Aralis storytime!
Wut up. Below is a very long Aralis story, the one I told at the last session. As usual, I worked it up by talking to myself at great length; what's below is my best attempt at reconstructing something that was never written down in its first form.
(I felt a little . . . I dunno, cheaty? doing storytelling in Aralis. In Madrigal I played a storyteller; in Aralis my character is an amateur writer and musician, which isn't the same thing. But enh, the truth is, I find I really like doing it. And it seemed just-appropriate-enough this session. I have never tried it outside the constraints of someone else's LARP setting, and I dunno if I ever would-those constraints are extremely useful.)
This story doesn't make too much sense if you don't know a certain amount about the setting. Hope it's relatively entertaining anyway! It will give me much dorksome pleasure to explain the background if anybody wants, though I suspect nobody's likely to read this who doesn't know it already . . .
Place of the Well
A laughing fountain hid under a pebble
A smiling river between stone and the stone
Cry in the desert, his voice will not echo
But close your lips and you two are alone
He is beloved of wing and walker
Think of lost things and he'll dance in your eye
But he doesn't love you, save when he remembers
When he comes courting he darkens the sky
I still remember those words as if they were fresh in my ear! As if it were still . . . still the day I first heard them, from that man, the weak one. But when I think . . . when I think, it was a great many years ago.
***
My name is Senetthait. Senetthait the Sharpeye, they called me, Senetthait the Marksman. In those days I lived with a little band of my kinsmen. We were what they call a fox-clan: men separate from our own tribe, who wandered and hunted and stole from anyone we could find. We stole from travelers-with better luck we stole them, you understand? Took them, kept them somewhere until their people paid us to have them back safe.
A life like that, you need to keep moving, always-you can't make yourself easy to find. But you also need good hiding places, and we had a favorite one: a little cave hidden at the base of a ridge, way up in the northernmost part of the Great Desert. We were near there, that day, spiraling round and round, surveying our hunting-ground. I was the one who saw him, a small man up on a dune, far away. He was staggering, dragging something behind him.
Sharaf looked at me-Sharaf, that's my cousin, the leader of our band. "Bring that man down," he said, and I raised my bow. There was no wind but it was still a good shot, a very good shot . . . such a long distance, straight into the sun, and I put the arrow right through his thigh. A wound like that and he'd be quite right in a week or two, when it was time to him to go home to his kin; but for now, he sat down and did not get up.
We climbed up to him and went through his things. He was a strange-looking man, I will say, small and soft-bodied and thin, with a sheen of blue in his hair; we had never seen a man like that before. And the bag he'd been hauling along, that was disappointing. There was some jewelry that, Sharaf said, marked him out as a priest of some kind. There were books, which we burned that night for the warmth. There was an odd metal tool, which I looked at for a long time. I decided it was for calculating the height of the sun in the sky, other things-for working out where you were in the world. We in the Desert, we have our own kinds of wayfinding; we don't need tools like that.
So we carried him back to that cave I spoke of, and we put him in the hole. This was a little pit, natural, inside the cave, just deep enough that a man couldn't climb out once you put him in. We bound up his leg and we put food and water in with him. All the while he was saying things, though he was not awake: Cry in the desert, he'd say, or Think of lost things and he'll dance in your eye, or prayers to his god.
We put him in the hole, anyhow, and we sent out the birds. To the four great oases, you see? Messenger-birds to find out who was missing this man and who would buy him.
Two days went, and birds came back with messages saying no one, nowhere. Sharaf was not so well with this, but he shrugged and sent out our youngest fastest fellow as a courier. The boy was to go to al-Wadib, that being the nearest of the great oases, and start asking about this man. He was surely foreign; maybe by now his foreign kin would have come, or maybe the boy could learn things. But afterward, while we waited, the man woke up and started to talk. And he said he was alone in the world.
He still muttered a great deal of nonsense, this weak man. But close your lips and you two are alone, he'd say-but then he'd sometimes make sense. He said he came from the ocean to the north. We knew what the ocean was-a great body of poisonous water-and the man said that he'd owned a ship, a caravan that went on this water. But it had sunk and all his people had been on board, all his friends and family. Anyone who cared about him. He had woken up on the edge of the water days to the north of us; he said that God, his god, had then told him to go south. He said he would know when to stop walking.
I remember thinking: what a cruel god his was, to play this trick on him.
Our runner came back from al-Wadib. And the weak one was right-no one was looking for him. There were no curious foreigners in the oasis. I think Sharaf went a little crazy right then. At any rate he did not have us move from our bolt-hole, which we should have done. "We'll wait just a while longer," he said, "and see if our luck changes."
