“Where do you live?” Mirabel asked.
“Blisteraising, above Utter Shevling. On the northern slopes, about nine miles south of it.”
“I didn’t realise you lived that far away. You’ll never get back before nightfall. I am sorry. I should never have kept you talking so long, but ... but, well, you’re such good company, and I never thought.”
“You’re more than welcome to stay,” Melkin said as he left for his tutorial, calling over his shoulder, “It’ll be good for my daughter to have some youthful conversation for a change.”
The rest of the afternoon seemed to fly by, Stella’s offer of help in preparing the meal willingly accepted. She and Mirabel talked without let over the preparations, about all manner of things. They continued even during the meal later that evening, sometimes drawing Melkin in but largely chatting away between themselves.
Melkin had found a spare postgraduate room in the college where she eventually retired, exhausted but elated, her mind fair spinning. By the time she’d climbed in between the bed’s cold sheets, the long day had caught up with her and she was soon on the borders of sleep. She remembered she’d somehow agreed to stay another night, so Mirabel could take her somewhere special the following day, but sleep soon robbed her of any thought of where that could possibly be.
***
They were up early, breakfast taken in the college refectory to save them time. Mirabel mischievously refused to tell Stella what lay at the end of their hurried passage when they soon came out onto Smiddles Lane and down into the busy districts of Yuhlm.
Stella felt the stares they drew, busy men pausing awhile as she and Mirabel passed by, some blowing quiet breaths through their lips, their eyes narrowing. Mirabel seemed oblivious as she pointed out things of interest, her arm often through Stella’s own to hurry her out of the way of carts when they crossed the crowded streets.
They cut across the northern districts of Yuhlm, keeping clear of its hectic heart, down against the Graywyse Defence wall a mile or so to the south. Eventually, that part of the wall on which sat the glass-domed tower she’d noticed the day before began to rear ahead. The streets were quieter here, deserted by the time they came out onto a broad and open avenue, lined by age-worn statues. It ran straight towards a long, huge building at the centre of which a vast door barred the way.
Before reaching it, Mirabel took them at a slant away from the avenue until they came to a flight of steps that ran dankly down to beneath the building. At the bottom, she tugged open a small door and ushered Stella into an even danker passageway. It fell to pitch-black when Mirabel scraped the door to behind them.
“Take my hand,” Mirabel whispered, close by Stella’s ear. “The way’s clear so you’ve no need to worry about tripping. Come on,” and she stepped ahead as she squeezed Stella’s hand reassuringly.
Their hollow footsteps accompanied them through the darkness for a minute or two until Stella felt her hand being lifted to Mirabel lips as they came to a halt, a short kiss to her fingers before her hand was let go. A thump and a grate of wood against stone heralded an inrush of light, another flight of steps blindingly revealed.
“Come on,” Mirabel again said. “Not far now,” and she quickly climbed back into the light.
The steps had lifted them to the far side of the building, another great door sealed shut a little way along behind them, and from which the avenue and yet more smooth-worn statues ran for a few hundred yards across another open space. They led to a broad flight of steps that rose to a wide cut in the top of the Graywyse Defence wall, now marching massively across their view.
For the first time, Mirabel marched on ahead, although she frequently looked back at Stella, hurriedly trying to keep up. Above and to one side, as they climbed the steps, the glass-domed tower rose glitteringly into the late morning light. Stella now realised just how huge it was. Mirabel, though, soon vanished from sight beyond the top of the steps and Stella, beginning to puff a little, pushed on to catch up.
When she staggered from the topmost step and lifted her gaze, she saw Mirabel standing with her back to her at the far side of the cut, hands on hips. As Stella approached, Mirabel didn’t move, her long and full hair waving lazily in the breeze. Beyond her, though, an unfathomable sight soon drew Stella’s gaze.
Stretching out a couple of miles or so into the bay lay a vast area of enclosed water, high walls protecting it from the sea beyond. At regular intervals, long, comb-like stone causeways ran across it towards the far wall, broad waterways passing between.
