As we walked, the captain whispered, “Do not be offended by their lack of interest. I have never seen any of them react to my ship or me or indeed anything at all.” So we made our way among them, and only some of them looked at us. Their eyes, though, were empty. I have never encountered such flatness of regard. How could they look on me, a stranger, and not show any reaction in their eyes or faces? But that is why you have sent me here: to learn and understand.
Just as we were leaving the cluster of their houses, I saw a young male shonyn. He was standing, which surprised me, since none of the others had been. And it seemed for a moment as if he were looking at me. Truly at me: I saw him blink and move his head. I smiled at him. Even as I did so his gaze left me. I cannot be sure now that he was seeing me as I imagined he was. I shall be very careful from now on to watch their eyes. I will smile at all of them as well, since I want them to think me friendly and speak to me.
I am glad you have sent me here. I will understand these shonyn, so that you also may understand them.
Nellyn does not expect to understand. He sits on the carpeted sand inside the Queensfolk teaching tent and listens exactly as the others do: politely, in stillness, blue-tinged hands folded while the Queensman and woman gesture with their brown ones. He listens to their words, which he does understand, mostly, although they are not shonyn words. “Repeat: bench, sun, river, sky, man, woman. Small ones”—this word he is not certain of—“repeat now.” He repeats; they all do, the sounds emerging strange but whole. After these, though, come the other words, which none of the small shonyn comprehend. They continue to repeat, but unlike “river” or “sky,” they cannot use these words.
“The past is time that is gone.” The tall Queensman is speaking, very slowly, his hands sketching lines behind him. “You were all born, were all babies, and that is now the past.”
“And there is future,” says the Queenswoman, whose words are quicker than the man’s. “You will grow old and die, and your bodies will be taken by the flatboats to the other shore, where you will be laid beneath the lynanyn trees. This is future time. Will be. Repeat.” And the small blue shonyn do, carefully, politely.
Nellyn does not expect to understand, but he wants to. He knows he should not, and he does not speak of his desire to anyone. At night, after his lessons, he sits at the feet of the wise ones, shonyn whose skin is creased and darker than his own. He peels lynanyn as they do, and listens as the blue juice branches down his arms. “These Queensfolk are here,” the dark shonyn say. “They come in their ships and speak to us. They take our lynanyn and give us metal and shining stones and think we understand them. They teach you, because you are small and lively—but you do not feel their words. You are shonyn, like the river that flows, always. Now still always, small ones.”
Nellyn listens, but his eyes stray to the shadows of the tents on the sand ridge above them. The Queensfolk are all asleep, just as the shonyn are waking. Flatboats are gliding to the other shore, where lynanyn are harvested from the water. Every night the same: the dip and rise of the paddles, the swish and thud of the gathered fruit, the slow return in dawn cloud, the sleeping. Shonyn grow into their skin and crease and sleep more, even through the night—and there is no change.
And yet Nellyn gazes at the Queensfolk tents as his elders speak, and he wonders. It is a slow wonder that blooms even in his sleep and wakes him shaking with fear and confusion. He often lies within the red curving walls of his hut and knows without looking that they are bright with sun. Awake in sunlight, as shonyn never are: the fear blossoms.
At first he lies very still, keeping his eyes closed against the light. He clings to the sounds of sleep around him: soft breathing, a whisper of shifting limbs. But he can still see the sun, a golden-red glow in black, and one day he opens his eyes and sees shadows on the walls. He sits up and looks at his sleeping companions, whom he has never seen before in any but the blurred air of dusk or dawn. They seem harder, their skin more solid in the light that streams into the hut when the curtain blows.
Nellyn thinks, I must lie down. I must sleep. He does not. Instead, he creeps out of his hut and into the sunlight.
He stands up, blinking. The river, he soon sees, is blue—bright, dazzling blue—and he has to look away from it. The black flatboats are drawn up on the shore, dry and still. Beside them, the wise ones’ stones are empty. He trembles beneath the searing blue sky. Fat white clouds pattern the ground, which is a painful gold. There are sparkles in it as well, like Queensfolk jewels. Nellyn sees his own small feet on the sand with a sudden shivering clarity.
