The Silences of Home (51 page)

He glanced up at the sun, which was dazzling, hanging directly behind the tents on the ridge. He wondered again which way he would go. He had considered striking out across the river then continuing past the lynanyn trees, northward, or angling southwest, into the deeper desert. These were paths he had never taken, and their beginnings looked very stark to him in the sun’s light—but he would choose one somehow, when his tunic was dry and his lynanyn slices wrapped. He blinked at the ridge. There were people-shadows between the tent ones. Two tall forms, likely the Queensmen, and another nearly as tall, with the bulge of a pack at its back. Perhaps two packs, one behind, one to the side, though Nellyn could make out even less of this second shape. He saw one of the Queensmen point down the ridge. Down—finger and arm angled unmistakably past the houses of the village, so silent now, just before dusk.

A new Queensman or woman
, Nellyn thought. Panic clutched at him. He was so close; he had finally decided, and was nearly away. But no: someone had come to ask him questions. Someone from Luhr, perhaps—maybe even from Lanara?
No. Be calm. No one from Luhr would travel through the desert, and there have been no boats since the copper trader came
.

The third figure was walking, that much was certain. It moved into deeper shadow as it descended the ridge. Nellyn considered retreating to his hut, but knew the person would have seen him standing here, motionless against the eastern sky that was no longer bright. He remained where he was for the space of four breaths. Then the figure stepped from shade into slanting light, and he saw strands of dark hair curling from beneath a white kerchief, red cloth straps tied over brown shoulders. And a child – a girl with long black hair, her arms and legs wrapped tight around her mother.

Nellyn walked. No waiting, though there would be a time for this again. He took one step, and another. The child was down now, her arms wide and weaving, her legs buckling, quickly steady. He laughed as he watched her, laughed as he looked up and into Alea’s eyes. He ran, and the river sang him home.

Sannesh glared at the stone. It was white and very smooth, except where carved shapes rose from it. The smoothest patch was directly in front of him; he had chosen it because of this. He had imagined he would fashion something spectacular out of this very white, very empty place—but once he had sat down, with hammer and chisel beside him, he had had no idea what to do. This was his tenth day sitting here with the sea at his back, tempting him with waves. His tenth. Some of his friends had
finished
their carvings in seven.

“Nothing yet, hmm?” Sannesh started and knocked the chisel with his left foot. Nannia always crept up on him so silently, and he was always surprised, even now that he was twelve and should be more composed. He shifted his glare from the stone to her knees, which were lined with salt and scratches.

“Go away,” he said—but his sister did not. She squatted down beside him and pretended to study his piece of the stone wall. He bit his lip to keep himself from saying something she would laugh at.

“A big thing,” she said, tapping her own lip with a forefinger. “Yes: something extremely large that won’t require much skill. Perhaps a rock. That’s it! You could carve a rock in the stone, and—”

“Go away,” he said again, loudly enough that his voice did not tremble. This time she did go—not because he had told her to, but because someone was calling her from the shore.

He looked at her carving as her running footsteps faded behind him. He attempted not to look at it ever, but this time he could not help himself. It was to his right, at the top of the wall. Their father had told them that this wall used to stand on its end in a pool of water. Sannesh could not picture this. It was a wall, very long and a bit taller than him—and Nannia had carved a vine in its upper right corner. So high, such a prominent location—he shivered at the boldness that had made her choose it. She was always certain of herself and her skills. She had carved her vine, with its one loop and its single flower, in six days when she was ten. The adults still talked about it, especially about how brilliantly she had managed to shape it around the tree that her uncle had carved, right after the pillar had toppled and become a wall. The tree trunk was broad and its branches wound halfway along the length of the stone. Nannia and Sannesh’s father had carved some of the leaves. Anyone who couldn’t think of something original simply added more leaves or blossoms. Sannesh was determined that he would not need to resort to this.

At least Mother’s shell is ugly
, he thought, reaching up to trace its rough swirls. He could see where she had gouged at the stone then drawn the chisel back and begun again. “It doesn’t need to be ambitious, Sann,” she had said to him many times, particularly in the last ten days. “It doesn’t even have to be pretty—after all, look what I did. Just carve something that seems true, to you.”

