The Silences of Home (49 page)

“And I could kill you,” Leish replied, though this reply made no sense, was simply his desire blurted without thought.

“Yes,” Aldron said, his body and even his voice gone very still, “you could.” He turned away a moment later.

Leish stirred as Aldron tugged his torch free and walked back toward the upper cave. “Do get some rest,” Leish called. “You’ll need to be strong tomorrow.” All his pleasure dissipated, as he spoke. By the time Aldron and his feeble light had vanished up the tunnel, Leish felt only fear again, old and barren as the stone.

The gathering pool stone was loose. Leish had not touched it until now; he had just looked and imagined that, although its colour and shape had changed, its position in the earth had not. But the earth too had changed: it was sand and dirt now, where water and clay had been. And the wind was so strong against the stone, every day, when before the days had been calm, except when storms had blown in from the sea. Whatever the reason, the gathering pool stone shifted a bit as Leish leaned against it, his feet scrambling for purchase on Mallesh’s shoulders.

“I must go up there,” Aldron had said to Leish when Leish had found him outside the cave after dawn. Aldron did not look at him once—not then, not a few hours later, when the light was stronger and Aldron had said, “I’m ready.” He had nodded at Mallesh, who had nodded back.
A Queensfolk gesture
, Leish had thought bitterly.
Mallesh has no idea what it is he does now
. Leish tried to catch Aldron’s eye when they were all standing at the foot of the stone, but he still would not glance at him. Leish was ashamed of his need to see Aldron’s eyes on him—and he was not sure how he himself would look, or what he would say, if Aldron did turn to him. But he did not. He waited for Leish to heave himself onto Mallesh’s shoulders, and then he climbed, his arms and legs placed carefully, almost lightly.

Leish did not think that Aldron would reach the top: the stone was too high and too smooth. Leish grunted beneath his weight, once Aldron was standing fully on his shoulders—and very soon there was no weight, and Leish looked slowly up. Aldron was above him, inching along the stone, finding foot- and handholds where there did not seem to be any. “Down,” Leish gasped, and Mallesh let go of his ankles and let him slip free.

They walked away from the stone, back toward the cave. “We shouldn’t be too close,” Mallesh said, “just in case the power is very strong, where he is.” Leish swallowed and shifted his feet in the dust.
The power
, he thought, and shuddered. “But we shouldn’t worry if he doesn’t succeed,” Mallesh went on, squinting at the stone and the man who was crouching atop it. “This land will heal itself in time. I think the water is already a bit cleaner than it was.”

Leish swallowed again, his throat too tight and dry for any water, no matter how clear, to soothe. “No, Mallesh, this land will never heal. That’s part of what Aldron did: he brought fire and death, and he brought it for all time. Our water will never be clean again, and the water of other lands will kill us if we seek it out. This is the curse, and I’ve seen it work. I’ve seen selkesh die. . . .”

Mallesh’s mouth was open. Leish had longed to force emotion and words from him; now that he had he felt no triumph. “No,” Mallesh said, and Leish prepared for him to become his brother again. Perhaps he would run to the stone, or get a dagger; Leish would have to restrain him. But Mallesh did not look at the man on the stone as he spoke again, loudly, the words grating in his throat. “How could you not tell me this? Our people are searching even now for healthy places, for life elsewhere—and all this time you’ve known about the curse? You knew and you said nothing to me.”

“You’ve hardly been eager to rejoin our people,” Leish said. “Or to talk to me.” Everything was wrong—still, after so long. After a life here and away; now here again, and still wrong. His mother had always comforted him when Mallesh hurt him. Leish remembered her hands on his face, touching him because he could never look at her when she was being so kind to him.

“If this man doesn’t succeed,” Mallesh said, his voice rough and low again as always, “we must find our people somehow, and tell them of their danger.”

Leish could not answer—but he did not have to, for Aldron stood just then, and raised his arms into the sky.

He was so high above the world. The open sky, the sand, the stone: he was standing on the rock of the leaping place again, watching the Perona scattering his people in distant blood and screaming. But that had been destruction—that and the other, here. Now was reversal. One more change—the last, truly. He felt the finality of it even as he felt the words beginning.