He cannot immediately focus on the lynanyn trees that line the opposite bank of the river; their silver leaves burn, and the black bark beneath is melting. He has seen sunrise and sunset on the leaves and thought them bright. Now he rubs tears away with the palms of his hands and strains to find the shapes of branches and trunks and dangling fruit.
He hears sounds then, the hum of heat and the insects that hover above the water or skitter over the sand. Muffled voices from the tents: the Queensfolk awake, talking, laughing, as all the shonyn sleep. Nellyn hears a few words he understands; the others seem warped or broken. He stands looking from his feet to the three tents, which are bright green and blue. His eyes and skin hurt.
Go back inside. Go back.
He walks slowly among the round red huts, watching the lynanyn-dyed cloth doors billowing. He knows the path up to the tents, but it is different now—new and terribly bright, like everything else. The teaching tent’s door flap is closed, but another’s, beside it, is open. Nellyn draws close, until the voices are quite loud and he can smell food. He does not look behind him at the river and the village; he does not even think to do so. He edges his head around the tent’s opening and peers inside.
Soral, his Queensman teacher, is bending over a table; a lynanyn trader sits across from him. They are tossing wooden blocks and laughing and eating something—not lynanyn—from a silver platter. A raised bed stands in one corner, and a small table beside it, covered in scrolls that Nellyn sees are dark with the odd marks Queensfolk make with slender sticks and call “writing.” A carpet like the one in the teaching tent covers the sand: it is red, green, blue, woven into shapes he cannot quite see. The sunlight shining through the tent walls shifts in the air like water.
Nellyn does not make a sound, and he moves only slightly in the doorway, but suddenly both faces turn to him. “Nellyn?” Soral says, his voice and brows rising together. The trader—a large woman, older than Soral—frowns. “Nellyn, what are you doing awake at this hour?” Nellyn cannot answer. His throat feels thick, filled with sand.
Soral smiles, says, “Come in,” and Nellyn does.
Soral sets him on a tall stool at the table and introduces him to the trader, who is smiling now as well, but Nellyn scarcely hears him. He is alone with Queensfolk, in their tent. None of his friends are beside him. The sun is high, not slipping below the horizon. He swallows and clenches his fists under the tabletop.
They show him how to play their game, speaking slowly so that he will understand—but he does not. He tosses the wooden blocks several times, then sits and simply watches. When Soral offers him food from the tray, he shakes his head, he tries not to even look at it. The smell makes him dizzy. Once or twice the two Queensfolk speak quickly and glance at each other over his head, and Nellyn knows they are talking about him. At last Soral says, “Nellyn, you should go back and try to sleep. You mustn’t be tired at sundown.” Nellyn nods and slips off the stool to the carpet, with its images (he now sees) of flowers and rivers and sky. He hesitates by the door flap. Soral says, gently, “Go on, small one.”
Nellyn goes, his feet carrying him quickly, as they never have before. He slithers down the slope. Near the bottom he falls, and his breath rasps as he struggles to rise. He does not sleep when he lies again beneath his own red walls.
That night he listens to the wise ones’ voices as if they
can take his fear away, and they do, a bit, then a bit more as the nights pass. He does not go again to the tents, except for his lessons. Soral smiles at him sometimes and looks as if he wants to speak to him alone, but Nellyn stays with the other small shonyn and does not meet his eyes. Then Soral goes away on a Queensship and another teacher comes, and this one never smiles.
Nellyn sits at the wise ones’ feet and listens to their stories: shonyn stories, looping and changeless. It is the same again. Sleep and stirring and sleep, words and paddles lulling him away from wonder, to safety. The same until another Queensship drops its anchor in the river, and a woman smiles at him.
