Walls of Wind and the Occasional Diamond Thief Boxed Set

by Jane Ann McLachlan

  At last he touched his breath.

  “It all began with the drought and the terrible famine that followed. Bria ate meat in those days; the Ghen hunted and brought it to them.” I glanced at Yur’i. He was not as shocked to learn that as I had been. I turned back to the painting.

  “This is Dayannis’s playmate, Sharris. He is three here, too little to understand what is beginning. He’s reaching eagerly for his small piece of meat. The Bria tending the fire are young, too, pregnant or nursing parents. They were permitted to eat to nourish their infants. So young themselves, in such a terrible time.”

  My breath caught. They had not looked so young when I first saw this painting, still emerging from childhood myself. I wanted to touch the painting, to stroke these lost children, as though my pity could reach through time and comfort them.

  “We were not allowed to give our parents food.” I resumed in Dayannis’s voice, reciting the story as it had been told to me, and signing as I spoke. “We seldom spoke, even after the meat was eaten and the Ghen had left, and when we did it was mostly in tearful whispers to our matris who came to console us, as long as they could.

  “This is my matri, sitting with the others behind the row of Ghen. Not that the Ghen were needed to hold them back from the cooking meat. None of the parents would have taken food from their children. The Ghen gave us something to blame while we ate what little food they could bring us.

  “I am looking at my matri in this picture, and holding my piece of meat in my hands. ‘Eat it, Dayannis,’ he said.

  “‘Eat it, Dayannis.’ The sound of his voice and the taste of that meat are one to me, beautiful and terrible, the sound and the taste of living and dying interwoven; that which nurtures and that which kills. My mouth was so dry that I choked but I wanted food so badly my hands shook. I accepted the flesh that died to sustain me, meat and matri both.

  “I wept as I ate. We all did. The parents wept with hunger and the fear of dying, and with pity for their children; the children wept with guilt. Even the Ghen were weeping, because the drought had driven the game away, or killed and rotted it; because they thought they’d failed themselves and us.

  “We ate because we could not stop ourselves when the Ghen put meat into our hands; because our bellies cried out louder than our tears; and finally, because we needed the strength to bury our parents.

  “We wept until we had no more tears to shed, until our eyes and our hearts were as dry and lifeless as the drought-ridden land. More terrible than all our tears were the days when we no longer wept.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to control the shaking of my hands as I signed, to stop the tears rolling silently down my face. Yur’i stood very still, panting for breath. The air on the escarpment was thin; I was panting myself, caught up in the horror of those children. But I remembered that Yur’i was Ghen.

  “Later Dayannis learned that the older Ghen refused to eat, also,” I told him. “They hunted for as long as they had strength and gave it all to the younger Ghen to share with the Bria. Only the best of the older hunters ate, and only because their skills were needed.”

  Yur’i watched my signing but would not look at my face. I had no choice but to trust the Creator Wind, and continue.

  “Heckt’er was born with me from the womb of my parent. There was never a time I did not know him. We played together as infants until we were weaned and he was old enough to leave my parent. I hadn’t been separated from him for more than a month when the drought began and he crept back in secret. My parent held us both against the gathering dark.

  “Many Ghen were killed fighting Broghen at that time. See this shadow at the entrance to our cave? The Broghen also suffered from the drought. They also hungered and found the forest hunting poor. The Broghen returned from their wild wandering, and we were their prey.

  “We huddled, still with terror, in our cave, caught between the sighs of our dying parents and the shadows of Ghen and Broghen battling over us; one for our flesh, the other for our wombs. Deeper and deeper into the cave we moved, and further from the wind of clarity, into distortion.

  “When the drought ended, when the game returned and the grasses and the birds, the wild roots, the berries and the nuts, when it all returned, we were alone. We were a band of orphans with only three seasons of young adults nursing infants, too traumatized themselves to deal with us.

  “Often we slept on the graves of our parents.”

  I paused, almost able to feel the bone-chilling cold of that unnatural bed. I found myself shivering and motioned to Yur’i to add more branches to the fire. I saw that he was shaking as he did so.

