by Liz Williams
I walked more slowly than she did. I caught up with her at the tide line.
‘It’s so quiet,’ she said. There was nothing but the breeze, the skittering cries of the efreets that lived in the cliffs – different to those of the bell tower, with long curved wings and beaks like tubes – and the soft hiss of the sea on the shore.
‘It’s a quiet place,’ I agreed.
‘Not like the other.’
I didn’t ask her which other. I simply waited.
It’s common for memory to come back in shards and fragments, to be pieced together like a broken pot. The pot will never be the same: it may look similar, but it won’t hold water any more, there are too many leaks and holes. We mend pots from a glue made from resin – it dries thick and lumpy, it’s impossible to spread it thinly, and you can see all the joins and fractures. Our minds are like that, too; you can tell where and how we were broken. And the glue is formed from the stories that we tell, to fill in the gaps. Sometimes I think that all memory is nothing but a story. Sometimes I wonder whether any of it was ever real.
The wind was rising a little, sending swirls of sand across the shore. Khainet began braiding her hair to keep the sand out of it. She did it deftly, with quick movements of her scarred fingers, and it was a joy to watch. So I told her this.
‘I never had enough hair to do that,’ I said. ‘This is as long as it’s ever been.’
She gave a faint smile. ‘It’s one of the first things I can remember. Someone teaching me to braid my hair.’
‘A woman?’ I asked. ‘Your mother?’
Khainet shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so. But I can—’ She hesitated. ‘I remember seeing a woman in a cage, and knowing that she was my mother.’
‘In a cage?’ Perhaps the woman had transgressed and been confined as a punishment.
‘Yes. She snarled at me when I went near. She was tall, like me, and she had hair like mine – long and white, but it was tangled. She had long nails and teeth, and pale eyes.’
‘She sounds unusual.’
‘When she saw me, she threw herself at the bars and grabbed them. I was very frightened. My sister picked me up and carried me out of the room.’
‘Your sister?’
‘She looked like me, too. And she was very fierce. She used to hiss and spit at the other women.’
‘Which other women?’ It sounded as though Khainet had been brought up in one of the group complexes. We’d pieced it together: the men closest to the Hierolath kept the biggest number of women.
Khainet frowned. There were a lot of them. They – spoke.’
It was my turn to frown. ‘They spoke?’ I echoed.
‘All the time. But I never understood what they said. They were kind to me, but I remember – rooms. Pale green rooms, with metal in them. I kept going to sleep in them.’
This all sounded very strange to me. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe it was. I must have been very young. But then the men came.’
‘You didn’t have a House Father?’ That couldn’t be. But Khainet was insistent.
‘I didn’t see any men. I didn’t know what they were, until they came. My sister came running into the room and she was scowling. She picked me up and carried me into a cupboard and then she shut the door. It was dark and I was afraid of her, so I didn’t make any noise, but when the door opened again there was a man standing there. I remember thinking that he looked like me: his skin was pale and so was his hair. He shouted at me and so I closed my eyes again. Then he hit me. When I woke up, I was in a man’s house and I stayed there until I was moved.’ She shrugged. She did not want to remember those parts of it, I could tell, and who could blame her?
Then she said, ‘Always noise. He used to shout. And then the children . . . all of us packed into one little house.’
I thought she must be talking about her House Father, but then she explained, ‘They were all boys. I only remember my other mother a little bit. Not the one in the cage. The new one.’
‘What happened to her?’
Khainet blinked, as if trying to remember. ‘I don’t – I can only see bits. She ruined some food. She was clumsy and I understood things she didn’t. I don’t know why.’ The words were coming more easily now, I noticed. ‘I remember her dropping the pot. He came in and he shouted. Next thing I remember, she was lying on the floor. She wouldn’t move. Two of the boys carried her out; they were laughing and joking. I did the cooking after that. Then he sent me away before the boys could use me.’
‘Where did he send you?’ I felt cold, despite the warm wind from the sea, and for a moment the wind smelled of earth.
