The Other Half of My Soul, part 06 of 11

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I know it’s bad manners to laugh at one’s own jokes, especially hoary old chestnuts like that, but Serenikha’s amusement poured through our link so strongly that I couldn’t suppress my giggles for more than a moment, and then we kept setting each other off.


The Other Half of My Soul

Part 6 of 11

by Trismegistus Shandy


My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.




The Knowing One was subdued when he returned from the Gray One’s body, and didn’t interrupt my conversation with Dad. He scuffed a gap in the circle he’d been enclosed in, murmured something about being back in half an hour, and left the room.

When Taylor returned to her body, she looked around, didn’t see the Knowing One, and gave me a sly smile.

“What?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” she said as the Knowing One came back in, accompanied by a servant bearing a tray with a pot of tea and several cups. I told her what the Gray One had said about us turning into pixies and going through a small portal.

“Yes, he told me after he swapped back and I was in Dad’s body. Which was kind of gross, actually, even though I’ve been in male bodies like a dozen times. I guess it’s different when it’s your parents... Mom’s body felt kind of weird too.”

“Because it was almost but not quite like your own?” I guessed.

“No,” she said in English, blushing, “it was because I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom and Dad conceiving me. I know they did, of course, but usually I manage not to think about it... Anyway,” switching back to Draconic with an apologetic look at the Knowing One, “I could take us back tonight if we weren’t particular about where we ended up. But if we’re turning into pixies, we’ll have to leave most of our stuff behind. All our clothes, certainly. So we’ll be naked when we turn back into our usual selves, which might be inconvenient in some places. I wouldn’t want to hike to our campsite naked from anywhere in Yosemite, for instance —”

I interrupted and told her Mom and Dad were going to get our cars and stuff from the campsite.

“Oh, good. Well, my point is I either need to open the portal to somewhere safe like Mom and Dad’s house, or else I need to talk to the Gray One ahead of time and have him, or Mom or Dad, or one of my classmates meet us at a secluded portal site with clothes and stuff. So that will probably take a few days.”

We finished our tea, and thanked the Knowing One for helping us out.

“It was fascinating,” he said. “Perhaps on some future occasion I will visit your world for a longer time.”

“If you come during the summer the Tenacious One can show you around,” I said. “She’s one of the Gray One’s local guides when she’s not in school.”

We left the Knowing One’s apartments and headed back toward the women’s quarters. But I’d never been in that area but once, and Taylor had been there a couple of times but she was tired from casting several spells; we soon got lost.

“I could work a directional spell using your link to Serenikha,” Taylor suggested when we’d come to a dead end in yet another corridor.

“No!” I said. “No messing with the link. You didn’t think the transformation would affect it, but it did, and you didn’t think the portal would be affected by it, but it was. Can’t you just cast a spell to tell you which direction is north?”

“There’s probably a spell for that, but I haven’t learned it. Hmm... maybe we can use your link without casting a spell. Try closing your eyes and just guessing where Serenikha is.”

I wasn’t too confident about that, but it couldn’t be worse than picking a direction at random. We turned left at the next intersection of corridors, and then went straight at the next one, and left again. Then, luckily, we ran into a servant who was able to escort us back to the women’s quarters and Serenikha’s neighborhood. (We’d been going the wrong direction.)


That afternoon Serenikha and her ladies, including me and Taylor, went out with Wushao and her ladies on a picnic excursion. We rode in open carriages from the palace to a large park in the upriver part of the city; the palace security guards had cordoned off a glade by the river for the use of the princesses and their courtiers and servants. (I realized that Taylor and I were courtiers now; it was a weird feeling.) We played a couple of tossing-games with odd little things more like badminton birdies than balls, except we were using bare hands rather than rackets, and us nagini sometimes used our tails; I was better at it than Taylor. By the end of the second game I was about as good as Serenikha, though not as good as Sienpai or a couple of the women on Wushao’s team. They beat us in two games out of three, after which we ate lunch, and the losing team had to pay a forfeit, spending the afternoon composing poems in honor of Wushao. Mine wasn’t great, but I surprised myself at how easily I wrote it, never having written any poetry before. It certainly wasn’t as bad as the one Taylor sweated over for an hour and a half, which was something like (translating back into English):

Wushao, the dragon princess,
Has not a face at which one winces.

And so on. At least mine scanned. Serenikha’s was pretty good too, but I wouldn’t do her any favors trying to translate it into English and making it sound almost as lame as Taylor’s.

