by Liz Williams
‘Can you hear that?’ she asked, just like Thorn Eld had asked me in my dream.
‘It’s not easy to miss.’
‘It’s coming from a group of the selk.’
‘They’re taking a risk, with a Morrighanu warship floating several hundred yards offshore,’ I commented.
Glyn Apt frowned. I didn’t know why she was choosing to confide in me on the subject. ‘The Morrighanu have no quarrel with the selk. That’s a vitki matter.’
‘It’s become a Darkland matter, and you’re from Darkland. I saw those sheds outside Hetla.’
Glyn Apt gave a little nod. ‘I noticed, from your interrogation. I repeat, it’s nothing to do with us. We’re a different sect from the vitki; you know that. Morvern isn’t Hetla.’
‘Why are you bothering to justify yourself to me?’ I had no real idea what the connection was between vitki and Morrighanu, though the link with the valkyries, the female sect of the vitki, was much clearer. Though I’d heard that the Morrighanu were a sect of Darkland’s far north, and that was after all where Morvern lay, I didn’t know how all these Darkland security forces interrelated.
‘Because the selk are asking for you,’ Glyn Apt said.
She even let me out of the cell, but under heavy guard. It was in any case useless to try anything under the circumstances; I was weaponless and although the seith offered opportunities for disguise, it wouldn’t have worked against people who were already versed in such matters. Glyn Apt took me up the stairs to the guard room and showed me the monitor that scanned the foot of the Rock on the western side.
Lights played along the barnacle-encrusted ledges, ready to illuminate any vessel that might be approaching the fortress. I saw nothing, except rock and wave and the great bulk of the Morrighanu warship, turning a little on the swell of the tide. Then – I was not sure if it was only the shadow of a wave, but it moved again and I saw that it was indeed a selk. It turned its blunt head to the camera as though it sensed me watching.
‘Ask it what it wants,’ Glyn Apt demanded.
I leaned forward and spoke softly into the monitor, tracking the speaker setting.
‘Are you out there? Can you hear me? Can you understand me?’
I knew that the selk had their own language of Shelta, but it was only at certain times of the year that they possessed sufficient sentience to speak it. The tabula hummed as it translated my Gaelacht.
Silence. The song had stopped. I had just convinced myself that there was nothing out there after all when a voice like running water said, ‘I hear you.’
‘Is it you who sings? Why?’
‘We have been looking for you. We came before, but you were not here. You saw our siblings, captured.’
Why hadn’t the Skald told me that the selk had come looking? But then I realized that there had not been time, and Idhunn’s death would have driven it out of everyone’s mind. ‘Those tanks outside Hetla? Yes, I saw them. I could do nothing to help them.’
I didn’t like sounding so defensive, when it was nothing more than the truth. I think I expected some kind of protest from the selk, some criticism, but it said nothing. And I was surprised that Glyn Apt had brought me out here to speak with them at all, rather than blasting the selk out of the water. But perhaps it was true that the Morrighanu had a different relationship with them to the vitki.
‘Tell it to come closer,’ Glyn Apt hissed.
‘Why? What are you planning to do?’
She gave me a glance of contempt. ‘Nothing. If I’d intended them any harm, I’d have done it by now.’
‘Come into the light,’ I called, and the selk did so, gliding with surprising swiftness and ease over the rocks. Seen through the monitor, it was larger and sleeker than the purely animal sealstock that thronged these northern waters. Its complex, flanged nose and the gills that collared its throat glistened with seawater. Its eyes were obsidian and alien and sad.
‘What do you understand, about my kind?’ it continued.
I hesitated. ‘I know that the selk were engineered, genetically, by my ancestors.’ It’s one thing to know that most of the non-human life on one’s homeworld has been created and altered, an unholy mash of genes, but it seemed an awkward thing to be discussing this with one of the results. It made me think of Mondhile, where humans had been altered instead.
