The Silences of Home (48 page)

“You’re accustomed to it. I see.” Leish took several steps past the puddle and looked at the sky and the rock. He turned his head until he was facing north. Mallesh saw him stiffen before he took another step. Mallesh himself hardly noticed the gathering pool stone any more; he often could not see it through the dust in any case. But today it was visible, and Leish did not look away from it.

“They tied me there. Maybe you saw it—maybe our parents saw. . . .”

“They’re dead,” Mallesh said. “Father on the shore, when the boats came, and Mother as she was running to the river behind me. We didn’t see you.”
And if we had? She would have stayed and I would still have run—that other person I was would have run
.

“Come inside again,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you before night falls.” Leish came with him, like a child who moves only because he is told to. He stared at the carvings Mallesh gestured to, at the shapes and then down at the tools that Mallesh always placed so neatly on the ground.

“You did this.”

“Yes,” Mallesh said.

“You.”

Mallesh touched the shell he had carved. It almost felt like a real shell, the ridges and serrations were that delicate. “Yes. It’s calming work. And there’s beauty in it—I never would have known this before, but—”

“What are you talking about?” Leish’s voice was very soft, but Mallesh stopped speaking. “You chip away at this rock, and you drink black water, and you say you’ve found calm? And beauty? You, Mallesh my brother, who used to stand atop that stone out there and shout about the next great age of the selkesh?” Leish was shouting as well now, but Mallesh stood tall before him. He needed to hear these words; it was like tempering metal, making it pure and strong with flame. “You ranted about boats and daggers and a triumph like Nasran’s—and now you live in a cave, and this, around you, is what you brought on all of us. And listen! Listen to the lands beyond ours, which still have clean water and grass and trees. If you strain very hard, maybe you’ll even hear the singing of the stone city—I still do. Listen: fountains and ivy! Sand with a river beneath it! Listen and you’ll hear—”

“Nothing,” Mallesh said, quite steadily, with his voice of holes. “I’ll hear nothing. Not the stone city, not the lands closer, or our own land. I haven’t heard any singing since I left the Queensrealm.”

Leish leaned back against the wall of carvings. His mouth was open. After a moment he straightened and pressed his lips together, so tightly that they went pale. He stepped to the cave’s opening and looked back over his shoulder. “I don’t know why you live,” he said, and then he walked away, into the rising dust.

Even from the bottom of the dried-up riverbed, Leish could hear Mallesh’s chisel. The sound followed him everywhere over the flatness that was Nasranesh. He had listened to it at the foot of the gathering pool stone, and at the edge of the ocean, and inland, where he could not even see the cave. He had imagined that the depth of the riverbed would dilute the sound a bit, but it did not. The
tap-tap
reached him still, even though he lay with earth walls rising above him.

Mallesh had finished the rivergreen strand and had begun an anemone. Leish tried not to look at the carvings, and sometimes he succeeded, though only for a few days. He had tried not to go back to the cave at all, those many weeks ago, but he had failed at that too. The only one of his resolutions that he had kept was to remain silent. He had not spoken to Mallesh since their first day together, when he had shouted and Mallesh had not. Leish had vowed that his brother would be the next one to speak, and so Leish ate what Mallesh cooked, and drank what Mallesh drank, and did not say any of the words that dizzied him.

But Mallesh did not speak either. Perhaps this was good: Leish did not know if he would be able to listen for long to the voice that came from his brother’s scarred throat. Mallesh whittled at his wall and trudged to the shore for pieces of wood and looked at Leish with his changed eyes and seemed content. Leish almost shouted again, several times—questions, accusations, hollow, wordless sounds—but he suspected that Mallesh would simply gaze at him as he had before, with pity and calm, and so make everything worse.

I’ll follow the riverbed
, Leish thought as he had so often already. If it wasn’t this thought it was,
I’ll go up the coast
, or,
I’ll see if the land over the mountains is as grey as it sounds
—but now, as ever, he rose and turned back to the cave. He ached to be away, but could not leave. Anger choked him as the ash did.
I dreamed of Nasranesh’s destruction long before it happened
.
Perhaps I’ll dream of something else, some other future for myself or this land, that will show me how to be
. But when he slept, he did not dream at all.

He passed in front of the cave’s entrance, imagining Mallesh pausing, waiting for the daylight to return. Leish went down to the shore. He might swim, though he hated the brown water and the smooth sand beneath it that was broken only by pitted rocks. He might attempt to swim to where the fish were, though he had tried this once already and failed (still, always, too weak). But when he reached the shore, he stood with his feet in the water and did not move. There was a boat rolling with the waves to the north and west of him, a rowboat with a single person inside, leaning on oars that were motionless in the water. The person’s dark-haired head was lowered. As Leish watched, the head lifted and he saw a face, also dark with hair, and eyes that found his own. Arms reached, and the oars raised and dipped, and Leish slid his knife from his chest-wrap.
Go get Mallesh
, he told himself.
Call for him, at least
—but Leish waited on the shore, alone and silent.

