“That’s not very big! How many of them are there? And what about the settlement?”
“There’s about thirty of us. The settlement is empty except for maybe some old folk and sick. There was a lot of fighting there.”
Quell stepped up beside Yaz. “And what were you doing out here, child?” He frowned, studying Maya closely. “Clan Axit, aren’t you?”
The bands tattooed on the outer edge of her left ear gave it away. Yaz had always thought it funny that this timid girl belonged to the famously warlike Axit. Perhaps among their tents being kind and gentle was all it took to count as broken.
“I was spying,” Maya said. “Arka needs to know the disposition of the enemy.”
Quell blinked. “The what?”
“What Pome is up to,” Maya explained. It seemed that even the Axit children knew more of the language of war than Ictha men.
“We should go to Arka,” Yaz said. “Will you take us?”
“I know the way.” Quell gestured back the way they had come.
“But Maya knows the way and how to stop us getting filled with spears by some overexcited guards before we can explain ourselves.”
Maya seemed doubtful for a moment, looking Quell up and down with mistrustful eyes. She was still a few years shy of the time when she might be swayed by handsome young men.
“He’s my friend,” Yaz said. “He came down the pit on a rope. To save me.”
Maya’s doubt seemed to deepen still further, but at last she nodded. “Follow me then. But be quiet. I heard you two coming from a mile off.”
* * *
MAYA LED THEM through a series of narrow tunnels made by coal-worms and squeezed by glacial flow over the intervening years. No gerant could have used them. At several points Quell struggled to fit through. He made no complaint but Yaz could see her own fear echoed on his face. They had both lived a life on the vast open of the ice and tight confines held a horror all their own.
As she followed, Yaz found herself wondering about the time she had spent in the city. Days? How long had she been in the void, dreaming strange dreams? Erris had spent a hundred lifetimes and more in its dark heart. Just a little longer in his green world and Yaz might have woken like Jekka Ixo from the old tales, emerging from his nap in the witch’s cave to find the world had moved on without him, his people changed, his children forgotten, and like Jekka she would have walked the ice beneath a burden of years that had imparted only age and no wisdom.
Crossing a wider chamber Quell drew level with Yaz. “If these people are fighting a war among themselves they aren’t going to be interested in helping rescue your brother.”
Yaz had been thinking the same thing herself. “There are other kinds of help. We have no idea what we’re up against with the Tainted. Arka knows things we need to know. And Thurin was living among them until recently.”
“Thurin? You mentioned him before. He was tainted?”
“Yes.”
Quell shuddered. “I’ve seen them, you know. Not just the giant woman—”
“Gerant.”
“I’ve seen others wandering outside the changed ice. Especially by the big pool. I thought they were sick, or driven mad by being down here too long, but those must have been taints too. I knew there was something wrong as soon as I saw the first one. I’m no coward, you know that, but I just turned and ran the other way first chance I got. I—”
“Quiet!” Maya hissed. She motioned for them to stay and moved on alone. As she went the shadows dragged around her like a cloak. A moment later she was gone, hidden by the curve of the wall and by gathering darkness.
“Can you trust her?” Quell asked.
“Yes.” With the word out of her mouth Yaz wondered where that judgment came from.
They waited and the silence built around the creak of the ice and the drip of meltwater. Quell began to shuffle that way he did when he wanted to ask something. He had shuffled just the same for two days before he first asked to kiss her when she was eleven and he was twelve. Now Yaz found herself on the point of telling him to spit it out when he finally spoke.
“I don’t know why just saying a handful of words is harder than letting myself down into an endless hole on fifty thin ropes knotted together . . . I want you, Yaz. I want us to share a tent, raise children. One day you’ll be clan mother. Everyone knew that. Come back to us, yes, but come back to me. I came here for you.”
“And Zeen.” Yaz’s cheeks burned and she couldn’t meet Quell’s eyes.
