The Silences of Home (10 page)

The Queen was nodding. “The river here is beneath the ground, and we tap it for our fountains. These fountains are the queens’ gift to their people—a sign of life, power, and hope, and an homage to our First, greatest Queen, who drew the water up above the sand with only the powers of her mind.” She leaned forward, and Lanara saw the silk of her tunic tighten against her shoulders. “Lanara has told me of your river. She wrote me so many letters, I feel as if I have seen your town and your silver trees.” Galha was smiling at Lanara, now.

“I wrote to you as I was expected to,” Lanara said, feeling warmth in her chest and on her cheeks. “I am happy that my letters entertained you.”

“Entertained,” the Queen said, “and educated. You have a gift, Nara. You are lucky, Nellyn, that—”

There was a sudden clatter. Lanara looked down and saw the goblet Nellyn had been holding, spinning slowly on the stone. The musician put her instrument down with a jangle of strings. Ladhra raised her eyebrows at Lanara, who bent to pick up the goblet. She saw that Galha’s sandals were speckled with wine. “I am sorry,” Lanara stammered, “he is not usually so. . . .” and then she turned to Nellyn and did not speak.

He was looking past her, past all of them, out into the sky. His eyes were so wide that she followed his gaze, but she saw only drifts of thin cloud and sun-bright blue. “Nellyn?” she said, kneading his limp hands, digging her fingers into the fleshy part of his palms. Galha was standing beside them. She, too, said his name, but his gaze did not waver. A steady shonyn gaze, distant, not present.

“Nellyn!” Lanara said again, more loudly.
Come back
, she thought,
quickly. Everything was going so smoothly. . . . 
She felt the Queen’s shadow over them both. “I’m sorry,” Lanara said, tilting her head; “he seemed well until now.” When she looked back at him, she saw that his eyes were closed, and she saw tears on his lashes, melting and slow.

The marketplace was quiet in darkness. Light shone from within some of the tents and wagons—red cloth, golden cloth, spaces bright between wooden slats. Nellyn heard laughter and singing, also within, and blurred. The palace towers broke cloud and stars; he knew this, even though he did not look up. He could not: he felt himself shaking, still weak from the height and strangeness of the balcony where he had wept, that afternoon.

He held his wrists up one after the other and traced the flesh where his veins were, hidden by blue. He drew breath from his belly to his chest to his throat to his mouth and let it out in a silent stream.
“The river is within you.”
He heard the words: wise ones’ words, sounding above water. Water
against the bank like breath against the air. Water threading sand like veins in skin. Life moving through places of stillness—all life together, all breath one. He remembered these sounds and these words, but he could no longer feel them.

He stood among the tents and wagons and unrolled sleeping mats, and opened his eyes wide on a night he did not know. The lights winked out as he watched, and the voices died. He began to walk through the silence, listening for wind or waves. He heard only the tearing of his own breath.

“Tall one.” He did not turn because it could not be a real voice. It had to be from before, from that other place. Not real. Just as the small red huts were not real, on the balcony that saw so much desert. “Tall one—I see you.” He felt hands on his arm, and stopped and looked down into a shonyn face.

She did not waver and disappear as he looked at her. She was solid. He saw the deep creases of her blue skin, and his own skin was pressed almost to bruising beneath her fingertips. “Wise one,” he said in his own language, and the woman smiled.

“Wise one—no, not I,” she answered, and her words fell like lynanyn into the river that had found him. “Not I, no—I am a nothing, a small lost shonyn—but not. Though I am, yes, old,” she continued, the last word in the Queenstongue. Nellyn eased his arm away from her gripping fingers.

“I was young but now am old. I was foolish, they said, and I will know this sometimes, but not all.” Queenstongue and shonyn language mixed—words not lynanyn, and no river, after all. He looked away from her shining, darting eyes.

“Our shonyn do not say they remember me, but they will. I left them on foot, when I was strong. I followed the Queensman’s footsteps here and we live together, but he has cast me off. And you,” she said, her nails digging again, “you also followed?”

He shook his head and his arm and tried to step back. “Yes,” he heard himself say.

“Then you and I will walk together. I find lynanyn on the ground at night, or I steal it in their day. I take you to get some.”

“No,” Nellyn said, and his feet finally carried him backward. Something tripped him up but he righted himself. He stepped and stepped again and did not look away from her.

“Tall one,” she called, “we are both forgotten. Walk with me.”

