The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  We saw no one for many ei. The northern provinces of Mondhile are empty, and we of the north are always threatened: by our weather, by our wildernesses, and perhaps most of all by each other. Leaving Mevennen in silent Eiru's capable charge, my cousin Sereth and I rode ahead to scout the country. The murai stamped and hissed, glad to run. I had to hold back my black mount, Vevey which didn't please her. She twisted her long snaking neck and tried to bite, but her sharp teeth glanced off the saddleguard and I cuffed her across the ears. Sereth grinned; she'd always said that men made poor riders. She sat with easy elegance on her own mount, her silvery hair streaming out behind her in the wind and her dark eyes narrowed in amusement. Feeling self-conscious, I put my hand on the animal's thick ruff and scratched in an effort to quieten her. She needed brushing; I could feel the weals of insect bites underneath the soft, dense mane.Vevey allowed herself to be mollified,so much so that she stood stock-still and swayed from foot to foot.

  “Oh, Eleres, come on.” Sereth shouted back impatiently, and turned her mount away, but Vevey wouldn't budge. Then suddenly, beneath my hand, I felt her mane begin to rise. She took a skittering step backward, and made a sound that I had never heard from the throat of a mur. Bewildered, I realized that Vevey was afraid.

  “Sereth?” I called. Looking over, I saw to my surprise that Sereth was also having trouble with her mount: it balked and sidled. The air seemed to sing with energy, as though I could sense all the lines beneath the land at once. My skin prickled with sparks, like wool in the winter cold. Mevennen, I thought in dismay, and with a desperate tug I tried to turn Vevey so that I could ride back to my sister. But then I saw something that drove all thought from my mind.

  In the gray distance of the steppe, a star was falling. It did not burn and blaze like the one I had once seen in the high mountains, but drifted as gently as a fallen leaf. It seemed to twist in the air, as though it were made up of two great turning vanes, which glowed crimson as they caught the last light of the fallen sun. It settled at the foot of the mountains and winked out. Sereth sat upright on her mount, as rigid as the bright blade in her hand.

  “What in the name of the land do you think that was?” she said.

  I shook my head. “I don't know.”

  The air seemed hushed in the star's wake, a great silence falling over the world. It was broken by a rustle in the scrub. Something bolted out from the low bushes and dashed for the sanctuary of a nearby outcrop of rocks. Vevey reared, almost throwing me out of the saddle, and I glimpsed a small, pale form vanishing between the stones. Regaining my balance with difficulty, I drew up the saddle pole.

  “Eleres? What is it?” Sereth called.

  “Something's up there.” I kicked Vevey's sides and, surprised, the mur scrambled up the slope toward the rocks. A skitter of stones bounced down the slope as something scuttled for cover. I swung the pole across my knees, with the sharpened point downward, and nudged Vevey so that she skirted the outcrop.

  Something hissed.

  Vevey backed up, snarling, and nearly threw me off again. As I was fighting to control her, the thing bolted from beneath the rocks and away to the edge of the outcrop, where it sat gazing at me. It was filthy and wrapped in a scrap of blanket. It was a child. It hissed again. Vevey flattened her plumed ears. I didn't blame her. I kept the pole up, in case the child had thoughts of attacking, but as soon as I moved it disappeared into the rocks.

  Sereth rode up by my side.

  “What was it?” she echoed. Her hair was bristling at the back of her neck. Light glinted behind her eyes. Something tugged at me inside my mind, a sudden longing for blood; for something captive under my hands and my teeth meeting in its throat as it died … Need blotted out everything else and the world grew red, but something at the back of my mind cried out for control. I was not yet too far gone for that. I drew a long, slow breath.

  “It's nothing. Only a child,” I replied, and saw her relax. “Must have been startled by that thing we saw—” I was about to turn Vevey back and ride down into the valley, but someone stepped into the circle of the rocks.

  This time, it was no child.

