The Silences of Home

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

  He had seen so many of these ships on his river, all clean and sleek. He had seen this very ship, a shining, graceful thing between the snow-piled banks of Fane. Now it seemed to limp behind the two boats that came before it. Each of them was tattered. Their sails were torn and bleached well beyond blue and green, and their wood was gouged and discoloured. The rowboats that hung above the deck looked black, as if they had been made from lynanyn bark—but that could not be; they must have been seared by some sort of heat or flame. Queensfolk clung to the rails. As the sunlight shone brighter and the boats drew closer, Nellyn saw gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, bandages stained black. He swallowed over bile—fear, and a stronger waft of stench—and looked for Lanara. So many faces, and the light was in his eyes. He rubbed at them and looked again, and saw the Queen step up to the prow and stretch her arms above her head.

  Galha’s voice was shrill, and he did not listen to her words. Some of the people around him gave a feeble cheer during her speech, but it did nothing to lighten the silence that hung over them all. He was nearly blind with the strain of seeking out Lanara’s face—blind, deaf, choked with dread, and still he did not see her, even when Queensfolk began to stream off the ships. The silence shattered. He heard cries of joy and some laughter, and a wail that made him flinch. The old man was gone from beside him. Nellyn stood still as everyone around him spun and shouted. Very soon there were fewer people on the wharf, and he could see the Queensship clearly. The Queensfolk coming down its plank now were leaning on sticks or being carried on litters of cloth and wood. Some were missing limbs; some looked intact in body, but lay staring at the sky as if they had no life in them. Nellyn took two paces toward the dock—and finally, finally saw a face he knew.

  “Aldron!” The word was a hiss. Nellyn called again, and Aldron was right in front of him in any case—but the Alilan man went past without glancing at him. Nellyn watched him for the space of three breaths. When he turned back to the ship, Lanara was there on the dock, walking slowly, looking at her feet as she set them down and raised them up again.

  He had no voice at all this time. He saw that her hair was thicker and curlier than it had been, that her skin and clothes were mottled with dirt. He watched her take her small, uneasy steps, watched her stop four paces away from him and lift her eyes.

  “You came,” she said, her voice rising as if it were a question.

  He tried to smile. “Of course. Did you think I might not?”

  “I wasn’t sure; the path is so steep. . . .”

  He reached her in three strides. Her hair and skin stank as the ships had—but beneath was her smell, and he remembered Luhr, a waterfall, mountains, an inn, a wagon, all these images vibrant and fierce because he had not held her in so long.

  Alea thought at first that she would wait for Aldron in the dark. She would sit at the kitchen table (not in the window; she would not watch for him) in her brown linen shift, without candles or lanterns. He would walk in and hesitate until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, and she would rise up, a silent shadow that would make him quail.

  When Nellyn saw the boats and she imagined that her waiting was nearly over, she paced up and down the stairs and around each of the floors. Even when she heard the crowd in the town and knew that the boats had docked, she did not glance out the windows overlooking the path. He might be looking up; he might see her and think her eager to see him. She remained far away from the glass.

  When the door opened, a little over an hour past dawn on the day of the ships’ return, she was on her sleeping floor. She heard the door shut and leaned against her wall for a moment to steady herself. She traced an edge of painted flame with her forefinger and took a deep, noisy breath against Alnissa’s silken hair. Then she went down the stairs, letting her feet fall heavily enough that the people below would hear her coming.

  Nellyn and Lanara looked up at her when she reached the steps leading into the kitchen. Alea stopped, frozen by Lanara’s filth and smell, and by her dull, darting eyes. Alea forced her own eyes away, to the spaces behind or beside Nellyn and Lanara that should have been taken up by someone else.

  “Where is he?” Alea said. Lanara bowed her head; for a moment Alea felt the steps dip away beneath her feet, and she had to grip the handrail and Alnissa to keep herself from following. But then she heard Nellyn say, “He is not here? I saw him on the wharf. I thought he would come directly”—and Alea’s rage roared again within her, so high that her head throbbed with heat.

