by Kelly Link
And so we fed the goats together, wading through the piled snow to their pen. They butted us for being slow about it, and she laughed. It lit her face as though a candle from within and, leaning on the hay-fork, I laughed too.
Starling sang that night in her own language. The stones of our hearth seemed to understand as I did not; the whole chimney shifted ever-so-slightly to lean toward her voice. I suspected, then, how and why there had been a tumbling rock for that man’s head—perhaps the only one who knew who she was and why the Emperor needed her. But I knew also that she had not let him die in the snow alone. I knew the scabs around her wrists still lingered.
I leaned toward her, too.
My mother told me before we slept that I should be cautious of Starling, but I could not manage it. What could there be in such a person to be cautious of?
The following night, I took Starling around our house and told her stories about our possessions so that she could learn the tangles of our accent. She gave me the names of things in the mountain’s language and, once in a while, stories of her childhood up the mountain playing tricks on her brother. She didn’t know our language well, but she did know it, and I picked up hers.
My mother didn’t try to stop us from talking, so long as we worked too. We let the goats out, scraped out the layers of dung and put down new straw, took care of cooking food and washing clothes, anything we could do and talk through it, giggling and chattering away in our combination of tongues. Starling taught me a few songs, though none that got the attention of stone, and I taught her some of the ones we sang. We warbled together over the washwater.
I found a speckled, glittery rock one day in the yard and gave it to her shyly. Her smile was beautiful, but the song she wove for me the next day about a wandering goat lost in the drifts was more beautiful still. And so we traded: stones for songs, and smiles for smiles, through all the deepest months of snow.
One sunny winter day Starling and I went as far as the road the soldiers had built. They’d dug down, filled in gravel and cement, and then topped the whole with dressed stone. The center stood up a little and there were ditches on either side for drainage. It was a good road, solidly built, but it stood empty. The village had no need for a road that didn’t even run to the market town.
Starling and I had learned enough of each other’s tongues and habits of speech by then to talk in both, though our conversations were scattered sometimes like light through a lantern-screen, so I could say in hers: “This is the path.”
“No,” she replied in her own language, “this is not a path. This is a—” I didn’t know the word she used, and when I looked at her, her face was like a stranger’s.
“I know not that word,” I said, speaking her language still to make amends.
“You should not.”
Echoing what the soldiers had said, I offered, “It goes through our whole land to the Emperor’s city.”
“Does it,” she said, and her expression was like stone.
I said, “And they built it all the way to the mountain—”
She walked away, and I had to chase after her and say I was sorry—though I was not sure what it was I had said—and give her some of my secret store of honeycomb to be friends again.
While we sorted dried herbs in the attic that night, she leaned over and kissed me softly, a gift she did not seem to expect to be returned. I would not have kissed her first, though I had wanted to since I’d first seen her. I would not have implied that she should pay her keep that way. But I could kiss her back, and did, until our lips were flushed and our fingers knotted in each other’s hair.
When the next blizzard rose, I found her by the goats’ shelter crooning to its walls of piled rock. She broke off when she saw me, and I backed away, but she gestured me closer.
“Stones call to each other,” she said, “to connect, as people do. They will band against the wind if I ask them.” She took my hand, clumsy through our mittens, and sang again. And it is true that none of our goats died in that storm.
Watching her, I loved her more than ever. Yet I knew that when spring came, Starling would go home. Our love could be no more than a summer thunderstorm: breathless, exhilarating, and soon over.
Starling knew of the mountain soldiers’ approach three days before they came. Snow still huddled in the shadows of houses, but spring was on its way.
“The stone talks of nothing else,” Starling said. She hesitated. “I do not wish to go with them.”
Joy leapt inside me that I would get another week with her, perhaps even more. I said, “Hide. I will tell them nothing.”
The mountain soldiers wore russet tunics and boots laced to the knee, and they carried their food on their backs. Not all of them were men.
They were not expecting to find their goal so near. “We look for the magic-singer,” their leader said, and Mother Kisa, the old woman who lived two doors down, pointed right at me.
“They have her,” she said. “They’ve been taking care of her!”
I made my face expressionless as stone.
My mother gripped my arm tight. “We should tell them.”
“They’re the enemy,” I said, not caring if they heard. “Why should we tell them anything?”
After they had bedded down in a barn, I crept out of the village—north, and then circling east across a fallow field so I could catch the motion of the one who followed me.
They stayed a week. They searched as many houses and as much of the meadows and woods as they could. Some of the villagers helped. My mother let them in to search our house, but they found no sign of Starling.
“Where are you hiding her? If we must return to bring Kestrel, it will not go well for you,” the leader promised me. “And he will find her. Wherever she is, the rock will sing it to him.”
“What if she does not wish to be found?”
He looked dubious. “Stay here with you barbarians?”
“Better than returning with you barbarians,” I said, though it was all bluff.
His hand twitched at that, as though he’d like to strike me, but he only turned away deliberately and called his soldiers off their search.