FOUR
“Nellyn, we are here.” The words are far away, like wind in the leaves of the lynanyn trees. “Nellyn. Put the pole down. We are here.”
Nellyn lifts his head and blinks at the trees and the dark water beneath his flatboat. It is deep night. Leaves and river are speckled with stars. The shore behind is a shadow. He sets his pole down carefully and turns to Maarenn, his gathering companion, who is looking steadily at him.
“You are strange now,” she says. “You are hardly here.”
“Yes, I am . . . thinking. But I am ready to gather.” He kneels on the wet wood and leans out, skimming his hands over the river’s skin, before she can say anything else. He feels a lynanyn, scoops it up in one expertly cupped hand, lays it on the flatboat. Maarenn begins to do the same thing, on the other side. He turns and sees star- and water-light rippling on her bent back. Her curls, also, are shining.
Thinking. The wrong word, and he knows it—but he has spoken this word to Maarenn, and it has to be truth now.
The Queensship looked like all the others: enormous, formed of red-brown wood that curved, topped with a sail of green and blue. The sounds of creaking timbers and splashing oars reached the village long before the ship itself was in sight. Nellyn stood at the foot of the Queensfolk ridge and watched until he could see it clearly against the reddening sky. He had just woken up. Other shonyn were emerging from their own huts, rubbing their eyes, stretching, calling to each other.
The anchor screamed, and even the wise ones fell briefly silent. Queensfolk lined the side. Nellyn looked at them from his distance and saw only one clearly. She was standing with the others, but while they gestured and shifted, she was still. Still enough to be a shonyn, though her skin was red-brown like the boat’s wood and her hair curled so closely to her head that he could see the lines of her neck. She gazed down at the shore and the shonyn sitting there. Then a man took her arm and they both climbed down a rope ladder into a smaller boat. She picked up oars and rowed, and Nellyn thought that she was still even now, as her arms and back stretched beneath green-wound cloth.
When she drew closer, walking toward him with the man at her side, Nellyn saw that he had been wrong: there was nothing of the shonyn about her bearing or her face. The lines of her body were hard and tight, as if she walked with aching muscles. Her eyes were wide and nearly unblinking. They darted and leapt, barely resting. She is amazed, Nellyn thought suddenly. “Amazement is the seed of change,” the wise ones would say after the children had returned from their studies on the sand ridge. “They wish for you to be amazed, surprised, excited by what they tell you. These are words we hardly use, because they are so strange to us. We shonyn are not amazed. We look and speak and live our days as always.” Nellyn had nodded with the rest—but now he looked at her and saw her, wondering and new, and he remembered Soral’s tent, the eddying daylight, the colours of the carpet. He swallowed and felt his fingers pressing into his palms. She walked toward him and her flickering eyes found his, and he too wondered.
An unripe lynanyn brushes his hand. His fingertips press hard unpuckered skin and open again. Do not look for her, he thinks. Turn away from her when she comes down to the village. He avoided Soral’s eyes and Soral went away. The wise ones’ stories soothed: Nellyn’s own language, smooth and gentle, with its words of endless river and cycles of lynanyn and night. Do not.
“Nellyn,” Maarenn says. He looks up and finds her eyes on him. “Nellyn, where are your thoughts?” He shakes his head and tries to smile. Across the river, a Queensfolk banner snaps in wind that still smells of daylight.
Lanara stood in the teaching tent, watching small shonyn file out into the dusk.
“You see?” Queensman Cannin demanded. “You see how impossible this is?” He stacked writing trays on the table with a clatter that made her blink. “They imitate—they do not understand. Apparently it has been this way since we found them. I cannot imagine why the Queen keeps sending us here. It’s all far too much effort for some blue fruit.”
Lanara said, “It’s not just the fruit. She wants to understand them—she has always desired knowledge of other people and places.”
