Walls of Wind and the Occasional Diamond Thief Boxed Set

by Jane Ann McLachlan

  ***

  I wasn’t yet four when Savannis was lost in the lightning storm. I’d been attending storytime for a year and a half and knew most of the stories by heart. At night I lay on my mat repeating them to myself before I fell asleep. I hadn’t yet seen the storyteller’s cave, although I knew about it. Savannis had a map leading to it among his drawings.

  On the third day after his disappearance I followed it, telling no one. He was secretive about that map, angry when I’d accidentally come upon it. But I was desperate.

  He was air to me. The illness in my lungs released its hold when I slipped into his tales or lost myself in the colors of his paintings. I would have torn the dark and deadly world apart to find him.

  When they carried Savannis home from the river, he had me move in with him at once. Because Savannis was so sick and so insistent, the healer put aside the protests of the Bria present.

  I don’t know how my parent felt about it. I waited while Matri talked to him, both terrified and hopeful that he’d refuse. Afterwards he merely asked, “Is this what you want, Yur’i?” and somehow I found the courage to touch my breath.

  Matri helped me pack and carry my things to Savannis’s house: my sleeping mat and headroll, the medicinal herbs he boiled into a soothing tea when I had trouble breathing—although it rarely happened any more—my slingshot and a handful of smooth pebbles, the hunting knife my parent had given me. Gant’i had already carried my Ghen chair over, before his duty on the wall. At Savannis’s door Matri set down my things and bent to sign to me.

  “Listen to me, Yur’i.” He waited. I had to look into his eye, something I rarely did. Eyes are too honest; I didn’t want to know what they might tell me.

  “The way we are—Gant’i and me and you and Tyannis and Saft’ir—I wouldn’t have it any other way. I want you to know that.”

  I cringed a little inside. What did he mean? Did I want to know?

  “‘All things conspire for good on the Creator’s Wind.’ That saying used to annoy me, but I believe it now. The Creator Wind doesn’t make mistakes, Yur’i. Do you understand?”

  I touched my breath, a little uncertainly.

  He leaned forward and gently blew into my face. I blew back, trembling a little, beginning to regret my decision, but before I could speak he rose and coughed at Savannis’s door.

  ***

  At any moment of the day or night Savannis would call to me, remembering a story he might not have told me yet. Most of the stories I heard a dozen times and had already heard at storytime, yet not a word was changed between the tellings. Even when memory failed, Savannis wouldn’t change a tale, but stop signing completely, looking bewildered. Then he’d notice me and I’d continue the story until he nodded, comforted.

  All this time I was wild with impatience. When would he teach me to draw? When would I make paper shout and dance with image and color? At least now I could look freely at his drawings, thinking to myself how I might render similar scenes. Now and then, I examined the map to the mysterious cave, wondering what treasure it concealed. But I said nothing of any of this to Savannis, afraid he might change his mind and I might never learn to draw at all.

  It was almost stillseason when he was well enough to resume storytime. He showed me how to move his drawing stick through the sand to illustrate the stories.

  “You’ll get the feel of it,” he assured me. “It’s only to hold their attention. The stories are what matter, and you know them.” I felt deceptive, but how could I tell him now that it was the drawing I hungered for, even more than the stories?

  The Bria children trooped up while I was still practicing with the stick.

  “You saved Savannis’s life,” little Tibellis said through my womb-sibling Tyannis, just before Savannis began the first story.

  “No, of course not, how could I?” I signed for Tyannis to translate. “The healers saved him. I only found him.”

  “He found me because Wind led him to me,” Savannis said, signing as he spoke. He was reclining in the lounge from which he now told the stories. “And Wind led him to me because I was too blind to recognize the next storyteller without His intervention.”

  The Bria children sat perfectly still, staring at Savannis. If I had been surprised by Tibellis’s praise, it was nothing to their shock at seeing Savannis sign to them, and call me the next storyteller. He did not acknowledge their reaction in any way, but simply began the morning’s story.

