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“News?” Pritcher looks up at him from the opposite end of the bench, his chest bare and his close-cropped hair, quite the color of rust, slightly darkened and sheening as it settles on the point of saturation just before dampness. Foundation precision.
Without mark or insignia, without any accouterments to shade loyalties, his body conveys complete strength: his shoulders are broad, even, the width of his ribcage continuous through the cradle of his hips, his stomach slightly defined with bulk. Nearly fifty years old! He's delightfully, strangely alive, with his body long and firm and brown, there's a bit of a gentle, ursine character to him, a dignified independence hung on his hard jaw and slightly mocking eyes like a vestigial limb.
Channis is in lesser command of himself than he imagines; When he looks to Pritcher's face, there's a barely perceptible tightening--imprecisely, around the eyes, and in the lips, though perhaps it's a fancy created by a magnetism to the man's mind--and his gaze flickers down to his own chest before returning to meet Channis' look.
Channis is conscious of his own appearance then, the slender taper of his jaw and the effeminate juvenility of his uncalloused hands, his golden hair shaken a little loose in the vigor of enthusiasm. With abstract embarrassment, he feels vaguely predated, it’s possible his face pinkens.
What game is he playing with this--and a hesitation, why a hesitation?--man?
“Not particularly. We could be at Tazenda in another hop.” He brings his hand to his mouth as he speaks, touching his own lips in a gesture of ponderance.
“Could?” Pritcher cannot be blamed for looking at Channis’ mouth, particularly when it flickers into a smile of flattering satisfaction.
“Yes, could.” He says, in the way a tutor will congratulate their pupil, and though it displeases Pritcher, he doesn’t deign to frown, “I was in fact planning a detour--outside of the general--eh--political orbit of Tazenda, if you’d permit it.”
“Indecisive?” Pritcher rubs up his damp arms with his wooden hands, “And I suppose you’re in want of my gratitude, for exercising basic courtesy by consulting.”
Channis’ smile is undisturbed, neither shrinking nor widening, “Please try not to hold that over my head, or we’ll never get along, general.” Pritcher’s hands close on each other, a manifestation of his prior accusation. Channis plows onwards, “I figured, for the sake of inconspicuity, we’d best give some impression of your leadership. I have a few ideas: all totally indistinguishable and unexceptional in their merit.”
The implication, of course: bumble, first. Navigate blind. This gesture is a touch too childish to rouse either offense or despair, and somehow, it makes Pritcher feel a touch of pity-like for the boy.
“I’ve no objection.” He says, face still, “The material supplied”--a tilting of the head towards the slim, black case which held the historical filmdata on Tazenda, which darkens the generous delta of his collarbone--“has hardly given any advance motivation for urgency. Quite useless, and totally unremarkable.”
“Ah!” Channis face is bright with revelation, and with that base satisfaction derived only from feelings of ‘specialnesss.’ “Prescient words, but precisely the wrong conclusions. We’ll reserve that discourse for another time. Best to refrain from introducing dangerous notions.”
“All right.” Channis wonders how he manages to exude such disdain and skepticism with such a still face, and such controlled posture. “Now the light, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course.” He waves his departure, brimming with brightness.
They work their way down the steppe, moving silently and lightly in the dark. With each sloping step, Channis draws nearer to Pritcher’s uncompromising bulk in the darkness, the loping, mechanical elegance of his stride before repulsive now aglow with familiarity, attractive for being a known quantity in the black and gleaming night. As they descend, his pretty, girlish face is swallowed in a waft of smoke, too intensely stimulating in that instant to parse the scent of it. He grabs Pritcher’s elbow, with fear, and determination to leverage that fear; Pritcher does not repel the gesture.
"This is--this is Ffh, Fregnia.” He’s never heard this hesitancy in him, his vocal posture tense and exacting, an amount of exertion antithetical to the Channis’ type. The air is cold, and living; Pritcher nods dismissively.
In the oblong puddlings of water, the deep shelves of the local irrigation system, they can see tall black idols, their reflections staking the ground; wreathed in fire, they seem to be tapping into livid, subterranean Hells, warbling and steaming, and the general downward incline of their journey does nothing to dispel this notion. Now, with Channis' jaw set against his own chest, and one hand raised before him in ward, each errant plume of smoke is redolent with the waxy, fresh smell of burnt pine, perfuming even the clear air. Very clean, almost astringent.
