The Silences of Home (11 page)

“I do,”
he had said. “
I do wish it.”
He knew the constancy of fear and sorrow now. Better to feel them far away from this city of towers and voices and water that was bound.

Spirals of bats darkened the sky above Luhr’s walls. Nellyn heard the blurring of their wings and cries, and he felt Lanara touch his knee. The double doors swung open before them, and Queensguards raised their hands as the brown horse drew the wagon out into the silence of the desert.

Leish could not look at the land.

He had been listening to it, though, for days, weeks, longer. Its song had swelled like the sea, buffeting him as he lay at the bottom of the boat. “Imagine, Leish,” he heard Mallesh say once, the words nearly lost beneath the song, “if these boats had not been built. Where, then, would you have cowered?”

Leish had wanted to cry, “I would not have come. I
should
not have come”—but he had no voice. And if he had spoken those words to Mallesh, he would have shrunk more deeply into the darkness at the bottom of the boat. For the singing of that far place was in him, and he would have followed it alone, swimming, if Mallesh had not ordered these boats and this journey.

Leish did not know how many boats there were. When he had looked out of his own, early in the voyage, he had seen a shifting mass of them, dark as birds on the waves. Selkesh swam as well, skimming beneath the ocean surface, surging ahead of the boats and circling back to rest as others swam. Leish had swum once, so deep that the light had vanished, and huge eyeless fish drifted past him. He had heard underwater shelves, molten fissures, plants whose roots echoed into the rock below the water. But even then he had heard sun on stone and towers that pierced the sky.

He knew, dimly, that the moon had waxed and waned. He heard islands, and saw them days later, raucous with trees and beasts. Other selkesh heard these places, but as the boats travelled on, Leish was the only one who heard the other land. “How far?” Mallesh would demand, leaning so close to Leish that he could feel breath on his neck. Once, when Leish had answered him, Mallesh had rested his hand on Leish’s back. A warm, lingering pressure—but when Leish had rolled over to look at him, Mallesh had drawn away.

They were not alone on the water. One day sea serpents lifted their heads and tails from the water, and the selkesh cried out in fear as sunlight leapt from golden scales—but the great beasts looked, only, and sank back beneath in silence. Fish leapt and darted, and porpoises, and other creatures the selkesh had never seen before, whose songs were new.

And then one day Mallesh said, “Do you hear them?”

Leish was sitting up, his eyes closed against the midday sun. Cloth-draped planks provided some shade, but he felt sunlight on his legs, burning them dry.

“Yes,” he said. The song of the yllosh was like that of the selkesh, but twisted, with sounds he did not recognize. He opened his eyes. Mallesh was leaning over the side, staring down.

“They’re getting closer. What will we do?” Leish thought,
I should enjoy his fear, or at least share it
. He was far away from the boat and the sea and his brother.

“Listen to them,” he said, and then they were there, rows and rows emerging from the water, stirring it into waves. Leish dragged himself up beside Mallesh and looked at their blue and green scales, their white eyes, their web-joined fingers. He tried to hear beneath the scales and bone, to listen to the blood that would be like his despite the centuries between them; but he saw and heard only strangers.

“Stop there!” Mallesh called as the yllosh drew closer to the boats. All of them stopped, except for one. She swam slowly on until she was directly below Mallesh and Leish.

“Why do you enter our waters?” Her voice was thick, threaded with hissing, and the words themselves were odd.
Older
, thought Leish, as Mallesh’s fingers clawed at the wood.

“We are journeying across the sea,” Mallesh said. “We seek to fulfill our destiny in a new land. Do not hinder us.”

Her white eyes were unblinking even when they slid from Mallesh’s face to Leish’s. “You will not enter our deep places,” she said, and Mallesh snorted.

“Those stifling underwater lands? We would not want to. We left those behind long ago.” He paused. Leish felt him straighten. “Do you know who we are?”

“Of course,” she replied, bubbling, hissing. “Why else forbid you entry to our places? Nasran-slaves.”

Leish saw the blur of Mallesh’s arm and lunged for it. “No,” Leish said quietly, and Mallesh’s hand shook so that the knife fell with a clatter. “Do not hurt them. They would surround us, overturn our boats. Think only of our goal.” He did not recognize his own voice.

“You are fortunate, yllosh-woman,” Mallesh said at last. “We will do you no harm now. But when we are established in our new land, I will return to these waters and find you.”

