THERE IS A LION IN MY LIVING ROOM
I FEED IT RAW MEAT, SO IT DOES NOT HURT ME
I FEED IT RAW MEAT, SO IT DOES NOT HURT ME
Boudika feels a sharpness to herself, a sharpness that is untrustworthy and cruel. It is the selfish, careless urge to pick a flower just because it is beautiful, knowing that to do so cuts the beauty short. Kills it. The clock begins to tick; the flower wilts. A fertile one, the water horse says. There is a wryness there. Boudika’s lips twitch into an almost-smile. She cannot help herself, and then the expression is gone. Replaced with a tiger’s apathy. She wants to ask, is your society matriarchal but does not. The Khashran had worshipped women. The men had been historians, keepers of the “souls”, priests. The women were the huntresses, the leaders, the warriors. “No one comes to mind, I’m sorry to say.” It was a lie. Her mind screams, Orestes, Orestes, Orestes but she would not admit it. Almost jealously, she guards the name within her, and wonders, what would he think, of this water horse?
Boudika does not know. She rarely knows what he would have thought, on much of anything. He had always given away so much, and nothing at the same time. The ocean drips from the sea-horse’s flanks, and Boudika watches the tension, the transition, from water to land. The water horse is clearly unaccustomed to it and in a way that is almost vindictive, Boudika is pleased—until she remembers her excursions and discomfort into the water, and that vindictiveness crumples in on itself. “I understand more than you think.” Boudika says. Already, her eyes have taken in this water horse’s weaknesses, her uncertain land-legs. It would be easy, Boudika thinks, compared to the Khashran. They were tigers on land and sharks in the sea. They did not need land shapes or water shapes; they transitioned between one and the other effortlessly. How often had a Khashran just barely broken the surface, some sort of crocodile, and launched themselves toward her imperceptibly in the shape of a shark-toothed stallion?
If this mare were a Khashran, Boudika would already be dead.
I don’t know if I deserve this kindness, stranger.
Boudika has no response to that. So she says nothing, and her mind fills with the phrase the path to hell is paved with good intentions. There was a guilt flooding her; a guilt for her hunter’s urge; a guilt for Orestes’ memory. And a sick pleasure, too. This was the edge of adrenaline she lived to recollect. It was the only time she felt like herself; on the verge of being something else.
“There are many things on this island to eat.” It was true. They may be strange, unruly things; wildcats and birds and creatures both beautiful and terrifying… but flesh was flesh, Boudika assumes. A dancer! The girl’s enthusiasm, her wide-eyed wonderment, is almost innocent enough to prompt a smile. Almost. Yet there is a sharpness to the frilled water-horse, a leanness, that betrays her as something other. It is there in every line of muscle, in the elegant curl of the neck and the near unnatural brightness of her jade eyes. Boudika recognises the instinct that rises within her, brazen and affirmative: it is the instinct of a prey animal confronted with a predator. It is an instinct that screams run, run, run and detects the nearly imperceptible quiver of a predator’s restraint. Boudika knows this feeling. She has come face to face with it many times. And she dismisses it easily, readily, with a lethargic flick of her tail and an arrogant closeness to a creature that, naturally, would like to kill her. “Perhaps you will see it, if you don’t eat me, that is.” Despite the sharpness the comment could have possessed, Boudika says it with an almost dismissive lightness.
The island seems eerily silent as they walk; it fills Boudika with unease the water horse cannot produce. Before, there had been birds everywhere. Now, there was nothing. She side-eyes her companion, wondering if it is the presence of Anandi. Then the relative silence is broken, and the way it breaks is abrupt: Boudika hears the cackling laughter of birds long before she sees them, and the convenience of their appearance is borderline ironic. In the brightness of the moonlight, they look like so many assorted jewels. They are a rich woman’s jewellery, laid out to be admired, on the beach.
“They were violent.” Boudika answers, much later than the water-horse had asked the question. Boudika does not say, but so were we. She does not talk of her old gods or confused past, of how Oresziah was colonised by a shipwrecked crew of vikings hundreds of years before she had been born. She does not tell the water horse that the competition between the settlers and the Khashran had always been steep and violent. She does not say that the settlers imprisoned their women and bred the water from their veins and that she, herself, must have a little of that carnal wildness flowing through her like poison, or magic, and that is why the sea sings so, so sweetly.
The bird is laughing at her. Boudika’s attention redirects sharply, malevolently. The thing is bright red; the colour of a polished garnet. Her lip twitches, distastefully, and she says, “The island seems to be giving you an offering, if you can catch it.” And the huntress moves sideways, tracking to the flank and then behind the flock of parrots. They stare at her brazenly, offering their guffawing laughter. Boudika flicks a tail at them, and they flutter back. By now, the flock stretches between her and the water horse—but the majority of the birds are focused on Boudika, as she nears them, head high and nostrils flared.
Her tail lashes again. Kicking sand.
The flock flutters back a foot or two. Then, abruptly, violently—Boudika lunges into the flock and they respond by laughing with all the ferociousness of a pack of hyenas. Yet, they flutter back another two feet—directly into Anandi’s reach.
And Boudika asks, into the flurry of jewel-bright, mocking birds—
“Is the king for you?” The unspoken assumption: are you royalty?
@Boudika"speaks"
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