The Silences of Home (43 page)

“Stop.” He leaned forward and gripped her upper arms. The blankets had fallen away from her. “Stop before you say something that will make me lose you again.”

She twisted her arms and his fingers loosened. Her skin felt bruised. “Are you so afraid of what I might say? It was a few years, Aliser, a few, compared with all the years we’ve seen together since childhood. Tell me why you refuse to hear about them.”

“Tell me why you insist on sharing them with me.” When she opened her mouth, he clamped his hand over it, his palm and fingertips digging until her eyes watered. “No—don’t tell me. I have no desire to know what kind of woman you were during those few years. You’re back—I’ve allowed you this much grace. Be thankful for it.” His hand lingered a moment more and then it was gone, and she was doubled over holding her own hands to her aching jaw and cheekbones.

He was not there when she finally looked up. She stood, lifted herself onto the balls of her feet—not to seek out his shadow, vanishing among the wagons: to find other shadows, of wooden wall and rooftops, sharp against the sky.

I am too weary for this
. Aldira’s staff was thick and tall, but even it was not enough tonight. She might have to sit down even before her turn came. She could not remember ever having seen a Teller sit during a Telling.
This will certainly be my last Alnila’s Night
, she thought, and tried to straighten, tried to stand in her place as if she were a younger woman.

The Telling began. Aldira blinked away the snowflakes that were clinging to her eyelashes. The snow was already thick on the ground, and more was falling; it shone in Alnila’s colours of heat and flame. Aldira attempted to concentrate on the Telling—the second Teller was speaking now, and the Goddess-shape was beginning to appear far above them—but she could not. She saw Alea in the glow. She was sitting with her parents in the first row of onlookers. Alnissa was in Aldill’s lap, only her wide eyes visible among the blanket folds. Alea was not concentrating on the Telling either. She was staring at the ground, so motionless that her shoulders and hair were heavy with snow. When her mother brushed some off, Alea smiled at her and gestured to the lights of the Telling. “Watch that,” she seemed to be saying, “not me.”

She was very thin: her face, her hands, all edged with bone. Aldira had observed this the last time Alea had come with Aliser to her fire, over a month ago. Aldira had not asked if she were feeling unwell. She had asked nothing, because Aliser had been there—and even if he had not been, she would have kept silent. She had hardly spoken to Alea at all since their conversation at the oasis. She had watched her, though, as happiness turned to worry turned to this new thing that stretched her skin taut.
Not proper to meddle
, Aldira thought, watching Alea still through the spinning snow.

Aliser’s Telling thread began to weave among the others. It would be Aldira’s turn after his. She invoked the Goddesses, silently, and begged them for clarity and strength. His images were polished and smooth, but just as bombastic as they had always been. Aldron’s, though—the sound and touch of wind, the pressure of heat on skin . . . Aldira stamped her feet and threw back her head to clear it of snow and all thoughts that should not be.

She nearly felt quiet as Aliser’s voice swelled beside her. Her gaze steadied and blurred as it always did before she Told. The people before her grew indistinct as everything within her sharpened. Correct stance, correct vision, inner and outer—but then something changed in the smudged crowd, and Aldira’s eyes focused.

Alea was rising. Her movements looked awkward and slow, but this might have been an effect of the swimming colours. For a time she was frozen, lit, apart from everyone else. She was looking at Aliser, and Aliser knew this. His words wavered in the air as if he had needed a breath. Then Alea walked away. She clambered over sitting bodies, ignored the faces that were turning to her. When she reached the edge of the gathering, she did not hesitate; she moved swiftly into the darkness beyond the Telling and the outer fires.

Aliser’s images were disintegrating. Aldira forced her own voice out to cover his failing one. She Told a light so brilliant and sudden that people cried out in awe. Her last Alnila’s Night, and she was very nearly Alnila herself, come to bless and dazzle. As her words flowed, Aldira forgot her weariness—but not her fear, or her regret, or the sight of Alea running from them all.

Alea’s feet remembered cobblestones—rounded ones, chipped ones, others worn hollow by wheels, boots, horse’s hoofs. Fane’s cobbles had always seemed to slope up, slippery with spray; these were soft with snow and lay flat. She walked slowly, stepping into the impressions of other feet so that her leggings would not get too wet. She hardly glanced up. She did not need to; her feet remembered.

She heard a pulse of noise when she was still paces away from the inn. She stood before the door and listened to voices, the clanking of metal and the pounding of fists on wood. She was about to retrace her steps when the door opened. She fell back, watched three people stumble out into the snow. They did not close the door behind them. She looked into the dining room, one hand on the edge of the door. Snow gusted around her feet, and faces turned to her. Someone called, “Well, woman, are you in or out?”

She squeezed onto a bench against the wall beside the door. The stools around the circular table were full, but that was fine; she had never intended to sit there.

