“What’s a sternum?” cried Tess, afraid of getting it wrong.
Seraphina indicated her own, and Tess dived in, perhaps too enthusiastically. The quigutl screamed, but that was the final push. The egg popped out, glistening with oil and quigutl blood.
The shell was stony gray and lightly pitted. Tess wiped it clean with her apron, realizing too late that this would leave some difficult-to-explain stains. The quigutl lay on its side, exhausted, its ribs rising and falling rapidly.
“Any more eggs in there?” Tessie asked.
The quigutl shook its weary head.
Tessie felt weary, too, but also exhilarated. She was almost sorry it was over.
“I’m Tessie,” said Tess, resisting the urge to hold out a hand for the quigutl to shake. That surely wasn’t how quigs greeted each other. “What’s your name?”
The creature swiveled an eye cone at her, as if it couldn’t believe she was still talking.
Tess stood up reluctantly, untying her filthy apron and wadding it into a ball. She had taken up one lamp, and Seraphina the other, when the quigutl raised its heavy head once more and spoke.
Tessie glanced at Seraphina, her face lit eerily from below. “What did it say?”
“That’s its name,” said her sister. “I can’t translate it. It’s just a name.”
“Say it again?” Tessie asked the quigutl softly, hating to impose upon its exhaustion.
The quigutl enunciated: “Pathka. Fthuma tikith pa Anathuthia kiushth.”
“It’s called Paska,” said Seraphina, converting its hard-mouth sounds into softer human phonemes. She paused, chewing the inside of her cheek, as if the rest were harder to translate, then said, “And it commends you to the great snake…Anassussia?”
“Anathuthia,” the little quigutl corrected her.
Seraphina shrugged it off. “I have no idea what kind of bizarre reptilian benediction that’s supposed to be, but there you go.”
“Thank you,” said Tess, who knew it was a gift, anyway. She smiled at Pathka, and the quigutl twitched its head spines in such a way that she knew, without understanding how, that it was smiling back.
“Thank you for helping me escape,” said older, male Pathka in the loft of the goat barn, once they’d eaten their meager supper. “That’s the second time you’ve named my life.”
“I what your what?” asked Tess, pausing with her dusty blanket half out of her satchel.
“Name is a nuanced verb in Quootla, sorry,” said Pathka. “I mean, that’s the second time you saved my life.”
“Were they going to kill you?” Tess asked, appalled.
“Eventually,” said Pathka. “Perhaps not literally. I don’t know how long I could have kept pushing against them, or when I might’ve decided my convictions weren’t worth the fight.”
Tess shook out the blanket, spread it, and lay down, folding one side over herself and leaving a lip for Pathka to lie on. He curled up next to her like a hot, spiky dog.
“So I saved your life that time in the cellar?” Tess mused, staring into the dark. She knew she’d saved Pathka’s life, in fact, but wanted to hear that she’d done one good thing as a child. Surely, if you were capable of one good thing, you couldn’t have been born bad.
Pathka was in her face, his scaly snout bumped up against her nose. “Don’t doubt it. That last egg was too big for me to pass; I could tell it would be, even as its shell was forming. I nested alone because I thought I might die, and I didn’t want to give Karpeth the satisfaction.”
“Karpeth?” asked Tess, wanting to pull away from Pathka’s fetid breath.
“My sibling,” said Pathka, backing off. “Karpeth was a…what do you call someone who thinks deeply and can’t stop talking about it?”
“A priest?” said Tess, mystified. “A philosopher? Dragons and naturalists also—”
“Philothopher,” said Pathka, seeming satisfied with the Goreddi word. “We don’t have a separate word for that; quigutl used to be enough. We were all philothophers once, but things have changed. We are adrift, and the thinnest breeze may blow us where it will.”
Tess recognized that last sentence as a line from Dozerius, and smiled to herself. She and Pathka had both loved stories when they were young; she’d traded Dozerius tales for the old quigutl myths about great serpents beneath the earth.
“Karpeth’s ideas have proved to be sticky; they cling to my brethren like a second set of scales. When the war ended and the Ardmagar Comonot made it legal for us to sell our devices in the Southlands, Karpeth decided this was our chance. We could accumulate money and become more like the saar,” said Pathka, pushing himself away from Tess’s side restlessly.
He began pacing the loft. “We would be ruthless, logical, dominating, miserly. Hoarding. No mercy for the weak. Thus did the saar achieve greatness while we crawled in the shadows, eating garbage.
“But look at me: small for my age, never the strongest. My mind and heart were mighty, though; I argued well against my sibling, and there were those who agreed with me.
“Karpeth ambushed me and got me with eggs, knowing it might kill me to lay them.”
“Saints’ bones!” cried Tess, appalled that her friend had endured a violent ravaging—by a sibling, no less—and was speaking about it matter-of-factly, as if it were nothing unusual.
“I wouldn’t have minded dying,” said Pathka, misinterpreting Tess’s horror, “but ko would have invited everyone to watch and fthep me in judgment.”
Pathka demonstrated fthep with a stinging tail-whip to Tess’s leg.
“Did Karpeth come to Trowebridge?” Tess asked.
“Karpeth is dead,” said Pathka, in a tone that forbade follow-up questions. “Ko ideas endure, however, and when I push against them, I get worse than a mere fthep.”
“Why would they chain you up and force you to stay?” asked Tess. “Wouldn’t it have been more agreeable to everyone if you’d left?”
“That,” said Pathka, “is a story for another time. I’d much rather hear what you’ve been up to these last six years than relive all my worst memories of Trowebridge in one evening.” Pathka shook himself like a dog and then burrowed his snout in her armpit. “I was right: you had a baby. Don’t deny it; I have the keenest olfaction in nature.”
“You can’t really smell baby under my arm,” said Tess, forcing levity into her tone, pushing back against the familiar leaden feeling creeping into her gut.
“It’s your mammary tissue,” Pathka explained. “It changes when—”
“Fine. Stop,” said Tess. Suddenly there were tears burgeoning in her eyes. She wrapped her arms around her head as if to physically hold them in.
She dared not cry. Three years of pushed-down grief had accumulated pressure, like water behind a dam, and she couldn’t release just a trickle. It would gush uncontrollably, split her up the middle, and kill her, like trying to pass a too-big egg.
Pathka sniffed her head anxiously. “What’s wrong?”
“Sorry,” said Tess. “Sorry. I—hold on. I’ll be fine in a minute.”
“No, I’m sorry,” said Pathka hastily. “I don’t smell young child on you. I hadn’t considered the implications of that. You don’t have to tell the story if it hurts you.”
She needed to say something, though, or the story would squat between them like a malevolent toad, poisoning the very air. Maybe it would be a relief to tell someone like Pathka. Surely he wouldn’t judge her. She didn’t want to feel anything while she told it, however, which was a challenge.
She racked her brains, composing an official, unsentimental version. The only way through was to judge herself. She said, “I was stupid.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Pathka, patting her foot.
Tess took a deep breath of goat-tinged air. “Foolish, then. After the war, I started sneaking out to St. Bert’s and attending natural philosophy lectures. Your old World Serpent stories drove me to it, in part.” Another deep breath. “I wanted to know more about them and other wonders the world might hold.” And she’d been bored, and mad at her mother. There was no point going into all that.