Stella stood beside Mirabel and gawped.
“Bazarral harbour,” Mirabel said as she turned to her. “Somewhere only I have had the pleasure of seeing these past twenty years or more ... until now.”
The silence and the feel of Mirabel’s stare finally drew Stella’s eyes from the sight, long enough to note the woman’s quizzical look.
“Apart from being a bit out of breath,” Mirabel said, “I see you had no problems getting up here.”
“Getting up here?”
“This way. More steps I’m afraid.”
“Hang on. What did you mean, problems?” but Mirabel had already disappeared from sight onto the next flight of steps that spiralled down to the harbour below.
The shaded air at the bottom seemed hard and tasted of metal in Stella’s mouth, raising goose bumps along her arms despite her jacket’s warmth. Mirabel led her the short way to a low, stout black post at the water’s edge.
“I think you’d better sit yourself down here and get your breath back,” Mirabel said as she patted the rounded top of the post. “Don’t want you falling in. I don’t know about you, but I certainly can’t swim.”
Stella sat down but then turned her widening eyes up at Mirabel, her mouth dropping open before she blurted out, “We’re outside the walls!” and her gaze lifted further to their towering reach behind them.
“We are indeed, my little mystery,” and Mirabel stroked a strand of hair from Stella’s face, the hand lingering at her cheek.
“It does exist,” Stella no more than breathed.
“Does?”
“It wasn’t just my imagination. You see it too, don’t you, Mirabel?”
“I do, yes, certainly, but I’m wondering why you should too?” and Mirabel sat down next to Stella, nudging her backside over with her own to make room. She slid an arm around Stella’s waist and drew her close, so neither would slide from a seat barely adequate for two.
When Mirabel began gently humming a popular refrain, staring out across the harbour, Stella angled away slightly and stared at her.
“You’re the same as me, aren’t you, Mirabel?”
Mirabel smiled, tilted her head a little and slowly leant in to Stella’s lips. Her kiss was soft and warm yet also firm, her tongue delicately insistent until Stella relaxed, closed her eyes and let it in. Confidently, it caressed her own, slid thoughtfully along its length, swamping Stella’s mind, subsuming her thoughts.
Mirabel paused, barely drawing her lips away. “No,” she breathed, and Stella felt the word sweep back and forth across her lips before she could open her eyes. “No, we’re not the same at all, Stella, my perplexing mystery.” She placed a fingertip against Stella’s lips for a moment before drawing it to the tip of her own tongue. “Apart from, that is, us both being nothing at all like any other Dican.”
Stella couldn’t think straight, certainly couldn’t speak.
“I’m sorry, my dear, but I had to be sure.” Mirabel briefly smiled before standing and looking out across the harbour again.
Her own fingers now at her lips, Stella tried to grasp the feelings that swam about her heart but they were all too slippery, then Mirabel’s soft voice drew her gaze.
“She does have a weft and weave after all,” she was saying to herself, her words finding poor purchase in Stella’s mind. “I can taste the patterns there. Without a doubt.” She looked down at Stella. “But..” and slowly she shook her head again. “But ...
it’s certainly not one I recognise. Not something of Leiyatel at least. Definitely not what threads its way through every other Dican. Not the same at all.”
The perplexity now riven across Mirabel’s face instantly sobered Stella, brought back her reason, and with it her voice. “Weft and weave?”
“Hmm?”
“You said something about weft and weave.”
Mirabel’s full lips somehow vanished to a taut line as she looked away. “Oh dear,” she sighed, “now what do I do?”
“How about explaining what on earth you’re talking about, and why the ... why the kiss?”
“That, my sweetest child,” Mirabel strained to say, “is not an easy task at all, not for one of my own long line. Not for me it’s not.”
When Stella stood and took Mirabel’s hand in her own, when she drew it close to her heart and inclined a smile at Mirabel’s close but now downturned face, the older woman lifted her eyes to Stella; eyes that brimmed so full of what she herself had felt all her life; loneliness, but a loneliness only now made plain, and so clearly all the more painful.
