Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (41 page)

The sun.

He is not your friend, Na'dio. Remember that.

But the cherry blossoms
, she said softly,
never look so beautiful as when the sun touches them. Look, Ona Alana. Look, Ona Teresa
. She lifted a hand, a perfectly smooth, small hand, and pointed to the veins beneath her own skin, the blue-green movement of blood that spoke of life in such an odd way.

They are beautiful, Na'dio
, her Ona Teresa had said.
The blossoms are lovely at this time of year
.

Serra Teresa
, Alana en'Marano said severely.

The Serra Teresa, from beneath the sun-shelter provided by Ramdan's steady hands, inclined her head slightly, lifting a fan and spreading it before her delicate features. The sun touched only the folds of silk that fell from her knee to the softness of perfectly tended grass—but even in touching that, it added colors the silk itself should not have possessed; pinks and blues and greens, skittering along the surface of something that was in theory white.

Alana en'Marano's expression was as sour as if she'd swallowed wine left standing too long in air and sun.
Your enemies are not your enemies because they are ugly, or worthless, or foolish, or weak. They are your enemies because they seek to damage you, to injure you, to rob you of worth in the eyes of those who have the power to judge you and to shorten or extend your existence based on that judgment. You understand this
, she had added sharply.
You are not a child
.

Diora felt honored by this. She could not clearly remember how old she had been when it was said, but the warmth of feeling adult came with the memory, and if the feeling had been false, the warmth remained nonetheless, an entirely different sensation from the heat of the desert sun.

She could not clearly remember how old she had been when it had been said, but she was absolutely certain that it had been said; the texture of Alana's rough voice, the weight of each syllable, the pause between each phrase for sharp, short breath—these were the things that she did not forget. Memory blurred sight, scent, the sensation of touch and taste. But time did not exist that could chip away at the memory of things heard. Her gift.

Her curse.

She lifted a fan as delicate and perfect as the fan that her Ona had raised that day; raised it and placed it before her face, spreading each segment slowly to reveal the silk across the whole—a delicate unfolding; one that was perfect to the eye, should any eye be watching. Habit.

The heat was fierce.

There were no flowers, no lilies, no falls or brooks, no cherry trees, no Lord's eye, the ubiquitous blue flower with a center of gold that sprang up like weeds in otherwise carefully tended pockets of wilderness. There were no winding brooks, course guided by the careful application of stone and rock; no grass, no soft moss to invite the weary traveler to take refuge.

There was only the sparse and wiry dwarves that might once have had trees as ancestors, and the rounded thick succulents that promised moisture and guarded it with spines and needles—and the sun could not reveal beauty that did not exist.

The sun is not your friend. Stay in the sun like those blossoms and you will suffer their fate. . What is their fate, Ona Alana?

To fall, little one. To fall and be trampled by men too careless to appreciate delicacy or beauty.

But won't that happen anyway, without sun?

Yes
, the older woman had answered, pausing a moment to search for her own fan.
But it will happen more quickly. Keep your youth for as long as you can
.

Why, Ona Alana?

Because it is youth and beauty that attracts the attention of men.

But I don't want the attention of men.

Alana's laugh was both amused and slightly bitter, although only examining it at the remove of years could both of these things be understood; Diora had the gift as a child, but not the experience to understand what it revealed.

Men will desire you, and if they desire you, they will value you
—
if you are a clanswoman of repute, whose family can protect your honor. So long as they desire you, so long as they find you as beautiful in passing as you find the cherry blossoms or the Lord's eyes, or even the Northern roses upon the plateau, you, too, will blossom; you will have water when there is no water to be found; you will have food when the sun has dried and cracked the land that yields it. Should war be necessary to protect you, or your children, you will have war
.

But your value
—
the sun will leach it away, as it leaches color and dye from silks, as it destroys the paintings that come from the Northern merchants
.

But…

But?

But the sun reveals beauty; it reveals color. It
—

Yes. And that is the second lesson you must learn. To reveal something is to make it, in the end, less interesting and less desirable—just as the sun destroys what it sees, so, too, does familiarity.

The sun is not your friend; endure his gaze only when there is no other choice to be had
—
and if you must endure it, take precautions with your skin, your face, your hands
.

Because if you are old, Na'dio, you will not be a flower; you will be like the petals that have fallen from the cherry tree and now lie across the ground waiting to be trampled by careless men.

She stared, from beneath a sun-shelter over a decade removed from those words and that conversation, a fan in her hand, the sky a deep and cloudless blue above her, and in the distance only sand as far as the eye could see. And she looked at her hands; the skin was slightly darker than it had been when she had carried the Sun Sword away from its haven into the darkness of the Lady's Night.

But she understood, now, what she had been unable to conceive of then, as a small child, as a
safe
child. For she could look up, just a fraction of an inch, to where the women worked in their bustle of morning activity, gathering water—what little they spared—and grain, a handful of sugar, a handful of something else that Diora could identify only as a mixture of herbs.

They were old. Older in appearance than Ona Teresa.

And they were young; younger by ten years, younger by twenty, than the Serra. The sun's gaze—the simple truth of the sun's gaze—and the wind's voice had carved lines in flesh, cracking the skin around eyes and lips, the skin across hand and wrist, in a way that could never be recovered from. Sun scars. Wrinkles. Spots.

Her own hands were young, pale, uncallused. And she needed them to remain so.

But she could see, in the eyes of these women, that, it would be a costly necessity.

Ramdan attended her.

It was disconcerting to have the steadiness of his presence without the wisdom of her Ona's, and although none of that dissonance marred her expression, it was there, like cloud across clear sky.

She had asked the Serra Teresa—if indeed she was entitled to that title, in this place—to rescind the command that had brought him, like shade or shadow, to her side, but the Serra had quietly refused.