The man was familiar.
Baldhron
—but the thought, and the hope, was swiftly gone. Leish squinted, tried to remember, even though a specific memory would not make a difference. Not selkesh, familiar: an enemy. Leish considered throwing his knife when the boat was close enough, but he did not. He would kill the man slowly, looking into his eyes. He would not be distracted or dissuaded this time. His palm was slippery with sweat, and his blood rushed within him.

The boat scraped along the stone of the shore. The man sat for a moment. He was breathing hard, and his arms were shaking—but when a wave came and lifted the boat to drag it back again, he pushed himself up and out. Leish took a step toward him.

“Leish,” the man said, wrenching his body around so that he was sitting. Leish leaned forward on his left foot but did not take another step. He had seen this man with the Queen, from somewhere high up: the tower, or the gathering pool stone, or both. The man had looked different then. Leish shook his head and walked, tightening his grip on his knife.

“Leish—stop, wait.” The Queenstongue, though the man did not look like a Queensman. But it did not matter who he was, only that he was someone, finally, who would die.

“Do you remember me?” the man said. “I am Aldron”—and suddenly it did matter after all.

Mallesh heard a splash in the quiet between chisel-taps. He adjusted the tool’s angle and tapped again, quite hard: he wanted this entire segment of stone to fall away, and it did, leaving a smooth slanted expanse. Now he could draw out the edge of a coral reef—something that his anemone could cling to, and something he could add to, perhaps with the shapes of fish or crabs. Before he could bring the hammer down again, though, he heard voices: low, distant ones, but he recognized Leish’s. When he rose, some words came to him more clearly, and he paused for a moment before he went out the opening. Queenstongue words, not selkesh ones, words that brought tunnels and stink and rage hissing into his quiet.

Leish was at the shore, leaning on one knee above a man who was lying on his back. Leish’s right hand was at the man’s throat. The man’s hands were at his sides, palms up, fingers loose and curving. Mallesh saw the dull gleam of Leish’s knife. He heard Leish say, “No”—a word Mallesh remembered—and then others he did not understand, a long, jagged stream of them. Leish raised his knife, and Mallesh shouted the selkesh “No!” and began to run.

When he had reached them, Mallesh said, “What’s this?” in the cracked stranger’s voice he had never wanted to use again. He and Leish had been living so peacefully, with only the sounds of cooking and drinking and sleeping between them. And now this man was here, and the silence was broken, and Mallesh would have to use all of his new strength to keep some calm about them yet.

“He’s Aldron,” Leish said. A slender line of spittle trembled between his lips, and more was gathering at the corners of his mouth. “He did this to us. He used his voice powers to ruin our land.”

The man Aldron was looking at Mallesh, his eyes rolled sideways so that the whites of them were very large. Even on his back with Leish’s knee against his chest, Aldron did not look frightened or angry.

“No,” Mallesh said, “that was the Queen. I heard that she spoke on top of the gathering pool stone. Other selkesh told me that the fire sprang up with her words.”

“No,” Leish said, “it wasn’t the Queen. She told him to use his powers, but they weren’t hers. I know this, Mallesh. I found out many things when I was a prisoner in the white city.”

Mallesh crouched to bring himself closer to the two men. “So if he did do this,” he said slowly, “why has he returned?”

Leish spat more Queenstongue words at Aldron, who answered without blinking. Leish laughed and dug his knife into Aldron’s flesh, just enough to raise a thin edge of blood. “Apparently he enlisted the new queen’s help and took a ship here from the harbour city. The ship dropped him just inside our waters, since the captain refused to bring him closer. He rowed down the coast until he saw the gathering pool stone, which he remembered.”

“Yes,” said Mallesh when Leish did not continue, “but that is only how.
Why
did he return?”

“He wants—” Leish began, and shook his head as if he would laugh again. “He insists that he has come to try and reverse what he did.”

Mallesh knew Leish’s expression, though he had never seen it on his brother’s face before. He knew what was within, shaping the expression. “And you don’t want to believe him,” Mallesh said, and was not surprised when Leish twisted around to look at him.

“Such insight, brother! I never expected you’d have gained so much from our destruction. Now, if only you could speak this murderer’s language, I’d so enjoy listening to the thoughts you’d share.”

“Leish,” Mallesh said after a time, “let him try.”

The wind was suddenly damp: rain, not just sea spray. Rain fell every few weeks, smudging the dust and stone with a darkness that did not stay. Aldron’s fingers twitched as the moisture touched them, and Leish raised his face, his mouth open a bit on the water that was so fresh and so fleeting. The wind had already blown it away when he stood up. He slid his knife back into his chest-wrap and walked away from the shore. Mallesh watched him, through the night that was falling. After Leish had ducked into the cave, Mallesh turned back to Aldron.

“Come,” he said in a language that would not be understood—and then he held out a hand that would.