That, he decided as he trudged back to the houses two useless hours later, was exactly the problem. There was nothing “true” about tree trunks and leaves and flowers. Shells he had seen, washed up on the shore—but none with a living thing within, like the clawed creature his mother had tried to carve. But she had seen a creature like this, in the other Nasranesh, and Nannia had heard vines singing, from an island to the southwest, and had formed hers from the colours and textures she had heard. He heard no singing. This was not uncommon: many of the other children, and some of the adults, could not hear the songs of other places. His parents had told him that most of the selkesh who had crossed the ocean had lost this ability, quickly or slowly, after their return to Nasranesh. His uncle had been one of these, Sannesh knew. But his mother still heard the songs, and so did his sister—and his father heard them more clearly than anybody else, though he hardly ever spoke of it.

Sannesh was silent at the evening meal. A group of young selkesh had swum out to the living ocean and brought their spears back bristling with fish. This did not happen often, since the trip was very long and dangerous. People ate the fish, and praised the young ones who had got it. Sannesh listened to them, from his family’s fire, and was too sullen to say, “I’ll swim that far someday,” or, “I’ll take the boat that Aldron of the Flames left, or I’ll build my own, and I’ll bring fruit back from an island.” He was usually sure of such statements—but if he could not manage even a small carving, what was the likelihood he would be able to succeed at more challenging things?

“You’re very quiet tonight,” his mother said. He shrugged, relieved that Nannia was not at their fire to offer her opinion on the matter. He was grateful too for the shadows of nightfall and dust that hid his face, and for the food that had made his mother too content to press him.

Later that night, though, his father lingered by Sannesh’s pallet after his mother had left. Nannia was still off somewhere, swimming or running with her countless friends; she might not come back to the house she and Sannesh shared until the moon had set. It was just Sannesh now, lying beneath his fur blanket—and his father, kneeling, looking down at him. Sannesh could feel this gaze even though his face was turned to the rock.

“It’s difficult,” his father said at last, “the carving.”

Sannesh shifted on the pallet as if he were merely trying arrange his body more comfortably. He did not answer; perhaps his father would think he was too tired to speak. But he waited there beside the pallet. Sannesh’s uncle Mallesh had been a silent man, from what Sannesh could recall of him. He had had a puckered scar on his throat and had hardly ever talked. He had seemed always to be somewhere outside of words. Sannesh’s father was like that a bit too, when he was not laughing with his children or telling stories.
He was a captive
, Sannesh thought,
and he suffered, and so he is sometimes quiet
. This thought made him squirm with shame, as it always did.

“My leaves took two weeks to carve,” his father finally said, and Sannesh turned his head a little. “Two weeks! And they’re crude things, even so. Though not,” his father added, after a pause, “as terrible as your mother’s horn-shell crab.”

Sannesh could not laugh—not quite. “But you knew what it was you were carving. You’d
seen
leaves, and Nannia heard something that helped her do her vine, but I have nothing to help me.”

His father’s hand was cool against Sannesh’s forehead—so cool, so comforting that he did not even try to flinch away from it. “You don’t have to carve now. You can wait until things are clearer for you.”

“No”—shaking his head so that his father’s hand fell away—“almost all my friends have already carved, and I know it’s important to you. . . .” He bit his lower lip, hard.

“When we were boys,” his father said, as Sannesh touched one of the amber pieces that lined these inner walls, “Mallesh always wanted more, and I always wanted less. So what’s important to me is that you be content. Truly, this is what I want. If you’re distressed by the carving, don’t do it.”

The amber piece closest to Sannesh’s right ear was very bumpy. He knew without looking what was within: one tiny, transparent wing. From a starmoth, his parents had told them—beautiful creatures that had winked like points of fire above the pools that had lain within walls of earth. This one’s wing had been torn from its body, so Sannesh would never know what the whole moth had been. But the wing was so familiar to him now that he could see it in the dark: curves and a point, white speckled with a darker colour, maybe green.

“I want to do one,” he said, expecting his father to nod and smile and say goodnight. Instead he waited, quiet again, and Sannesh looked up into his face. “I need to,” he said, groping for words but safe as long as his father was meeting his gaze, “because of my friends, and because it’s important to you. And because I can’t hear land or water singing, and carving something would make me feel more like a real selkesh.” He paused. The sea was high tonight; he heard the waves pounding the rock of the shore. “Because,” he said, slowly, “you tell us so many stories about how things were. If I could carve something, I’d be part of the story, even though I’m not, really. Or. . . .” He lifted his fists and ground them against his closed eyes.

“Sann, you
are
the story. It’s yours, whether or not you carve or hear singing.” Sannesh felt hands on his hair, lips brushing his forehead. He heard his father rise and part the fur hanging. The waves were louder as he stood there in the opening. Then the hanging fell.

