Walls of Wind and the Occasional Diamond Thief Boxed Set

by Jane Ann McLachlan

  The Ghen child rose, looking about. Kayjais leaped toward him and he drew back. Then Zipporis pushed him in the direction of the line of Bria. They pushed and pulled him down the line until he was safe, away from the twirling sparks of fire.

  Now it was a race between the two, Kayjais and his attendant flames against Zipporis and his Bria rescuers. If Kayjais touched a sleeping Ghen first he curled on the ground, allowing the sparks to dance around him; if Zipporis reached him first, he was handed down the line to safety. The sparks tried to surround Zipporis, too, but he dodged between them before they could clasp hands around him, until the last Ghen was either rescued or encircled in sparks.

  “I was a good Riattis,” Zipporis signed, counting the standing Ghen when the play was over.

  “I was a better lightning!” Kayjais signed back, pointing to the Ghen children now sitting up among the giggling sparks.

  “No,” Yur’i signed, sweeping his arm to include both the standing and the sitting Ghen. “Every one of those Ghen would have been yours, Lightning, except for the courage of Riattis and his Bria rescuers.”

  “Can I be Riattis next year?” one of the three-year-olds signed.

  “Would you risk your life to rescue Ghen?”

  “Oh yes,” he signed, still caught up in the story.

  “Then you must do something nice for a Ghen child this year, and he must tell me about it. All right, children. Tomorrow we’ll start on the story of Garn’or. Who knows it?”

  A few hands rose tentatively in the air.

  “I’ll draw it in the sand. That may help the rest of you remember.”

  ***

  I congratulated my grandchildren on their play, enjoying their excited chatter until the young Bria guarder who watched them in the afternoons arrived. For the first time in—how long? Too many seasons—I felt that the problems in our city were not insurmountable. Why hadn’t it occurred to me to give the children a common language and have them play together?

  Because I was focused on adults, not children. And between every adult Bria and Ghen lies the accusing face of an infant Broghen neither can forget. They don’t really want to speak together. They don’t want their children to play together, don’t allow it outside of storytime. The change Yur’i had begun could not have come from Council; Council can’t outlaw shame.

  The silence between Ghen and Bria cripples us, but do we dare break that silence? Ghen must know of Broghen in order to wake and face them in the night; Bria must not know of them in order to sleep in the night with infants in their wombs. Yur’i was following an unpredictable wind in teaching our children to talk together.

  As I walked, the problems that faced our city returned to me. The crisis that was developing could not be put off until these children grew up. Nor would it leave them unchanged. Without a solution to the white Broghen outside our walls—and the gray ones born within—all of Yur’i’s work in bringing the children together might be lost.

  I was nearly at Council Hall when I saw Anarris. He saw me at the same time and approached, grinning broadly.

  “Our numbers are growing,” he said. “One third of the Bria graduating from their specialization year have joined us!”

  “Do you want to depopulate our city?”

  “It’s the Ghen compound we’ll be depopulating.” He laughed aloud in triumph. “Even if we get half the young Bria next year, Bria will hold their numbers. The city’s becoming crowded, anyway. But we’ll prevent older Ghen from having a second child. In a single generation, we could half their numbers!”

  “Can you imagine the Ghen will allow that?”

  His expression changed. His lips actually curled back so I could see his teeth!

  He spoke in a low voice, almost a hiss: “It’s stupid of you, dangerously naïve, to think they’d never turn their violent nature against us. At least if we outnumber them, we may have a fighting chance!”

  I pulled away from him in horror and ran up the stairs into Council Chambers.

  Secrets

  (Yur’i)

  “All right, children. Tomorrow we’ll start on the story of Garn’or. Who knows it?”

  A few hands rose tentatively in the air.

  “I’ll draw it in the sand. That may help the rest of you remember.” I picked up Savannis’s stick.

