"I may have something else you might like."
Niyol looked up from the registers he was filling out with a raised eyebrow. Or rather, looked down, since the head of this particular caravan didn't have much going for him in the legs department. There weren't many caravans allowed to enter Dinétah without being shot on sight, trusted to travel between Dinétah and Ȟe Sápa. Usually the privilege meant they knew not to press their luck. But Tó Dínéeshzhee', he was realizing, was developing a reputation.
He sighed, looking to where the men of various clans loaded and unloaded such goods as had been traded for. None as many as Dibé Łizhiní, which Niyol chose to attribute to his own skills. "And what exactly is that?" he asked, not bothering to look at him, not sounding even remotely interested.
The caravaner held up what might once have been a toy for children, a flimsy flying thing with wings and a propeller. The tin was dented and scratched, the paint had worn off, but it looked functional. It was garbage. Worthless garbage.
Mai would love it.
"That," Niyol said coldly, "is trash."
"So I should just throw it on the fire, is what you're saying?"
Niyol sighed, stuck his pen behind his ear and held out his hand. "Let me look at it, then."
"You wanna look at it, you pay."
He tsked with irritation, furrowed his brow and went back to filling out inventory forms. "The hell you expect to get for that thing, anyway?" he asked after a moment of pretending not to care.
"Pomegranate."
The word he'd been in the middle of writing trailed off into an ugly splatter. "That's absurd." The man only shrugged. "Look, I could maybe see buying that on a lark, but you can't expect me to give you a pomegranate for that. Be reasonable. Skein of yarn, maybe."
"We got plenty of yarn. I don't want yarn. This here is mine, and what I want for it is a pomegranate."
They had a few of their own pomegranate trees. Not many, but a few. Mai liked them most, and if she had to choose between a pomegranate and some old tech garbage… there'd be no question. "Notah," he called, to one of his brothers currently carrying a crate of rice. He waved him over. «On your way back out, bring me a pomegranate.»
Notah raised an eyebrow, looked down at the little man and the little plane he held. "Mai?" Niyol scowled, and Notah laughed; Dibé Łizhiní, but not Sani, he both understood and didn't.
Times like this, he really missed his mother.
«Heading to the dump?» Mosi asked, raising a meaningful eyebrow at the toy in his hand.
«What do you want, Mosi?» he asked instead of answering, not bothering to slow down. He was not even remotely in the mood for any Ma’iito? bullshit.
«My brother said you're taking Mai out of Dinétah,» she said, and he didn't have to ask which brother. Atsidi was the only one who would have known, since he hadn't been able to avoid telling him about it. Not the details, thankfully, but he'd needed to know enough to assign warriors to protect them. Atsidi had never seemed half as interested in marrying Mai as Mosi was in marrying him. He would have thought she'd have wanted to avoid the scandal, if nothing else. Ma’iito? reveled in other people's scandals. He would have liked to have told her to go fuck herself – but there was still a chance, however remote, that her brother might want to marry Mai. Which meant he had to be nice to her.
«Yes. We're taking a trip for personal reasons.» Which was just a sideways method of telling her to go fuck herself, but so it went.
«And the rest of your clan is okay with that? You're not worried white cannibals will rape her to death?» Her eyelashes fluttered, and Niyol fought the scowl that that tugged at his features.
«You're such a doll,» he said with a tight smile, «always worrying about others.» Nosey little bitch, anyway, making him worry even more than he already was. He'd never run into any wandering hordes of cannibals, so he told himself it was going to be fine. They were going to be guarded, anyway. There was no reason for everything to be anything but fine.
«Atsidi's just beside himself,» she continued, still following, because her legs were almost as long as his. «He's so worried about her.»
«I don't doubt it,» he said, though he doubted it very much. He had a hunch, though he couldn't confirm it, that Mosi was pressuring her brother to marry so she could make room in the house for him. The man didn't seem to have a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of joining their household; the only reason Niyol wasn't opposed to him was that he didn't seem like he'd make waves. Mai absolutely, undeniably, spoiled the everliving shit out of them. Ordinarily clans self-corrected for that sort of thing, because it was in everyone's best interest to avoid frivolity. But they still had the most sheep, and that meant they had the most everything.
