The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  A weapon! Morlenden had walked alone all over the reservation, sleeping in the open when the weather permitted, and sometimes when it didn’t, working with the rowdiest and the roughest, and unlike Fellirian, had never carried a weapon in his life. Fellirian did. But not him. He had never thought to need one. Nor for the matter, did Fellirian. But who could imagine him needing one? Fights he had had, in no shortage, knee and fist, foot and elbow, lost and won alike in equal measure. Still he carried no weapon. And now there wasn’t anything. Morlenden turned to go, feeling uneasy, apprehensive. But also defiant: So if my enemy is one of us, then let him close with me, face to face, blows on the front! I may be done with love but I can still fight, and I’ll thrash his arse! Morlenden knew that it was poor weaponry, those brash words, but all the same they made him feel better.

  Before he left, out the trapdoor and down the ladder, he stepped out on a narrow landing, not large enough to be properly called a porch; just a place to recline on. At the far end, the corner, it widened into a shelf, a little balcony, a place on the west side to catch the setting sun; something he had seen before—but not before . . . he felt an odd sense of déjà vu. He remembered.

  The image of Maellenkleth. There had been a pattern of light and shadow about her, and he had assumed it had been from the window, but of course it hadn’t been; it had been sunlight falling through the summer foliage. Of course. The image now returned as clear as when Kris had sent it and he saw her, as alive as if he had seen her himself. And there was something about her he had not noticed before, dazzled by her youth and beauty.

  Not the body or the pose, relaxed, at her ease, the lover’s tentative smile-of-invitation playing along the planes of her face, welling out of her eyes; what was it about her eyes? The skin was a warm sun-browned tan-olive, the limbs still slightly awkward, unfinished, adolescent, the hands long and bony, just as Klervondaf had suggested. She had a high forehead, childishly hidden under the bangs she wore her dark hair in, in the front. And the eyes . . . the eyes! That was it! It had been in the eyes! Although the image had not moved, but had been a single instant’s slice, still something about the eyes had been disturbingly familiar, and now he could see and integrate it. Morlenden had seen that same abstracted and vacant gaze long ago, in one who spent much of her time and life training herself to see primarily with peripheral vision, the eyes tracking in a pattern to be read out in the visual center, rather than concentrating upon and following a single object. Like Sanjirmil of sixteen years before, only here rather more pronounced. But it had not seemed a handicap at the time to Sanjirmil, nor did it seem so now to Maellenkleth. Of course, they were both Players of the Game Zan, and something they did in the Game gave them that peculiar gaze, that fixed, staring abstracted look. Morlenden reflected again: But Kris, taught as a Player, did not have it at all, and in his own inserted memories, he could not find anything that would give rise to it, that it would be so pronounced. It could be only a behavioral artifact of the Inner Game, something neither he nor Krisshantem had ever seen or known!

  He turned into the treehouse, climbed through the trapdoor, and descended the ladder to the ground. Morlenden looked about, as best he could, and then set off southwestward, through the empty woods, guessing direction in the frosted, translucent shadowless gray light, carefully watching for signs of company along his trail as he went. That he saw no sign reassured him not at all. For when he and Taskellan had found Krisshantem (or had it been the other way?), Kris had materialized, so it seemed, out of nothing. Perhaps there were others similarly skilled. At least enough to follow him unawares, and stay away from Kris so that the follower could not be identified.

  By the afternoon, with the air turned cold again from a wind out of the north with more than a hint of dampness in it, Morlenden faced the conclusion that he was not going to arrive at his own yos, or anywhere near it, on this day. By his own internal system of dead reckoning, which he admitted to be in error more often than not, total recall notwithstanding, he thought he was located southeast of the lake district and the Perklarens, and about a day’s walk northeast of his home. The area he was now traversing was nowhere as wild as the far northeast, the country of the Hulens, Krisshantem, and apparently few others, but it had still only recently begun to be integrated into the holdings of the reservation Braids and was rather underpopulated. Morlenden knew of few holds in this part, and those which he could remember were nowhere near here, wherever here was; he was not exactly sure. He knew only that if he continued in the direction he had been faring, he would eventually strike an area he was familiar with.

