Glory Season (2 page)

At once, their meaning struck.

“
Lysos
,” Maia gasped, throwing off the covers. “Leie really did it!”

Sudden shivers drew a second realization. Her sister had also left the window open! Zephyrs off Stern Glacier blew the tiny room’s dun curtains, driving dust balls across the plank floor to fetch against her bulging duffel. Rushing to slam the shutters, Maia glimpsed ruddy sunrise coloring the slate roofs of Port Sanger’s castlelike clan houses. The breeze carried warbling gull cries and scents
of distant icebergs, but appreciating mornings was one vice she had never shared with her early-rising twin.

“Ugh.” Maia put a hand to her head. “Was it really
my
idea to work last night?”

It had seemed logical at the time. “
We’ll want the latest news before heading out
,” Maia had urged, signing them both for one last stint waiting tables in the clan guesthouse. “
We might overhear something useful, and an extra coin or two won’t hurt.
”

The men of the timber ship, Gallant Tern, had been full of gossip all right, and sweet Lamatian wine. But the sailors had no eye for two adolescent summerlings—two
variant
brats—when there were plump winter Lamais about, all attractively identical, well-dressed and well-mannered. Spoiling and flattering the officers, the young Lamais had snapped their fingers till past midnight, sending Maia and Leie to fetch more pitchers of heady ale.

The open window must have been Leie’s way of getting even.

Oh, well
, Maia thought defensively.
She’s had her share of bad ideas, too.
What mattered was that they had a plan, the two of them, worked out year after patient year in this attic room. All their lives, they had known this day would come.
No telling how many dreary jobs we’ll have to put our backs to, before we find our niche.

Just as Maia was thinking about slipping back between the covers, the North Tower bell clanged, rattling this shabby corner of the sprawling Lamai compound. In higher-class precincts, winter folk would not stir for another hour, but summer kids got used to rising in bitter cold—such was the irony of their name. Maia sighed, and began slipping into her new traveling clothes. Black tights of stretchy web-cloth, a white blouse and halter, plus boots and a jacket of strong, oiled leather. The outfit was more than many clans provided their departing var-daughters,
as the mothers diligently pointed out. Maia tried hard to feel fortunate.

While dressing, she pondered the severed braid. It was longer than an outstretched arm, glossy, yet lacking those rich highlights each full-blooded Lamai wore as a birthright. It looked so out of place, Maia felt a brief chill, as if she were regarding Leie’s detached hand, or head. She caught herself making a hand-sign to avert ill luck, and laughed nervously at the bad habit. Country superstitions would betray her as a bumpkin in the big cities of Landing Continent.

Leie hadn’t even laced her braid very well, given the occasion. At this moment, in other rooms nearby, Mirri, Kirstin, and the other summer fivers would be fixing their tresses for today’s Parting Ceremony. The twins had argued over whether to attend, but now Leie had typically and impulsively acted on her own.
Leie probably thinks this gives her seniority as an adult, even though Granny Modine says I was first out of our birth-momma’s womb.

Fully dressed, Maia turned to encompass the attic room where they had grown up through five long Stratoin years—fifteen by the old calendar—summer children spinning dreams of winter glory, whispering a scheme so long forming, neither recalled who had thought it first. Now … 
today
 … the ship Grim Bird would take them away toward far western lands where opportunities were said to lay just waiting for bright youths like them.

That was also the direction their father-ship had last been seen, some years ago. “It can’t hurt to keep our eyes open,” Leie had proposed, though Maia had wondered, skeptical,
If we ever did meet our gene-father, what would there be to talk about?

Tepid water still flowed from the corner tap, which Maia took as a friendly omen.
Breakfast is included, too
, she thought while washing her face.
If I make it to kitchen before the winter smugs arrive.

Facing the tiny table mirror—a piece of clan property she would miss terribly—Maia wove the over-and-between braid pattern of Lamatia Family, obstinately doing a neater job than Leie had. Top and bottom ends she tied off with blue ribbons, purchased out of her pocket. At one point, her own brown eyes looked back at her, faintly shaded by distinctly un-Lamai brows, gifts of her unknown male parent. Regarding those dark irises, Maia was taken aback to find what she wanted least to see—a moist glitter of fear. A constriction. Awareness of a wide world, awaiting her beyond this familiar bay. A world both enticing and yet notoriously pitiless to solitary young vars short on either wit or luck. Crossing her arms over her breast, Maia fought a quaver of protest.