  The figure who stood before me was one of the mehedin nomads. He was a man in his seventies or thereabouts, dressed in a flapping assembly of skins. His hair, loosely braided and woven with grasses, hung down to his knees. He carried on his forehead a faded red tattoo of Marahan, the faintest of the stars at the horizon's edge. Further tattooed bands around his fingers showed that he had once been bantreda like ourselves: a person who belonged to a House and a caste. The bloodmind state which so afflicts us must once have driven him from home and family, led him to walk the world with the rest of the nomadic mehed, to lose spoken speech. He had let his nails grow, and they reached a length of several inches. His top incisors curved out like tusks, and furrowed the lower lip. Though we were armed and mounted, and he was twenty years or so older, I was still wary. The strong smell of earth and sweat, with an underlying bloody note of carrion, came from him.

  Vevey shifted uneasily and flared her nostrils. I greeted him with a gesture to the east, where the star Marahan was rising, glowing almost indiscernibly behind the bone-colored clouds. The mehedin cocked his head as if listening. A breath of wind lifted my hair and brushed my cheek. I looked at the ground to show respect. Sereth rode up behind and slowed to a stop. The mehedin looked up, looked away, then at Sereth and myself. We held out our hands, palms upward, denoting bantreda status. He bent and scuffed his hands in the earth, masking the tattoos. Making the signs of the journey, we showed him where we had come from: first the coast, then the cliff road. In turn, he indicated the east, his left hand bringing us the sense of the edge of the steppe: from the lakelands in the high Attraith, all the way down across the Ottara Path and following the Eluiden line. With the preliminaries out of the way, conversation could begin.

  The mehedin gestured toward Sereth, to say: this one. We sat straighter to show attention. The mehedin pointed at his crotch, then to his stomach, then back to Sereth. Meaning flowed through the air, communicated by the movement of his hands and the meanings that he exuded. Sereth turned up her hand: Yes. I have had a child. He drew a line in the air from her head to her mounted feet. Yes, a daughter, one like me. The long nailed hand covered his eyes, he turned his head away.

  “You're saying my daughter's alive,” Sereth cried, gesturing in turn.

  Yes.

  “But you're trying to tell me—what? That she will not live? That I won't see her? That she won't come back from the wild?”

  The clawed hand of the mehedin turned up, down, up again with the palm to the empty sky. I do not know. And then he made the gesture that signifies respect, for those about to die.

  We stared at him, politeness forgotten. Sereth whispered, “What do you see, to talk of death?”

  The old man stepped up to the side of her mount and touched her hand. It was a curiously gentle gesture. The mur took a dancing step away from him and flattened its ears.

  I said uneasily, “Where are the rest of your people?”

  The mehedin motioned to the east, to Marahan.

  “You're alone?”

  Yes.

  I looked at him again, and saw beneath the skins his fragility, the faint flutter of his pulse in his throat. He had come away to die. We cast our gaze to the ground and turned the mounts away. I looked back, once, and the mehedin still stood with his eyes toward the rising star. Around him the air shivered across the rocks. He had raised the path of energy which lay under the land about him so that a predator should not find his path: the mehedin can do such things, for they are even closer to the world than we are.

  “What do you think he saw?” I asked. My words seemed to ring hollow on the air. Sereth did not reply. She had resumed her hold on the reins and plucked uneasily at the leather. Then she looked into my face and I saw that there was an unfamiliar fear in her dark, beautiful eyes. I stared at her. I couldn't remember ever seeing her look so afraid before,
except perhaps once, during the birth of her daughter.

  “He saw death, Eleres.”

  “He was talking about his own, surely?”

  “No,” she said shortly. “He was talking about mine. My death or my daughter's. That thing we saw falling from the sky—it's an ill sign, Eleres. I know it is.”

  I opened my mouth to reassure her, but she kicked the sides of her mount to spur it forward.

  Abruptly, she said, “You said you saw a child back there? How old was it?”

  “I'm not sure. Maybe six or seven.”

  “Whenever I come this road, I think about my daughter,” Sereth whispered.

  I reached out to touch her hand.

  “She'll come home, Sereth. Don't worry—”

  But my cousin only looked at me and said, “Will she?”

  “I know she will,” I said. Sereth did not look reassured. Thirteen years ago, the birth-bearers—of whom I had been one—had left Sereth's daughter up on the Attraith on the borders of the funeral grounds, a good place for a year-old infant. We had come up again, in the winter, and the child had been long gone. But I think I may have seen her once more in that first year, a small shadow moving fast across the snow, because I recognized the rags of the blanket in which we'd carried her up there.

