The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Who are you?” she heard Old Aldira say, and Alea too looked at the one who had Told.

  He was a boy, she saw with a shiver of surprise. Not much older than she was, tall and slender and dark, grinning down at them with his arms folded across his chest.

  “I am Aldron,” he said in his boy’s voice, the words flat and dry.

  How can he Tell like that and then be normal again, so quickly? Alea thought. She wound her own arms around her waist.

  “Aldron of the Tall Fires caravan. You have likely heard of me.”

  Aliser scrambled to his feet. “We certainly have not,” he said. Alea watched his hands open and shut at his sides. “And why should we?” He was a full head shorter than Aldron, but broader. He drew his shoulders back and thrust his chin up. As if that will make him taller, Alea thought, and felt a sudden stab of pity and shame.

  “As for you,” Aldron said, “your feeble Telling is proof that the Goddesses gave you their colours but neglected to bless you with their greatest gift. What good are Alnila’s red and Alneth’s green if you have no voice to honour them?”

  Red-haired green-eyed Aliser took a stumbling step toward him, which Old Aldira halted. “Silence,” she snapped, “both of you. And sit.” They did, though Aldron hesitated as if he would not. They did not look away from one another. “Aldron, this is Aliser of the Twin Daggers caravan. Now greet each other civilly. Your pride should make you friends.”

  They did not speak. Old Aldira sighed, but Alea saw the lines around her narrowed eyes and knew she was smiling, though not with her mouth.

  “And who,” Aldron said at last, turning to look down past Aliser, “are you?”

  Alea took a steadying breath. “I am Alea. Also of the Twin Daggers caravan.”

  “Alnila warm you,” he said, “and Alneth succour you. Alea.” She smiled as he did, slowly, like flame blooming in wind.

  Aldron came often to Old Aldira’s fire as the leaves in the wood began to fall and the green grass turned gold. “Doesn’t your Teller have a fire?” Aliser demanded once when Aldron appeared beside the wagon. “Or your family? Or are they tired of you too?”

  Aldron did not answer for a long time. Alea watched his dark eyes move from their fire to the smoke of the fires near theirs and over to the distant trees.

  “My Teller is very old,” he said at last. “He hardly knows that I’m not there. And I don’t have a family.”

  Aliser’s mouth fell open.

  “Aliser,” Old Aldira said sharply, “don’t gawk. Aldron, there is no need for you to explain.”

  “My parents died,” he said. He was looking at Alea now, and she nodded once, as if this would help him continue. “Of the marsh sickness. My grandfather took me to my caravan’s Teller, and then my grandfather died. I hardly remember him, and I don’t remember my parents at all.”

  Aliser was staring at the ground. He picked up a stick and tossed it into the fire, which spat fitfully but did not rise. “Oh,” he said.

  Old Aldira clapped once and rose from the bottom step of the wagon. “Very well. Now that Aldron is here, perhaps he can show you both how to make your colours sharper. Colours only, Aldron—nothing more complex than that. Let’s begin with the palms. . . .”

  That night Alea looked very carefully at her own family. Her mother, Aldana, was holding the new baby to her breast with her right arm; with her left she was reaching for herbs, sprinkling them in the soup, stirring with a wooden paddle. “You will be just as beautiful as she is,” Alea’s father Aldill often said to her, and she always smiled at him, though she did not believe him. She had Aldana’s hair—long and heavy and black as scorched wood—but she did not have her grace at dancing, and she doubted she would ever be as tall.

  Her father was sitting with her older brother, Alder, trying again to teach him how to skin a hare. Their faces and hands swam in the firelight, and the hunting knife glinted as Alder turned it. “No,” their father said, “no, no, listen to me. . . .”

  Her sister was in the wagon. Alea heard her babbling words that were not yet words and their grandmother laughing. The wagon would be glowing inside, with firelight and woven blankets and the ivy and flame that were painted on the walls and roof—their family’s own design in paint and cloth, made to please Alnila of the Flame and Alneth of the Earth, who blessed all families.

  “Alea!” her father bellowed from the other side of the fire. “Come here immediately and show your brother how to do this neatly.” She rose and went to them as her mother sang the baby to sleep.

  Rain began to fall and did not stop. There were grumblings that the wagons would all be washed away by the time Alnila’s Night came and some Alilan commented, only half in jest, that they would soon be forced to seek shelter in the nearby town. People huddled in their wagons, coaxing the fires in their stoves higher. The smoke that billowed from the wagons’ chimneys was swallowed by lowering cloud.

  Alea stayed with her family for five days and nights—longer than she had for many, many seasons. One murky morning she could not stay any longer.

  “How strange to see you so eager,” her father said over the baby’s wails, “when only four seasons ago we had to drag you flailing and weeping to Old Aldira’s wagon.”

  Alea shifted from foot to foot in the doorway. The door was already open; rain was blowing against her leggings and cloak. “Yes, Father, I know. But I’m older now, and I’m learning things there.”

  “Go on, child,” her mother said, gesturing with her free hand. “And hurry, before we’re all soaked.”

  Alea glanced at her father, who was smiling at her now, and then she ducked out into the darkness of water and mud and sky.