They left soon after that, along the foothills toward the river. I had thought I might not survive their visit—our own Emperor’s soldiers had cost our village several lives even before they left for the mountain—so I watched them go, relieved and confused. They were not in their own land; perhaps they feared our Emperor’s rage if we died at their hands.
Whatever the cause, nobody had lost their life, and the mountain soldiers’ search went on around the mountain.
I almost expected the cave to be empty when I got there, unfamiliar in its emptiness, but there she was. She ran to me, put her arms around me and kissed me sweet in the sunshine.
“They’ve gone?” she asked, in my language, and I said, “Yes. But they’ll return.”
She flicked that away into the wind. I felt cold knowing she’d leave soon, soldiers or no.
But she was here now, my Starling, and we sat in the cave’s mouth for all that day, hands entwined and laughing, surrounded by stone.
The sun set as I walked back to my village, casting light over the slopes below. The Emperor’s land stretched out beneath me like a blanket, nipped and snarled by rivers and forests and towns. The road cut a straight line across it, a loose thread tugged to breaking-point. For the first time I saw that the Emperor’s city and the mountain people both thought of us as a boundary to be tested or braced, an edge to hone like a knife-blade on a stone. I had always before felt myself, my village, to be the center.
Coming in among the houses, I caught the glares of my neighbors. Mother Kisa spat when she saw me and slammed her door.
My mother sat by the unlit hearth. “Nisima,” she said.
I sank down next to her.
“The elders came. They say you must choose. If you stay, you must take the goats to summer pasture.”
“Now?” It was weeks earl
y, not to mention that the older boys had always done that. Doubtless it troubled the elders’ thoughts that the boys who’d gone up-slope with the Emperor’s soldiers had not returned. But perhaps I was a worry larger even than that.
My mother shrugged one shoulder, neither denial nor agreement.
There were questions I could not ask, answers I did not want to know. Had she fought for me—argued for compassion? For the headiness of youth and love? Had she, in the end, agreed with them?
Or had she agreed all along, and tolerated Starling only so much as hospitality demanded?
I bowed my head. I said, “I’ll go.”
Under her eye, I packed: my cloak, my clothes, and only those supplies I’d put up with my own two hands last harvest. We said little else, for what was there to say?
In dusk, I climbed once more. Starling welcomed me and asked few questions. She saw the village as a center, too, I think—one pulled by unfamiliar forces. In that she was wrong. Our conflicts grew as close as family.
For several days we lived in that cave, lived well, drank milk cooled by a creek, picked green shoots and ate them, leaned against each other like the shaped pieces of a lintel that made something strong between them.
“I will have to go,” she said one day, when she’d returned from fetching water, and I said, “I know.”
“What will you do?”
Without thought of what language I spoke, I said, “I know not.” They would likely still let me herd the goats. But I would have to laugh with them about the stone-witch from the mountain who’d enchanted me that winter, and I could not bear the thought. “Is there—would there be a place for me in your home?”
“I know not,” she said, and sat heavy next to me, tangling her fingers in my hair. “My people’s soldiers are returning.” She bit her lip and then decisively went on. “They wish to rescue me from using my works in service of your emperor.”
That last word was in my tongue, for certain. Hers had no such term.
“How?”
“The road,” she said, using the word she’d said I shouldn’t know. “It brings together all this land. With magic, it would protect—” She took her hand back to gesture, cradling as if she held the Emperor’s territory in her palms, and tried again. “Our songs resonate in stone. If a stone-singer wished it, the road could bind the land up into one, as the mountain is one place whether up or down-slope. But that would use our power, my power, against my people. Our land. The road runs to the mountain, and so the mountain would resonate too. Its roots in the earth would resonate. Your emperor wants to claim—all that.”
It was the most she’d ever said about her works.
“And what do you wish?” I asked, clumsy with her as I’d been when the soldier dropped unconscious before my mother’s house.
“I wish to be free of the duty I see in front of me,” she said, but when she looked at me, she smiled. “And yet I would not wish this had not happened.”
“This Kestrel that the soldiers spoke of—”
Starling said, “The leader of stone-singers. We rule the mountain,” and that word in her tongue meant lead or help or protect or remember, too. “They would not harm me. Only take me back.”
“You . . . do not wish to?”
“There is something I must do before I go. Stone wishes to bind, but I can cause it to break too. Yet I am loath to do it, for I know your emperor will not be pleased.”
Seeing me frown, she touched my face. “A stone-singer may request guest’s privileges at any up-slope village,” she said, slipping into the slang familiar to me. “A respectful singer, and her partner, could travel between them doing little works and be useful.” To be useful was also to belong. I doubted that now, but hearing her use those words brought warmth to me. “Kestrel would not quibble.”
“Even after you complete your duty,” I said, “you would not go back?”
“I cannot, I think,” said Starling. “Can you?”
I kissed her so I did not have to speak. I could have—once, I would have—but with her beside me, how could I choose that path?
The morning’s fog lifted as we came to the road. Under the sudden sun, small figures labored toward us: the mountain soldiers. Even then, Starling was resolved.