  Nellyn and Lanara had disappeared after that. Alea had heard things, dimly: the splash of water in the large copper basin that stood outside now that the days and nights were warm; voices, low and distant, and then silence. As she was feeding Alnissa in the late afternoon, Nellyn came into the kitchen and prepared a tray of food. When he was done, he opened his mouth to speak, but Alea held up her hand and turned her face away from him, and he went back up the stairs.

  It was when the sunlight left the room that she thought, I will not light candles or lanterns. I will sit here in the dark and wait for him. But as the hours passed, the burning of her fury made her think instead of light. Scores of candles, all the lanterns in this room and hers, perhaps even the fire—though in the end it was candles and lanterns only, since they would make the kitchen hot and bright enough. She made a second lightroom in the tower, so that Aldron would see her immediately, and their baby; so that there would be no shadows to shelter him from them. She sat with her back against the table, very straight, certain that she would not doze—but she was there a long time, and Alnissa was sleeping, and Alea must have dozed after all, because when the door creaked open, her head snapped up.

  Aldron was leaning on the door frame, one hand over his eyes to shield them from the unexpected light. The laces of his shirt were undone; she saw a wide piece of cloth wrapped around his chest, and the skin around it, grey with dirt—all his skin smudged and cracked. His hand dropped from his face and he blinked into the room. In the time it took him to focus his gaze, she had seen the rest: his hollow cheeks, his matted beard, his eyes, which were nearly invisible, sunk into bone. She made a sound, quite soft, but he angled his head and blinked twice more and saw her. He took two steps, looked down at his feet, then up—but before his eyes found her again, they found the basket at her feet.

  He fell to his knees beside it, so close to Alea that her eyes watered with his stench and she saw the tangles in his hair. He knelt for a long time with his head bent, looking. He lifted a hand and it hovered above the basket but did not lower.

  “Touch her,” Alea said, her voice aching in her throat. “Pick her up. She’s yours, she’s your daughter”—but his hand fell back to his side. Alea leaned forward and put her hands in his knotted hair. She drew him gently forward until his head was in her lap. “Hush,” she said, even though he was not crying. She kissed him on his hair and on his skin. “Hush, love.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lanara had been warm for two days—a deep, encircling warmth that had let her sleep as she never had on the ship. Nellyn had brought her food, and washed her, and stretched out beside her after dawn. She woke against him, watched the blue cloth he had hung sway in the wind that blew through their small window. She had never left, perhaps. She had been here, sleeping and waking, suffused with this warmth that made her heavy.

  Except that she had been away: she could not deny this as she stood on the cliff path at the place where it turned in its descent to Fane. She looked down at the fires that burned on the wharf and up along the river. She heard snatches of singing and laughter when the wind shifted. She watched and listened and felt the weariness of her body, and its unsteadiness, as if she still walked on a deck, not earth and stone. I can’t, she thought. I’m so tired I can hardly stand. Exhaustion, that was all, the only reason she turned and walked back up the path, away from the Queen’s celebration.

  She did not see Alea, when she climbed through the tower. She had only seen her on
ce since her return, and Aldron not at all. Lanara had not sought them out; they would all be apart for a time, resting, and that was as it should be. And Aldron had the baby now. Lanara vaguely remembered seeing it in Alea’s arms when she had stood on the stairs, looking into the kitchen.

  Lanara heard nothing in the tower. Nellyn would be writing in the log or attending to the candles in the lightroom. She would sit and watch him. It was all she wanted to do, which surprised her a bit. She should have yearned for the revelry and companionship of the party, and yet she was here, stepping up through silence so thick it lapped like waves in her ears.

  “Oh.” She said the word involuntarily, and it echoed in the writing room. Nellyn and Alea turned to her. He was sitting at the desk and she was on a cushion on the floor near him. They had not been talking, just sitting.

  “You said you would go to the celebration,” Nellyn said, rising, crossing to her. He touched her cheek.