He wrenched himself around and ran.

Every time Nellyn moved his head on the pillow, Lanara expected to see blue—a blot or a smudge, in the shape of his skull or the strands of his hair. This was a strange thought, and it made her feel as if she were the feverish one. She had been attempting to cool his fever ever since he had crawled into bed beside her three nights ago, whimpering, his flesh already burning. His episode on the Queen’s balcony, and now his sickness. Lanara lay beside him and murmured to him, hoping that her voice would bring him back.

On the morning of the fourth day, she woke to Ladhra’s voice. Lanara slipped out of her sleeping shift and into a tunic. She hesitated for a moment by the bed. Nellyn’s lips were moving, though she could hear no words.
They’re probably shonyn words
, she thought, and went quickly into the main room so that she could imagine that she was shaking off her fear.

“Nara,” Queen Galha said. She was standing where she had stood on that other morning, though there was no scarlet mourning ribbon in her hair today. Malhan was behind her and Ladhra beside him. Lanara looked out the open door and saw two Queensguards on the top step, their backs turned to the house. She saw the shining lengths of their bows, and the tips of the arrows that filled their green-and-blue-stitched quivers.

“Your father’s tomb is ready at last,” the Queen said. “It took longer than I wished it to, but the artisans have more than rewarded my patience.”

“Oh,” Lanara said, the word thick and rough. She felt three days of sweat and sleeplessness upon her, and knew her tunic was wrinkled and threadbare—but Galha smiled at her as if she saw none of this.

“Come with me. I will show it to you, and Ladhra will stay here with Nellyn. One of my Queensguards will stay as well, in case she needs to send for you.”

“Yes,” Lanara said. “Good.” She followed the Queen past Ladhra, who was already at the table, sorting clean cloths from soiled with one hand and reaching for a bowl with the other. “Thank you,” Lanara said to all of them—and then she went out into the daylight.

The palace tombs lay beneath the northernmost ring of towers. Lanara and Ladhra had often stood at the low doorways and stared at the ladders that angled away into shadow, but they had never gone any further than that. Now Lanara followed Galha and Malhan down, while the Queensguard who had accompanied them stood at the bottom, awaiting them with a lantern held high.

They did not need the lantern when they stepped beneath an arched entryway and into Creont’s tomb. Its slanted roof was cut with long thin openings. Morning sun lay on the stone walls and floor, washing the crimson paint with gold. The cut glass set in the walls flickered and burned. Lanara stood still. She stared at the glass pieces and saw shapes: blooming flowers strung with arrowheads, drops of water falling from slender hands. Real water sang atop the stone sarcophagus in the centre of the chamber. Creont’s tomb fountain was crystal, fashioned somehow into a copy of the palace. Lanara forced herself to walk to the sarcophagus. She leaned in close to the fountain. There were tiny fountains within it, cascading down towers and pooling in courtyards and open rooms. She drew quickly back, brushing the Queen, who had come up behind her.

“It does not please you?” Galha said.

“Oh yes,” Lanara replied, “it does—it’s beautiful. . . .” As beautiful as the painted, glass-encrusted stone and the ivy that was already beginning to unspool up the walls. As beautiful as the sarcophagus, also red, inlaid with rubies and emeralds and sapphires in patterns that made her vision blur.

“Gaudy. Self-indulgent.”
Creont would have growled the words. He would have been turning away as he spoke.
“More queenly show—and for whom?”

The city’s dead were set in tombs outside the city walls, caves that were not painted or adorned, and were filled only with blown sand. The bodies were buried, not placed in stone boxes, and there were many bodies in each cave. Lanara had known this since she was a child, but she had never thought of it until now.
He should be there,
she thought, guilt threading among her misery.
There’s nothing of him here—nothing to call him back or give him peace. Nothing he would appreciate—
except, perhaps, for the large sand snail that was tugging slime along the sarcophagus lid. Its heavy brown shell tipped to the side and she thought it would fall—but it righted itself and continued ponderously on.

“Nara.” Galha’s voice sounded very loud. Her long tunic hissed across the stone as she stepped to Lanara’s side. “Tell me what’s troubling you.”

Lanara’s breath felt thin; too little air underground, or a weight of tears in her chest. “I miss him,” she said. So few words for the feeling, but there were more. “And I can’t stop thinking about how he died, now that I’m tending Nellyn. The fevers and the words that I can’t hear or understand—it’s death again, and I can’t do anything to stop it. It’s my fault, too: I wasn’t here when my father fell ill, and I was the one who took Nellyn away from his people.” She closed her eyes, but the mourning crimson was still there before her, like a stain.

