SUMMER 83, 514
In a play, once, Minnie had heard of the long evenings of the Akvatari, and she had found it intoxicating and lush at the time - a kind of sacred, imminently foreign decadence.
Having experienced the questionable joys of Aburan heat, she was now fairly convinced that the whole thing was a simple adaptation - the evening brought, at least, the sun's tardy nap time, and a blessed breath of wind some nights. The water too, was cool and pleasant in the canal, running through the damp fabric of her blue cotton skirt.
She rotated her feet, feeling now almost a pleasure at the sensation of her ankles straining against the ribbon binding them together. Swimming still felt like an activity ill-designed to show her as competent, but it was not so frustratingly impossible, now - she even swam, now, alone in the current, Semiyr having gone to a gallery showing. Her body wore the simple wrapping across the breast of the Akvatari, and her cheeks bore freckles - they made her laugh, for she had not spent so much time in the sun since she had been a child, and they indeed gave her face a kind of youth when she looked at it in the wavering water's surface.
It was third's-night, and she had just come from the Spire of the Red Lanterns, and the complex traceries of letters and vine work lay across her back and belly like black botany. She plashed her tail-feet, swimming like a (clumsy) Akvatari, and smiled, a sad sort of smile. The painting, the soft movements of the brush in the hands of Krindre Leibsänger were a pleasure she still had not learned to swallow fully, and a bittersweet pleasure, for they made her think of Mara still. Ronight, particularly, with the sand-sour air of a sirocco blowing in from the continent, she felt very much away, very much homesick.
It was this, then, that brought her to swim, instead of back home to the House of Lives Lived, down into the docksides. Perhaps Raisa would be there, she thought, and not be busy - it was not too late for a cup of evening tea, maybe? Or perhaps she could simply sit and watch the stevedore's - a ship had come up from the South, not so long ago, and would be at the moorings now. It was a pleasure seeing them loaded, for in Abura there was no steady stream of regular bundles, but an endless assortment of oddments - a statue swathed in heavy white canvas, or great flat covered canvases, tucked carefully inside of fresh timber, boxes of dried pampas-grass cradling delicate works of glass or porcelain, and the soft, sad singing of the artists who sold their works to the Guild.
She came to the canal's edge then, in the gathering dim of the night. The dusk was just reaching its end, the last warm light of the evening melting away beneath the cool tongue of the night-wind. The stars shone almost as clear and insistent as they had when the ship was at sea. She pulled herself up to the canal's edge, sat on the stone's there, and pulled her canvas satchel up beside her, bending to begin to unbind her ankles.
x
In a play, once, Minnie had heard of the long evenings of the Akvatari, and she had found it intoxicating and lush at the time - a kind of sacred, imminently foreign decadence.
Having experienced the questionable joys of Aburan heat, she was now fairly convinced that the whole thing was a simple adaptation - the evening brought, at least, the sun's tardy nap time, and a blessed breath of wind some nights. The water too, was cool and pleasant in the canal, running through the damp fabric of her blue cotton skirt.
She rotated her feet, feeling now almost a pleasure at the sensation of her ankles straining against the ribbon binding them together. Swimming still felt like an activity ill-designed to show her as competent, but it was not so frustratingly impossible, now - she even swam, now, alone in the current, Semiyr having gone to a gallery showing. Her body wore the simple wrapping across the breast of the Akvatari, and her cheeks bore freckles - they made her laugh, for she had not spent so much time in the sun since she had been a child, and they indeed gave her face a kind of youth when she looked at it in the wavering water's surface.
It was third's-night, and she had just come from the Spire of the Red Lanterns, and the complex traceries of letters and vine work lay across her back and belly like black botany. She plashed her tail-feet, swimming like a (clumsy) Akvatari, and smiled, a sad sort of smile. The painting, the soft movements of the brush in the hands of Krindre Leibsänger were a pleasure she still had not learned to swallow fully, and a bittersweet pleasure, for they made her think of Mara still. Ronight, particularly, with the sand-sour air of a sirocco blowing in from the continent, she felt very much away, very much homesick.
It was this, then, that brought her to swim, instead of back home to the House of Lives Lived, down into the docksides. Perhaps Raisa would be there, she thought, and not be busy - it was not too late for a cup of evening tea, maybe? Or perhaps she could simply sit and watch the stevedore's - a ship had come up from the South, not so long ago, and would be at the moorings now. It was a pleasure seeing them loaded, for in Abura there was no steady stream of regular bundles, but an endless assortment of oddments - a statue swathed in heavy white canvas, or great flat covered canvases, tucked carefully inside of fresh timber, boxes of dried pampas-grass cradling delicate works of glass or porcelain, and the soft, sad singing of the artists who sold their works to the Guild.
She came to the canal's edge then, in the gathering dim of the night. The dusk was just reaching its end, the last warm light of the evening melting away beneath the cool tongue of the night-wind. The stars shone almost as clear and insistent as they had when the ship was at sea. She pulled herself up to the canal's edge, sat on the stone's there, and pulled her canvas satchel up beside her, bending to begin to unbind her ankles.
x
