The Silences of Home (33 page)

Alea was quiet by the time Nellyn reached the kitchen. She was standing, leaning on the table with her arms straight and her head bent, so that he could not see her face.

“What is it?” he said when he was beside her. She was breathing very quickly, and her eyes were half closed.

“My legs,” she said, “ look”—and he did, and saw that her yellow leggings were dark, darkening as he watched. “Is it blood?” she asked, her voice climbing higher again, with each word. “Is it blood or is it water? And if it’s just water, what colour is it? My mother told me that clear birthing water’s good, but yellow’s bad and brown worse—what can you—”

“Alea.” He put his hand on the curve of her spine, pressed down when he felt her trembling. “It is water, not blood. And it has no colour in it.”

Her arms bent as she let out her breath. “Good. But it’s still too early. Nellyn, it’s much too soon—the baby can’t be ready.
I’m
not ready. . . .”

“You are. We are. Now tell me: where do you want to be? The fire here is already high, but I can stoke the one upstairs.”

She pushed herself away from the table and turned to him, stepping back to make space between them for her enormous belly. “Upstairs,” she said—and so Alea did see her walls, after all, before Nellyn had finished painting them. It took them many minutes to climb there. She managed the first eleven steps holding onto the railing, with Nellyn close beside her—but at the twelfth she gave a cry and twisted herself against him, and did not move again until half a minute had passed. He supported her after that, and although she did not have another pain on the staircase, she moved more slowly and clung to him with white-tipped fingers.

When they stepped at last into the room, her fingers tightened even more sharply on his forearm before she lifted them to her mouth. She looked at the stone—at the earth and ivy and wood and flames that were painted upon it—and when she said his name it was wobbly with tears.

“I’m not done,” he said in a rush. “The fire isn’t complete there, and I wanted to add some stars above the flames, all the way around. I wanted you to see—”

“Hush,” she said, moving her fingertips from her own lips to his. “It’s beautiful—it’s perfect—” and then she moaned as another pain gripped her.

At first she stayed on her pallet, lying on one side, and watched Nellyn bring towels and blankets, extra wood and water in a deep basin. She draped a sheet over herself and he pulled off her sodden leggings. He ran to her when she cried out, and knelt beside her until the pain had gone. Thirty minutes went by, and three pains, and she struggled to sit up.

“I can’t lie down any more,” she said, “I have to sit”—and he brought her pillows from his sleeping floor to put behind her back. “Talk to me, distract me. Tell me about your home, again.” He did, slowly, stopping whenever her hands rose to her belly to press and stroke a pain away. She asked him questions and laughed sometimes when he wanted her to. He watched her smile at him and at her painted room, saw her muscles relax, between pains, and he felt his own body loosen with relief.
I have never seen a woman—not even a shonyn woman—birth a baby, but Alea has, and she is strong and cheerful again. All will be well
.

“Look,” she said, pointing to her window, “it’s dark—you should go light the candles.” He hesitated for a moment, but she said, “Go on—I’m fine. And bring me some food when you come back. I’m hungry. . . .”

They ate fruit and nuts and bread after he had lit the candles and scribbled an entry in the log (
No wind, clear sky, smooth water
: “Modest even for me,” he said afterward, and she laughed again). She talked to him now about her girlhood and her people. She often spoke during the pains; some letters became very long or very short: “My si—sters would da—nce and I—’d—
hoooo
—” He checked on the lightroom twice, amazed that these hours had already passed; her breathing and movements were his measurements now, and they seemed so slow.

And then, around midnight, she could no longer speak through the pains, which came more closely together and lasted a bit longer every time.
Waves
, he thought as she whimpered and ground her heels against the floor, waves taller and faster against the riverbank during the first of the rains when shonyn scurried to hide indoors. She clutched his hand while she moaned. In between, he loosened her fingers and rubbed her palms and she smiled, though from further away than before.

“I need to walk,” she said after he returned from trimming the wicks yet again. She pushed herself onto her hands and knees.

