by Julia Gray
'He's not stupid, mind you,' Kerin went on. 'He won't try anything unless he's sure of some support. When the news of Lereth and Zolen's finds this afternoon gets around, people will be starting to think our luck's changed.'
'And Terel will be safe.'
'More than that. He'll be in demand. Every time an animal gets sick, at least.'
'It was amazing,' Ysatel told her husband. 'He seemed to know exactly what was needed, and the change in the piglet was incredible.'
'Is he still asleep?'
'He was the last time I looked. Whatever he did, it took a lot out of him.'
'Restocking his store of dreams?'
'Maybe, but I've never heard of a sharakan trading in that way before.'
'More's the pity,' Kerin declared. 'Practical help is often a lot more use than mystical guidance.'
'You'd better not let Farazin hear you say things like that,' Ysatel warned her husband. 'Sky-watchers can be touchy.'
Scar returned to his master that evening. The dog seemed to be back to normal
- if a bit subdued and somewhat footsore - but although he resumed his guard duties for Cutter with his usual fervour, there was one noticeable difference in the hound's behaviour. As Cutter found out the next day, Scar became nervous and agitated whenever he was forced to go anywhere near the Mirana house, and if left to his own devices would not approach the place at all.
The news of the piglet's recovery soon spread throughout the village, and in most people's minds it was yet more evidence that the foreigner was able to exert a supernatural influence over animals. Opinion was still divided over whether this was a good thing or not, but now that Fenduca seemed - if anything - to be under a benign spell rather than a curse, most were prepared to give the boy the benefit of the doubt. For once Cutter kept his opinions to himself, and went about his business as though nothing had happened.
Over the next few days, Ysatel noticed several changes in her patient. He was eating much better than before, and visibly recovering some of his health and strength.
The boy also appeared to be particularly attentive whenever she was with him.
He hung on her every word, often seeming to repeat them silently, as if trying them out for himself. He would sometimes try to repeat them out loud, and she encouraged him in this, teaching him simple vocabulary by pointing to things around him and suiting some actions to her words. At the same time, she occasionally had the eerie feeling that he knew what she was thinking, that he could anticipate what she was going to do even before she was aware of it herself. On one occasion he drained a cup of water and held it out to her just as she had been about to ask whether he wanted any more to drink. And they had been sitting outside one day - something he liked to do as often as possible now -when he warned her against picking up a metal bowl that had been placed too close to the fire, and which would have burnt her fingers. Each time, Ysatel told herself that it was just his intuition at work, but she was not always convinced by her own arguments. Even so, she began to enjoy the boy's company, taking pleasure in his improving health, and hoping that she would soon learn more about him.
There were, however, some rather more disturbing aspects of the stranger's behaviour that left her feeling puzzled. The first and most obvious of these was the disruption of his sleep — and sometimes her family's - by his nightmares. He often cried out, apparently in distress, and yet when she went to see what was wrong, he was sound asleep. She would watch him in the candlelight as he mumbled and twitched, wondering whether she should wake him, without ever being able to make up her mind to act. Eventually he'd grow quiet again and she would go back to her husband, unnerved by the thought of the visions the foreigner might be seeing.
A second, more subtle pattern emerged when he was awake. Whenever anyone approached, he looked up expectantly - hope flaring in his strange eyes - only to look disappointed when he saw who it was. It was as if he were expecting someone who never came. And the most curious thing of all was that this reaction could even be prompted by the appearance of an animal, or a bird.
Ysatel soon gave up trying to interpret such behaviour, deciding to concentrate on practical matters rather than mysteries, but it bothered her nonetheless.
The midwinter sun was a pale orange disc behind a high layer of cloud. Even at midday it hung low in the sky, and its muffled rays provided little heat, but Ysatel was feeling quite warm. She had just returned home with a heavy bundle of firewood, and first the exercise and then the residual glow of the embers kept her from feeling cold. It would not be so for her men, she knew.
Searching for finds in the river was cold work even in summer, and by the time they'd finished for the day, they'd all be chilled to the bone - and in sore need not only of the fire she was building but of hot food too. She was about to go inside to inspect her stores and decide what to cook, when Terel emerged from the doorway, lurching on his deformed foot and with a panic-stricken expression on his face.
'What is it? What's the matter?'
The boy's hands fluttered like demented birds, and he said something she could not follow, but he was clearly very agitated.
'I don't know what you mean,' she said, moving closer.
'Shak!' he cried. 'Shak!'
Abruptly he knelt on the ground and placed his good hand, palm down, on the dirt. Then he shook convulsively so that his fingers jumped and quivered.
'Shak,' he repeated. 'Soon. Come.'
'Shake?'
The boy nodded wildly, pointing to the ground.
'Shake! Soon.'
As soon as she realized what he was trying to tell her, Ysatel wasted no time.
She turned and ran towards the river, shouting as she went.
'Get out of the river! There's an earthquake coming! Quick! Get out of the river!'