When I reflected on how easily I’d come up with my poem, I suspected that I’d picked up some of that skill from Serenikha through my link. Later, I decided to test my suspicion. “Knock knock,” I said in English.

“Who’s there?” Serenikha responded with hardly a moment’s pause.

“Orange.”

“Orange who?” She didn’t hesitate, but she did look a little puzzled.

“Orange you glad to see me?”

She stared at me for a moment and then burst out laughing. And I know it’s bad manners to laugh at one’s own jokes, especially hoary old chestnuts like that, but Serenikha’s amusement poured through our link so strongly that I couldn’t suppress my giggles for more than a moment, and then we kept setting each other off. Sienpai had been looking jealously at me from the moment we started talking in English, but she didn’t dare say anything that might sound like she was criticizing Serenikha. When Serenikha noticed that, our amusement suddenly turned into contrition, and Serenikha said in Draconic:

“I’m sorry, but that joke depends on wordplay in English. It won’t be easy to turn into Draconic.”

I explained why I’d done that. “I think we’re picking up each other’s skills through the link. I’d never written any poetry before, nor Taylor either, but you saw how well I did compared to her. And I knew how to tie a sari, or nurse, without you explaining it... I wanted to see if you were getting skills from me, not just knowing how to speak English but recognizing joke-patterns and things like that. Did you remember hearing that joke before?”

“No, never, or I wouldn’t have laughed so hard. And I don’t know why I knew to say Who’s there? or Orange who?, but I did.”

Serenikha still felt bad about excluding her other friends from the joke, so we spent half an hour figuring out how to create knock-knock jokes in Draconic. We worked out this pattern:

“Announce a guest.”

“Who calls upon my mistress?”

“So-and-so.”

“So-and-so of what province?”

“So-and-so of such-a-place.” — where this last phrase was a pun, sounding like some other phrase or sentence.

Michiko picked this up quickly and came up with a dozen hilarious announce-a-guest jokes, which unfortunately I can’t share with you any more than we could share the orange knock-knock joke with her. (Meta jokes like the interrupting cow, however, carried over just fine.)

One of Wushao’s courtiers said there were a family of pixies living somewhere in that park, but though some of us walked through the woods after we’d recited our poems, we never saw any of them. We returned to the palace a little after sunset.


When we were alone in our chamber and getting ready for bed, I suddenly remembered something and asked Taylor:

“What were you grinning at right after you came back to your own body? Something you didn’t want to talk about in front of the Knowing One?”

“Oh,” she said, and laughed. “The body the Gray One was wearing when he swapped with the Knowing One was female, older than Mom, and about forty pounds overweight. The Knowing One wasn’t best pleased, but he didn’t complain; I’ll give him that.”


The next morning during breakfast, I told Serenikha about our plan to turn into pixies and go home through a tiny portal, and Taylor filled her in on more details.

“We’ll probably have a chance to open a small portal somewhere safe within the next five to ten days. The Gray One is going to keep me informed about the fluctuations of magic levels at several potential portal sites.” One of those was Mom and Dad’s house; another was in the nature preserve on the campus of Kinnison College, and the others of course were in the offices of several west coast Travel Agency branches. (There were others, but they’d decided to focus on ones within a day’s drive of Mom and Dad’s house, where our cars were. If we arrived naked in the Travel Agency office in Boston, for instance, getting to California quickly without ID could be a problem, even if Mr. G.'s local employees could get us clothes and money.)

Serenikha let Sakhi have all the milk she could get, and let her have a turn at me. That was one ravenous baby; of course a nagini her age is twice as massive as a human baby at the same stage of development, most of it in her tail. When I’d done nursing, and had burped her, I asked what Serenikha’s plans were for the day.

“We can’t see Wushao today,” she said, “she and a few of the ladies of her court are making a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Haoshu, and won’t be back until late tomorrow. I thought we’d relax around the palace today, then go up the river tomorrow, and meet Wushao and her ladies on their way back from the shrine.”

We played peek-a-boo with Sakhi until it was time to let Dhamarikha change her diaper and take her back to the nursery for a nap, and sang songs, and made up more announce-a-guest jokes, and managed to fill the time until evening in various ways. Taylor excused herself for a while after lunch to talk to the Gray One, and told me afterward that she didn’t have an exact date and time for the portal yet but the Gray One thought there might be an opportunity within the next two or three days. “Just maybe we’ll be back in time for classes on Monday.”


