The Silences of Home (47 page)

“Thank you,” he said. He stood with her a moment more. She stared at the window latch, which was undone, though the window was closed. She did not look away even when he walked across the room and through the door Baldhron had opened.

“Do you think it was wise to let him go?” Baldhron said. “He’s mad—he may do something you’ll have to lie about.” He was smiling, drawing his left forefinger around and around the pommel of the knife in his belt. Lanara went past him, slowly, so that he would see nothing but indifference. By the time she reached the front doors, Aldron was gone.

The captain would not meet her gaze. “My Queen,” she said in her salt-rough voice, “I have promised to do your bidding. It is just . . . it is the matter of safety that continues to concern me.”

Lanara frowned. “Safety? You will have one passenger, and he is no threat to anyone. Your way will be quick and clear. I have already given you silver to compensate you for lost trading goods and time. I will have more given to you when you return. I have no idea why you are so reluctant.”

The captain stared at the side of the ship next to them, which hid them from the wharf and the houses there. Her short hair was blowing against her cheek: the right wind, hard and warm from the west. “My Queen, it is . . . I am afraid. There is a curse.”

“Yes. But it will not harm you or your crew or ship. I have arranged for one of my personal guards to accompany you”—she gestured to Crelhal, who was standing behind her with Baldhron—“to reassure you and act as my representative.”
And to ensure that the mission is carried out correctly and completely
—though of course she did not say this.

“Ah,” the captain said, and finally looked at her. “That will be a comfort. Thank you. It must be difficult to spare such a person.”

“Indeed,” said Lanara. She wondered what Malhan would have made of all this, or if she would have even told him. He would likely read of it, when Baldhron and his parchment returned to Luhr.

The captain glanced over Lanara’s shoulder. Her eyes widened just as footsteps sounded on the dock.

“Go, then,” Lanara said without turning around. “Go with the blessings and protection of the First upon you.”

The captain climbed into the rowboat that bobbed on the water below them, and Crelhal followed her. They sat with their heads averted as they waited.

Lanara turned. Aldron was standing a few paces away, gazing past her at the ship that rocked gently at the mouth of the harbour. “That one?” he said. She did not reply. He looked from the ship to her and did not look away as he walked.

When he was beside her, she twisted around again so that Baldhron would see only her back. His motionless silence was almost as difficult to bear as his stare—but none of this mattered. She stepped closer to Aldron, hoping that he would flinch or move away. He did not. He stood nearly touching her, and she found his eyes, despite her fear. “Come back,” she said in a low voice that shook, a bit with the unexpectedness and impossibility of these words. “When you’ve seen it, you’ll change—you’ll feel differently about yourself and me and everything else. Come back then.”

He raised his hands and tilted them so that their backs lay against her cheeks. She felt the roughness of his knuckles as they stroked once, twice. She almost smiled, almost showed him all her impossible hope—but then she saw his own smile, and the pity in it.

As she drew away from him, against the flank of the nearest ship, he slid into the rowboat beside the captain. Lanara had intended to uncoil the mooring rope, but she could not move, and after a moment Crelhal did it, rocking the rowboat as he stood and reached. He and the captain made the sign of the arrowhead and took up their oars; Aldron faced the open sea. Lanara watched them, her back straightening with each oar stroke.

“So,” Baldhron said as the rowboat disappeared into the shadow of the larger vessel, “you’re a woman of complicated and numerous loves. A small blue fruit-gatherer, a mad poet-horseman—I’ll win you yet, my Queen.”

Lanara’s hand lifted and landed so swiftly that she hardly felt it. Baldhron sucked in his breath, raised his own hand to cover his cheek. “We are so alike, you and I,” he said. “You’ll understand this someday, and then you won’t be able to hate me as you do now.”

“Alike?” She attempted to scoff, succeeded only because she was numb from this mad succession of days.

“Indeed. Two young children who lost their mothers. What did they tell you about
your
mother’s death, my Queen?”

She felt a pressure, like fingers squeezing her throat. She laid her own fingers there and tried to knead the sensation away.
He wants to frighten you
, she told herself, clinging to the numbness that was threatening to dissipate.
He wants to hurt you—don’t listen. Never listen
.