  “You'll know soon,” I said to her. “Luta reckoned she'll return this autumn.” Since our northern summers were so short, that was no more than a couple of months away. “Will you stay on when your daughter comes home?”

  “No. I was planning to leave once she's safely back from the wild—go back to Rhir Dath and let the girl find her own feet in Aidi Mordha.”

  That was wise, I thought. There were too many tensions at the moment between Morrac and Sereth's clan House of Rhir Dath and my own close relatives—nothing very seri-ous, but the sort of embittering family row that you keep thinking is over, and then realize with dismay is flaring up all over again. It had been going on for so long that we'd almost forgotten who'd started it, let alone why. In the early stages of my affair with Morrac, I'd congratulated myself that we'd steered clear of that tension, but now I wasn't so sure whether we weren't just replaying it out in another form … Anyway, whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, it would be best not to involve Sereth's daughter in tired old family politics. She'd have enough to deal with on her return from the wild.

  I glanced at Sereth as she rode, wondering whether her daughter took after her. The girl would be blessed if she did. Sereth and her twin brother, Morrac, shared a delicacy of feature, without the overt harshness of bone that sometimes afflicted that branch of the family. Her dark eyes were long and slanted; it was said that her mother's family had come from the farthest north, from a people who were renowned for their beauty, and I did not find this difficult to believe. Sereth pushed up her sleeves to the elbows and let her hands fall to her sides, riding with grace and controlling the animal with her knees. She did not look back.

  We rode on in silence. Shortly I spurred Vevey on, rode her to a halt, and turned in the saddle. The valley spread below me: umber, gray, and ocher in its summer colors. Below, Mevennen and Eiru rode slowly along the old road, from this distance seeming to float on the haze. Mevennen's small figure was bowed in the saddle; Eiru rode straight as a sword.

  We saw no one else along the road that day, and by mutual agreement, Sereth and I said nothing to Eiru or Mevennen of prophecies or falling stars. The summer night fell late, and in the evening we brought the mounts off the road and camped. Irehan and the remaining stars sank beneath the edge of the world, and the late northern constellations rose up between two thin moons. The sky was a gray haze.Mevennen curled sleeping in the grass. I was keeping a close eye on her, but the ethien sedative that she'd taken was still having its effect and she did not seem distressed. I'd dreaded the possibility that her fits might worsen, but once she'd taken the sedative, I'd worried that she had taken too much. That was the trouble with her illness—whatever you did seemed to be the wrong thing. But at least Mevennen was resting quietly now.

  I gazed at her, thinking again of what it must be like to be out in the world and unable to feel the beauty of it, unable to experience the waters, the metals, the energy lines beneath the land that made the world such a living presence. It would be like riding blind, I thought: helpless and disoriented. No wonder they called it landblindness. Like all of us, Mevennen was a child of the world, and yet it rejected her, like a shellfish spitting out a grain of sand. I wondered, as I had done so many times before, what it must be like to live not only with the pain and fragility, but also with that knowledge of rejection. And I also wondered, for the thousandth time, if there really was no cure for Mevennen's illness. Conventional wisdom said that there was not, and this was why those who had been spurned by the world must die, but what if conventional wisdom was wrong? The only person I had heard of who had been cured of such a sickness was said to be the lover of Yr En Lai, that ancient Ettic lord who plays such a part in the legends of the north, but maybe that was just a myth.

  Thinking about such things, I lay on my back after the evening meal and listened to the hunting birds, and the insects whirring in the quiet air. Sereth came to sit beside me. Presently she said, “Put your head in my lap?”

  I leaned backward, and felt her fingers in my hair, which always sent me into a kind of trance. The light faded.

  Sereth said, “You're so much like your siblings, you know. Your brood are all the same, you and Mevennen and Soray: dappled hair, sharp chins, those pale eyes. You're all angles.”

  I turned to look up into her shadowy face. “You're like your twin, too,” I said.

  “Morrac does love you, you know,” she said quickly, as though I'd disputed it.

  “Oh, he does, does he?” I asked dubiously. “I wish he'd act like it more often, then.”