So then it got bad, two days later. Our runner must have got some attention at al-Wadib after all; someone must have seen him and tracked him back to our cave. They came in the darkest part of the night. Another fox-clan, five men just as desperate as us, maybe even skinnier. Sharaf and another man were able to keep them busy at the entrance to the cave while I got out by this back way we had, and got up on a ridge right nearby. So I was able to shoot three of them dead right there. And Sharaf and our other man killed the fourth and fifth of these enemies; but by then Sharaf's arm was cut so badly it wouldn't be right again, and the other man was dead.
Sharaf, I think he truly went mad. I remember: "We've had nothing from this weak little man in the hole," he said, "nothing! So nothing is what we'll give him!" So he had us all go back into the cave and there we stayed. Do you understand? We were to stay in the cave, with the weak one down below, and we were to give him no food. And no water. And we were to wait.
That first day he was anxious and insistent, but we did not answer him. He talked to himself then. (A laughing fountain, hid under a pebble, I remember him saying. That over and over.)
The second day the talking went on, and he was praying more. But he was quieter; we survivors were all quieter when we heard him. The third day went by, the fourth day. But he didn't die. We lowered no water to him, but the weak one did not die.
We . . . in the Desert, we don't do these things. You in the outer world, to you we leave wars, atrocities, all those huge cruelties. If you were out on the sand and not of my tribe, to be sure I'd rob you if it were to my advantage-but I'd end it there.
I suppose that's why, on the night of the fifth day, I tied a rope to a strong rock above the hole and went down. The little man's body was very light-He doesn't love you save when he remembers, he said as I picked him up-and I was able to make him hold onto the rope and even climb up, with help. While I was pushing him up over the lip of the hole, my heel was suddenly very cold. I looked down. There, running around my foot, was a little trickle of water coming out of a crack in the stones.
We had been over every inch of that cave, and we had found no such thing before. It would have been a great excitement to us, a source of water! But no matter; I pushed him up and climbed up after him. And we were off out that back way I spoke of, into the cold cold desert in the middle of the night.
Oh that man, that frail and tiresome man. I have never known anyone to drink so much water as he did. In two days he'd taken our whole supply of it, everything I had brought. He got stronger, happier, but I looked at our empty skins and was furious. I called him "Weak One" to his face then! We were in the middle of nowhere, out of water. I was afraid; I said that maybe we should turn northeast and make for al-Wadib. It'd be bad if they recognized me there, very bad, but it couldn't be worse than a thirsty death on the sand. We all know that fear.
But no, the man said we would go on to the south. Why did I follow him?
A day later he stopped, and again I was afraid. He had been reciting his little rhyme all day, mixed with long prayers I couldn't follow; I worried that he had gotten lost in his mind, like he was when we first found him. I begged him to walk on and he wouldn't; I shouted at him to walk on and he wouldn't. My voice was already beginning to be frail and hoarse from the thirst. I cried "I will leave you! Truly, I will leave you and go to the oasis; I will take my chances!" and I turned away. He stopped praying and said "Stay," in a soft and entreating voice, and my feet stopped on the ground.
The place where we were, I know that place very well now. There were outcroppings of rock there, and a great many sandy rocks fallen away. He began to pick these up, lay them down in a low flat place on the sand. He made a square out of rocks, which he chose carefully. He never stopped that little chant of his; A smiling river between stone and stone, he said, and looked up at me and grinned.
Then he took more stones and laid a second course over that square. Then a third, so that he had a sort of large square box with no top. And I felt it then. Just for a moment! A clear, strong moment: all the strange words, the incantations of his made sense to me, and I could see in that instant how they had all built up to this-
He laid his hand on the ground, between the stone walls he'd built, and he pushed. Down he pushed now in total silence, and the sand fell away under his frail little palm. Blackness was there in the hole, and then a glint far below. It was water.
So, the next day, replete, I went hunting and shot two hares. I didn't take enough care about being seen, and I hadn't even thought to worry about how long we had stayed in that one place. I should have expected it: Sharaf and one of the others from our band, coming from the north. They had a woman with them, someone they had made captive along the way I think. They saw me.
Did I raise my bow first? No, I think not; I think they were already running at me across the bright sand, knives out and shining in the eye of Vaasa, by the time my first arrow was on the string. The last two men I ever killed-one of them my leader, my own cousin. The woman, left behind, looked at the two corpses and ran.
Still we did not leave the place of the well.