  I drew the story as Savannis spoke and signed it, tracing the illustrations in the sand as he had taught me. They were not well done. Wind and sand together resisted the stick, which was too tall for me and shook in my unaccustomed hands. But Savannis nodded his approval. I was glad at least that Pandarris and his peers, all a year older than I, hadn’t come back to storytime after Savannis’s illness. These puzzled, younger faces watching me were difficult enough, without those scornful, older ones.

  Savannis insisted that I would be the next storyteller; insisted not only to the children but to the entire Bria-Ghen Council, who came to him in ones and twos when the parents began to complain. Finally, Council Chair and Chair Ghen visited. I waited outside the house to hear my fate, embarrassed that they might think I had presumed to be the Bria storyteller, but even more terrified they would disallow it. If they did, Savannis would never teach me to paint.

  After they left, Savannis called me inside. “They’ll debate it in Council,” he answered my anxious signs. “Don’t concern yourself about that. You are my apprentice, with or without their approval. As if they have any say when Wind has made His choice.”

  When storytime ended for stillseason, Savannis continued coaching me. By the time the wind returned I knew every story as well as he did, and I had begun to paint.

  The hardest part had been learning to hold the sharpened chalks and paint-brushes in my short, straight fingers, then to move them deftly across paper or cloth with just the right pressure to blush a cheek or darken an eye. Savannis taught me patiently what he knew. The rest I taught myself; shadows and spacing and depth, foreground and background, the difference between stillness and arrested movement, between calm and passion.

  Everywhere I looked, pictures jumped out at me. I painted in a fever, as though the integrity of each moment in time was threatened, and only I could hold it safe upon my paper. I saw all of us—but perhaps it was only I—balanced on the edge of chaos.

  ***

  “They are not all sitting in a row.” Savannis smiled at me before glancing back at my painting of a Council meeting. “But why are they so angry?”

  I looked at my painting again. My womb-parent’s mouth was open as though in protest, while councilor Briarris sat stiffly beside him, frowning. Council Chair’s hands were balled into fists in his lap and Chair Ghen gripped the arms of his seat, his extended claws piercing the wood. Extended claws? What had I drawn?

  “It’s not good,” I signed, crumpling it into a ball.

  “It’s good, Yur’i.” Savannis took the paper from me, smoothed it out, looking at it thoughtfully. “Perhaps it’s time I took you to the cave. You’ll be the storyteller then, whatever Council decides.

  Origins

  (Savannis)

  “Mind the rocks. They give sometimes here,” I signed to Yur’i as he scrambled up the slope after me.

  “We need to rest, Savannis. Listen to your breath.”

  His breath was as loud as mine, I considered telling him; then I reconsidered, and stopped and leaned upon my walking stick. Yur’i squatted on a large boulder staring at the ground, then shifted and looked backward down the steep incline we’d just ascended. Avoiding my eye.

  His eagerness when I proposed this trip has been replaced by nervousness. I have been too silent; he’s caught my mood. What should I say? Nothing will prepare him for what he will soon know.

  “I have a story to tell you,” I signed, sitting beside him on the wide, flat rock. He looked up, grinning a little.

  “It is a fright
ening story,” I cautioned. “I’ve never told it.” I looked past Yur’i, down the incline to where the dense ugappa forest began. I won’t come here again. Even in daytime when the forest is safe, the walk is too long, the climb too steep, the memories too bitter. I do not want to die here, in our past.

  “...A terrible story. But it has a good ending.” I forced myself to smile at him.

  He did not grin, but he met my gaze. I was proud of him then; I felt it like a cool wind racing through me.

  Where should I start? I began to sway slightly, and slipped into the sing-song of the storyteller, signing as I spoke.

  “Bria are not made to withstand violence. Born into a brutal world we are fragile, helpless. We would not survive without the Ghen—”

  He knew every word I said, but hearing the familiar calmed him. My hands itched for the drawing stick with which I illustrated all my stories, but I had only my heavy walking stick. The ground was rocky here at any rate, and soon enough there would be pictures for him.

