SALT AND WATER By Charlie N. Holmberg
The sound of his dying breath played a broken melody on the strings of Chellis’s thoughts. The silence of the tiled chamber amplified the haunting song; only the occasional shifting of chains disturbed it.
She tried not to weep, for only when she stopped crying long enough—promising no wasted tears—would they release her back to her chambers. A chamber that sat empty, for the Hagori whom she served had killed little Temas.
Chellis had suspected ulterior motives from the Hagori when her unexpected bunkmate arrived two months before, and a child at that, only eight years of age. A Hagori orphan, not even a Merdan like herself. But after a week of Temas’s smiles and songs, Chellis had come to believe that her dian—her “caretaker”—had come to pity her. That her dian felt guilty over the beatings and the harsh words all dians used to make their Merdans cry. That perhaps she thought eighteen months of loneliness had been too harsh, even for a slave.
Another tear squeezed between Chellis’s eyelids, absorbed by the spongy blinders pressed against her face. A lie. Another lie, but that one crueler than the rest. The Hagori had merely waited long enough for Chellis to grow attached to the boy, to love him, before slitting his throat right there in her chambers. And then her dian had snapped the blinders over her eyes, unwilling to risk wasting a single drop of Chellis’s lifesaving tears. Healing tears that only a Merdan stolen from the sea could weep.
She shifted in the chains that suspended her over the shallow vat—chains that bound her arms and ankles to the wall behind her. The edge of the vat dug painful, deep lines into her scaled knees, its gaping mouth waiting for any tears that might escape the blinders. The manacles dug into the scar tissue over her wrists. Her shoulders were numb from supporting her body, which leaned forward with only the chain preventing her from toppling into the vat itself. Her webbed feet tingled. The small fins around her ankles felt like ice, though no ice could be found in the desert home of the Hagori, save within the empty cavities of their chests.
Chellis breathed through her nose, trying to calm the convulsing muscles in her abdomen. Trying to dry out the hurt and relieve the twisting barb that mangled her spirit and sliced her soul. She blinked against the wet sponges in the blinders and willed herself still.
Suspended over the vat with silence her only companion, Chellis could almost smell the sea. She let her tired mind believe that she did, let it whisk her away to the wide-open waters, blue as sky, where she swam weightless among whales and alongside her kin. So few in number, the Merdans. The slave fishers’ relentless hunt for them dwindled their people and shredded their families. The Hagori only saw the Merdan as a balm for their war. Not once had the warmongers tried to barter for the lifesaving tears. They’d only taken.
Three sets of footsteps entered the collecting room, echoing off the tiled walls so loudly it seemed an entire army had come for her. Chellis distinguished the soft sounds of her dian’s sandals from the heavy boots of the guards. She held still as her dian reattached the fine chain leash to the metal collar encircling Chellis’s neck. Only then did the guards unlock the manacles around her wrists and pull her back from the vat. Blood surged into Chellis’s webbed fingers. She bit her bottom lip to keep from crying out. The soft bones in her knees wrenched and popped as the leash hauled her upward. Blood flowed into her feet, marking every new bruise along its path.
“Hold still, Naki,” Lila-dian warned, calling Chellis by her Hagori name. The two guards stood close enough that Chellis could feel the shroud of heat rising from their skin, smell the cactus oil in their beards. It made her itch—made her want to scream and swim away—but Chellis held still, unsure that her weak legs and sore body could withstand another lashing. Not today.
Lila-dian carefully pulled the blinders from Chellis’s face and scraped her eyelids to remove any dried or excess tears. Chellis opened her eyes slowly, wincing at the light, blinking away the blurry images twirling in her vision. They settled, too pale and too bright.
Lila-dian placed the blinders in a rectangular, waterproof case held out by the guard on Chellis’s left, who carried it from the collection room like a Hagori infant, newly born and weak-necked.
Chellis’s eyes adjusted. The collection room was small and round, a white-tiled cylinder with one exit, one bench, and one large vat that swallowed the center of the floor. Two stations, marked with large metals Ts, bordered the vat. These were where Merdans knelt to cry their tears if their dian expected a flood of them. For Temas, Chellis had given them a flood.
She glowered at Lila-dian, who met the expression with an empty face. May the cursed woman slip in Chellis’s tears and be swallowed by the ocean itself.
