Part Two: Ayem
Maissel was already awake the next morning and boiling two large, iridescent white kwama eggs in the pot atop his Dwemer stove when Maela stepped silently off the stairs and into the square little room. She was much improved for a night's good rest and a real bath; the smudges and swirls were gone from her face and her hair clean if not smooth in its pin-held bun. She looked to have washed her clothes, as well, and dried them overnight by her little oven; the tan skirt and thin white blouse she wore had no travel stains to be seen.
She yawned cutely as she took a quiet seat at the table in the center of the room, trading tiny smiles with Maissel as he looked up from his pot stirring. She'd left off the scarf she usually wore for warmth; her blouse left her dimpled blue-grey shoulders bare.
Maissel clattered around the room quietly, fetching plates and cups from the hutch against the wall and fishing the palm-wide eggs from the steaming pot as the girl's large red eyes followed him, her head pillowed sleepily on her palm. He slid a redware plate in front of the girl, one of the boiled eggs rolling and steaming across it, then took a seat opposite her and handed his guest a small knife and fork.
"Thanks," sighed Maela as he took up his own knife. "You don't happen to have any yam butter, do you?" the chandler nodded taciturnly to a plain redware crock in the middle of the table, and Maela smiled her thanks. The girl ate with a quiet, somnambular contentment, dragging her knife through the thick leathery rind of the egg, then cutting the pale grey innards into thick slices and spreading them liberally with dark brown yam butter from its dish. She chewed slowly, staring down blankly at the dark grain of the table, not watching her host as he ate, but drinking silently of the water he poured into a small clay cup for her. Bit by bit consciousness seemed to tip toe back into her eyes, and they slipped off the table surreptitiously, to the tapestries on the walls, the hutch laden with dishes and cups and goblets, the small merry fire, and settled on the Dwemer stove by the hearth.
She eyed it thoughtfully for several minutes, her head hanging as she chewed her egg.
"Muri used to have one like that," she said slowly, not looking at Maissel. "In the tribe. But Kanly knocked it off a cliff with a bad shot, and the thing shattered completely with the fall."
"Someone in your tribe had a Dwemer stove like mine?" asked Maissel in surprise.
Maela nodded, but fixed her eyes on her plate instead of elaborating. The two ate in introverted silence for another few minute before the girl went on.
"Muri says it belonged to her aunt when she was a girl. Her uncle, Uroshnor, supposedly went into the ruin in the western mountains to retrieve it and win Muri's aunt's favor." She chewed another bite of buttered egg. "How did you get yours?" A quick flash of large red eyes to the chandler's narrow face, then back down to her meal.
Maissel grunted noncommittally as he watched the girl eat. "I'm afraid I don't know, exactly," he said, after a moment. "I've always had it, or my family has, anyway. Since my grandfather's time, and I know few family tales older than that. For all I know, grandfather could have gone himself to that same Dwemer ruin and retrieved it, like this Uroshnor you spoke of."
Another flash of the big red eyes, this time skeptical; it was apparently too much of an arrogance to intimate that his settled ancestors could have performed deeds as daring as those of the Zainab. She shrugged her bare shoulders.
"Maybe," she said as though bequeathing a boon. "Uroshnor did many of those sorts of things, if you listen to the stories of those like Muri, who were children when he was alive. Hunting outland demons. Kidnapping the daughters of the Telvanni wizards. Slaying monsters."
Maissel chuckled briefly. "He sounds like quite the mer."
"He was," answered Maela with a nod. "He brought the Zainab great honor. So did his son, Kaushad the Fruitful. They were both Ashkhans, you know. Uroshnor is the great-grandfather of our current Ashkhan, Shabael Al-Kaushad. Shabael took his grandfather's name as part of his own when he became Ashkhan, hoping that he would become so great," she added with sudden venom, "but his arrogance has not yet become so great as to take the name for his own entirely."
"You speak as though this is common, this taking of names," said Maissel, passing momentarily without comment over the girl's surprisingly vitriolic tone for her Ashkhan. "Is it custom to assume different names after birth, with your people?"
The round, smooth shoulders shrugged again. "Not common. Mostly with Ashkhans, really, or among those with many honored ancestors in their family. A mer might assume the name of one of his most honored, memorable ancestors, the ones whose names echo down through the centuries, to do honor to that ancestor, or to forge a special relationship with their spirit, or to declare his intentions for his life. Or he might have the name thrust upon him by the people if he walks a path so worthy of his ancestor's deeds that the resemblance is undeniable. It is more complex than this, of course," she said, glancing up briefly again, "but you do not need to know the ways of the true-hearted Velothi, Settled One."
The chandler shrugged and nodded his acquiescence. "As you say," he murmured, his voice boulders grinding like giants' teeth. He let the conversation sit a few minutes, as Maela scraped the last of her egg off of its thick shell and took a long drink of water before saying, "But I am most curious... you sounded remarkably critical when you spoke of your Ashkhan."
