“The river,” Lanara said, “yes—let’s talk more about this. It is low now, not a lot of water. Soon it will rain. Then the river will get high again. Do you like rain?”
This time no one spoke. The shonyn children looked at the carpet and hardly seemed to breathe. “What is wrong?” she said. “What did I say? Serran?”
The girl whispered one word, a shonyn word, rolling and strange.
“What does this mean?” Lanara asked, though she knew there would be no answer. “One of you, please tell me. . . .”
“Fear,” said a new voice, and Lanara turned to the open door flap. The young man was standing there, half inside, half out. “The word means fear in your language,” he said, and she felt herself nodding. He spoke to the children then, his words like wind-blown sand. They looked up at him, blue-black heads angled away from her.
She cleared her throat. “It is late. You may go. Except,” she added as they rose and began to leave, “for you.”
The young man watched them until they had all walked down the hill. She leaned against the table and watched him.
“As I have already told you,” she said when he looked back at her, “I am Lanara. What is your name?”
“Nellyn,” he said. Her brows arched when he continued, “That is my Queensfolk name. My teacher Soral thinks it sounds like my shonyn name.”
“And does it?” she asked. Good, she thought, keep talking, Nellyn.
“Not very much,” he said, and stepped out of the tent.
“Nellyn!” she cried as she strode after him. “Nellyn—wait!” He was walking away from her, his feet falling silently on the sand of the ridge. “You will not walk away from me again!” she called at his retreating back. “It’s ridiculous—it’s rude!”
He disappeared down the hill. She saw him a few minutes later, by a flatboat. She watched him push it into the river, a woman beside him.
“Shonyn life,” Lanara mimicked in wavering falsetto. “River and flatboats and lynanyn.” She made an inarticulate sound and went back inside.
My Queen, I was encouraged today by an interaction with the young shonyn man I wrote about on my first day here. He came to the teaching tent and helped to translate something one of the children had said. After they had left, he remained behind and we spoke, mostly about his own Queensfolk teacher, Soral. It was a brief conversation, but I am certain that we will speak at more length soon. He is aloof and inscrutable, as all shonyn are, but I feel I will be able to change this. His name is Nellyn.
Nellyn’s footsteps sound too loud on the ridge. He tries to be quiet, to be calm. He does not run as he did from Soral, on the day the sun drew jewels from the sand.
Fear, Nellyn thinks, the Queenstongue and shonyn words both, as he walks away from her.
FIVE
Lanara sat on her bed with a thin stack of parchment in front of her. “Trees,” she read, squinting at Cannin’s spidery scrawl. “Food . . . Pottery . . . Climate.” She rested her fingertip beside the last word.
Climate:
Hot and dry. Rains once a year, lasting about seven days. Winds high during rains, moderate at other times. No lynanyn gathering during rains.
Lanara glared down at the page. “That is all?” she said, then glanced up to see if anyone had heard her. As if shonyn would be up here now, she thought. Still, I am talking to myself. I must alert Ladhra that I am already going mad.
She set the parchment down on the carpet beside her bed and went to open the door flap. There were long shadows on the sand: dark, distorted tents and listless banners. The shonyn would soon crawl out of their mud houses to sit by the river. Nellyn would be among the first, Lanara knew; she had watched the village every day, though she had not gone down to it. Patience, she had told herself, attempting Creont’s sternness. Be as slow as they are. Watch and learn. But she could not, today—not with Cannin’s infuriatingly brief document behind her, and the shadows lengthening into yet another gentle twilight. Lanara offered silent apologies to her father as she descended the ridge and sat down to wait in the shade of Nellyn’s house.
He ducked out minutes later—the first to do so, as she had anticipated. He had stood and was starting to stretch when he saw her. She quelled a triumphant smile at his surprise. His arms and fingers froze and his eyes widened until she could see white around their darkness.
“Walk with me, Nellyn,” she said as she rose. “To the riverbank, past the sitting stones. And do not try to leap in and swim away from me.”
