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Karluk’s daemon settles on his wedding day.
Henry is sitting outside with the extended family, who are eating and drinking. There is meat laid on, lamb and sausages and dumplings, piled high with mounds of rice, bread, fruit and cheese. Skewers of chicken sit next to roast ribs, and there are big dishes of spiced aubergine squashed in next to bowls of stew.
He is not allowed near the ceremony, of course. That is for the immediate family only. So he does not see the actual settling take place. But when the bride and groom come out to meet the guests there are murmurs of surprise, and after a moment of confusion Henry realizes that Karluk’s Osai is the centre of everyone’s attention, coiled across his shoulders. She is in the form of an animal Henry recognises but cannot name, an animal similar to a pine marten but smaller and with a less lustrous coat. She looks, not to put too fine a point on it, extremely pleased with herself.
The ceremony might not be very big (or at least he has been told it is small), but there are still more than thirty people waiting to congratulate the bride and groom, and it isn’t until the next morning that he gets to ask about the change.
“Is that common?” Henry says, notebook at the ready. Karluk shifts a little, looking embarrassed, and turns to his father.
“It’s not unusual,” Akunbek says, chuckling. “It happens more for women, because they leave their family when they marry. A big shift like that is often the moment daemons settle. But Karluk is marrying a little young, so it’s not entirely surprising.”
“What about your country?” Karluk puts in, looking curious. “Do daemons not settle at weddings there?”
Henry shifts a little, and looks blankly towards Juno. She flaps her wings twice in a little bird shrug.
“It’s less common for us,” she says. “People generally marry a little later in England, so daemons are settled by the time the ceremony takes place.” She does not add what they are both thinking, which is that even among young couples, a wedding is not so defining a ceremony as it is here. Henry’s English relatives would be vaguely ashamed if their child’s daemon settled at a wedding. A daemon’s form is supposed to reflect your innermost self, not your outward circumstances.
Amir’s daemon is a wolf. Her whole family has wolf daemons, she tells him, when he asks about it.
“Going back fourteen generations,” she says, shifting the basket of laundry on her hip. Dilawar has trotted off to sniff at a nearby house. “The girls don’t always have them, but mostly we do.”
“I’ve never heard of a daemon type running so strongly in a family before.”
“Well it doesn’t happen so much any more,” Balkirsh says, stepping around the side of the house and joining in the conversation. People do that a lot here, whether or not they have something useful to add. Balkirsh is the best of them, and is always worth listening to. She doesn’t talk to Henry very often, and he suspects she thinks he’s a bit of an idiot.
“In the old tribes it was more common,” she explains, settling herself next to them. “There was a tribe near us, the whole family were cats, even some of the wives. But the times are changing. Our patterns of life are no longer the same, and even our daemons are different.”
Her daemon is not a true wolf, like Dilawar, but a golden Jackal, though his fur has long since faded from gold to grey. He watches them all with a sharp gaze, and Henry knows there can be little he misses.
“Tell me more about England,” Karluk says. “You don’t have traditional clan daemons there?”
“No,” Henry says. “In England daemons are, well, more individual I suppose. There was one family I knew where the father had a cat, the mother a goose, and the daughter a snake. And that wouldn’t be unusual. A daemon’s supposed to reflect who you are, you know?”
Amir tilts her head, the way she always does when she hears something surprising, like she’s trying to look at it from every angle to understand it properly.
“Of course daemons reflect who you are,” she says. “But isn’t your family a part of who you are?”
Henry hadn’t thought about it like that, but of course it makes sense, and he tells Amir as much.
It’s only later, when he’s alone, sifting through the notes he made on that conversation, that he thinks about his own family. Mother’s Tamlin was a hawk, Father’s Jenny a bear. His little sister had only just settled when he left, but Laurence had been an adder, long and sleek. A nature for her to grow into. And then there was Juno. He is still not sure, now, if she became a swallow because of all English birds they seemed most exotic to him, or if his desire to travel was innate, and she simply reflected that.
“There’s no answer to that question,” Juno says, perched on the windowsill. “Amir is right. Family, environment, they determine personality. No man is an island and all that.”
Sometimes there are no answers. He joins Juno at the windowsill, looking at the long red light of the sunset. The plains are saturated with it, kindled to flame that slowly winks out and leaves a purple twilight in its wake.
Tamsin’s daemon was a peregrine falcon.
That’s what Henry thinks of, when he stands in the cold dark of the desert with the heavy weight of a gold watch in his hands.
The range that a daemon has is to some extent cultural, though it never gets beyond thirty metres. Amir and Dilawar had that range, good for hunting on horseback. Juno’s range is only about ten feet. Politeness permitting, she always encourages him to climb into towers, so that all her range can be spent in the air, chasing and hunting insects. Tamsin’s Shihab had a range of about twenty metres. It was not enough. Peregrines are built to soar, but his wings were bound as surely as if he’d been hooded. Henry only saw him fly once, that day in the pasture’s when Tamsin’s hair was loose and long, black as night against the blue sky.