“Something to eat or drink?”

She nodded at the serving boy and cleared her throat. “Wine. And bread with butter.”

By the time she had finished her second cup of wine, the dining room was not as crowded as it had been. She could see the fireplace and the staircase that would take her up to rooms she knew. She stared at these things with such intensity that she did not notice more people leaving, and others looking at her.

“Well, well,” a woman’s voice said, quite loudly. Alea heard it, ignored it—but then the voice said, “It’s the horse-woman! Aldea, Aleena. . . .”

“Alea,” she said, and Pareya shrugged.

“Close enough. Tell me—where’s the dark-haired sorcerer you usually follow?” One of the other women at the table giggled, and one of the men scowled. “Oh, and the small blue-skinned person who often sat with you—the one who sleeps during the day and wakes at night. What of him?”

Alea set her cup down on the empty bench beside her. She stood up carefully; wine and heat always made her dizzy. “The small blue-skinned person,” she said, “was Nellyn. I believe he’s in his village now, though he was in Fane when I left there. The dark-haired sorcerer was Aldron.” She felt herself smile despite the aching that had begun. “Aldron fought in a battle for the Queen and took a grievous wound and never recovered his spirits. I don’t know where he is, though our daughter, who’ll be two in the spring, is with me on the plain.”

“Ah,” Pareya said, raising an eyebrow, “a daughter. You and the handsome one.”

“Yes. Aldron and I.” She took her damp cloak from its peg and put it around her shoulders.

“Not leaving so soon?” Pareya said. “I wanted to ask you about the noise and lights you people were making earlier tonight. Fascinating. We watch every year from up on the wall, don’t we, Medwel? But tonight’s display was so much brighter. So—what are these lights? Could you make one for us now?”

Alea pulled the door open. “No,” she said over her shoulder. “I won’t perform for you.”

She stood outside the town gate for a long time, watching the thinning snow and the colours that still hung like mist above the trees.
A return without an ending
, she thought. Her feet were numb, as were her fingers beneath her cloak. She was cold and stiff and smiling. She felt all this for one moment more, and then she walked back toward the fires. Toward her daughter, and Aldron’s.

Nellyn almost turned back. Once, three weeks away from Fane, he retraced all the steps he had taken that day. When he reached the place where he had lain the night before, he sat down and stabbed at the grass with a stick, over and over.
I was wrong to leave
, he thought, sinking the stick into the earth.
I was wrong to come back even this far
—pulling it out, watching the dirt fall away from it onto the grass that was still flattened from the weight of his body.

He slept and ate very little in those early weeks. He remembered that he had felt like this during his first days in Luhr—his head and belly light with a need he had no desire to fill. But then there had been a clear, whole joy, a different kind of need satisfied; now there was only confusion that twisted his mind and even his steps.

Go back. Life is change, and there has been a change—but she still loves you, and is that not enough?

Keep walking. Remember Gwinent, who taught you the meaning of change? This is stronger. This would make you understand things you should fear.

He left the riverbank only when he saw houses ahead. Because he hardly ate, the food he had brought with him from Fane lasted a long time. When it was finally gone, he ate berries from bushes and raw strands of rivergreen, scarcely tasting any of it. He walked beneath canopies of trees that rustled with night creatures, and among hills so thick with flowers that he stepped on them with every footfall, even though he tried not to.

He walked from afternoon until dawn in the first month, then only at night. There was a new quiet within him—or perhaps it was an old one. He lay beneath trees or among flowers and closed his eyes against the sunlight, breathing, listening, bending away from thoughts. He began to sleep, two hours, then four. One day he woke among long shadows. He saw them on his skin, saw that the sky was golden with the last of the sun. He had slept from dawn until dusk: a shonyn sleep, old and new.
Now still always
—he knew this without thinking it.

The grass turned to sand. He felt the change against the soles of his feet and smelled it, especially when the wind blew from the west. He had imagined, months ago, that he would have to run when he drew this close, but he did not. He was not impatient or fearful. He felt nothing but tranquility until he came to the place where the riverbanks rose high above him, red rock laced with crystal.

He stood on the narrow path and gazed up. He had last been here in brilliant sunshine, so brilliant that her skin had turned from brown to scarlet. She had steered the flatboat. They had slept, close together but not touching. And then she had gone away. Change after change after change; a choice made. He had had no memories in weeks; now he was weak, dizzy with rage and sorrow that were as knotted as roots, and just as solid. He ran, as if haste would return him to a space of quiet—but of course it did not. He ran until the rock walls lowered once more to sand, and the moon was gone, and the rings of stars as well.