“Alea, you should rest, surely—”

“
Get me up.
”

They walked around the room once, twice; she leaned against him when the pains came. He imagined that she would tire and sit, or maybe lie down—for the baby must be close to coming now: it had been half a day since the pains began. But she shuffled on, stopping in the same places with each circuit, and he came to know each brushstroke of these places, and every bump or pit in the stone—and still she walked and leaned. He breathed with her: deep and quickening as the pain began, and lengthening, softer as it ended. He held her hips as she hung from him with her arms around his neck; he felt her breathing and her cool dry skin. The circles they walked were shonyn, for him—shonyn nights, each one the same, blurring into the last and the one to come. A rhythm he knew with his blood.

The pains began to come even more closely together, so that she hardly took three steps before another was upon her. She cried, “Lie down, lie down” and kept crying out, even after she was on her pallet. She wailed without pause and seemingly without breath, and he knelt beside her, all his certainty dissolving. She no longer looked at him, and although she still clutched his hands, when he wrapped them around hers, she did not truly seem to notice them or him.
Be with her
, he told himself to quell his fear.
Follow her in every moment—that is all
. He felt his calm returning—but then her parted lips shaped words.

Fire beats against sky and skin, outside, where there are stars—but there only because of this other fire, deep deep within. A body like a brand, a body tight and hard as metal; not a body. The flames twist and climb and burrow, and they will always be here, scalding breath black—but not always: a break, smoke billowing in wind. The body returned. A surge and a heavy thrusting weight, another, another, and then the space of wind again, for breathing and looking at the sky of desert, lake, woods. Pressure like falling or floating underwater, too long but no other choice—and the weight moving down and through. The body filled and open, tearing with a different fire—another body, easing slow and vast, then rushing slithering weightless free.

Nellyn heard a thin, liquid sound through his own whimpering. He blinked away the imprints of sparks and stars and saw a baby. It was lying on its side, curled limply on a blanket. Its skin was as blue as a shonyn’s. Nellyn stared at it and at his own trembling hands. There was bright red blood on the blanket; also on the baby’s head, flattening its black hair, and streaks of it on belly and leg. And on Nellyn’s hands. Alea’s hands, he saw, were clean. They reached down, holding something. A ribbon, his sluggish mind told him: a scarlet ribbon, which she tied firmly around the looping cord that joined the baby to her. The cord was whitish, with something darker inside—green or deep red. Alea’s fingers held a knife now. She sawed it upward through the cord and there was a spatter of blood, but the baby was quiet. Alea’s hands slid beneath the baby’s head and legs and lifted. Tiny arms and legs splayed wide—fingers and toes as well—and Nellyn saw the mouth open to wail again. He also saw that the baby was a girl.

Alea set the baby down against her skin, just below her breasts. She drew a clean blanket over them both, rubbing and warming. Nellyn saw tufts of hair, limbs that were pink now except for the hands and feet, which were still tinged with blue. Alea was singing, or speaking—he was not sure which. He looked at her for the first time since her Telling. Her hair was sweat-slick, clinging in whorls to her cheeks and neck. Her face was mottled, flushed and pale. Her forehead and left ear were smeared with blood. She raised her eyes to him, and he saw the pink of burst veins where there should have been white. She smiled, held up one side of the blanket so that he could lower himself down beside her, so that she could cover him too and warm them all.

Her moan woke him. He started up, saw the baby’s face close to his, relaxed. The baby’s eyes were open, very dark and steady, as if she knew him, and everything else. Alea moaned again and shifted, and said, “Nellyn—it’s not done.”

He scrambled to build up the fire and gather fresh blankets. When he glanced out the window, the dazzle of the sea made him squint—day already, well past dawn. Alea cried out behind him and he ran to her, because this cry was different from any she had uttered before. “Goddesses protect me, keep me close and keep my child, my children—something is wrong, wrong. . . .” He set his own hands beneath the baby. She was air and earth and water at once: slippery and slight, but with a weight that surprised him. He wound her in a sheet, tightly, thinking,
She will want to feel held close—it is how she has been, all this time until now
. He set the baby bundle behind him on a pillow and covered it with a small blanket, so that only nose and eyes and wrinkled forehead were visible.