  Even two years after Savannis’s death I still thought of it as his drawing stick. When I left the infirmary and moved into Savannis’s house, Darillis’s year as Council Chair was over. A number of Bria objected when I began telling the stories, but Council supported me—or at least declined to forbid me.

  Savannis had already taught the children my signing in preparation for my return, of which he had been so certain. Some parents refused to send their younglings to me, especially when I invited Ghen children, too—but there was no one else to teach the Bria stories, and they wanted their younglings to hear them.

  “That was wonderful,” Tibellis signed, approaching me from the bench where he’d been watching. Councilor Briarris, with Kayjais and Zipporis dancing at his sides, came up to us.

  “He says to tell you he’s very pleased with what you’re doing.” Tibellis’s eye shone as he translated Councilor Briarris’s words. I felt a tension I hadn’t been aware of ease out of me.

  “When he has time, he wants to learn your signing!”

  I grinned and touched my breath.

  ***

  Tibellis stayed after the others had all left. “How is your work coming?” I asked.

  I’d hoped to pass Savannis’s storytelling stick to Tibellis, but he chose to specialize in sculpture. He was building his journey-piece now, a large work: five children listening to a storyteller. He’d almost completed the hollow forms of the children, ready to put inside the delicate springs that would make them fidget, tilt their heads and stamp their feet as they watched the storyteller drawing in the sand.

  He’d captured the expressions of childhood in their features, in the way they held themselves—wonder and delight and that intense involvement in every moment. But he would be judged mainly on the realism and artistry of their movements.

  “I might not have been so impatient during storytime if ours had been like this.”

  “It was like this for me.” But I grinned to take the sting away. Tibellis was only trying to praise me, not criticize Savannis. “Necessity is the wind behind creativity. I can’t use my voice to stir them, so I have to use actions. And they have so much more energy than I do.”

  Tibellis smiled. It wasn’t the full-hearted, lips-rolled-back grin of a Ghen—Bria didn’t smile that way. Saft’ir told me that other Ghen thought Bria smiles were too controlled, too slight. They found Bria cold. Tyannis told me that Bria were often afraid of the wide, fang-exposing grimace of the Ghen. They saw something predatory in it. Are Saft’ir and Tyannis and I the only ones who simply see a smile on Ghen and Bria faces?

  Tibellis didn’t leave. I waited, wondering what was on his mind. At last he signed, “Have you thought of joining, Yur’i?”

  “No.” Surprise made me abrupt.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of what I would pass on.” I shrugged a goodbye and went into my house.

  His question disturbed me and made my sleep restless. In the morning I awoke with the image of Broghen in my mind and a brooding sense of failure and despair. It was difficult to concentrate on the children’s story.

  Halfway through, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a Broghen stealing toward us. I leaped up with a fearful cry, but it was only a shadow and my imagination. By the time I’d calmed the children down, the thread of the story was lost, so I sent them home.

  I had been through this before, fleeing from ghosts of the past and terrors of the future; I couldn’t risk letting them overwhelm me again. I decided to go to the cave of paintings. I hadn’t been back since Savannis took me there as a child; it was time I faced up to them.

  ***

  Inside the cave I lit a fire and walked
from one end to the other, looking at the vivid paintings. As I neared Dayannis’s, at the back of the cave, I slowed down. They had revealed a terrible truth, which had almost destroyed me.

  Nevertheless, I forced myself to look at them: the drought, the famine, the orphaning of the children, the uncontrolled birth of the Broghen, the terrified violence of the young Ghen.

  I had expected to face an onslaught of panic. Instead, the paintings aroused in me a profound pity. Why hadn’t I noticed before how young they all were? Of course, I was a child myself when Savannis brought me here, and these paintings depicted the worst nightmares of childhood.

  I pictured the faces of the children who came to me for stories. Do they fear courrant’hs? Liapt’hs? No, they spoke of them sometimes with shivers of delight: dangerous things, but under the control of adults.