Two days later the woman came back, and she brought with her other women and a group of men, and they did not attack. They had brought tents, supplies; they came to stay. We built a safe little camp there-
I must explain this to you: we knew that the well would not live the whole year round. When things grew too hot we would have to move to one of the great oases (and we did, and no victim of mine recognized me, so against the odds we were safe). But we also knew that we could come back again to the well in its season, and it would return to life for us. We belong to the Great Desert and it belongs to us. We know that our feet will cross every burning inch of it; and if they do not in this life, our sons' or their sons' feet will mark the sand we missed. It will always be there, waiting for us to come back to it again.
***
So many years . . . so many, gone by now. You know, they wanted to make me their sheikh? Senetthait the Marksman? But I thought of Sharaf, mad, dying in his blood, and I said no.
The weak one, he taught us for years. He taught us to pray to his god, and he taught us secrets. We loved the new things he brought into that place . . . the mystery of water. Yes. Forgive me, I am quite old now.
So old! So many days. So when I said no, they asked the man I'd brought out of that black stone pit, the well-builder, the teacher, and he said yes. And indeed we are a tribe now, and if we remember all the secrets he taught us we will go on walking the sand and dreaming of the sea, forever.
Today they told me a strange thing. You see, we've come back to the place of the well for yet another season . . . forgive me, I am tired . . . and they have told me that they are giving it a name. My name! Senetthait. My first thought was that I did not like this; I do not feel like a source of life or wisdom, being so old and so foolish.
But then I think: I stopped and listened to a voice, in a dark place. And I became a conduit, a passage through the night; a great presence flowed through me and into my great dry desolate realm. He is beloved of wing and walker; think of lost things and he'll dance in your eye. He doesn't love you, save when he remembers . . .
And yes, even now the the air around me grows dim, black, heavy with rain.
***
And that is my story! To the listener I note that this is one of many conflicting origin-tales for my mother's tribe-indeed, perhaps it's less likely to be true than most of them. Certainly it is less dignified.
Although it is the case that that tribe winters at a seasonal oasis called Senetthait; there is no stone well there now, but the Desert wears such things to dust quite quickly.
And it is true that their sheikhs cling to some notion that they are descended from Adelith, and for that reason they often take epithets such as "the Frail" or "the Infirm." Or, indeed, "the Weak."
-Ḥasmir bin Yeyshan Ḥarat, son also of Naur Ḥarat who was born to the al-Eyreim
(I felt a little . . . I dunno, cheaty? doing storytelling in Aralis. In Madrigal I played a storyteller; in Aralis my character is an amateur writer and musician, which isn't the same thing. But enh, the truth is, I find I really like doing it. And it seemed just-appropriate-enough this session. I have never tried it outside the constraints of someone else's LARP setting, and I dunno if I ever would-those constraints are extremely useful.)
This story doesn't make too much sense if you don't know a certain amount about the setting. Hope it's relatively entertaining anyway! It will give me much dorksome pleasure to explain the background if anybody wants, though I suspect nobody's likely to read this who doesn't know it already . . .
Place of the Well
A laughing fountain hid under a pebble
A smiling river between stone and the stone
Cry in the desert, his voice will not echo
But close your lips and you two are alone
He is beloved of wing and walker
Think of lost things and he'll dance in your eye
But he doesn't love you, save when he remembers
When he comes courting he darkens the sky
I still remember those words as if they were fresh in my ear! As if it were still . . . still the day I first heard them, from that man, the weak one. But when I think . . . when I think, it was a great many years ago.
***
My name is Senetthait. Senetthait the Sharpeye, they called me, Senetthait the Marksman. In those days I lived with a little band of my kinsmen. We were what they call a fox-clan: men separate from our own tribe, who wandered and hunted and stole from anyone we could find. We stole from travelers-with better luck we stole them, you understand? Took them, kept them somewhere until their people paid us to have them back safe.
A life like that, you need to keep moving, always-you can't make yourself easy to find. But you also need good hiding places, and we had a favorite one: a little cave hidden at the base of a ridge, way up in the northernmost part of the Great Desert. We were near there, that day, spiraling round and round, surveying our hunting-ground. I was the one who saw him, a small man up on a dune, far away. He was staggering, dragging something behind him.
Sharaf looked at me-Sharaf, that's my cousin, the leader of our band. "Bring that man down," he said, and I raised my bow. There was no wind but it was still a good shot, a very good shot . . . such a long distance, straight into the sun, and I put the arrow right through his thigh. A wound like that and he'd be quite right in a week or two, when it was time to him to go home to his kin; but for now, he sat down and did not get up.