“Your new land,” she repeated, and began to turn away. “You were fools to leave the golden waters of our ancestors, and you are fools still. Will you hunt for land until no land is yours?”

She did not wait for an answer. Scales flashed as the yllosh disappeared silently, leaving only the gentlest of ripples. The selkesh boats bobbed beneath the sun.

“On!” Mallesh shouted, standing. “Faster! On to the western land that awaits us!”

A great cry rose from the other boats—and they did go faster; they sped into the setting sun, day after day, until all of them could hear the land’s song, and Leish was nearly deaf with it.

“There!” he heard Mallesh call one morning, and for the last time Leish shrank against the boards so that he too was salt-rimed wood. “Leish—there it is! Stand with me. . . .”

Leish lay still. When the boat ground onto pebbled shore, he cried out his own song, beginning and lost.

Alea met Aldron when they were children, on the great plain bordered to the west by autumn-coloured woods. Alilan caravans had been gathering for days, and the tall grass had already been flattened by wagons and horses and the fires of countless families. Children shrieked and ran among the wagons, reunited with friends they only saw twice a year. The young Tellers did not play with these other children. They sat around fires on the outskirts of the camps, listening, as always—separate and studious and seemingly older, as always.

Desert’s red sand—large, far, shining. Oasis pool—black water, tall green palm trees—

“Enough, girl!”

Alea blinked. Her Telling images vanished, and she saw only Old Aldira’s scowl.

“Dull. Flat.” The Teller was pacing, waving a hand at the smoke that was rising from her fire. “I always say the same things, and you never heed me. If a Telling does not
enrapture
, it has failed.”

“But we can only Tell the way things look,” Aliser said as Alea swallowed and tried not to cry. He was frowning, which made the red freckles on his nose seem to widen. “How can a Telling be . . . enrapturing if we just—”

“Please, Aliser,” Old Aldira said in a tired voice. She knelt across from the two children, her fingers kneading the white fabric of her skirt. “Your defense of Alea is, as usual, endearing but misplaced. It does not matter that you are only able to Tell appearance. If there is no passion at the beginning, there will never be any. I have taught more Tellers than anyone else, and I can swear to the truth of this. Alea, you will try again—but now Aliser will have his turn. Perhaps
he
will succeed.”

Aliser smiled at Alea before he began. She smiled back, because his eyes were so bright and encouraging and because it would hurt his feelings if she did not.

Sand around the oasis red and sparkling, up and down like frozen water. Oasis pool dark with shadows of palms, tall trees—

—that rustle in the hot wind, though the water beneath is still. The wind is on your faces, blowing sand that stings your cheeks. You close your eyes. A horse whinnies, a baby cries, a woman begins to sing. And then you feel hoof beats throbbing against the soles of your bare feet, and you draw your dagger and it is cool and smooth as silk in your hand.

Alea opened her eyes as the strange voice echoed into silence. She put shaking hands to her cheeks, which felt sand-raked and hot.

“Who are you?” she heard Old Aldira say, and Alea too looked at the one who had Told.

He was a boy, she saw with a shiver of surprise. Not much older than she was, tall and slender and dark, grinning down at them with his arms folded across his chest.

“I am Aldron,” he said in his boy’s voice, the words flat and dry.

How can he Tell like that and then be normal again, so quickly?
Alea thought. She wound her own arms around her waist.

“Aldron of the Tall Fires caravan. You have likely heard of me.”

Aliser scrambled to his feet. “We certainly have not,” he said. Alea watched his hands open and shut at his sides. “And why should we?” He was a full head shorter than Aldron, but broader. He drew his shoulders back and thrust his chin up.
As if that will make him taller
, Alea thought, and felt a sudden stab of pity and shame.

“As for you,” Aldron said, “your feeble Telling is proof that the Goddesses gave you their colours but neglected to bless you with their greatest gift. What good are Alnila’s red and Alneth’s green if you have no voice to honour them?”

Red-haired green-eyed Aliser took a stumbling step toward him, which Old Aldira halted. “Silence,” she snapped, “both of you. And sit.” They did, though Aldron hesitated as if he would not. They did not look away from one another. “Aldron, this is Aliser of the Twin Daggers caravan. Now greet each other civilly. Your pride should make you friends.”

They did not speak. Old Aldira sighed, but Alea saw the lines around her narrowed eyes and knew she was smiling, though not with her mouth.

“And who,” Aldron said at last, turning to look down past Aliser, “are you?”

Alea took a steadying breath. “I am Alea. Also of the Twin Daggers caravan.”