  I looked again at the painting of the children who had survived the drought: our ancestors, left alone in a cave, with no adults to dispel the monsters for them. They were too young to face Broghen, as I had been. Too young to understand the fault wasn’t theirs.

  “Parents stand between their children and disaster.” What story was that from? Ah, Narv’al, speaking to his youngling. In the story he’d been wounded defending the walls of our new city. “As the Creator Wind stands between our civilization and chaos,” the story ended. But it was not the Creator who built walls.

  I examined the first painting, the one of the drought. There were the Bria parents, standing at the back of the cave, refusing food. Standing like a wall between their children and starvation. I imagined Heckt’er and the other young Ghen later building our wall to stand between them and the insanity of Broghen. A wall of stone, in place of caring adults.

  “I didn’t do it,” Tyannis had said when, as a small child visiting a farm, he’d stampeded the callans. “The wind did it.”

  I didn’t do it, Dayannis’s response was the same. I didn’t have a Broghen.

  Wind did it, Heckt’er said. And Dayannis told the children: They’re out there, beyond the wall. Not our fault. Not our responsibility.

  They built a city of secrets: secret monsters, secret languages, secret paintings of a secret past. What was the storyteller but the guardian of all those secrets?

  I was well-suited for my role. Hadn’t I buried my own secret deep in my heart to fester all my childhood? What power there was in secrets! It had nearly killed me, all that secret power I gave to the infant Broghen that killed Tyannis’s twin.

  But I was an adult now; we were a city of adults, as well as children, now. Yet we were still denying the Broghen, hiding their birth in our secret hearts and laying the blame elsewhere.

  Madness lay in that direction. I knew it, I had been there. And wasn’t that madness slowly creeping over our city?

  I returned to the front of the cave, to the painting Savannis had been working on. “You’ll finish this when you’re the storyteller,” he told me years ago.

  It was a painting of our city from the northeast wall. It showed the first trees of the forest and all the way down into the center of the city. There were Bria and Ghen in the streets, and in the foreground Savannis was drawing a story while Bria children listened.

  Savannis’s paintbrushes lay on the floor of the cave in front of the painting, cleaned and ready for use. I brought water and mixed the powder dyes in the clay bowels beside the brushes. I began painting Broghen, as I’d been seeing them at the corners of my mind ever since I left the infirmary.

  Caught up in my painting, I lost all track of time. I painted Broghen on the wall; monstrous adults climbing into the city, small ones climbing out, into the forest. I placed a Broghen at the back of every Ghen and every Bria. Behind the children, I drew small Broghen. Even behind Savannis I drew one, and he as blithely ignoring it as every person in the painted city.

  I’d been painting for two days and nights, leaving the cave only to drink from the stream and pick wild berries and roots to eat, or cut more firewood to light my work. On the third evening I cleaned my paintbrushes for the last time and studied what I had done.

  I had painted an end to the secrets. Only I knew how it had all begun. Only the Storyteller, guardian of the past, could see our civilization from the distance of time, and imagine another way.

  But how could I take us there safely?

  Exhausted, I lay down in the cave to sleep.

  When I woke it was mid-day. The sun filtered through the cappa leaves at the cave entrance and there in its dappled pool stood Tibellis, staring at my picture.

  “Do you really think they’ll get into our city?” he signed, his hands shaking slightly as he formed the words.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I followed this.” He held out Savannis’s old map. I was reminded of how I’d found Savannis with it. I didn’t want Tibellis to care that much for me.

  “Do you think the Broghen will get into our city?” he asked again.

  I looked back at him, indecisive. What would the knowledge do to him? But it was time storytellers stopped keeping Dayannis’s secrets.

  “They already are.”

  I could see him trembling as he stood looking at the painting. Had he understood my meaning? Finally, still not looking at me, he signed, “Don’t they see them?”

  “They’re secret Broghen.”

  He shuddered. “That’s even worse.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “That’s much worse.” After a few minutes I signed, “Will you help me expose them?”

