Amberlight

by Sylvia Kelso

  “Cataract.” Memories tug tide-wise. “Wooden walls. Side-set logs. Cedar—new cut. Catapults. Customs people in armor. A lot of grey—grey-black mud. Dinda—the tyrant—is crazy. I was—told . . .” The brows knot, struggle of need and caution, resurrection of imperatives and secrets from another life. And then the demanding, pleading stare.

  “You said you ‘always’ wear Cataract boots. So you were used to money. A lot of money.” Analysis is how Tellurith pays. “And you’ve seen Cataract first-hand. Did Dinda pay you?”

  “No.” Too immediate and too decided for dissimulation. “I know about him. But not from him. I mean . . .”

  “I understand.” Briefed about him, under some other loyalty. “Cataract. Do you see anything else?”

  And the eyes turn inward, the mind strains, for that moment that ends, over and over, in a clench-teethed snarl of, “No!”

  * * * *

  “There are symptoms, Ruand, yes, for memory-loss. We get a couple most years.” From, Caitha does not have to add, head injury in the mines. “Vomiting. Delirium. Light-stress. Often we have to bandage their eyes. But without deep brain damage, most of it passes in the first sun-cycle.”

  During which, she does not have to add, this patient was completely drugged.

  “Did he throw up at all?”

  “Some retching.” Caitha shrugs. “He might not have eaten much that day.”

  Tellurith glowers at the infirmary door, white-painted and bland as morning-lit qherrique.

  “Nothing that would last longer?”

  “Headaches. All over the skull. They can last a quarter moon.”

  “Does he . . .”

  Caitha looks her Head unblinkingly in the eye.

  “We gave him sleep-syrup—kept him completely under sleep-syrup—for three days. Headaches can ease well before that.”

  Tellurith takes a little breath.

  “Should they have—with this one?”

  A physician’s loyalties are rarely in danger of division. Her patient is usually her House. Now it is Caitha who looks away.

  “In my experience—I would think not. ”

  “And have you asked—has he asked . . .?”

  Caitha looks back to her. Amberlight eyes, somber, darkened to unpolished bronze.

  “Ruand, if there was head pain—he’s said nothing to us.”

  * * * *

  “Hamadryah.”

  “Verrain. Caravan city. At the desert edge. Halfway to the capital.”

  “Caravan?”

  “Caravan—I don’t know!”

  “What else could cause it? Mother’s name, ’Rith! Caitha said there were no headaches. It can’t be physical!”

  Tellurith sets the decanter back, with care, on the gold-embossed stand that protects her dining table. Hearing, instead, that paroxysm of comprehension. Feeling the hand all but rip her shirt front; the tears, strangled in her lap.

  “He’s a man. He’s Outland. Physical . . . may not be all there is to it.”

  Iatha slams her napkin across the silverware. “Bah!”

  * * * *

  “Quetzistan.”

  “Dhasdein. Eastern province. Bandit country.”

  “Who do they raid?”

  “Dhasdein, Verrain, whoever pays for them.”

  “Did you?”

  “I—I—damn!”

  * * * *

  “What does Mother mean to you?”

  “What does it mean to you?”

  He has transgressed, and knows it, but the snap signals she has done the same. He stares stubbornly at the wall.

  “Tomorrow, the physicians are due.”

  The head comes round in a hurry.

  “To check your thigh again. And the rest. If everything looks all right, they may let you start on solid food.”

  “Looks . . .”

  He says it on a breath. There is sweat on his forehead- bones.

  Her tongue aches to say, I know how you dread it, more for the humiliation than the pain. I can make it easier . . . None of it can be spoken, lest it sting that vehement pride.

  “I’ll be here.”

  The eyes come round to her. Too black, too depthless, to read gratitude, but the loosening of their corners speaks relief.

  * * * *

  “Shirran.”

  “Ships. Oars.”

  “Who pulled them?”

  “Black men. Chains.”

  “Was it in the Archipelago?”

  “Archipelago?”

  Tellurith sighs.

  “Tomorrow, someone else will work at this. And,” as well get it all over at once, “we’ll be shifting you out of here.”

