The Snake and Spice: A Short Story

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The Snake and Spice

“Servici tu vismek cum bagura?” a young man with nervous eyes but a bright smile asked. They stood beneath the scant shade and wind buffer of a simple wooden structure with a hemp tarp thrown over it, amidst a long line of similar structures. People, mostly humans, were packed all around, standing in lines, filling the tables in the center of the market, or shouting at each other to buy or sell. The scent of boiled cabbage, spices, oil, and grilled meat filled the air, only just covering the scent of sweaty people and dirty cobble stones. 

Burgundy stared blankly at the food vendor as her mind raced, desperately searching for any scrap from the babble that had been thrown at her that she could understand. I hate questions! She licked her scaly nose, a nervous tick she’d developed since coming to Cathrock. Where is Arbana when you need her? Why can’t the vendor just assume? True, the merchants she’d encountered who tended to make decisions for her also tended to be brusk, chilly, and money-grubbing. But she’d faced panic at the hands of a friendly face trying to meet her every need too many times in the last month. Yesterday, she’d noticed herself licking her nose at the sight of a polite smile from a stranger she’d passed in the street. She almost preferred the chilly ones, since they made no effort to communicate in the first place. Almost.

The merchant, sensing her confusion, began another stream of babble, and when this produced no noticeable reaction or improvement, the merchant also became anxious. His fingers pressed tight around the box of food in his hand. The two feet between Burgundy and her food felt like miles in a stiff breeze, and the tension visibly building in the merchant’s body was a punishment and a shame to her. 

Not for the first time, Burgundy wondered if she’d made the right decision in running so very far from home. Sure, she could make her own decisions now, and people’s expectations for her had at last risen above being an untouchable bouquet on a table, and that was nice. But so far, Burgundy was mostly failing to meet any expectations, even her own, and it was driving her a little crazy. Since when has learning things been so hard? The native language of Cathrock, Cat’rocki, being the prime example. Theoretically, she’d studied at least the basics of grammar and manners, with common greetings and vocab, in the course of her studies under Sir Bazick, but somehow, the moment she was on the ground and trying to use it, her mind went blank and she was about as functional as a stone trying to perform backflips.

The merchant grew a little pale, and managed to say “S-s-s-sorry!” in a brutalized version of her mother tongue. Perhaps he’d sensed her rising agitation. 

Burgundy shook her head. “No, I’m sorry.” Eager for the awkward interaction to be over, she set down what she thought was the appropriate amount of coin on the counter.

“Yes?” she tried to say in Cat’rocki. 

The merchant glanced at the money, processing what she might be trying to say. He set the box to one side, and with a careful finger picked through the coins she’d set down, pulling three towards himself and pushing the remaining ones back towards Burgundy. 

Burgundy tried to swallow the embarrassment she felt as she retrieved her coins, and was glad for black scales that didn’t change color with emotions the way chameleon skin or human skin seemed to. It was utterly humiliating to run away from a place that refused to treat her like an adult and a person, only for her ignorance to force everyone in her new environment to treat her like a child just the same. Back home, the natural reaction to humiliation was to prove one’s honor in easily recognizable ways. But I don’t have any such recourse right now, and no name or family to fall back on instead. Yes, perhaps a part of her felt regret; if not regret for the life she left, then regret over how much she’d had to sacrifice to leave it.

The vendor then lifted two cylindrical containers above her box of food. One seemed to contain a sauce, the other a seasoning. He pantomimed emptying these on top of her box, then asked, “Yes?” in his heavily accented Kreshian. Perhaps this was what he’d been trying to ask from the beginning, maybe it wasn’t, but his genuine and clever efforts to communicate eased Burgundy’s anxiety. She still felt stupid, though. 

She shook her head no, then added “Thank you” in Cat’rocki as the words suddenly popped into mind. She had no way of knowing what those seasonings tasted like, or how the food tasted without them, for that matter, and the desire to just have this awkwardness over with was still raging strong. She could ask for the seasonings next time, if the food tasted better that way. There would certainly be a next time.

She thanked the young man again, and quickly collected her food. He gave her a polite smile, but she thought that the relaxing of his shoulders and the quick shift of his eyes to the next customer spoke all too loudly of relief. There would be a next time, but, given the option, she’d try not to make it this vendor. He’d been nice, sure, but she wouldn’t be able to forget the embarrassment anytime soon. There were by now black spots all over the city that she avoided visiting, lest she see someone who’d seen her shameful attempts to live, and she be forced to remember the discomfort.

She eyed the fragile wooden seats resting against the table that the firedancer, Arbana had claimed for them with their shopping bags and softly hissed. With resignation, Burgundy coiled her large, serpentine body next to the table and leaned one elbow against the chair. Chairs here just weren’t designed to hold people of her size and shape. Little was. Even her bed had haphazardly cobbled together with boxes, pillows and blankets piled in a roughly nest-like shape in a former storage closet. Kreshians aren’t usually crazy enough to come here, I guess.

