The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

  “I can’t believe you aren’t exhausted,” she said one morning, almost frowning.

  “I’m not,” he said, touching a finger to the skin between her eyes. “Not any more.”

  “Nara?”

  Lanara groaned and rolled away from Nellyn but did not wake. He slipped out of bed and drew one of his new tunics over his head. As he fumbled with the belt, the voice called out again.

  She was standing inside the door, dark against the daylight. Nellyn blinked and began to see her: black hair pulled away from her face, wide eyes that looked green, mouth still open a bit on the name that had also been a question.

  “I am Nellyn,” he said after a long silence.

  “I know. I was there when the guard brought you to the garden.”

  “I do not. . . .” He strained to find the word he needed, another new one, another sound that fractured time, “. . . remember. I do not remember you.” Only the water, and Lanara.

  “Where is she?”

  He was about to gesture to the bedchamber behind him when Lanara emerged, smiling, rubbing her hands over cheeks and hair and down her neck.

  “Ladhra,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “Ah.” Such a small word—but Lanara stopped walking, stopped smiling. “The Queen my mother wishes to see you. And him.” Ladhra did not glance at Nellyn. “Shouldn’t he be the one sleeping?”

  “His name is Nellyn.” He recognized anger in the flatness of Lanara’s voice.

  Ladhra turned and walked out of the house. “Come with me,” she said from the steps. “Now.”

  Lanara’s fingers dug into the skin between his knuckles, but she did not look at him as they walked. “I’ll take you to the Queen,” she had said, “when you’re rested and ready. She’ll be eager to meet you. And so will Ladhra.” But now the woman Ladhra strode ahead of them, and Lanara too was angry, and the palace was closer, looming so far above that he could not lift his eyes to it. He felt weak, as he had not since his arrival. Lanara was bending away from him even as he clutched her hand.

  When they entered the grove of trees, his dizziness passed in wonder. There were trees in the city, near fountains and lining the road into the marketplace, but not this many or this tall. The sky was leaves and branches, thicker than stars or even cloud. He stopped walking when the trunks had drawn around them, blocking out the walls behind and ahead. For a moment he felt the same stillness he had felt by the city fountain—but before he could breathe it in or push it away, Lanara tugged at his hand and drew him on.

  The palace corridors were cool and dim, and lined with guards who raised their hands as Ladhra passed and sometimes spoke to her. She nodded at them but did not reply. Lanara and Nellyn followed her to a staircase that wound up and up, ringing with their footsteps. Soon Nellyn heard only his breath, which twisted his insides until he could hardly stand up straight. Lanara was a step ahead of him, holding his fingers. He could not lift his head to look at her. The walls pressed in toward him and the air darkened, and he tried to say her name.

  “Ladhra!” Lanara’s voice was faint, emerging from beneath his own breathing. “Wait for us! Wait!”

  He was sitting, though he did not remember doing this. Lanara was standing beside him; he felt her hand resting on his hair. As his breathing calmed, he heard footsteps coming slowly down to them.

  “Ladhra.” Lanara spoke quietly now. “He isn’t accustomed to going so fast. Please wait for us.” Ladhra nodded and turned her head away, pressing her lips together so tightly that they whitened. “Don’t be angry with me,” Lanara said.

  Ladhra let out a long, slow breath. “I haven’t seen you for so long,” she said, “and I knew you wouldn’t notice how long it was.” She glared at the tower wall. “I wanted to be angry for much longer than this.” Lanara laughed, and Ladhra looked down at her and smiled.

  “We’ve never been very good at sustained anger,” Lanara said, “thankfully. I’m sorry I disappeared.”

  Nellyn stood up and Lanara asked, “Better?”

  There was still a darkness at the edge of his vision, and his legs still trembled a bit—but he said yes because he did not want her to worry about him now that she was happy again.

  They climbed the rest of the stairs very slowly. “Here,” Ladhra said at last as the tower ended in another hallway, much wider and brighter than the one below.

  Nellyn stood gasping in the sunlight that fell onto the flagstones and turned them pink. “In here,” Lanara said, and drew him to a door flanked by guards.