Alea was weeping. He bent over her, smoothed the damp hair back from her forehead. “Hush,” he said, “you will finish this soon. You are fine. You are
wonderful.
” But still she cried, in heaving, jerking sobs, and squeezed her swollen eyelids closed. There was no Telling this time, and so he watched her bend her chin to her chest and push down. He saw new blood leaving her, and he saw the crumpled gleam of a baby’s head, just a bit and then more, and more, until it was round and full and out. Alea screamed once, as the body slipped free with a rush of fluid; then she was silent.

There was a thick, putrid smell. Nellyn choked and turned his head away. This baby’s body was greenish and crushed and far too tiny. He took a deep breath through his mouth and looked down at it again, then quickly up at Alea.

“Let me see it,” she said in a low, hoarse voice. He swallowed and tried to shake his head, but could not. He rolled the thing gently onto a cloth without touching it with his hands. He held it up—still attached to its cord—so that she would see the side of its face that looked whole and sleeping. And one hand, with its five fingers and five nails.

Alea pressed her lips together but did not look away. “What,” she said, and “Is it a. . . .” and he said, “A girl.”

For a moment Alea did not move. Then she raised her face up and laughed. Nellyn touched her shoulder. She shook his hand away, gasped, “Twin girls! Imagine:
twin girls
!” She laughed on, even as her body convulsed once more and the afterbirth slid onto the blanket beneath her. Nellyn did not touch her again. He cut the second baby’s cord (much more slender than the first one’s) and wrapped the mass of afterbirth in the bloodied blanket. He found a clean blanket for the baby—red and blue wool; Alea had chosen it in Fane, on the day he had bought her the copper armring. He was gentler with this baby than he had been with the other, even though the other had wriggled and mewled and this one was so still. He wound the cloth around legs and chest and arms, drew a long piece up over the face and head and knotted it behind. He did not know what to do with it then. He laid it near Alea, who was quiet now, her eyes closed but fluttering lightly beneath their lids. He dribbled water between her lips, and she swallowed it but did not stir, not even when he said her name. Her skin was cool against the back of his hand.

The candles in the lightroom had all burned out. Most were just stumps, drowning in bubbled tallow. The floor beneath the candelabra was so layered with it that he could not see the wood. He thought,
We are lucky that there was no fire
—only there had been, of a sort, and he shivered as he remembered it.

He left the cleaning for later and went down to the writing floor. He washed his hands in the basin there. The water was cold, and the scrubbing crystals stung his skin. He left the dirty water too, and walked over to the desk, where the baby girl lay swaddled and wailing. He set her in the crook of his left arm and jiggled her a bit. She continued to cry, her eyes squeezed shut, her freed fists waving. He slid the tip of his little finger between her quivering lips and she sucked immediately, fiercely, tugging his fingers against the hollow at the back of her mouth. It would not satisfy her for long, he guessed—but after a few minutes her jaw slackened. Afternoon light turned the sea to bronze, and Alea’s daughter slept against his heart, and Nellyn breathed with her, softly, into the silence of the tower.

Lanara heard wind first. The wind in the desert sounded like this; she lay and listened to its moaning. There were other sounds, though, that were not as familiar: murmurings, cries, a jagged hissing. She moved her head, felt her cheek graze stone—hot, sharp stone. She sat up and opened her eyes.

For a moment her head and stomach swam with nausea and she saw nothing but darkness. She leaned forward with her fists against her eyes and swallowed a few times. She tasted dust and coughed, and then she saw the dust. It was black, soot or ash or both, swirling around her and up against a dull grey light that must be the sky. The rock she was sitting on was also black; it was bubbled and pitted and breathing steam. As she looked at it, she felt the tight throbbing of her skin. She remembered the wound on her left arm—but as she scrambled to her feet, she saw blisters on her right arm and leg, and scarlet flesh between them. Her right cheek was blistered as well, and the tips of all the fingers on her right hand. She had lain on burning rock and not felt it; she had slept through pain and choking ash, had only woken because she had heard a wind that reminded her of home.