‘To a house of use. I don’t know why,’ she echoed.
I know, I thought, as I stared at her beautiful face, but I said nothing. For the upper echelons of the Most Holy, when they grew tired of the dull meat at home. She added, ‘I remember a lot about that. But I don’t want to.’
I couldn’t hold back the question I’d been longing to ask: the same question as always. ‘What changed you?’
She took a long time answering, but that’s normal. It still takes me time, when I talk about it.
‘I don’t know. I remember standing by a window. It was in the morning, I think, because the sun was climbing up. I saw the green domes – the Most Holy, Seliye tells me they call it – and I thought how beautiful they were, but they also terrified me. Then I looked down at my hands and I saw them as mine. After that, it happened slowly, maybe over one month. When the men spoke at me, I started to understand a few words. I spent a lot of time staring in the—’ she frowned,’—the mirror, as though I was trying to recognize myself. And then I was down in the main hall, waiting for a man, and I saw a girl. She came in with another man and he made her wait. It was very hot. When he went to the desk she pushed her head covering back and her eyes met my eyes. I knew she was looking at me as a person and I was looking at one too. Then the man came back and she was a thing again.’ Khainet paused and slid a sandalled foot along the black sand, back and forth. The straps of those sandals were worn and scuffed, fraying almost to the point of snapping. ‘That night, a bird came. At first I thought it was just sitting on the window sill, but it didn’t fly away when I went to it. It spoke to me. I don’t know how, but it spoke. It flew around me and gave me a picture in my head: of the streets and the gate. It told me to go to the gate when the crescent moon rose.’
‘Other people tell similar stories,’ I said. ‘It was the same for me.’
She looked doubtful.
‘I didn’t know how I’d go, but I did. They weren’t expecting me to do anything like that. I just slipped out before dark and followed the picture, and then I hid in the shadows by the gate. And it opened.’
‘But you saw no one.’
‘No. How did you know?’
‘Because no one ever does.’ That had been the same for me, too. ‘And then you ran.’
‘I knew I had to get out of the city, but you know, Hunan, I didn’t really understand why. All I knew was the men’s world, and my place.’ She paused again, scuffing the sand. ‘I never looked back once I’d started running. I hid in the rocks. Once I was out of the city, the pictures were new ones. They showed me where to go. They showed the colony.’ She reached out and grasped my hand. ‘You sent the bird, didn’t you, Hunan? You sent the pictures. You showed me the way to go, how to come here.’
Her face was lit with gratitude and I sighed as I told her that no, I had sent neither bird nor maps, that the colony does not have the resources for such things, and that we did not know who sent them. We had no idea.
THIRTEEN
PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)
Eld and I came off the ice close to midnight. The moon hung in the south, floating just above the sea, and we used it to head towards the forest of Morvern.
I knew little about this part of Darkland, but then, no one knew much, except the Morrighanu, and perhaps the vitk
i. It had been the first part of the continent to be settled, by renegade scientists outcast from the Reach. Frey had come from Morvern, and that alone was enough to make the land feel cold to me, more alien than even another world, the air crackling with hostile intent.
The monotony of the journey was beginning to slow me down, though I took careful note of all and any markers, like the tracker I had once been and, indeed, still was. I was grateful for the afternoon’s sleep, or trance, whatever it had been. A couple of hours passed, during which neither Eld nor I spoke, but finally we reached a lip of slippery rock. Below, a cliff plunged away into a great dark expanse. I could smell snow, and trees, and something beyond that that spoke of spring, like a promise. It smelled similar to the forests of the Reach, and I began to feel just a little easier. A false comfort, I knew.
‘Morvern,’ Eld said, pointing. ‘This is the start of Sull Forest.’
‘And where, Eld, do you propose that we stay the night?’