She walked past him before he could speak again. She did not see him as she strode back to the Queenshouse, but she heard him behind her all the way there, his footsteps loud and measured. She nodded to her guards and climbed the stairs to her room. A few moments after she had slammed her door, she heard the scratching of Baldhron’s writing stick. She rose and opened her shutters, and then she heard only the sea, quickening before the hard, warm wind from the west.

Mallesh brought the hammer gently down on the chisel’s end. A cloud of dust rose and hung for a moment, as all dust did in this wind-thick air. He tapped again, and again, and the stone began to breathe. He felt it beneath his hands, and he paused to draw out his welcome. There was always an instant like this, now that his skill was increasing: a flutter that rose from the cave wall and became a pulse. He remembered feeling it first when he had been carving the leaf of a fireblossom tree, there by the entrance where the sallow light was strongest, and when he had shaped the shell beside it—and now, chiselling a long, rippling strand of rivergreen. He sat back on his heels and looked at the lines he had made and those that still lay within the stone. It was so slow, the looking and the carving, and he would never have imagined, in his other life, that he would have the patience for it. When they had been children, Leish had always been the one who could sit before a new row of gathering pool benches and gouge out shapes. Mallesh had always fidgeted and thrown down his tools after his own clumsy attempts yielded nothing but scars in the wood. He did not fidget here, in his cave, and he did not even touch his tools until he knew what he would do with them.

He had found the chisel and hammer—and several fish knives—at the foot of the eastern peaks. The mountain selkesh had lived here, miners and forgers whose clear pools and rivers had lain just below the line of snow. Mallesh had been certain, as he fled the fires of his own home, that they would be there still. He swam upriver as the flames rose above his gathering pool. Others swam beside him. They had not swum for long. The fire had pursued them, reaching through the water and boiling it away so that the selkesh had scrambled onto the banks. They ran then, beside the riverbed that was deep and fissured and mute. They ran as trees toppled and burned to ash. Some of them stopped running and fell among the trees and did not rise again. Mallesh did not fall, even when his coughing bent him double and made him retch bile that burned his scarred throat. He spoke when he could, and motioned to the others to stay with him. He knew they would find the mountain selkesh, who would take them in and wash the ash from them in ice-limned pools. They would make a new home as they mourned their old.

But the silent riverbank had led them to nothing. The mountains, yes: Mallesh had recognized their shadows against the yellow sky. He had looked at them as he crouched, tearing at a tree mouse with his teeth and hands. He had nodded his head at the shadows and the others had looked at them as well.
I will lead you true at last
, he had thought, so certain, even though he could no longer hear the singing of the peaks or the ones who lived there. He had led them nowhere. The mountains were naked rock, black, brown, grey, layered with shifting dust. There was no green and no snow. The uppermost peaks were like knuckles, the slopes between like withered webs. And at the bottom were the bones of the town: scattered metal and wood, overturned anvil stones. Some of the metal had melted; tools and jewellery had fused together into multi-coloured lumps. Many of the tools were intact. Mallesh had taken some, as his companions searched for the mountain selkesh who had lived there. He had not been certain, even then, why he had done this. There had been some bodies, mostly old people. The rest was emptiness.

“They may have gone over the mountains,” someone had said to Mallesh.

Mallesh had heard her hope. He had seen it in the faces of those around him—hope and grief together. He had looked for blame when they turned their eyes on him, but had found none. What he saw and did not see enraged him.

“What do you hear?” he had rasped, as if he could hear, himself. “What singing is there, over the mountains?”

They had bowed their heads and he had had his answer, and so their hope had infuriated him all the more. “Fools!” he had shouted over the pain that rose with his voice. “The land across the mountains will look and sound like this land does. All our lands are ruined. Why search for any of our kind if we’ll find only this?”

But they had searched nonetheless. They had begun to climb the bald mountainside, where once there had been paths of grass and fallen leaves. They had ignored his thin, torn cries. He had watched them until they were hidden by ash, and then he had retraced his steps, all of them, back to the edge of the sea.