Stella placed a kiss on Mirabel’s fingers, still held close to her breast, her brow dampening with the smudge of Mirabel’s tears.
“I ... I think,” Mirabel tried to say, but drew a sharp breath. “I think it’s time I told you what my own kind’s nature forbids us to tell, but not here, not now. I couldn’t bring myself to ... not in the cold light of day.”
Stella lifted her gaze and watched Mirabel’s whispering lips.
“Tonight. In the dead of night. If we can find a silence between us, a silence that eschews the rest of the world, then I will tell you, but only then ... or at least, I promise I’ll try.”
9 About Upping Sticks
They sat quietly for a while until Stella’s shock at having had her visions made so undeniably real finally subsided. A thought now struck her. If the white specks she’d seen across the estuary really were buildings then were they inhabited?
“Mirabel?”
A plop answered Stella and she looked up to see a circle of ripples spread out across the water below. Mirabel reached down and picked up another stone.
“Does anyone live out here, Mirabel?”
“Hmm? Out here? Oh, you mean beyond the walls?”
“Yes. Across the estuary for example?”
Mirabel stared at her. “How old did you say you were?”
“Nearly thirty. Why?”
“Nearly thirty, eh,” and for a moment her gazed passed straight through Stella. “You would only have been ... two or three when it began.” Mirabel threw the stone she’d been holding; another plop, another ring of ripples.
She smiled at Stella. “Whilst you were playing with your dolls, or cuddling lambs or whatever, people were beginning to up sticks and move inside the castle.”
“Castle?”
“Ah, of course. Inside the walls then, if you will.”
Stella frowned.
“It won’t hurt to tell you this now I suppose,” and Mirabel stood and kicked what few stones remained around the post over the edge of the quay. She peered after them, as though searching for an answer in the pattern of ripples.
“When I was still married to Phaylan, we lived near a small fishing village called Grayden, at the mouth of the estuary,” but then she turned a frown and heavy eyes to Stella.
“It was odd really. At first there were only a few who started becoming dissatisfied with the place, but it wasn’t long before there were more. Then it became a rush to snap up the best of the empty farms and properties within the ... within the walls. It can’t have been more than a year before the place became deserted.”
She looked up at the sun. “We ought to be getting back now. Come on. I’ll tell you on the way.”
They didn’t speak as they climbed the steps back to the top of the wall, for which Stella was thankful. She had to stop at the top to get her breath back, but it gave her another chance to take in the magnificent view, one she thought she’d never again see.
Mirabel narrowed her eyes. “A young lass like you shouldn’t be so out of puff.”
“I’m not sure being a starmaker is doing me any good,” Stella eventually said, wiping her brow.
“You alright to carry on?” to which Stella did nothing more than nod.
Only when they were climbing the steps away from the passage beneath the building across the avenue did Mirabel speak again, putting her arm through Stella’s. “The same thing had been happening in all the other ports, and across the Vale of Plenty... you know, over the estuary. Everywhere in fact.”
Stella nodded, intrigued to hear it had a name.
“Well, you see, Phaylan being a steermaster meant we got to hear about other places. At least until his work dried up. Not much call for a pilot when there are no ships setting sail.”
“Then where have they all gone? The ships?”
They’d reached the end of the avenue. “Not long after everyone left Grayden,” Mirabel whispered, now there were a few people about, “and Phaylan told me he was going back to his duties in Galgaverre, I returned home to live with Dad. Between you and me, I’d had enough of living at Pilot’s Point. I mean, Phaylan’s a nice bloke and all that, but ... well ... you know? With him not having much of interest downstairs as it were, splitting up suited me fine, and anyway...”
“But what about the ships, and everything else come to that? Bazarral harbour looked like it’d been stripped clean.”
“It had. They all were. That’s what I was coming to. I’d only been living back here a couple of weeks when they invited Dad to join some sort of committee. They wanted his engers to help with the clearance. You know, devise ways of getting it done quickly, and without involving too many people.”