  It has been cleared by the physicians. And after tomorrow, they may need the infirmary.

  The eyes are wide, all but wild. Arrogance is fragile in an invalid. Physically helpless, psychically shattered; and she has just rocked the foundations of his tiny world.

  “What is . . .Why?”

  She sits down on the bed-side, puts a hand on his shoulder. That he permits it is a measure of the shock.

  “It’s nothing to worry about. I—simply have some work I cannot put off.”

  No work, the wild look says what he is too proud to lay tongue to, should come ahead of me! Child’s frailty, child’s affront. Child’s panic. “Where is this? Where am I going—”

  “This is the House infirmary. You’ll have your own room. In the tower.”

  “What tower?”

  “The men’s tower. We—men and women have separate quarters, in Amberlight.”

  The wildness has intensified. His face is slick with sweat.

  “It won’t be so different. A new nurse or two, perhaps, but Caitha will visit you.”

  It is panic now. Stark and white. And under it, the razed foundations of another man’s, a redoubtable man’s, perhaps a ruler’s pride. Which is what clamps the lip in his teeth and the terror behind that harrowed black stare, the cry of a dependent betrayed, abandoned, which haunts her into sleep.

  CHAPTER II

  Moon’s end over Amberlight, a sleek left-handed crescent in a bitterly cold, cloudless spectrum of blood-crimson-to-vio­let pre-dawn sky. Red sky at light, sorrow’s delight. Shrugging on work-coat and bull’s hide helmet and solid knee-high work-boots, Tellurith eyes it askance.

  Mutter, shuffle, flicker of torchlight tells her most of the crew is already in the court. Helmeted heads, bulky silhouettes, merge amid huge marble vases of fern; a gift, doubtless ironic, from Shuya, president of Verrain. Slab-shifters cluster, well-known fac­es with the litter poles. Tunnel crew, a bristle of shovel and pick. Physicians’ team. Stretcher-carriers.

  And the one unfamiliar shape, edging up with an angle of instrument-case at her back. Darrya. Proven shaper, having made the device she bears, House-bred, from an old Craft family, now meeting the greatest test of all. Her first time at the face. First time approaching moon’s dark has matched her womb’s dark, the time of woman’s greatest power, greatest receptivity, of hearing, as the Crafters say. The two or three days before her monthly flow begins.

  They exchange salutes. Tellurith adds a couple of Head-like, reassuring words. It is never easy. Ever. But the moon presses. At her stance, more than anything, the crew begins to move.

  Under the men’s tower. Through the twelve feet high, padlocked, cross-barred garden gates. Up the steps.

  The sun is still a long way behind. In the mouth of the mine-adit, screened by its clump of pines, Tellurith halts for the prayer.

  “Work-mother, moon’s lady . . .” Her tongue recites the phrases that her soul affirms. A light in the men’s tower, a snail-track of torches further down the hill-flank, attract her brain. Jerish is cutting too. And sometime in the next week, before the new moon comes, they will be follow
ed by the rest of the Thirteen.

  The prayer ends. The crew mutter assent. The tunnelers pass out the shielded candle-lamps. In ritual order, tunnel crew, slab-shifters, House-head, cutter, physicians, stretcher-bearers, they file into the mine.

  The way is short enough, up in a rough-walled, rag-roofed semicircle, by time-settled steps amid the carpet of debris. Rock fragments. Broken shoring timber. A roomy enough tunnel, but the hill is limestone, fractured, crumbling, and capricious in its falls. The lanterns pass in ritual quiet.

  Until the tunnel widens and the mother-face confronts them, condensation glistening, a wall of frozen moonlight, grey and blank as some great, blind, living eye.

  Silently, the crew group themselves. Slab-shifters in front. Physicians to the left, tunnellers behind, House-head to the right. Tellurith grips Darrya’s shoulder. Then they all step back, and she is alone, one small human figure, facing the qherrique.

  Silence prolongs itself. So quiet they all hear the breath, well-controlled, Tellurith notices, before the novice starts her song.