Except reputation. Their reputation was shit. But it was hard to care when you had tequila and a bathtub the size of some houses.
«If she dies, will the Black Sheep have to send a matriarch from another reservation? You can always join Coyote Spring, we'll be happy to have you.»
«I'm the only other Sani,» he reminded her, as if she didn't already know, as if it was his sense of responsibility or propriety that kept him from marrying.
«But if she died–»
«I would be too busy mourning to consider marrying,» he said flatly, cutting off the thought too quickly to be polite. His grip on the little plane in his hand was white-knuckled, though he kept his demeanor otherwise as sweet as always. He had a reputation as a charmer to uphold, after all. It was one of the only reasons they tolerated his near-constant forays into the desert, his well-known affection for whores. They forgave it, because he was charming and because duty kept him from marrying, because everyone was perfectly happy to pretend he was trying to be respectable, that Niyol Sani was the one to be pitied.
Mosi crossed her arms over her chest, though she wasn't the type to pout, not like Mai. She was all sharp edges, strong features, a paragon of womanhood. A woman like that would let him get away with approximately fuck-all. «What would it take to get you married, Niyol?»
<span> </span>Brain damage. He was at the door, so instead he gave her what he liked to think of as his most dazzling smile. «A woman who'll let me brush her hair at night,» he said against his better judgment, «who'll wake me up with her mouth on my dick, and let me fuck her friends for lunch.» And then he shut the door behind him before she could respond, though the glimpse of the look on her face was entirely worth the shit he would eventually get.
«I got you a present.»
«Fuck off.»
That meant she was working, because that only ever happened when she was working. He never knew why that was, if his sister had some secret rage buried inside her, if she was actually a foul-mouthed pit of anger that only revealed herself when her mind was otherwise occupied. Somehow, he doubted she had quite that much depth. It seemed much more likely that being interrupted while working was the only thing that could penetrate her perpetually sunny demeanor.
«Technically you got you a present, obviously,» he continued, undeterred. «But since I picked it out, I think it counts.» Mai was crouched on the floor in the middle of her room, dressed in nothing but a ratty old skirt, small and thin. She'd tied her hair in a lazy knot at the back of her neck, had the windows all shut to keep out the wind and the sand it brought with it. She had some kind of electrical something-or-other resting on her knees, plastic case cracked open and soldering iron in hand. Probably figuring out how to make some old tech work without batteries, since that seemed like about half of what she ended up doing.
The storage problem, she called it, everything salvageable ran off batteries that weren't, they could make power but they had no way to save it. Niyol didn't pretend to understand half of what she told him, about batteries and how they worked and why they couldn't make new ones. He didn't even understand how their wind generators worked, funny little things that looked nothing like anyone else's. The fact that she could recreate anything old tech astonished him, he wasn't about to get hung up on the things she couldn't.
He set the little plane on top of her head, and she huffed out her nose, made a sound like an angry cat about to bite. That was the other thing she did when she was working, forgot how to be civilized. There was a public workshop, where the silversmiths and the weavers all worked and enjoyed each other's company, but Mai always worked at home. They were too noisy and too curious, she was too strange. He thought being smarter than they were meant she should get a pass, but they didn't seem to agree.
Snatching the toy off her head, she froze when she saw it. «Does it work?» she asked, wide-eyed and awestruck.
«No idea. That's your thing, not mine.»
She set down her iron and her project, and turned the little plane this way and that, trying to figure out how it worked. Finally, experimentally, she began to twist the little propeller; eventually she set the plane on the floor, and the little propeller sent it slowly across the floor until it hit an old engine block. «Neat,» Niyol said encouragingly.
«It's not really enough to achieve lift,» she said, disappointed. «It might go a ways if you threw it, but that doesn't really count.»
«So… it's bad?»
«No, no, I didn't say that. It's lovely. If the body is an accurate replica, I might be able to… hm.»
He'd lost her again, her head in ten different places, at least half of them in the sky. «Have fun,» he murmured as he backed out of the room.
«You, too,» she said automatically, and he smiled.
