Walls of Wind and the Occasional Diamond Thief Boxed Set

by Jane Ann McLachlan

  At last he gave a strangled breath on his own

  Secrets

  (Yur’i)

  With every step I took deeper into the cave, my breathing grew more labored. The paintings of past storytellers leered at me from the dark walls, caught in the light of Savannis’s flickering fire. His motions, signing the tale behind each picture, floated before me, now reassuring, now threatening to reveal some dreadful secret I dared not know. We were almost at the back of the cave.

  “Here are Dayannis’s paintings,” Savannis signed. “Now you will know the truth about our past.”

  ***

  I opened my eyes to find Savannis leaning over me. Where was I? How had I got from the back of the storyteller’s cave into the open wind? The sun was a black circle in the sky, sloughing off darkness instead of illumination, the Sphere lying in its shadow, a mocking ghost. I closed my eyes. At least I could breathe again.

  “Are you all right?” Savannis signed into my hand.

  I shrugged weakly, not wanting to remember the growing stillness in my chest, the rush of panic, shallow gasping after air, the dancing lights like falling stars as I plunged into the darkness behind them.

  “You are too young. I should have waited. But there’s so little time and so much to teach you.”

  “I’m all right.” My fingers stumbled over the signs. I tried to sit up, but swayed as the dizziness returned. Gently he pushed me down and I lay back. “It’s just my illness. Not your fault,” I signed when it had receded again.

  “The paintings are too frightening for a child. I should have remembered my own reaction, and I was a parent then.”

  What was he talking about? I struggled to remember what I’d seen inside the cave. Pictures of the stories that he’d taught us, Riattis, Jan’ar and then... ominous, dark images filled my mind, veiled by a sense of horror which rose to panic as I tried to break through it. I gasped for breath.

  “I thought that Ghen were told. I thought you knew about Bro...”

  My lungs were closing, I was drowning in the sunny air! Savannis continued signing, but I could make no sense of his motions, my eyes going in and out of focus as I tried to breathe.

  “There’s always... at birth... But it’s not... Yur’i. The infant Ghen... holds it back... no harm to...”

  “No!” I screamed it as I signed it, using the last of my air, but Savannis had already stopped, had realized the moment before I screamed.

  His face dissolved in flashing lights, and blackness closed in on me again.2

  ***

  I should never have visited that cave. Those paintings weren’t meant for me to see. That’s why I have so little memory of them. Ridiculous to imagine that a Ghen, who couldn’t even speak to Bria children, should be the next Bria storyteller!

  Savannis was silent on the trip back to the city. His fingers were still as he sat at his table watching me pack my belongings. Finally I sat back on my heels, looking at the neat, small pile of my things. Should I take the pictures I’d drawn? No, better to leave all that behind. I wanted to forget living with Bria entirely. I’d go to the Ghen compound, not back to Rennis’s house. I could learn to be a recorder for their expeditions, or run their printing machines. Even a lame Ghen could do that.

  “I’m leaving,” I signed unnecessarily, looking at Savannis at last.

  “You’ll be back. You are the storyteller now.”

  “I can’t speak to Bria children, Savannis. I can’t even... Choose someone else.”

  “You’ll be back.”

  “Goodbye, Savannis.”

  ***

  It wasn’t hard to learn the printing press. It was useful work, though they didn’t really need me. There already were two printers, and a youth a year younger than I came every day after his hunter training. But they let me help.

  There wasn’t much to print—only what was significant to all Ghen—records of explorations and joinings, Chair Ghen’s reports on Council, a small bulletin that Mant’er had begun for hunters.

  Mant’er intrigued me, with his scars and his limp. He seldom spoke and never laughed. His translucent inner eyelid, which enables Ghen to see even in the most severe winds, drooped permanently, so that he looked weary and remote. I didn’t really want to know his story but the young apprentice told me anyway. From him I learned what other Ghen already knew: Broghen exist. I didn’t ask why I had not been told. The only possible reason made me ill with shame.