  He turned quickly and left the cave. I followed him into the daylight. The pupil of his eye was still large from its adjustment to the dim cave and he trembled as he walked so that now and again he stumbled, almost falling. I wanted to reassure him, but I didn’t. I would no longer stand between Bria and the truth.

  We were almost home when he signed, “That is why you won’t join.”

  Caught off guard, I hesitated, then touched my breath.

  “Yes, I’ll help,” he signed.

  I was ashamed of my fear in the face of his courage.

  Council Relations

  (Briarris)

  “Is there any further new business to report?”

  I held my breath as Koon’an rose from the Ghen section of the public gallery and slowly approached the Chair. He passed between my seat and Rennis’s, and I had to hold myself from shrinking away, as though he carried disease. There was a pounding in my ears and I panted after air, but these things I also hid. I was acutely aware of Rennis, rigid in his chair, and was tempted to touch his hand or shoot him a pacifying look. Instead I put an expression of cheerful curiosity upon my face and looked only at Koon’an, who stood a few armlengths from Council Chair, in the center of the U-shaped oval of the Council.

  Of course I knew what he was about to say. We had rehearsed it all in closed-Council, and agreed to have it unfold at the last Council before still-season: the meeting when we honored Ghen and Bria accomplishments over the past year—artists, musicians, builders, athletes—those foremost in every category. We wanted as many as possible to hear the news as Koon’an presented it, not as others repeated it.

  Fortunately the Ghen, and some of the Bria, were aware that Koon’an had only just returned from his expedition north, so it was believable that we were hearing his report for the first time, along with them.

  “I have returned from leading an expedition far into the northern mountains,” Koon’an began.

  As he spoke, Chair Ghen translated his words into signs for Council Chair, who repeated it sentence for sentence in a loud voice for all to hear. What an act he would have to put on as he pretended to hear this for the first time, while the gallery of Bria hung on his every word. Thank Wind I was not yet Council Chair!

  “In the mountains we discovered...” he let Council Chair translate so far before he loosed his first shock over them. I stared almost desperately at Council Chair, willing him to carry it off.

  “...another civilization of Bria and Ghen.”
/>
  Council Chair’s artificial gasp of surprise was swallowed by the response of the audience. Good. We hoped they would expend their shock on the positive news.

  I risked a glance at Rennis. He was not even trying to act, but stared tensely down at the table before him. I was grateful for his silence, at least. I could not imagine how I would feel if Koon’an had left my only youngling in the mountains with savages, despite his reassurances of Tyannis’ safety.

  “They live together in peace, as we do. They met us in friendship. They helped us safely across a dangerous mountain pass, and even now, in their village, they are caring for three of our expedition who were wounded and couldn’t return with us.”

  The breathless excitement in Council Chair’s voice as he translated affected the crowd just as we had intended. Many looked stunned, others laughed aloud in delight, a few were even hugging one another. There had been speculation on this possibility from time to time, but to actually find others, to know for certain that we were not alone... I found, after all, that very little acting was needed; the news had an unreal quality no matter how often one heard it.

  Anarris, sitting with a group of Single-by-Choice, was frowning. Could he sense the conflict that he was trying to build in our city slipping away? I would have preferred to see him caught up in the news. As it was, he might be looking for an opportunity to spread division, and he was sure to find it in what was to come. With a crowd this large... I firmly put an end to such speculations.

  Sandarris, at the edge of their group, was clearly unaware of the mood of their leader. He clapped his hands in delight and grinned when I smiled at him. My naïve, idealistic youngling.

  I rose to speak. “What do they look like?”

  Koon’an waited for the translation as though he hadn’t known the question was coming.

  “The Ghen are smaller than us, and their scales are white, not gray,” he replied. “The Bria also are smaller than city Bria, and their fur is paler than Briarris’s, white-blond. Aside from their coloring and child-like size, they look like us.”