Amberlight

by Sylvia Kelso

  “If it comes to it?”

  “Ruand—the problem is the crews.”

  Tellurith looks away. Across her work-table, to the piled records on Hanni’s desk.

  “They don’t like,” Zuri’s voice is normal now. Quite expressionless. “An outlander,” she picks words like a cat across puddles, “an—unproven—outlander . . . so far into the House.”

  An outlander whose loyalties are both unproven and unknown. And can never be wholly fixed.

  Unless they are proven dangerous beyond all doubt.

  “All my crews would be happy,” Zuri’s eyes affirm it, “to train, to work out with him. Tactics, unarmed combat, anything but guns. I couldn’t ask better. But beyond that . . .” And now the House’s warden, the troublecrew’s Head, speaks at last. “Ruand, it isn’t safe.”

  * * * *

  “Train for fighting. But not fight.”

  Her heart bleeds. To quench that joy, that anticipation, that quick, sure, renewed life. To watch the glow, like ebony qherrique, die in those black eyes.

  “Alkhes . . .”

  He stands up and goes to the door. Inadequate words to catch the fluid upward twist, the perfectly balanced transit into motion, the supple silent stride. Re-tempered. A dueling sword.

  “It’s an honorable place—”

  He whips round. Against blue noon-sky he is a slight, shirt-haloed silhouette.

  “I don’t want honor, Tellurith. I want to do something!”

  Biting her lip, she measures a breath.

  “Can you be a freight-checker? A loading-master? A stevedore?”

  She can sense the glower.

  “You want a job in the Kora? Shearing sheep? Growing rice?”

  “Damn it, Tel!”

  “Or the quarries out at Iskan? Are you a stone-cutter? A carver? Do you know masonry?”

  “Do I—by the gods, yes! Yes! Iskan! Quarry’s up the ranges, right in among the snow! Eucalyptus smell—those big white helliens, always dropping bark. I was there for—anyway, I learnt stonework! Yes!”

  He is practically dancing in the door. And before she can out-flank this he has caught her hands, pulling her from her chair. No time for alarm at that new strength, the latent danger that doubtless has Azo on her toes. “Tel, let me try the pearl-rock. The qherrique.”

  Tellurith does not gasp. Does not yell. When her breath comes back, just stares into those black eyes, so vividly alive now, urgent with all of a whole, redoubtable man’s energy, palpable as an embrace.

  “If I’m not fit to sculpt, I could do the rough stuff. Cut panels. Work in the mine . . .”

  Nor does she scream and hide her eyes. Just says it, baldly, trying to make her lungs fill.

  “Men don’t work qherrique.”

  “I could do it—! Damn it, Tel, I could learn to make contact or whatever you do—at least let me try!”

  “No.”

  “Gods damn, Tellurith! That’s what’s wrong with this whole blighted city. Ingrained, nailed-down, built-in, stone-weighted—prejudice!”

  It comes like a qherrique blast. Harder than the hurling away of her hands, the charge across room to spin and skewer her, black eyes flinging their own thunderbolt.

  “Men heave bales and carry ingots and pull oars and tally freights—men butcher cattle, men shear sheep, men weave wool and—and—I’ve seen them!” The voice is hissing now. “Men can do anything in the thrice-damned City—except in this House!”

  Something is stifling within her. Struggling for breath. Yet she sounds perfectly calm. Even quiet.

  “Or any other House. Men don’t work qherrique.”

  They don’t use it either, she wants to say. They don’t cut the slabs or shape the statuettes or install the power panels, they don’t drive the vehicles or fire the light-guns or sail Navy ships. But something, the qherrique or something wholly within herself, holds the words in her throat.

  The tantrum has intensified. Become that soft, contained deadliness.

  “So what do your men do?—whore?”

  Some greater blockage in her throat now. Perhaps it is pain.

  “Uphill men don’t work. It’s—indecent—for them to be seen outside the House.”

  His lips part. Even that black ice half-thaws, under the shock.