  Mant’er’s story haunted me. The dangers of the forest that pressed in on us, the brightness of young Heckt’er’s courage, the depth of Mant’er’s despair. It was an important story; it should be recorded.

  I found myself tracing Mant’er’s brooding face on scraps of paper. His expression fascinated and repelled me. A certain downward twist to the lips and at the edges of the eyes. The weary angle of the eyebrows, of the shoulders. An empty look about his hands, as though something vital had slipped through them and been lost. Chaos had found him.

  Over and over I drew that expression, until I began to see it on other faces. Savannis’s—yes, it had been there often although I’d never recognized it, looking at him only as a child looks at a teacher. My parent’s face—when had I seen it there?—but yes, it was a true picture, I knew it. He looked at me that way sometimes, when he didn’t think I noticed. I drew myself as a child, looking back at him, and on my face—No! I ripped the paper into pieces. What reason would I have to look that way?

  “Why wasn’t I told about Broghen?” I finally demanded of Gant’i when we were alone together. Then, before he could speak, I turned and limped away. I wasn’t ready to hear it, after all.

  “Yur’i!”

  I walked faster.

  “It wasn’t your fault!”

  “Shut up!” I screamed, breaking into a lop-sided run.

  ***

  My dorm-mates had to waken me that night. I was shaking and feverish, uttering whimpering cries into the darkness. That was the first. Night after night the dreams returned. I would wake in the dark remembering only vague terrors and lie for the rest of the night on my sweat-chilled mat, waiting for sunrise.

  I began to be afraid to go outside. I avoided looking into the faces of other Ghen, for fear of seeing the scorn and disgust I knew would be in their eyes. The very thought of the forest so near smothered me—I imagined ...specters... lurking between the black trees.

  I stopped going to the printing press. Mick’al came to see me then, but I refused to speak to him. He told me other Ghen had sometimes felt as I did, Ghen who had lost friends on a hunt, or who had been born with a Bria that died.

  “What have they to do with me?” I screamed at him. “Go away!”

  After that it got worse.

  I only left my sleeping quarters to eat. Carefully I picked my way to the eating hall, turning aside from any who passed by me, detouring around shadows, circling entire buildings to avoid seeing the wall and the forest beyond. When I finally reached the hall, more often than not I couldn’t eat.

  Everything smelled of death. If I forced myself to bite into a piece of meat, it tasted fetid, making me gag until I spit it out and ran to rinse my mouth. Soon I couldn’t even look at food.

  Gant’i came to see me, then Saft’ir, but I would speak to neither of them. They even sent Tyannis, who begged me to go to a healer. I did not want to be healed. I didn’t deserve to be.

  When Rennis came I ran into the washing room and locked the door. I sat huddled in a corner, holding my ears and banging my head against the wall behind me to block the sound of his weeping on the other side of the door. I could still hear him long after Gant’i came and half-carried him away.

  Several Ghen broke down the door and took me to the infirmary. I lay on a mat there, waiting to die.

  At least they stopped my parent and Rennis from visiting. I allowed the Ghen healer to entice me into drinking something, but the next day I was more alert and I could feel the liquid, like putrid water, lying in my stomach. I scratched
my throat with an extended claw to purge myself again and again until I vomited blood and collapsed on the floor.

  When I awoke they had wrapped my hands in leather pouches. My throat was on fire. I was groggy and had been drifting in and out of consciousness for a long time. Beside my mat, Savannis half-lay in a reclining chair.

  I blinked.

  He was still there. He leaned forward when he saw that my eyes were open.

  “Yes, I’m here, Yur’i,” he signed.

  I watched him carefully.

  “I brought some pictures.” Savannis held up a piece of paper. My hands itched at the sight of it. With an effort I closed my eyes. When I opened them cautiously a minute later, the paper was back in his lap.

  “It’s only one of the stories I tell the children. I need pictures to help me remember. I won’t show it to you again, but I’ll tell you a story if you’d like?”

  He waited while I thought. It took a while to realize that I’d been asked a question, and then consider what was needed by way of an answer. Finally I looked up again.

