The Silences of Home

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

  “Ladhra!” someone beside Lanara screamed, and she made the name herself, with her mouth and all her muscles. She ran four paces and slashed at a figure still crouched on the deck. She felt its flesh and bone, and the hot spatter of its blood on her own skin, and she shrieked her joy into the lightening air of Nasranesh.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Mallesh climbed up the gathering pool stone at dusk, when the treetops shone gold and the lower leaves and trunks were shadow. The features of the selkesh on the benches below him were also smudged with darkness; he wondered whether his own would be any clearer.

  “My people,” he cried, when he was standing straight. He felt as if he were shouting, though his voice was rough and thin, like a strained whisper. When he had been pulled out of the sea onto the shores of Nasranesh, the hole in his throat had been scarred shut. He had not tried to speak for weeks after that, and when he had, this voice had emerged. The selkesh listened to it, feeble as it was. They fell silent when he spoke to them, and leaned forward as they had when he had been whole and strong. He had dreaded their compassion—but it was fear he saw on their faces when they listened to him and looked at the wound he had taken across the sea. It was their fear that had made him want to live again, after the journey across, when he had yearned each day to die.

  “My people,” he said again, now that they were all gazing up at him, “strange boats have entered our waters. Leish’s treachery has been confirmed!” He ground his fingers into his palms to keep his hands from shaking; that the gathering would be sure to see, despite the dimming of the light. “I told you, after my return from the western land, that our attack on the stone city failed because of Leish. The Queen and her fighters had been expecting us: he informed her of our plans.” The lie came easily from his mouth now, but his hands still trembled—and some selkesh still shifted a bit on their benches, uncomfortable, unsure. “Some among you have doubted me,” he continued, “for I swore to lead our people to victory across the sea and yet I came back to you defeated, without many of those who had followed me. Without Leish, who was the first to hear the city’s song, who was the first to desire and possess it. It must have seduced him indeed, for him to have betrayed his own people. And now to pursue them with boats from the west.”

  He waited while his audience muttered; a pause for effect, but also to rest his voice. It tired so quickly now, and many words turned his throat’s ache into anguish. While he waited, he saw some of the selkesh turn to one another and motion with their hands. He saw Dallia among them, her long black hair shining, somehow, as the treetops did. She was not moving or talking, just staring up at him, holding his mother’s hand.

  She had come to him by the hearth pool he had claimed for himself when he returned. He had not been able to stay with his parents, who welcomed him home and pitied him, and did not believe what he told them about Leish. “The seasong has changed.” Dallia had said, facing him across the small dark pool. He had felt his innards twist with dread, had angled his head in an almost-nod, hoping she would say more. “I have heard it, as have others. The water sings higher now, over shapes that do not belong to it. Dead wood—boats, probably. The notes grow more shrill every hour, and our people wish to know what this means and what we will do.”

  He had swallowed, heard it clearly in the silence that had filled his head since he had been dragged from the river to the sea. His men had pulled him beneath the icemounts’ great flanks, and he had tried to ignore the sudden faintness of the songs he knew. The river behind him, the sea ahead, the islands, the shores and people of his own home, which he should be able to hear, by now—their notes were smudges. My wound has made me deaf, he had thought, and this had seemed another reason to die. But he had lived, and the songs had grown no clearer, even as his wound began to heal. He heard nothing clearly, only a thick buzzing through which some notes thrust, a few together, most on their own, so that he could not identify them. Once back in Nasranesh, he had found this pool and lain beside it. After weeks of silence he had spoken to the awed selkesh who had come to him to ask about the failed campaign. Shame, lies, desperation—and then Dallia, looking at him without any awe at all, waiting for him to answer her.

  “They have found us,” he had said, as if he had heard the changing seasong himself. “Leish has led them here. Tell everyone to await me at the gathering pool.” She had stayed where she was for a moment, and he had lifted his eyes away from hers, which saw him too clearly—as they still did, even with him atop the stone and her so far beneath and the air deep blue with dusk.