“I do not swim,” he said, and she sighed.
“Ah. Of course you don’t.”
They walked slowly among houses that were still quiet and sat where the bank was thick with plants. “They do grow crops,” Cannin had told her, “after a fashion. A little plot of herbs and vegetables that has apparently been there since the village began, whenever that was.” Lanara saw that some of these plants were brittle, their fronds brown-tipped and shrivelled. She looked from them to the shallow river and said, “Tell me why the shonyn are afraid of the rains.”
After a predictable pause Nellyn said, “The Queensman Cannin does not record this with his writing stick?”
She peered at him, wondering whether shonyn were capable of sarcasm and finding no answer in his face. “No,” she replied. “And anyway, I want to find these things out from a shonyn. You. So—the rains.”
He turned to look upstream. The stones where the old ones sat were hidden behind the plants. “The rains bring change. We fear this.”
She frowned. “Only that? And do these rains not come every year? Are they not a part of your . . . pattern?”
“Yes, they do come, always—but they are never the same. And we cannot leave our houses or gather lynanyn. Lynanyn fall without being ready. It is very dark, even during our sleeping. It is a very. . . .” For the first time she saw him hesitate, “. . . strange time. So we fear it.”
“I see,” Lanara said. She put her elbows on her drawn-up knees and stared at the lynanyn trees across the river. The leaves glinted violet as the sun slipped westward.
“No,” he said, surprising her again, “you do not see. You do not understand what change is, to shonyn. It is not so terrible for you. And you do not live by patterns. You hardly seem to have stories.”
Lanara arched her brows at him. “Apparently, while Cannin was learning nothing about shonyn, you were coming to a full understanding of Queensfolk.”
They looked at each other until he looked away.
She is angry. He sees it in the set of her jaw and shoulders. He wants to say he is sorry, to tell her that he actually knows nothing at all of Queensfolk, but he does not, since his words might anger or confuse her again. He waits in silence, looking across the river but still seeing her beside him, her blue and green tunic and the brown of her long, slender hands.
He understands shonyn women. He has touched one or two, lying in houses dim before dawn. Smooth blue skin and curls that cling to his fingers; voices that murmur with the river. He has felt desire as a slow, steady warmth, ebbing and flowing in the circle of his nights. He does not recognize what he feels now. It is pain without a place on his skin.
“I am sorry,” she says into their long silence. “I should not have spoken to you that way. We obviously have much to learn from each other.” She smiles at him as if she is tired. “I would like to talk with you again. Perhaps we could meet here every day at this time, before the children come for their lessons. Would you agree to this?”
Nellyn hears shonyn voices, though the words are indistinct. They are gathering now, to tell their tales and to listen. And he does not want to join them; he acknowledges this with a rush of terror and relief. “Yes,” he says to Lanara, and feels the pain prickling in his bones and blood. “I agree to this.”
She tries, from that day on, like Soral, to teach him time. “There is a beginning, middle and end to all things. Lives, experiences—th
is river,” she adds, tracing a long sinuous line in the sand with her finger. “We call it the Sarhenna, after the queen who discovered it. See—this is its shape. Its source is here, deep in the desert. Here is your village. And here is the river’s end, at the town of Fane, on the Eastern Sea.”
Nellyn looks at the line, and at her finger. There is sand beneath its nail. “The river is,” he says. “It flows here, always.”
She nods. “Yes, of course—but ‘here’ is only one part of the river.”
“I do not understand. The river here is all,” he says, thinking she might frown—but instead she smiles.
“You should come with me. We’ll get on a boat and sail to the sea and I’ll make you understand end.”
He feels blood rushing to his cheeks and looks away from her abruptly.
“I am joking,” she says. “Being . . . light-hearted with you.” After a moment she says, “Smile at me, Nellyn.”
He gazes at the drawn-up flatboats until they blur into one black stain on the riverbank. “I apologize,” she says at last. “Again. I feel so clumsy sometimes, talking to you.”