  Aldron was in Old Aldira’s wagon. Aliser was not. “Come and sit,” the Teller said. “And have some cider, girl. You’re shivering.”

  Alea sipped her cider, trying not to slurp. Across from her, Aldron tossed a small pillow into the air, over and over again. He sighed several times, and yawned, and did not look at her. Old Aldira leaned forward and swung the stove door open with a poker.

  “Although you are both particularly vivacious today,” she said as she fed a log into the fire, “I feel I must effect a change in mood. Aldron, use your prolific Telling powers to convince us we are warm.”

  He straightened and set the pillow down on the bench. For a moment there was a stillness. Alea gripped her bench, steeling herself against the blast of Telling that would surely come. But when Aldron opened his mouth, only a whisper emerged. A single flame kindled between them—orange, with white at its heart. It flickered steadily. She watched it, and his solemn face beyond it, and she began to speak her own words into the murmuring quiet.

  Her flame was blue and very slender. He smiled when he saw it, and Told his orange flame closer, so that the two twined and rose and there was a fire. She saw sweat on his cheeks and felt it on her own forehead, beneath her hair. This Telling was an illusion, as they all were, yet her body and Aldron’s did not know this while the images formed. Their fire crackled and spat. The noise would be his, she knew, but still she Told her small part.

  Warmth, she suddenly thought. Old Aldira said warmth, not just fire. Her blue flame vanished as she Told the desert sun, bloated and white. Aldron instantly added sand, which scalded her feet and hissed over the floorboards. She Told a cauldron of steaming soup; he Told its bubbling and a smell of onions. She Told cloaks and blankets, and he made them heavy and soft. Then she covered him in fur like a winter animal’s, and he covered her, and the Telling dissolved in laughter. They laughed and laughed—children’s voices, high and giddy. When Aliser came in, they were still smiling.

  After the children had gone, Aldira sat without moving for a long time. She was always tired, after Aldron’s visits—drained by the restless energy of his body, and by the power of his words. Drained by her own need for these words. When she finally rose and walked across the wagon, she felt so
mething shift beneath her foot. She bent and swept her hand over the place and felt sand. She brushed it into her palm and stared at it: real sand, where there should only have been a memory of Telling. Fine, white, dry sand, never touched by sunlight or blown by desert wind. She curled her fingers around it and said, very quietly, “Twins protect him.”

  The rain turned to snow, and the forest trees stood stark and jagged against the sky. The air was thick with smoke from the wagons’ chimneys, and from the town’s, where the black roof tiles were now piled white. The Alilan gathered branches and logs from the woods and began to stack them in the centre of the camp. The main fire of Alnila’s Night would be built here, with the smaller family fires radiating outward from it like sparks. Children raced around the growing pile, imagining darkness and dancing.

  “Pay attention to the Telling tomorrow,” Old Aldira told Alea and Aliser the day before the celebration. “Try not to allow yourselves to be swept away by the words. Likely you are still too young for such control: the power of all Tellers together is considerable. But try to listen to the words beneath the images. Try to understand how we are making our Telling strands and how we weave them together.”

  Alea did try, at first. She watched each Teller stand—ten of them, representing each of the caravans. She could not see their faces; they were ranged around the other side of the fire, and their features were blurred by flame and smoke and the night that hung between. The rest of the Alilan sat or knelt or stood. Alea could feel them around her, stretching back to the smaller fires and even beyond, to where the horses whinnied and pawed at the snow.

  One voice began. The image was the same every time, and every time Alea’s heartbeat quickened when she heard it: a single wagon, a single family, held motionless by snow that spun and drifted around the wagon’s wheels. A second voice joined the first. Alea saw a streak of light high above them, plummeting from the stars that were the fires of the Alilan dead. The light grew, lengthening and brightening, until it was a woman’s hair, a woman’s arms reaching toward the wagon. Alea trembled a bit, as she had when she was very, very small, huddled against her mother’s knees. The fire goddess towered, a coursing plume of blue and orange and red; then she extended her fingers. Flame showered the snow and caught on a bush, and the family leaned toward the fire, their faces amazed and thankful.

  Alea lost the separate threads. There were other voices now, and other figures. More wagons, and lines of horses: the growing strength of the Alilan, blessed by Alnila’s gift of fire as her earth sister Alneth slumbered. The Alilan danced to show Alnila their gratitude—and Alea realized that she was dancing, too, whirling among bodies that were real. Old Aldira will be angry with me for not listening right, she thought very dimly, before her brother swung her up onto his shoulders and she shrieked with laughter and dizzy joy.

  Aliser found her after the dancing was done, when all the Alilan except the children and the very old were disappearing into the woods or the further reaches of the plain. (“Where do you go?” she had demanded once, and Alder had chuckled. “Remember: Alnila is the goddess of fire and passion.” Alea had stared blankly at him, and he had laughed at her loudly, until she hit him.)

  “Wasn’t that beautiful?” Alea said, still breathless, and Aliser nodded.

  “Beautiful,” Aldron said as he stepped into the light, “but tame. Easy. I could do better all on my own.”