  “We will surprise them—we will swim to their boats and attack before they know we are there. Any of them who escape will be met here by our knives and spears.” The crowd was quiet, but they might as well have shouted; he heard them. “Why should we follow you when your previous guidance brought us only death and dishonour?” Mallesh glared down at them, attempted to find words that would convince them.

  “I will go to the boats,” Dallia called as she stood. “I hear them clearly; it will just be a short swim. Who will join me?”

  Selkesh cried out, offering their names, leaping to their feet. Mallesh nodded, as if this had been his plan, as if he weren’t relieved and furious and echoing with silence within.

  Dallia led her band into the sea just before dawn. Mallesh arranged most of those who remained in a line on the shore. They waited, clutching spears and knives, and when the sun rose, their breath left them together in one great sigh. Mallesh did not sigh; he hardly felt his own breathing. He looked at the dark distant shapes ranged across the horizon. He remembered arrows and long straight knives and selkesh screams that had sounded in his head long after all the songs had died. He rolled his spear shaft around against his palm and his webs and the lengths of his fingers; a spear for hunting shankfish among the bones of the Old City, or red-bellied eels in the river where it broadened, in the shadow of the peaks.

  Two hours after dawn, other shapes appeared on the water. The selkesh on the shore strained to see; Mallesh did not need to. “The attack on the boats has failed,” he said. His shadow-voice was even lower than usual, but they turned to him with wide, fearful eyes. “Let us stand together, here. They will see us as we are: strong and unafraid, lovers of our earth and water.” He was not sure where these calm, measured words were coming from; they did not feel or sound like the ones he had used before to rally his troops. But the selkesh looked at him and nodded, and the ones who still bore the scars of Queensfolk blades and arrows were the first to straighten beside him.

  The small boats drew closer. Sunlight glinted from metal and wood, green and blue cloth, the water that scattered from oars. So many boats—but one came ahead of the others, a larger one, in which two figures stood. A woman, Mallesh saw—the Queen; he would have known this even if Baldhron had not told him what she looked like. She was nearly as tall as the one who stood beside her.

  “Leish. . . .” The name hissed along the line of selkesh like a wind in the trees behind them. Mallesh heard it as clearly as if each of them had whispered it to him alone, and he flinched, though he did not look away from the selkesh in the boat. Not Leish, he thought. Another from the army, perhaps—not Leish; this one does not resemble him at all. But the eyes half hidden by swollen lids were Leish’s; the long blood-encrusted fingers were his, and the cracked lips that hung apart, awaiting words or water. Mallesh felt his lies pressing on him, squeezing away his breath and blood as the arrow had. “Leish’s treachery . . . Leish’s doing . . . Leish has led them to us. . . .” Mallesh could not move, though he knew he should: the boats were close, drawing together like a shoal of hunting fish. He could see red cloth in the Queen’s dark hair, and the places on Leish’s face where the moisture of his own rotting flesh had gathered.

  “Leish!” A shout from the line—his father, Mallesh knew. Their father. A spear streaked toward the Queen, who slid behind Leish. As the weapon clattered against wood, her left arm snaked around his throa
t. She raised her right arm very high and held it still for a moment then she brought it sweeping down.

  As soon as the first arrows left the Queensfolk bows, Mallesh moved again. “Run!” he cried. The selkesh beside him fell with an arrow in his chest, but Mallesh did not glance down. “Back to your hearth pools. We will engage them closer, so they cannot use these weapons! They do not know our homes or our land. . . .” He knew that he had told them to stand only a short time before, and now, so soon, to command them to run—it would seem confused, confusing, when really his mind was clear for the first time since he had come back here. “Run!” he cried again, ignoring the pain in his throat. “Send your children upriver and fight these invaders from your pools and trees. . . .”

  Most of the selkesh did turn and race toward the trees and vines that stood between the shore and the hearth pools. Some lingered to throw their spears before they ran back. Mallesh saw a few Queensfolk pitch into the sea while the others struggled to steady the boats. But the boats were nearly aground now, and the arrows still whined, thick and glittering, and Mallesh too leapt away from the shore.

