“May I play?” the girl asks, and he turns back to her and smiles.
“Yes, small one. Thank you.” He watches her walk to where the other small shonyn are, gathered by the dry bank below the wise ones’ stones. The river is very low; the flatboat poles are hardly wet, when he and the others raise them up. Lynanyn they do not pick from the water lie on the opposite bank, their skins split and oozing into the dust.
Nellyn has not seen Lanara from the bank or the village, and he has not gone up to the tents. He wonders whether a Queensship has come during the day and taken her away again—but he knows that this cannot have happened so quickly and silently. Because she does not come to me, I think she must be gone, he thinks, and sighs at his own foolishness.
“A man is here,” Maarenn says later as the flatboat rocks beneath them. Nellyn kneels facing her and does not speak. “A Queensman,” she continues, “with Lanara Queenswoman. I hear his voice at sundown, and there is a small tent with an animal inside.” He feels her eyes on him in the cloud-thickened darkness. “She does not speak to you now?”
“No,” Nellyn says, and tries to smile. “You are curious about these things, even though ‘their doings are of no interest to you.’” His voice deepens and slows. She laughs at his imitation of a wise one.
“Even though,” she agrees. “And you too are curious, gathering companion, though you do not speak of it and only stare at her tent with large eyes.” She rolls a lynanyn toward him. It bumps his knee gently. “Take care,” she says quietly. “Remember who you are.”
He does not sleep at all that day. The sunlight on his walls is muted, almost grey. When he ducks outside, he sees that the bank of cloud in the west is crackling with white light. The sand beneath his feet is warm, not hot as it was on the day he went up to Soral’s tent. But as on that day, Nellyn hears voices. Hers and a man’s, low and laughing—and with them another sound, like someone striking a flatboat pole repeatedly into the sand.
They are standing beyond the third tent; Nellyn stays behind it and watches them. Lanara is holding her bow, pulling back a string and an arrow very slowly. When she opens her right hand, the arrow sings, then sinks into a tall cactus. The cactus tips slightly. It is supported by several rocks, not by roots, and Nellyn thinks, That man tears it from the earth and brings it here.The man is beside Lanara. He too wears blue and green, though the colours are more faded than hers. He grins down at her, his teeth glinting suddenly from the hair around his mouth. “Not bad,” Nellyn hears him say, “for a Luhran female.” She pretends to shove him and he pretends to stumble. Nellyn sees her smile and turns away.
He still does not sleep. He lies with his eyes closed, he lies with them open. “Our sleep is our strength,” the wise ones say—and he realizes the truth of this as he bends to gather lynanyn with fumbling hands. His limbs feel heavy and clumsy. His eyes ache until he rubs them, and then they burn. When he speaks, his tongue drags over his teeth.
He listens to the breathing of his sleeping companions and thinks of the Queensman. He imagines he can hear his voice rumbling beneath the hammering of his own heart and the boom of approaching thunder. The dizziness that struck him on the flatboat when he smiled at Lanara returns. Sometimes he feels as if he is falling, and his fingers claw at the sand or the wood of the flatboat.
He is awake when the rain begins. At first he thinks the sound is in his head, and he sits up carefully, waiting for it to abate. It does not, and thunder cracks, very close. It is here, he thinks, rubbing his hands across his forehead and over his cheeks. Lightning, thunder, the hard patter of rain. His vision blurs and darkens. He sees the Queensman’s grin and Lanara’s fingernail, crusted with sand. Soral’s wooden blocks falling in sunlight that eddies like water. The Queensman looking down at her—looking, smiling, reaching. These things are not real, but he sees them anyway, so clearly that he groans and grinds his fists against his eyes. What is this? he thinks as he scrambles to his feet. I am not the same. Something is new.
He runs over rain-blotched sand. Bile rises in his throat, and everything around him spins, but his feet pound up the path to the ridge. He sees Lanara and the Queensman standing in the door flap of her sleeping tent. He hears the man’s voice and watches his lips: “So your little blue people are afraid of a bit of rain, are they?” Words and skin swim in the muddy light. Nellyn tries to keep the man still, just for a few more steps, just until he can reach him with all the force of his running and his need.
