been taught to enter the Sophryne state while awake, Esperidi slipped by gradual degrees across the Veils and beyond Ophia’s surface veneer, where loss and woe relentlessly wailed.
The melody now echoed within her consciousness as if seashells were pressed against her ethereal ears. Though she no longer had any sense of where the song originated, aside from the distant, wounded timbre of the woman who sang it, Esperidi encompassed the gentle breeze around her in a mental rather than physical gestalt, neither warm nor cool.
Finally, her Vision clarified as a grey-tan wasteland, one that her inner eyes could not penetrate more than a few strides in any direction. She stood upon its shimmering ground.
Before her, Tohbin wandered alone, friendless in an interminable sandstorm. He was unaware of her. In the transcendent grip of the Sophryne state, however, Esperidi did not see a lost, feeble man. She saw a being of soulful grace.
She had to meet him on that plane. The transparency afforded by this less-than-physical realm and the urgency that had brought her here allowed her to peer into the man’s inner being, unraveling layers as if from a psychic onion.
Prior to the Rupture, Tohbin had a life-mate, the woman who’d brought Kunsei into the world. They’d bound themselves to one another according to the rituals set out in the Sacred Writ, but Tohbin had wed his Lamya for love.
Esperidi witnessed Lamya’s death in the jungles, and she intuited that the gravest darkness in Tohbin’s present life was not comprised of any defined threats but rather of absence.
He rarely indulged in hope. Perhaps he had forgotten it was possible. He did not remember how to nurture it. It had, seemingly, betrayed him too often in the past. After all, his life-mate’s illness and death had been rendered more cruelly tormenting by his hopes for their shared life.
Yes, the trails he feared were the ones he’d already traveled. Tohbin didn’t know how to disentangle his consciousness from the webs of the past. But maybe, experiencing his freedom from his body—with all its attendant fears—here, he could sever those cords, claiming an oasis for his soul.
For a while, Esperidi hovered close by him. Perhaps because he sensed her presence and kind regard, Tohbin’s surroundings softened somewhat. The desert was still as featureless and uncompromising, but the winds tapered. The horizon brightened; pink and orange washes crept across its edges.
But what assurance did Tohbin have that that sun would not crash onto Ophia and set it aflame? He had seen such things. Rarely did he travel to a place without hearing how wind, fire, flood, or earth convulsions ravaged humankind. He had no assurances, no points of stability amid that Rupture-wrought chaos. But wait—
There was one point of warm affirmation, though Esperidi couldn’t identify it at first. She tried to recall her teachings. Shiya-coqui had told her: “Your natural thoughts will lead you, like a trail of crumbs, one by one, towards the destination you seek. Just remember your intention.”
What was her intention here? Healing. Yes: That insight made her realize that the barrier she experienced did not originate within Tohbin but within herself. And so she plunged into that place of resistance within her to identify the burning timbres of pride and love singing within Tohbin’s heart.
Esperidi had to venture back into her childhood to when her Papa had not yet been beset by overwhelming grief and loss, burdened by his duties as a member of the Cordonne, plagued by fears of the coming invasion. When all these things had not dovetailed to divert the course of his life from a young idealist to a man obsessed with control and order.
But when she traveled back far enough—Oh! It smote her heart to feel how far back she had to go!—She was a child, no more than nine years old. But there, she could identify it, the light that sustained Tohbin.
It was a father’s pride in and love for his child.
For the love of his son, Tohbin had been willing to leave their home and tribe in the Kawli Rainforest and drive caravan runs for the Masters in Shetain. That provided the two of them with stability and hope for the future. Tohbin could not afford to consider the ethics of what he did beyond that. Life was cheap and raw in post-Rupture Ophia, whether in the jungle or the desert.
And the constant travel afforded him another kind of freedom. He often couldn’t treat his son with integrity without fearing mockery when they were among the various villages and settlements. Many believed he should “toughen” his boy, teach him self-reliance, and not “weaken” him with affection, encouragement, and praise. But once on the trail again, Tohbin could express his love without restriction—the one free avenue to joy left to him. And his son flourished under its glow like a flower in sunlight.
Esperidi now understood the fundamental timbres of quiet contentment and confidence that characterized the younger man.
“Tohbin,” she whispered, “your son needs you. Ophia needs fathers like you. Ophia needs men like you.”
Tohbin, registering that whisper in the sandstorm, halted his aimless wandering. Reassured by his recognition, Esperidi repeated her appeal several times.
Then, she reached the uttermost limit of her exertions and had to release Vision.
The exhilaration, the urge to dissolve into Sorsajna, was almost impossible to refuse. Esperidi returned her focus to her physical body, resurrecting the sensation of inhabiting flesh, the feel of the ground beneath her, and the bonds of gravity. She opened her eyes to the night’s moonbeam. And a rush of earthbound feelings assailed her: her fresh heartbreak, loss… and cautious hope.