Galha touched her hand. “I should not have brought you here. Forgive me, my dear—and let me help you. Let me help you and Nellyn.”

Lanara opened her eyes as the Queen was going out into the dim corridor. When Lanara did not move, Malhan said, “Follow her, Lanara.” She did, hastily, while he walked steadily behind her. Her breath came more smoothly as soon as the tomb’s glow had faded.

This time Galha led her deep into the palace. They passed many tower doors and guards whom Lanara knew, but soon they reached the innermost ring, with its two towers that she had never seen before. One of these was the Queen’s sleeping tower; the other was her study. Queensguards Lanara did not recognize made the sign of the arrowhead and tugged open two thick wooden doors, and she began to climb, dizzy with confusion and weariness.

“
My mother’s study isn’t at all like the Scribeslibrary,”
Ladhra had told her many times when Lanara had demanded a description. Lanara had been to the Library often. It was huge and sunlit, and filled with the sounds of writing sticks and unfolding parchment.
“The study is silent,”
Ladhra had said,
“and dim”
—but these words were not enough, Lanara realized as she stepped into the room. It was round, the entire top of the tower, which was ringed by other, taller towers. No sunlight fell through the high arrowhead-shaped windows. Lanterns and candles lit rich red wood: table, chairs, floor, and the rows of drawers that stretched from floor to domed ceiling. The open cabinets in the Library contained the scribes’ transcriptions, rough and final, of documents provided by the Queen: public documents, many of them transparent with age and handling. The drawers in the Queensstudy held all the records of all the days of the queens since Sarhenna the First: private, closed, kept for the eyes of future queens. Lanara stared at these drawers, shifting her feet on the smooth, strange wood.

“Sit with me,” Galha said, gesturing to a chair by the enormous triangular table. Lanara sat. “Drink,” the Queen said, and Lanara saw that there was a goblet by her right hand. She took one sip, and another. The wine stung, made her feel dry and stronger. “Why is Nellyn sick?”

Lanara licked wine from her lips and set the goblet down on the table. “Because,” she said slowly, “he’s overwhelmed. There are so many people here, so many buildings, and his own town is tiny.”

Galha shook her head. “But for many weeks after his arrival he was well. Why has his sickness struck him only now?”

Lanara took another swallow of wine, waited for it to sear its way down her throat before she answered. “When he arrived he was content only to be with me. I was so excited by this. I dragged him into the city and made him try all kinds of different foods. At first he didn’t seem bothered by any of this. But he hasn’t been eating recently—not even lynanyn. And he won’t go outside without me. He’s frightened here. He chose to come after me, and now he’s discovered that he can’t live where I do.” Another gulp of wine. She would be too drunk to stand when this conversation ended.

“So,” the Queen said, tracing the stones inlaid on a box of writing sticks, “he may simply need to be in a smaller, quieter place. Somewhere that will not frighten him.”

“Maybe,” Lanara said. “Yes.”

Galha stood and walked over to one of the drawers. She reached up and pulled it open, lifted out a stack of parchment. “Let’s see,” she said, spreading the sheets out in front of Lanara, “if we can find somewhere that will serve you both. A place where you can do my work and he can feel more secure.”

Lanara watched the Queen bend over the parchment, moving fingers and eyes across the shapes there. “Why?” Lanara asked after a moment. “Why do this for me? For us.”

Galha looked up at her. “Any wise ruler knows that an unhappy subject is an unproductive one.” She smiled. “Also, it is what any mother would do for a beloved child. Now, see—there is a posting about to become available somewhere here. Malhan, come and tell me if I am right about this. . . .”

When Lanara returned to her house, hours after she had left it, she found Ladhra hunched over a pile of parchment. “You look like your mother,” Lanara said from the doorway.

Ladhra grimaced. “No, thank you,” she said, letting go of the parchment’s ends.

Lanara ignored her friend’s bitterness. “More love letters?” she said as she picked up a lynanyn from a bowl on the table. She skinned it with her fingers and squeezed it. Blue juice poured over her hands into a small bowl.

