Walls of Wind and the Occasional Diamond Thief Boxed Set
Page 15
I should break this one. I only maintain it because of the children’s parents. They were upset enough when Yur’i joined their younglings at storytime, with Tyannis translating. Such a furor about sharing Bria stories, you’d think they cared about them!
Rather, they didn’t want their children to see womb-siblings signing to each other, an unheard-of practice. Even the word “womb-siblings” shocked them. Tyannis invented it, implying a whole new relationship between Ghen and Bria. Unfortunately, none but Tyannis saw that relationship.
Hypocrites! They didn’t really care about the intimacy of sharing a language only with their joined mate. That tradition, meant to keep a joined pair together, is unnecessary now that we live in a civilized manner. What was intended as a bridge, they now use as a barrier. But if I push them too far...
Tyannis brought me a cup of tea and some bread from my cupboard. He fidgeted as I took a sip of the sweet, hot liquid. Such an active child, trying so hard to pretend he didn’t long to run outside. His parent is very religious. Perhaps too intense at times, but that’s understandable. And it has had good effect upon these two. Who do they remind me of? Let me see, which story was that...?
“Yes, child? Ah, my tea.” I lifted it to my lips. It was cool, but I drank it anyway. I wish they had brought it to me when it was still hot.
“Would you like to go?”
Tyannis hesitated, too polite to say “yes” outright.
“Run along.”
Yur’i looked up as Tyannis moved toward the door. He’d been examining the paintings on my walls. How did they look, from his two-eyed perspective? Could he have done better if he had the long, jointed fingers to hold my paintbrushes?
To me the paintings were exquisite with meaning, but now, viewing them objectively, they appeared flat, motionless. You cannot paint the wind into a picture. It didn’t bother me that other Bria would never look at them; they weren’t like the moving, three-dimensional sculptures or the flowing fabric art of our artists. They were memories, nothing else. Yet I relied upon them more and more.
“Do you want to stay?” I signed to Yur’i as he shifted to follow Tyannis. He nodded, his eyes downcast, only glancing sideways briefly at me.
There is something about this child that worries me. Why won’t he meet my eye? It’s more than the shyness of being forced into a strange culture; that much I would expect. The little Ghen bears a heavy stillness, but he is secretive about it, as though ashamed of something. Ah, the burdens of childhood. I must talk to Mick’al about him. I keep forgetting.
I waved Yur’i over to a large stack of papers: my pictures, rough drafts mainly, for the few that I turned into paintings.
“Look at them. What do you see?”
He examined the first one. “The Ghen-Bria Council.”
“Do you like it?”
“I like paintings.”
“But?”
“They’re... flat. Everyone is sitting all in a row.”
“Of course they look that way.” Was I hoping for praise?
He lifted the top one, looked quickly at me for permission, set it aside at my shrug and examined the second picture. He was silent a long time, looking at it.
“Well?” I asked finally. At the sound of my voice he turned, his jaws open in a wide, fang-studded grin.
“Ah, you like this one?” I signed.
“It makes me feel sick,” he signed back happily.
“Yes.” I leaned back. The painting was of stillseason. “That’s how we feel, without the wind.” He touched his breath and returned to his examination of the pictures. I closed my eye.
My pictures were all like stillseason; they are pauses in the wind of time, a single moment flattened onto paper, a little death. Any yet, without them, all that I have struggled to remember and teach the children would be lost...
***
I woke in alarm. Who was that in my house? A gray-scaled Ghen! Going through my things while I slept!
“What are you doing?”
He looked up quickly. I peered more closely at him. He returned my pictures to the table and took a limping step toward me. Ah, Yur’i. I repeated my question in signs, my motions sharp, agitated.
“Looking at your pictures,” he signed back. On the top of the pile I could see my map to the cave.
“Who told you you could look at those?” Could I not even take a nap with-out being invaded in my home, my secrets disturbed?
“You did,” he signed, the surprise so clear on his face I could not doubt him.
“I did no such thing,” I signed back, anyway. “Go home now.”
My irritation was not with him but with myself, at my forgetfulness. Fear rose in me, a bitter taste on my breath. Parts of my life were disappearing. The faces of the children I have taught, the stories of my life, even as I paint them, blink on and off like sputtering oil lamps, beyond my control. Yesterday, halfway through a story, I lost the thread of it. The children sat waiting, whispering, finally giggling.
I looked down into my lap, hiding my panic, thinking of the cave. Desperately I ran through it in my mind, seeking the lost story, clutching to me what little I could salvage, always less and less, my people’s stories, my very self, like water falling through my fingers. Blind! The eye of my people is going blind!
I wept for my failure, wept for my people. I wept all the more because they didn’t know enough to weep for themselves. They don’t see the gathering blindness that is descending upon them.
The whispering, the giggling hushed. Small bodies pressed forward, small hands patted me, tender little lips blew on my withered cheeks. “Don’t cry, Savannis, don’t cry.” “I love you, Savannis,” and a chorus of “I love you’s” rose timidly around me.
Then a small voice piped up, “Jan’ar went out to fight the terrible courrant’h that had killed so many hunters...”