  Nellyn took a step back when the door opened. He blinked against even more brilliant sunlight and a breaking wave of voices. He saw more guards, and women sitting at small round tables, eating grapes and bread. He heard music, maybe a stringed instrument he had seen in the marketplace, whose name he had forgotten. The marketplace, where no one turned to look at him.

  The voices and music fell silent as he and Lanara followed Ladhra into the chamber. He tried to stare only ahead, but could not. He saw lengths of silk against the floor, and brown hands plucking grapes from stems. Glass goblets full of sparkling crimson. Eyes and lips, blurred with the speed of his gaze, but still there, clustered and close.

  A woman was standing beneath an arched doorway. “Welcome, Lanara,” she said, and for a moment he thought he heard a wise one; her voice was slow and rich, and there was water flowing somewhere nearby, almost river.

  “And welcome also to you, Nellyn,” she went on, and he was closer, and saw her clearly. She was smiling at him, though Lanara and Ladhra were raising their hands to her, their fingers pressed together. He did not speak. “She is so beautiful,” Lanara had told him. “And so strong. I love her as I would love my mother if she were living—and you will love her too.” Nellyn followed Queen Galha out beneath the doorway.

  At first he was relieved to have left the crowded room, but then he glanced around and felt his breath leave him again. They were suspended in sky, fastened to the stone of the palace only by a slender metal railing. “Come and look,” he heard Lanara say as she guided him around fountains and blossoming plants. “Ladhra and I would come here and sit. . . .” They reached the rail, and her words vanished in wind.

  For a moment he saw the city, flat and heat-blistered beneath them, and a gleaming snake of wall. Beyond that was a haze of sand that did not end. Lanara’s hands were resting on the silver metal. He looked at them as if they could soothe the rising sickness of his fear.

  “Sit here by me,” the Queen called from behind him, and he did. The chair was soft and faced the railing. Ladhra and Lanara sat, and there were others as well: a man dressed in brown, who sat beside but a bit behind the Queen, and a woman holding the stringed instrument whose name Nellyn could not remember.

  “Nellyn,” Galha said, “we are honoured that you have chosen to be here with us. Let me name those here, so that you can begin to know them.”

  There was a goblet in his hand. He took a sip as the Queen spoke on, and coughed as the crimson liquid seared his throat.

  Lanara watched water falling in the fountain. She could not yet watch Galha or Nellyn. “You are the first of your kind to come within the circle of my friends,” Galha was saying. She was pitching her voice higher so that her words would be clear to him. “Speak to me, Nellyn. I want to hear your voice.”

  The wind scattered the water like rain. Wind so strong, this high, that if you leaned out over the balcony railing you felt tugged, hands slipping, cries torn away. Lanara turned to Nellyn as the silence continued.

  “But I am being so vague,” the Queen said more slowly, with a gentle laugh. “Please forgive me. Let me ask you, so that you will be able to talk more easily. . . . What do you think of our city?”

  Nellyn was staring at the blue jewel in the Queen’s hair. The goblet in his hand began to tip. Lanara reached over and righted it. He did not look at her.

  “Your city has no ri
ver,” he said at last, “but the fountains are beautiful.”

  Well done, Nellyn, Lanara thought. She rested her fingertips on his hand—such a slight gesture, when what she really wanted was to put her arms around him and hold him, strengthen him as she knew she could. Tenderness had ached in her ever since he had come, so weak and beautiful, to find her.

  The Queen was nodding. “The river here is beneath the ground, and we tap it for our fountains. These fountains are the queens’ gift to their people—a sign of life, power, and hope, and an homage to our First, greatest Queen, who drew the water up above the sand with only the powers of her mind.” She leaned forward, and Lanara saw the silk of her tunic tighten against her shoulders. “Lanara has told me of your river. She wrote me so many letters, I feel as if I have seen your town and your silver trees.” Galha was smiling at Lanara, now.

  “I wrote to you as I was expected to,” Lanara said, feeling warmth in her chest and on her cheeks. “I am happy that my letters entertained you.”