In two stumbling steps she moved from rock to dirt, which was cool enough to stand on. She whimpered, tried to turn away from the wind that scraped its claws across her, but could not. Although it did not stop blowing, its direction changed, leaving open spaces that she saw before the dust rose again. She saw dirt broken by more hissing rock, and smaller stones that looked white; she saw pools of thick black liquid that simmered and spat. She saw Queensfighters, standing and kneeling, as bloodied and burned as she was. Some of them were still holding swords; one was using hers on a Sea Raider who scrabbled and shrieked and then was silent. Lanara saw a few other Raiders who lived and many more who did not. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw clear sky far away, beyond the billowing dust, and blue-green water that rolled in gentle waves. She could not believe in this ocean, just as she could not believe in the place whose rich, dark earth still clung to the skin beneath her fingernails.

She saw a very tall stone to her left; it was so white and smooth that it might have shone in sunlight. She did not know what stone it was until she saw the people around it. It had been green-grey before and partly submerged in water (that wide, glinting pool that had also reminded her of home). But the Queen and Malhan were standing by this white stone, and the prisoner was still tied to it, though very high up now that the water was gone. Lanara dragged herself toward them, through the clutching wind. It took a long time: the dust was often too thick to see through, and she had to stop and wait for another clear patch. Twice she stepped on more of the scalding rock, and once her heel touched one of the bubbling puddles. She was bent and staggering by the time the Queen’s voice guided her through one last veil of ash.

Galha was craning her head up to see the prisoner; her back was to Lanara. “. . . stay with me,” Lanara heard her say. “You will come back to my land with me, and we will see how long you will be able to live without water.”

I must reach her
, Lanara thought dizzily.
I must bow down before her, for she is the greatest queen since Sarhenna
. She could not move. The Queen was the same as ever: tall, straight, her words to the prisoner clear and sharp. She stood surrounded by the destruction she had wrought, and she was the same. “My Queen.” Lanara’s words rasped against one another so softly that no one looked at her, not even Malhan, who was only a few paces in front of her. Galha spoke again.

Lanara was about to call out more loudly when she heard another voice, a low, wordless voice—so faint beneath all the other noises, wind and steam and skittering stones—but Lanara knew it, and began to walk. She walked quickly somehow, and still no one noticed her.
She rounded the stone’s base and fell to her knees and lowered her head so close to Aldron’s that she felt the slow, weak thread of his breath against her mouth.

“Aldron.” His eyelids fluttered but did not open. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth and from his right ear. There was so much blood on his chest that she thought, when she glanced down, that his tunic was black. But then she saw the darkness spreading, and she saw the spear that lay on the ground a few steps away from him.

“My Queen!” This time her voice was quite loud—but Galha and Malhan were already above her.

“Nara. Thank the First you are alive. Come, now: we will find one of my physicians to tend to your burns, and to that wound on your arm.”

Lanara leaned back on her heels, though she kept one hand on Aldron’s forehead and the other on his tunic where it was wet and torn. “My Queen, I don’t need tending—it’s Aldron who needs help. Let your physician see to him first. There may be little time. . . .”

Malhan bent his head, but he did not move more than that, and the Queen did not move at all.

“He is alive,” Lanara cried, forgetting obeisance and awe. “How can you do nothing? He came so far for you—he took this wound for you—why do you stand apart from him, talking to the prisoner?” She leaned forward again, smelled ash and earth in Aldron’s hair. Her blistered cheek stung with tears.

“Nara. My dear, look at him—he is already gone.”

“He is not.” His thread of breathing, his whispering heart. She looked up at Galha. “Please: find me a healer, or someone else who will find me one. I will stay with him. And you,” she said to Aldron, firmly, as if she expected him to contradict her, “listen to me. I know you don’t take orders well, but listen to me—hold onto my voice.
Do not leave me
.”