We climbed up to him and went through his things. He was a strange-looking man, I will say, small and soft-bodied and thin, with a sheen of blue in his hair; we had never seen a man like that before. And the bag he'd been hauling along, that was disappointing. There was some jewelry that, Sharaf said, marked him out as a priest of some kind. There were books, which we burned that night for the warmth. There was an odd metal tool, which I looked at for a long time. I decided it was for calculating the height of the sun in the sky, other things-for working out where you were in the world. We in the Desert, we have our own kinds of wayfinding; we don't need tools like that.
So we carried him back to that cave I spoke of, and we put him in the hole. This was a little pit, natural, inside the cave, just deep enough that a man couldn't climb out once you put him in. We bound up his leg and we put food and water in with him. All the while he was saying things, though he was not awake: Cry in the desert, he'd say, or Think of lost things and he'll dance in your eye, or prayers to his god.
We put him in the hole, anyhow, and we sent out the birds. To the four great oases, you see? Messenger-birds to find out who was missing this man and who would buy him.
Two days went, and birds came back with messages saying no one, nowhere. Sharaf was not so well with this, but he shrugged and sent out our youngest fastest fellow as a courier. The boy was to go to al-Wadib, that being the nearest of the great oases, and start asking about this man. He was surely foreign; maybe by now his foreign kin would have come, or maybe the boy could learn things. But afterward, while we waited, the man woke up and started to talk. And he said he was alone in the world.
He still muttered a great deal of nonsense, this weak man. But close your lips and you two are alone, he'd say-but then he'd sometimes make sense. He said he came from the ocean to the north. We knew what the ocean was-a great body of poisonous water-and the man said that he'd owned a ship, a caravan that went on this water. But it had sunk and all his people had been on board, all his friends and family. Anyone who cared about him. He had woken up on the edge of the water days to the north of us; he said that God, his god, had then told him to go south. He said he would know when to stop walking.
I remember thinking: what a cruel god his was, to play this trick on him.
Our runner came back from al-Wadib. And the weak one was right-no one was looking for him. There were no curious foreigners in the oasis. I think Sharaf went a little crazy right then. At any rate he did not have us move from our bolt-hole, which we should have done. "We'll wait just a while longer," he said, "and see if our luck changes."
So then it got bad, two days later. Our runner must have got some attention at al-Wadib after all; someone must have seen him and tracked him back to our cave. They came in the darkest part of the night. Another fox-clan, five men just as desperate as us, maybe even skinnier. Sharaf and another man were able to keep them busy at the entrance to the cave while I got out by this back way we had, and got up on a ridge right nearby. So I was able to shoot three of them dead right there. And Sharaf and our other man killed the fourth and fifth of these enemies; but by then Sharaf's arm was cut so badly it wouldn't be right again, and the other man was dead.
Sharaf, I think he truly went mad. I remember: "We've had nothing from this weak little man in the hole," he said, "nothing! So nothing is what we'll give him!" So he had us all go back into the cave and there we stayed. Do you understand? We were to stay in the cave, with the weak one down below, and we were to give him no food. And no water. And we were to wait.
That first day he was anxious and insistent, but we did not answer him. He talked to himself then. (A laughing fountain, hid under a pebble, I remember him saying. That over and over.)
The second day the talking went on, and he was praying more. But he was quieter; we survivors were all quieter when we heard him. The third day went by, the fourth day. But he didn't die. We lowered no water to him, but the weak one did not die.
We . . . in the Desert, we don't do these things. You in the outer world, to you we leave wars, atrocities, all those huge cruelties. If you were out on the sand and not of my tribe, to be sure I'd rob you if it were to my advantage-but I'd end it there.
I suppose that's why, on the night of the fifth day, I tied a rope to a strong rock above the hole and went down. The little man's body was very light-He doesn't love you save when he remembers, he said as I picked him up-and I was able to make him hold onto the rope and even climb up, with help. While I was pushing him up over the lip of the hole, my heel was suddenly very cold. I looked down. There, running around my foot, was a little trickle of water coming out of a crack in the stones.
We had been over every inch of that cave, and we had found no such thing before. It would have been a great excitement to us, a source of water! But no matter; I pushed him up and climbed up after him. And we were off out that back way I spoke of, into the cold cold desert in the middle of the night.
Oh that man, that frail and tiresome man. I have never known anyone to drink so much water as he did. In two days he'd taken our whole supply of it, everything I had brought. He got stronger, happier, but I looked at our empty skins and was furious. I called him "Weak One" to his face then! We were in the middle of nowhere, out of water. I was afraid; I said that maybe we should turn northeast and make for al-Wadib. It'd be bad if they recognized me there, very bad, but it couldn't be worse than a thirsty death on the sand. We all know that fear.
