The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  To quiet her, I said, “Yes. Yes, of course I promise. And now you really should rest.” I rose from the bed, and she let me settle the covers around her.

  “I'll talk to you later,” she said, as if apologizing.

  I kissed her, and left her to sleep. It seemed she was cured, and I had a promise to the ghost to keep.

  13. Shu Gho

  Shu felt as though she'd come round rather than woken up. A heavy tightness of headache was wrapped like a band around her brain. She ran the medkit scanner over herself and found evidence of slight neurological trauma. She wasn't sure if she'd interpreted the results correctly, but it seemed that stepping through that forcefield, or whatever it was, had not done her a whole lot of good. And she was still stuck here in this damned house. As she was sitting on the edge of the bed, however, Eleres came through the door.

  “How's Sereth?” Shu asked urgently.

  “She's better. The fever's gone and she's conscious.” He glanced down at his hands. “I made you a promise. You said you wanted to leave.”

  “Can we go? Now?” Hastily, Shu began to gather her things.

  He nodded. “We can go.”

  Shu found herself flinching as they stepped through the gate, but nothing happened. The first thing she did was to try the communicator and, to her delight, it was working again. She was pretty sure, now, that the forcefield was responsible for its malfunction. But Shu soon found that, though she could communicate with the camp, no one replied. There was a message waiting for her, to say that Bel had gone with Dia and Sylvian to the ruins to “run some tests.” She remembered that first visit, when they had been unable to communicate with the camp. It was likely that the energy field was responsible for this, too, but Shu was not reassured. She tried to reach each of them in turn, but to no avail. Shu left urgent messages everywhere she could, telling her companions not to do anything to the generator until she got back. She told them about the dowsing, about the connection to the world. She hoped it would be enough.

  Eleres stood staring at her with open curiosity as she babbled away into the communicator.

  “What's that?” he asked, when she had finally finished speaking.

  Shu detached the communicator from her wrist and held it out.

  “Here. I'll show you how it works as we walk; it's very simple.”

  Eleres turned the synthetic strip over in his hands, studying it curiously. “What is is?” he asked. “A charm?”

  It would still have been so easy to pretend, but Shu told him the truth.

  “No,” she told him wearily. “It's just a device, nothing more. Something that will enable us to speak over a distance. If you touch this” —she indicated the contact button—” and start talking, your words will be sent through the air.”

  His pale eyes narrowed skeptically. “Useful,” he said at last.

  “When there's somebody on the other end to receive it, yes.”

  Scared of losing yet more time, Shu hurried him up through the town to the city wall. The days had been warm and the countryside was basking in this apparently shortlived summer. The thin grass was bleached almost white, and beneath it the earth had crumbled to a russet, granular dust, water-starved. The walk had Shu out of breath fairly quickly, the streets here were steep. She was usually less easily tired than this, but by the time they reached the landgate her vision was beginning to blur and she could hear her breath wheezing in her throat. It alarmed her, and she was grateful that Eleres did not seem to notice. He seemed preoccupied, but not unhappily so. Shu knew it was a little foolish when he didn't even see her as quite real, but she found herself growing fond of him. He reminded her of her grandson Sung, another quiet boy, now long dead.

  When they reached the city wall, however, they found that the town's defense was up, and singing. It seemed to Shu that she could almost see it, like a glaze over the air. The gate was closed; she remembered it as it had been only a day or so ago, with weeds growing around its edges. It had not been closed for a long time, but it was shut tight as a trap now. Eleres's head went up and he frowned, as though he had sensed something. By the gate there was a girl with a proud, watchful face, holding a sword. Eleres went over to speak to her.

  “Why is it up? Are they going to let us out?” Shu asked him frantically, when he came back.

  “I'm sorry,” he said wearily. “We'll have to go back to Temmarec.”

  “Why?” She felt as though she were trapped in a nightmare of boxes; breaking out of one only to find herself stuck in another, larger one.

  “The town's closed for the next three days. No one can come in, or out.”

