L'Enyorance

Forty-one years, more or less I surmised, since my father's passing.

And that was really all the thought I gave to him, or rather his death. I spent the bulk of the time before my departure making peace with the past eighteen years of my life. I thought about L'Ausa's words to me that day; I tried to remember why I wanted to return to Fideus, why it had meant so much to me. She had avoided telling me as long as possible, that her kind agreed to contact the Chathalans again, and that she personally petitioned for my release.

There was a strange plangency to it, to all of it, as I strolled the pastures and olive groves of the Auses' world, my world, or "Questa Terha" as they simply called it. I felt it as I watched infant Cucs scuttle deftly across it, each one pulling her segmented heft across a haze of emerald with only a pair of forelegs for locomotion. It was euphony: the Cucs' thick, rounded tails snapping the reeds at a pond's edge; a breeze twittering from deep within the cloister of a nettle tree's branches. I saw it on the children's faces, in their oblate, hazel-flecked eyes and wet, slivery grins, even as it fluttered from their barking nebs.

The Chathalan word for it is l’enyorance: nostalgia.

***

The voyage to Fideus I spent by myself. I slept alone, in a corner of my cabin, against the stack of ceremonial pillows that Cucs and Auses use in place of the long, traditionally elevated dais the Chathalans called a llid. It was a peculiar experience at first: sleeping by myself and in an enclosed space, that is. I had no desire to associate with any of my fellow Chathalans, those other children who were abducted at the same time as I was. The Auses had secluded us from each other, the entire eighteen years, in small cells across the planet. In all, I always believed that there could be no more than a hundred of us, plucked at random, or perhaps by the most unfathomably esoteric shred of quasi-logic from deep within the collective bear mind, from the llars familiars that now repined, cold, in our memories. Each of us, La Majaur herself told me once, was assigned to a group of Cucs, who in turn swarmed wholeheartedly under the intellectual and spiritual aegis of an experienced Ausa. These specially selected Cucs spent their formative childhood years on La Terha in what amounted to a kind of finishing school, where they were educated in the Auses' history, language and culture, as well as the entire mind-numbing spectrum of Ausana discoveries and explorations.

I never have been completely sure, but to this day I believe that all of us who were taken were girls.

I tried to recall those first days, what it had been like to wake up on a strange world; what it had been like to walk under the monstrous nettles and oaks that plumed the strata of warm, clattering breezes. I tried to remember that from the time I turned fourteen, a mere two years or so after my internment began, I was ... afflicted with an extraordinary capacity for guilt. It seemed that every mistake I made, every one of L'Ausa's lessons that I failed, brought me some vague yet very pungent sense of shame-dappled fear.

One day it seemed, all of a sudden, that I had forgotten him all too quickly, too readily.