He was only a boy.
Chellis dropped her gaze as Lila-dian wrapped the leash around her own forearm. It had been such a horrid wound on Temas’s neck. If only Chellis could have dodged the guards. If only she could have reached Temas’s limp form, perhaps she could have wept enough to mend his severed windpipe and seal the split skin. Maybe she could have saved him.
But no Hagori boy was worth more than a soldier on the front. No. Her tears—tears shed for Temas—would be used to mend murderers and nourish the men and women who permitted the killing.
If only Chellis could die herself . . . but the warmongers kept too close a watch for that.
Lila-dian yanked the chain and tugged Chellis toward the door, the remaining guard trailing behind them. Each step grated her skin, which had gone dry from her long suspension over the vat. The fins stretching from Chellis’s ribs to her upper arms chafed as though coated with sand. The scales over her shoulders would surely flake free if she lifted her arms. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d lost scales. But the Hagori didn’t care. Merdan scales were worthless in their coffers.
Her bare feet padded down the marble hallway, just a step behind Lila-dian. Chellis stared at the back of the woman’s knees, clothed with the fine beige cotton of her uniform. Chellis sported only a short-skirted, shapeless dress, threadbare and patched in three places. She hated that dress. In the sea, she had worn nothing. No clothes, no chains.
Temas.
She didn’t want to go back to the room where Temas had died. To the empty bed devoid of his warmth, or the hot nights deprived of his delicate snores. Chellis bit her tongue. I will not cry. I will not. She wouldn’t go back to the vat, even if Lila-dian did something else horrendous to her.
Lila-dian tugged up on the chain, halting Chellis’s stride. The guard took a post a few feet from the door to Chellis’s chambers as Lila-dian’s stubby fingers selected a key from a small ring fished from her pocket. The bolt locking the door snapped back, and Lila-dian shoved Chellis through, pushed her head down, and unhooked the chain from Chellis’s collar.
The walls shaped the room into a perfect square, just large enough to fit a cot on one end and an oval tub on the other. Merdan bodies were not made for the desert, so they had to soak in saltwater—a Hagori potion that felt nothing like the sea—once a day. Over the vat, Chellis had been swabbed with the solution twice. In her room, only her dian could turn on the water.
That’s when Chellis saw it—the rusty, almost-brown stain on the thin, dingy carpet. Uneven circles of old blood, one as wide as her fist, some droplets barely more than mist.
Blood. Temas’s blood. It stained the carpet. No one had even bothered to clean it up.
“You’ll have a later meal because of the new rotation,” Lila-dian said as she wound the leash around her left hand. “Sit quietly until I return with it, and I’ll let you bathe before bed.”
The bloodstains formed shapes before Chellis’s eyes: abalones, stars, eyes, mouths. In them she saw Temas’s smile as he told a joke Chellis didn’t understand.
“Naki?”
Dead. They had killed him, and her dian had blinded her from the scene as soon as the tears began, face as smooth as the marble floors in the hallway.
“Naki, are you listening?”
Chellis straightened, ripping her gaze from the blood.
“Do you need to go back to the vat?”
Chellis met her dian’s dark eyes and did something only a Hagori did.
She lunged for them.
The attack surprised the dian and knocked her off balance. They both tumbled to the ground, Chellis on top.
Chellis didn’t have nails, but she pressed the tips of her thumbs into Lila-dian’s eyes. The Hagori woman cried out, signaling the guard at the door.
“I hate you!” Chellis screamed in Hagori, slapping her dian’s face one way, then the other. “I hate you, I hate you!”
Lila-dian screamed. The guard’s rough hands seized Chellis’s shoulders and jerked her back, but not before Chellis grabbed two fistfuls of Lila-dian’s dark hair. The guard heaved Chellis up and away, and the hair tore free from the dian’s scalp.
Chellis flailed in the guard’s grip, still clutching the hair in her webbed fingers.
“I hate you!” she shouted, tearless. “The Moray devour you in pieces! He was only a boy!”
Two more guards scrambled into the room as Lila-dian blubbered and scrambled to her feet. One of them drew a leather-wrapped club and whipped it across Chellis’s crown. The room spun. Her limbs died. The guard holding her dropped her to the ground, and Lila-dian spat onto her cheek.
At least, Chellis thought as her heavy eyelids closed, at least I didn’t cry.