Jan’ar, of course. Jan’ar. But who had spoken? Tyannis. He faltered as I looked at him, but I nodded eagerly. And then he looked at Yur’i, who signed to him.
“Jan’ar took five triads of hunters with him, but it was Jan’ar who...”
***
That night, the wind paused.
It is possible that for a moment in my sleep I held my breath and thought the whole world stopped. But I am the Voice of Wind, attuned to stillness even more than other Bria. In that momentary interval I woke, knowing.
How long had I known, not admitting it? Like layers of gauze, forgetfulness has settled on me, slowly, irritating at first, then a growing distraction, gathering weight and darkness until it bears me down, a shroud, leaving me blind, breathless, gasping in the vacuum of a mind that was once rich and wise and powerful.
I am the storyteller, the memory of the Bria! Where will they find their past when I have lost it, misplaced it in the relentless twilight, creeping like poison over my mind? Ignorance will reclaim them, all the more terrible for their veneer of civilization.
Whether the world trembled or only I, that tremble wakened me. I lay in my bed motionless with fear. I was intensely aware of the cold midseason wind raging in through every open window to soothe my ruffled fur. My house shook in the night storm, but that single second of breathless hesitation now made the wind’s jubilant boisterousness seem mere bluster. Will I be the last storyteller?
The cave! I must go to the cave. All of my stories are there. I will see my stories in the cave where past and present meet, see and remember and take them back to the children who will not giggle and whisper, but will listen. And one of them will rise and take my stick in his small hands and draw with me, when I have remembered the stories, when I have told them so well that they call out to the next Bria storyteller to draw our past in the sands of our city, to trace it in the hearts of Bria children, the children of Wind.
I rose and hurried into the night. I didn’t need the map. Even now, old and frail and pursued by shadows inside and out, still I know my way to the cave. I could feel my feet growing younger, smaller, the feet
of a small child hurrying after Larissis, who is leading me for the first time to his cave. My cave now.
The tempest raged through the forest. Trees shook in its path as if to jar the darkness from me as I stumbled forward, clutching branches for support, relishing the wild wind, the strong living breath of Wind.
Lightning illuminated the night, surprising me. How many years had passed since the last lightning storm? I should have been afraid, but instead I was reassured. I took it as a sign from the Creator that there would still be time for memory to light the black recesses of my mind and shake our history into a child’s cupped hands.
Bolts of lightning hit the earth, like the outstretched fingers of the Creator Wind, touching the heart of His creation and lighting my way. Ahead of me I had a long walk through the woods, then a slow crossing over the slippery rocks barely rising above the swollen Sorran river, and a wearying climb up the steep, rocky slope of the escarpment, before I could rest at last.
I was halfway over the Sorron, balanced precariously erect between two mossy boulders amid the rampaging current, when the lightning struck. Brilliance and beauty and pain flamed through me in a single instant, intense, excruciating.
With a flick of His finger, Wind tossed me into the cold and savage current. I gasped in air, and water, and air; I was battered against rock, swept into eddies and tiny, frantic whirlpools until at last I was caught in a net of branches reaching out from a fallen tree lying half-submerged across the river. The cold water had quickly put out the fire that burned through me, but I was bleeding and raw under my scorched fur, and breathless from my wild ride. More dead than alive, I crawled through the jagged branches and pulled myself onto the rough bark of the horizontal tree trunk. I was grateful when oblivion closed over my agony.
I don’t know how long I lay there, darkness and light washing over me in alternating rhythms, a slow tempo to the counterpoint of pain flowing and ebbing with the tide of my heart. The tree rested in the water, higher toward its base, still rooted in the riverbank. I lay on my back along the top of it, so that from the chest down I was almost submerged in the cool water. Occasionally the wind would fling a spray of liquid into my face to slack my thirst. A number of the leaf-stripped branches which had rescued me stood like the spokes of a crib to guard my sleep. Feverish and delirious with pain I drifted in and out of consciousness while Wind itself held me and bathed me and healed me.
Even so, I would have died. Held in a crucible of agony I retreated, back through the stories of my life and the stories of my people, back and back and back to the dawn of consciousness. Slower and slower flowed the stories in my mind until, like a setting sun, I hung balanced in the moment between day and night...
The grunting of an animal intruded into that trembling moment before my final descent. Its guttural sounds came closer, tipping me at first toward night then, as recognition slowly dawned, inching me back up to consciousness. Guttural noises, repetitive, pitched in the keening cry of a child’s sorrow. Not a Bria sound, not Bria to Bria like the passing of a lamp from hand to similar hand. Not what I wanted, but what I was given. The hard, furless touch of a Ghen. Wrong, all wrong.
And then, his small, dissimilar hands in mine, shortened Ghen fingers gently moved my fingers. Up and down in a strange rhythm, over and over until the repetition reached me. Patient and urgent, both, he moved my fingers: Savannis, Savannis, come back. Come back, Savannis! Come back and teach me, Savannis!
Yes, I tried to whisper. A cooling spray of water touched my face. I licked my parched and silent lips. Cupping his little hands and dipping them into the river, Yur’i lifted the clear water and tipped it into my mouth. I swallowed, fluttering my hands. He reached for them.
