The rivergreen strand was not ready to be finished. Mallesh set his tools down and rose, easing his limbs straight. He left the cave, looked from sky to sea. It would be dark soon—though “dark” too had changed. Some days were so heavy with dust and cloud that they seemed to be nights, and the nights were true black, with no stars or moon to lighten them. Today the sky was yellow-brown, and the dust only rose a bit from the ground. Mallesh could see from his cave to the shore, which was unusual.
He walked slowly toward the shore, already peering at the twisted lengths of wood that lay where the tide had brought them. The tide deposited wood every day, and every day Mallesh gathered it, piece by piece, and stacked it outside his cave. He did not know where the wood was from, though he had guessed once that it was whatever was left of trees that had burned somewhere else, where the fire had not been so intense. He also was not sure why he collected it. His own fires were tiny, made to cook only the meagre fare he found for himself: rodents that still lived here, in holes in the black rock, or fish that washed up half-dead with the driftwood. But his wood pile was nearly as high as the cave’s outer wall, and it grew a bit more every time Mallesh returned from the ocean.
He swam before he began to carry the driftwood home. He swam several times a day: at dawn, mid-morning, mid-afternoon and dusk (his body knew these hours even if the sky sometimes could not show them). When he had first come back from the mountains, he had thrust himself through the brown empty space where the Old City had been, trying to reach water that still lived. He had had to swim a very long way—and by the time he had reached a place where the sea was clear and scattered with fish, he had been too exhausted to use his spear. He had hung in the water and felt his weakness—and he had almost pushed himself further, knowing it would mean his death. But he had turned his aching body back, had dragged himself to the fire-scarred shore of Nasranesh and lain there, choking on ash and breath.
He never attempted to reach these other waters now. He circled in the murk because he had to, to keep his skin from cracking and peeling away, and although he sometimes longed for the soothing, sparkling touch of the old sea, he was mostly content. His pattern kept him quiet, and alive. Carve, walk, carry, swim, over and over, and no room or desire for more.
He took a piece of driftwood back to his cave, then returned for another. Even if they were slender and light, he only carried one at a time; he liked to take as many steps as possible. The water always felt so comforting after an afternoon of long, steady walking. He had been to the cave and back to the shore four times when he looked along the tide-line and saw something that was not wood, something much larger and thicker, and pale, not blackened by fire. He stood and squinted at it and thought that it must be a dead sea creature—perhaps a longhorned diver. Curiosity and a sudden stab of hunger drove him closer. He would smoke whatever of the meat he could not eat in the first day. He would hang it in the dimmest, coolest part of his cave. . . .
He stopped ten paces away from the thing. Not wood, not a longhorned diver—a crumpled, sodden, dust-brushed thing that Mallesh finally saw clearly, and knew. He ran, and did not realize that he was running.
Leish felt the sea rising in him. It surged from his gut into his throat, and he could not contain it: his skin would split and wash away. He felt his arms and legs flail against this tide, and then it was cracking him open, pouring out of his mouth and nose. This had to mean that he was dying—for selkesh did not hold water in them unless they were unconscious beneath river or sea, unless they were not breathing. But after the salt had scraped him raw, he felt his air-breathing begin, and heard himself cough. His eyelids were too heavy to open, so he lay still, on wet rock that his skin was beginning to feel.
Memory was slow but insistent. He had dived, blind with rage and shame, and deaf with wind. The sea had been gentle afterward. He had swum carefully, conserving strength—but also listening. He had not heard these songs from beneath for such a long time, and they had wrapped him round and welcomed him. He must have been too careful: he remembered weariness and hunger that he could not satisfy with the sponges and oceangreen he had torn from stone. The middle ocean had hummed with darkness and food that was too deep for his frail body to reach—so he had stroked on, eastward. He had clung to Nasranesh’s notes as if they were beautiful, not warped and cut with silence.