But no, the man said we would go on to the south. Why did I follow him?
A day later he stopped, and again I was afraid. He had been reciting his little rhyme all day, mixed with long prayers I couldn't follow; I worried that he had gotten lost in his mind, like he was when we first found him. I begged him to walk on and he wouldn't; I shouted at him to walk on and he wouldn't. My voice was already beginning to be frail and hoarse from the thirst. I cried "I will leave you! Truly, I will leave you and go to the oasis; I will take my chances!" and I turned away. He stopped praying and said "Stay," in a soft and entreating voice, and my feet stopped on the ground.
The place where we were, I know that place very well now. There were outcroppings of rock there, and a great many sandy rocks fallen away. He began to pick these up, lay them down in a low flat place on the sand. He made a square out of rocks, which he chose carefully. He never stopped that little chant of his; A smiling river between stone and stone, he said, and looked up at me and grinned.
Then he took more stones and laid a second course over that square. Then a third, so that he had a sort of large square box with no top. And I felt it then. Just for a moment! A clear, strong moment: all the strange words, the incantations of his made sense to me, and I could see in that instant how they had all built up to this-
He laid his hand on the ground, between the stone walls he'd built, and he pushed. Down he pushed now in total silence, and the sand fell away under his frail little palm. Blackness was there in the hole, and then a glint far below. It was water.
So, the next day, replete, I went hunting and shot two hares. I didn't take enough care about being seen, and I hadn't even thought to worry about how long we had stayed in that one place. I should have expected it: Sharaf and one of the others from our band, coming from the north. They had a woman with them, someone they had made captive along the way I think. They saw me.
Did I raise my bow first? No, I think not; I think they were already running at me across the bright sand, knives out and shining in the eye of Vaasa, by the time my first arrow was on the string. The last two men I ever killed-one of them my leader, my own cousin. The woman, left behind, looked at the two corpses and ran.
Still we did not leave the place of the well.
Two days later the woman came back, and she brought with her other women and a group of men, and they did not attack. They had brought tents, supplies; they came to stay. We built a safe little camp there-
I must explain this to you: we knew that the well would not live the whole year round. When things grew too hot we would have to move to one of the great oases (and we did, and no victim of mine recognized me, so against the odds we were safe). But we also knew that we could come back again to the well in its season, and it would return to life for us. We belong to the Great Desert and it belongs to us. We know that our feet will cross every burning inch of it; and if they do not in this life, our sons' or their sons' feet will mark the sand we missed. It will always be there, waiting for us to come back to it again.
***
So many years . . . so many, gone by now. You know, they wanted to make me their sheikh? Senetthait the Marksman? But I thought of Sharaf, mad, dying in his blood, and I said no.
The weak one, he taught us for years. He taught us to pray to his god, and he taught us secrets. We loved the new things he brought into that place . . . the mystery of water. Yes. Forgive me, I am quite old now.
So old! So many days. So when I said no, they asked the man I'd brought out of that black stone pit, the well-builder, the teacher, and he said yes. And indeed we are a tribe now, and if we remember all the secrets he taught us we will go on walking the sand and dreaming of the sea, forever.
Today they told me a strange thing. You see, we've come back to the place of the well for yet another season . . . forgive me, I am tired . . . and they have told me that they are giving it a name. My name! Senetthait. My first thought was that I did not like this; I do not feel like a source of life or wisdom, being so old and so foolish.
But then I think: I stopped and listened to a voice, in a dark place. And I became a conduit, a passage through the night; a great presence flowed through me and into my great dry desolate realm. He is beloved of wing and walker; think of lost things and he'll dance in your eye. He doesn't love you, save when he remembers . . .
And yes, even now the the air around me grows dim, black, heavy with rain.
***
And that is my story! To the listener I note that this is one of many conflicting origin-tales for my mother's tribe-indeed, perhaps it's less likely to be true than most of them. Certainly it is less dignified.
Although it is the case that that tribe winters at a seasonal oasis called Senetthait; there is no stone well there now, but the Desert wears such things to dust quite quickly.
And it is true that their sheikhs cling to some notion that they are descended from Adelith, and for that reason they often take epithets such as "the Frail" or "the Infirm." Or, indeed, "the Weak."
-Ḥasmir bin Yeyshan Ḥarat, son also of Naur Ḥarat who was born to the al-Eyreim