“For you. You weren’t pushed. You jumped. And it made me think you were running from something. There’s no curse on your blood . . . But Zeen too. I said I’d get him back and I will if that’s what it takes.”
Yaz nodded. He hadn’t said he loved her again. Maybe that was too hard a word to repeat. Or maybe he only needed her, like a piece of his life that left its own hole when taken. She tried to find an answer, but Quell was right, words can be hard to say. And there was a curse on her blood. The regulator hadn’t meant her for the pit but he did mean her for the Black Rock. He’d decided for her. Decided on a life spent in mountain caves praying to the Hidden God that only the priests knew. A few brief excursions to the clans maybe, but as a stranger, an outsider to all she knew, dispensing law and cheating precious food from them in exchange for what must be a tiny fraction of the iron they took from the Broken.
They waited, the silence still thick about, aching for an answer but now at least free of Quell’s shuffling. Yaz grew tired and she crouched. She took Elias’s needle from her collar and studied it. In tales the gods gave more impressive gifts. With difficulty she tied a hair about it and let it hang from thumb and forefinger. She could feel Quell’s gaze on her. Mother Mazai had an iron needle that would always point to the north. As Yaz had half expected Elias’s needle turned slowly then stopped.
“Is that north?” Quell asked.
“I don’t know.” At least that was now an acceptable answer. “This place has me all turned around.” This was also the answer she had been unable to give to what he had said before.
She returned the needle to its place and set her hand to the dark grey stone beside her. Her fingers traced the scrapes and grooves left by the endless flow of ice. For a moment she saw trees about her, grass beneath her fingers, warm and springy, the chatter of birds in her ears, so different from gull cry. A gentle breeze that caressed rather than bit.
“Yaz?” Quell tilted his head in question, then helped her up. “She’s back.”
Maya stood a short way off in the tunnel’s gloom. She waved them on. “The guards know we’re coming now.”
Yaz saw nobody watching for them on their approach to the ravine. It unsettled her to think she had missed them even knowing that they were there.
Along the near side of the ravine half a dozen cave mouths glowed with starlight, isolated islands of illumination below which the rock face steepened toward vertical and plunged away to the hidden torrent roaring in the distance. Yaz still felt unsafe on the narrow path down, really just a series of grit-strewn ledges crudely joined together.
Not far from the top they appoached a cave mouth that Yaz hadn’t noticed on her earlier visits, now lit from within and crowded with Arka’s faction. The handsome, legless smith, Kaylal, sat near the entrance and waved a greeting. “Yaz! They found you!”
Yaz smiled back. Beauty aside, something good shone out of Kaylal; she saw it the first time she laid eyes on him. The other young smith, Exxar, moved up behind the smith and set both hands to his shoulders, arms sliding out from the thickness of his rat-skin cloak. His was a different kind of handsome, solid and clear-cut, but lacking the unearthly quality Kaylal possessed. And his gaze was less friendly. This is mine, it told her, keep walking. Kaylal grinned at her and lifted a tolerant hand to cover one of Exxar’s.
“Arka’s in here.” Maya led them on past the c
ave, down to the door of the drying hut. She knocked twice then stood aside for them to enter.
* * *
THIS TIME YAZ found the warmth of the drying hut a welcome change from the cold outside. Whatever had broken inside her when she’d torn that hunter apart, it had left her still less of an Ictha than she had been before. Behind her Quell muttered an oath as he entered. He would have never felt such heat before.
“Yaz.” Arka spoke from a chair toward the rear of the cave. She was flanked by Ixen from the forge and Madeen the cook on one side, on the other an older gerant, one thick arm heavily bandaged with bloodstained furs, and an armoured man with a shaved head, a sword ready in his hand. Eular stood closer at hand beside the wall with Thurin next to him, perhaps as his guide. Thurin gave her a smile but he looked troubled. The old man favoured Yaz with his eyeless regard. “Remarkable,” he said. “The hunters didn’t get you after all.”