They would know: the Goddesses, and Alea, and Alnissa. All the sea folk and all the Alilan would know his heart, when this eastern land was reborn. He would draw roots from nothingness, and earth from rock. He would fill the water by the shore with fish. He would sing this Telling, and at its end would be a heartflower. He had saved all his words for this song; he had not Told once since he had stood here before, at the foot of the stone. But now his voice was welling in him as it had when he was a boy on the plain, a boy in the desert, everything too large for him and him too foolish to know it. Only now did he know, and he welcomed the knowledge as he would welcome the silence that waited for him when this final Telling was done.

He raised his arms. He had to, to keep his body steady in the wind—but he also wanted to. Alnila and Alneth would see him, and although he would look tiny to them, they would understand his supplication. He spread his fingers apart. His mouth opened, and his voice
is silence. All the words of power and beauty hover in his throat and on his tongue, and then they curl away like bark in fire. The dust rises from the rock and he feels it in his mouth, smothering, clotting.

He was nothing. The wind should lift him; he would draw apart, empty flesh from empty bone, with no flames to mark his passing. They had all known he would end this way: Aliser, Old Aldira, even Alea, though she, at least, had loved him. No Alilan rites, and no one to watch except the two sea folk and their heavy, colourless sky.

But the sky is not colourless. There may be no fire within him, but there is fire outside, drawing closer over the sea. No sounds in him to Tell, but sounds around him, still distant: a spitting of flame and a great, rolling rumble. The fire is orange and red at its edges, and white at its heart, which is a form so vast he can hardly focus on it—but it is moving very quickly, and soon he does see. Hair and arms, eyes like deep-buried coals, a body that is flame without a source, for it
is
the source.

He would not fall—not to his knees and not to the ground. He held himself tall: an Alilan man again, at the last.

As his lips make the name of the burning sister-goddess, the other appears beneath her. The rumbling ends in a sound that is both splinter and rush, and the sea convulses. Rock rises, and coral, and clay studded with scurrying crabs and anemones that reach and stroke. Hair of seagreen and eels, and a deep black mouth breathing smoke and lava that hardens as it touches the air. This sister gathers up fish and plants, snails, flowering moss, worms. They trail and cling as she spins toward Aldron, beneath Alnila’s fire.

They stop above the rock of the sea folk’s cave. The Goddesses are still apart from Aldron, but they are entireties, all sky and all land, and he feels their breath sting his skin with scattered sparks and earth. He cannot shape their names now; there are no more words for him. Only his body remains, small and straight and ready. His eyes are filled with flame and writhing colours—but he sees something dark beneath it all. Something dark, as small as he is, that stands, then slips away and back again. A man with a spear; a man whose eyes course with the fire and green of the Goddesses above him. Aldron looks into his eyes, across all the space that separates them. He does not look away, not even when the fire and the earth and the spear come singing, together into his silence.

Aldron fell with a heavy sound that reverberated long after his body had settled into the dust behind the gathering pool stone. Mallesh looked down at Leish when the air was quiet again. He waited for Leish to look back at him, but he did not; he squatted beside the black pool and stared at nothing. After a moment Mallesh began to walk alone to the place where Aldron had fallen—for there were things to do now, and they were as clear to him as the shapes that waited for him beneath layers of rock.

Aldron was lying on his side. This surprised Mallesh; he had expected to find Aldron’s arms and legs splayed, or perhaps crushed beneath him. But his knees were drawn up and his arms were bent: he was curled like a baby around the spear in his chest. Mallesh knelt and rolled him over, thinking,
He lives, and he will try again to heal my land, when I have healed him
—but Aldron’s eyes were black and staring, and his mouth breathed only bloody spittle. When Mallesh wrenched the spear free, the spittle thickened and gushed. Aldron’s beard soaked flat, and the dirt beneath his head was stained. Mallesh did not wipe the liquid away from Aldron’s skin. He cleaned the spearhead on the earth and rose and saw that Leish had not moved.