  The afternoon wore on, after the manner of land under the influence of diffuse and slow-moving weather systems; soon one could expect the rain to start, perhaps snow, and it would continue for days. Now the light was failing, a late cloudy-day light, weak and blue in overtones; the ler eye, with its larger proportion of retinal cone cells, progressively lost discriminatory ability at lower light levels, and in gray light became particularly poor. Morlenden resigned himself to being cold, and began casting about for suitable shelter for the night. Unthinkable to walk on blind through the woods and tangled new ground, cluttered with raw second-growth: eventually, he would trip and fall over something.

  It was while he was looking for some suitable natural shelter, an outcrop, a fallen tree, some ruins from the period when this land had been under the humans, a barn or shed, that he became gradually aware he was in a place showing subtle signs of use: a fresh path, one used fairly recently by travelers. An odd clearing in the half-grown woodland, where a tree had been artfully removed. Rather unlike the work of a Braid, working the land for some product. They would be more careless, and also more specialized. So there was probably an elder lodge somewhere in the vicinity, most likely recently established. That could be anything: Morlenden had never concerned himself with the organizations of the elder class and in fact knew only of the more famous ones, where they were and how they lived. He listened carefully, unable to determine anything visually with any certainty in the distances, in the overcast pre-rain murk, shades of gray and violet. Nothing. A sluggish creek nearby. A dripping sound, very slow, somewhere off in the opposite direction. An expectancy, a waiting for rain. Yes, for sure there would be rain. He could feel it. No snow.

  From far off, muffled by distance and the weather, and by the half-overgrown lands, Morlenden thought he heard the tolling of a bell, from across the overgrown fields. He listened again. Silence, for a long time. Then the sound: a bell’s tolling, slowly, single deep pulses spreading like the slow ripples across a stagnant pond, tangled and choked with weeds and debris . . . again, pulse, followed by silence. Assuming that the first one he had heard had actually been the first, he counted them, as the almost inaudible pulses flowed deliberately through the wet air. The eighteenth hour. He did not know who might be ringing the evening in, but he turned in the direction the tolling had come from.

  It was almost completely dark by the time he was sure, after much stumbling, that he was in fact coming to something; there was evidence of cultivated fields, cut-over brush, and an impression of neatness and order, almost parklike as he drew nearer. A light mist had begun to fall. Morlenden followed what seemed to be a well-used path. Something was ahead.

  Walking along, half stumbling in the poor light, he almost walked into a figure standing in the pathway in an attitude of silent waiting. It wore a cowled winter pleth, dark in color, and stood, head bowed, even when Morlenden approached. Morlenden went around to the front of the figure, and peered within the dark hood. Within, a pair of calm eyes slowly moved their focus from the ground to Morlenden’s face, fixing him with a steady, expressionless gaze.

  Morlenden said, “I am a wayfarer, Morlenden Deren by name, homeward bound, caught out in the rain and the fall of night. Is there shelter nearby?”

  The figure did not speak, but raised its arm and pointed along the path in the same direction Morlenden had been walking, inclining its head in that directio
n, once. Then the figure returned to its meditations, looking back to the earth as if it had been Morlenden who had been the apparition.

  Morlenden inquired politely, “Do you not speak?”

  The silent figure made no reply, and indeed made no further acknowledgment of Morlenden’s presence.

  Morlenden did not press the matter, concluding that perhaps he was already disturbing some delicate equilibrium; he turned from the figure and proceeded in the indicated direction. After passing through a few bends in the path, now bordered by tall and dense hedges of privet and pyracantha, he came upon a rustic wooden gate, and within that, a rambling compound of buildings, rough stone and half-timber stucco, some obviously pens for livestock, others worksheds. A few were larger, of two stories, apparently the living quarters. More of the cowled figures were about, proceeding on their errands with exaggerated slowness. One passed by Morlenden, paused, and pointed to one of the large buildings. Then it turned and continued on its progression, all in the profoundest of silences. One thing he knew now: this had to be an elder lodge. Which one?