Eyes gleaming in the moon’s light, Thorn looked at me as though I were mad. ‘Why, in a hostel, of course.’ Then he turned and disappeared. I stared stupidly for a moment, then saw the crack in the rock down which he had gone. When I investigated it, I found a series of worn steps cut into the cliff. Eld was already some distance down them; I followed, as quickly as I could.
I’d naturally assumed that he was being sarcastic, but when we came to the end of the steps, with my calves vibrating like harp strings from the long climb down, I realized that the joke at my expense was a minor one. I could see a bank of trees, but above them, the arch of gables. There was a settlement at the foot of the cliff. No lights were showing: perhaps a curfew had been imposed, or maybe they had simply all gone to bed.
‘Eld?’ I nudged him. ‘Is this safe? To be seen?’
‘Safe for me.’
‘And what does that mean, precisely?’ My own voice was as cold as the ice above us.
‘It means that you, my dear, will not be seen. And I will be disguised.’ As I watched him suspiciously, the moon seemed to drift behind a cloud and when I could see once more, someone else stood in front of me. Even in the faint illumination from Loki, I could see this, but I could not have said how Eld was different, even though I studied him feature by feature.
‘Just raise your seith as you did on the sled,’ Eld explained. ‘It’ll be enough. My ravens will do the rest.’
I did as he suggested. I was glad that he seemed to have such faith in my abilities; I wasn’t sure that I shared it. Just before we headed into the trees I looked up at the sky. Loki hung among the spring stars, the Ship and the Corona. There were no clouds to be seen, only the silent flutter of black wings.
Eld did not have to counsel me to keep my mouth shut. I followed his unfamiliar figure like a shadow, through the doors of a building among the trees. All was quiet, apart from the occasional cry of a hunting bird and the occasional slop of snowmelt from roofs or trees. I did not even see how he opened the door, but shortly we were standing in a hallway that could have been anywhere in the Reach: carved panels with quaint hunting scenes, an overstuffed couch. The very familiarity of it was unsettling. There was a grille in the panelling across the hall. Eld spoke to someone whom I could not see and started to negotiate rates. My attention wandered. The place was dingy and smelled of mould and damp. A girl sidled down the stairs and through the door, keeping her face averted from us. I started, but the seith held, together with whatever protection had been afforded by Eld’s information system, and she showed no sign of having seen me. As she slipped out, I saw that one side of her face was a mottled mass of bruises. I could almost taste her hopelessness on the air, lingering like sad perfume in her wake.
Eld took a small piece of metal from a hook on the wall. After a moment, I recognized it as an old-fashioned key. I had only seen one once before, in a theme restaurant in Tiree. It made me wonder just how far Morvern might be behind the times . . .
I followed Eld up a narrow flight of stairs to a landing. Eld glanced at the key, and it was then that I belatedly realized we would be sharing a room. I was reluctant to be left on my own in this vitki haunt, but equally uncertain about the prospect of sleeping in the same place as Thorn Eld behind a locked door. The same thought had evidently struck Eld himself, for he looked a question back at me.
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ I said in an undertone. I did not want to show the vitki that his presence unnerved me. I had the satisfaction of seeing Eld look mildly surprised.
‘If it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me. Of course, you know that you’re entirely safe with me?’
‘Thanks for making that clear,’ I said, and was surprised to find myself slightly put out. I was that unappealing, was I? But of course, he had seen the full extent of my facial injuries and one could hardly blame him for failing to find me attractive. A whisper within told me that this was why I’d chosen to keep the scars. But I paid no attention to the voice and besides, it didn’t matter even if it was true. I had no interest in Eld, I told the voice. No interest at all.
The room was as dank as the lobby, with twin beds and a slight gap between. Eld bade me goodnight, removed his coat and boots and lay down on a bed with his back to me, where he fell into a silent, motionless sleep. It was, I suppose, foolish to hope that he might have proved human enough to mutter or snore, but the more sensible part of me reminded myself to be thankful for this. I lay staring into the dimness, fancying that I could see the flicker and beat of ravens’ wings in the shadows, carrying knowledge to and fro. We were in Morvern, in Darkland, a nation with whom my people were at war: I could not afford to forget who Thorn Eld was, nor what. Thousands of years ago, perhaps he and I would have been magician and witch, shaman and seer. These days, we were simply people who had been trained in normal human abilities, nothing more than that – or so I kept telling myself. But in spite of the long day and my fatigue, it took me a while to fall into sleep, all the same.