  “Come on, Eleres—he talks about you all the time. You preoccupy him.”

  “I don't know if that's true, Ser. He turns me away whenever I think we can mend things. Very often, he doesn't want to talk to me, or even see me. I find it increasingly difficult to believe that he'd go to such lengths to feign indifference.”

  I didn't like the bitterness in my own voice and fell silent. It seemed easier to ignore the things that made me unhappy, easier to pretend that they didn't exist.

  After a moment, Sereth said, “What about Ithyris?”

  “What about her? She isn't here, I haven't seen her since the winter. But yes, I want to see her. I miss her.” It was a long time since Ithyris ai Sephara and I had been lovers, and even then it had been one of those quiet affairs based more on friendship than on passion. Still friendship endures, and even then I was beginning to realize that it might matter more.

  Sereth bent down so that her hair brushed my face. She was disturbing; I had often wondered whether Sereth and I might not have become lovers, too, if her brother hadn't got there first. Or perhaps it was only that she reminded me of him. Into the waning light she whispered, “What do you think of what he said today, the mehedin?”

  “I don't know,” I told her lamely, not wanting to think about maybe-prophecies and ill omens. “We won't know until—well, whatever happens, happens.”

  Sereth rocked unhappily against me, until I sat up, put my arms around her and held her until she began to relax. But even with her close to me, I slept uneasily that night, and woke shortly after dawn to find that she was anxious to move on.

  3. Journal, Shu Idaan Gho, 51 Jhul, 40,370. Colony: Monde D'Isle

  The last transmission ever received from this ancient colony said that this world was cursed, that a darkness had fallen upon it. Cursed or not, Monde D'Isle seems very strange to me on this first real day of our expedition. It's certainly bleak, like nowhere I've ever seen before—except perhaps the ancient holoscenes of our own Irie St Syre before the terraforming programs were implemented. Monde D'Isle is probably a little like old Earth must once have been, too. But those early holoscenes were made several thous
and years ago, and Irie's nowhere near as wild now.

  The colonists who came here from Irie, led by that dubious visionary Elshonu Shikiriye, are on record as having taken terraforming equipment with them, and enough time has elapsed for the process of ReFormation to have taken place. However, to the dismay of the others on this mission, there's no sign of ReForming here; no evidence that the colonists kept to our Gaian Path of placing their new environment in harmony with themselves.

  Naävely, I was expecting to find something closer to Irie St Syre's green hills and tempered climate, but this is a barren land and a harsh one. We landed on a high plateau, overlooking a stony waste of steppe that is broken only by narrow spines of grass. I can see mountains on the horizon, and even from this far away they seem immense, their snowcapped peaks melting into the pale glare of the sky. The wind blows constantly and smells strange; the rain is fierce and random. I keep reaching automatically out for the nearest biocontrol panel, to balance the rain and the wind, but of course there's nothing.

  I'm getting ahead of myself. For the record, I should say that touchdown was completed on the fiftieth day of Jhul in the year of Gaia. On completion of landing procedures, we gave thanks through the recitation of the Earth Mantra, and have established base camp in an area to the east of the plateau. We have named this land Arven, in honor of our dead navigator, and our Ship's Guardian Dia Rhu Harn has led the mantras in her memory. Our surviving crewmembers are as follows: myself, Dia, and her young acolyte Bel Zhur, the daughter of one of Irie's most formidable priestesses. Also with us, and of the Gaian faith, is exo-biologist Jennet Sylvian. There are also the three delazheni, which have mercifully survived the voyage. I'm watching them now—they're down on the slope, methodically putting up the two small biotents among the stones. I can see their segmented arms jerking to and fro. Dia doesn't really approve of the delazheni, saying that she feels she has compromised her principles by bringing them along. She thinks we should be doing things for ourselves, that hard work is good for the soul or some such notion, but I think the rest of us are secretly thankful to have a bit of help with the more labor-intensive tasks. I find some of Dia's ideas a little contradictory—after all, on Irie we use biomachines a lot— and I must confess that these days I'm more suited to contemplation than to hard physical labor. I'm a writer, after all, and at sixty-eight years old I think I've earned the right to let a few biomachines do the work for a change.