  “But why not?” Shu could hear an almost childish desperation enter her voice.

  “Because there's going to be a masque. I am sorry. I knew it was coming, of course, but I didn't expect them to close the gates so soon.”

  “A masque? Like a festival?” She'd heard the term masque before, in something Mevennen had said.

  “Sort of.”

  “Can't they just let me out? I'm not going to be part of the masque, after all.”

  He shook his head. “It's the law. It's safer this way. In case people wander in and get hurt.”

  “Safer?” Shu remembered then what Mevennen had said, about women becoming pregnant at masques, that they were held at the mating seasons. And she remembered the bloodmind, too. A festival, or something more? Well, she thought despairingly, she'd soon find out.

  There was nothing to be done. At least she could contact camp again, and let them know what was happening. She walked numbly back down the hill with Eleres. The air smelled of dry earth and pollen from the brittle grass. Incense drifted up on the smoke and condensed in the summer air. It was all so peaceful.

  “Can you sense water, under these streets?” she asked him.

  “Yes. This town's full of springs and wells. I can feel it everywhere I go.” He raised his head and smiled. “It makes me feel part of this place.” For a moment, he looked unselfconsciously happy.

  The bloodmind, Shu thought again: darkness and light. How could they simply take away everything that made these people what they were? And she hoped again that her message would be heard, that it would not fall on deaf ears.

  14. Eleres

  On the evening that the masque began, Jheru and I went up onto the dry hillside within the landwall and watched the light burn out over the sea. Sereth insisted on coming with us. She seemed restless, perhaps a legacy of her illness or maybe the change that was coming over her at the beginning of the masque, triggered by the proximity of other women. She wanted to get away from other people for a bit, she said irritably, but I would not let her go on her own.

  It was very hot. Water sensitive as I am, I could hear the retreat of the last rain deep within the hillside, seeping through cracks. Up in those beginning slopes of the Otrade there was a particular place where a well lay far beneath the earth and on that baking evening, it was comforting to me to feel it below the parched soil, like a deep, untroubled eye.

  And there was another comfort for me, too. I was also— no surprises there—falling in love. Jheru's kindness, a serenity which was underlain by vagueness as much as calm, his capacity for dreaming, all made me draw closer and reach out to his soothing presence. It was an odd, troubled time, a reversal of the situation in which I had been for the last four years. Now, the person I loved was the still center and events turned uneasily around me. This was so different from loving Morrac that I wondered whether, in fact, I really was in love with Jheru or was taken in by the illusion of some other emotion. I'm not sure I even really cared. I was startled to discover how relieved I felt to be free of Morrac. It's often the way. Only when a love affair is beginning to be over do you realize how miserable you have been, and for so little reason. I did not know for certain how Jheru felt about me but, strangest of all, this did not seem to matter. Not even thoughts of Mevennen and the urgency that should have accompanied them mattered. Nothing ever does, at the start of a
masque.

  “People are starting to gather down there,” Jheru said, lazily chewing grass, blue eyes hooded against the last light of the sun. “We should go back to Temmarec.”

  Sereth said in a whisper, “I wish we could stay up here.” I turned to look at her. Her gaze was downcast to the rusty earth beneath her feet and her face was mournful. I saw for the first time how much weight she had lost during her illness. We tend toward gauntness as a race, but even so her face was drawn, the skin pale to the point of translucency. Jheru was gilded by the early evening light; it lay heavily across the dark material of his shirt like pollen and his eyes caught and held it, water clear. But it shone through Sereth until she was gone from my gaze, lost in the smoking sultry light. I blinked, and the molten light was as before.

  “Sereth?” I said, and she turned to me with a kind of desperation.

  “Can I talk with you alone?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  We moved a little way down the hillside and Sereth said, with a deliberateness of manner that was unfamiliar to me, “I'm not looking forward to this masque.”

  “No?” It surprised me; she had always loved the things that made her most herself, took her into the wildness of spirit.