  Never the same song, never the same as for anyone else, never sung for anyone else. Softer than a woman calling her own soul. Quieter than the closure of a lullaby.

  Imperceptibly, infinitesimally, dimming, paling the yellow candle flame, the mother-face begins to glow.

  Moonrise, pearl-light, too soft for frosting, too pure to call opalescent, too deep, too inward to say, illumination, filling, flooding the tunnel, a well of living light. As she watches, Tellurith’s eyes fill. She feels, remembers the communion, Amberlight’s greatest life at its greatest moment, the loss tearing her heart.

  Darrya unslings her cutter. Clears it. Walks forward to the face. And the qherrique glows brighter, the full, pearl’s heart luster of assent, under her caress.

  Darrya sets her feet. Centers herself. The song closes as they always do.

  “In the Work-mother’s hand.”

  Then she wakes the blade. Slower, more delicately than with any scalpel, begins to cut the long upper face of the slab.

  A good beginning, considers Tellurith, filing behind the slab-shifters with the litter, Darrya stumbling sweat-drenched and speechless in her arm. A clear assent, a steady cut. No fumbles in the loading, and Marghi’s team can handle the padded leather sling in their sleep. The face hardly wept. By next moon, the scar, like so many before it, will be almost gone. It is not so often the Work-mother grants them such an auspicious pass.

  Ten steps later, the ceiling comes down.

  * * * *

  “S’hurre.” Tellurith clears her throat. “We have a problem to solve.”

  Not the posy of bruises, lacerations, broken ankle and strained shoulder in the infirmary. Not the setting of new timbers when the next tunnel crew has cleared the scree. Not the apportioning or working of the slab that came out without a scratch, protected by shifters’ backs. In some puzzlement, the faces round the table turn to her. Craft-heads, Telluir House’s decision-makers, several of them Head’s cousin-kin.

  “And I need a decision from the House.”

  On the fate of an enigmatic male picked up bleeding to death, a personal commitment assumed by the House’s head, but also a dangerous mystery. An outlander whose purpose and origin are lost, even in his own mind, but whose rags of personality shout, Troubler of nations; King’s emissary. With perilous hints of Am­berlight, high Amberlight involvement, atop the smell of Dhas­dein or Cataract.

  “We know he isn’t Dinda because he’s the wrong color, or Shuya, because she has no extras, or his Imperial Majesty or his Illustrious Crown Prince,” ironic cheers, “because there’s been no to-do downstream. Otherwise, he could be any dangle under the Mother’s moon. And short of some very expensive, very long-winded, very risky enquiries, there’s no way of finding where he’s missed.

  “In two weeks, despite extensive work with me, his memory has not returned. He is now in the men’s tower. Where he will not work with anyone else, and is now refusing to eat. That small—obstacle—we can circumvent.” Some wry laughs. “The decision I need from you goes longer. Do we keep him? Or do we turn him out?”

  * * * *

  Some hurrying to work, some lingering to chat, the rest of the meeting has left Hanni and her two off-siders to shield Tellurith amid a mess of appointment diaries and voting slates. But though she has done all but hide in the big silver-grey conference chamber drapes, Iatha has dogged her Head up the two levels to her workroom, and seen Hanni herself dislodged.

  “And now, my pretty vote-swinger, where’s the twist?”

  “It was a fair discussion—” Tellurith reaches for a slate-stack. Iatha snatches it away.

  “Oh, they were three hours deciding if it was more honorable or safe or smart to waste food and risk murder keeping him, than to save time and lose secrets tossing him away. You knew how it would go, from the minute you said ‘turn him out’.”

  “It’s the only safe choice—”

  “Of course it is. House honor, common charity, too Mother-blasted much to risk. So why—”

  Iatha’s eyes narrow. Tellurith waits.

  “So why,” says Iatha very softly, “didn’t you twist the next one too?”

  Tellurith scowls.

  “Yes, ’Rith. If we keep him—just what do we do with him?”

  Tellurith scowls harder. “I have to see Zeana—”

  “She could cut that piece in her sleep. Where is this going, ’Rith?”