  Too slow, Lanara thought as she rowed. Ever since the ships and the dying Sea Raiders, she had felt the world dragging around her. The killing had been quick: a blink, or a single pulse of heartblood. She had thrust her sword into the first Raider she had seen, and suddenly it seemed that she was pushing the last body over the ship’s side. It was then, leaning over the rail watching dead Raiders float, that her surroundings had slowed. One of the Raiders had had long black hair that spread out around her like drifting velvet. Lanara had looked away from it, at the rowboats being lowered from this Queensship and the others. Aldron had been beside her, wiping his dagger on his leggings—one side, then the other, then back to the first—slow and strangely silent, as everything else seemed to be.

  She pulled the oar back against her chest. The shore ahead was almost painfully clear, the colours and textures searing her eyes so that they would remain even if she closed her lids. Hummocks of shell-spattered moss at the water’s edge; a tangle of enormously tall trees behind, hung with vines that rose in the wind despite their weight of blossoms. It was a warm wind, like nothing Lanara had felt in Luhr, or on her travels, warm with cool beneath, like water that has lain in a fountain’s bowl in sunlight. The wind also was slow.

  She lifted the oar up and pushed her body forward. One stroke closer—and now she could see the faces of the ones who waited on the shore. Their skin was smoother than the prisoner’s, their eyes whiter than his yellow ones. She saw their crude spears and tiny knives, felt the shape and heft of her bow pressing against her back as she rowed. Too slow, she thought again, and wished the Queen had not commanded her fighters to stay their hands until she gave them a signal. A signal: her arm raised, descending—Lanara saw it, felt her boat tip as the others in it stood and nocked arrows to their bows. She was standing with them, though she did not remember doing it. Aldron was in front of her, still sitting, smiling up at her as she drew her bowstring back.

  She shot four Raiders down before one of them flailed his arms and sent most scattering back among the trees. A few remained behind. She shot two of them, and Aldron felled one with a dagger, and then their boat bit sand, and she sprang onto the moss and ran. She heard herself panting and realized she had been hearing this sound since the dawn attack. Faster, Nara, faster, Nara—each footfall Ladhra’s voice, pushing Lanara from open sun to dense green shade and then to dappled river-light.

  She stopped running. Nearly all the Queensfighters had, though some had slowed closer to the river. There were no Sea Raiders here, just massive roots and trunks, and rounded hills rising among them, covered in creepers and moss and flowers. And the river, slow beneath the dome of trees, glinting black in some places and gold in others. Lanara heard the river as she had not heard screams, or the thud of bodies on wood, or the splashing of scores of feet by the shore. The river sang so quietly—neither surging like the Sarhenna nor splashing like the fountain in the Throne Chamber—but Lanara went still, listening to it.

  “Where are they?” someone murmured, or shouted. Lanara shook her head, tried to clear it of the sounds of water and leaves. Two Queensfighters moved slowly to the river’s edge. They looked down into the water—and they were in the water, thrashing and choking, sinking—and Queensfighters behind Lanara were also shrieking and falling. She looked back for a moment, just long enough to see knives and spears raining down from the trees; then she was running again, through a world that was no longer slow. She ran among the hills, weaving so that no flying weapon would find her. Her feet remembered hard earth, baked flat, but she did not stumble on this sinking green, and she leapt over roots almost without glancing at them. She halted a few steps from the riverbank. The Queensfighters were bobbing there, face-down in the shifting light. Blood curled away from them: mourning ribbons that would thin and vanish.

  “Careful.” Aldron’s voice sounded as if it came from far away—farther than the trees behind, whose branches bent with bodies. Lanara did not turn to him, though she let him pull her down. They crouched by the bank. She saw plants beneath the water, swaying with the current; a glimmer of fish, as well, and the shadows of the floating Queensfighters. And suddenly a darker, longer shadow, sliding up from black water.

  “There,” she said, more sigh than word. She fumbled for an arrow—no, her sword—the thing was too close already, its face veiled in water but twisting through—and Aldron plunged a spear down, wrenched it in and deeper. The water foamed wildly. Lanara saw hands flailing, grasping the spear haft. Very quickly the river was calm again. Aldron pulled the creature up so that it lay half on the bank. He braced his foot on its shoulder and jerked the spearhead free.