How can I leave this room? How can they make me go?

Abrupt panic closed in like encasing ice, locking her limbs, her breath. Only Maia’s racing heart seemed capable of movement, rocking her chest, accelerating helplessly … until she broke the spell with one serrated thought:

What if Leie comes back and finds me like this?

A fate worse than anything the mere
world
had to offer! Maia laughed tremulously, shattering the rigor, and lifted a hand to wipe her eyes.
Anyway, it’s not like I’ll be completely alone out there. Lysos help me, I’ll always have Leie.

At last she contemplated the gleaming scissors, embedded in the tabletop. Leie had left them as a challenge. Would Maia kneel meekly before the clan matriarchs, be given sonorous advice, a Kiss of Blessing, and a formal shearing? Or would she take leave boldly, without asking or accepting a hypocritical farewell?

What gave her pause, ironically, was a consideration of pure practicality.

With the braid off, there’ll be no breakfast in the kitchen.

She had to use both hands, rocking the shears to win
them free of the pitted wood. Maia turned the twin blades in a shaft of dawn light streaming through the shutters.

She laughed aloud and decided.

Even winter kids were seldom perfectly identical. Rare summer doubles like Maia and Leie could be told apart by a discerning eye. For one thing, they were
mirror
twins. Where Maia had a tiny mole on her right cheek, Leie’s was on the left. Their hair parted on opposite sides, and while Maia was right-handed, her sibling claimed left-handedness was a sure sign of destined greatness. Still, the town priestess had scanned them. They had the same genes.

Early on, an idea had occurred to them—to try using this fact to their advantage.

There were limits to their scheme. They could hardly put it over on a savant, or among the lordly merchant houses of Landing Continent, where rich clans still used the data-wizardry of the Old Network. So Maia and Leie had decided to stay at sea awhile, with the sailors and drifter-folk, until they found some rustic town where local mothers were gullible, and male visitors more taciturn than the gossipy, bearded cretins who sailed the Parthenia Sea.

Lysos make it so.
Maia tugged an earlobe for luck and resumed hauling her gear down the twisty back stairs of Lamatia’s Summer Crèche, worn smooth by the passage of generations. At each slit window, a chill breeze stroked the newly bare nape of her neck, eliciting a creepy feeling that she was being followed. The duffel was heavy, and Maia nursed a dark suspicion that her sister might have slipped in something extra while her back was turned. If they had kept their braids for another hour, the mothers might have assigned a lugar to carry their effects to the docks. But Leie said it made you soft, counting on lugars, and on that she
was probably right. There would be no docile giants to ease their work at sea.

The Summer Courtyard belied its name, permanently shadowed by the towers where winterlings dwelled behind banks of glass windows with silk curtains. The dim quad was deserted save a single bent figure, pushing a broom under dour, stone effigies of early Lamai clan mothers, all carved with uniform expressions of purse-lipped disdain. Maia paused to watch Coot Bennett sweep autumn demi-leaves, his gray beard waving in quiet tempo. Not legally a man, but a “retiree,” Bennett had been taken in when his sailing guild could no longer care for him—a tradition long abandoned by other matriarchies, but proudly maintained by Lamatia.

On first taking residence, a touch of fire had remained in Bennett’s eyes, his cracking voice. All physical virility was certifiably gone, but well-remembered, for he used to pinch bottoms now and then, rousing girlish shrieks of delighted outrage, and glaring reproval from the matrons. While formally a tutor for the handful of male children, he became a favorite of all summer kids for his thrilling, embroidered tales of the wild, open sea. That year, Bennett took a special shine to Maia, encouraging her interest in constellations, and the mannish art of navigation.

Not that they ever actually
talked
, the way two women might, about life and feelings and matters of substance. Still, Maia fondly recalled a strange friendship that even Leie never understood. Alas, too soon, the fire had left Bennett’s old eyes. He stopped telling coherent stories, lapsing into gloomy silence while whittling ornate flutes he no longer bothered to play.