  “Entertained,” the Queen said, “and educated. You have a gift, Nara. You are lucky, Nellyn, that—”

  There was a sudden clatter. Lanara looked down and saw the goblet Nellyn had been holding, spinning slowly on the stone. The musician put her instrument down with a jangle of strings. Ladhra raised her eyebrows at Lanara, who bent to pick up the goblet. She saw that Galha’s sandals were speckled with wine. “I am sorry,” Lanara stammered, “he is not usually so. . . .” and then she turned to Nellyn and did not speak.

  He was looking past her, past all of them, out into the sky. His eyes were so wide that she followed his gaze, but she saw only drifts of thin cloud and sun-bright blue. “Nellyn?” she said, kneading his limp hands, digging her fingers into the fleshy part of his palms. Galha was standing beside them. She, too, said his name, but his gaze did not waver. A steady shonyn gaze, distant, not present.

  “Nellyn!” Lanara said again, more loudly. Come back, she thought, quickly. Everything was going so smoothly. . . . She felt the Queen’s shadow over them both. “I’m sorry,” Lanara said, tilting her head; “he seemed well until now.” When she looked back at him, she saw that his eyes were closed, and she saw tears on his lashes, melting and slow.

  The marketplace was quiet in darkness. Light shone from within some of the tents and wagons—red cloth, golden cloth, spaces bright between wooden slats. Nellyn heard laughter and singing, also within, and blurred. The palace towers broke cloud and stars; he knew this, even though he did not look up. He could not: he felt himself shaking, still weak from the height and strangeness of the balcony where he had wept, that afternoon.

  He held his wrists up one after the other and traced the flesh where his veins were, hidden by blue. He drew breath from his belly to his chest to his throat to his mouth and let it out in a silent stream. “The river is within you.” He heard the words: wise ones’ words, sounding above water. Water against the bank like breath against the air. Water threading sand like veins in skin. Life moving through places of stillness—all life together, all breath one. He remembered these sounds and these words, but he could no longer feel them.

  He stood among the tents and wagons and unrolled sleeping mats, and opened his eyes wide on a night he did not know. The lights winked out as he watched, and the voices died. He began to walk through the silence, listening for wind or waves. He heard only the tearing of his own breath.

  “Tall one.” He did not turn because it could not be a real voice. It had to be from before, from that other place. Not real. Just as the small red huts were not real, on the balcony that saw so much desert. “Tall one—I see you.” He felt hands on his arm, and stopped and looked down into a shonyn face.

  She did not waver and disappear as he looked at her. She was solid. He saw the deep creases of her blue skin, and his own skin was pressed almost to bruising beneath her fingertips. “Wise one,” he said in his own language, and the woman smiled.

  “Wise one—no, not I,” she answered, and her words fell like lynanyn into the river that had found him. “Not I, no—I am a nothing, a small lost shonyn—but not. Though I am, yes, old,” she continued, the last word in the Queenstongue. Nellyn eased his arm away from her gripping fingers.

  “I was young but now am old. I was foolish, they said, and I will know this sometimes, but not all.” Queenstongue and shonyn language mixed—words not lynanyn, and no river, after all. He looked away from her shining, darting eyes.

  “Our shonyn do not say they remember me, but they will. I left them on foot, when I was strong. I followed the Queensman’s footsteps here and we live together, but he has cast me off. And you,” she said, her nails digging again, “you also followed?”

  He shook his head and his arm and tried to step back. “Yes,” he heard himself say.

  “Then you and I will walk together. I find lynanyn on the ground at night, or I steal it in their day. I take you to get some.”

  “No,” Nellyn said, and his feet finally carried him backward. Something tripped him up but he righted himself. He stepped and stepped again and did not look away from her.

  “Tall one,” she called, “we are both forgotten. Walk with me.”

  He wrenched himself around and ran.

  TWELVE

  Every time Nellyn moved his head on the pillow, Lanara expected to see blue—a blot or a smudge, in the shape of his skull or the strands of his hair. This was a strange thought, and it made her feel as if she were the feverish one. She had been attempting to cool his fever ever since he had crawled into bed beside her three nights ago, whimpering, his flesh already burning. His episode on the Queen’s balcony, and now his sickness. Lanara lay beside him and murmured to him, hoping that her voice would bring him back.