  “I have a day’s work—”

  “Who’s going to work with him? Or do we just lock him up in the tower and pretend he doesn’t exist?”

  “Rot it—!”

  “Can it be—can it be that you don’t know?”

  “Rot and gangrene you, I do know!” And as Tellurith turns at bay, the qherrique, the oracle, whatever it is that speaks to House-heads makes good the lie. “We can’t let it go, so I’ll have to work with him—and I’m blasted if I’ll waste more work-time or spend my life traipsing up the tower. Shift him over here—put him in a spare room—the Mother knows I have too many of them! Move in a couple of Zuri’s troublecrew—let them peel parsnips and wash sheets for Shia if there’s no other cover, I know you won’t let me hazard my precious head with him alone. I’ll work on him after dinner or at midnight or over the breakfast table. And you can figure how to make him eat!”

  * * * *

  “Why did you refuse to go on with the words?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  The gambits clash in midair. Visible as the best guest-silver with which Shia’s eccentricity has laid the table, the embroidered cloth, the blood-tulips of wine, the costly furniture, the backdrop fresco of glowing qherrique, the prospect, beyond rain-gemmed glass, of city lights. The glare in those black eyes.

  (“In the Mother’s blessed name, ’Rith!” After all the storms, Iatha imploring her, literally on the verge of tears. “Risk yourself, and the House, and for all I know, the City, but not this way! Have some sense!”

  To which the only answer, irrational, inexplicable, compulsive as every signal from the qherrique, is, “It feels right.”)

  Iatha, naturally, has settled the hunger-strike with scurvy facility. Told him he will leave the physicians’ hands as soon as he can walk.

  And this same day he has negotiated his shaky way down the tower, up into the House-head’s quarters, to the room nearest the servers’, appointed fit for any Head’s favorite. Down to the slippers he is wearing. At a price the barely-touched plate, the too-stiff stance and over-bright, black-ringed eyes announce.

  “Do you find the clothes to your taste?”

  The paled cheekbones flush; the glare becomes ice. All too easy, with this one, to make a gall of debt.

  “Gods blast it, why?”

  “Had you rather we put you on the street?”

  “You . . .”
>
  Too intelligent to hurl things, too furious for speech. Hefty troublecrew in earshot. But as he falls back in his chair, Tellurith’s pulse-beat scores the fright.

  Delicate as poison, he sets aside the glass.

  “Just what is it you want?”

  A King’s emissary at the very least. From a multitude of responses, a House-head’s intuition urges truth.

  “We can’t get rid of you. It isn’t honor. It isn’t safe. On what terms you stay—is your choice.”

  Were he not still so physically and mentally drained, no doubt there would be less signal than that bloodless face. Certainly he would not have to ask outright. Tensing, swallowing. “‘Safe’?”

  Tellurith sets aside her own glass. Beginning the real gamble, she is icy, self-oblivious, as if back in the mine.

  “What do you know about Amberlight?”

  Nothing. You know that. It is in the mute shake of the head.

  “We are not a nation, even such a nation as Verrain. We are one city, with a limited number of folk, and a great deal of land. A great deal of wealth. It has been gifted to us over centuries. Do you know why?”

  And at this hinge of destiny there is still time for triumph, at seeing the gamble work. When the huge black eyes blink, still riveted on her, and the fine-cut lips whisper, “Qherrique.”

  “What do you know of qherrique?”

  And like a sleepwalker’s, the lips speak.

  “Pearl-rock. Origin unknown. Nature unknown. Value unlimited. The key to River-rule. Only found at Amberlight. Only worked by women, traditionally. Thirteen separate outcrops, each the property of a House. Traded, as statuettes of the city’s Goddess, to any authority who can raise the price. For its ruling powers.”

  “Powers?”

  “With pearl-rock, a ruler—down to a house or clan-head—can control his folk.”

  “Hardly ‘control’.” Whatever the cost of interruption, Tellurith cannot forego a frown. “A ruler with a statuette—which must be made and tuned specifically for her—can feel the folk’s harmony. Can—influence it. Quiet trouble, reduce dissent.”