  “I'm afraid of what may happen. Eleres, I'm afraid I'll never go home.”

  Patiently I said, “We talked about this. You've been so ill—”

  “It's not just that. It started before we met the me-hedin… I couldn't talk to you about it. I thought I could control what I am, and it seems I cannot.” She rubbed her face with her hand, still awkward with the injury. “Do you love Jheru?” she asked abruptly.

  “I am in love, yes.” I used the verb meherech: desire, novelty, longing. “Do I love? If I'm honest, Ser … I don't know Jheru well enough. We talk all the time, but how can you ever judge from that? What you're told and what is really true?”

  “What will you do, after the masque?”

  “What do you want me to do? I won't let you ride alone, if you're still not well. Where you go, I'll go. But I think you should stay here for a little while. I have to—” Remembering that I had not told her about Mevennen and the ghosts, I broke off; it seemed an unnecessary complication.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “Did you think I would leave you? How selfish must you think me, Sereth.” I hadn't meant to sound so guilty. I still thought, I suppose, in terms of the three of us, Sereth, and Morrac and me. But maybe the old pattern was changing, and after all, it was true that I had been planning to do exactly that: leave Sereth, and go after my sister.

  “No, I don't, no.” She shifted across and put her arms round me. Her face was twisted. The old Sereth would have told me not to be such a fool. My chin on her head, my arms around her, I thought of the promise she had asked of me, to be there when her child came home.

  “Sereth,” I told her gently. “You're just on edge because of the masque. You'll enjoy yourself, you know you will. Just lose yourself in it—” But she released me abruptly.

  “Oh, let's go back,” she said with irritation, and with a sudden return to her usual energy she strode away down the hillside. I stared stupidly after her.

  “Well, then,” Jheru said peaceably, unfolding and brushing earth from his sleeves and trousers. By the time we reached the throng of people milling around the inner town, Sereth was nowhere to be seen. We walked to Temmarec in silence.

  “Come and sit with me for a moment,” I murmured. Obligingly, Jheru settled himself beside me under the vine-laden roof of the veranda. Neither of us spoke. I was very much aware of his presence beside me, our hips almost touching. He leaned back against the pillar of the veranda, half disappearing among the curling jade leaves of the vine. I glanced at him. The blue eyes were filmed and vague. He was smiling slightly.

  “Jheru? Are you all right?”

  “It's only ethien,” Jheru said dismissively, after a pause.

  “I didn't know you took that.”

  “Not as much as I used to,” he said, “but still more than I should, I suppose. At the funeral, I—” He broke off. “Things like that unsettle me.”

  That accounted for Jheru's vagueness, I thought. Meven-nen took a lot of the sedative, to block out the call of the world; perhaps Jheru had similar reasons. I was suddenly reminded of Morrac, relentlessly drinking. I thought with a sinking heart, How little do we know each other.

  “It doesn't bother me,” I said.

  There was an uneasy laugh. “It bothers me.” Jheru said.

  “Then why do you take it?”

  “Because—because it's the only thing that shuts it out. Do you understand, Eleres?” He spoke more harshly than I had ever heard him do; he sounded like Morrac.

  “Shuts what out?” I asked obtusely, but I already knew. Out at the funeral ground the world had seemed so immense, like another living presence. I'd almost felt it turn and look at me as a predator might: a long, inhuman stare, considering where the weak spot might lie. It seemed that it sang to me: leave it all behind, come to the wild, come down to blood and killing and death … The call of the world was like the call that a huntress makes, to lure in prey, but I knew that it was nothing more than my own split self, at war. I shook my head, to clear it, and for the first time, I realized that deep within my heart I almost envied Mevennen, that she could not sense the world always looking over her shoulder.

  It was still warm; the air was scented with dust, tea brewing in an anteroom, smoke drifting up from the town, desire in the air. I turned words around in my mind and couldn't utter a single one. At last, I said, “Look, it's getting late. The masque will be starting soon. Come upstairs, help me celebrate.” After the masques, you don't remember much and what memories there are soon fade. I liked to make love more consciously, and to choose.