“Nellyn!” Lanara cries. The Queensman turns to him. Nellyn sees his lips part in surprise, scorn, pain. Nellyn’s body holds them both on the ground for a moment. He sees his own hands gripping the man’s tunic. “Nellyn!” Lanara cries again, and he sees her reaching for him. He wants to touch her hair and the skin of her neck and the hollow of her throat. He shouts as he raises his arm and twists back to the man. The man’s fist rises—and then pain blazed and the world changed its shape, and Nellyn understood.
SEVEN
My Queen, it seems what Nellyn told me about the strange and difficult nature of the rains is true. Today, after weeks of thunder, the rain began to fall. As soon as we heard it, Queensman Gwinent and I went to watch from the door flap of my tent. We had not been there very long when Nellyn came running toward us. At first I did not recognize him: he was moving so quickly, and his face was full of rage. It was the first time I had ever been able to identify an emotion, a real expression. Before I could intervene, he ran at Gwinent and they both fell to the floor of my tent. Nellyn had taken him entirely by surprise and was able to hold him down for a moment, despite Gwinent’s greater strength and bulk. But then Gwinent hit him in the face with his fist several times, and Nellyn rolled off him, unconscious.
Gwinent was extremely angry. He demanded to know who Nellyn was and why he would have attacked him in such an unprovoked manner. I attempted to explain again about the rains, and ventured the opinion that Nellyn had been affected by them. I too became rather agitated. Gwinent is a seasoned Queensman: he should have seen instantly that his attacker was much smaller and weaker than himself. He could have halted the attack with far less force than he employed. As I spoke, I was staunching the blood flowing from Nellyn’s nose (which appears to have been broken).
Gwinent knew nothing of the shonyn. He should have fended Nellyn off and deferred to my own understanding of these people for a solution to the situation. Perhaps his time in the desert has affected his judgment?
When I laid a damp cloth on Nellyn’s brow, Gwinent’s anger overcame him. He accused me of misplaced loyalty and stormed out of the tent. A short time later he rode away. I watched him make off westward with his few bags strapped to his horse. It seems he does not intend to return here to wait for the next Queensship. I cannot say that I am disappointed, though I do regret the nature of our final exchange.
A far more important thing happened then. Nellyn opened his eyes and looked into my face, and he said, very clearly despite his broken nose, “That was the first time.” For several minutes I could not speak. He had referred to something in the past. He had finally grasped the knowledge so many other Queensfolk had tried to convey.
“The first time for what?” I finally asked.
He turned his head to the door flap and seemed to listen to the rain. “Anger and pain. And then knowing.”
I was not sure that I understood him, but I said, “And what will happen now?”
He looked at me again. His eyes were very bright, but I do not think with happiness. “Change,” he said. “I . . . will change. I have changed.”
I laughed and hugged him and congratulated him on his success, and he smiled, though his eyes were still strange.
He said he wanted to go home, and declined my offer to accompany him. I offered again when he stood and nearly fell—but once more he declined. For a moment he braced himself with one hand on the back of my chair; with the other hand he held the blood-soaked cloth to his nose. Then, without a
nother word to me, he left the tent and went slowly back to his house. I watched him to make sure that he reached it—and he did, just as the rain that had only been spattering turned into a downpour. (I can no longer see the river, or even the village.) I trust he will endure these rains, and his new knowledge.
I hope I will not sound immodest when I write that his accomplishment is also mine. Patience has been difficult to maintain in my dealings with him—but it has been rewarded. I have this thought to keep me company now, as I wait for the rains to pass.
Nellyn stared at the blood. His blood on Lanara’s cloth—it was black now, dried and stiff, made darker by the gloom of the hut. The thunder had passed; there was only the rain, which pounded the hardened clay until he thought it would dissolve around him. He heard the muttering of his sleeping companions above the rain. They sat together by the lynanyn pile and murmured, and Nellyn did not look at them.