  “Heckt’er consoled Dayannis when his matri died,” I signed to Yur’i. “Here he is in this next picture sitting beside Dayannis, his hand on Dayannis’s shoulder. Look at him first, before you look at the next painting. I can only look at it after I have looked at them finding some comfort together. Perhaps they started signing then. There must have been a time when it began, but Dayannis did not paint it.”

  I gave him time to look at it before slipping back into Dayannis’s voice. “We were all children, weak from a year and a half of near-starvation, sick to our souls from burying our parents, Ghen and Bria alike, and terrified that the Broghen, having finally withdrawn into the forests, might at any moment return. And so they did, from time to time, in the dark of the night. One seeks one’s own. We understood that. We, like the Broghen, no longer knew the difference between loving and feeding.

  “But we wanted to. We gathered berries and nuts, we cooked the wild roots and legumes, and sprinkled in the tender fronds of silis for flavor. We would no longer eat the meat Ghen brought us; we wanted to forget the taste of death.

  “At night, when the Broghen hunted, we huddled at the back of our cave behind our fires, far from the friendly wind, and tried to sleep while Ghen walked the entrance guarding us. We tried to heal, and we might have done so...

  “But then the pregnant Bria gave birth.”

  “There is a little wind in this picture.” I motioned Yur’i closer to see it more clearly. “It moves across a full season. Here, in the corner, Heckt’er and Dayannis are squatting with the other children, waiting to eat. Such a small puff of wind, like a moment of sleep between night terrors. A single green season between the drought and the time of that birthing.

  “Ghen didn’t attend births in those days. Bria parents took their pregnant children to the birthing cave and assisted them there. But all the parents and grandparents who would have led the young Bria, at the breaking of womb-water, into the birthing cave, lay dead in their graves.”

  Yur’i was panting for air again. I remembered how I had felt, hearing all this for the first time. Should I take him outside? But we still had a long trip home.

  “Shall I continue, Yur’i?” I signed. He gasped beside me, but did not answer. Nor did he turn away. I took that as assent.

  “The pregnant Bria probably knew they should go to the birthing cave. Most certainly their parents told them to, before they died; warned them of what to expect, how to prepare. They must have been too terrified to believe it, or else remembered only the word ‘Broghen’ and could not bring them-selves to go alone and helpless and in pain into the birthing cave. And so they just lay down on the floor among the other children. Here, in the middle of this second painting, you can see them.”

  I meant to explain the painting to Yur’i myself, but could not bear to continue that way. I had to slip back into Dayannis’s narrative, as I had learned it. I had to tell it as a story.

  “This one is dead. See the two infant Broghen sitting on his corpse? The first has bitten through its own umbilical cord and attacked the second, which does not know whether to chew its cord and breathe, or kill its sibling. There another, having no one to birth it, is emerging through the gaping wound it tore out of the Bria’s flesh for its escape.

  “Here is a Bria crazed at the sight of his Broghen newborn tearing the fragile body of his Bria infant. He
re a nursing Bria holds his youngling above the hungry jaws of a two-day-old Broghen, while his still-nursing Ghen turns to attack, his mouth still wet with milk. Not so the Broghen infant: its mouth is wet with blood.

  “This Bria has left his own infants to attend the fearful birthings. See how his arms are bitten and scratched from pulling the infant Broghen aside, how his eye turns to seek his own unguarded younglings huddled at the back of the cave with the rest of us, wide-eyed and screaming, screaming, screaming!

  “We screamed for days, screamed and whimpered and huddled in tearful, exhausted sleep and woke to the hot breath and the fierce pain of tearing infant Broghen teeth and screamed again!

  “Between our screams, we heard those who had birthed the monstrous Broghen crying out to their dead parents, begging their forgiveness, believing in their delirium that this was their retribution.

  “And yet, hideous as they were, these were their babies. The conflict of emotions tore them apart as much as the sharp little teeth of their terrifying offspring.