He knew now that his rage had been fear.
I only ever led them wrong
, he thought once, sitting in the mouth of the cave he had found near what had once been the river.
I did not go with them because I could not have borne to be wrong again
. And so he was alone, surrounded by the silence where all his songs had been. As the months passed, he grew quieter and quieter within, until his own silence matched that of his world. Only his hammer and chisel were loud; it sometimes surprised him, that he could make this kind of noise.

The rivergreen strand was not ready to be finished. Mallesh set his tools down and rose, easing his limbs straight. He left the cave, looked from sky to sea. It would be dark soon—though “dark” too had changed. Some days were so heavy with dust and cloud that they seemed to be nights, and the nights were true black, with no stars or moon to lighten them. Today the sky was yellow-brown, and the dust only rose a bit from the ground. Mallesh could see from his cave to the shore, which was unusual.

He walked slowly toward the shore, already peering at the twisted lengths of wood that lay where the tide had brought them. The tide deposited wood every day, and every day Mallesh gathered it, piece by piece, and stacked it outside his cave. He did not know where the wood was from, though he had guessed once that it was whatever was left of trees that had burned somewhere else, where the fire had not been so intense. He also was not sure why he collected it. His own fires were tiny, made to cook only the meagre fare he found for himself: rodents that still lived here, in holes in the black rock, or fish that washed up half-dead with the driftwood. But his wood pile was nearly as high as the cave’s outer wall, and it grew a bit more every time Mallesh returned from the ocean.

He swam before he began to carry the driftwood home. He swam several times a day: at dawn, mid-morning, mid-afternoon and dusk (his body knew these hours even if the sky sometimes could not show them). When he had first come back from the mountains, he had thrust himself through the brown empty space where the Old City had been, trying to reach water that still lived. He had had to swim a very long way—and by the time he had reached a place where the sea was clear and scattered with fish, he had been too exhausted to use his spear. He had hung in the water and felt his weakness—and he had almost pushed himself further, knowing it would mean his death. But he had turned his aching body back, had dragged himself to the fire-scarred shore of Nasranesh and lain there, choking on ash and breath.

He never attempted to reach these other waters now. He circled in the murk because he had to, to keep his skin from cracking and peeling away, and although he sometimes longed for the soothing, sparkling touch of the old sea, he was mostly content. His pattern kept him quiet, and alive. Carve, walk, carry, swim, over and over, and no room or desire for more.

He took a piece of driftwood back to his cave, then returned for another. Even if they were slender and light, he only carried one at a time; he liked to take as many steps as possible. The water always felt so comforting after an afternoon of long, steady walking. He had been to the cave and back to the shore four times when he looked along the tide-line and saw something that was not wood, something much larger and thicker, and pale, not blackened by fire. He stood and squinted at it and thought that it must be a dead sea creature—perhaps a longhorned diver. Curiosity and a sudden stab of hunger drove him closer. He would smoke whatever of the meat he could not eat in the first day. He would hang it in the dimmest, coolest part of his cave. . . .

He stopped ten paces away from the thing. Not wood, not a longhorned diver—a crumpled, sodden, dust-brushed thing that Mallesh finally saw clearly, and knew. He ran, and did not realize that he was running.

Leish felt the sea rising in him. It surged from his gut into his throat, and he could not contain it: his skin would split and wash away. He felt his arms and legs flail against this tide, and then it was cracking him open, pouring out of his mouth and nose. This had to mean that he was dying—for selkesh did not hold water in them unless they were unconscious beneath river or sea, unless they were not breathing. But after the salt had scraped him raw, he felt his air-breathing begin, and heard himself cough. His eyelids were too heavy to open, so he lay still, on wet rock that his skin was beginning to feel.

Memory was slow but insistent. He had dived, blind with rage and shame, and deaf with wind. The sea had been gentle afterward. He had swum carefully, conserving strength—but also listening. He had not heard these songs from beneath for such a long time, and they had wrapped him round and welcomed him. He must have been too careful: he remembered weariness and hunger that he could not satisfy with the sponges and oceangreen he had torn from stone. The middle ocean had hummed with darkness and food that was too deep for his frail body to reach—so he had stroked on, eastward. He had clung to Nasranesh’s notes as if they were beautiful, not warped and cut with silence.