“What is this?” one of them had said, sometime earlier pointing at the cloth and Nellyn’s face. He had not replied. He had turned his back on all of them and squatted by the door, where the curtain hung heavy and the earth was soaked with rain.
He stared at his blood and saw other images, as well, too many, all at once, burning and throbbing until he thought he would slip again into darkness, as he had when the Queensman had hit him. He saw himself in the river, splashing with the other small ones, gazing at the flatboats as they set off at dusk. His small self; his young self, before Soral. Everything quiet circles until that day in Soral’s tent. A line, Nellyn thought. My life became a line then, just as Lanara told me. My life in the sand, straight, marked with changes from that day, though I did not understand it until now. Now: aching, stiff, spinning with past and future so that “now” did not exist. I used to. I have never. I will. Circles opened into lines and he felt broken and grieving and new.
He looked out of the hut, barely hearing his companions’ gasps. The rain was hard and warm, and he was blind for a moment as it coursed over his face. Then he blinked and blinked again and he could see, though not clearly. Everything was flowing and strange: the other huts, the sand. They sky was tiny, crushed by cloud. He saw the river when the wind tore spaces in the rain. It was brown and foaming.
Nellyn crawled outside. “No!” someone cried after him, but he did not turn back. He stood up slowly, stretching his arms, wriggling his toes deep into the sand that was now mud. The falling water made his nose sting. He touched it and winced at the pain that lanced behind his eyes and up into his skull.
He took a careful step and fell. There suddenly seemed to be another river here, gushing among the houses. It plucked him and spun him, and he scrabbled for a bit before he let it take him. He slithered and bumped—and then he heard the roaring foam of the real river approaching, and he dug his heels and hands into the mud. He came to a skidding halt on the bank and rolled out of the small torrent that had carried him. His legs dangled into nothing. He waved them weakly a few times but could not crawl fully onto the bank.
A fish was lying an arm’s span away from him, flopping and gasping, its reddish gills opening on air it could not breathe. Nellyn touched it lightly with his fingertips, then swept his arm out so that it sailed back into the river. He lay with his cheek in the mud and his legs in the air and started to laugh. He laughed until he shook. He heaved himself onto his back and thought he might also be crying, though the difference between the two would not matter. Circles and lines, his blood and his stinging nose, a red wheezing fish—and her, the only clear, sensible thing somehow, the only image that did not flow away from him. He laughed, and the rain swallowed his tears.
Eight folded, thread-bound letters were lying by Lanara’s bed when the rains ended. The first few were quite short, the last few extremely long. She wondered, on the day the sun came out, about the wisdom of sending the long ones, which reflected her increasingly desperate state of mind a bit too clearly. I will read them again in a few days, she decided. She thought this almost idly. The sun was turning the remaining drifts of cloud to gold, and she could feel its warmth on her outstretched legs. She sighed and wriggled her toes and listened to the silence where the rain had been.
Green shoots were uncurling around her tent and down the slopes of the ridge. She thought she could see them growing. Some were already very tall, with delicate pink or yellow flowers. The distant cacti were also covered in blossoms. Birds clung to the spines and dipped their beaks in, and she almost went to them, to look more closely at their whirring iridescent wings and their tiny feet. But she stayed by her tent, with her back against a support pole, until the sun was directly overhead and hot. Then she rose and walked toward the village, her feet bare on the damp sand.
The shonyn would be sleeping, she guessed, as relieved to see the sunlight as she had been. She would come down again at dusk, to greet them and watch them greet each other, all of them hungry for voices and space and the comfort of light before darkness.
She hesitated beside Nellyn’s house. The curtain hung motionless, still splotched with wet. She heard nothing from behind it. She thought of his face, bloodied and changed, as she had so often while the rain pelted her sleeping tent. Patience, she reminded herself. You will see him soon enough. She turned away from his house and went down to the river, which was high and clear and dappled with birds, fish, fallen lynanyn.
