Chapter 212 – Memories

She was four. She was running through her home, feeling the glee of movement. The hot desert air blew between the sandstone pillars of the open hall. Beyond them was a garden of hardy desert plants. She didn’t like it as much as the courtyard garden, the one with the pond and all the pretty lotuses. The black ones were her favorite, because the petals had a rainbow sheen.

There was a noise, and she turned her head to look. She caught a glimpse of the distant mountains to the north, the ones with the big long name she couldn’t pronounce.

Then she was sprawled on the ground. She’d tripped, and the sandstone floor had shredded her knee. She began to wail.

“Little lotus,” came the kind words of her father.

She kept bawling. “Daddy!” she said, clutching her knee. It was scraped, but not that bad. Still, the blood was trickling out, and it stung.

He kissed her on the forehead. “Heal it, daddy!” she said between sobs.

“You can. Remember? Hold onto this.”

She grabbed his finger so she could feel the ring beneath it. Both the ring and his finger were cold. “But it hurts!”

“Close your eyes and feel it, little lotus,” he said.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

“Breathe in. Breathe out. In again. Out again. Feel your inner self. Search for the part of you that hurts. It should be easy to feel.”

“I feel it,” she whined.

“Keep your breathing steady. In slowly, just like me. Out slowly. Good. Now remember, push the rest of you into that hurt. Feel it move the way you want. Like watching the ripples in the pond calm.”

She’d done it so many times. It was just hard when it hurt. “I’m doing it,” she whispered.

“Yes you are, darling,” her father said. With a flick of his finger, a trickle of water came out from one of the nearby jugs and washed away the blood. He then bent down and gave the healed knee a kiss. His lips were dry. “All better,” he said.

She giggled.

“And what did you learn?” he asked.

She groaned. He always asked that. “Be careful when running,” she said, showing her exasperation with her whole body the way toddlers always did.

“But do keep running,” he said with a wink.

***

She stood in the courtyard garden while her father tended the jeweled lotuses, holding her mother’s hand. She heard a muffled “mraw!” and up came Meu, carrying another bone rat.

“Ohh, good kitty,” her mother said to him. “Gaius, the cat found another. I thought you cleared the fields of them.”

Her father sighed. “I did, beloved, but there are two constants in this world: war and bone rats. We can either avoid one or the other.”

Her mother sighed. Telekinetically, she disassembled the exoskeleton of the rat. Meu paced about excitedly until the bone rat corpse hit the ground again, and then the little terror of a cat started going at it.

“Gross!” she shrieked, but she kept watching the cat.

Later, she found him perched up on the balcony licking his paws in between surveying his domain. She could see the farm. Here and there, she could see the mummy guards, posted around the field and the perimeter of the house. They were creepy, but she also knew they wouldn’t harm her.

She ran her fingers over Meu’s mottled fur. “Good kitty,” she said.

In the distance, something drew her eyes. A flash of light, far out in the desert. Purple and orange. It was pretty. “What’s that?” she asked the cat.

“Mreew,” the cat said, annoyed that she’d stopped petting him. She resumed.

***

She sat across the table from her mother. Each of them had an abacus. Her mother wiggled her eyebrows in a way that always made her laugh. “Ready for another round, flower?”

“Yeah!” she shouted.

“Okay.” She flipped over a clay tablet where she’d scrawled a math equation. “Go!”

She froze, trying to remember what the symbols on the tablet meant. Her mother started moving beads, which meant she had to hurry. “Twelve,” she read carefully, and started clacking beads over. “And four!” Clack clack clack! went the beads and then she started counting them.

“Fifteen!” she shouted with elation.

“Count again, sweetie.”

She scrunched up her face, touching each bead. “Six…teen?”

“Good job!” her mother said.

“Yes!” she cried out, and ran around the room in a victory lap before returning to the table. Her mother was already smoothing the clay, ready to write new numbers. “Again!”

***

She stood at the front door and screamed.

Meu was there, fur far too red, dragging its way through the threshold. There was a trail of blood.

“Meu! No!” she rushed forward. She could hear her father telling her to slow her breathing. But she needed his ring. She couldn’t heal Meu without it. “Mooooom!” she shrieked. She started petting the cat, making sure she was gentle.

Her mother came running, but by the time she got there, it was too late. “I’m sorry, little flower. When your father gets back, we might be able to do something, but he’s gone.”

She pressed herself into her mother, sobbing for a long time.

When she had sobbed herself dry, they went out to investigate the field. She clutched her mom’s hand tightly.

There were three bone rat corpses laid out around the bush.

“Well, he certainly went down fighting,” her mother said.

That made her feel a little better.

***

“Concentrate, Naluri,” her father said. “The flow must go through the circumference of the ring. The runes do the hard part. You just control the flow.”

Naluri squinted, holding her hand. She’d grown frustrated several times before, and her father had let her run around and get the frustration out before she returned to it.

“That’s my stubborn lotus,” he said, and then he put the shining black ring on her finger again where it adjusted itself to fit snuggly. Naluri let her thumb trace the initials carved on it: G.N. Gaius Nezzar, she knew, her father’s real name. The one he used only at home. The world had forgotten it, he’d said. Dad said a lot of weird things. Mom was constantly telling him that, in that lighthearted way she did.

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“Feel the flow,” her father repeated.

Naluri squeezed her eyes shut altogether. She imagined her soul was a river made of light, just like he’d taught her. She just needed a trickle to thread through the ring, like a string going through the eye of a needle. Only, just like putting a thread through an eye, it was frustrating. She grit her teeth. There! A tiny trickle. She pushed at it. She gasped. “Daddy! Daddy it worked! I think it worked!”

“So it did,” he said, and he had this huge grin spread across his face, his gray eyes shining with pride.

Below them, the corpse of Meu, wearing a collar engraved in runes, stirred and sat up.

“Meu!” she shouted excitedly. “Oh Daddy, thank you,” she said, and hugged his leg.

“Of course, little lotus,” her father said, stroking her hair. Naluri spent hours playing with her now-undead cat, using the ring to give it commands. When they went to the village, he took her aside and said, “When we go to the village, do not mention the cat. Ever. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said seriously. They were still hiding, she knew. It had been repeated enough. As far as the village they visited knew, they were farmers. Best that they didn’t know just how far away that farm was, or what tended the fields.

When they got to the village and she saw the other children playing, she looked at her dad. He was wearing his ‘disguise face,’ as he called it. Illusion magic. He nodded at her, and Naluri went tearing away to go play.

She was good. She never mentioned the cat once. It earned her a scoop of dessert when they went to the market later.

***