The Queen’s voice was so loud that Leish could not hear it when he woke on the gathering pool stone; he heard only distorted thunder that echoed but did not fade. After a time words began to thrust out of the other noise, and he understood them, though he tried not to. “. . . will never grow again here. Little water, little food—but your people will live. They will not find a new place. Water of other places will kill. . . .”

He concentrated on different sounds: voices that were farther away, metal scraping stone, a wind that screamed. So many sounds, all deafening, for they sprang against emptiness above and beneath. Against space, where before there had been the song of Nasranesh.

Leish opened his eyes: better to see rather than merely to hear and wonder. He was not sure if he cried out. All his senses flattened. Moments later they bloomed, opened wide and wider still. Light and shapes battered at him as the sounds did, and smells smothered him as if he were a stone sinking into black water. He heard, now, the notes that remained: diseased, hollow things, very faint, rock and ooze and scalding dust. He gasped for breath and wrenched his head from side to side—and he saw the ocean. As he looked, its song rose within him again, slow and sweet, unchanged. He reached for it and then reached beyond, heard islands and even that western shore that had called to him so long ago. He heard fresh water and plants and rich, dark earth, and he choked on his own thirst and knew what the Queen had done.

“Water of other places will kill.”
The selkesh would hear songs of water and would be unable to follow them. They would hear the growing colours of other places and be forced to remain on the dirt of Nasranesh. Her prisoners, all of them, if they wished to live—though who among them would? Who would drink from the black pools just so that they would have to drink again and again?

Leish looked away from the ocean, inland. He caught glimpses of flat earth among the sheets of dust. Flat earth, and selkesh upon it, running where the river had run before, weaving its gold toward the peaks. He strained to see them—Dallia? Mother, Mallesh? That slight one, Father?—but they were so small, fleeing and wreathed in ash.

“You.” Galha was below him, standing on the fissured pool-bed. He looked down at her, squinting a bit, since forms and shadings still hurt his eyes, just as her voice still rang too loudly in his ears. She was smiling. “You will stay with me. You will come back to my land with me, and we will see how long you will live without water.”

He thought he might try to speak. “I will not live even one day for you,” he might say, or, “I will die long before you take me back to your white city.” But as he was forcing his stiff, cracked lips open, he saw the woman Lanara stumble to a halt behind Malhan (so brown and still that Leish had not noticed him). She passed behind the stone, and the Queen and Malhan followed. Leish heard the women’s voices but not their words. Shortly after that, the space around the stone began to fill with Queensfighters. First two, carrying bowls and sacks and folded cloth, who also went around the stone to where Lanara was. Leish heard nothing for a long time—then a scream that made him moan, as well.

More Queensfighters came, some walking, some crawling, some borne up by others. All of them clustered by the stone and were examined, one by one, by the two with the bowls and bags. Leish watched this from his height, and was not sure why he did. None of the Queensfighters looked up at him. They huddled together, hunched around their blood and their pain, which he cared nothing for—except when he remembered that it had been selkesh who had drawn this blood. He hung from the stone as the dust-fanned sky darkened, and he listened to the ocean’s song as if it could dull the cries of the people below him and the land below them.

Every time the Queensship pitched, Aldron whimpered. Lanara had looked forward to being aboard, during the rough, halting walk to the edge of the sea. Aldron had been unconscious, his head rolling with each step of the five Queensmen who bore him. Lanara had walked beside him, pressing two of her fingers against his right wrist so that she could feel the tremor of his blood. The rowboats had been lying on the sloping rock that was the shore now—many scattered and overturned, but all intact despite the fire and wind that had howled into the sea. “The Queen’s mindpowers,” someone behind Lanara had said. “She spared the boats even as she destroyed our enemies.” Lanara could not murmur in response as those around her had. She had managed to say, “Gently, please” to Aldron’s bearers as they passed him into a boat. She had sat in the bottom with him and taken his head into her lap. The waves had been high; it had been a long, wet, arduous trip. She knew the other Queensfighters in the boat needed her strength at the oars, but she stayed with Aldron and imagined how much more solid the Queensship would feel beneath them.