  “...So goes the story of creation as I taught it to you.”

  He blinked at the abrupt change in my voice as I began to peel the sweet story away from the truth lying underneath, as hard and unpalatable as a fruit-stone.

  “What I didn’t tell you then is that Dayannis made the story; painted it on the wall of a distant, secret cave. He made it out of the nightmare of his youth, so hideous it nearly destroyed them all...” I paused. “Forgive me, Yur’i, for what I am about to show you.” I rose stiffly to my feet.

  “Dayannis made the story of creation?” Yuri signed.

  “While he painted, Wind moved his fingers, his charcoal, deep in the cave where there is no wind,” I replied. “As I have felt Wind moving my brush inside that cave. The Creator speaks through us.”

  “Will He speak through me?”

  Could the Wind speak to Bria through a Ghen? I chided myself for my doubt. Had He not chosen this child? “If you let Him,” I signed.

  I resumed the climb. Yur’i followed silently.

  Before long I could see the stark angle of rock ahead. “We’ll need wood for a fire,” I told Yur’i, gesturing at the scrub brush around us. He gathered an armful of branches and dry twigs while I rested, leaning over my stick. Then I led him around the protruding rock, stopping before a wide cappa bush.

  “No one knows of this cave. Heckt’er himself rolled those stones to block the entrance, leaving only one small opening behind this bush.” I turned to him, feeling a guilty joy at the prospect of surrendering my burden.

  “Do you remember the time I used the end of a fire-log to draw a picture on the stone beside my house? Yes? I thought you would. You cried when the rain washed it away. I should have known then you were the one.” I paused. But self-recrimination serves no use, and I continued. “Inside this cave, where neither the wind nor the rain can erase them, Dayannis drew pictures of our people’s past.

  “Whatever is not in these paintings is lost, vanished into dreams and fears and prejudices. Just as our unmoving Bria eye requires motion to see the present, our shifting memories require stillness—the stillness of these paintings—to see the past.

  “Bring the wood you’ve gathered and come inside.”

  ***

  I swayed in the small, dark cave, waiting to become accustomed to the stillness. The other caves where the Bria had once lived had wider entrances facing into the wind. This one was narrow and its opening blocked. But I had learned to endure its stillness.

  I took the wood from Yur’i and began to arrange it within the small circle of stones in the center of the cave. I found my way easily in the darkness, as familiar with this cave as with my own home. Reaching into the pouch at my side, I lifted from its clay nest a glowing, moss-wrapped coal and set it among the smallest twigs. Yur’i bent and blew upon it gently.

  “I’ve seen you watch me drawing stories in the sand,” I signed to him as we waited for the fire to catch. “I’ve seen you smile as the pictures flow like voices from my stick and move in the breeze, sand sifting over earth as the wind blows over Wind. I’ve also seen you frown, watching the lines of meaning shift away. No other child frowns into the wind. Do not protest, child. I’m not accusing you of anything. These are the signs of a storyteller.” Again I felt my guilt, and shook it off. The wind blows on.

  A tiny spark leaped up at the edge of a twig. Yur’i fanned it and it grew, spreading along the fragile twig, seeking sustenance.

  I stared into the dark recess of the cave. “They watched their parents dying while they ate.”

  Yur’i looked up, aware that I had spoken but unable to understand my words. I beckoned and he rose, following me to the paintings nearer the cave entrance. I didn’t show him the one that I’d begun. We would discuss that later, since he would have to finish it for me. I showed him the paintings of the stories he already knew, of Garn’ar and Riattis and Jan’ar and all the others, painted when they occurred, by generations of storytellers.

  “They were real!” he signed excitedly.

  The fire was brighter now. I motioned him to add more branches and led him further down the wall, to the earlier pictures.

  “This is our walled city, before it was built. Dayannis painted this to show Heckt’er his vision; a place of beauty and safety, where Bria and Ghen could live together. It came to him in a dream as clearly as you see it on this wall.”