“I also am sorry for this.”
She says briskly, “Well then, if we’re done apologizing to each other, let’s continue.”
When it becomes apparent that she will not be able to explain time to Nellyn, they talk of other things: Luhr’s spires and fountains and the marketplace where people from all over the land gather. “But no shonyn,” he says, and she shakes her head although it is not really a question.
“Not that I have seen, no. Though there are fruit vendors there who sell lynanyn. Some say it is their most prized and beautiful fruit. And there are breads and sweets, plants from beneath the sea, berries from the mountains. Such a wonderful variety of everything: people, food, music, clothing.”
He sees her eyes sweeping over the empty river and the heat-curled plants and the red huts. He says, “This place is too quiet for you. Too small. But for me it is enough.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “Is it?”
He cannot say the word that should be spoken. Her head is tilted to one side, as if she is listening to his silence.
“So tell me about this place, then,” she says, and his voice returns. He tells her about the richness of uses to which lynanyn is put: food, yes, but also dye for clothing and pottery, materials for cloth and threads and rope, medicine for fevers and wounds. He tells her one of the wise ones’ tales, of shonyn who cut lynanyn trees and watch them die; of shonyn who cross the river to settle on this bank so that the trees can grow again.
“When was this?” she asks, her writing stick poised above the parchment she brings with her every day.
He looks at the black marks she has already made on the page. “It is always,” he says, “and now, in these words.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it again. “Mmm,” she says, and does not write anything.
She is a part of his pattern, now, but this does not comfort him. The wise ones speak and he hears her voice, talking of mountains and spires and breads—strange words for things he cannot imagine, but they are her words, and they come to him even when he is not with her. He watches her walk up to the tents. When he pulls himself onto his flatboat, he sees that she watches him from her ridge, though he does not know why.
“You talk to her,” Maarenn says one night as Nellyn is trying not to look back at the shore.
“Who?” he asks, and she sighs.
“Nellyn. You know who I mean. What do you talk about?”
He listens to the laughter of the small ones who are clustered on the bank, sailing flatboats made of lynanyn-tree twigs. They laugh and splash, and he aches to be there with them, ankle-deep in warm river water. “She asks questions about our life, and I answer them. She writes what I say.”
“Ah,” Maarenn says. “She is very friendly. She tries to speak to us in our language. And she is lovely. In a strange way, but still lovely.”
He says, “Yes,” and feels his pain loosen, just a bit, as if he has shared it.
The night after that, Lanara walks back down to the bank as the flatboats are setting off. He starts when he turns and sees her there, instead of on the ridge. She waves at him. He thinks, She looks sad. Then, She comes to see me off—and he smiles at her across the water, as Maarenn’s pole dips and soars. Lanara’s mouth opens in a surprised circle, and he smiles more broadly, so easily now that he has begun. She clutches her hands to her heart in what he knows is mock alarm, since she too is smiling now. He wants to wade back to where she is standing, to let the flatboats go on without him.
Suddenly he is dizzy. There is a humming in his head that feels like the fear and pain he knows but also something else, something he cannot name or grasp. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, carefully, and the humming subsides. When he looks again at the shore, Lanara is kneeling on the ground, talking to a wise one.
The next day he wakes early and waits for her by his hut. She does not come. On that day and others that follow, he sits alone on the sun-crumbled bank beside the shrivelled plants. He hears thunder, so far away that it is more pulse than sound. The sky is dry and blue, except in the west, where there is a smudge of low, angry purple. The night wind smells of rain.
SIX
At first the hoof beats sounded like thunder. Lanara looked up from the letter she was writing and squinted at the desert to the south of her tent. She saw heat shimmer, broken by dark cacti with branches like beseeching arms—and another dark shape, this one moving. She rose as it drew closer, its trembling lines hardening into a rider on a white horse. Even from a distance she could see his tunic’s green and blue. She raised her arms, though he was riding directly toward her.