  Continuing to the indicated building, Morlenden found a door and entered. Inside there was a low counter, and behind that, a smallish and rather austere refectory. The counter was covered by a massive slab of blue glass, with a legend etched into its bottom in reversed letters, which read: Granite Lodge. In smaller letters, it was stated: CONTEMPLATION AND THE SILENCE. Morlenden found a neat little sign on a post which advised: Distinguished visitors will share in our meditations. The buttery serves from the fifth hour until the eighteenth. Suitable accommodations in the floor above. The discerning guest will find the enumeration of specific tariffs unnecessary. Morlenden understood; he dug into his waist-pouch and retrieved several small coins, which he placed in a convenient depressed place in the glass surface. He looked about uncertainly. There seemed to be no one in the refectory. He sought stairs or a hallway to another part of the building; far to the right, a darkened hallway terminated in narrow stairs. Morlenden set off in that direction, and began laboriously climbing to the upper floors.

  On the second floor, there was a narrow hallway, illuminated by fat, slow-burning candles mounted in sconces of black iron. Inside, the half-timber construction of the outside walls continued, broken by heavily timbered doors, which apparently led to sleeping-apartments throughout the floor. Morlenden went to the first door, tried it. It was locked. The second—located at an angle across the hallway, and a little farther on—was not; he entered.

  Within, there were two beds, rather after the human mode, but very simple, mere frames for padded platforms. But they were piled high with plenty of coverlets and counterpanes. Morlenden opened his outer cloak and tested the air. Cold; he would need all those coverlets in this damp pile. At the far end of the room, a table and chair rested under a tiny window, which was set high up on the wall. There was a single large candle on the table, now unlit. Morlenden removed the candle and took it outside, where he presented it to one of the candles alight in their sconces, lit it, and returned to the room. Now illuminated with the warm yellow light from the candle, it did not seem quite so bare and stark. The woodwork was of the finest hand-craftsmanship, although with that suggestion of raw patina that signified new material, not yet seasoned by time. On the table was a large, heavy tome, accompanied by a sheaf of paper, a pen, and an inkstand. He looked more closely; the legend on the front of the book read: Knun Vrazus39—The Doctrine of Opposites. Morlenden smiled faintly and leafed idly through the book. Hand-inscribed, beautifully illuminated and lavishly illustrated with quaint drawings of mythological beasts and figures, demons, angels, metamorphs. He understood very well: one was intended to meditate here, in this little cell, and pass on one’s thoughts and ruminations to the future inhabitants, as well as the denizens of Granite Lodge. He sighed dispiritedly: Morlenden would have preferred to visit the taproom for a dram or two, perhaps a draft, and a bit of conversation. He dug the remaining boiled egg out of his traveling-pack, and cracking it, ate it, sitting gingerly on the hard edge of the bed. As he ate, he listened to the noises of the place, noting nothing save the dripping of rainwater off the roof into puddles outside, and a light, sweet gurgling farther away, the running of water in a gutter or downspout. There was no sound of people at all.

  Finishing his egg, and drinking water from a small pitcher that he uncovered in a tiny wall-cabinet, he looked about the small, bare room once more, shook his head, and began to undress, hanging his outer clothing on a peg on the wall. The rest he folded and placed on the desk, leaving on only his undershift. Morlenden set about making up the bed, grumbling to himself, chiefly about the nature of cold boiled eggs before bed. He was just about to blow out the candle when he heard footfalls on the stairs, then coming into the hall outside. Another guest, he thought. May they attend the same party I did. He listened. There was a faint rattle at the first door; just as he had done. Then the visitor tried his own door, which was now latched but not locked. It rattled once. There was a pause, and then the visitor knocked on the door. Raising his eyebrows, Morlenden took the candle and went to the door, and opened it: and found himself looking into the rain-wet face of Sanjirmil Srith Terklaren.

  She was still dressed in a heavy winter overcloak with a hood that fell far over her forehead, the overcloak was turned water-repellent side out, and in the wavering candlelight, hundreds of sparkling points shimmered all over it, and along Sanjirmil herself where she was uncovered, her face and hands. Her dusky eyelashes; deep black with the same bluish overtones as her hair.