The men within earshot stopped what they were doing and looked at her, hesitating. But such was the force of conviction in her voice as she repeated her cry that several of them were soon scrambling towards the banks, shouting to others further away to do the same. Few thought to wonder that the warning had come from Ysatel, whose home was a long way from the wolf-fish pool. She was obviously in earnest, and only a fool ignored such an alarm.
When the tremor came, it was quite strong, but lasted only a few moments and did less damage than the previous one. Thanks to Ysatel, all those working in the river escaped the surges of water and the associated rockfalls. When the villagers learnt that she had been able to warn them because of the foreigner's premonition, their conviction that the stranger must be a sharakan
— and not a sorcerer - was confirmed.
Chapter Nine
Terrel stared down into the fish-pool, watching the peculiar creatures whose placid movements were causing the surface of the water to ripple gently. He had never seen a wolf and had only a vague idea of what they looked like, and so he could not tell how these fish had come by their name. The strange tendrils that sprouted from the top and sides of their heads looked to him like the whiskers of a cat or the spindly legs of a spider.
'Do they sense the tremors coming through their feelers?'
'No one knows how they do it,' Ysatel replied.
What can I possibly have in common with them? Terrel wondered. What makes us both able to predict earthquakes? But these were questions he could not even hope to answer.
'They seem quiet enough,' he said.
'They are. When the fish are like this, there's nothing to worry about,'
Ysatel told him. 'But we'll be keeping a close eye on them for the next few days. Farazin says there could be another quake soon.'
Terrel nodded, and looked up to where the White Moon hung like a pale disc in the eastern sky. It would be full the next day, and the day after that the Red Moon would also reach the point of its maximum influence. The combined effect was likely to be quite powerful. Then again, Farazin's predictions had not always proved accurate. In fact, the old man had told Terrel that the earthquake he'd successfully warn
ed Ysatel about should actually have happened two or three days later than it had - when the Amber and White Moons had been full within a few hours of each other. Not even the sky-watcher knew why it had come so early, and at the time no one had thought to check on the wolf-fish to see whether they had also been fooled.
'What happens to the fish when there's a quake coming?' Terrel asked.
'They get agitated,' Ysatel told him, 'and swim much faster than usual.
Sometimes they jump clean out of the water. And they wave their feelers about as if something's driving them mad.'
Terrel tried to relate this description to the internal trembling that he experienced, but couldn't see much connection. His certainty arrived inside him unannounced, not through any of his external senses. And he knew that Kerin's own experiences - his jasper feet- could only tell him about something that was already happening.
'How much warning do they give you?'
'Two or three hours, sometimes longer if it's a bad one.'
That was much more than Terrel could manage. He usually only had a few moments to raise the alarm before a tremor struck.
'I wish I could talk to them,' he murmured to himself.
'Maybe you can,' Ysatel said, smiling. 'You seem to have done all right with the other animals.'
Terrel laughed, thinking that he had indeed conversed with some very strange creatures — including some Ysatel did not know about — but he was still convinced that the wolf-fish were beyond his understanding.
'I think they'd just run away if I tried to touch them,' he said.
'Or bite your fingers off,' she warned. 'They can be quite nasty when they're hungry.'
'In that case,' Terrel decided, 'I'm not even going to try.'
'Do you want to go back?'
The pool was on the opposite side of the river from their hut, and this was the furthest Terrel had ventured from his bed so far. Even though he'd recovered much of his strength, the trek had been an arduous scramble over rocks that were often slippery or sharp-edged. But curiosity overcame the weariness he felt.
'Not yet.'
Terrel had been in Fenduca for almost two median months now, and although he could recall little of the first half of that time, he had become progressively more active and inquisitive since the second tremor. He had seen a great deal for himself, but the key to his newly acquired knowledge was his ability to speak the villagers' language. Ysatel had been his tutor, both willingly and — to Terrel's slight shame — sometimes unknowingly. Following Elam's advice, he had first employed the
psinoma to help him understand what she was saying, and had then tried to express himself to her in words -spoken aloud whenever possible, but implanted silently when that failed. Progress had been halting at first, but soon — much to his surprise and relief — phrases began to make sense on their own, without the need to pry into her thoughts. After a while he had begun to understand what other people were saying too. However, even though he was reasonably fluent now, Ysatel remained the person he was most comfortable with. They had come to regard each other as friends rather than just nurse and patient.
For her part, Ysatel found the fact that Terrel had progressed from near incoherence to fluency in little more than a month quite amazing. She had helped him as much as she could, patiently correcting his mistakes and nudging his memory when he stumbled over a difficult pronunciation or the construction of a sentence, but the boy seemed to have an uncanny knack of picking things up - including words she was reasonably sure he had never actually heard. He still faltered sometimes, and made mistakes, but those occasions were becoming increasingly rare. He was constantly hungry for knowledge, and asked questions about everything he saw. She had known Aylen since he was seven, and not even he had been able to match the foreigner's childlike curiosity.