* * *
Chellis lay on the floor of her room just three feet from her cot. The Hagori had manacled her wrists, binding her arms behind her back. Metal cuffs hugged her ankles as well, crushing the fins there, and a rough, taut rope bound her knees to her collar, forcing her to remain in a curled position. She could throw her weight enough to roll from one side to the other and relieve her shoulders, but nothing could soothe the painful arch of her back, nor the hunger that had become almost sentient in her stomach, rolling and growling, futilely struggling to claw its way into the dark, dry world.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when the chamber doors opened—the room bore no windows, and blinders covered her eyes, though she had withheld her tears, save a few.
She listened as carpet-muted footsteps filled the room. Three . . . no, four pairs, followed by voices softly mumbling Hagori. Two pairs of feet moved toward her, and deft hands removed the blinders from her eyes. Chellis blinked. A Hagori man stepped out of the room to bottle what little she had wept.
A key pushed into the chains binding her wrists, and an unfamiliar voice—a man’s voice carrying a Hagori accent—said, “Move slowly when these come off. You’ll be sore.”
Chellis strained to see who spoke behind her, but the rope binding her neck to her knees wouldn’t allow it. Heavy steps—a guard—neared, but the voice stopped them.
“It’s all right,” he said.
The guard replied, “She’s gone wild. I think it’s best if—”
“I said it’s all right,” the voice repeated. Chellis saw the man’s tan arms as he leaned over her to loosen the rope. He had a small, straight scar on the knuckle of his right index finger. “You can go; I’ll handle her from here.”
“But, sir—”
“Stand outside the door if you must,” he said, reaching for Chellis’s feet. She held very still as he unlocked the manacles there. “But I’ll not have you scaring her.”
Though free from her binds, Chellis waited for the guards to retreat and shut the door before extending her aching legs and rolling over to see the stranger.
“Careful now,” he said. His hands posed to help, but he didn’t touch her. Chellis’s back cracked as she sat up. She winced and rubbed her wrists.
The man scooted away from her. He was young—younger than Lila-dian, but older than Chellis’s usual guards—and unlike most Hagori, he wore his hair short. But like all Hagori, he had dark brown eyes and tan skin. A bronze loop pierced his left ear halfway down the cartilage. His full lips didn’t sneer.
“My name is Ahad,” he said. “I’ll be your new dian.”
Still massaging her wrists, Chellis eyed him, silent.
“Lila-dian has been reassigned,” he explained. “Are you hurt?”
How could she not be?
Ahad stood up without an answer and moved to the door, where a tray of food sat on the floor. It held the usual bowl of mixed-seafood slop—whatever the citadel chefs didn’t use in their delicacies—and a wooden cup of true seawater. Ahad . . . dian . . . placed it before Chellis and moved to the tub on the other side of the room.
He measured tall for a Hagori, very tall, and had a narrow build. He wore the dian’s uniform of a gray wrap-like shirt and loose beige pants that bound tightly to the calf.
He inserted his key into the wall by the tub spout and turned on the water.
Chellis’s skin ached as she saw the crystal liquid pour into the tub, but her nose drew her eyes to the bowl of food. No amount of defiance could subdue her hunger. She clasped the bowl with both hands and lifted it to her mouth, swallowing whole chunks of fish hearts and shrimp heads. She coughed, almost choking, and ate more.
Lila-dian would have scolded her for “manners.” Ahad-dian said nothing.
She guzzled down the seawater, relishing the briny taste on her tongue.
Her stomach churned.
The cup toppled from her webbed fingers and smacked against the tray. She pressed one hand to her stomach and the other to her mouth. She swallowed as the slop sloshed in her belly.
Poison? Lila-dian had poisoned her food twice before, leaving her retching for a full day. Just to harvest tears.
Chellis glowered at Ahad-dian, who held a small sack of salt in his hands.
He merely smiled at her.
“Eating so much on an empty stomach will make anyone sick,” he said.
She stared, palm pressed to her lips, willing her stomach still. Not poisoned?
Ahad-dian poured salt into the bath and shut off the water. “Do you understand me?”
Chellis’s stomach settled somewhat, and she dropped her hand from her mouth. Of course she understood. The Merdans all learned Landwalker languages, Hagori and Nakanese and Trinnish, in addition to their own dialect and signed speech. Did the slave trainers know so little about her dwindling people?