  Lanara nodded. “Yes, and I started to walk there, but I’m just too tired still.” That’s all—again the insistence, the pushing against something else so that it would remain nameless.

  “Sit,” he said. “Here—we have fresh sunfruit. . . .”

  “Where’s Aldron?” she asked when she was on the stool, a bowl of sliced fruit untouched in her lap.

  Alea straightened on her cushion and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Sleeping, finally. He hasn’t slept since he returned.”

  Lanara stared down at the fruit, pushed at one red sliver with her right forefinger.

  “What happened there?” Alea’s voice was so low that Lanara nearly felt the words rather than heard them. She could not look up—but of course she had to speak.

  “Hasn’t he told you?” she said, so that she would have more time to order her words.

  “No. He hardly speaks. He’s weak and ill, yet the wound in his chest is almost completely healed, so there doesn’t seem to be a reason for his weakness. Tell me, since you have your voice: what happened in that place?”

  It was easy to talk once Lanara had begun. She talked of the voyage across, the landing, the battle, where Aldron had fought bravely and well. She talked of the Queen standing atop the tall stone in the pool, of her raised arms and the sudden blazing of her mindpowers. The fire, the wind, the curse, Aldron gasping behind the stone. Lanara described it all, growing more certain as she did so. She had not told Nellyn this much, only small bits, and he had not pressed her for more. She had been afraid to tell more, as if the words, spoken, would bring the flames and bubbling skin back to her—but they did not. She was stronger, almost herself, as she had been in the winter.

  “So,” Alea said, long minutes after Lanara had finished, “where was Aldron when your Queen’s power burst forth?”

  Lanara frowned. Alea’s voice was higher than it had been, with an edge that would have been mockery if it had not also sounded like desperation. “At the foot of the stone,” she said. “Behind it while she spoke.”

  “Ah, yes,” Alea said. “Your Queen simply opened her mouth and spoke the destruction of the sea people.”

  “Yes,” said Lanara. The word sounded defiant, and she bit her lip to stop others like it from coming.

  “And how did your Queen explain her sudden ability to speak magical words?”

  Lanara forced herself to answer slowly. “The First Queen,” she said, and told that story too, so that she would be reminded and Alea would understand—but Alea started to laugh before the tale was done.

  “You’re a fool, Lanara,” she said breathlessly. “You and all your people. Your Queen has ruined Aldron, and no one knows the truth of it.”

  “How dare—” Lanara began, and Nellyn said both of their names, but Alea spoke the loudest, standing now, very tall.

  “Why was Aldron not tended to after he got his wound, though the Queen and her fighters were nearby?”

  Lanara ran her tongue over her lips. “She thought he was already dead,” she said, but Alea shook her head.

  “No. You knew he wasn’t. You said you heard him, yet the Queen was paying him no attention. She didn’t think he was dead, she wanted—”

  “Stop!” Lanara cried. “Stop, stop—you can’t know how it was, there. It was all confusion, everyone was still muddled from the visions, the power—you can’t possibly understand—”

  “Ah, but she can.” Aldron was on the stairs, looking at Alea. “She can,” he said again, into the stillness, “and she does, and she hates me even more than she did before.”

  Alea pressed her lips together, bent her head so that her hair fell across an eye and cheek. “No, I only grieve for you. For all of us—because we’ll have to go, won’t we? We’ll have to flee this place and these people before someone finds out what you’ve done.”

  “What he’s done?” Lanara repeated. “I don’t understand. . . .” She tried to swallow over a sour taste that had risen in her throat.

  “His Telling power,” Nellyn began, quietly, only to her, but she rounded on him, said, “His power isn’t real—they told us that in the inn, remember? It can’t change things. It’s pleasant enough but only while the images last.” She spun from Nellyn’s silence to theirs. “Show me, then! Change this writing stick from black to red, or tear that parchment without using your hands. Show me.”

  Aldron was looking at her now, at last—across a space, not pressed so close to her that she could not see his eyes. He shook his head once, almost imperceptibly, and she wanted to launch herself at him and claw away this “no,” whatever it was for. She did not move. She watched him look back at Alea and smile (the smile, like the head-shake, a slight, shadowy thing).