Niyol looked up from the registers he was filling out with a raised eyebrow. Or rather, looked down, since the head of this particular caravan didn't have much going for him in the legs department. There weren't many caravans allowed to enter Dinétah without being shot on sight, trusted to travel between Dinétah and Ȟe Sápa. Usually the privilege meant they knew not to press their luck. But Tó Dínéeshzhee', he was realizing, was developing a reputation.
He sighed, looking to where the men of various clans loaded and unloaded such goods as had been traded for. None as many as Dibé Łizhiní, which Niyol chose to attribute to his own skills. "And what exactly is that?" he asked, not bothering to look at him, not sounding even remotely interested.
The caravaner held up what might once have been a toy for children, a flimsy flying thing with wings and a propeller. The tin was dented and scratched, the paint had worn off, but it looked functional. It was garbage. Worthless garbage.
Mai would love it.
"That," Niyol said coldly, "is trash."
"So I should just throw it on the fire, is what you're saying?"
Niyol sighed, stuck his pen behind his ear and held out his hand. "Let me look at it, then."
"You wanna look at it, you pay."
He tsked with irritation, furrowed his brow and went back to filling out inventory forms. "The hell you expect to get for that thing, anyway?" he asked after a moment of pretending not to care.
"Pomegranate."
The word he'd been in the middle of writing trailed off into an ugly splatter. "That's absurd." The man only shrugged. "Look, I could maybe see buying that on a lark, but you can't expect me to give you a pomegranate for that. Be reasonable. Skein of yarn, maybe."
"We got plenty of yarn. I don't want yarn. This here is mine, and what I want for it is a pomegranate."
They had a few of their own pomegranate trees. Not many, but a few. Mai liked them most, and if she had to choose between a pomegranate and some old tech garbage… there'd be no question. "Notah," he called, to one of his brothers currently carrying a crate of rice. He waved him over. «On your way back out, bring me a pomegranate.»
Notah raised an eyebrow, looked down at the little man and the little plane he held. "Mai?" Niyol scowled, and Notah laughed; Dibé Łizhiní, but not Sani, he both understood and didn't.
Times like this, he really missed his mother.
«Heading to the dump?» Mosi asked, raising a meaningful eyebrow at the toy in his hand.
«What do you want, Mosi?» he asked instead of answering, not bothering to slow down. He was not even remotely in the mood for any Ma’iito? bullshit.
«My brother said you're taking Mai out of Dinétah,» she said, and he didn't have to ask which brother. Atsidi was the only one who would have known, since he hadn't been able to avoid telling him about it. Not the details, thankfully, but he'd needed to know enough to assign warriors to protect them. Atsidi had never seemed half as interested in marrying Mai as Mosi was in marrying him. He would have thought she'd have wanted to avoid the scandal, if nothing else. Ma’iito? reveled in other people's scandals. He would have liked to have told her to go fuck herself – but there was still a chance, however remote, that her brother might want to marry Mai. Which meant he had to be nice to her.
«Yes. We're taking a trip for personal reasons.» Which was just a sideways method of telling her to go fuck herself, but so it went.
«And the rest of your clan is okay with that? You're not worried white cannibals will rape her to death?» Her eyelashes fluttered, and Niyol fought the scowl that that tugged at his features.
«You're such a doll,» he said with a tight smile, «always worrying about others.» Nosey little bitch, anyway, making him worry even more than he already was. He'd never run into any wandering hordes of cannibals, so he told himself it was going to be fine. They were going to be guarded, anyway. There was no reason for everything to be anything but fine.
«Atsidi's just beside himself,» she continued, still following, because her legs were almost as long as his. «He's so worried about her.»
«I don't doubt it,» he said, though he doubted it very much. He had a hunch, though he couldn't confirm it, that Mosi was pressuring her brother to marry so she could make room in the house for him. The man didn't seem to have a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of joining their household; the only reason Niyol wasn't opposed to him was that he didn't seem like he'd make waves. Mai absolutely, undeniably, spoiled the everliving shit out of them. Ordinarily clans self-corrected for that sort of thing, because it was in everyone's best interest to avoid frivolity. But they still had the most sheep, and that meant they had the most everything.