"That is because the Ashkhan is a pathetic little mer who thinks his tongue can get him anything he wants," answered Maela in a surprising growl. "He attempts to walk the path of his grandfather, but he has little of his ancestors' boldness; he has a coward's heart and a filthy cat's liking for sugar. It is a wonder he did not lose more teeth than three," she added in a dark mutter.
"But enough," she said as she let her knife clatter to her plate, her breakfast finished, "you prying fat-smith. How do you intend to show me your craft?" She waited expectantly, eyes on the chandler.
"Piecemeal," grunted Maissel simply. "I cannot show all of my trade in a few weeks, so you will have to be satisfied by the scattered tasks I will be undertaking according to my usual schedule."
"Mm," mumbled the girl quietly, tracing the lines of the table with the tip of one finger. "Very well. What is first?"
"Ash is first, and ash is last," grated Maissel as he stood and began clearing the dishes from the table, stacking them on the hutch for reuse. Maela looked up at him, puzzled, but he did not explain. "Before that, though, I must have a wash," he said. "Wait here."
The chandler vanished from the room, down the stairs with fresh folded clothes under his arms, to the dark cellar's embrace, leaving Maela to her sleepy surveyance of his simple, bare home in the warmth and light of the small fire. When he returned, his grey hair dripping down the collar of his loose black shirt, the girl looked more alert, sitting up straight on the hard seat of her low backed chair. She jumped to her feet as he she spotted Maissel by the stairs.
"Ready, then?" she chirped.
Maissel nodded slowly. "I am. Follow me." He turned, pausing to snatch up his heavy pack from where it sat against the wall, and began climbing up the narrow creaking staircase. "But, girl, we need to speak of a few things before we begin."
"What things?" asked Maela, looking curiously at the mer's back as she followed him up the stairs.
"Your presence in the village," answered Maissel gravely. "You are my guest, of course, and I have the right to guest anyone I wish excluding criminals, but, girl, you should know that some here may not welcome your presence."
Maela scoffed loudly as they turned the next flight, Maissel's bare bedroom dark at their side. "You are telling me this, fat-smith? I would not expect your people to welcome the presence of a true Velothi in their midst; we are too much of a reminder of their own weakness."
"Hmmph," huffed the chandler, unlatching the long trapdoor at the top of the stairs and pushing it open, letting a slice of pale sunlight and crisp fresh air into the dark stairwell. "You are rude, girl. I am one of those you disparage." He gave the trapdoor a sharp push, and it flipped backwards onto the roof with a loud bang, exposing them completely to the sharp wind.
"I... did not include you, exactly," said Maela as she climbed onto the roof, sounding slightly chagrined. "You are not like most of your kind."
"That may be, or it may not," answered the chandler rockily. "Just watch yourself while in Vos. Keep a low profile. None of us are exactly harmless." The girl answered with a grudging nod of her round chin, and Maissel moved to close the trapdoor behind them.
It was a bright morning, after the dark of the house; the skies were clear and blue over Vos, the winds gusting and cuttingly cold at that height. The tower rooftop was small and flat, stonemold like everything else in Vos, with a low wall running around its edge. Small slanting runnels had been molded into the 'floor', and holes pierced the low wall periodically, to drain away the rains when they came. All of Vos was below them there, save the top of other tower across the reddish glass dome of the chapel; the little tan-gold houses with their simple hard blooded inhabitants, going about their daily chores ignorant of the Ashlander watching them from above. Beyond the village loomed the empty rocky heights where her people would camp, and the steep sided hills of the Grazelands, dry and brown with the stubble of harvested wickwheat. And in the other direction, the shore at the base of Vos' low cliff, where the long sand paddies, bolstered by stacked stones, were flooded with the high tide but otherwise empty, the saltrice seeds and marshmerrow rhizomes they held through the cold winter invisible beneath the sands. And the bay, the clear blue water splotched green with kelp, the thousand tiny islands and black spires of stone blending together in the distance, and the gigantic mushroom tower of Tel Mora just a few spans of water across from the village and as silently distant and secret as it had been the other side of the Sea of Ghosts. The Telvanni sorcerers were not sociable, even the relatively young and inexperienced ones; they never appreciated being reminded of Vos' existence. The villagers kept to themselves, and gladly; the Telvanni were dangerous and evil, profane necromancers and insane sorcerers.
It was a sign of the bravery and strength of the Ahemmusa that they made the islands of the bay their stalking grounds, camped with impunity in the shadows of Zafirbel Bay's three unnatural mushroom towers. Of course, there had never been any sign that the Telvanni had even noticed when the Ahemmusa shifted into the bay a generation ago, and they were not so daring as to camp on the same island as one of the towers, but there was still a powerful foreboding attached to them for it, to the image of Ashlanders come araiding, sea water dripping from their mouths and the strange mushroom towers at their backs. Their strength and ferocity was real, but it was this daring that made the Ahemmusa so feared by the Zainab and Erabenimsun.