The old man stooped over his broom as Maia bent to catch his rheumy eye. Her impression, perhaps freighted with her own imaginings, was of an
active
void. Of anxious, studied evasion of the world. Did this happen naturally to males no longer able to work ships? Or had the
Lamai mothers somehow done it to him, both erasing a nuisance and guaranteeing he really was “retired”? It made her curious about the fabled sanctuaries, which few women entered, where most men finally went to die.

Two seasons ago, Maia had tried drawing Bennett out of his decline, leading him by hand up narrow spiral steps to the small dome holding the clan’s reflecting telescope. Sight of the gleaming instrument, where months earlier they had spent hours together scanning the heavens, seemed to give the old man pleasure. His gnarled hands caressed its brass flank with sensuous affection.

That was when she had shown him the Outsider Ship, then so new to the sky of Stratos. Everyone was talking about it, even on the tightly censored tele programs. Surely Bennett must have heard of the messenger, the “peripatetic,” who had come so far across space to end the long separation between Stratos and the Human Phylum?

Apparently, he hadn’t. Bewildered, Bennett seemed at first to think it one of the winking navigation satellites, which helped captains find their way at sea. Eventually, her explanation sank in—that the sharp glimmer was, in fact, a starship.

“
Jelly can!
” he had blurted suddenly. “
Bee-can Jelly can!
”

“Beacon? You mean a lighthouse?” She had pointed to the spire marking Port Sanger’s harbor, its torch blazing across the bay. But the old man shook his head, distraught. “
Former!… Jelly can former!
” More phrases of slurred, nonsensical man-dialect followed. Clearly, something had happened that was yanking mental strings. Strings once linked to fervent thoughts, but long since fallen to loose threads. To Maia’s horror, the coot began striking the side of his head, over and over, tears streaming down his ragged cheeks. “
Can’t ’member … Can’t!
” He moaned. “
Former … gone.… can’t
 …”

The fit had continued while, distraught, she maneuvered him downstairs to his little cot and then sat watching him thrash, muttering rhythmically about “guarding” something … and dragons in the sky. At the time, Maia could think of but one “dragon,” a fierce figure carved over the altar in the city temple, which had frightened her when she was little, even though the matrons called it an
allegorical
beast, representing the mother spirit of the planet.

Since that episode on the roof, Maia had not tried communicating with Bennett again … and felt ashamed of it. “Is anyone there?” she now asked softly, peering into his haunted eyes. “Anyone at all?”

Nothing fathomable emerged, so she bent closer to kiss his scratchy cheek, wondering if the confused affection she now felt was as close as she would ever come to a relationship with a man. For most summer women, life-long chastity was but one more emblem of a contest few could win.

Bennett resumed sweeping. Maia warmed her hands with steamy breath, and turned to go just as a ringing bell cracked the silence. Clamoring children spilled into the courtyard from narrow corridors on all sides. From toddlers to older threes and fours, they all wore bright Lamatia tartans, their hair woven in clan style. Yet, all such bids at tasteful uniformity failed. Unlike normal kids, each summer brat remained a blaring show of individuality, painfully aware of her uniqueness.

Except the boys, one in four, hurrying like their sisters to class, but with a swagger that said,
I know where I’m going.
Lamatia’s sons often became officers, even shipmasters.

And eventually coots
, Maia recalled as old Bennett blankly kept sweeping around the ruckus. Women and
men had that much in common … everyone grew old. In her wisdom, Lysos had long ago decreed that life’s rhythm must still include an end.

Running children stopped and goggled at Maia. She stared back, poker-faced. Dressed in leather, with her hair cropped, she must look like one of last night’s revelers, gone astray from the tavern. Slim as she was, perhaps they took her for a man!

Suddenly several kids laughed out loud. Jemanine and Loiz threw their arms around her. And sweet little Albert, whom she used to tutor till he knew the constellations better than Port Sanger’s twisty lanes. Others clustered, calling her name. Their embraces meant more to Maia than any benediction from the mothers … although next time she met any of them, out in the world, it might be as competitors.