“Yes,” I signed. And gently, carefully, I cupped his small Ghen hands together inside mine; the hands that would next hold the memories of the Bria.
Council Relations
(Briarris)
“Savannis makes his own decisions,” I repeated. “The storyteller has always chosen his successor, without interference from Council.”
I might as well have been talking in stillseason. I’d already argued the issue in closed-Council; I had little hope of changing their minds now, in open session. Not with a crowd of Bria sitting in the public gallery, making their opposition clear. Anarris was there, but his group was only a fraction of the protesters. Yur’i would not be recognized as Savannis’s apprentice while Darillis was Council Chair.
Darillis was afraid. The increasing menace of the white Broghen unnerved him. The questioning look in every Bria eye left him breathless. The crowds that came to Council demanding that customs be upheld and those that came demanding they be set aside, equally frightened him. Like a plague, I’d watched his hysteria infect the other councilors.
I felt it myself. And we councilors weren’t the only ones affected. Now this: a Ghen as the spiritual advisor of the Bria? What was Savannis thinking? If ever we needed to hear from Wind, it was now. But He would have to speak to us through Bria lips. A part of me wondered, could one set conditions upon one’s Creator?
But that was not why I spoke up. I spoke up because it was I who had insisted Yur’i be allowed to attend story time. How could I not defend what I had set in motion?
At any rate, there were more urgent issues before us. Last year, seven Ghen had died on the expedition to the south. Childless Bria had responded with indifference or scorn at the inexplicable and dangerous activities of Ghen. Those who had given birth and knew what the Ghen had met up with in the south resented the reminder of something they’d rather forget.
The Ghen, in turn, were embittered by these reactions, frustrated at being unable to exonerate their dead. We’d discussed the growing tensions in closed-Council, but what could we do? We were the only Bria who knew the real reason behind the excursion to the south, and we couldn’t tell what we knew.
At least no white Broghen had been discovered. It wasn’t our own striking back at us. Our relief was immense, if short-lived. Ten days after the Ghen returned, a white Broghen attacked our walls, severely wounding a young, unjoined Ghen. He lived, but now could never mate. Then, in stillseason, two more attacks occurred. With the sadu’hs hibernating in their burrows and the anhad’hs migrated to the south, game was scarce in the forest and wetlands. The night guards had been tripled, and only Ghen who had already parented were allowed to take night duty.
When stillseason ended, Igt’ur told me that some of the Ghen were suggesting infant Broghen be destroyed. We were in the habit of meeting two or three removes before Council began, and were walking along the banks of the Symba. His comment shocked me. I stopped in my tracks. He waited, his face impassive. I realized I wasn’t as shocked as I wished I was.
“I can hardly bear to know I birthed one of those things,” I confessed to him. “To think that it may be out there, waiting to devour us...” I bent my head.
After a long moment, Igt’ur signed to me, “Would you be happier knowing otherwise?”
I looked up from his hands into his face. He held his calm expression, but we’d been joined for eight years, now; I’d learned to read his face. In that moment I wondered if I knew him at all.
“I don’t think I’d like to know that, either,” I signed, my hands shaking.
***
Officially, courrant’hs were blamed for the attacks on our wall. Young Bria began treating Ghen with more respect. A courant’h at one’s doorstep is intimidating.
But every Bria who’d given birth knew, or suspected, that it wasn’t courrant’hs stalking us. Few spoke of it, but in almost every eye I saw a mixture of horror and guilt: is it mine? Is it my own flesh that has come hungering for us?
No one said it out loud. Even so, young Bria were affected by the tension in their parents. The secret was bound to come out. One could explain away deaths on a distant expedition, but even young Bria began to question these recurring attacks upon our walls. A sense of approaching disaster hovered over the city.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Perallis argued; just the opening I was looking for.
“We must send a second expedition to the mountains, as we planned.”
“No!” Darillis’s voice was shrill. “We need the Ghen here, defending us. If one of those... those things... gets in—” he rushed from the room, unable to continue. This was the third time closed-Council ended thus.
Then a young Bria killed himself the day after giving birth. And on the morning the new Ghen parents left to take their hideous burden south, a crowd of Bria grandparents spontaneously assembled before dawn at the gate in the wall to watch them leave, even though stillseason was not yet fully over.
The silence was heavier than the air in stillseason; so oppressive that even the hungry infant Broghen were hushed. Darillis was called, but he refused to come. Only after the last Ghen had passed through the gate and disappeared into the forest, did the silent throng disburse.
Is there anything more corrosive than shame?
Secrets
(Yur’i)
“I’m too young to die!”
One of my earliest memories is crying that out to my parent. Something had brought on one of my attacks of breathlessness and as I struggled to draw air into my aching lungs, I somehow found the strength to protest.
“Don’t be silly,” my parent replied. To him it was obvious that I wasn’t suffocating, but the episode had come up so quickly it overwhelmed me. I was seized with a panic so profound that even now I feel it and cannot bear to recall the incident too closely.
I remember thinking then, with absolute certainty, that life was fragile, capricious beyond our control. And that I had already failed.