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dunmerofskyrim · 7 years

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It was only this year, I think. This year and yet a world ago. I was a boy then. A mercenary contracted to the company of the Red Vahn, in the pay of Jarl Ulfric Stormcloak.

There had been a battle. I had no hand in it. Held neither shield nor spear but went among the bodies with the throat-slitters, the scavengers, beside my quartermaster to take what we could from the wreckage. Pulling gold teeth from out the jaws of death; cutting arrowheads from the fallen.

It was the first I’d seen. Death I’d seen before. I’d killed — not clean, not often, yet all the same and even so. But a battle’s something else entire. Like a thing that shouldn’t be: a great ripeness of carnage, corpses. Springtime in the Rift and the reek and the flies and the hunger of wasps made the whole spectacle more than could fit in my head. Waste, as far as the eye could see. Ground boggy underfoot despite weeks without rain. And then there were the wounded. And they were almost worse.

No hand in the killing, and perhaps that thickened my guilt. Fight in the throng and you protect those around you. Your violence is also an aegis for the fighters ahead and behind, to left and to right. I’d saved no-one that way. I begged our company’s healer, at least let me help with the wounded. He was an Altmer, tall, lines round his eyes like the cracks in pottery too small and tight to let even water seep through. Clovis, an Altmer with a West Nordic name. Healer to our company, barber and surgeon, plier and puller of real teeth when they rotted.

He’d let me help him before. My mother had taught me plants good for poultices: ravelbyne, willowbark, the white from the eggs of the Skyrim rock-warbler. I’d been useful to him then. Keen eye and listening ear, I’d learnt from him. I helped him cut cloth for dressings and he cut my hair. (And I still wear the outgrown aftermath of that cut now, mussed from the sack thrown over my head, slicked to my brow with sweat.) But when the wounded came in from that battle on the plain, I begged him.

“Let me help you again.”

“You don’t know how.”

“So teach me.”

In the back of a wagon he taught me words. A mantra in Altmeris so old no-one speaks it, save when they don’t want to be understood. Words to distance myself from pain and quicken the mending of my own body.

“What use will that be when more wounded come in?”

“If you’re among them? Plenty.”

“And if I don’t plan to be?”

“A healer heals what he knows. As far as bodies go, I assume you know your own best. If not, you’ve – ah – had a youth more interesting than mine. But the fact remains: to learn healing, start with yourself.”

“But where does the magic come in? It’s just words.”

“There’s nothing for magic to work on, is there? Are you hurt, Simra?”

And now I collapse, and I think: Yes, I’m hurt, yes. I collapse on the floor of the towerhouse and the buckle of my knees, the pain in my hands as I catch myself, tell me I ought never have got up. My vision is dark. A feeling like strong drink starts in my skull. And I roll onto my back, then onto my side. The flank where I’m wounded is upright. My shirts stick to the skin and beneath it my torso feels caved in, bruised, beginning to throb.

The mantra Clovis taught me. The Rift. It was only this year, and I was only a boy, and I’ve not yet stopped being that. I’m not yet nineteen. That’s a truth I’ve tried of late to put from my mind, but bleeding and starting to whimper I feel every part a child again. Lost and afraid and not knowing how to save myself. It’s that childish feeling that starts me crying. A wrenching hopelessness, as I realise my only hope is myself. No-one is coming to help.

The mantra can be begun at any point along its length. It’s a circle. Only touch to a point in its circumference and trace around. I grope and grovel towards the place it has in my mind now. I touch, and begin to trace, begin to talk it through. Unfamiliar sounds in a language I don’t know. But they chant the rhythms of the body, the cycles of waste and renewal. And their rhythms force my breath to slow where it had grown tight with panic. That’s the mantra’s first mercy.

Still there’s dark seeping into my eyes. A threat on the edges of my mind, made of memories that beckon, beg me to drown as I dream them. Anything but live in the now, where the pain pounds like a drumbeat, overshouting the stamp of my heart.

Awake. I need to stay. I need to stay awake. The sleep that wants me will swallow me whole.

Simra’s pen hovered. His hand paused til the nib went dry.

Chronicle, account, book-to-be — whatever it was, it was growing messy. Like a once-groomed garden left unchecked. It had started out as neat squares of prose on the folds of parchment he’d bought in Bodram. Now it was a roll of papers, extraneities, scraps scribbled here and there and tied all together with a strip of someone’s torn shirtcloth. Good parchment at its heart and oddments furling round and outwards. Only Simra could order them now, and that bothered him…

The leaf he was working on rested on the back of his satchel. Stiff leather, stiff paper or parchment laid over it. It had served him fine as a writing desk for years when nothing finer could be found.

The little Telvanni-made notebook sat next to him, beside his inkstone in its carved bone box. It was open to his calculations, scribbled down from memory after that morning in Othrenis. Just to check he’d not cheated himself, or let himself be cheated. Just to keep track rather than count out all his coin again. Just so that if someone in Senie asked – a merchant, a traveller – at what price rice for retail down the southwestern road, he’d be able to tell them. Information’s a saleable luxury too, and lighter by far than coin.

He’d bartered away what he couldn’t use. The helmet with its bonemould peak and mail coif; the shell earring and painted luckstone. He’d walked into town with five pairs of boots slung across the saddle of the guar that he led for a pack-beast.