  “There should be another,” he said. “At least one.” He looked back toward the trees, and Lanara followed his gaze. There were fewer spears falling, more arrows now, arcing into the broad leaves, and more Sea Raider screams than Queensfighter. She turned again to the river just as Aldron waved his spear at a patch of sunlit water upriver. They both ran—but the water was empty, the plants beneath it undisturbed except for those by the bank. “Maybe it’s at the very bottom,” he said, poking at the place. Lanara stared at the plants that were still shuddering and shook her head. She looked from them to the hill closest to the river; she looked up above the hill and saw a thin, broken line, almost dissolved, hanging against the sky.

  “Smoke,” she said, her thoughts swift and clear. “The river has underground branches that lead there, and there.” She pointed at another hill, and another, all the same, all breathing smoke from fires that had been recently quenched. “These are houses,” she said, and raised her sword.

  At first Aldron helped her hack at the creepers and moss, but she motioned him away, panted, “No—they’ll try to escape into the river again—wait there.” He did, and she continued alone. The earth beneath the growing things was soft but very thick. She hacked at it and it sprayed around her until it lay like drifts of snow, and still she was not through. She dropped her sword and scrabbled with her hands. She hollowed out a hole and then hit a web of roots and picked up her sword once more. Faster, Nara, faster, Nara. She heard a ragged cheer go up from the other Queensfighters, far behind; she heard Aldron cry out, heard his spear in the water, but she did not pause. “Got one!” Aldron called, and the last root gave way in a shower of earth, and she stumbled forward, into darkness.

  She stood with her sword held in front of her and breathed in moist, heavy air. As she did, she saw that the darkness was not complete. There was light coming in the hole she had made, of course, but there were also specks of it hovering in front of her—coloured specks, which winked and spun and showed her a pool of still water perhaps ten paces ahead. The lights began to spin faster and more erratically. When they blurred toward her, Lanara bent her head and shielded her face with her hand. For an instant her hair and skin felt brushed with warmth—silk or soft, so
ft fingertips—and her ears were filled with a low whirring. She lifted her head when these sounds and touches had passed. She did not glance behind her; she squinted ahead, saw the sheen of water and, as her eyes adjusted, moss smooth around it, and a clear stone place stacked with wood. She looked up and saw broad roots jutting from the earthen walls, shapes on these roots might have been bowls, cups, lengths of cloth.

  She sheathed her sword, which was gritty with dirt, and drew her dagger from her belt. One step away from the outside light, and another—and then she was falling.

  The moss was as gentle as some new wool she had touched in a cottage near the coastal road—but there were arms around her legs, and they were wrapped hard and fierce. She heaved onto her back, carrying the weight with her, and it was gone—it was a body rising up against the weak sunlight, an arm descending. She threw up her own arm and felt the quick heat of her flesh tearing open. She stabbed with the dagger she held in her good hand and heard a high, piercing scream. The body crumpled onto hers. She grunted as she rolled it off and onto its back.

  A small one, like the shonyn small ones that play by the shore. She heard the voice as clearly as if Nellyn had been beside her, and she shrank from it. The Sea Raider was young, but hardly a child; he was already tall, already strong enough to kill, or try to. His eyes stared up at the earth-and-roots ceiling, so far above that it was invisible in the half-darkness. His open mouth made a perfect circle, as a Queensboy’s never could. Lanara looked at his knife, which had fallen onto the moss; its blade was wet, and she held up her arm. The skin of her forearm gaped and bled, though not very much—strange, since she could see the shine of bone when she fingered one side of the wound. She tried, one-handed, to rip some cloth from the hem of her tunic. When this did not work, she grasped an end of cloth below the Raider’s shoulder and unwound it. His upper arm, bare, was quite slender. She held the cloth with her chin, pulled it as tightly as she could, round and round her wound. She tied it with fingers and teeth and spat, afterward into the moss. She knelt for a moment more beside him, because she had begun to shake—but then the light flickered and dimmed and Aldron shouted, “Nara—are you all right? Come outside and help us.” She rose, strong and steady, and walked again into the daylight.