  On the morning of the fourth day, she woke to Ladhra’s voice. Lanara slipped out of her sleeping shift and into a tunic. She hesitated for a moment by the bed. Nellyn’s lips were moving, though she could hear no words. They’re probably shonyn words, she thought, and went quickly into the main room so that she could imagine that she was shaking off her fear.

  “Nara,” Queen Galha said. She was standing where she had stood on that other morning, though there was no scarlet mourning ribbon in her hair today. Malhan was behind her and Ladhra beside him. Lanara looked out the open door and saw two Queensguards on the top step, their backs turned to the house. She saw the shining lengths of their bows, and the tips of the arrows that filled their green-and-blue-stitched quivers.

  “Your father’s tomb is ready at last,” the Queen said. “It took longer than I wished it to, but the artisans have more than rewarded my patience.”

  “Oh,” Lanara said, the word thick and rough. She felt three days of sweat and sleeplessness upon her, and knew her tunic was wrinkled and threadbare—but Galha smiled at her as if she saw none of this.

  “Come with me. I will show it to you, and Ladhra will stay here with Nellyn. One of my Queensguards will stay as well, in case she needs to send for you.”

  “Yes,” Lanara said. “Good.” She followed the Queen past Ladhra, who was already at the table, sorting clean cloths from soiled with one hand and reaching for a bowl with the other. “Thank you,” Lanara said to all of them—and then she went out into the daylight.

  The palace tombs lay beneath the northernmost ring of towers. Lanara and Ladhra had often stood at the low doorways and stared at the ladders that angled away into shadow, but they had never gone any further than that. Now Lanara followed Galha and Malhan down, while the Queensguard who had accompanied them stood at the bottom, awaiting them with a lantern held high.

  They did not need the lantern when they stepped beneath an arched entryway and into Creont’s tomb. Its slanted roof was cut with long thin openings. Morning sun lay on the stone walls and floor, washing the crimson paint with gold. The cut glass set in the walls flickered and burned. Lanara stood still. She stared at the glass pieces and saw shapes: blooming flowers strung
with arrowheads, drops of water falling from slender hands. Real water sang atop the stone sarcophagus in the centre of the chamber. Creont’s tomb fountain was crystal, fashioned somehow into a copy of the palace. Lanara forced herself to walk to the sarcophagus. She leaned in close to the fountain. There were tiny fountains within it, cascading down towers and pooling in courtyards and open rooms. She drew quickly back, brushing the Queen, who had come up behind her.

  “It does not please you?” Galha said.

  “Oh yes,” Lanara replied, “it does—it’s beautiful. . . .” As beautiful as the painted, glass-encrusted stone and the ivy that was already beginning to unspool up the walls. As beautiful as the sarcophagus, also red, inlaid with rubies and emeralds and sapphires in patterns that made her vision blur.

  “Gaudy. Self-indulgent.” Creont would have growled the words. He would have been turning away as he spoke. “More queenly show—and for whom?”

  The city’s dead were set in tombs outside the city walls, caves that were not painted or adorned, and were filled only with blown sand. The bodies were buried, not placed in stone boxes, and there were many bodies in each cave. Lanara had known this since she was a child, but she had never thought of it until now. He should be there, she thought, guilt threading among her misery. There’s nothing of him here—nothing to call him back or give him peace. Nothing he would appreciate—except, perhaps, for the large sand snail that was tugging slime along the sarcophagus lid. Its heavy brown shell tipped to the side and she thought it would fall—but it righted itself and continued ponderously on.

  “Nara.” Galha’s voice sounded very loud. Her long tunic hissed across the stone as she stepped to Lanara’s side. “Tell me what’s troubling you.”

  Lanara’s breath felt thin; too little air underground, or a weight of tears in her chest. “I miss him,” she said. So few words for the feeling, but there were more. “And I can’t stop thinking about how he died, now that I’m tending Nellyn. The fevers and the words that I can’t hear or understand—it’s death again, and I can’t do anything to stop it. It’s my fault, too: I wasn’t here when my father fell ill, and I was the one who took Nellyn away from his people.” She closed her eyes, but the mourning crimson was still there before her, like a stain.