It was dawn that stopped him at last. First light on water, on silver leaves, on blue fruit. He looked at the river and the village—but not at the ridge behind it, or the tents there He sensed them tugging at the edge of his vision, but would not turn to see them. He stood and felt his breathing slow to match the circles of lynanyn and sun and red huts, and the steps that had led him away, so far, and back again.

Nellyn is hungry. He gathers rivergreen at dusk, and fat seed pods from shore plants, and even grain from the garden plot by his hut. None of it is enough. Not when he stands knee-deep in the river and hears the splash of flatboat poles and the thud of lynanyn on wood. Not when he sees shonyn on the shore, peeling, eating, drinking blue. He looks and listens only; he does not walk past the plants to the huts or the sitting stones. He is apart because he must be, because he must re-learn, in solitude, what he has forgotten.

He is ready, one day at dusk. He feels the sand beneath his feet; it is warm from the daylight. He steps slowly, carefully, as measured as the river water within and outside him. He does not look at the ridge or the tents because he does not need to. He does not need to rush toward the wise ones on their stones or the small ones at their feet. He does not need to call to them. It is one dusk among so many others. The words he hears as he draws closer are the same as ever.

No one looks at him when he comes to stand behind the small ones. He listens to the words with a joy that warms and steadies him. He moves with the others like him to the flatboats on the shore. He sees Maarenn, and raises his hand to her as always. She sees him. She stares, one hand on the black wood, the other drawn up to her mouth. He smiles at her and steps toward her, and there are wise ones between them, a long, motionless line, all of them with their backs to him. He stops, looks over a shoulder at Maarenn. Her eyes meet his for a moment more and then she is bending, wading out into the river.

“Wise one,” he says to the one directly in front of him. She does not turn. “Wise one,” he says again, the shonyn words another joy, despite his sudden fear, “you are not content with my presence? You wish me to explain? I tell you: I try to live without shonyn ways, yes, but I cannot.” Still no movement from the line. The flatboats are nearly in the deep river; the silver leaves are blinding with last light. “You counsel me when small: do not seek amazement, for it brings change. I have amazement and change, yes, but I cannot bear these things. I cannot. I return. I am here, as always. Now still always: so you say, and so I know.”

They shift. One by one they turn and walk past him, back up to the sitting stones. They arrange themselves there and begin to speak again, to each other and to the small ones. When he follows, they do not look at him. Maarenn has seen him, so he knows he is here, but they do not see him. Other words rise in his throat—other reasons, and pleas. He does not speak them. He walks back along the shore, to the hut that stands alone by the plants. He slips behind the faded blue curtain and sits on his pallet. He gazes at the veins in his wrists in the almost-darkness. The branchings of his river, which carry life and calm. He gazes at them until full night hides them, but he feels them still, pulsing against his fear.

He sleeps at dawn, wakes at dusk with relief and certainty. It is a test and an illustration: they are showing him the consequences of change. He opens his curtain and ducks outside, then pauses. There is a blue bowl beside his door, filled, with slices of lynanyn. A whole lynanyn sits beside the bowl. He squats, picks up the round fruit and rolls it between his hands. Its skin is firm, but the fruit within is softening; perfect ripeness. The skin peels away in one long, winding piece. He bites, and juice trails down his hand and arm. He eats and drinks, picks up the lynanyn slices and eats them too. He is restored. The lynanyn is a promise, an acknowledgement. He walks back to the village to acknowledge it in his turn.

They do not look at him. Again they sit and talk to each other; again they rise to stand between him and the river when he goes toward it. The only difference is that Maarenn does not meet his gaze. She pushes her flatboat out, beside a man Nellyn knows, a new gathering companion: a man like Nellyn, in Nellyn’s place.

He does not speak to them this time. He sits by the water near his hut and watches the flatboats until they are nearly invisible, black wood on black air. He is struggling to breathe with the care and clarity he has possessed for so long. He struggles against anger, which is easy and twisting and would return him to a place of change. He falls asleep on his pallet just after dawn—but he wakes when the hut is still striped with sunlight.

There is a soft noise, almost inaudible beneath the drone of insects and the lazy lap of water, but he hears it. He kneels beside his curtain and opens it just a sliver.

“Maarenn.” He speaks her name very quietly, but she startles, drops the bowl from her hands. Lynanyn slices scatter on the sand in a spray of juice and seeds. She begins to angle her body away from him.

“Stop. Sit with me. Speak to me.” Her head is still turned. “Look at me.”

She does. She bends to pick up the bowl and her eyes do not shift.

“Speak to me,” he says again. “Please, gathering companion.”

“No.” A dull, flat word, this first, and he feels its weight. “Not that. You are not here.”

He crawls out of his hut and sits among the splotches of juice. “I
am
here—now still always.”

“Not always,” she says, and he sees her discomfort, though he does not know what kind it is or what it means. He has no chance to ask her, for she walks away, quite quickly, over the sun-bright sand. “Thank you,” he calls, but she is already small, and the light is too intense. He picks the lynanyn slices up and holds them, gritty and slick, in his hands.