‘You understand that we are now close to the time when our self-awareness will be lost, until the waters begin to grow cold once more? When sentience is gone from us, we will not be able to help our captured kin.’
‘And you’re asking me – the Skald – for help?’ I thought of Idhunn’s ruined body in the Rock’s medical ward, of the vacuum of power she had left behind her, now filled by the Morrighanu, and of the oncoming war. At the moment, the Skald was not in the strongest position to help anyone.
‘I am asking anyone who might listen. Most of your kind see us as beasts, nothing more.’
And that was true enough. It was illegal to hunt the selk, at least in the Reach, and during their periods of sentience it carried a murder charge. But even in the Reach I had seen what I was certain had been selk fur, on the collars and coats of the pinch-faced wealthy, in plain view on the streets of Tiree.
‘Your kin are imprisoned in Darkland,’ I explained to the selk now. ‘And you must know that we not only have no jurisdiction there – at all – but that we are also on the brink of war and this fortress has been captured.’ I did not look at Glyn Apt, and she said nothing.
The selk shifted uneasily against the wet shadows of the rocks. ‘We know this. Why else were our kin taken?’
It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘You mean the selk in those tanks are undergoing some kind of preparation for the Darkland war effort?’
‘So we believe.’
‘Do you know what it is? What the vitki are trying to do with them?’ That was Glyn Apt, surprising me. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been so startling that the Morrighanu weren’t informed about vitki plans, given the nature of Darkland and its sectarian in-fighting.
‘Or what they were being used for,’ I murmured. I thought I might know the answer to that. Glyn Apt ignored me.
‘We do not. But ourselves and the kind you call the vitki have a long history, like the deeps beneath the ice, cold and black and little seen. Once, there was war between us.’
‘War?’ I knew nothing about this and this time I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice. Beside me, Glyn Apt shifted as if restless. But the selk itself spoke in so musical a tone that I was sure there were cadences, nuances, that were missed by my limited human hearing. ‘When was this?’
‘A thousand thousand seasons ago.’
This was not a great deal of help: the selk calculated time differently to humans and there was little point in asking it to translate into our years if the tabula could not do so.
‘Who won the war?’ I moved on, picturing the icefields running red with the blood of the selk. Apart from a brief period in their long bleak history, the vitki had always been in possession of technology; the selk had not.
‘We won. But not without great loss.’
‘You won a war, against men with machines?’
In the dim window of the monitor, the selk’s face contorted strangely, the ruffles of the gills rippling as though a strong wind blew across it. Perhaps the selk smiled. I could not tell.
‘The outcome of a battle may depend on the place of its fighting. They followed us onto the icefields, at the start of the spring thaw. They thought we were few, and failing. But our kind, The People, sang to the ice and in the spring it is brittle and treacherous. It gave way beneath our enemies. They thought the made-skins they wore would save them, but there were more of The People under the ice, many more, and the enemy were attacked as soon as they were in the sea. The cold killed as many as we did. They did not make that mistake again. They kept to their land of black glass cliffs and great mosses, we to the poles and these islands, where—’ the selk paused
, with unexpected tact, ’—our losses are fewer.’
‘But if the selk and the vitki were to encounter one another again, on ground more congenial to the vitki—’ something was nagging at the back of my mind, ‘—do you think it likely that your kind would lose?’ Considering those great war-wings I myself thought it more than likely: in fact, a certainty. But the selk hesitated before saying, slowly, ‘I do not know.’
‘Tell me this. Do your kind possess weapons?’ The People sang to the spring ice. That suggested some kind of innate sonic capability. But the selk answered, with only a hint of irony in its musical voice, ‘Why? Your kind see us as no more than beasts, and soon, so we will be.’
Not going to tell me, then. I could not blame it. I thought again of the furs worn by the rich of Tiree. And the selk was right. When they entered their animal awareness, they would have no memory of their captured kin, so it did not matter what weaponry they might own.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘These are difficult times. I can’t promise you anything.’
