[ What Do You Have To Say? | Ni'Srilan: The Desert ]
Posted by Inigo on January 26, 2009, 10:38 pm, in reply to "thread"
216.165.13.32
“Oh Canton, you would love it!” Inigo answered her with a surge of enthusiasm, reserved not so much for the subject matter itself but for the image he had conjured of Huyana in Canton. It was as if he experienced the silly glee of a successful matchmaker.
“You can’t go anywhere without stepping on a living thing, we were ever slipping on moss. Moss on rocks is not a good mixture” he told her as if he were an instructive dam, “and there were”, he interrupted himself by jumping ahead onto a rocky outcrop, “such rocks! Such rocks as the desert winds would have eroded in an instant. Full bigger than me and you put together, and great thick trees grew out the top of them. The sunlight could but dapple the ground with all the leaves it had to wiggle through and the distance it had to manage before he reached the loam. And there was a valley where the river flooded in the spring, so that when you came out from under the last branches at the edge of the woods all you could see was fields of long grasses waving in the currents of the river, the whole pasture flooded past lushness.” Inigo’s shoulders sighed and rolled back comfortably as he came to the end of his story, satisfied by the vivid texture of his reflection. “It’s nothing like this place at all”, he said with a sideways glance at the far reaching dunes. Perhaps that was why his mother had chosen it, to divorce herself from the memories she found in blood red sands. Or perhaps it had been Nasrullah who had chosen the herd’s resting place, knowing that Inigo would be all the more easily convinced with the thrum of longing in his breast and the wail of the dunes relegated to his dreams. Reining in his unruly memories, Inigo honored the conventions of courtesy and shifted his focus back to the blue roan mare before him. “Where did you come from?”
If the previous babbling speech was any evidence to go by, Inigo, if nothing else, notices things. With an obsessive eye to observation he drinks up any detail he comes upon like a thirsty man in the desert, gathering for the sake of gathering alone and sharing whenever prompted. It is in understanding this that you may understand Inigo’s essential nature. And so it should not surprise you that Inigo noticed when Huyana’s playful manner changed, when her eyes became guarded by an uncertainty. Nor should you be taken aback by the discrimination with which Inigo plucked the most strikingly illogical word from the whole of Huyana’s next sentence.
“Now?” Inigo puzzled, what had changed between before and the now she referenced? They had not even mentioned the desert past their initial jest, which hardly contained anything convincing. Her words were strange, like thoughts pulled from his head. But Inigo is not a suspicious horse, leastwise, not overly. Still, he watched her more carefully than he had before, taking in the agile curve of her hip and the splay of her hooves. “Whatever have I done to convince you? A look in my eye, a shifting of my weight? Please let me know so that I can reuse whatever dashing piece of rhetoric I used to take you in?” He smiled, ever amusing himself.
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