They’d soon passed into busier parts of Yuhlm, Mirabel recounting so much detail of what had happened that Stella suspected it was largely as a distraction, but more for her own benefit than Stella’s. By the time they were climbing Smiddles Lane towards the college, Stella had been put in no doubt as to how thorough the clearance had been.
“‘Not a shred of evidence’ was the way they put it,” Mirabel told Stella.
“But who wanted it done? And why?”
Mirabel bit her lip and slowed. “Well, Galgaverre of course. Through the offices of its guardian, Guardian Penolith, but I suspect their Master of Ceremonies was behind it all.”
“Master of Ceremonies?”
“Lord Nephril?”
“I know the name, but I don’t think I’ve ever met him.”
“You’d remember if you had, believe me. Once met, never forgotten.”
When Stella pressed her about him, Mirabel looked flustered and batted aside Stella’s questions. She’d changed subject to the prospect of refreshments by the time they came in through the college gates.
The striking of the fourth noon-hour bell hurried them, to avoid the press of students that would soon erupt from their final lectures and so clog the corridors. They weren’t fast enough and soon found themselves swimming against a tide of dark robes, delaying them from the nice, hot cup of tea Stella had just been promised.
10 A Cuckoo Learns of Loneliness
Mirabel stared through the window at the pitch blackness without. She’d been sitting motionless at the desk in Stella’s small room for the past ten or fifteen minutes, the only sound the occasional creak from her chair. Stella had allowed her the time, patiently sitting on the edge of the narrow bed. She’d been sifting through the day’s events, but so little seemed to make sense.
Since their return, they’d had little chance to talk. Mirabel had made them both tea and then prepared their evening meal, all pushing aside the questions that had brimmed at Stella’s lips. The chancellor’s return had finally sealed them for the rest of the evening.
Stella wasn’t sure now what those questions had been, their discussion at the harbour already seeming but a distant memory, like a half-remembered dream. Only one c
lear thought remained: she was an alien amongst her own people. Wasn’t that what Mirabel had said? Mirabel, the only person she had ever felt anything for. How strange. But what were those feelings? Something to do with her weft and weave. Wasn’t that what Mirabel had said? But did her feelings for this woman let her see clearly enough? Should she trust her?
“Tell me about weft and weave?” Stella’s voice clearly startled Mirabel, but only brought her gaze to rest on Stella’s fingers, nervously entwined in her lap.
It was a while before Mirabel whispered, “You’d clearly had a long and vigorous walk to get to the college yesterday. When my father brought you out onto the terrace, I could smell you, smell your essence. You startled me, you really did.”
“I didn’t think I smelt that much.”
Mirabel quietly laughed. “It wasn’t the strength of it but its nature.” She leaned forward and gently unfolded Stella’s fingers, raised them to her lips and held them against a lingering kiss, through which she slowly breathed in.
“Is the night yet quiet?” she finally asked herself, and once more looked out through the window. “Will all ears be sound enough asleep? I wonder.”
Her voice rose a little yet somehow seemed softer. “I’m going to tell you a secret, my dearest one. A secret I am bound never to tell.”
She sat back and closed her eyes. “My story begins more than two thousand years ago, when the ancient engers put their minds to a problem.” Mirabel revealed how the Bazarran of the time had come to learn how sorely weakened Leiyatel had become, and how they knew the blame lay squarely at the door of the High Dicans.
“They were the wrong people to be in power, but they were, they and the royal line they’d created. Their demands on the Certain Power were draining her, but they wouldn’t listen to Bazarran reason. More fool they.”
The Bazarran, Mirabel pointed out, have always been ill-matched to High Dican politicking, and so the ancient engers had sought an entirely different remedy – one that stretched out into their own distant future. They planned ahead to the inevitable end of Leiyatel, and with it the fall of the High Dicans, something that finally came about only some sixty years ago.
Starmaker Stella (Dica Series Book 6) Page 4