'Can we sit and talk?' he asked now, his accent making even the simple words sound exotic.
'For a little while,' she replied, glancing up at the position of the sun.
They settled themselves on a ledge of rock, from where they could look out over the pool and the river beyond.
'Farazin said that the quakes were the result of the land moving,' Terrel began, 'but Macul doesn 't move, does it?'
'Not in the same way as Vadanis.' One of the few things Ysatel had been able to learn about his life - he still evaded some of her questions - was that he had lived on the Cursed Islands, or the Floating Islands as he called them.
Even after he'd been accepted into Fenduca's community, that piece of information had caused some trepidation among the villagers, but Ysatel was used to the idea by now.
'But our lands do move,' she went on. 'Just not as fast. You should really talk to Farazin about this, not me. I only know what I've picked up from him.'
'I'd rather talk to you.'
Ysatel glanced away, not wanting him to see how much his comment pleased her.
'Tell me what you can,' he urged.
'All right,' she said, pausing to collect her thoughts. 'There are various forces that work on the land. The pull of the moons is one, of course, but there are others, underground. I don't know why. These forces build up as they push against each other, until something gives way and part of the land moves.'
'And that's what causes the tremors?'
'I think so.'
'It sounds dangerous,' he commented. 'When the moons pull on Vadanis, the islands just change course.' He had never heard the process described in those terms before, but now it seemed quite apt. 'It's much better that way.'
It didn't sound better at all to Ysatel, but she chose not to say so.
'It can be dangerous sometimes,' she admitted, 'but most of the time it's not even noticeable.' There hadn't been any tremors since the one Terrel had foreseen. 'We manage well enough.'
Terrel glanced at her, wondering whether he was being teased, but Ysatel's expression remained neutral. She was watching some men at work in the river, sifting through the silt for the small gemstones and nuggets that were the sole reason for Fenduca's very existence.
'I still can't believe the same forces produced that,'' Terrel said, glancing up at the towering mass of the black mountain.
'Farazin says that maybe all mountains are built that way,' she replied, 'but most take hundreds or thousands of years. The astonishing thing is this one only took a few months.'
'Astonishing hardly covers it.' That anything so vast could just have grown out of the earth was unbelievable, but Terrel had heard Kerin describe what he had seen with his own eyes, and was certain that he had been telling the truth. The wonder was that the prospector had survived to tell the tale.
'There's nothing else like it in all the jasper forest,' Ysatel said, sounding almost proud. The jasper forest was the fanciful name given to the region of stone and water in which the villagers and other wandering prospectors spent their lives.
'Have you been up there?'
Ysatel shook her head.
'Only a few people had the chance before the soldiers arrived. By the time I got here the fences were already up, and I had no choice but to stay in Fenduca.' There was
no regret in her voice. The village was a harsh and sometimes violent place, but it was where she had met Kerin.
'How long have you been here?' he asked.
'Ten years.'
Terrel was silent for a while, then he turned to look at her.
'Kerin's a lot older than you, isn't he?'
Unaccountably, Ysatel found herself blushing. She laughed to cover her embarrassment, wondering why the boy's guileless comment should have affected her.
'I suppose so. That sort of thing doesn't matter much when you love someone.'
Terrel nodded solemnly, apparently considering this idea. Something in his strange eyes spoke of hidden pain, and Ysatel wished that he could trust her enough to tell her his secrets. But he remained silent, and in the end she found herself volunteering some secrets of her own.
'I sometimes wonder why I haven't b
een able to have a baby,' she said quietly.
'I think Kerin would've liked to have had a daughter - but if it's not happened by now, it's not likely to, is it?' And in any case, she added to herself, there's nothing I can do about it.
Terrel had begun to look distinctly uncomfortable at this turn in the conversation, but Ysatel didn't notice. She was talking to herself as much as to him now, releasing something she had kept bottled up for a long time.
'Mind you, giving birth isn't something to be taken lightly. Lots of women die that way.' She hesitated, wondering whether to go on, then took the plunge.
'That's what happened to Aryel. The baby was a girl, but she only outlived her mother by a few days. Kerin never saw her. He should have been at home, but he was away longer than expected. Up there.' She nodded towards the mountain.
'He's never forgiven himself.'
Terrel had been aware that Ysatel was not the mother of Kerin's sons, but this was the first time he'd heard any of the family history. He didn't know what to say.
'The boys grew up without a mother,' she went on. 'It's a wonder they're not wilder than they are.'
'They had you,' Terrel said.
'Only for the last five years. Before that Kerin had to do it all himself.'
'But you're a real family.' His accent often made words sound strange, but this time his voice seemed to be choked with emotion.
'Yes, we are,' she said firmly, pulling herself together. 'I'm sorry, Terrel.
I never meant—'
'I never had a family,' he blurted out, interrupting her apology. 'My parents abandoned me when I was a baby. I don't even know who they are.' Having been reluctant to reveal much about his past, he wasn't sure why he felt compelled to make this confession now.