  She spoke first, either recovering her composure or never having lost it, saying, “And you, here? May I join you?”

  “Yes, yes, of course you may,” he stumbled, waving the candle. “Yours is the first voice I have heard here; you will be welcome.”

  Sanjirmil entered the room shyly, avoided facing Morlenden directly, speaking as if to herself. “You have not visited here before? They are silent, these ones, true enough. Never have I heard them utter a single word.” In the center of the room, she removed the outer overcloak, shook the rain off, and cast about for a peg on which to hang it. Finding it, the empty peg on the opposite side of the room, she hung the cloak, followed by a large bag that she had worn slung over one shoulder, which clanked dully as she let it rest against the wall.

  Morlenden could see that the overcloak had not kept out all the rain, for there were damp patches along the shoulders and hem of her pleth. This she also removed unselfconsciously, draping it over the end of the unoccupied bed. All that was left was her undershift, which she left on. Morlenden noticed many things about her now, but the first thing that caught his eye was an embroidered design worked into the right shoulder of the undershift, similar to the patterns he had observed earlier in the yos of the Perklarens, but different in shape. Where the others had been simple geometric patterns, more or less symmetrical, the one on Sanjirmil’s undershift had no obvious cellular reference and was asymmetrical—a line of blue dots, arranged in a curve at either end, the right end being larger than the left. He recalled the basic Player information Krisshantem had forced into him, looking into his new memories for the figure, and found it. It was one of the moving patterns from the beginner’s Game, a figure that moved orthogonally along its base across the field in the direction of the larger curl. Like all persistent figures in the Game, this one had a name: Prosianlodh, which was to be rendered by an enigmatic idea—ship of the empty place. The name was not explained. Inner Game.

  But he saw other things as well, things he had not troubled to see, or avoided, when the girl had accompanied the Perwathwiy Srith to the yos of the Derens before his trip upcountry. Sanjirmil was now hesitating on the edge of her own fertility, at the summit of adolescence, the end of it, trembling on that edge. He remembered in his mind’s eye the hoyden, the ragamuffin of sixteen years before. Seen closely, as she was to him now, there were still large amounts of those same qualities present—the gestures, the hesitant impatience, the
thin, pouty, determined mouth, the half-frown of concentration along the lines and planes of her face. But more, indeed, was there. Her hair was as dark and coarse and tousled as it had always been, but it was longer and fuller now, falling carelessly about her shoulders, almost ready to be braided into the single woven strand that was the mark of parent phase. Her body was fuller, also, mostly adult, but possessing something not quite lermanish in its rounder curvings, yet not human either, still subtle and muscular after their fashion. She took the candle from him and placed it upon the desk, moving with measured grace, as a young girl might before her lover, a flowing, dancing motional set, allowing the undershift to swirl about her, and standing afterward so that the light from the candle would shine through the undershift, suggesting much and revealing nothing. It was a classical move, only slightly less direct than a spoken invitation. Morlenden saw and appreciated all that she was displaying here for him, understanding the message completely. She knows no less than I that my time for that is gone, past, he thought. So it is not so blatant as it appears. It is not invitation, but reminder. As if either of us could ever forget.

  He had not forgotten: Sanjir-Ajimi had been hot and sweaty, pungent as the scent of burning leaves, wet wood, and her skin had retained, even after washing, the faint taste of salt. He had caught her scent here as she had passed him: sharp and imperative, smoky as ever, more so. For the first time in his life he caught himself admitting to some regrets upon the course of things. Morlenden looked back over his life for a moment, quickly, and recognized Sanjirmil for what she had been to him: an ultimate, certainly of the domain of the body, of dhainaz. And of how many other things that he had missed? What was it she was offering?

  Sanjirmil seated herself gently on the edge of what would be her bed, a little tiredly, stiff as if from a long walk. She asked, half-mockingly, “And what do you here, Ser Deren?” She leaned back on her elbows, allowing her undershift to fall more open about her throat, another classic ploy that Morlenden could not miss; and in the candlelight the yellow light fell along her dusky-olive skin, the shadows in the hollows of her collarbones, a place for kisses.