  “Decent House-men,” it comes out so calmly, so precisely, “stay in the tower. They have a gymnasium. A library. They spend a lot of time—training the boys. Preparing for—visitors. House-men are very particular about clothes. Body-oils. Scents. Their grooming. Their hair—”

  “Hair!”

  “A decent man doesn’t want to work qherrique! He can hold a conversation, he can play a flute, he can please a wife! He’s raised to honor his family and respect his wives—”

  “And what happens when he gives them sons?”

  There is a silence so deep Tellurith thinks it has sucked out the air. She hears Shia in the kitchen. She feels her blood pump. She knows, with awful certainty, that her face is turning white.

  And his is answering, the tumbled hair grown blacker and blacker, the eyes hollowed into chalk-set pits.

  “Is that what happened to yours?”

  Fainter than breath. Yet it seems to sear her heart.

  Her body and her awareness have parted company. Very far away, someone else has assembled the words.

  “House women—must bear a daughter first.”

  He does not speak. Is not breathing. She confronts a seeing, thinking corpse.

  Tellurith can only watch, in that remote, ringing quiet. As very carefully, very slowly, he lowers a half-raised hand. Turns away. Walks, with the conscious care and slow-motion gait of the critically wounded, out the apartment door.

  * * * *

  “’Rith?”

  Sun-fall on Amberlight, winter-hastened, an ice-blade wind, an iciest lavender, peacock green and frost-burn vermilion sky. Across her balustrade, Tellurith regards it with vague surprise.

  “Mother rot . . .” Mutter, lost obscenity. “’Rith,” incongruously gentle, “come inside.”

  Her limbs are numb. Her face aches. Someone has amputated her ears. Stumbling over the threshold, she computes a House-head’s lost afternoon, unscheduled, telescoped. And no one has said a word.

  “Coffee, Shia.”

  It burns to her stomach’s base. Laced with liquid fire.

  “Rot and gangrene you, Iatha!” she splutters, when she stops coughing. “Kzensis would have done!”

  Raw Korite barley spirit. Iatha’s face swims into focus. Taut and hard, but now, unaccountably, smug.

  Memory comes back. Blasting away speech.

  “’Rith. It’s all right.”

  Iatha is patting her. As Iatha patted her the day the mine fell, after they got her mother out. As Iatha has patted her, beside the birth bed, each time she bore a child.

  “Soup.”

  And as in the birth-ward, she eats.

  And wakes.

  “Calm down, you needn’t call the Navy. Your cockerel’s still in the coop.”

  “What—how—”

  “Came to roost in the garden, in an Imperial sulk. When it got late, Zuri and I put him in the tower—Sit down!”

  “Iatha!”

  This time the hiss cuts no ice. Iatha confronts her, with a glower she knows too sinkingly well.

  “Iatha, what did you say?”

  “I told him,” the glower has become a jut-jawed glare, “a few things he needed to know. That you didn’t build Amberlight. That the customs of the City are not your choice. That every mother who ever bore a baby dies when she loses a child. That you never asked to be House-bred, any more than you asked to throw three sons. That I’ll tear his tripes out and feed them to him, in white sauce, on a plate, if he ever mentions it again.”

  “O
h, Yath.” She is struggling, lungs blocked, throat choked, vision lost. Somewhere she hears Iatha’s growl. Then they are locked in each other’s arms, squeezing each other’s breath out, catching each other’s tears.

  “Pox-rotten whore’s-get dangle, Mother blight his—”

  She surfaces. It is Iatha, still tear-choked, comfort beyond expression, rumbling in her ear. “Wipe your face, ’Rith. You look like jam on an alley-whore’s plate. Want to wash?”

  “No, I—”

  “’Rith, wash your face.”

  And when she erupts from the bathroom, broken appointments howling on her heels, Iatha blocks her rush and says, blank-faced, “Not yet, ’Rith. Someone to see you, here.”

  Past her shoulder black hair, white shirt fill the doorway, and all the air leaves Tellurith’s lungs.

  The shirt is ripped. There is a blur, a definite scrape, running down his cheek. ‘Zuri and I,’ she would warrant, ran to five or six more. It is in the way he stands, too still, with Verrith and Azo close at his back. Too close.