Sannesh did not sleep in the new silence. His father’s words often made him feel restless, larger than his own body. Now he was more than that: he was huge. Part of him wanted to get up and run into the waves, to swim and breathe where the water was calm—but he did not move. He lay on his side with his fingertips touching amber, thinking about a starmoth and the lines he might cut in stone to complete it.

When Nannia slipped in just before dawn, Sannesh was still awake. She groaned as she stretched out on her pallet. After that, she made no noise for so long that he thought she had fallen asleep.

“Carve a big clod of earth,” she said suddenly. “That’d be easy, even for you.”

“Be quiet,” he said, smiling, filling the rock house and all the night beyond like a thousand glowing wings.

Leish walked among the houses and the black pools that bubbled and spat. Some selkesh spoke his name as he passed; others simply held up their hands. The fossil stones that formed the outsides of the houses shone in the guttering light of the fires. The air still smelled of blackened fish. Leish breathed it in and thought again, as always, of Mallesh. Eight years ago he had set off swimming in search of fish. So he had said, in his almost wordless way, to Leish. He had never swum back again. There had been others through the years who had disappeared into the sea. Weak-bodied or weak-spirited, some selkesh said—but Leish imagined Mallesh going deeper and deeper into silence, and was not so sure.

The waves were very high, and Leish felt spray on his face and limbs long before he reached the shore. He stood where the water could find him, washing up and over his feet then back again to leave them cool and stinging. The shackle scar on his ankle ached in salt water even now. He lifted the foot and turned it gently round until it ached less.

“Is he asleep?” As she spoke, Dallia rubbed her palm across Leish’s back, over his other scars.

“No. Not yet.”

“And Nannia, is she back?”

Leish drew Dallia forward to stand beside him. She leaned into his arms. “Not yet,” he said, and chuckled as he felt her sigh.

After a time she said, “All the singing’s faint for me tonight, even the islands’. Can you still hear everything?”

He pressed his lips against her hair. “Yes,” he said. “All the same songs. Silences, too—old and new ones.”

She straightened and stretched. Her own scar was white, no longer purple. It was mostly hidden by her hair, except when she shook it back as she was doing now. When she turned to him and said, “Let’s swim this dust away before we check on the children,” he smiled and took her hand.

They walked against the waves until their feet found the rock shelf that divided shallow sea from deep. They stood up and balanced, their fingers and webs spread wide, nearly touching. The light from moon and water turned their skin to scales, to shell, to shades of moss and earth. A wave rolled past them. Dallia teetered and breathed and slipped away beneath. Leish waited. He heard laughter far behind him, tasted salt and wind and ash. Then the ocean rose to meet him, and he swam.

“Choose among the deeds of every queen,” my own Queen commanded me, “and craft for me one tome in which these will be documented. Do not linger overlong on any single queen, for the greatness of the line must be seen to have been shared equally.”

I have read tablets and scrolls and books. I have read every word chiselled or written about every queen of this realm since its beginning. My own parchment lies thick on the desk before me—and yet I cannot fulfill the task set me by my Queen. The queens’ deeds have not been equal in wisdom or majesty. I will never hold up my own time as a mirror to bygone eras. Such assertions would be untrue, and, even worse, deception.

Sarhenna was the First, and Galha was the Last: this I now know. Galha was the Last, and this realm has been sunk in the shadow of inconsequence ever since. She was a warrior queen, a ruler of passion and prowess. She was a learned queen, whose reign produced an unprecedented number of scribes and writings, both historical and contemporary. And after her? The ancient bloodline of the queens was broken. There were no more mindpowers, and no more resounding triumphs. The Queensrealm lost its hold on its northern and western borders. There were no more consort-scribes; the throne behind the queens’ now belongs to the princes, who neither record nor instruct. The Scribestower is nearly empty, for there are, in my time, but eight students (and only three of these show any promise). Some in the realm insist that the queen whose reign I have long attempted to document is as wise, in her way, as any of her predecessors. Some say that Luhr’s fountains and trees shine as brightly as they did in Galha’s time. I know this is not so. The children who sail their parchment boats in these fountains know this is not so. How, then, can I complete the book my Queen has demanded of me?

I will think more on this tomorrow. Tonight I will imagine myself a child again, listening to tales in the gentle place before sleep—for stories told in darkness are the only ones that shine.