  “Heckt’er and the nursing Ghen children struggled to defend us, but they were no match for the demented Broghen erupting into predatory life straight from the womb. The older Bria by now were throwing themselves in the path of the Broghen, crying their remorse, as though the Broghen could tear their guilt from them along with their flesh.

  “At last the Ghen in their distant cave, coming to deliver the food they had gathered for us, beheld us in our bloody and terrible chaos.

  “They killed the Broghen. Before our eyes they killed them, savage and merciless in their unschooled youth, the oldest of them no older than any of us. They pushed aside the Bria who tried to stop them, not knowing that they were shedding their own blood, not understanding why we shrank from them, why killing adult Broghen was different from destroying these small savages still wet from our wombs, blind and desperate and hungry but even so, our offspring: ours and theirs.

  “We watched as they were murdered in front of us, and we moved into a place beyond screaming.

  “We lived in that silent place for a long time. We almost stopped moving, except when it was necessary. One by one, the pregnant Bria killed themselves.

  “We understood. We were even grateful. Death was more real to us than life. Silent and still, we all felt the pull of death. It called to us in the voices of our starved parents, our dead or dying friends, our slaughtered, monstrous infants.

  “Here at the end of this picture you can see us as we were then. No more tears, no more screams. Just silence. Only a single flicker lights the campfire on this side of the picture. A single ember aglow. One more drop of blood would have licked it out.

  “See the Ghen standing here in the corner while all the Bria of mating age huddle in the back of the cave? See the sharpened rock in this one’s hand? It is stillseason again, after two years of dying. Had even one Ghen approached that group of Bria, they would have killed themselves.

  “Even the infant Ghen were shunned. Unweaned, they stumbled to the cave entrance where they were gathered in by the Ghen and taken to their caves. The youngest ones surely died, not yet able to chew and swallow meat.

  “I tried to stop it but the nursing Bria shrank in revulsion from their infant Ghen, whimpering in my arms, as though they were Broghen. I could not reach them, they were so filled with nightmares.

  “The ashes of too much death lay heaped about us, smothering us. How still we sit, waiting for the wind to blow away the ashes of our desecrated childhood, to relieve us of the guilt of living.”

  Beside me, I heard Yur’i gasping for breath. But the past held me too tightly; he was less real to me than Dayannis, now.

  “Of all the older children, only I healed,” I continued in Dayannis’s absent voice, signing automatically, as though the movements were part of the story. “It was not that I grieved less for my parent, or that I had feared less giving birth to Broghen. No, but I painted some of the horror out of my soul. And I had Heckt’er. I learned, through his signing, of his own sorrow and the sorrow of all the young Ghen.

  “They had never seen infant Broghen before. They had arrived to see a horde of vicious predators attacking Bria in a cave of blood and death and they reacted. I trusted Heckt’er and I understood him. You cannot hate what you understand.

  “Here in this painting I am surrounded by the children. Those who were too young to remember the horrors of the past two years came to me happily; those who remembered, came to me desperately. They left their parent’s breasts as soon as they were full and came to blow on my face with their milky lips. Each breath blew more of the ashes from my heart.

  “I told them stories of hope, of Bria children whose parents were not troubled. Stories of Bria who did not fear to roam, who even played with Ghen, as Heckt’er and I had played. As we played still, for we were barely leaving childhood ourselves, though it seemed we had lost it long ago. I tried to prevent another generation of Bria from hating Ghen.

  “But there I failed. For now and then, their parents also talked. They talked about Ghen with tremors in their voices, shrank from Ghen with horror on their faces, whispered of Ghen in their sleep: Ghen who had starved their parents in front of them, Ghen who had killed their infants in front of them, Ghen who were all murderers!

  “I had my drawings to tell me the truth; they had their fear and their guilt to tell them otherwise. The children came to me for love, but they believed their parents.”

  I turned and looked into the fire, as though it could burn away the bitter past. Yet it was I who guarded it, maintained it. I had become Dayannis, just as Larissis did when he brought me here. It is the weakness and the strength of a storyteller, to enter his stories so fully that they are more real to him than he is himself.