“Alnila warm you,” he said, “and Alneth succour you. Alea.” She smiled as he did, slowly, like flame blooming in wind.

Aldron came often to Old Aldira’s fire as the leaves in the wood began to fall and the green grass turned gold. “Doesn’t your Teller have a fire?” Aliser demanded once when Aldron appeared beside the wagon. “Or your family? Or are they tired of you too?”

Aldron did not answer for a long time. Alea watched his dark eyes move from their fire to the smoke of the fires near theirs and over to the distant trees.

“My Teller is very old,” he said at last. “He hardly knows that I’m not there. And I don’t have a family.”

Aliser’s mouth fell open.

“Aliser,” Old Aldira said sharply, “don’t gawk. Aldron, there is no need for you to explain.”

“My parents died,” he said. He was looking at Alea now, and she nodded once, as if this would help him continue. “Of the marsh sickness. My grandfather took me to my caravan’s Teller, and then my grandfather died. I hardly remember him, and I don’t remember my parents at all.”

Aliser was staring at the ground. He picked up a stick and tossed it into the fire, which spat fitfully but did not rise. “Oh,” he said.

Old Aldira clapped once and rose from the bottom step of the wagon. “Very well. Now that Aldron is here, perhaps he can show you both how to make your colours sharper. Colours only, Aldron—nothing more complex than that. Let’s begin with the palms. . . .”

That night Alea looked very carefully at her own family. Her mother, Aldana, was holding the new baby to her breast with her right arm; with her left she was reaching for herbs, sprinkling them in the soup, stirring with a wooden paddle. “You will be just as beautiful as she is,” Alea’s father Aldill often said to her, and she always smiled at him, though she did not believe him. She had Aldana’s hair—long and heavy and black as scorched wood—but she did not have her grace at dancing, and she doubted she would ever be as tall.

Her father was sitting with her older brother, Alder, trying again to teach him how to skin a hare. Their faces and hands swam in the firelight, and the hunting knife glinted as Alder turned it. “No,” their father said, “no, no, listen to me. . . .”

Her sister was in the wagon. Alea heard her babbling words that were not yet words and their grandmother laughing. The wagon would be glowing inside, with firelight and woven blankets and the ivy and flame that were painted on the walls and roof—their family’s own design in paint and cloth, made to please Alnila of the Flame and Alneth of the Earth, who blessed all families.

“Alea!” her father bellowed from the other side of the fire. “Come here immediately and show your brother how to do this
neatly
.” She rose and went to them as her mother sang the baby to sleep.

Rain began to fall and did not stop. There were grumblings that the wagons would all be washed away by the time Alnila’s Night came and some Alilan commented, only half in jest, that they would soon be forced to seek shelter in the nearby town. People huddled in their wagons, coaxing the fires in their stoves higher. The smoke that billowed from the wagons’ chimneys was swallowed by lowering cloud.

Alea stayed with her family for five days and nights—longer than she had for many, many seasons. One murky morning she could not stay any longer.

“How strange to see you so eager,” her father said over the baby’s wails, “when only four seasons ago we had to drag you flailing and weeping to Old Aldira’s wagon.”

Alea shifted from foot to foot in the doorway. The door was already open; rain was blowing against her leggings and cloak. “Yes, Father, I know. But I’m older now, and I’m learning things there.”

“Go on, child,” her mother said, gesturing with her free hand. “And hurry, before we’re all soaked.”

Alea glanced at her father, who was smiling at her now, and then she ducked out into the darkness of water and mud and sky.

Aldron was in Old Aldira’s wagon. Aliser was not. “Come and sit,” the Teller said. “And have some cider, girl. You’re shivering.”

Alea sipped her cider, trying not to slurp. Across from her, Aldron tossed a small pillow into the air, over and over again. He sighed several times, and yawned, and did not look at her. Old Aldira leaned forward and swung the stove door open with a poker.

“Although you are both particularly vivacious today,” she said as she fed a log into the fire, “I feel I must effect a change in mood. Aldron, use your prolific Telling powers to convince us we are warm.”

He straightened and set the pillow down on the bench. For a moment there was a stillness. Alea gripped her bench, steeling herself against the blast of Telling that would surely come. But when Aldron opened his mouth, only a whisper emerged. A single flame kindled between them—orange, with white at its heart. It flickered steadily. She watched it, and his solemn face beyond it, and she began to speak her own words into the murmuring quiet.

