Wednesday Briefs: Ancalagon Ch. 59

 

Wishful thinking. The market was chaos with Four Arms everywhere, but all eyes were on me. If the Kardoval were looking for us, and people wanted to turn us in, we’d be easy to find.

I had to hope the rebels here would accept Garjah. I wasn’t sure if they’d be more or less suspicious with me in tow, but he’d refused to leave me in the shuttle. Bouncer had been equally insistent on coming with me, so he paced at my side.

Maybe they weren’t staring at me so much. The predator with poisonous claws would probably make any sane person nervous. Especially after the first thing Garjah did was buy some meat and start tossing it to him as we walked.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “Can you be any more obvious?” Weren’t we supposed to be hiding?

“I’m sure anyone who might be alert to my appearance already knows I am here. If I were coming at the head of a security force, you would not be by my side and I would not be walking with a cerops and feeding him.”

Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. “You’re making it seem like we’re on vacation.”

“I don’t take vacations.”

I flapped a hand at him, scowling. “Don’t try to twist words. Here for leisure, not business. Or arresting people, since that is what you do.”

Garjah raised his eyebrows, his nostrils narrowing as he looked down on me. “I do far more than that.” He sounded insulted. “Peacekeepers arrest those who are guilty of crimes.”

“I really need to figure out all the job roles you guys have specialized,” I muttered. “Or I’m going to keep sticking my foot in it.”

Garjah looked down, already shifting us to the side of the narrow path we were walking beside the busy street. A pair of Four Arms crouching in a doorway grumbled, looked up, then shot to their feet and into the darkened recesses of the shop without another complaint. “What did you step in?” He eyed Bouncer suspiciously.

Rolling my lips in, I bit the bottom one, trying to hold in my laugh. I snorted, then choked on the giggle that somehow made its way out my nose with a nasal honking. Garjah stared at me like I was insane.

Okay, I was the insane one for using an obscure human idiom and then laughing, well, not so normally but still. He’d brought me to a remote small city to buy unpalatable food and drink and give them away to indicate our good intentions to rebels determined to bring down the government that he’d supported right up to that very afternoon.

If the light wasn’t fading, I’d have taken him somewhere to explain how the joke was on him. Instead I pointed to a shop with a small booth in front, bins full of different foods, some raw, some prepared, propped up on table lit up with spotlights in the corners of the awnings. “Aren’t those the acoji nuts you wanted?”

“Oh yeah, come on.” He took one last careful scan of the ground, as if checking for waste or anything else unpleasant that would soil his feet, and then towed me across the road between shuttles zooming past. By the time we made it, my heart was racing as fast as the vehicles had been.

“Isn’t there a crossing path through that?” I asked breathlessly, watching the shuttles weaving together. “Why do they have to fly so low anyway? Why not stay above the streets?”

“Above them? Why would we do that? Then no one will know the shops are open and come to see who is here and what they can buy.” The food seller winked. “I’ve never seen your kind before.” She tilted her head, examining me. “Four Arms, but no markings, and all that fuzz on you.” Both her eyebrows went up. “Hmm. Looking for exotic foods from some strange planet are you?”

Cheisumn, as the name above the cafe and food stall announced her, only shook her head. “Well think again. Not much import allowed from them.” She pointed a long graceful finger at us. “Come with me. I may be able to rustle something for some weary travelers long in the seat.”

As they followed her into the building, she paused when Bouncer followed me. Her eyes rounded so wide, she almost lost them. “That… animal—”

“Is my friend,” I interrupted her. “He goes with me. Everywhere. All the time.” That wasn’t strictly true, but I wasn’t going to equivalize right then.

She glanced at me, then Garjah, who was standing just behind and beside me, hefting the bag of nuts. I’d peeked into it once, and never again. It reeked of something like three day old body suits when the sweat had made the collar both sticky and stiff plus dead. Something had to be dead inside those oblong little white spheres. They looked more like shriveled organs left in fluids too long; the skin on the outside sloughing off with the gentlest of touches, the insides both wrinkled and swollen with fluids.

Disgusting.

Almost as bad as the tuber milk. Milk came from processors, not plants! When I’d told that to Garjah the first time he’d offered some of the thin, red fluid with a last meal, he’d looked at me like I was mentally deficient. For all their technology, they were a very agrarian society. I’d grown up too much on stations and planets with little plant life hospitable to humans.  

And of course, tuber milk is what Cheisumn handed Garjah. “Here, here. Sit, sit.” She pointed to a low bench against the far wall. Two men were already on another bench against the other wall, a window open to the night air bringing in the scent of dust and moist, heavy heat.

Bouncer sat at my knees, his gaze fixed on the two strangers.

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J Ray Lamb

Julie Lynn Hayes