Maissel's hand at her elbow drew Maela away from the wall, and out of her thoughts.
"So what's first, then?" she said eagerly, remembering their purpose. "What was all that talk about ash? What does ash have to do with making candles?"
"Nothing," answered the chandler. "But it has everything to do with making soap. Come over here, girl."
He beckoned her before a short line of large wooden barrels and buckets arrayed across the rooftop, then bent down and flipped open the top of his leather pack, lying on the roof against one of the barrels. It was filled with dark ash.
"I use the ash to make lye water," he explained as he pulled a large bucket under the spigot of one of the barrels. "This is rain water," he said, tapping the barrel next to it. "I fill a barrel with ashes, then add the rain water and let it sit. After a few days, you have lye water." He turned the spigot of the first barrel, and murky brown water gurgled out into the bucket.
"And what do you use this sneaky water for, fat-smith?" asked the girl.
"Soap, as I said," growled Maissel. "It is lye water that transforms the fat of the guar into the useful soap cakes. But you will see more of that in a few days. This water is not finished, though," he added as the last drops drained slowly into the large bucket. "It needs temperance with another sort of ash. Hand me that bucket, there."
Maela passed him a second bucket, and the chandler quickly dumped the dark ashes from his pack inside.
"What is the difference?" asked Maela.
The chandler took a thick wooden rod from its place leaning against one of the barrels and began stirring the ashes in the bucket slowly as he answered. "The ashes I used before were burned elm from my fireplace," he said. "These are the spewings of Red Mountain I collected from Molag Amur."
The small 'O' of surprise popped up once more on the girl's face, framed by her red-split lips. "You have been to the wastelands?" she gasped incredulously.
Maissel chuckled. "I daresay I've been to the wastelands in the south more often than anyone else you know. I go every year, for the ashes."
Maela frowned. "But - but the monsters, the kagouti and alit and nix would get you! I have heard they are even more dangerous in the Amur than they are here. You would be eaten up, if you really went there! And besides, my people would see you going south through our lands, and they have not." She spoke as though that settled the matter; he had clearly been lying.
The chandler's rough laugh echoed over the village.
"The Zainab do not see all, girl. I have evaded your scouts in the hills and those of the Erabenimsun in the wastes for more years than you can imagine. More difficult to avoid are the beasts, but I manage that as well. For the most part."
"I don't believe," the girl stated stoutly. "You could not avoid us for so many years."
"Believe it. My family has been slipping through your hills without your knowledge for at least five hundred years. There have been accidents and near misses, but the mere fact that you do not know of our daring proves our skill. I myself have never been close to capture. If you do not believe me, girl, check this ash," he nodded down to the bucket. "You cannot find ash of this kind without crossing the hills, west or south."
The girl looked away mulishly, lips pursed in an expression reminiscent of the Mask, and Maissel left her to her stubbornness. Kneeling by the bucket, he untied a small leather pouch from his belt. Pulling open the drawstring, he bent his head briefly over the contents, murmuring a short prayer. Then he poured the grey contents slowly into the bucket.
"Well, now what was that?" asked the girl, still sounding offended, as Maissel replaced the empty pouch at his belt.
"Ancestor ash," he stated simply, and began to stir the contents of the bucket once more.
Maela let out a horrified squawk. "Ancestor ash?" she squeaked. "You're mixing the dust of your ancestors with - with common cinders?" Her pretty face was a picture of horrified revulsion. "I knew you settled folk were blasphemous, but I never would have thought anyone could do something so vile!" Her nose was wrinkled, her mouth turned down harshly.
"This is not blasphemy," replied Maissel, surprisingly unperturbed. "This is reverence. We do not worship in quite the same way as your people, but we still give honor to the ancestors. The lye water I will make with these ashes will be sanctified lye, used only for the preparation of soaps for holy rituals. This soap is one of the ways we remain close with our ancestors; it is central to many of our ceremonies, for weddings and births, for the purity of our priests before holy works, for the washing of the dead before cremation. As the fat of the guar cleanses our bodies, so do we beseech the beneficence of our ancestors to cleanse our spirits." He tapped the stick on the side of the bucket to free it of ashes, then set it aside and hefted the bucket high, pouring the dark grey contents into an empty third barrel.
"That... is very different from what I was taught of your people," said Maela quietly. "Perhaps it is not such blasphemy."
The chandler stooped to snatch the first bucket, filled with brownish lye water, from the roof, and poured it carefully into the barrel with the ancestor ash.
"You are young, Maela," he said, letting the empty bucket drop to the ground, "and your people know little of our ways at best. We are less different than you think. But come; the water must steep for at least a day before it can be used, and the prickled skin of your shoulders tells me the wind's chill has cut you." He laid one broad, callused grey hand on the cold-pimpled skin of her neck, and ushered her gently back to the warm darkness below.