‘This was no more than I expected,’ the selk replied, dipping its head, whether in acknowledgement, disappointment or respect, I did not know. ‘I will come again, on the next tide. Will you meet me?’
‘She’ll be here,’ Glyn Apt said, surprising me again. For sure I’d still be a prisoner, but Glyn Apt’s willingness to let me talk to the selk was unexpected. It still didn’t make sense to me.
The selk slid rapidly to the edge of the rocks and was gone into silver water. The guards moved swiftly forward as if unleashed and I was taken back into the fortress. Before they put me in the cell, I caught a last glance at a monitor, out to sea past the warship. I do not know what I was looking for – a wake, perhaps, of something swimming? But there was nothing there, only the great drowning moon on the horizon’s edge, and the cold and endless waves.
TWO
They say I am a weapon
I surprised them, I think, by the nature of the killing, but why should one hold back, when one is good at something? After that, they asked me if I knew why I had these abilities.
‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘You brought me here, after all.’
I hoped to startle them. They did not think I knew this, or so I believed. But they just smiled, the old woman and the old man. They said, ‘Do you remember life, when you were a girl?’
‘I remember the heat,’ I told them. The burn of the day outside the cavern walls, in the sinks and crevices, sun baking off sand into a greenglass sky. I didn’t like the heat but the other women did, and could not understand why I crept from it. But then, I was different in many ways.
‘Nothing more than that?’ That was the old woman, very sly.
‘I remember the men coming, and my sister crying.’
‘Do you remember your mother’s death?’ That was the old man, avid for pain, and it was my turn to smile.
‘Should I have done?’
‘Did you not love her?’
‘Should I have done?’ I said again, remembering my mother clutching and grasping at the bars of the cage, her eyes as white and mad as moonlight.
The old woman and the old man did not answer that, and they left me alone to go my own way, back into the forest. They did not bother to attempt a memory ’ride. They’d tried that before and I’d called on the world beyond, summoning figures from the shadows of my head. Warriors with animal faces, intestines hanging through the rents in their armour, beasts with wicked, knowing red eyes. All the figures from my dreams that had comforted me as a child. I had sent one of my interrogators mad, the old woman told me later with a kind of pride.
‘You are a weapon,’ she had said, after the events in Morvern. That was all, and there was no talk of reward. Why be rewarded, after all, for that which you love?
THREE
PLANET: NHNEM (HUNAN)
My children haunted the bell tower. I didn’t see them every day, just sometimes, and usually it was a sign of storms. Perhaps the violent air conjured them up, drew their spirits down from the north. They looked just as they had when I’d escaped: First Joy with his small stern face, Boy-Next-Time’s buttoned-up mouth and anxious eyes, Luck-Still-to-Come no more than a little thing. It’s likely that the girls were put to death when my going was discovered, but I don’t know for sure.
I didn’t dream about First Joy as often as the girls: it was as though he ignored me in my dreams just as he’d ignored me in life, following House Father around like a hound. But Boy-Next-Time and Luck-Still-to-Come were never far away, just out of sight or round a corner, watching everything I did.
They were different, in my dreams. I know perfectly well now that my daughters had no more awareness than I: they were little animals, nothing more. Yet in my dreams, we spoke together and they told me everything about their day – the beetle they’d seen in the garden, with its shiny green back; the bird in the leaves; the flying machine that had streaked across the sky and frightened them so that they ran indoors.
We didn’t speak of House Father in these dreams, and yet of course in that life he’d been the centre of the household. We crept around, always trying to please. The girls used to bring him presents from the garden but he never saw them as gifts, just as something the hound might bring in.