Pritcher had first scanned each totem for extraneous movements--for the limp hung bodies of repentants, or the writhing of sacrifices, but they’re idols, not gibbets, nothing more than symbols, like overlarge scarecrows, made of no material any more novel than black wood. Each is level to the other, such that as they descend the stalks rise taller and taller overhead. They lose their fantastical character; their lurid points become stars.
"I--it's supposed to be--I think there's a harvest festival, something or the other, happening this time of year. I was hoping we would get lucky…" His bell-like voice tinkling and struck upon the night, wavering in the smoke. Irresolute, and his breath large and fallible between. It falls on Pritcher's ear.
Pritcher stares into the serried mirrors made of the black water stretching on either side of them, the underworld tableaus shining ad nauseum in each of them. "Lucky," he repeats.
Rising towards them is a throbbing, living music, almost droning for its rote steadiness, though a high and tinkling sound is played upon it, a progressive sound that seems to spin a tale. The voices of women come through the smoke, and then they sink below it, just as the spongy loam bordering each well gives way to roughly hewn, but almost neurotically symmetrical stone pathing.
A settlement rises up around them, with the dronesong beating hard through its walls. Ever deeper, with the uniform stone edging them always and the black bodies now lost high in the steppe, only their long trains of smoke obscuring the sky.
They pass a number of clustered, unguarded faces, all, in complete androgyny, dressed too thinly for the weather, banded about the breast and with loose trousers that show the silhouette of their legs through their thinness. Some are wreathed in the furs of little canids--somewhere between Terminian ferrets and foxes, or like the slim-headed hunting dogs of Anacreon--that appear stuffed rather than skinned, their heads still attached and their bodies fat, with appendages and tail dangling limply, jauntily from shoulders and backs or spilling down into the enticing cleft of the pectoral.
In this primeval, unnatural light, come through the smoke in diffuse red like some omnipresent watcher subjecting them to a changeful observance, they all smile heartfully at the pair--Channis knotted firmly to his side, their shoulders pressed thinly, though now Pritcher considers repelling him, if just to become a more attractive confidant to the locals. It seems an unuseful maneuver--they are so open and genuine in their awe and friendliness that Pritcher feels them uncivilized, or idiotic.
“To what do you pray, my friend?” Channis calls, smiling, brashness returned at the sight of these pretty, charming, happy people, and one of them--a woman, by the voice, reaches for him in joviality. He falls into her arms easily--Pritcher releases him with only the barest contest--and she replies with a rivaling brashness.
“What left? What left to pray to, my friend?” And she laughs, as if she has said something very clever, and perhaps she has, for Channis smiles hugely and spins her about; Pritcher resigns himself to having been cleaved away, this peripheral, sheared association comfortable, familiar, and not totally unuseful in generating novel conclusions.
Her booted feet (metal soled!) stamp, stamp, to the drone of the music, and the animal head draped on her shoulder slides against Channis’ throat when she bends to dip him. Its teeth catch the light, the gleam of it on the nose produces an imagining of wetness, touching there to the slight protrusion of thyroidal cartilage. Soft, untouched skin. Pritcher touches his blaster with two fingers, just two, then his hand falls away.
Channis comes to him, smelling of manifold sweetness, and a little bit briney. His eyelids are half-lowered, and his hands are pink, his cheeks and mouth pinker, and his curls plastered to his temples like a golden circlet. There’s a crown of vines set in his hair, waxy pricklings rising from their tough bodies, all the color of dried blood. His smile is sedate, and those pink hands look completely innocent when he offers them, such that to refuse them would be somehow violatory, crass, inappropriate. He is always granted things in these ways, these ways impossible to refuse.
Pritcher sets his nearly-emptied tray at his hip, the twisted metal utensils deposited neatly in the recess at the far end of it. Channis pulls at him with an impatient, shocking strength, though not enough of it to disturb his measured, acquiescing ascension. Channis takes up both of his hands, and Pritcher indulges him with a clumsy spin.
He hollers, high and musical, the sound of it flauting and wavering with the travel of his body, and he punches out a final breath of it when he presses against Pritcher’s uniform front, breast to breast despite their difference in height.