  “Will you flee with me, then?” he said.

  Alnissa was crying. Nellyn heard her begin, softly, as Aldron asked Alea his question and Alea answered him. The crying grew loud and indignant, and still no one moved. Nellyn walked past Lanara, past Alea and Aldron. He walked down two floors, and over to Alnissa’s basket. Her face was nearly as crimson as the blanket she lay upon. He never murmured or cooed, as Alea did, but the baby always quieted immediately when he picked her up. She did so now, her head heavy between his shoulder and neck.

  “I’m sorry,” Alea said from behind him, “I should have been the one to come to her.” She lifted Alnissa away from him and sat down on her pallet to nurse her. Aldron was there as well, thrusting clothing into a brown sack. “You’re still weak,” she said. “Perhaps one more night . . . ?”

  Aldron straightened. “No,” he said in the hoarse, thin voice that seemed to be his now. “I can’t. How could I sleep surrounded by . . . this?” He did not look away from Alea or gesture, but Nellyn knew what he meant: surrounded by painted flame and earth and sky.

  Nellyn went down to the kitchen. Lanara was already there, standing by the empty fireplace with her arms crossed. She did not glance at him, or at Alea when she came down. Only when Aldron descended with a bag over each shoulder did Lanara’s gaze shift. She watched him as he took his travel cloak down from the peg by the door and rolled it up. I have never seen her look like this before, Nellyn thought. He turned quickly away from her and followed Alea, who was going back up the stairs.

  She stood touching the painted walls with one hand. The other held Alnissa against her shoulder. “I can’t take anything. Nothing except the clothes I arrived with, and Alnissa’s.”

  “The basket?” he said. Alea shook her head. “The blanket, then. You’ll need it, surely, and it comforts her.”

  “Yes, of course—here, hold her a moment.” He felt the sleeping, curled weight of her one more time, the last time that was certain in this world that was a line, not a circle. Nellyn breathed her scent and tried to hold it. Now still always, he thought, shonyn words that he felt within him yet, even if they were not true.

  Alea put her arms around his neck, and Alnissa, between them, stirred and sighed. Alea held him very tightly, her fingers in his hair, h
er forehead against his. When she kissed him he tasted salt. He tried to take it away with his thumbs and his lips; tried to stop her sadness and greet his own, for it was new, familiar, already lost. He felt her warmth, and soon it was gone, and Alnissa’s too, and he was alone.

  Lanara and Aldron were standing where they had been before; Alea noticed this, though she hardly looked at either of them. She adjusted the sling she had made from the red blanket, ensured that Alnissa was secure within. She remembered suddenly how she had felt kicks and prods on the wagon ride into Fane. Perhaps Alnissa’s movements, or her sister’s, or both—not that it mattered now. Only this leaving mattered.

  Aldron was slow behind her on the path. Alea turned back once to offer her hand or arm, but he shook his head. She walked on, quickly. When she came to the end of the path, she waited until she heard him gasping and close then she stepped onto the wharf.

  She reached the first of the fires in six paces. The heat of flames and air beat against her skin, and she turned toward the popping of wood and sparks even though she did not want to. Not her fires: and the air was moist and salt-rimed, not red as desert sand. But there were people, sitting or standing, lifting flasks to their mouths and laughing, some of them dancing. She watched from between two fires. She wanted to run until she reached the other fires, the other dancers, the wagons that were still her only home. But no, she thought, bitterness like fingers at her throat, and she looked behind her for Aldron.

  He was well back from the first fire, though its glow reached him, lit his staring eyes and twitching lips and the hands he held trembling before him. He could not be seeing these fires, or even those of the Alilan. He sees horror, Alea thought, and she ran to him and took his hands, tried to smooth the shaking from them. “Come,” she said, “we’ll get through, we’ll get out.” She led him around the fires. His hand was limp in hers until they reached the brightest houses. Here he stopped, and she stopped with him and saw which house they stood before.