#sengden

Context: Sorqaqtaiyo has died, and has returned to Sengden as a ghost. Sengden has been impersonating her for years, using the name ‘Sorqaqtaiyo’. Why is this a journey? Because this is when Sengden learns, finally, that Sorqaqtaiyo is alive: and everything changes from here. 

The woman before her, unrecognisable, is bone-thin with a shorn head and feverish eyes. ‘Kalur Nenyet?’

Sengden stares. 

‘Kalur Nenyet?’ 

The voice comes from her throat. It is old with familiarity where the broken nose and hollow cheekbones are not: a hint, a smell, a clue. She wants to shut her eyes to it but she cannot look away. , 

‘That’s a funny name to call yourself. Did you choose it, or were you given it?’

No.

‘The silent weaver? That’s not really your style, Sengden.’ 

The woman stands opposite her, watching her intently. Her eyes are dark and endless, and she does not blink. Her hands are insect-thin and the skin on her face mottled and burnt, but she holds herself in that casual, arrogant way she always had. Like she knows she is beautiful, and like she is waiting to be told. 

Sorqaqtaiyo.

Sengden thinks: no. She thinks: no. 

But it is her. Under the thinness and the burntness and the shavenness it is her. But where is her hair, her broadness, her warm strong arms? Her eyes - coal-hard and challenging - are the only part of her that is the same. 

‘I do sort of like it though - don’t worry about that. It’s sort of wistful. It’s a bit too similar to seyenjhakul, though. Did you always want to be me?’

Sengden feels that she is becoming nothing: all parts of her, one by one, are going still. It cannot be. It is not. 

‘Taiyo,’ she says. 

It is. 

The woman’s face breaks into a smile: genuine and bright. It is dazzling, and Sengden almost cannot breathe. 

‘But it’s also quite a pretentious name, Sengden. The silent weaver? Really?’

At last she finds her voice. 

‘It’s hardly as pretentious as Sorqaqtaiyo.’

‘I was young! And it was quite - quite foresighted of me, quite prescient. Thus it begins. And I begun it, didn’t I? It began with me.’ She laughs, delighted at some past history. ‘Besides, it’s not my name anymore. It’s yours.’

‘I didn’t choose it,’ Sengden says. The words come without her permission, automatic. She is waiting to feel something, anything: joy or despair. Instead she cannot stop staring.

The woman is studying her, head cocked. The gesture is aristocratic and carelessly wealthy, entirely at odds with her ragged clothes and bloodied temple. ‘But you did choose to take it from me. Nobody forced you. That’s a kind of choosing. Anyway, I’m back now. Alive again, impossible returned to the world again - and so on. So what happens now, Sengden? Do I get to be you, now? Sengden and Sorqaqtaiyo, swapped. Or will you give me my name back and do I get to be Sorqaqtaiyo again?’

She blinks. That question is too big to answer for any moment, and in this moment she can only still only stare like a fool or a lover. Instead Sengden crosses her arms. ‘They call me Nenyet now.’

The woman laughs. It is a laugh of disbelief. ‘Nenyet? Do they really? I won’t. I can’t imagine I’ll ever call you that.’

‘Then don’t call me anything. It’s my name.’

The woman smiles, a viper smile. ‘You’re being rather prickly, Sengden. I’d almost think  you’re not pleased to see me at all.’

It is such a Sorqaqtaiyo thing to say. Not aren’t you pleased to see me? or you can’t be pleased to see me but I’d almost think you’re not pleased to see me at all, an assertion, an antagonism, archly provocative and always completely and utterly correct. Everything she says is correct, if only because she is the one to say it. 

Sengden smiles. Her reflex to please - only her and only her - is almost forgotten, but not quite. It surprises her how quickly it comes back. This was all I ever wanted, she could say. All I ever wanted was to see you again. 

Instead she takes her knife out of her holster, and begins to turn it delicately between her fingers. ‘No. I’m not pleased to see you.’

The woman pauses. Something flickers across her face, and then she laughs, once. ‘Well, I won’t blame you for that. I imagine it was quite nice to have me dead for a while. Peaceful. Was it?’

Sengden stares.

That is not her. It is the first thing that is wrong, the first jolt in her stomach. It cannot be her. 

