LET’S GO. LET’S DANCE THE TÉNÉBREUSE.
Written for the prompt 'courage is morally neutral’ at 31_days.
Series: Avatar.
Characters: Ursa; OC.
Rating/Warnings: T. Description of violence, character death, dead body.
... Apparently I can write firebending!Ursa. Sort of.
... ou en bas, cette indécente amazone dans son petit désert privé ...
Max Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, trans Dorothea Tanning (New York: George Braziller, 1982), p. 27.
A traveller walks into a small bar in the Earth Kingdom, past the click and slap of old men playing Pai Sho by the street door, where round circles of vague green light glow against the outside wall, the sun coming through the bright dye of the unlit lanterns. He slides himself onto a stool at the bar, lets his pack fall to the floor, spins a bronze coin onto the counter and slaps his thumb down on it. He orders a cup of rice wine.
The woman behind the bar nods her head without looking round. She is levering thin white rings of pickled bamboo out of an earthenware jar with a pair of long chopsticks. She is tall, taller than most women in this scrubby little town, her short black hair caught back in a green tie. Her nails are ridged and a little lopsided, as though she has done much harder work with her hands than this and they have grown back in slightly off-centre. Her knuckles are a little swollen and whitened with scar tissue.
She flips a cup off the shelf, tips a measure of cloudy wine into it one-handed, turns to the traveller. He does not look up.
“Thanks,” he says. “Leave the bottle.”
She tells him the price. He leans back, cracks his knuckles, takes a long look at the little bar, the white-glazed bottles on the shelves, the dark wood tables, the narrow stairs leading up through the ceiling, the woman standing behind the counter.
She pushes a wooden board over to him, a fan of bamboo slices spread out across it, translucent and wet.
Behind him a wagon rumbles through the noon-heavy street, the old men bicker. Faint shouting swells in from the river, fades as the boats pass downstream. You can smell it in the bar, or maybe taste it, wide dank water in the heat.
“Quiet place you’ve got here,” says the traveller, making conversation.
The woman nods.
“Bit of a change from the big city,” the traveller carries on, running a finger round the edge of his cup. He has not yet drunk any of his wine.
“Ba Sing Se,” he clarifies. “The lower ring. It’s like an ant-worm heap. Anyone could lose themselves there.”
He clears his throat, brushes his broad hands off on his thighs. He is middle-aged, perhaps a few years older than the woman, with a round peasant’s face, short fingers with wide cracked nails, road-dust in his hair.
His accent is flat, coastal; the woman, you can tell, has come from the south, perhaps. A good long way, in any case. And from a good family, certainly. The manager says she adds class. Always a friendly word, though. A good worker, after the first few weeks.
“That’s where I was,” he says. “A little while back. Never seen anything like it, really. Boatloads of refugees coming in every day. More after the new Fire Lord came in, of course, people told me. Near two years now they’ve been pouring in from all over. Ant-worms, like I said.”
The woman loosens her shoulders, raises an eyebrow. She slides a knife out from under the counter, begins to slice her way through a round green lime-apple. Its scent comes out into the air, strong, sharp, a little swampy at the edges with ripeness. The traveller rocks his stool back, swivelling it away across the floor until he has to lean forward to reach the counter.
“Of course,” he says, “a place like this, it’s different. Peaceful. People notice new things.”
“Oh, yes?”
The woman’s voice is quiet, even.
One of the old men slides out a Pai Sho counter and cackles.
“He’s talking about you, Da Xia, or I’ll pay up half my tab. Your past has come to town, girl.”
He tips back a swallow of pale flat beer, gives a stagy leer over one shoulder.
“Or perhaps your man, hmm?”
The man cracks a token smile.
“’Fraid you’ve got that one wrong, old timer,” he says. He and the woman regard each other.
“I do have a message from him, mind you,” he says.
He rises, flicks out one arm across the bar so quick and smooth you might hardly notice, two fingers straight out. The woman moves as if to catch a falling child, a careful dart under and in, one hand around his outstretched fingers, the other flat against his chest. Her elbow catches the wine bottle; there is a sudden soft noise, a stink of sharp spirits. One of the old men makes a noise of disgust.
“Oh,” she says. “Please! Please, the doctor. He’s caught the sun.”
She lowers the traveller, face down on the counter. Flaps a spare hand at the men.
“Now, please,” she says, tightly. “I’ll take another look at the tab of whoever gets back first.”
They stumble out of the door on each other’s heels.
When they come back, though, the doctor holding his glasses on with one hand as they trot through the streets, the traveller has left.
A false alarm, the woman says, coming back out from the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up. He had the wrong person, in any case. The wrong drink, too, her mistake. And just a touch of the sun. This summer, it’s gone on too long, too hot.
She knocks a bit off their tabs, all the same: the manager will never notice. There is still a horrible stench of spirits and ripe fruit and cooking hanging all through the bar; the old men prop open all the windows before they settle back down.
A few days later a white, rounded body catches in the nets staked across the river down where it spreads out into a wide brown estuary. Fishermen in breech-clouts pull it onto their flat-bottomed boat, wrestle it face-up. It’s something they have done before.
There is a hole in the front of the traveller’s robe and a wet cooked hole in his chest, neat and round as the membrane on the cheek of a frog.
Back upstream, the woman packs her bags, moves on in across the Earth Kingdom, one of many on the summer roads.
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