“No,” Ladhra said, and sighed. “Though I almost wish they were. My mother, wisest of all the queens, has decided that I should familiarize myself with the writings of my great-great-great grandmother. Or, more accurately, my great-great-great grandmother’s consort-scribe.” She drew her palms across the parchments, and they curled away from her.

“No change?” Lanara asked, glancing at the bedchamber door, and Ladhra shook her head. They went together into the other room, where Ladhra stood and Lanara sat, the bowl balanced on the bed beside her.

“Nara.”

Lanara eased her hand behind Nellyn’s head and held it up. The juice dribbled into his mouth, and she saw him swallow. His eyes were moving beneath their lids.

“Nara, he needs to go home.”

She laid his head back down and wiped his lips and chin with a cloth. “Your mother doesn’t think so,” she said, and continued quickly, before Ladhra could reply. “And anyway, he can’t. He isn’t one of them any more. He told me they wouldn’t have him, and he wouldn’t want them to.”

Ladhra knelt beside her. Lanara felt her gaze, though she looked only at Nellyn. “He said that before he got sick. And he isn’t one of us either—you know that.”

Lanara turned away from him. “Does it matter? I love him.”

“It does matter. You’re too different. Let him go back to his people and recover his strength. You’ll soon find another love here, among your own people.”

“Ah, yes,” Lanara said, rising, striding around the bed to the windows and back again. “A Queensman—like Baldhron? Is that the kind of love you’d have me find?”

“No. Perhaps! I don’t know—you’re angry, you’re confusing me—let’s go outside and—”

“Baldhron?” Nellyn’s voice was soft and very deep, but both women started. “Who is . . . Baldhron?” He was smiling at Lanara, and his eyes were clear and steady.

“Oh, Nellyn,” she said, and knelt by him as Ladhra’s footsteps faded on the stones outside.

Today, as darkness came to the city and the air grew cool, Queen Galha met Lanara, daughter of Salanne, before the royal stables. The Princess Ladhra was also in attendance, to wish her dearest friend well. The Queen made Lanara a gift of a wagon and a brown mare, so that the shonyn Nellyn would not be further weakened by riding.

Lanara was also given her royal orders, sealed with the Queen’s mark: she is to travel east to Fane, where she will assume responsibility of the signal tower there. Her journey too will be of importance, for she will record details of the places through which she travels and the peoples with whom she has contact. Although these eastern lands are part of the Queensrealm, many of them remain little-known and are manned by only a few Queensfolk. Lanara’s writings will deepen our understanding and thereby strengthen our place in history. For this reason, Queen Galha has commanded Lanara to journey slowly and linger wherever she wishes.

The Queen kissed Lanara upon both cheeks. Princess Ladhra neither spoke to Lanara nor embraced her. Lanara took up the reins, and the wagon left the palace grounds. The Queen climbed to her tallest balcony and from there, many minutes later, witnessed the quenching of the gatekeepers’ lanterns. Only then, when she was certain Lanara’s wagon had left the city, did Queen Galha turn to other matters.

They rode down through the Queenscity as darkness fell. The wagon lurched and jolted; Nellyn clenched his teeth and clutched the seat until his nails bent. He glanced at the brown horse in front of them, then slowly upward, past lantern-lit windows and the shadows of fountains and courtyard walls. The sky was filling with stars, though the moon had not yet risen. He wondered whether there would be a moon at all. He had been inside too long, beneath sheets and ceiling, so far from the night.

“Tell me again,” he said, hoping Lanara would smile. She had been silent and grave since they had left the stables. He supposed this was because Ladhra had not spoken to her, or even looked at her. He was not entirely certain that this was the reason, however: Queensfolk emotions continued to confuse him. “Tell me again about where we are going.”

Lanara did smile, and he kissed the skin below her ear so that she would laugh. “Fane,” she said, twisting to catch his lips with hers. “A much smaller place than this,” she went on, straightening to look ahead, still smiling, “but we won’t be living in the city itself. We’ll live in a signal tower, and it’ll be perfect: high above the city, but only a short walk away if we need something. It’ll be so quiet.”

“We’ll see the end of the river together after all,”
she had said after he had woken from his long fever-sleep, eight days ago.
“We’ll see the ocean. If you wish it.”
He had thought of her by her Sarhenna River that had had no name for him, as the lynanyn trees swam with sinking light and the wise ones gathered on their stones. Maarenn would be waiting for him, her feet already in the water. Blue curtains would be stirring, and blue-black hair, and the fruit in the river.