A hum swelled in her chest. She raised one foot and placed it on the road.
Her song burst forth. It roiled with an anger and a grief uncaged by any melody that I could fathom. It echoed off the slopes. My heart quailed under that weight of sound, but I stood firm for Starling, for her hand grasping mine so tightly and for the desperate sadness on her face.
Starling strained the notes until her voice cracked. She staggered backward, her foot falling to the grass.
The road shattered.
I flinched from the noise. When I straightened, those carefully-joined stones were cleaved to jagged pieces far as I could see. Farther, I was sure, and I wondered what our Emperor would do.
Beside me, Starling wept.
The mountain soldiers shouted joy. They strewed the rocks and chunks of gravel over the ditches. Only their leader kept his course. As he neared, he called for Starling to join them for the journey up the mountain.
“No,” Starling said. I had helped her dry her tears, but her voice was raw still. “Tell Kestrel they will build it up again. Someone must dwell close by to break it.”
He tried to persuade her. Her! There was no contest between them, and I thought Starling at least should have known it.
But stone-singers are known for being stubborn, and it is the truth. They do not know how to turn aside from a problem. And so my Starling stood before the broken road and argued.
When she raised her voice, I squeezed her hand. She looked at me, startled; and then she smiled.
Hand in hand we turned our backs to them and to the village, and we walked once more up-slope along the chuckling stream.
Ape Songs
Giselle Leeb
They sent out the parade with the Ape of the Earth. Hands tied, he went up front. They had tied his hands since the time that he had tried to dig without permission. Likewise, they had taped his mouth shut so that he could not sing. The time that he had started to sing, cracks had appeared in the earth.
No one could guess the Ape’s thoughts; even un-taped, his mouth was a stiff gash with no ability to turn up at the corners. They had made him in an age of advanced plastics when elastic, realistic skin was a cheap option; but they did not want him to be perceived as real: he was made for a distinct purpose.
The Ape plodded on ahead of the guards. His heavy metal frame annoyed him. His feet annoyed him. Why had they given him such heavy feet? He was supposed to be related to a monkey after all—and to them, apparently. Well, screw them. Screw swinging in the branches—they had used up all the trees anyway, the miserable bastards. The first thing he’d do when he escaped—and he would escape—would be to improve his feet, and his eyes.
He would also sing. And nobody would stop him. They had given him ‘the voice of an angel’ but he had already succeeded in changing it. The first time he’d used his new voice, they’d laughed, thinking that he was joking. Then he had turned up the volume and sung his heart out at what he imagined was a natural ape’s pitch, all the while thinking of revolution and escape.
“You are hurting our ears,” they had said, and, naive as he was at that time, he had actually believed them. He had felt sorry for them and stopped singing. And then they had taped him up. The bastards!
He, at least, had an aim. He had developed an antidote to boredom all on his own, while they still depended on him for amusement. The only thing that the people seemed to think about was not being bored. How boring! The ape felt like an oil sump, absorbing the public gaze. Well, screw them!
They had manufactured him to be unpredictable, even unsafe, although they knew if things got rough they could simply turn him off. The cowards!
Away down the boulevard he went, his feet sticking in the melting plastic si
dewalk, his simple silver flanks reflecting back the lights glaring out from the themed bars that lined the route: Antarctica, The Canadian Wilds, The Amazon. They worshipped these places and were desperate to see them for real.
The Ape was relieved that the bars prevented the crowds from visiting the countryside. They’d destroy it. The bastards! At the same time, he resented the invention of the bars—if the patrons hanging about on the streets outside could go further afield, they might stop gawping at him for a while.
He passed the derelict plot of earth with its mangy grasses and its pathetic sign, ‘A Peace of Earth’. The bars were for fun, but they treated this scraggy acre as sacrosanct.
The ape lunged aggressively at randomly programmed moments and the crowds cheered. These humans were so easily pleased. Would they even bother to retaliate? Did they have the balls?
He did not care for them at all. And why should he after how they had treated him? He whacked down one foot after another, hoping to disappoint so much that he could go back to his cage and devote himself to escape.
The second time I started, I’d forgotten I was a girl; I was just a ground thing, curled in dark soil, waiting to come up. I was warm and comfortable. It was something to rest in the earth, to just be.
When the vibrations reached me—heavy footsteps—I woke from my doze and began to imagine what things would look like now. I imagined crowds chanting the mystery, the mystery, on busy streets. I had been told that I must save them, though I still had no idea what to do.
I pushed up hard; my head was grazed and bleeding by the time I broke through the topsoil. I stood, dizzy, staring down into what was so deep and dark blue I thought it must be the sea.
I had been upside down for a long time. My head cleared and I realized that I was gazing up into the sky. I looked around me and saw fields and—trees, lots of trees. I was astonished, really. This must be the countryside, I thought. Of course the sky would look different from the rainbow sky of the city. The sun was still burning hot, but I felt a damp wind chilling me and I knew for sure that it was real: I had never felt cold before.