He thinks now about how easily, how willingly she gave up her freedom. Culture bound her, as securely as his own culture binds him, though he is a thousand miles and seven years away from it. There were no other paths for her to take, there was no way for her to make the choice to be with him. Like a trained hawk, she returned to the upheld fist.
He doesn’t know if it’s fair to think of her this way. He knows that she certainly does not see herself the same way. Culture is between them, as he always knew it would be. There was a moment where they were willing to fight against that barrier, in unison, but that moment passed and ended.
The watch is heavy in his hands.
“Don’t look,” he says to Juno, and she buries her head in her wing. He made a promise that he could never have kept. The promise was a lie, even as it was made. He cannot keep it with him. It would be too much to carry. He throws the watch into the dark, and does not see where it lands.
The girls who save him from the water have almost identical daemons.
They introduce themselves as Layla and Leyli, and they talk so fast that his understanding of Arabic is challenged in a way it hasn’t been for years. They stumble over themselves trying to tell him everything, and as he struggles to keep up he finds himself focused on their daemons. Rani and Raji are otters, sleek and quick and full of laughter. They run ahead of the horses, run back, chatter to each other, mock-fight, play hide and seek. It’s a mystery to him how the girls can talk at such length without being distracted by their daemons, but he has to admit that he’s rarely seen a daemon whose animal nature was so obviously suited to its personality.
The more he travels, the more he understands that the rules of daemons are not rules at all, but shift from place to place and time to time. In India, where he lived for three years, daemons are separated by caste. In England there is a rigid code of personality associated with daemons. You are supposed to be able to read a person from the animal that accompanies them.
To a certain extent that seems true here, but when he asks Ali the guide looks at him with mild surprise.
“Personality, eh?” He shrugs, rubs at his chin a bit. “Well I suppose there’s something to that. Those girls getting married have daemons as excitable as they are. But it’s a matter of practicality too, right? Who wants a fish for a daemon? You’ve got to have a daemon that can adapt.”
Ali’s daemon is a goat, which does not really help Henry to think about the issue any more clearly.
There are stories Henry never learns. He knows it. As he travels from city to city he sees it, all the closed houses, all the quiet conversations that do not extend to him. Even when language does not prove a barrier, there is only so much he can ask.
Mohsen is an excellent host. He shows Henry around the town willingly, and though Ali has to translate, Henry learns a lot. The food is good, and though the massage is painful, Henry is fascinated by the bathhouse, where the men sit and smoke shisha while their daemons wander around contentedly. Mohsen has a marvellous daemon, a huge and beautiful Saluki. There is no question of his daemon suggesting he is a servant. Parin is russet and sleek and arrogant, and trots at his side with a long and elegant stride.
The women are another question. Henry is told not to stare at them, and he does his best to obey the rules of the culture, but he finds himself sneaking glances at their robed forms, like the heavy afternoon shadows brought to life. Their daemons are cloaked too, at least the large ones. The smaller animals crawl inside the womens’ clothes and hide, as the laws of that place demand they do.
He never sees the way they run free and frolic in the bathhouse, chattering and playing while the women wash. He never sees them shaking off their outside robes in the freedom of their own home, stretching out paws or wings contentedly. He never meets Mohsen’s wife, whose daemon is a bright-eyed squirrel. But he does collect several translations of Rumi’s poems, including a couple on daemons, and that is enough to make him happy. He particularly likes the one that begins “Your soul has gone wading with the long-necked cranes”.
In England it would be heresy to name the daemon as the soul so directly, but here they see it as natural.
“That’s why the women cover their daemons on the streets,” Mohsen says slowly, trying to explain. “A woman’s soul is between her, god and her husband. Men must bare their souls to each other in the course of business and travel, but a woman’s soul is like ice. Touch it, hold it, and it will melt in your hand.”
Rumi’s poetry comes back to him as he travels on. My soul has gone flying south for winter, he thinks, looking up at Juno as she soars in the empty sky. He feels a constant little tug on his heart. She is stretching the bond between them, never enough to hurt or break it, but always at the limits of the possible, longing for a distant perspective, to show him more than he can see alone.
When she settled, it was an expression of decision he had already made subconsciously. Now he thinks that he will never be at peace, not completely. He couldn’t live in England, he couldn’t live in India. He is destined to wander forever. The glimmer of his gold pocketwatch sailing into the darkness lies across his mind. It was a talisman of home to him, of safety and security and comfort, but it was a lie. There is no place that is truly his except the endless road and the empty sky, and the promise of understanding, somewhere beyond the horizon.