FOURTEEN
PLANET: MONDHILE (Sedra)
As I have said, I remembered the terrain from my days in the warband. Then, we had travelled to Moon Moor at the start of winter, with the frost thin on the ground and crackling in the thorn bushes and the glaciers bright against the high white sky. We moved in single file, on the backs of war murs, bred for hard fighting. In those days there had been many skirmishes across the north; now, they were fewer. A succession of difficult winters, and long ones, had put paid to any wish to continue fighting – that and the deaths in war of some of the more intractable clan leaders. That never hurts.
I had been towards the back of the warband. There was no call for a metal-speaker up front: the useful people there were those who could discern the easiest way across tricky terrain, avoiding the marshy places where a mur could stumble, or the patches of sand where a mur might sink.
But I had other talents, of use all the way along the line.
We filed across the scrub, with the murs’ breath and our own blowing out in clouds into the chilly air. Even in thick leather gloves, my hands were cold. I did not remember being so cold as a child, but now I marvelled that I hadn’t frozen. Everyone was bundled up in leather armour and furs, or thick woollen capes, apart from the feir warriors, who seemed to feel the cold as little as children themselves. They walked bare-armed and bare-headed, without weapons. They’re close to the bloodmind, those folk. They spend as much time in it as out of it – not all the time, like the mad wandering people, for they are tied to clans, but it’s a close thing. We did not have to be warned to avoid them: they were as dangerous as half-tamed mur, snapping and snarling at the slightest intrusion into their vicinity. I watched them as we rode: a group of tall men and several women, with long tangled hair. Their claws and teeth were longer than the average, too. I wondered what it must be like, to live in the bloodmind so much of the time, a quasi-childhood, lacking anything other than the traces of self-awareness, not to be able to name your own name, or your clan, conscious only of threat an
d the opportunity for battle. I’d been in it myself only once since childhood: the result of a masque, when the bloodmind’s focus turned from savagery to sex. I remembered a bit about that, too, and I grinned as I rode.
Moon Moor stretches for perhaps thirty lai along the edge of the mountains, before the scrub turns to the bare earth of the foothills. It takes a day to cross on mur-back, longer if the mist comes down from the mountains. We were perhaps a third of the way across when the attack came.
They were a band of northern clans: wild people, rumoured to live on lines of dark energy and eat human flesh. When I rode with our warband, I believed this, but later, when I had lived a little, I thought that they probably believed the same about us. They rode swift mur, the coats mottled black and white to blend in with the northern forests. Even against this thorny scrub, they were well disguised due to the sprinkling of snow, and they were as fast as ghosts.
And they had dreamcallers with them. We found that out soon enough, but I felt them before I saw them. Their dreams prickled at the edges of mine and I threw a wall of shivering illusions into the air, but they were stronger than I was. I sent out a silent call to our other dreamcallers, further up the line, but it was too late: I’d been snapped. One moment I was facing a brake of scrub, sharp with thorns and frost, and the next, I was in a wasteland of the dead. Everyone around me was dead: corpses torn to pieces and the air thick with the smoke from the funeral pyres. I started to choke on it, even as a small cool voice at the back of my mind told me that it wasn’t real. The mountain wall drifted into view through the smoke: we were still on Moon Moor. I turned with a flush of hope. I wanted to know if I could find my sister. But one of the corpses sat up and spoke to me, its jaw clicking back into place as it did so. It was another woman, a warrior like me, with the curve of pregnancy just visible beneath her battle dress. I could see the litter squirming within, as though she had become transparent.