Arka beckoned them closer. “We thought we’d lost you down in the city. But you found your way out and found a friend. This would be the elusive spearman who knocked down Goxx in the Pillar Cavern?”
Yaz glanced back at Quell in surprise.
“I did knock someone down.” Quell came to stand beside her. “They were in my way and others were chasing me.”
“You seem to have exchanged spears too. Where did you get that one?” Arka eyed the bloodstained iron.
“We found it with Jerrig’s body.” Yaz spoke before Quell could answer.
“Jerrig!” That brought Arka out of her chair. They all asked their questions at once, shock on every face. Were there others with him? Had he fought? Which cavern? How long ago?
Arka and the four around her soon fell to arguing loudly among themselves. Even Ixen found his voice.
“You said they would leave the others alone. My mother is still in the settlement!”
Yaz led Quell across to Thurin and Eular. Small as it might be, Arka’s faction were clearly not of a single mind. On the ice the Ictha had no problem choosing their direction in a featureless waste. Down here many directions beckoned, every mouth held a new opinion.
“Yaz.” Thurin stepped toward her as if he were going to take her hands, then faltered. “We thought you were dead! We thought the hunters had you!”
“It takes more than one of those to stop an Ictha!” Quell moved forward, almost between them. “We dealt with—”
“Are Quina and Kao alright?” Yaz interrupted. She didn’t want everyone there to know about the hunter she had undone. Not yet. Not before she had a better understanding of what was going on. Also she was worried about Quina. And Kao.
Thurin nodded. “A lot of others aren’t though. Enza and Herro were killed. Jecca and her brother badly hurt.”
Yaz couldn’t put faces to those names. It reminded her though that Thurin had been born here. This conflict meant far more to him than to the rest of the drop-group. She reached out a hand to his arm, midway between shoulder and elbow, the way the Ictha offered sympathy.
“Even when you’re not here you cause change, Yaz.” Eular sounded neither sad nor happy, as though what had happened were as inevitable as the ice.
This was all on her? Blood and death and friend against friend? The sudden weight of events left Yaz staggering beneath the burden of weariness she already carried, almost unable to keep her eyes from closing. She looked from Quell to Thurin, both of them drawn to their full height, facing each other like boys playing at warriors. Quell stood shorter, broader, the strength of him in his face, his pale eyes normally so calm now tinged with something more fierce. Thurin, taller, thinner, more delicate. As ever, Thurin looked haunted, carrying his tragedy like a wound, dark eyes narrow above sharp cheekbones, his hair as black as Quell’s though wild, a standing shock where Quell’s fell long and even. She let herself stumble to distract them from releasing whatever pointed exchanges queued behind their lips.
“Yaz!” They both came to her. She mumbled that she just needed sleep and together they helped her from the cave. Maya guided them further down the ravine to a place she might rest.
Yaz hardly saw the chamber that Maya led her into or the faces of those already there. Instead she sank onto the thin pile of hides they set for her and plunged into sleep.
The dreams that rose to catch her were green and growing, and somewhere in them a dead boy waited for her.
20
I’M DREAMING.” YAZ stops her wandering and stands, barefooted, on the cold stone. The ice sky arches above, no more than a spear’s length beyond the reach of her fingers. The chambers of the Broken, like bubbles beneath sea ice, open on every side from this one, stretching all the way from the Missing’s city to the pit.
All around her the space reverberates with the same glacial song that has been sung since long before the gods of sky and sea made the first man and the first woman. Yaz wonders if the great whales, those behemoths who swim to unknowable depths and know the secrets of the ocean, learned their own songs from that of the eternal ice, for both have much in common. A refrain of old sorrow, immeasurable memory, a language of loss in which the true names of all things are known and spoken.
Yaz crouches to touch the bedrock. Once a rich dark soil blanketed this place, deep enough for the roots of trees, warm enough for flowers. Around her fingers grass grows, tickling against her palm, ghostly green, many-bladed, struggling for the sun. She looks and all about her a memory of pine and oak is building, a memory of beech and elm, rising high above, up into the ice as though it were the phantom and the trees simple fact, here and now and always true.