  “The one about Dimet’ir, I thought,” Savannis signed in answer to my unspoken question. Again he waited, until at last I raised a bound hand to my lips.

  Savannis signed the humorous story of a young Ghen who couldn’t keep silent in the forest. Every time he went hunting he frightened the game away until no one would hunt with him. He was a good recorder, but expeditions go into unknown territory and even in the most tense moments Dimet’ir couldn’t resist whispering to the Ghen beside him or whistling to a passing bird.

  Finally, forced to stay in the city, Dimet’ir eventually transposed Ghen language into symbols, carved the symbols onto blocks of wood and created the first Ghen printing press. It’s said that only Dimet’er could have invented a way of talking even when he was finally being quiet.

  “Would you like to see the picture?” Savannis waited until I motioned to touch my breath, then held the paper up. I looked at it closely, frowning a little. He bent and leaned it against the wall so his hands were free, but I could still see it.

  “Would you do it differently?” he signed.

  I thought about that for a long time. Too long. Savannis was old and the effort of telling a story, even a short one, had tired him. He was asleep when the infirmary assistant came, grasped the back of the wheeled chair on which he sat and gently pushed him out of the room I lay in. That was when I noticed the blanket that covered him, and realized that he was also a patient.

  When the Ghen healer came to see me, I asked him if I could visit Savannis. I had to whisper, but that was my only concession to the burning ache in my throat.

  “Will you eat?” he asked.

  I thought of the taste of meat and shuddered.

  “Why won’t you eat?”

  “It’s not good.”

  “It doesn’t taste good?”

  “Rotten.” Even saying it made me want to gag.

  “It isn’t, you know,” he said.

  I looked away.

  “Will you try?”

  “Will you drink, then?” he asked when I was silent.

  After a moment I raised my bound hand to my breath in agreement.

  It took me the entire evening to get down one glass of ruberry juice. I closed my eyes because the red color... well, I closed my eyes. But they unbound my hands and I drank it, and kept it down. When I choked down another the next morning I was allowed to visit Savannis.

  He was asleep when I entered his room. I sat on the chair beside his sleeping ledge and watched him. It was a Bria chair, and at first I perched nervously on the edge, but it was solidly built and besides, I wasn’t much heavier than a Bria, now. After a while I closed my eyes.

  I wakened to the sound of a strangled cry, but it wasn’t my nightmare this time. Savannis moaned and twisted on his ledge, calling out. I hurried over and shook him gently. He looked at me without recognition, speaking urgently in Bria. I signed to him but he stared back, uncomprehending. Then he began to weep, great, despairing sobs that shook his frail body.

  I couldn’t bear that sound. I ran to the door and shouted, banging the door frame, shouting even when I saw two attendants running toward me and a Bria healer coming from the other direction. I cried for help, my breath ragged, shallow, not enough air, I couldn’t breathe, and all the while the sound of Savannis’s despair was at my back and all because of me!

  “I killed him!” I screamed, the words barely rising through the vacuum in my lungs as I pitched forward into the arms of a terrified attendant.

  When I awoke on my mat I saw a glass of ruberry juice on the floor beside me. I picked it up and poured the blood-red liquid over my head for everyone to see. Then I began to claw my chest, my arms, my legs, tearing desperate wounds into myself.

  But not fatal ones. As soon as a cut went deep enough for the pain to penetrate my mental anguish, my claws retracted. Again and again I tried. Finally, reaching for the cup, I smashed its rim against the floor, leaving a jagged edge. As I lifted it to my throat, an attendant raced through the door and threw himself upon me, and another behind him. They tore the cup from my hands and held me down until I passed out again.

  ***

  “Do you remember what you said in Savannis’s room?” the Ghen healer asked when he came to see me. His voice was calm. He knew I was listening although my eyes were closed, my face turned away. “They tell me you said, ‘I killed him.’ Is that right, Yur’i?”

  I’m asleep, I thought fiercely, I can’t hear you. But my chest was already tightening, my breath coming faster.

  “You didn’t hurt Savannis. In fact, you helped him. You called an attendant when he needed one. He’s better now.”