  The evening sky glowed green behind the slats, but the room still bore the warmth of the day. As I had done so many times, with so many lovers, I lit a lamp and the light itself was a pale greenness in the shadows. The light caught a strand of smoke, spiraling upward between us. My movement dispersed it, sending it swilling about the room. I sat on the floor by the armchair and after a long moment, Jheru's fingers wound into my hair.

  “It doesn't matter what you do,” I said.

  “Doesn't it?”

  I turned. Jheru leaned back in the chair, his eyes a little glazed. But he was at least looking at me.

  “Sometimes I am … less myself, with ethien.”

  “Perhaps it makes you more yourself.”

  “That worries me, too,” Jheru muttered. I edged up onto the side of the chair and put my arm around his loose shoulders. Jheru whispered something which I did not hear, and shifted to make room for me. The wellwater eyes were clouded, with desire or the drug, or perhaps both. I slipped my hand inside the dark shirt and slid it upward until it rested against smooth skin. The tattooed tongue of the bird which coiled across the skin was faintly rough underneath my fingertips, of a different texture to the surrounding flesh. I could trace it with my fingers, following it round until I abandoned it and pinched the nipple until its softness stiffened. Jheru whispered something else that I did not hear. I withdrew my hand, pulled the drawstring of his shirt open, bent my head to the exposed breast, licked the dark skin as far as the throat. Jheru's skin tasted slightly bitter, the taste of the drug exuded through the skin. It numbed my tongue, not unpleasantly. By the time my tongue reached the curve of his jaw, I was lying across Jheru's stirring body.

  He shifted lazily, then sat up, saying hoarsely, “Come to bed.”

  I stripped off my clothes and lay back on the thin sheet. Jheru, naked now, curled sinuously against me, his tongue lapping at my throat. We kissed, his long tongue wet and delicate in my mouth, the taste of the drug spreading through me. His skin was as soft as feathers, his nails sharp against my flesh. The drug made Jheru passive; I straddled his elegant body, bending so that my hair brushed throat and shoulder. I was lost in movement then, and wh
en I came to orgasm it seemed to go on for a long time, leaving pleasure behind and passing into emptiness. I remember the slack, beautiful face beneath me, eyes darkened by the ethien. We remained there, myself lying by Jheru's side, listening to his rasping breathing, and later on the weather broke, cracking blue-green lightning behind the shuttered membrane of my eyes and sending the sudden heavy rain hammering over the slats of the roof.

  I dozed uneasily, disturbed by the storm that circled the town, running down the coast to a distant roar, but spiraling back once more, trapped by the cliff wall of the Otrade. The thunder and rain that accompanied it came intermittently and with it a breath of freshness, but between the gusts the air lay heavy and warm. I rose to open the window and look out into the storm. The night skies were lit by Elowen, racing behind tattered clouds, the slice of moon eaten away into a lacy filament. The air was full of dampness. Along the steep side of the house, a second window had been opened. Someone cried out, perhaps Sereth, disturbed by the passage of the storm. My senses were pounding in my head. I dressed, and went outside.

  The narrow passages, so quiet and somnolent during the day, were massing with people who had ventured out after the storm. The energy of the town's defense sang beneath our feet, the ground seemed to burn. Around me, the tide of my people ran: beauty everywhere, their eyes lambent in the darkness, pale silver, water blue, an empty gold. They were dressed in brocade, velvet, silk; dark greens, indigo, crimson, night-black, and amethyst. I saw a tall man in sea-colored robes, eyes glowing behind the face of a bird; a woman naked beneath a pattern of paint, her misty hair falling to her jeweled ankles. Above me, thronging the summer balconies and verandas of the town, people watched, garments rustling, whispering in a susurrus of anticipation that ran through the streets, borne on the incense wind. The passages drifted with smoke from the fires; the scent of the flowers which hung down from the balconies; the perfume of desire.