  “Tellurith?”

  It takes all a House-head’s composure to say, “Come in.”

  Carefully, too carefully, he obeys. Aware of those living restraints, so near. But out in full light, she sees the ashen face. The look in his eyes. Daze, darkness. As if he has been hit on the head.

  “Tellurith, I—”

  He swallows.

  Then says quite simply, “I’m sorry,” and turns on his heel.

  “Where are you going?”

  He stops dead.

  When she waits, he turns about. In his shirt-sleeves, he looks about twenty years old. But what speaks is a grown, comprehending, accepting man.

  “It would be better if I was . . . elsewhere.”

  In the tower. Iatha’s work. Extreme, extravagant recompense. Literal sacrifice. Suddenly it is too much to unravel tonight. Tellurith flaps an arm at him, at them. “It would be better if you go where you belong. Azo, Verrith, see he gets there. In his room. In bed.”

  * * * *

  It is a relief to miss him at breakfast. After a long mind-filling day, to have a dinner engagement as well. Something of a surprise to see nothing of him next day. At a fourth peaceful breakfast, she begins to feel concern.

  When it appears that he has been dutifully if fiercely working out with the troublecrews, she dares to hope. Until, at dinner that week’s end, she finally gets a look at his face.

  A very subdued face. Her presence, no doubt. Yet watching him under her lashes, she feels another, painful certainty. That dulled look is more than fatigue, more than her proximity. If he is doing what he is supposed to, it is not by choice.

  “Tellurith?”

  She has looked too long. The black eyes are very big. Dangerously astute.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Not,” she says at last, “with me.”

  Imperceptibly his muscles relax. Iatha’s scouring must have gone very deep. But then he goes tense all over. Sets down his knife.

  “Tellurith . . . I am trying.”

  “Oh, rot it, I know you are.” Her shirt collar has begun choking her, her plait drags at her head. I don’t want you to try, she wants to bawl, I want you to be in love with it, I want you to be what you were before, even what you were before Amberlight, who wants to tame a hawk and watch it moult inside a cage?

  He is on his feet. The eyes pin her, a black, aching uncertainty, a physically painful hope.

  “Tel.” He is barely whispering. “Is there—something else?”

  For a moment time crystallizes, as at the face. She is aware, quite clearly, of her body, which has its own hungers, tidal, imperious; that she is a day into the Dark, and that body is saying, apolitical, amoral, heedless: I want. Of the backlash from the previous hurt, the old wound that demands its own easement, an equally torturing hope. And under these, that Amberlight, the qherrique, that queer wordless certainty, is saying: Go on.

  She is intensely aware of Azo, Verrith’s surveillance, Shia in the kitchen, a more public moment in a House-head’s never more than token privacy. And that this is one of the craziest risks to House safety and personal pride she has taken in a gambler’s life.

  She gets out of her own chair. Walks round the table. Her heart is hammering loud enough to time a galley’s oars. He watches her, not moving. Except the eyes get bigger and bigger, and as she comes close she feels a wild creature’s, a trained killer’s reaction, his whole body hair-trigger tense.

  She is inside, right inside, his danger space. One wrong move, every tiny shift of stance tells her, and she could be dead.

  Tellurith reaches out, as she has wanted to do from that first moment in Exchange Square, and draws her fingers through the black wing of forward falling hair.

  A tang of rosemary, a whiff of hard-worked, newly-washed man. A slide of warm silk, outland fine, outland straight. Lightly, slowly, her palm follows down the curve of his jaw.

  His breath stops. Then he leaps as if cut with a whip. One backward spring and grace lost with composure in frantic stumbling flight to an almost soundless, “No!”

  * * * *

  Awake and fuming two hours later, the noise makes Tellurith plunge nearly as far.

  Not a shout. Not a scream. A wildcat yowl so hideous it yanks her athwart Azo’s charge down the passageway and spins her off the wall to find the door in Azo’s wake.

  Verrith’s shoulder bounces her the other way. In time to clear the rebound as Azo doubles over, clutching belly, Verrith hurdles her fall and Tellurith bawls, “Alkhes!”