  Wrong. Stupid.

  I concentrated on breathing. In and out, carefully. “Savannis would like to see you. Would you like to see him?”

  In and out. In and out. I half-raised my bound hand to my lips, dropped it again. In and out.

  “Do you understand why you have these attacks of breathlessness?”

  I began to pant. “My lungs,” I gasped. Inandout.

  “That was true when you were an infant, but you’ve outgrown that. It isn’t your lungs now, is it, Yur’i?”

  Inandout, inandout, inandout. “Yes!”

  He said nothing for a while. I didn’t look at him. Finally he sighed. “I’ll tell Savannis he can visit, shall I?”

  In and out. “Yes.”

  ***

  It wasn’t Savannis who visited that afternoon, it was Tibellis. I barely recognized him. He’d gone from a lisping child to a youth in the two years since I’d seen him.

  “Hello, Yur’i,” he signed. The attendant, crouching beside my bed, unwrapped my hands so I could answer him.

  “How did you learn my signing?”

  “Savannis taught us at storytime.”

  “Why?” I was unreasonably angry and Tibellis’s answer, “Because you’re the next storyteller,” threw me into a rage.

  “Do I look like a Bria storyteller? Do I act like one?” I half rose on my mat, incensed. The attendant shifted nervously.

  “My matri says you do.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He saw one of your drawings. He told me to wait and see.”

  “Stupid! Stupid!” I screamed it as I signed, causing Tibellis to shrink back into the chair, but I was unable to stop. I raised my hands, extending my claws with a snap and shook them in his face. “Do these look like storyteller hands?”

  The attendant leaped forward and grabbed my hands, forcing them down.

  “You don’t know me!” I screamed. “Leave me alone!” My words were in Ghen, but I could see by his shocked little face that Tibellis understood.

  When I had been subdued, my hands rebound, Tibellis was still there. Too frightened to move. Drowsy with medication, the thought brought me only slight regret.

  Tibellis rose from his chair and stood shaking beside my mat. “The children miss the stories,” he si
gned, as though he hadn’t seen my madness. “You don’t have to be the storyteller. Just come and tell us the stories until there is one.”

  There was something about his face, in the droop of his shoulders, in the way his hands hung, empty...I closed my eyes.

  ***

  Savannis was wheeled in the next day. He pointed to my hands and spoke imperiously to his Bria attendant. They argued briefly. Savannis turned to me and signed, “If he undoes your hands, you won’t hurt yourself.”

  I hesitated.

  “You’ll keep your claws retracted while I’m here, child!”

  I touched my breath quickly. Savannis glared triumphantly at the attendant. The young Bria, as intimidated as I was, untied me.

  “I taught that child every story he knows!” Savannis signed, his eye flashing as the attendant hurried out. I glanced sideways at my hands, not even tempted.

  Savannis sighed and leaned back into his chair. “I’m tired, Yur’i. Old and tired. I told the story last time, now it’s your turn.”

  I stared at him.

  “Any story. It doesn’t matter. You know them all.”

  “...I don’t remember...” I signed slowly.

  “That’s my excuse, not yours. You remember. Take your time, I’m not going anywhere.”

  I pulled myself up till I was sitting against the wall. Slowly, with long pauses, I signed the story of Riattis, a lazy and quarrelsome Bria who died saving Ghen when lightning struck their compound and caused the Great Fire.

  “Word perfect,” Savannis signed when I was finished. “Now draw it.” He leaned down and placed paper and chalks beside me. I stared at them, lying on the edge of my mat.

  “Sit up, child, you’re not dead yet!”

  I pulled myself up straighter out of habit; Savannis often said that to inattentive children during storytime. He pointed to the paper: “Draw on that.”

  It took me six removes. I forgot my stinging cuts, my aching stomach and raw throat, forgot the obtuse healer, the impersonal room in which I waited to die, forgot even Savannis dozing beside me. I sketched reluctantly at first, then willingly, then in a fever, as though I were drawing my redemption, not Riattis’s.