He lifts onto his toes, then, swaying and mumble-singing below his jaw, into his collar, warbly, meaningless, and idiotically happy. The heat of his mouth bounces off the silicon-stiffness to redden his own face. Their fingers are knitted together.
“This is unprofessional, Channis.” There’s a loosening in his shoulders, his elbows, but his spine is completely rigid. Channis steps into a waltz; this is a controlled enough movement that Pritcher can follow it, without either embarrassment or cognition, though he wonders when he had learned it.
“Please… inebriation is…'' he breaks off into a low, simmering laughter, each breath of it completely independent. It’s an oddly mature sound for his boyish disposition, his girlish airs, and the contrast pulses hotly in Pritcher’s ear as the boy leans in against it, “Think--a world of Mules!”
A lull rises up between them, the commanding sort, as if a conductor had made a particular sharp motion of the wand, the sort that strikes upon the fine networking of sensors in the air and signals, in high, sparking impulse: all cease. As if he really would like him to consider it. “Would your inebriation have aided him, had impaired him?”
Would…? Pritcher feels sick, slightly dizzy with a dull, detached horror, as if the feeling is merely a varnish going foul, seeping into places where it does not belong.
Channis goes on, speaking with a lush, conspiratorial accommodation, an utterly friendly gesture of allegiance, and he smells like anywhere from a dozen to forty women whose advances he could not refuse, whose gifts of sweet oils and hand-twisted leis could not be turned away on this merry, gleaming night.
“We have grander maneuvers.” We, he says, we, a lodging in the ear. Pritcher thinks he will double over, in pain or in disorientation, but his body does not reciprocate the sentiment. Channis leans heavily against him.
“In other respects, we must"--and whispering, giddily--"surrender ourselves to the unknown.”
Pritcher realizes quite well that Channis is leading their movements. He grips his elbows, tweaks a nerve there strangely with his forefingers, a motion too precise to be accidental. The cold quiver it evokes slithers through Pritcher's body, comes to rest just behind his heart.
“And besides, I have a wonderful idea…” He has no notion, earthly or otherwise, as to what he could be alluding to with such a word, such a voice, and that is truly frightening, though the force of it is felt distantly, as if through a volume of gelatin.
“Ahh, you’re tall!” Channis says, as if in deliberate derailment. Pritcher makes a face, or half of one, but Channis looks at him with deep and voluminous eyes, his brows smoothed upwards in a slight astonishment, as if he finds the gesture to be insincere.
“Have you done anything useful for the past two hours?” Pritcher says, in a harsh whisper.
“Ahh-ahh." Channis wags his finger, the nail catching light, "Have you?”
Pritcher grunts eloquently, but Channis laughs plenty. A light, pretty laugh, meaningless.
"Besides, our cause is accomplished. I feel we have created sufficient confusion." He still says we, but Pritcher is fairly--and only fairly--sure that he is the only one confused, sinking deeper and deeper into this odd sense of unknowing, of feeling fleeting sensations and thinking unreal thoughts, the volume of air above him unbroachable and the ground below dormant, potent with surety, latent promise, in no anticipation of accepting him, merely biding, biding… Are you alright? Pritcher realizes that Channis’ behavior is entirely insensible, but, really, he doesn’t.
His vision is dim, did you drink? Channis says with his mouth, only his mouth, he holds his body loosely with his hands, and his collusive eyes. This feeling of holding, as that sensation of living, as being bowed to his metabolic process, no choice in it, none at all, himself like the spasms of a synapse…
Channis' eyes are unreasonably bright, violence provoking; Pritcher wonders if his parents had ever struck him as a child, for the way he stares, for his proprietary and denying hold on life. His hair is damp enough to stretch, the curls elongated and dripping onto Pritcher's temple. The touch is warm, wet, coarse where the curl sprays apart.
"Mm--ngh?"
Channis laughs, though he makes a pinched expression; the laugh is not a pleasured one, and not an easy one.
"Good morning, general. Are you in a mood to visit Rossem?"
Rossem? He opens his mealy mouth once or twice, closes it and feels his tongue come apart inside of it like a pat of damp earth.
Channis flushes, and straightens up. Pritcher follows his lead, briefly putting his hand to his temple before disguising the gesture, smoothing back his hair and neatening his sideburns with a scrubbing of the fingers.