"He understands what the Voyani cannot understand, Na'dio. Your worth, and what your worth rests upon. If the Lady truly values those serafs who have served in honor and obedience, in grace and with a full understanding of duty and responsibility, she will honor Ramdan above all serafs who have been judged worthy to serve her and sit by her feet."

But there are no serafs here
, Diora replied, feeling behind the words a surprisingly sharp bitterness which she kept from her face, her posture, her movements.
Not even the Serra Maria brought serafs to the caravans; she attends her own needs. I am… ill-loved. I cannot afford to draw more attention to myself. Not in this fashion
.

You will never draw less attention to yourself in this caravan. No matter what you do, you are marked
. Ona Teresa paused. Lowered her head, her hair bound by cloth in a fashion that was foreign to the Serra Diora—as it would have been foreign to any Serra.
And perhaps I will ask a boon, Na'dio. Perhaps I will ask a favor. Ramdan is seraf, yes. But he is more than that, to me; he has saved my life in all ways, great and small, and he chose to travel with me when I chose to leave Marano, simply because he serves me
.

But… he was trained to serve a Serra. And not a foolish Serra, not a girl who blossoms with youth and., beauty that then fades, diminishing her value, but a Serra with mind and vision and ambition; a Serra who can perform the intricate steps of the dance one
must
dance when surrounded, always, by the ambitions of powerful men
.

He has served me well. But he will never serve me in that capacity again.

Diora had fallen silent then.

And I would not deny him the ability to practice his art, his craft. Not when there is clearly a worthy successor who requires his service.

She was silent now. The enormity of Serra Teresa's words had been slow to blossom; so much of Diora's intellect had been turned, like weapon and shield, toward surviving both the Voyani and the enemy that lay beyond them.

He will never serve me in that capacity again.

The Serra Teresa—Ona Teresa—was nowhere in sight, although in truth, had she been it would have been hard to spot her. There was noise in everything the Voyani chose to do. Even when they moved without speech, their movements themselves were loud and graceless, their footfalls heavy, their arms flying in all directions, their bodies hunched forward or back as if they spoke with their movements, and graceful posture was an element of an entirely foreign language.

From time to time, they stopped to gape at her. The children pointed as they spoke, the men just stared. The women stared, but the quality of their gaze was different depending upon many things: there was heat in the look that grazed her. Jealousy. Disdain. Curiosity. Even envy. No desire. All of it so simple to read, all of it in the open.

It would pass soon.

She found the mornings easiest because they had a rhythm and a routine that seemed to be missing from all other elements of Voyani life.

First, the children were woken. They came from both wagons and tents, dragged in twos and threes by men and women who were sometimes their parents, and sometimes not. Elena, the Matriarch's heir, her fire-hair windblown and wild, would come with the food that the children would eat, and she and the older women would set about preparing it. They argued, snapped, snarled at each other; they sang; they listened to the arguments that erupted from the children.

Even the arguments were strange. They were like the arguments that lay hidden behind the curtains of harem life, where children could afford to use words and phrases that would displease their elders. But the children of clansmen used such words—as Diora had—when they were too young to know better; too young to know anything except that speaking them in the presence of their father was
strictly
forbidden.

After the children ate, the men and women arrived, and they seemed to come randomly. With the exception of the Matriarch's immediate family, age seemed to define who sat next; the older you were, the more quickly you ate.

So unlike the clans. So unlike.

She felt a pang, and she could not name it, and did not wish to try.

Instead she turned her face up, beneath the bower of a large, ivory sunshade, to see the solemn face of the quiet, steady man who held it.

These loud and boisterous people surrounded her as she sat in her isolation. They spoke without apparent thought; without grace or control or modulation. She who had always been able to hear the emotion that lay beneath the spoken word found that to listen for it was one thing; to be confronted by it at all times, quite another.

"Serra," Ramdan said, bowing low to preface a possibly unwelcome interruption.

Her gaze traced the underside of his chin; her attention, pulled by a gift that was far too sensitive had wandered. "Ramdan?"

When she turned to, or from, him, she moved deliberately and slowly. When she raised her fan, or lowered it, each gesture was as soft, as graceful, as she could make it. Like the lilies upon the waters of the Lady's Lake, she seemed to float above the cacophony of the Voyani caravan. For the first time, she wondered where the roots of such flowers resided, if lilies lay down roots at all.

"At the edge of the desert, it is… more peaceful." He bent and placed by her side a small, rounded cup made of delicate clay. Into it, although its maker had intended it for other liquid, he poured water. Sweet water.

She said nothing at all for a long moment, staring at the water that reflected the heart of the desert's heat: sun's face. One of her many enemies.

Then she lifted the cup that had been offered.

Ramdan was old. He would, she thought, serve with grace for another five years, another ten. He had served the Serra Teresa di'Marano for as long as Diora could remember; had been a shadow, a perfect, graceful, resourceful shadow, cast by the Serra's light, or perhaps, cast by her as she stood in the light. They had never been separated.

The desert makes me weak
, she thought.
The Tor is so far away, the Voyani so close, I forget who I am
.

But forget or no, she looked up, the water untouched, as if to drink it was significant. "Ramdan?"

He nodded to indicate that he paid attention; he met her eyes. But he did not speak.

"Please," she said, modulating her voice until it carried to his ears, and his alone. "Speak as you would, if you would."

He nodded again, but this time he did not look at her; his hands strayed to the wooden grip by which he held the sunshade.

"You have served the Serra Teresa di'Marano for all of
my
life. You have served her in everything she has chosen to do, in silence; there is not another man—not a clansman, not a seraf, not anything in between—that she has valued or prized so highly."