  A black and white whirlwind flashes an unrecognizable un­recognizing face. A grabbed arm back-hands Verrith into the door. Azo lurches up. Tellurith is just in time to snatch before that scream and lunge reach the knife. As he hurls himself bodi­ly the sheet wraps his waist, Verrith knees his down-crashing ribs, Azo lands full force on his back and Tellurith jumps for his head.

  “Alkhes!”

  He head-butts, he bites. She doubts intention now. Like that night in the infirmary, he is quite beside himself. Azo pins the earthquake, Verrith flings hobbling ropes of sheet. And in three or four endless minutes he is out of breath.

  “Alkhes?”

  The shuddering convulses him, violent as falling sickness and as involuntary. Panic turns to compunction as she changes her hold, patting his cheek, finding her cutter’s voice. “It’s all right, it’s only me, you’re all right.”

  The tremors ease. For one moment rigored muscles melt. Then he makes another sound of pure terror and tries to rip his head away.

  “Alkhes, rot it!” More than compunction now. “I won’t touch you.” Blatant falsehood, panging guilt. But the tone should be clear enough. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”

  Finally they get him unwound. Azo’s lip is staunched, Verrith’s ribs checked, to nearly incoherent apologies. The bed is re-assembled, some verrian tea made, mild sedative. Azo and Verrith depart amid reassurances. Clutching the mug, he hunches on the bed. And Tellurith, unable to help herself, sinks down behind him, rubbing his shoulders, trying to convey comfort, reassurance, apology, through the newly-donned shirt.

  It slides over muscle-shape, solid physical presence, human warmth. Whose inner flinch, whose willed acceptance of her touch, hurts worse than the blows.

  “I’m sorry.”

  It is all she can find to say.

  For a fearful moment she thinks the offer has been refused. But then he turns his head to her, and those eyes are vistas of the outer dark, haunted, hunted by ghosts.

  “Tel . . .”

  The cup starts to shake. She has just time to catch it before the wave catches up.

  “I dreamt . . . I was back there. I thought . . .”

  Exchange Square.

  The gang. The rape.

  “I remember, Tel.”
/>   She gets an arm around him before she loses the cup. Has time to thank the Mother that whatever else she has cost him, this refuge remains. And a far longer time to hold him, arms clinging for grim death round her waist, while she strokes hair and cheek and wipes sweat off as anonymously and imperson­ally as on those flagstones; before the aftermath finally ebbs away.

  She coaxes him into the bed, then. In the qherrique’s night-cycle glow he looks ridiculously young and defenseless, big black eyes against the pillow, reluctant to release her hand. But when she offers, “I could stay,” he literally flinches; before he manages, with a semblance of composure, “No, no . . . I’ll be all right.”

  * * * *

  “Tellurith.”

  “What are you doing here!”

  A grey winter morning on Amberlight, beyond the balustrade a leached prospect of soaked city and sweeping rain. Grey morning inside, where Tellurith has entered her workroom grimly bent on business. To find her trust, obligation, desire, embarrassment, ensconced in Hanni’s place.

  “I’m your first appointment. In the book.”

  “You—you—”

  Wit and effrontery enough to circumvent her and suborn her secretary and coolly infiltrate her system as he needs. Tidy, shaven and somber as if he really were here to discuss freights.

  “I just want to know, Tellurith—why?”

  After a moment’s thought she shuts the door. He rises. Comes to meet her, in the workroom’s heart.

  “I should have thought ‘why’ would be obvious.”

  “Maybe it would—with anyone else.”

  “Eh?”

  “You’re a House-head. I’ve started to learn what that means. And if just—that—is all there is to it . . . it wouldn’t be you, Tellurith.”

  Distract him, before those wits work. The heart thumps over in her chest.

  “You did want to be some use.”

  She has seen him pale but never blush. The red suffuses like a sunrise, up under the ebony forelock from the very base of the throat. It does not touch his wits.

  “Don’t try to off-side me! You do it far too often. What—else—was in it for you?”

  She takes two steps, turns, and leans on her desk front. Cool now, as at the face.