Cannin snorted and wiped his fingers across his brow. “When queens say they want to understand people, it means they want something from them: support, allegiance, trade goods. But she’ll get no such things from these shonyn. The sooner she recognizes this, the sooner she can stop wasting our time.” He saw the expression on Lanara’s face and cleared his throat roughly. “I suppose you’ll write the Queen about my insubordination now. I’ve been here too long, girl, far too long—but my time is done in a few days. That boat will take me home to Fane, thank the First.” He stood at the door flap, holding it open with one hand. “I leave it to you, this supposed task of understanding.”
And so he did. He also left the trays with their wet sand and sharpened stones for writing. He left scrolls of his own observations (“All too few, I’m sorry to say”) and lists of desert plants and animals. Lanara watched him give his brief, sharp lessons. On the fourth day, at noon, she watched him board the boat. “Thank the First,” she muttered as anchor and timbers shrieked. She lifted her arm as the ship crawled downstream. No one waved back at her.
Several days later she went down to the river at dusk. The old shonyn on their stones and the young ones at their feet were not looking at her. She smiled at them anyway. “Good evening,” she said slowly, in their language. She had found a brief list of words among Cannin’s scrolls: Shonyn words, approximate, he had written across the top.
One of the old shonyn nodded ponderously at her. “Good evening,” he replied, and she heard that it was a bit different from what she had said, though she did not know how. The others stirred and nodded and said good evening, and she felt her smile widen.
She had forgotten the other words. Good sleep? River? Fine lynanyn? She said, “Good evening” one more time, trying to catch their eyes and failing, then walked among them to the houses. She did not look back. She knew that none of them would be looking at her.
The young shonyn man was standing where he had been on the day she arrived. He was staring at his feet, she saw, and she turned her own feet from the path and went toward him. “Good evening,” she said when she was in front of him. The words sounded ridiculous now. She said carefully, in her own language, “You must have studied with us—you must understand the Queenstongue.” He did not move. “I am Lanara.”
There was a long silence. She noticed that his black hair had a sheen of blue, which matched his skin. He looked as if he had been soaked in lynanyn juice. He was a bit shorter than she was—especially, she thought with a brief stab of annoyance, with his head lowered.
“I am not like Cannin,” she said in a rush. “He was old and did not want to understand you. I do. Want to understand you.” She watched the wind shift his hair and felt suddenly desperate, her chest tight and hot. “Speak to me. Please.”
He looked up, so slowly that she nearly did not realize he was doing so. His eyes were very dark, and this time they were quite steady. Shonyn eyes, she thought. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, or even what he’s seeing. She could not smile now, and she forgot words. When he turned and began to walk away, she did not call after him.
Lanara returned to the teaching tent and wa
ited, straightening the stack of writing trays in front of her. The shonyn children filed in slowly. Slowly they arranged themselves in their four straight rows on the carpet. They looked at Lanara, but not at her. They had sat in these rows and repeated her words for days—blurry days she could only count by the number of letters she had written to the Queen. Six letters; six days of awkward speaking that she knew was not the same as teaching.
“Children,” she said now, “I want you to talk to me.” She had not known that the words were coming until they did. She set down her writing tray with a firmness that might make them sound confident. “Yes—you talk to me. I want to hear about your lives. What you like to do every day. Or night.” She closed her eyes for a moment. Slow down, Lanara, she could hear her father saying. You have always been too hasty. Or Ladhra: Don’t worry, Nara: you are actually helping them learn the Queenstongue when you speak so incoherently.
“Messannell,” Lanara said, and a boy in the front row lifted his eyes. His gaze, like the man’s earlier, was unwavering. “Tell me what you do after you wake up every evening.”
The silence was very long. She tried not to shift impatiently.
“I go to the river,” the boy said at last in a high, clear voice. “I listen to stories. I watch flatboats get lynanyn.”
“What are the stories about?”
“Shonyn life,” he said after another pause.
She smiled encouragingly at him. “Yes?” she said when he did not continue. “Tell me about this.”
“Shonyn life,” he said again. “The river. Flatboats and lynanyn.”
The Silences of Home Page 3