  “And I had my own nightmares to deal with. I dreamed of all of us old and dying childless, our unborn infants dead within our wombs, for lack of mating.

  “I dreamed of Heckt’er and the young Ghen in their distant cave, who had done their best to save us; dreamed them old and despairing, not knowing the reason for their rejection.

  “I dreamed of Broghen waiting in the forests, howling their victory in dissonant shrieks above the music of the endless wind. And I dreamed of Wind, its woods and mountains and waters.

  “I dreamed of restless young Wind and of its failure to nurture thought. Perhaps it was the Creator, bending over Wind, who sent my dreams, who whispered into my nights for love of Wind.”

  I stared at the painting, gripped by the past, as always. After a few moments I continued signing.

  “At first Dayannis denied his dreams. He couldn’t overcome his fear. No Bria, knowing the truth of childbirth, would willingly face it. Furthermore, there were no parents or grandparents to help him; he would be utterly alone in his birthing. No, he refused!

  “And then he dreamed his answer. He saw himself leaving the Bria cave to go with Heckt’er into the birthing cave. He saw Heckt’er leave the Ghen to live with him there until he bore his Bria younglings and Heckt’er’s Ghen child.

  “He saw the Bria children who loved him creeping from their parents’ cave to hear his stories and to see how Ghen and Bria could live together. He saw them playing with his and Heckt’er’s younglings and forgetting all they had heard of the birth of Broghen. It was in the birthing cave, where Dayannis lived with Heckt’er after their first mating, that Dayannis dreamed the dream of the walled city and Heckt’er began to build it.

  “He dreamed his dreams of hope in the night while by day he buried every Bria old enough to remember their terrible past.

  “Sharris died last. Bria are not made to withstand violence.”

  I shivered in the fire-warmed cave, looking at the paintings of our primitive past.

  “Heckt’er attended Dayannis’s birthing. Heckt’er spared the fearsome infant Broghen of their mating, releasing it into the forest far away. That is our atonement and our salvation; that we forbear to shed the unhappy blood of Bria and Ghen.”


  I took a deep breath and began the final chant, back in Dayannis’s voice. I swayed with weariness as I signed.

  “This is the story of our people, the story of our city, recorded in the paintings in this cave. It must not be forgotten. How easily it could be destroyed! Three swipes of a sadu’h pelt across the walls and a portion of our past would be erased as though it never happened, and Bria would walk once more through the days of our lifetimes blind to all but our immediate sensations. We would move from birth to death as a bird lying on the wind moves, knowing nothing but nest and food and the demands of our young, one life lived by all, over and over; the life of the body, the life of beings without thought.

  These pictures lift us above the current of our blood that moves us at its whim. Many Bria fear the gift these pictures give us, the gift of decision, of choices, the gift of the knowledge of time. So I have hidden them for you to guard.

  “Always remember the faces of the young Bria, pregnant with their brood, after they had seen Broghen. Always remember the extremity such knowledge drove them to. So we must wait, telling our younglings only that the Broghen live beyond the wall, but never how they come there.

  “You will guard this cave when I am gone. You will remember our past and paint our present and dream new dreams of our future. Step by step, like the small puffs of a summer breeze, we will give an answer to the Creator. We will tame His wild Wind.”

  I stood, staring silently for the last time at the gruesome drawings of our past. I was both saddened and relieved now that I had discharged my final duty. Would Yur’i understand why it was so important to remember? Even I longed to forget.

  I turned, becoming aware at last of his desperate breathing. He took a step toward me before his legs crumpled. I caught him as he fell and staggered out of the cave, ignoring the lacerations his scales made across my arms as I carried him.

  “Forgive me,” I begged, as I lay him on the ground. I put my mouth against his, forcing into his body the air from my own lungs. He was too young. I should have waited. “Wind over Wind, save him!” I prayed. I breathed into him and each breath was a prayer: “Save him!”