The silver leaves were blindingly bright; even their reflections dazzled her eyes to tears. She dipped her foot in the water, which was cool. With a quick glance behind her, she dove in. Five long strokes took her to where the river bottom dropped away. She floated there, feeling the brush of plants and fish against her legs. For a moment she remembered the Queenspool in the Throne Chamber, and the glass-walled room outside it. A bird skimmed the river’s surface near her and plucked up a fish. Another bird bobbed among a cluster of lynanyn, slicing them open one by one until the surrounding water was blue. She smiled and swam slowly downstream.
The shonyn crops were thick and tall. Lanara rolled onto her back as she approached them. She saw their green against the blue of the sky and thought, I must write Ladhra and tell her how beautiful this is—and then she saw Nellyn. He was sitting where they had sat together, before Gwinent and the rains. He was looking down at a lynanyn, peeling it in one unbroken, winding strip. She felt weak with relief as she watched him: he was here, he looked the same as he always had.
“Nellyn,” she called at last, wanting to see his face, and when he lifted his head she saw that he was not the same.
He smiled at her as she swam to the bank. “Lanara,” he said when she was sitting beside him, wringing out her tunic. She dropped the folds of cloth and stared at him. “What is it?” he asked.
“My name,” she said. “I’ve never heard a shonyn pronounce it.”
“Lanara,” he repeated, drawing out each syllable. “Do I say it well? Did I?”
She smiled. “You did, yes.” He held out a dripping piece of lynanyn to her. She took it from his fingers, which were warm and dry and steady. “How are you?” she said, her eyes slipping away from his. “How were the rains, after your . . . experience with Gwinent?”
“Gwinent. So that is his name. I am well, now. I was perhaps a bit mad at first, and my sleeping companions were afraid for me. But now I am well. I stayed alone in an empty hut just there. I needed this loneliness.” He picked three seeds from the lynanyn and put them in his mouth. “You still stare at me.”
“Yes,” Lanara said, her own piece of fruit forgotten and slowly staining her palm. “It’s just that you’re so different. And you speak almost perfectly, as if you’ve always used our words for time. I’m amazed that you’re so calm, I suppose.”
He shook his head. “Not calm—but I thank you for this thought. And my speaking is smooth because I always heard these words as a small one. A child. They were in my mind all this time, without understanding—but now I understand, and they are ready. It is strange, yes. I wish
to tell my teacher Soral.”
“I could write to him,” Lanara said. “I’m sure he’d be very proud.”
Nellyn nodded. He threw a seed into the water and it disappeared immediately beneath. The rings that bloomed after it widened to the shore. “And you,” he said, “how were your rains? And Gwinent’s?”
Lanara cleared her throat. “Gwinent is gone. He left while you were still unconscious, and he didn’t come back. Which was a good thing. The rains were difficult, but I wouldn’t have wanted his company after what he did to you.”
Nellyn smiled again. She thought suddenly that he seemed drunk, or younger, or not shonyn. “Tell me about your difficult rains,” he said.
She ate the piece of lynanyn before she answered. The stain on her palm was crescent-shaped. She traced it lightly with a finger. “I thought I was lonely here before this. That seems silly now. Each day of rain was a bit harder, a bit emptier. At first the sound of it on my tent was soothing, but very quickly it grated on me. There was no quiet and no escape and no one to talk to or laugh about it with.” She sighed. “I was so excited when Queen Galha told me I’d be alone here. Such responsibility! Such a perfect way to prove myself to her! But I’d have begged her for companions, those last few days. Even Cannin.”
“But not Gwinent.”
She glanced sidelong at him. “No,” she said. “No, not him. But since you’ve mentioned him again, and since you’re obviously quite comfortable with talking now, tell me why you ran at him that day. And don’t tell me it was only the rains.”
He did not answer for a very long time. The old Nellyn, she thought. She wished she had her parchment and writing stick and hoped she would remember if he told her something useful.
“It was only the rains,” he finally said, very solemnly.
The Silences of Home Page 5