Wollshenyllosh. He had remembered her, one day or night, as he bobbed with his head above the waves. She had nearly led him to her home waters—a yllosh place, far beneath but flooded with light and growing things. He had sliced back below the surface, listening for the song of such a place. He heard it a short time later, faint and shimmering, and he spun and fumbled, seeking it—but in the end it eluded him, and he was limp with exhaustion.
The rest he only remembered in bits. Fish slipping around him, his own body suspended, motionless. Dark water lightening to clear, then thickening again as Nasranesh’s song grew louder. A current tugging at him, his muscles unresisting and relieved. A feeling of rising, rising, so quick that he swallowed too much water and could not choke, took it into his body and could not expel it again. He had slept then, until the sea had thrust its way out of him and left him on stone that sang of death.
He did not think he would ever be able to open his eyes. Never, he thought, hearing the notes that had been taken away, listening to those that were left. They had been difficult enough to listen to from across the sea, but now they were unbearable. Perhaps he would die if he just lay here. The hot, rough wind would scour away his skin and then his bones, and all would be silence.
“Leish.”
The voice was so much louder than the singing. Leish groaned and tasted salt and was too weak to spit it out. He pulled his arms up over his head and pressed himself against the stone. Moss had sung here once, and living shells, and tiny flowers whose petals would close over a fingertip.
“Leish, please. . . .” A strange voice, so hoarse it was transparent. Leish was shaking; someone was shaking him. He swung one of his arms and felt a rush of air and then skin—firm skin, and fingers drawing his fist away. He could not. Now that he was here, he could not possibly look on this place as well as hear it. He had returned; this had been so important in a desert, in a city of bright wooden houses with red roofs. And now he could not open his eyes.
“Leish, will you not look at me?”
He rolled onto his back, one arm still draped over his face. He let the arm fall, felt dust blowing over his eyelids and nostrils. The fingers were laced with his now, warm and tight. Leish drew a deep breath and coughed once more. Then he opened his eyes and rubbed them clear. He saw his brother’s face, with a yellow sky behind it.
Leish’s eyes were closed again by the time Mallesh set him down on the floor of the cave. Leish’s skin was pale and wrinkled from its immersion in sea water. Mallesh soaked it, bit by bit, in the black liquid that bubbled from a place just outside the cave mouth. He scooped mud from the bottom of this puddle and smoothed it on the ragged webs between Leish’s fingers and toes. Mallesh drew his fingers slowly through Leish’s hair, teasing out the knots, plucking pieces of plants and sponge that had come from the ocean far beyond Nasranesh. When he was finished, he covered Leish with a blanket he had made months ago, from animal skins; just a small blanket, which did not cover feet and lower legs, but it would warm him a little.
Leish slept for two days. Mallesh crouched or lay close to him, watching and waiting. This is why I came back here, he thought once. The strength and volume of this thought surprised him, for he had been so quiet, even in his own mind, for so long. Other things spun with the words: pictures, colourful and sharp. Leish sick, lying on jungle leaves, hardly blinking as Mallesh talked and talked; all that talking, and his desire for the white city, making him hard and petty—Mallesh remembered this and was thankful for the new man he had become. A man who could care for his brother without envy or anger, a man who lived where he was, deaf to all other places.
This time, when Leish woke, Mallesh waited for him to speak first. Mallesh had been bathing him again. Leish shifted, propped himself on an elbow and looked down at his own skin. He looked out the cave opening then, and a moment later he crawled to it, lifting his limbs as if he did not want to touch them again to the dirt floor. Mallesh walked behind him.
“This is what you’ve been washing me with.” Leish was standing, one hand on the rock wall behind him, the other pointing to the black puddle. Two bubbles grew and burst before Mallesh answered.
“Yes,” he said, watching Leish’s eyes, seeing them widen as he heard Mallesh’s new voice. Leish’s voice had changed too. Mallesh wished that they did not have to speak at all. Perhaps they would not, after this stage had passed.
“And you drink it. I’ve drunk it.”