Her flame was blue and very slender. He smiled when he saw it, and Told his orange flame closer, so that the two twined and rose and there was a fire. She saw sweat on his cheeks and felt it on her own forehead, beneath her hair. This Telling was an illusion, as they all were, yet her body and Aldron’s did not know this while the images formed. Their fire crackled and spat. The noise would be his, she knew, but still she Told her small part.

Warmth
, she suddenly thought.
Old Aldira said warmth, not just fire
. Her blue flame vanished as she Told the desert sun, bloated and white. Aldron instantly added sand, which scalded her feet and hissed over the floorboards. She Told a cauldron of steaming soup; he Told its bubbling and a smell of onions. She Told cloaks and blankets, and he made them heavy and soft. Then she covered him in fur like a winter animal’s, and he covered her, and the Telling dissolved in laughter. They laughed and laughed—children’s voices, high and giddy. When Aliser came in, they were still smiling.

After the children had gone, Aldira sat without moving for a long time. She was always tired, after Aldron’s visits—drained by the restless energy of his body, and by the power of his words. Drained by her own need for these words. When she finally rose and walked across the wagon, she felt something shift beneath her foot. She bent and swept her hand over the place and felt sand. She brushed it into her palm and stared at it: real sand, where there should only have been a memory of Telling. Fine, white, dry sand, never touched by sunlight or blown by desert wind. She curled her fingers around it and said, very quietly, “Twins protect him.”

The rain turned to snow, and the forest trees stood stark and jagged against the sky. The air was thick with smoke from the wagons’ chimneys, and from the town’s, where the black roof tiles were now piled white. The Alilan gathered branches and logs from the woods and began to stack them in the centre of the camp. The main fire of Alnila’s Night would be built here, with the smaller family fires radiating outward from it like sparks. Children raced around the growing pile, imagining darkness and dancing.

“Pay attention to the Telling tomorrow,” Old Aldira told Alea and Aliser the day before the celebration. “Try not to allow yourselves to be swept away by the words. Likely you are still too young for such control: the power of all Tellers together is considerable. But try to listen to the words beneath the images. Try to understand how we are making our Telling strands and how we weave them together.”

Alea did try, at first. She watched each Teller stand—ten of them, representing each of the caravans. She could not see their faces; they were ranged around the other side of the fire, and their features were blurred by flame and smoke and the night that hung between. The rest of the Alilan sat or knelt or stood. Alea could feel them around her, stretching back to the smaller fires and even beyond, to where the horses whinnied and pawed at the snow.

One voice began. The image was the same every time, and every time Alea’s heartbeat quickened when she heard it: a single wagon, a single family, held motionless by snow that spun and drifted around the wagon’s wheels. A second voice joined the first. Alea saw a streak of light high above them, plummeting from the stars that were the fires of the Alilan dead. The light grew, lengthening and brightening, until it was a woman’s hair, a woman’s arms reaching toward the wagon. Alea trembled a bit, as she had when she was very, very small, huddled against her mother’s knees. The fire goddess towered, a coursing plume of blue and orange and red; then she extended her fingers. Flame showered the snow and caught on a bush, and the family leaned toward the fire, their faces amazed and thankful.

Alea lost the separate threads. There were other voices now, and other figures. More wagons, and lines of horses: the growing strength of the Alilan, blessed by Alnila’s gift of fire as her earth sister Alneth slumbered. The Alilan danced to show Alnila their gratitude—and Alea realized that she was dancing, too, whirling among bodies that were real.
Old Aldira will be angry with me for not listening right
, she thought very dimly, before her brother swung her up onto his shoulders and she shrieked with laughter and dizzy joy.

Aliser found her after the dancing was done, when all the Alilan except the children and the very old were disappearing into the woods or the further reaches of the plain. (“Where do you go?” she had demanded once, and Alder had chuckled. “Remember: Alnila is the goddess of fire
and
passion.” Alea had stared blankly at him, and he had laughed at her loudly, until she hit him.)

“Wasn’t that beautiful?” Alea said, still breathless, and Aliser nodded.

“Beautiful,” Aldron said as he stepped into the light, “but tame. Easy. I could do better all on my own.”

Aliser sneered. “Really? You’re a fool, Aldron. And you’re too proud.”

“No Alilan can be too proud,” Aldron said. He was so still that his lips hardly seemed to move with his words. “
You
are a bore. You have no idea how to be brave or different. My Tellings will be new. They’ll change things.”