Nellyn does not go into the village again. He does not see Maarenn again, though he finds lynanyn at his door every day. He listens and sometimes he hears her, but he does not go out. He wades in the river at nightfall, and walks from the water to the brown plants to his hut and back to the river: loops of steps, circles that never close. He waits and tells himself that he is not waiting.

Once, at dawn, there are clouds that do not dissipate. They are far away to the west, only a thin edge of darkness in the clear, but he glimpses them as he ducks into his hut. He stands unmoving and stiff. The thunder begins a few sleeps after. He hears it and sees that the cloud-line is larger now, and advancing. His eyes slide from cloud to Queensfolk tents, which he should not, does not look at—but he looks, as the thunder rumbles.
Like hoofs
, he thinks, and the images are too swift for him to halt: a wagon on a road above the sea; riders on horses, churning ice and frozen mud. He groans and swings around to see the river—not faces, or winter colours that are not present, nothing but the river that is his centre, always, even when the rains come to hide it.

When the rains do come, he lies on his side with his upper arm over his ear. This shuts out the noise when it is just a light pattering on the clay—but soon it is its own thunder, which he feels with his skin.
Last time
 . . . He writhes and claws at the ground.
No—no last time
. He has always been here; it has always been the same.

He is not alone. He sees this, in the murky light, sees a figure crouched just inside his curtain. He blinks, expecting to recognize one of his sleeping companions—and why not, if everything is the same?—but it is Maarenn. She comes to where he is lying and kneels beside him. He feels rain falling from her hair and clothing as she bends over him. She draws her wet hands across his cheeks and through his hair, and leans closer, closer, until she is touching him with her lips. He is here, pulling her down to lie against him, fumbling with cloth so that she is closer still. He is here, drinking her, breathing her—and then he is not. There is no “here;” layers, instead, other skin and other rain, another voice crying out his name. He cries out too, and closes his eyes to keep the other places from spilling into the hut. He is smothering and blind, hears only his own cries, which turn into whimpers and then to gasping breaths. He is alone. He knows this even in his blindness. There is no one with him—no one who is not smoke. Smoke blowing out over the ocean, a blanket beneath the smoke and a baby in the blanket, and a woman with her forehead against the window glass.

He sleeps, but the images do not. He is surrounded by brightness, shapes so stark they cast no shadows. He wrenches himself awake, and then he is outside, turning his face up to catch the rain. The sky is mottled, cut with lightning that is moving eastward, trailing thunder. The rain is hard and steady, his face and arms sting as he walks through it. He slithers on the wet sand but does not fall. His feet take him up, away from the empty sitting stones and the sodden curtains, up to a ridge where sand and water are flowing together, seeking the river.

The teaching tent is empty. He stares at the stacked writing trays and the carpet where the small ones sit.
Where I sit
, he thinks; then, suddenly, in Queensfolk words,
Where I sat
. He shudders, moves to leave the words behind. The next tent is glowing. A lantern within, probably. A lantern, a candle, a tree of candles hanging, weeping tallow. Wicks to trim and drippings to scrape and bread baking in the kitchen, the smell of it rising.

A Queensman looks up from the parchment in his lap. Nellyn sees his lips move: “Greetings.” A shonyn word. Nellyn feels his own mouth making Queensfolk sounds: “I have been lost. I will not return.” The man stands. The lantern is on a high table, like the one on the Queen’s balcony above the sand. The colours of the carpet are turning in small, smudged circles.

“Sit down with me,” says the man and raises his hand. Nellyn laughs, though he has no strength to wonder why. He goes out again into the rain and wanders down the slope. Queensfolk words pursue him:
She walked with me. My blood was on her cloth
. The huts are all the same, but there is the one, set amongst the others. His sleeping companions are inside, cowering.
They called after me from the doorway. I left them and fell and water carried me down
. The shape of the bank is changing, under the rain, but he recognizes it.
I lay here with the red fish. I swept it back into the river.
He sits and sits, as the dark clouds darken further into night. He is soaked and shivering, but he does not rise until the clouds are grey once more. Even then, he only stands up because there are sounds coming from the west. Creaking wood sounds, flapping wet canvas sounds. He feels another laugh rising, a wild, high one that he swallows.

He stands and watches the Queensship sail through the rain. It is moving quickly: many oars, as well as a wind blowing from behind. Quickly, even though it must stop; he knows it must. There are three people on the deck: one at the great wheel, two others at the prow. All of them are cloaked and hooded, faceless with cloth and the rain that is running into Nellyn’s eyes.
A boat brought her to me. A boat brought me to her. A boat took her away, with him; and he came back, and so did she, and they were together, not together, and I left. . . .