Except reputation. Their reputation was shit. But it was hard to care when you had tequila and a bathtub the size of some houses.
«If she dies, will the Black Sheep have to send a matriarch from another reservation? You can always join Coyote Spring, we'll be happy to have you.»
«I'm the only other Sani,» he reminded her, as if she didn't already know, as if it was his sense of responsibility or propriety that kept him from marrying.
«But if she died–»
«I would be too busy mourning to consider marrying,» he said flatly, cutting off the thought too quickly to be polite. His grip on the little plane in his hand was white-knuckled, though he kept his demeanor otherwise as sweet as always. He had a reputation as a charmer to uphold, after all. It was one of the only reasons they tolerated his near-constant forays into the desert, his well-known affection for whores. They forgave it, because he was charming and because duty kept him from marrying, because everyone was perfectly happy to pretend he was trying to be respectable, that Niyol Sani was the one to be pitied.
Mosi crossed her arms over her chest, though she wasn't the type to pout, not like Mai. She was all sharp edges, strong features, a paragon of womanhood. A woman like that would let him get away with approximately fuck-all. «What would it take to get you married, Niyol?»
<span> </span>Brain damage. He was at the door, so instead he gave her what he liked to think of as his most dazzling smile. «A woman who'll let me brush her hair at night,» he said against his better judgment, «who'll wake me up with her mouth on my dick, and let me fuck her friends for lunch.» And then he shut the door behind him before she could respond, though the glimpse of the look on her face was entirely worth the shit he would eventually get.
«I got you a present.»
«Fuck off.»
That meant she was working, because that only ever happened when she was working. He never knew why that was, if his sister had some secret rage buried inside her, if she was actually a foul-mouthed pit of anger that only revealed herself when her mind was otherwise occupied. Somehow, he doubted she had quite that much depth. It seemed much more likely that being interrupted while working was the only thing that could penetrate her perpetually sunny demeanor.
«Technically you got you a present, obviously,» he continued, undeterred. «But since I picked it out, I think it counts.» Mai was crouched on the floor in the middle of her room, dressed in nothing but a ratty old skirt, small and thin. She'd tied her hair in a lazy knot at the back of her neck, had the windows all shut to keep out the wind and the sand it brought with it. She had some kind of electrical something-or-other resting on her knees, plastic case cracked open and soldering iron in hand. Probably figuring out how to make some old tech work without batteries, since that seemed like about half of what she ended up doing.
The storage problem, she called it, everything salvageable ran off batteries that weren't, they could make power but they had no way to save it. Niyol didn't pretend to understand half of what she told him, about batteries and how they worked and why they couldn't make new ones. He didn't even understand how their wind generators worked, funny little things that looked nothing like anyone else's. The fact that she could recreate anything old tech astonished him, he wasn't about to get hung up on the things she couldn't.
He set the little plane on top of her head, and she huffed out her nose, made a sound like an angry cat about to bite. That was the other thing she did when she was working, forgot how to be civilized. There was a public workshop, where the silversmiths and the weavers all worked and enjoyed each other's company, but Mai always worked at home. They were too noisy and too curious, she was too strange. He thought being smarter than they were meant she should get a pass, but they didn't seem to agree.
Snatching the toy off her head, she froze when she saw it. «Does it work?» she asked, wide-eyed and awestruck.
«No idea. That's your thing, not mine.»
She set down her iron and her project, and turned the little plane this way and that, trying to figure out how it worked. Finally, experimentally, she began to twist the little propeller; eventually she set the plane on the floor, and the little propeller sent it slowly across the floor until it hit an old engine block. «Neat,» Niyol said encouragingly.
«It's not really enough to achieve lift,» she said, disappointed. «It might go a ways if you threw it, but that doesn't really count.»
«So… it's bad?»
«No, no, I didn't say that. It's lovely. If the body is an accurate replica, I might be able to… hm.»
He'd lost her again, her head in ten different places, at least half of them in the sky. «Have fun,» he murmured as he backed out of the room.
«You, too,» she said automatically, and he smiled.
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