Wollshenyllosh
. He had remembered her, one day or night, as he bobbed with his head above the waves. She had nearly led him to her home waters—a yllosh place, far beneath but flooded with light and growing things. He had sliced back below the surface, listening for the song of such a place. He heard it a short time later, faint and shimmering, and he spun and fumbled, seeking it—but in the end it eluded him, and he was limp with exhaustion.

The rest he only remembered in bits. Fish slipping around him, his own body suspended, motionless. Dark water lightening to clear, then thickening again as Nasranesh’s song grew louder. A current tugging at him, his muscles unresisting and relieved. A feeling of rising, rising, so quick that he swallowed too much water and could not choke, took it into his body and could not expel it again. He had slept then, until the sea had thrust its way out of him and left him on stone that sang of death.

He did not think he would ever be able to open his eyes.
Never
, he thought, hearing the notes that had been taken away, listening to those that were left. They had been difficult enough to listen to from across the sea, but now they were unbearable. Perhaps he would die if he just lay here. The hot, rough wind would scour away his skin and then his bones, and all would be silence.

“Leish.”

The voice was so much louder than the singing. Leish groaned and tasted salt and was too weak to spit it out. He pulled his arms up over his head and pressed himself against the stone. Moss had sung here once, and living shells, and tiny flowers whose petals would close over a fingertip.

“Leish, please. . . .” A strange voice, so hoarse it was transparent. Leish was shaking; someone was shaking him. He swung one of his arms and felt a rush of air and then skin—firm skin, and fingers drawing his fist away. He could not. Now that he was here, he could not possibly look on this place as well as hear it. He had returned; this had been so important in a desert, in a city of bright wooden houses with red roofs. And now he could not open his eyes.

“Leish, will you not look at me?”

He rolled onto his back, one arm still draped over his face. He let the arm fall, felt dust blowing over his eyelids and nostrils. The fingers were laced with his now, warm and tight. Leish drew a deep breath and coughed once more. Then he opened his eyes and rubbed them clear. He saw his brother’s face, with a yellow sky behind it.

Leish’s eyes were closed again by the time Mallesh set him down on the floor of the cave. Leish’s skin was pale and wrinkled from its immersion in sea water. Mallesh soaked it, bit by bit, in the black liquid that bubbled from a place just outside the cave mouth. He scooped mud from the bottom of this puddle and smoothed it on the ragged webs between Leish’s fingers and toes. Mallesh drew his fingers slowly through Leish’s hair, teasing out the knots, plucking pieces of plants and sponge that had come from the ocean far beyond Nasranesh. When he was finished, he covered Leish with a blanket he had made months ago, from animal skins; just a small blanket, which did not cover feet and lower legs, but it would warm him a little.

Leish slept for two days. Mallesh crouched or lay close to him, watching and waiting.
This is why I came back here
, he thought once. The strength and volume of this thought surprised him, for he had been so quiet, even in his own mind, for so long. Other things spun with the words: pictures, colourful and sharp. Leish sick, lying on jungle leaves, hardly blinking as Mallesh talked and talked; all that talking, and his desire for the white city, making him hard and petty—Mallesh remembered this and was thankful for the new man he had become. A man who could care for his brother without envy or anger, a man who lived where he was, deaf to all other places.

This time, when Leish woke, Mallesh waited for him to speak first. Mallesh had been bathing him again. Leish shifted, propped himself on an elbow and looked down at his own skin. He looked out the cave opening then, and a moment later he crawled to it, lifting his limbs as if he did not want to touch them again to the dirt floor. Mallesh walked behind him.

“This is what you’ve been washing me with.” Leish was standing, one hand on the rock wall behind him, the other pointing to the black puddle. Two bubbles grew and burst before Mallesh answered.

“Yes,” he said, watching Leish’s eyes, seeing them widen as he heard Mallesh’s new voice. Leish’s voice had changed too. Mallesh wished that they did not have to speak at all. Perhaps they would not, after this stage had passed.

“And you drink it. I’ve drunk it.”

“Yes,” said Mallesh. “It’s the only fresh water there is, and I’m accustomed to it now.”