“Yes,” said Mallesh. “It’s the only fresh water there is, and I’m accustomed to it now.”
“You’re accustomed to it. I see.” Leish took several steps past the puddle and looked at the sky and the rock. He turned his head until he was facing north. Mallesh saw him stiffen before he took another step. Mallesh himself hardly noticed the gathering pool stone any more; he often could not see it through the dust in any case. But today it was visible, and Leish did not look away from it.
“They tied me there. Maybe you saw it—maybe our parents saw. . . .”
“They’re dead,” Mallesh said. “Father on the shore, when the boats came, and Mother as she was running to the river behind me. We didn’t see you.” And if we had? She would have stayed and I would still have run—that other person I was would have run.
“Come inside again,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you before night falls.” Leish came with him, like a child who moves only because he is told to. He stared at the carvings Mallesh gestured to, at the shapes and then down at the tools that Mallesh always placed so neatly on the ground.
“You did this.”
“Yes,” Mallesh said.
“You.”
Mallesh touched the shell he had carved. It almost felt like a real shell, the ridges and serrations were that delicate. “Yes. It’s calming work. And there’s beauty in it—I never would have known this before, but—”
“What are you talking about?” Leish’s voice was very soft, but Mallesh stopped speaking. “You chip away at this rock, and you drink black water, and you say you’ve found calm? And beauty? You, Mallesh my brother, who used to stand atop that stone out there and shout about the next great age of the selkesh?” Leish was shouting as well now, but Mallesh stood tall before him. He needed to hear these words; it was like tempering metal, making it pure and strong with flame. “You ranted about boats and daggers and a triumph like Nasran’s—and now you live in a cave, and this, around you, is what you brought on all of us. And listen! Listen to the lands beyond ours, which still have clean water and grass and trees. If you strain very hard, maybe you’ll even hear the singing of the stone city—I still do. Listen: fountains and ivy! Sand with a river beneath it! Listen and you’ll hear—”
“Nothing,” Mallesh said, quite steadily, with his voice of holes. “I’ll hear nothing. Not the stone city, not the lands closer, or our own land. I haven’t heard any singing since I left the Queensrealm.”
Leish leaned back against the wall of carvings. His mouth was open. After a moment he straightened and pressed his lips together, so tightly that they went pale. He stepped to the cave’s opening and looked back over his shoulder. “I don’t know why you live,” he said, and then he walked away, into the rising dust.
FIFTY-ONE
Even from the bottom of the dried-up riverbed, Leish could hear Mallesh’s chisel. The sound followed him everywhere over the flatness that was Nasranesh. He had listened to it at the foot of the gathering pool stone, and at the edge of the ocean, and inland, where he could not even see the cave. He had imagined that the depth of the riverbed would dilute the sound a bit, but it did not. The tap-tap reached him still, even though he lay with earth walls rising above him.
Mallesh had finished the rivergreen strand and had begun an anemone. Leish tried not to look at the carvings, and sometimes he succeeded, though only for a few days. He had tried not to go back to the cave at all, those many weeks ago, but he had failed at that too. The only one of his resolutions that he had kept was to remain silent. He had not spoken to Mallesh since their first day together, when he had shouted and Mallesh had not. Leish had vowed that his brother would be the next one to speak, and so Leish ate what Mallesh cooked, and drank what Mallesh drank, and did not say any of the words that dizzied him.
But Mallesh did not speak either. Perhaps this was good: Leish did not know if he would be able to listen for long to the voice that came from his brother’s scarred throat. Mallesh whittled at his wall and trudged to the shore for pieces of wood and looked at Leish with his changed eyes and seemed content. Leish almost shouted again, several times—questions, accusations, hollow, wordless sounds—but he suspected that Mallesh would simply gaze at him as he had before, with pity and calm, and so make everything worse.