Leish sat alone deep within Mallesh’s cave and imagined water. It was water that had carved it out, a branch of the river that had fed the selkesh’s hearth pools, perhaps, though Leish had never seen it when it had lived. In the weak light of his brand, he saw the place now: rounded walls banded with flecks of gold and crystal, rough where the water had thrust at them and smooth where it had simply flowed. He tried to hear its song as it would have been, braided with all the other rocks and waters of Nasranesh—but he heard nothing except the hum of emptiness and, beyond that, the clamour of the sea.

The footsteps sounded very loud even when they were still far away. Leish listened to them as they descended the sloping river-tunnel. When they had nearly reached him, he drew his spear toward him. The spear had been lying near Mallesh’s tools, in the upper cave, and he had not said anything when Leish had picked it up. Maybe he had not noticed. It was a fine spear with a sharp, shining head and a haft Mallesh must have worked himself, since the original had to have burned. Leish set his hand upon the wood but did not pick it up.

Aldron sat down several paces away from Leish and sank his own torch into the loose sand. He waved his hand to disperse the smoke that drifted in front of his face. Leish did not; he stared at Aldron with stinging, tearing eyes and would not blink.

“I left my people,” Aldron said after they had sat awhile in silence, “because they wouldn’t permit me to use my powers.”

No
, Leish thought,
don’t speak. Hold onto your voice, as you do with Mallesh
—but this was not Mallesh, and Leish had waited so long for words like these. “Don’t talk to me of your people or yourself,” he said, and was amazed at the strength of his voice, which he had hardly used for two years. Strength had grown, it seemed, from all of his prisons.

Aldron nodded but spoke again, as if he had not heard Leish. “Queen Galha offered me a chance to use my powers in ways I’d never have been able to on my own. I agreed to come here with her because of that.”

Leish rolled his spear against his thigh and pressed it there. The wood was so smooth that he did not think it would splinter even if he dug his nails into it. “And that was all,” he said. “That was why you destroyed my land: to take glory from your own power.” As his words glanced from the stone walls, Leish remembered other words: Mallesh’s, shouted from high above the gathering pool, from a boat on the sea, among jungle trees; Mallesh’s and Baldhron’s, far beneath the sand, in tunnels that gleamed and stank. Leish had cowered as they shouted—he remembered this. He pushed all of it away, himself and his brother and where they had gone. Why they had gone. The only real things now were Aldron and this place that he had killed.

“And what of your glory?” Leish said when Aldron did not speak. “Was it as satisfying as you’d hoped?”

Aldron said, “Of course not,” and his voice was tremulous, higher than it had been.
Good
, thought Leish, and knew how he would hurt Aldron next.

“So you had no triumph, after all, but at least you have your life. You almost didn’t, I heard. The Queen tried to kill you, I heard—hardly a just reward for your service.”

Aldron picked up a stone from the ground next to him. It was flat on one side. Aldron touched his finger to it, and Leish knew what it was he touched: bones and fins, a tail twisted in underwater flight. There were many such stones here, littering the ground where all the fish had died in fire and air.

“She told me, before, that I’d have to be silent about my part in the battle. The glory would have to be a private one. I knew this, and I agreed to it. But yes, she tried. . . . She sank a spear into my chest as I was lying by that tall stone afterward. I was so weak I could hardly see her.” He paused, set the stone down again. “How did you hear of this?” he said slowly, and Leish smiled.

“Your Alea told us, when she came to confront the Queen” He did not want to wait for Aldron to speak this time, so he continued, faster. “Yes: she came to the Queen’s white city and told the truth of the curse before everyone who was gathered in the chamber. I was there, of course, chained to the Queen’s chair, so I heard it all, even the words Alea said that brought the battle back. For a moment it was there: the fire, the dying things. She was magnificent. And the people did believe her, for a short time after—before Lanara told another story and changed everything again. But what a woman, your Alea, so beautiful—and your daughter too, just like her mother already.”

Aldron rose. He walked over to Leish and stood above him, and Leish looked up, still smiling. “What happened to them?” Aldron said, so softly that his lips hardly seemed to move. His hands were clenched; Leish felt the air between them and his own skin. He knew that there would be a ripple of wind before Aldron’s fists found him.

“I will not tell you this,” Leish said.
Not even if you could tell me what happened to my own Dallia would I tell you this.
He waited. Aldron was so close, and the light was so dim, that Leish could not see his expression, just the line of his cheek and the dark blur of his beard. His eyes shone flat and blank, and Leish was sorry for this; he wanted, needed more. He sat, not steeling himself, not afraid or eager. Aldron had been wounded; Leish did not matter.

“Tell me,” Aldron whispered at last, and Leish said, “No.” He thought that the pleasure that pierced him was the first clear, true thing he had felt since he had left Nasranesh.

“You’re lucky,” Aldron said, more loudly, “that I’m not as petty a man as you are. I could refuse to try and heal your land.”