In the early days, he’d pull me away from my duties to go inside me, almost absent-minded, and I remember hating and not understanding it. I never got used to it. It is a joy now, not to be touched by anyone. He didn’t touch the girls, but that was because they were too young: it would change when their blood came, as I now knew too well. I hadn’t understood it in my own Father, either, and I suppose that was where the hating came from. But it was the way of things. We couldn’t complain, for we didn’t have words. Now, I like to think that I’d have killed him if he’d laid a finger on my daughters, but this is just a dream. I’d have shut my eyes instead. I’ve never heard of a woman killing a grown man, not even after the change. House Father, for instance: so big, such a strong man. I don’t say that admiringly. When he hit me, my head rang for hours.
So it was not surprising, in a way, that he made no appearance in my dreams. I had cut him out of them, and it was just me and the girls, speaking of things that mattered.
If they were alive now, they would be a man and two women, not these little ghosts. At one time I thought that the guilt might fade, and that made it even worse, driving it deeper and deeper into me until it spilled plentifully out like harvest. Then I realized that the guilt was never going to go away, and strangely, that made me feel better: the vicious wheel stopped and I could settle down to simply feeling bad. People like Seliye tried to console me.
‘You didn’t know what you were doing. You didn’t understand. How could you have done? You had no choice, none of us did,’ – on and on in her grating voice, all of it true, all of it useless. For now I knew, now I had knowledge.
I’d disobeyed House Father.
I’d fled from Iznar.
I’d abandoned my children and so now they haunted the bell tower, like the efreets that rose up to catch the insects that come after storms. I saw their faces glancing around the corners of doors, a running form out of the corner of my eye, a whisper in the night. I couldn’t go and find them. I would die. But if they had been free, would they, I wonder, have tried to find me? First Joy would not have done, I am sure: he was House Father’s son. In the dreams, I remember the men making their noises in the corner, my head going up when I heard the grunt of my name, or a recognizable command. To First Joy, I was the moving lump that gave him food and made his bed, slowly – I remember that – tucking the corners of the blanket down in the way I had been trained.
But the girls – when the women of the colony talked of such things, we treated it as a mystery, as powerful as the mystery of who built this ruined city. We’d had no speech, before, and yet I’d understood my daughters and they’d understood me. Slowness, stupidity, language’s lack, and we still knew what each of us thought. If we could do that
still – the women say, in the language that now seems to separate us rather than bring us closer. If we could do that still, and keep what we have gained. But it seems that there’s always and ever a price. Their haunting is the price I pay – their haunting, and the smell of roots and earth that comes over me every time I think about Iznar.
But I’m like a ghost myself. We all are. We can’t exist. We are not real, we have no place and no substance. We are a nightmare in the minds of men, who have yet allowed us to remain here, something that doesn’t make sense.
But the colony looks real enough, when I look out of the window of the bell tower, across the yellow-brown roofs and steaming earth to the black line of the sea. The men of the north will not come to the sea; they fear it, so our spies have said, but I don’t know why. True, its waters burn if the skin is held in them too long, but the women of this colony have become used to it, our skin hardening even further, our hands like tools as we burrow in the hot sand for the shellfish and the shore scorpions.
I know exactly how many of us there are, down to the last incomer. Four hundred women today, while yesterday there were four hundred and one, and the day before that, four hundred and three. The fever took its toll; we buried twenty in all, outside the city walls.
Not a great number of women, but enough. Last year, I note from my records for this same month, there were three hundred and eighty. Our numbers fall and rise, rise and fall, like the pull of the little moons. But we won’t go on to the world’s end. We are here on borrow-time, and I do not understand why we are here at all.
Sometimes I wander through the temple, up to the bell tower. We call it a temple, but we’ve really no idea whether this is what it was. More borrowing, of the home of someone long dead; someone who wasn’t even human. The women – myself included – like to think of it as a temple, to something like the Hierolath, but female, because this comforts us. But maybe the figures it depicts weren’t Hierolaths at all. Maybe they weren’t even female. We just don’t know, and so we change them to fit our dreams, since there’s no longer any chance that they might disturb us by being real.