Mallesh had not seen Leish leave his side during Aldron’s attempt at Telling. Mallesh had been staring at Aldron: at the working of his mouth and the wildness of his eyes, which leapt from the sea to the sky. Mallesh had not looked around him; he had not needed to. Nothing was changing. The dust still blew, and the wind still smelled of old fires. Aldron’s lips had stopped forming words after a time. He had stood very tall, reaching with his fingers and arms and his raised-up head—and even though he had looked so strong, Mallesh had seen his defeat. Perhaps he should have turned to Leish then and said, “Let’s decide what we should do now—all three of us, together.” But he could not move his eyes from Aldron’s—not until Aldron’s shifted to Leish, and stayed there. Only then did Mallesh turn—and the spear was already flying, arcing gently up despite the wind.
So straight
, Mallesh had thought.
Leish could never throw like that before
—but what was “before,” for any of them, now that they were here?

Mallesh leaned on the spear. Something would have to be done with the body—something different than what he had done with all the selkesh bodies he had found here, after he had returned alone from the peaks. Those he had dragged to the place where he thought the burying trees would have been, before; a place upriver, at a bend where the earth had been soft and deep. These could not be true selkesh burials, for there were no hearth and gathering pool waters to bathe the dead ones in; nor were there kin trees whose roots would encircle and sing. But Mallesh had hacked at the hard, cracked ground beneath the ash until he had hollowed out an enormous hole. He thought it must have taken him days to dig and days more to cover again, but he had not noticed this time passing. He had laid them all within, as gently as possible. He had placed his parents side by side on the top; their faces had been the last he had seen. When he had finished, he had hauled large stones to the mound and arranged them above, so that the bodies would not be disturbed by wind or the burrowing of beasts.

He would not bury Aldron. Too much effort, now that Mallesh was a weaker man, and in any case, Aldron had not been selkesh. There would have to be another, different way. Mallesh held the spear in front of him and spun the shaft slowly between his fingers. When his hands stilled and felt the warming wood, he knew what he would do.

Leish felt light. He had thought that he would follow the spear up, his body just a wind, but he had remained on the earth. He was there still, though he was dizzier every moment. Dizzy, giddy, made of air, even though his land’s song was the same as it had been before Aldron had climbed the gathering pool stone.

It’s wrong
, he thought, grinding his fingernails into the skin of his palms as if discomfort would return him to himself.
Wrong to feel such joy when nothing has changed
—but something had. He had, as Aldron had met his gaze at last, and held it. As the spear had left his hand. Aldron had not looked at the spear; his eyes had remained on Leish, so wide and vivid that Leish could see them even now.
Wrong
, Leish thought again, and drew a deep, new breath.

When Mallesh walked back toward him, Leish rose. He swayed a bit, and grasped at words he might be required to say—but Mallesh went past him, to the side of the cave. He pulled a length of driftwood from the top of the tall stack that stood there and carried it back to the gathering pool stone. He came back for more, and more; only when he lifted Aldron’s body and laid it on the pile did Leish understand, and move.

The driftwood was so smooth that it did not splinter, when it was grasped and tugged, but it was also difficult to hold, and Leish dropped several pieces before he could carry any. He found, once he began, that his dizziness had no effect on his strength; he seemed stronger, if anything, balancing the wood and throwing it. It was because of him that they finished as quickly as they did. The sky was darkening already—so early, as it had in the Queensrealm winter. Mallesh bent, gasping, over the bottom of the pile. It was Leish who struck the flint, hard, until sparks wheeled and lit.

The flames spread swiftly. Leish and Mallesh retreated to the cave when the heat grew too intense. By then it was dark, and Leish was ravenous. He ate two treerats that Mallesh had cooked the day before, and drank four handfuls of black water. Mallesh went into the cave after the fire had been burning for a few hours, but Leish stayed outside.
I’ll never be tired again
, he thought. He watched the fire light this place that had been Nasranesh, and he heard fire- and landsongs twining, and it was almost beautiful. He saw and heard the blaze lower, sometime after dawn. When Mallesh emerged from the cave, Leish was watching fresh ash swirl over his feet.

“I’m not tired,” he said to Mallesh, to see if the hardness of his voice would weigh him down a little—but it did not.

“Maybe, but you should still sleep.” Mallesh’s words rippled like water against Leish’s ears: loud and soft, soft and loud.

Leish did not sleep for many days. He sifted through the remnants of the fire and passed the largest chunks of ash through his fingers. He ate and drank every few hours, and ran for hours more, up the old riverbed and back again. The world bent around him. He was the fixed centre, and everything else pulsed and flowed, toward him and away.

“Swim,” he heard Mallesh say one day. “Your skin is unwell.”