The next day, we bathed early and gathered in the carriage drive; Serenikha’s carriages took us to the river, not to the main docks where the sea-going ships exchanged cargoes with the riverboats, but further upriver to the imperial family’s private docks. Here we boarded Serenikha’s barge and ate breakfast while the boatmen rowed us upriver.

The river twisted and turned as we got out of the city and into the countryside. Larger riverboats passed us both ways, but there were fewer of the small boats than there had been. The flat country around the city was starting to give way to hills visible in the distance on either side of the river by midday, and the hills were getting closer and looking bigger when the captain of the barge announced that we were almost to our destination.

There was another fancily ornamented barge tied up to the docks there, along with several smaller boats, but there was still room for us too, and we walked and slithered ashore a few minutes later.

“Where are we meeting Wushao?” I asked.

“Right around here,” Serenikha said. “She should be coming down the road from the shrine within the next couple of hours; that’s her barge tied up there.”

We went into a nearby tea-house, and posted a couple of servants along the road to tell us when Wushao and her party were approaching. We’d eaten, and some of us were on our third cup of tea when Taylor said: “She’s almost here,” and a few moments later one of the servants came running in and said: “Her Highness the Princess Wushao is approaching. We have told her you are here.”

“Excellent!” Serenikha said. And maybe ten minutes after that, Wushao and her ladies came in to the tea-house, calling out their orders to the proprietor’s children and servants, and greetings to us; everything was pleasant confusion for while.

One of Wushao’s ladies approached me, asking diffidently: “Beg pardon, my lady, but are you Her Highness the Princess Serenikha, or her friend from the other world?”

“I’m Leslie,” I said. “Which of us were you looking for?”, expecting of course that she wanted Serenikha, who was sitting further up the table between Shiyama and Wushao.

“You, my lady. Or perhaps your sister, the mage... is that her over there?”

“Yes, that’s her.” Besides Serenikha, Taylor and me there were only two other nagini present, both of them a good deal older.

“I had a question about your home — about the other world. Is it true that high-born ladies can marry whoever they like?”

“We don’t exactly have high-born and low-born in my country,” I explained; “we’ve got rich people and poor people, but some of the rich people were born poor, or their grandparents were, and some of the poor people are children and grandchildren of rich people who frittered away their money... anyway, however much money you’ve got, you can marry anybody who’s willing to marry you. — But some other countries in my world are different, they still have arranged marriages and like that.”

“Oh! And —” her voice dropped to a whisper, “when you go there, you become somebody else?”

“Yes — for a day or two or up to a month, however long you wish, you’d swap bodies with someone in my world who wants to visit here. I think Kinuko of Chrysanthemum Street is still the Gray One’s agent for this region —”

“And you might swap with anybody, even a tengu or —” her voice dropped even lower, “a man?”

“Well, no and yes. I mean, people from my world coming here might swap with a tengu. But if you’re coming to my world you can be sure you’ll be human. No telling if you’ll be a man or woman, though. Or even a boy or girl, though there aren’t as many children visiting your world.”

I told her some more about my world, and asked her a few questions about herself; her name was Pengshu and she was from a provincial noble family, having been sent to court when she was fourteen (the same age I first swapped with Serenikha) to hang out with the princesses, pick up some social polish and hopefully find a rich husband.

The ladies of Serenikha’s and Wushao’s courts mixed things up on the way back, several of us including me riding back to the palace on Wushao’s barge, while several of Wushao’s ladies rode back on Serenikha’s. Back at the palace, we dined together in the larger dining hall between Wushao’s neighborhood and Princess Taoshai’s; Taylor and I were seated at the same table with Wushao and Serenikha, but not very close to them.

After dinner, when Taylor had excused herself to go to our room and contact the Gray One, I hung around a while longer. Serenikha sent for Sakhi, and Dhamarikha brought her in; Serenikha and I both took a turn nursing her, and beaming at her while Wushao’s ladies admired her alertness and her remarkable resemblance to her mommy (and her uncle).



Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)

The Bailiff and the Mermaid Smashwords Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes Smashwords Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey Smashwords Amazon
A Notional Treason Smashwords Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories Smashwords Amazon
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Comments

Swapping Jokes

terrynaut's picture

Lots of swapping going on in this chapter. Swapping jokes and bodies. I like all the reactions after swapping back. It would certainly be an eye opening experience.

I'm not fond of knock knock jokes but I like how they modified the jokes for Draconic. This is a fun chapter.

Thanks and kudos (number 12).

- Terry