  He stared at the painting in reverence, as though he could see Dayannis’s hand stroking lines onto the bleak rock wall. I waited, giving him time to savor this moment. But I had much to tell him, and we still had a long journey home before dusk made the way too dangerous.

  “I must tell you about Dayannis’s paintings as they were told to me,” I signed. “As they have been told to every storyteller through the ages, back to the time when Dayannis himself spoke to the first storyteller.” I waited until he touched his breath. Then I began in a voice no longer my own, but Dayannis’s, signing as I spoke.

  “In my dream I was running, fleeing through the forest, alone, lost, terrified. It was stillseason and night. I was blind in the motionless woods, nauseous and breathless and dizzy. I ran desperately, breaking branches, stumbling over rocks, falling on tree roots and leaping up again, blood on my hands, my legs, my arms... Will I ever be free of blood?

  “Behind me, closer and closer, I heard the hot, insane shriek of the predator frenzied for its prey. I felt it, like a devouring darkness at my back and I ran, blind and sick and hopeless.

  “Then, as I threw myself between two tall ugappas, they moved together, tightening against each other. They reached out their branches and drew other trees to them, until the sense of safety at my back stopped me.

  “I turned and watched with amazement as tree after tree tilted and bowed and shifted into line until I was surrounded by a circle of ugappas, their leaves tossing and rustling with laughter despite stillseason. Outside their strange protection monsters raged in confusion. I walked around the circle touching my garrison of ugappas and I felt invincible. I knew then what Bria were meant to be: the soft and treasured heart of a wild, young world that had only begun to dream of civilization.”

  I paused. Yur’i looked intently at the picture Dayannis had painted of his dream, the walls of ugappa rising from the forest to shield our homes, where children, Bria and Ghen, played safely in the open wind. At length he looked up, fascinated to be hearing a new story.

  “At that time our ancestors lived near here, in two large caves further up the escarpment, one for Bria and one for Ghen. Heckt’er told the Ghen about Dayannis’s wall and they began to build it.”

  I slipped back into Dayannis’s voice: “All the Bria, except for me and the younger children, were dying. Dying from the sight of too much death, from the callousness of a barbarous world, from the horror that filled their souls in place of hope. I thought they were dying; I did not understand that they were already dead, that they were waiting only until their infants were old enough to be weaned. I
painted this picture for them. But it was already too late; they never saw safety.”

  “What happened to them?” Yur’i signed, his nervousness returning. He turned, looking toward the front of the cave as though he contemplated leaving. I resisted the urge to apologize again. He had to know. I touched his arm.

  “Are you ready to know the truth about our past?”

  I waited for him to touch his breath. Finally he did, a small movement, made without looking at me.

  I remembered my earlier concerns about him. He carried a secret burden already. I had questioned him about it but gotten nowhere. I suspected that the experience occurred so early in his childhood he’d forgotten it, and remembered only some sense of loss, or failure. Was I right to place another burden on him? But it was too late for misgivings, we were already here.

  “You must guard this truth and never speak of it. Hide it beneath the gentler stories that you will tell the children when I am gone.” I waited till he glanced at my face; waited still, until he touched his breath once again.

  “You will see the truth in Dayannis’s paintings.”

  The flame of our fire was dying down. I went over and put more branches on it. Then I led him to the very back of the cave, to the first painting of all. It was smaller than the others, its lines more hesitant, as though drawn by a child’s hand. The detail was missing, but it was clearly the work of a budding artist.

  “Dayannis is young in this first painting, four years old,” I signed. “His sibling died at birth, as many did then.”

  Yur’i started and backed away, turning from me. I remembered that Tyannis’s sibling—Yur’i’s womb-sibling, in their family language—had also died. I waited. He didn’t turn back for me to continue until I touched his shoulder.

  “Do you want to be the storyteller, Yur’i?”

  He understood my meaning but he hesitated. For a moment I was afraid he would change his mind. I noticed then how he trembled and panted for air, and I hesitated myself. Then I thought, Wind has chosen him.