“Queenswoman,” he gasped when he had reined his horse to a rearing halt, “thank the First I have found you.” His face and hands were crusted with sand and sweat. Beneath this grime, his skin was a peeling red. “I fled a battle,” he said as they tethered his horse in the shade of the provisions tent. “And then I got lost. My food and water ran out yesterday. But how rude I am,” he said, turning to her with a smile. His teeth were even and white in his tangle of beard. “I am Gwinent of Sordinna, a tiny hamlet you’ve probably never heard of, to the west of Luhr.”
“And I am Lanara of Luhr.”
He arched one eyebrow and gave a low whistle. “A real Luhran. I had no idea they could be so attractive.”
Lanara laughed. “High praise from a man who’s been lost in the desert. Come and have a drink. And a wash.”
“Why not a swim,” he said, “to take care of both?”
They walked upstream, away from the shonyn village. When they went down to the river he drank first, in deep, silent gulps. Then he waded slowly in, wincing as the water touched his raw skin and the cuts that crisscrossed his arms and legs.
“How did you get those?” she asked.
He surveyed his arms as he bobbed, chest-deep. “A sandstorm. Bits of cactus and stone everywhere. Not a very dramatic reason. Would you be impressed if I said something about the battle? Or predatory birds?”
Lanara laughed again, then fell silent. She watched her tunic darkening in the water.
“What’s wrong?” he said, his legs slicing him in one long glide toward her.
“Wrong? Oh, just that you know something’s wrong. And you can understand me when I talk at a normal speed. And you’re awake in the middle of the day. All of which makes me realize how homesick I’ve been.”
“For Luhr?” he demanded. “Stodgy, stuck-up, smelly Luhr?” He dodged her splash with ease.
“For a man who’s been lost in the desert,” she said, “you’re entirely too energetic.”
She told him about the shonyn as they lay drying on the bank and later, eating slices of lynanyn and hard bread soaked in lynanyn juice.
“These shonyn have good taste,” Gwinent said as he chewed. “And I’m n
ot just saying that as a man who’s been lost in the desert.”
She chuckled. “Mmm. But I miss fresh bread. And sweets. And vegetable soup. I know I shouldn’t. I’m here at the Queen’s command, after all, doing important work.”
He made a sour face. “And when has doing important work ever been a cure for loneliness?”
She curled her fingers around bread crust and did not look at him. She had called it homesickness, but he had named it truly. Loneliness: the spreading chill in her gut that she had not expected. She wrote to Ladhra and her hand shook with the need to see her, to walk with her among the trees of the Queenswood and laugh at nothing. She wrote to her father—though not as often—and tried desperately to see their small, sunlit house. Just as desperately, she tried not to see it. I am failing Queen Galha, she thought. And myself.
“Thank you,” she said to Gwinent. “I suppose I’ve been foolish. It sounds so simple and sensible, the way you phrase it.”
“Hardly. But you’re welcome.” He touched the back of her hand lightly. She watched his fingers, with their blunt nails and their cuts.
“Tell me about the battle you fled,” she said. She did not move her hand.
“Don’t you have to teach soon?” he asked, and she saw that the sky was pink and the sun was low.
“Yes,” she replied. “But not for a while. Talk to me until the children arrive. Please.”
His forefinger drew lazy circles around each of her knuckles. “I’ll be happy to. As long as I’m not keeping you from your important work.”
She could not see the houses or the river or the lengthening shadows. She could not see if there was anyone waiting for her by the plants. “Talk to me,” she said again, and smiled at him.
“Serran.” The child looks up at Nellyn as he puts his hand on her shoulder. “Tell me—your teacher is here? Not . . . gone away?”
Serran shakes her head. “She is here.”
He nods and looks again at the tents on the ridge. Already they are difficult to see: the sky is blotted with clouds. Not rain clouds; those are behind, advancing with the thunder.
The Silences of Home Page 4