“How do I know your names?” Yaz stands and the wood has become the world, a blueness waits high above, glimpsed in whispers through myriad leaves and reaching arms.
She walks with the warmth and complication of twigs and leaves and fallen acorns beneath her feet. “I’m dreaming.” But the bark beneath her hands feels rough and gnarled, detailed beyond her ability to imagine, too solid for any dream where sleeping hands might close on air.
In a glade a fallen tree several seasons down lies reaching for the sky, branches stark against puffy clouds. On the far side in the treeline’s shade a doe nibbles fresh shoots.
Yaz stares at the doe, amazed at its strangeness and just as amazed that it is somehow familiar to her. As if the time that escaped her in the void were not truly lost but had been filled with experience and somehow that knowledge, those memories, have begun to bleed into her dream.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Erris stands beside her. Across the glade the doe looks up with liquid eyes and darts off among the trees, so fleet of foot that Yaz’s heart almost chases it.
“I don’t have words for what I’ve seen here.” Yaz’s gaze remains captured by the space where the doe had stood. She has lived a life in the jaws of the wind, her eyes trained to find meaning within a hundred shades of white and grey. She has lived as a singular mote of warmth upon a vast and lifeless wilderness. “It’s too much. There’s too much . . . of it.”
Erris’s hand is on her shoulder. How so light a contact can be so heavy with meaning she has no idea.
“Are there no other people here?” Yaz asks.
“None that the void remembers.”
“So . . . we’re like Zin and Mokka.” She feels the blood in her cheeks.
“Who?”
“Zin and Mokka.” Yaz blinks at him. “The first man and woman.”
Erris grins. “Not all myth is true.”
She scowls at him, suddenly conscious of his weight of years, more than all the elders she has known put together. “Next you will tell me that the Gods in the Sea are a lie, and the Gods in the Sky.”
He laughs now, a thing as warm as the forest about them. “No, Yaz, there are definitely gods in the sea, and if so small a thing can hold gods then the sky must also.”
Yaz gazes at the sky. It is not her sky, neither
the star-scattered ceilings of caverns nor the merciless vault above the ice, scarred at its utmost heights with ribbons of frost. It is not her sky and she is not here.
Somewhere her body is lying on a cold stone floor in a cave. When she wakes it will be to a war she wants no part of, murder in closed spaces, friend against friend. And her escape, her impossible escape, would take her into the black ice then up through untold miles to the white hostility of a land that wants to kill all of them, clanless, tentless, and even if they had both tent and clan . . . hopeless.
“You could stay here with me,” Erris says, and Yaz doesn’t know if she is remembering this, dreaming it, or if the offer is really here and now and that somehow Erris can reclaim her to the void to live a green eternity in the memory of a vanished world.
“When you’re lost on the ice they say that you reach a point where the wind ceases to feel cold. They say a warmth enfolds you, a sleepiness, and that all you want to do is to lie down, just for a bit, to lie down and coil around the wonderful warmness that is your death. And they say what makes the Ictha who we are is that we never do. We never surrender to that illusion. They say that we are found frozen on our feet.” She turns to meet his gaze, his serious eyes. “I don’t know if that’s true or not but the point of the story is true. It’s not in us to give up. And this . . .” She waves her hand at all of it. “This wonderful, miraculous place, and . . .” And you, she wants to say. “All this is the warm death. This is giving up.”
Erris’s smile is a sad one. “I can’t argue with that. Much as I would like to. The void is a miracle. It offers everything. But it is not life. And I could never tell you that it was.” The hand on her shoulder steers her to where he now points, a darker place beneath the arms of a great yew, its boughs laden with dark green needles and berries like drops of pale blood. “The way back, my lady.”
The Girl and the Stars Page 22