Because what would the old Sorqaqtaiyo have done? She would have been hurt by something like that, certainly; perhaps she would have thrown something, kicked something, raged and then gone silent whilst Sengden watched, amused, beginning to speculate in exquisite detail what exactly she must have said wrong. And what would the old Sengden have done, before the world went wrong? In the face of Sorqaqtaiyo’s violence she would have laughed, and kicked her shins; in the face of her silence she would have followed her around, talking endlessly and indelicately, until Sorqaqtaiyo rounded on her and finally, breathlessly, they sank to the floor.

But she never would have laughed. 

I will have to learn her again, Sengden thinks. It crashes over her, like waves of despair. Everything she has learnt: every list and every observation, secreted at the day’s end, every time she had watched her and watched her delighting in being watched. I will have to learn every inch of her once more and it will take me years.

Everything for nothing, she thinks, all over again. Everything all over again. 

Sengden looks at her knife. It is hers: both of hers, something she took from Sorqaqtaiyo’s dead body when she stripped her naked, but the most familiar thing she owns, more so than her own skin. 

‘This is yours,’ she says, and holds it out. 

The woman lifts an eyebrow, and lifts her hands pointedly. ‘That’s nice of you, Sengden, but you know I have better weapons now. Being dead.’ As she speaks a defiant flower of flame blossoms and dies in her open palm. ‘Keep it. If it’s served you well, I’m glad. Good steel is hard to get. When did you take it from me?’

‘After you died. I took a lot of things.’

Sorqaqtaiyo laughs. It is a proper laugh, surprised and proud. ‘Did you? Really? What else did you take?’

‘Almost everything.’

The woman’s smile turns sly. ‘Almost everything? Nenyet. Nenyet Kalur. Sengden. Did you bury me naked?’

Her eyes are challenging and her smile is hard. It had always been their game, this, the coldness and callousness of them both and the bored practicalities; because they weren’t like other people, they were different and better and higher than all of them, and the way they spoke in their nakedness and lazy firelight was in scorn and contempt of those people’s little lives. It had been a contest, mutual and daring, to see if anything they said would ever shock the other at all. Sengden has never known anyone quite so much like herself. 

Did you bury me naked? Sorqaqtaiyo had asked. She had. It was a wet clawed unmarked hole where she had rolled her corpse in, clammy and stiffening, and she had not scattered earth over it but pushed it in, kicking it in great wet clumps. She had been in a hurry. She sees the woman’s skin, greying and wet. For a moment she is someone else and the question horrifies her: the blasphemy and the ruining of the sacred, the forbiddenness of it. And then she is herself herself again, and she begins to laugh. 

‘Of course I did,’ she says. Relief breaks over her like a yolk, and she is giddy with it. 

‘Naked? All of me?’

‘Naked as the day you were born.’

‘How vile of you, Nenyet. How horrible. You even took my clothes?’ 

Sorqaqtaiyo’s smile is blinding; it burns through the starvation, the blood on her temple, the dirtied frozen cloak. Sengden had forgotten how beautiful she always was, how alive: it is not the same as memory but something more, as vivid and hurting as fire. She stands, unmanned.

‘Of course. I needed them.’

‘You needed them?’

Sengden folds her arms. ‘I needed them.’

Sorqaqtaiyo copies her, playing the petulant child. ‘You needed them. You needed them. Why? You needed them to be me? Did you need them to play dress up and be me?’

Sengden grins. She moves forward, surging, buoyed on a wave of staggering light. Taiyo. Taiyo. She cannot think for it and now, now she feels the happiness she was waiting for. Oh gods. How many years, how many mountains?

‘Sengden,’ the woman says quietly, and Sengden pauses. 

For a moment she hovers, hesitant. Sorqaqtaiyo - this new and dead Sorqaqtaiyo, flickering slightly with a silvered light - looks up at her under her eyelashes, dark and pooled and waiting. She lets herself be held as Sengden touches her with impossible fingers - her trembling skin, her throat, her temple.

‘Taiyo,’ Sengden says. Her hands are disbelieving, reverent. She strokes her arms, so thin and frail. ‘Taiyo - you -‘

‘What? Hmm?’ Her voice is teasing, lilting. Sengden does not understand how she had ever thought she was less than anything they all said she was. She is impossible, and alive. She is impossibly alive. 

‘Taiyo -‘