She merely nodded.
Ahad-dian stepped away from the tub, but gestured to it with his hand. “If you want it. You look . . . uncomfortable. You scared the others. Fear leads them to neglect; you’ll have to forgive them.”
Chellis eyed him, mulling over his words. No Hagori spoke so politely. Even Temas hadn’t. Was it a new dian tactic? What more could they possibly do to her?
“What’s this?” Ahad-dian asked, moving toward her. She backed up into the cot, but he stopped halfway across the room, crouching down on the carpet.
Her eyes followed his, and her ribs involuntarily contracted around her heart.
The bloodstains. Temas.
Ahad-dian lifted a five-inch switchblade from his belt, identical to the knife Lila-dian carried. The knife that had left long, thin scars down Chellis’s back and breasts. Chellis held her breath.
“Not Merdan blood,” Ahad-dian commented, almost more to himself than to her. Merdan blood flowed blue and left gray stains—stains that blended well with the dingy carpet. “And too old for Lila.”
He glanced at her, his eyes curious. She saw a dark sort of light in their depths. Sympathy? But no Hagori knew that emotion, especially dians.
He stabbed the tip of the blade into the carpet and dragged it around the stains, cutting a square piece that revealed stone underneath. He stood, returned the knife to his belt, and stuck the carpet under his arm.
“What on earth did she do to you?” he asked, though he looked ahead at nothing in particular. When his dark gaze shifted to Chellis, he said, “You’re welcome to the tub, Naki. I can’t leave the room, but it’s there.”
Chellis’s skin itched. She stood, wincing again at the stiffness of her joints, and padded toward the tub. She discarded her rough dress and slid into the water, sighing as its coolness climbed up her skin, soothing away chafes and flakes.
“No one will expect harvesting from you today,” Ahad-dian said. “And hopefully not tomorrow. Your health might be forfeit, but even the overlords won’t risk your life. And they won’t question my judgment. They haven’t in the past, at least.”
Chellis smoothed back her thin hair and studied the dian with wide eyes. Ahad-dian seemed sincere. Had the great Moray finally heard her pleas and granted her a fraction of relief?
“I recommend you rest after you bathe, Naki,” Ahad-dian said. “You’ll need it.”
“My name is Chellis,” she dared to say.
Ahad-dian straightened, his eyebrows raised. “So you do speak.”
Chellis sank deeper into the water.
Ahad-dian offered a small smile. “A strange name,” he said, “but if you prefer it, I will use it.”
She had that option? “I do.”
“Chellis, then,” he replied. “I recommend you rest after you bathe, Chellis.”
How strange to hear someone else say her name. Her true name.
Even Temas hadn’t done that.
* * *
For two and a half days, Chellis had peace.
She did not leave her room, she did not see Lila-dian, and she did not cry, save for a short time the night after Ahad-dian’s arrival, when she wept once more for Temas. She hid her tears in the seams of her dress and over her own scrapes and bruises. Though Lila-dian didn’t know it, she had taught Chellis how to weep in complete silence.
Before two and a half days could become three, Ahad-dian came to the small chamber with a kelp-green card in his hand—a Merdan summons. Or, rather, an irrefutable command for more tears.
Chellis eyed the card, her throat tightening. But Ahad-dian said nothing of it, merely set it on the tub rim. He sat beside it. Chellis, on the cot, picked knots from her hair with her fingertips.
“What is the ocean like?” Ahad-dian asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Your ocean, not ours.”
Chellis blinked. She searched the question for tricks, but she found none. Then again, Ahad-dian had proved himself—so far—a dian who didn’t employ tricks, unlike Lila-dian.
She answered, “It is all the same ocean.”
“Is it?” Ahad-dian countered, his voice sounding like feathers on a morning breeze. “On a map, maybe. But my ocean is the surface, the layer of water that parts before the bow and reflects the sky. The water that breaks when I cast a line, that ripples around the string. Your ocean is all the layers beneath, where the ripples don’t touch. It’s the sand and the coral and all the dark miles I don’t see. Please, tell me. What is that ocean like?”
Chellis’s hands dropped from her hair, and she studied the Hagori man. Perhaps for too long, but he didn’t chide her for it. He met her gaze, his expression unwrinkled.
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