Burgundy lifted her chin and stretched her neck against the tension building there, then opened her food. Just then, Arbana appeared with her own food. The charming human had chosen the soup vendor a little ways down the street, and the spice of it stung the back of Burgundy’s throat from across the table. She tried not to cough as they both tucked in. Her own food was bland, and she found that she was glad. Better bland than inedible. Cathrock cuisine was typically rich and spicy, which Arbana said suited the cooler climate, but Burgundy preferred being able to taste the actual ingredients in her food, not just the spices. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever get used to that part of living there.

Arbana glanced up from her soup about halfway into it, and gave Burgundy a critical look. 

“What’s got you so upset?”

Burgundy blinking in surprise. She’d thought she’d been acting normally. “I’m fine,” she assured her friend, but Arbana smacked a startling fist against the table.

“Let’s have it, princess, before I give you something else to be upset about!”

Burgundy blinked again, then sighed, staring down at her tasteless food. “It’s just… hard,” she admitted.

Arbana narrowed her eyes. “What’s hard?”

“Everything,” said Burgundy, her head sinking so low she could have licked the food out of her box. 

“You want to go back?” Arbana said, thorns in her tone.

Burgundy quickly shook her head. “It’s not that! It’s just…”

“Hard?” finished Arbana with a slightly scornful smirk.

Burgundy shrugged. Arbana set her soup down and folded her hands in a way that got passersby to glance her way and raise their eyebrows in admiration.

“What specifically happened,” she asked with more patience than last time.

“The vendor didn’t speak Kreshian,” Burgundy said. Perhaps if she could just neatly sum up everything, it could be tied up neatly and neatly forgotten again.

But Arbana was far from satisfied. “You speak enough Cat’rocki to order food,” she observed matter-of-factly. 

Burgundy hissed softly before saying, “Not when I’m under pressure.”

“What pressure?” Arbana wondered. “It’s just getting food.”

Burgundy pressed her thin lips together. How was she going to describe the pressure of a service person trying to attend one customer quickly so they could get to the next, the pressure of people’s expectation that you can communicate normally, the pressure of needing something as essential as food and not even knowing where to look for it without help, the pressure of being utterly alone, the pressure of her whole life being like this, making each new example of pressure and struggle feel that much weightier because there was no relief? She took a deep breath to ease the sudden wave of anxiety and frustration that had rushed up her throat at these thoughts. A nobles doesn’t get upset. A noble is never petty. 

While she was still wrestling with the wave, Arbana tapped her lips with a finger, drawing quite a few more stares, then waved her hand like a cat’s flicking tail. “Then we’ll just have you practice in pressure-free settings until it’s so burnt into your brain that it comes out even when you can’t think.” 

Burgundy looked up, encouraged more by Arbana’s certain tone than by her words. “Do you think that will work?”

Arbana smiled widely and spread her hands dramatically, entertaining more than just Burgundy. “How do you think I learned to dance for kings? Now stop miming an empty sock and eat. We’ll be training for the act as soon as we get back and I’ll be using Cat’rocki.”

“How is that a pressure-free setting?” challenged Burgundy, but she was smiling. The pressure to live and conform wasn’t gone. She was still living in a world which was clearly not designed to accommodate her. She surely had many more embarrassing failures in her future. But she’d been wrong about one thing. She wasn’t alone. And maybe that was enough.

“By the way,” she added between mouthfuls. “How do you say “sauce, no spice” in Cat’rocki?”

Arbana paused, then quickly said, “Yi kasin, fu nu kasa.” 

But Burgundy caught a wicked gleam in Arbana’s dark eyes, and flicked her tongue. “That’s the opposite, isn’t it.”

Arbana’s smile was even more wicked than before. “You’ll know when you try it.”

“Why would you do that?” Burgundy complained with another soft hiss.

Arbana snapped her fingers without a hint of shame. “Because if you say that, and then get a mouthful of spices without even the sauce to mellow it out, you’ll never, ever forget which is which. Some lessons should be learned the hard way.”

Burgundy wasn’t sure she agreed. But, she was certainly learning quite a lot of things the hard way, and it was nice to think that it wouldn’t all be self-inflicted misery in the end.

“Thank you,” she said in Cat’rocki.

“Nothing to it.”

Afterward

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed, but even if it was a mixed experience, please say so. I am writing these short stories in an effort to become a much better writer, so if you decide to become part of that effort by giving me your honest opinions, I’m all ears and deeply grateful.

If you did enjoy it, be sure to check out my other short stories and poems, like the ones below. Happy escapism!

With grins,