Timbers groaned and the cabin tipped and Lanara snatched at a glass vial that fell from the bag the doctors had left her with. They had washed Aldron’s wound with water and wine. This had caused him to flail and shout—so one doctor had sat upon his legs and Lanara had set her knees on his shoulders while the other doctor stitched his ragged skin together. He had been limp again by the time the fourth stitch had been pulled taut, quickly and rather clumsily, since the ship was heaving and straining against its anchor. The doctors had shown her how to apply a poultice and bandage, they had stitched her own wound and given her a bag of supplies. Then they had shaken their heads and recommended that she refrain from hoping for her friend, and had ducked out of the cabin.

The ship was underway now, and the sea was rougher than it had been. Aldron slid up and down in Lanara’s bunk despite the pillow she had wedged behind his head and the blanket she had rolled up at his feet. His sliding was quite gentle compared with her own. She wrapped her arms around the wooden support pole at the head of the bed and clung there as the ship rose and fell. Sometimes her legs flew out from under her when the floor dipped, and her own weight nearly dragged her away from the post—but she scrabbled with her feet, and clung, and held her breath until the cabin righted itself.

She hardly heard the knock on her door over the sound of creaking wood. “Yes!” she called, “come in”—and the door crashed against the wall. Malhan held it open, bracing himself with one hand on the door frame.

The Queen also steadied herself on the frame, with hands and wide-apart feet. “Nara!” she cried. The waves were much louder with the door open, and there was another noise, perhaps thunder. “Come with me to my cabin. We have food, and you must be hungry.”

“Thank you,” Lanara said, nearly shouting, “but I think I’ll stay here. I don’t want to leave Aldron so soon—and anyway, I have some bread and water here.”

“Then I will have someone move him,” Galha said. “He will also benefit from the comfort of my cabin.”

Lanara shook her head and tightened her arms around the post. “He shouldn’t be moved now. Best to leave him as he is. Maybe when he’s better. . . .”

“Very well.” The Queen remained in the doorway. “Nara—they didn’t frighten you too much did they? My mindpowers?”

“No.” A lie—but the Queen had told her about the mindpowers months ago and must not think her weak now. “I wasn’t frightened. I was amazed, as I knew I would be.”
But then I found Aldron behind the stone, still alive. Perhaps your senses were blurred after you used your mindpowers? Perhaps you didn’t hear him?
Lanara shook her head again, forcing the questions away.

The lantern swung as the cabin angled up. Galha’s smile looked lopsided in the twisting of light and shadows. “Good. Come to me soon, my dear. And I will check on you later. You and Aldron both.”

The door made no noise as it shut. Lanara heard Aldron’s whimpering, which had been covered by waves and thunder and voices. She let her aching arms fall and climbed over the board that ran the length of the bed. Aldron had slid against the wall, so there was a bit of room—enough for her to lie on her side, facing him. Her blanket covered them both. She rested her left arm on the pillow above his head; her right hand she placed on his chest very lightly, above the blood-splotched bandage.

“I loathe doctors,” she said quietly, her lips very close to his ear. “Do the Alilan have them? They never, ever say, ‘This one will recover.’ Perhaps they’re not allowed to, for some ridiculous professional reason. So I’ll say it for them: you will recover. You must. It’s spring, you know—Alea will be having your baby soon. Imagine that: a baby in the signal tower! We’ll put your child in a basket in the kitchen window casement—there’s so much sunlight there. Have you and Alea already chosen names? I know some people’s customs forbid the choosing of a name before a baby is born. Your twin goddesses will bless you, with this child and with your own life. Alea will tend you. Nellyn will too. He’s so gentle, so careful and good. When we were in the mountains, I fell on a sharp stone and he stitched the wound and bathed it every day. His touch was so light I hardly felt it.” Lanara bent her head against Aldron’s shoulder. “It’s spring,” she said, and squeezed her eyes closed against the tears that would turn her blistered cheek to fire.