Some of it went in trade. A toothless pantryman in the fuggy warmth and shade of his shop, amongst the shelves of jars and baskets of potsherds. He’d smiled too often as Simra traded him the earring, the luckstone, for their worth in wares. A refilled flask of the local sujamma; worse by far than Tamsora Minu had served him, but not too bad to drink if you weren’t too proud to drink it. A leaf-wrapped parcel of black-flecked white scuttle. A small jar of preshta-jan to season days of nothing but rice, and a paper-bagged handful of black dried hunter’s mushrooms.

The helmet went to a smith. But she was the tools-and-nails backcountry kind, and Othrenis is a small town, and Simra knew better than to ask for all its worth in coin.

“You have rice? Millet?”

“My winter stores.”

“Any you can sell?”

She put up two pounds from her pantry, brown hulled grains, black now and then with wild rice, errant from off the plains. A skillet too, of dark-hammered iron, and two-dozen fowling arrows: a gift to keep Noor in temper about a morning wasted on trade.

“D’you sharp blades too?”

“Two shil a knife. Three for a longer blade.”

“A yera and four then.” Simra unsheathed his four knives, his heavy-bladed sword, laying them down. At once he felt half-helpless without them. Even with a looted hatchet through his belt and magic at his fingertips. “Be back for them and the remaining – what? – call it two yera and four?”

“Two.”

“Just two?”

“Just two. Buying it’s no sure thing. Who’d I sell helmets to herebouts?”

“Only people like me.”

“Only people like you,” she nodded.

Simra didn’t argue. Only carried on through Othrenis to its narrow corner of a marketplace.

No rain today but the ground was still churned to mud from the traffic of traipsing feet. A streetfood seller roasted groundnuts and grilled skewers over rocks he kept hot with flames from his fingers. Cone-hatted farmers wrapped up against the cold in all the clothes they owned grouped together round cauldrons of trama-root and brown rice tea to sell their surplus.

Scant harvest this year, Simra reckoned over their baskets, their urns, their bundles. They had little to sell and prices were dear. Winter rewards the miser, he thought. But he bought three more pounds of saltrice, five starchy white winter dirtyams like hairy crooked fingers, and a bunch of long onions with skins like paper. Paid in coin. Would have felt almost charitable if not for his own slimming funds. Winter rewards the miser but the hearts of the hungry belong to the generous; the maxim finished itself, bitter in his thoughts. Where had he read that? Heard that? It wasn’t Temple creed, that was certain. Eight or Nine? It would come to him, but wouldn’t come now…

Returning to the smithy, Simra bought a skewer of three plump grilled dumplings. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted, after all? They were hot, comforting, filled with fermented rice-bran paste and shards of crushed numb-pepper. He forced himself to eat them slow, staving off guilt with each chaste small half-mouthful.

When Simra left had left Othrenis that morning, he left with a feedbag of rice and yams and onions slung over the guar’s neck. A string of dead men’s boots still hung there with it. Not even the farmers would buy them.

Four shils worse off. That’s where the page said he stood now, in blot and bleeding ink. No matter the pay he’d had from House Minu; he’d lose that soon enough as well. He had the arrows, the sharpened steel. The skillet where a simmer of scuttle and yams and preshta-jan was steaming down now, starting to smell good as it fried. But the page of calculations still briared at him.

He closed it. Stowed it in his bookbag where it wouldn’t look at him and he needn’t look back.

“Who taught you?”

Tammunei asked it from across their camp before Simra could go back to writing. They half-rose to hunker a stride or two closer, around the small fire, the seething skillet and its contents. Red oil, sliced black scuttle, chunks of yam gone the colour of rust as they softened and sizzled.

“Taught me what?” Simra asked, leaning over the satchel and parchment in his lap to put the words into his torso’s shadow.

Tammunei’s eye went to the skillet, the steam.

“My ammu, mostly.”

“No,” Tammunei frowned. “You weren’t very good before. You haven’t seen her since.”

Something tightened in Simra’s throat and he told himself it was only the insult. “You mean when I met you? I thought I was alright…”

“You’re better now,” Tammunei offered. “So I wondered who taught you, between here and then?”

“Morrowind,” Simra lied, short-tongued, a little sharp. “Didn’t know the ingredients when I came here. That’s all. Scuttle, scrib — where’d I learn to cook that in Skyrim, hm?”

Now they’ve got you remembering, Simra thought. Tammu and Ebonheart and all that came after. Every word he wrote now drew him closer to writing that out.

“I’m sorry,” said Tammunei. “I’m interrupting.”

“No. No, I’m done writing.” Simra began to fold his parchments, his papers, clean his pen while his inkstone went dry. “Food’ll be ready soon. Best get to it.”

“Noor’ll be back soon. I should look useful. Or thoughtful at least.”

“And so the witch sweeps in from off the plains to scowl at my cooking…”

“Shul! It smells good! She’s grateful. Only she shows it badly.”

“I got her arrows. Hunting ones. Another reason for her to pretend she doesn’t know the words for ‘thank you’.”

“She’ll like those.”

“And I’d like if she caught us some racer with them. Deer, goat, nix. Thinks any of that’s likely?”

“Not deer. Not for five days now.”

“Not even gonna ask how you know that.”

“Less goat too with every eastward step.”

“Hm. I’m sure we’ll manage.”

#TES #Morrowind #Dunmer #Simra Hishkari #SH Forth and Back #SH New Canon #Tammunei Ereshkigal

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