I’ll follow the riverbed, Leish thought as he had so often already. If it wasn’t this thought it was, I’ll go up the coast, or, I’ll see if the land over the mountains is as grey as it sounds—but now, as ever, he rose and turned back to the cave. He ached to be away, but could not leave. Anger choked him as the ash did. I dreamed of Nasranesh’s destruction long before it happened. Perhaps I’ll dream of something else, some other future for myself or this land, that will show me how to be. But when he slept, he did not dream at all.
He passed in front of the cave’s entrance, imagining Mallesh pausing, waiting for the daylight to return. Leish went down to the shore. He might swim, though he hated the brown water and the smooth sand beneath it that was broken only by pitted rocks. He might attempt to swim to where the fish were, though he had tried this once already and failed (still, always, too weak). But when he reached the shore, he stood with his feet in the water and did not move. There was a boat rolling with the waves to the north and west of him, a rowboat with a single person inside, leaning on oars that were motionless in the water. The person’s dark-haired head was lowered. As Leish watched, the head lifted and he saw a face, also dark with hair, and eyes that found his own. Arms reached, and the oars raised and dipped, and Leish slid his knife from his chest-wrap. Go get Mallesh, he told himself. Call for him, at least—but Leish waited on the shore, alone and silent.
The man was familiar. Baldhron—but the thought, and the hope, was swiftly gone. Leish squinted, tried to remember, even though a specific memory would not make a difference. Not selkesh, familiar: an enemy. Leish considered throwing his knife when the boat was close enough, but he did not. He would kill the man slowly, looking into his eyes. He would not be distracted or dissuaded this time. His palm was slippery with sweat, and his blood rushed within him.
The boat scraped along the stone of the shore. The man sat for a moment. He was breathing hard, and his arms were shaking—but when a wave came and lifted the boat to drag it back again, he pushed himself up and out. Leish took a step toward him.
“Leish,” the man said, wrenching his body around so that he was sitting. Leish leaned forward on his left foot but did not take another step. He had seen this man with the Queen, from somewhere high up: the tower, or the gathering pool stone, or both. The man had looked different then. Leish shook his head and walked, tightening his grip on his knife.
“Leish—stop, wait.” The Queenstongue, though the man did not look like a Queensman. But it did not matter who he was, only that he was someone, finally, who would die.
“Do you remember me?” the man said. “I am Aldron”—and suddenly it did matter after all.
Mallesh heard a splash in the quiet between chisel-taps. He adjusted the tool’s angle and tapped again, quite hard: he wanted this entire segment of stone to fall away, and it did, le
aving a smooth slanted expanse. Now he could draw out the edge of a coral reef—something that his anemone could cling to, and something he could add to, perhaps with the shapes of fish or crabs. Before he could bring the hammer down again, though, he heard voices: low, distant ones, but he recognized Leish’s. When he rose, some words came to him more clearly, and he paused for a moment before he went out the opening. Queenstongue words, not selkesh ones, words that brought tunnels and stink and rage hissing into his quiet.
Leish was at the shore, leaning on one knee above a man who was lying on his back. Leish’s right hand was at the man’s throat. The man’s hands were at his sides, palms up, fingers loose and curving. Mallesh saw the dull gleam of Leish’s knife. He heard Leish say, “No”—a word Mallesh remembered—and then others he did not understand, a long, jagged stream of them. Leish raised his knife, and Mallesh shouted the selkesh “No!” and began to run.
When he had reached them, Mallesh said, “What’s this?” in the cracked stranger’s voice he had never wanted to use again. He and Leish had been living so peacefully, with only the sounds of cooking and drinking and sleeping between them. And now this man was here, and the silence was broken, and Mallesh would have to use all of his new strength to keep some calm about them yet.
“He’s Aldron,” Leish said. A slender line of spittle trembled between his lips, and more was gathering at the corners of his mouth. “He did this to us. He used his voice powers to ruin our land.”
The man Aldron was looking at Mallesh, his eyes rolled sideways so that the whites of them were very large. Even on his back with Leish’s knee against his chest, Aldron did not look frightened or angry.
The Silences of Home Page 50