  Aliser sneered. “Really? You’re a fool, Aldron. And you’re too proud.”

  “No Alilan can be too proud,” Aldron said. He was so still that his lips hardly seemed to move with his words. “You are a bore. You have no idea how to be brave or different. My Tellings will be new. They’ll change things.”

  Alea stood up between them. “Tellings don’t change things. They can’t. Old Aldira says that the Goddesses made it so that we could never use our Tellings to make changes in the real world. Someone did it once, and she was punished by the Goddesses—”

  “The Goddesses!” Aldron scoffed. “Don’t bother repeating your lessons to me. That old woman’s teaching you to be afraid of your own power.” He looked down at her, and all she saw were shadows, in his eyes and flickering over his skin. “I thought you were different from Aliser.”

  She made a sound like a laugh, though she hardly heard it through the anger humming in her ears. “There’s nothing wrong with Aliser,” she said.

  “Clever,” Aldron said to Aliser, “making a girl speak for you.”

  Aliser shouted and lunged for him, and Aldron stepped neatly away. Aliser stumbled past him into a pile of snow.

  “Stay with him, then,” Aldron said to Alea, and he walked away from them into the darkness.

  “He is a fool,” she said as Aliser cursed and shook snow from his hair.

  The next day, as the caravans prepared to take their separate paths, she threaded her way among blackened wood and wagons that were unfamiliar to her. “Where is the Tall Fires caravan?” she asked someone, and he pointed, and she wandered and asked again. She was no longer angry; she needed to find Aldron, to tell him something she was not sure of yet. But when she came to the right place, the wagons were already gone. She saw them in the distance, black spots against the plain. She stared at them until they disappeared. Then she stared at the grass, bent and broken beneath the snow, and she thought, I feel like that grass, though she did not know why.

  FOURTEEN

  She has forgotten him, Aliser thought as the wagons rolled across marshland into the lake country. He watched Alea frowning into spring light as she Told sight and the beginnings of sound; he watched her smile and turn to him, when her Tellings were done. She never mentioned Aldron, not even once. When summer came and the wagons turned toward the red desert, Aliser felt dread in his gut. Surely now, so close to the oasis and Alneth’s Night and the other caravans, she would speak of him. But she did not.

  Their caravan was the first to arrive at the oasis. She and Aliser waded into the still dark water and laughed at their wet leggings and the rippling shade of the palms. “Our Tellings don’t make me feel like this,” she said as she leaned over and dipped her head into the pool. She raised her face and her plait swung behind her, soaked even blacker than it usually was. Aliser wanted to touch it, not as he used to when they were smaller and he tugged at it until she screeched. He wanted to weave his fingers through it like the red and white ribbons she wore.

  “Come with me,” he said to her one morning when the sun was still low. “My sister says we can ride Sandar now, before it’s too hot.”

  Alea looked at Old Aldira, who was pursing her lips. “May we?” Alea asked, and the Teller sighed.

  “I know that we will accomplish nothing this morning if I say you cannot. Go now, quickly—and pick me some watersage. At least make it a partially useful ride.”

  “Not too far!” Aliser heard his sister call as he urged the horse away. “And no galloping!” He lifted a hand but did not look back.

  “Hold on,” he said to Alea, and felt her arms tighten around his waist. Sandar cantered away from the wagons as the dawn clouds came apart in sunlight.

  They followed the river that flowed from the oasis pool. It was high and wide, even though the rains had passed weeks ago. The banks were thick with colour: green fronds and stalks and leaves, pink and blue petals that were closing now, as the sun rose. Bushes dotted the sand; they too were covered in leaves and folding blooms.

  “Look how beautiful it is,” Alea said when they were sitting with their feet in the river and their backs against a tall rock. Sandar was beside them, snorting and shaking her head so that her red mane flew.

  “Yes,” Aliser said. The leaping place looked small from here: just a rock like the one they were sitting against, when really it was so tall, nearly a cliff.

  “I guess that’s why the Perona fight us for it,” Alea said, and Aliser frowned at her.

  “Well they shouldn’t,” he said, “and they wo
n’t dare to again. It’s Alneth’s place, our place—where we’ve been taming our horses forever. Anyway, we beat them last time they challenged us for it.”

  “I know,” said Alea, and was quiet.

  “Imagine,” Aliser said, wanting her to speak again, “we’ll be taming our horses here soon. Getting our fighting daggers. And after that we’ll be able to fight.”

  “And Tell,” Alea said, frowning herself. “In front of everyone. Imagine that.”

  “I can. It’ll be glorious—we’ll be so strong by then and everyone’ll be so proud. Let’s practice: I’ll try to Tell thunder or maybe horses running, and you can—”

  “No,” Alea said. She drew her feet out of the water and pulled her knees up beneath her chin. “Let’s just sit here a bit longer and listen. Old Aldira says we have to listen all the time now, to make sure we can Tell sounds right.”

  He tried to sit as she was, motionless and facing the oasis, but he could not. He shifted and splashed and looked sidelong at her, so that he could see her plait hanging against her white tunic, and her brown feet resting on the sand.

  “Listen,” she said as they rose at last.

  Aliser groaned. “I’ve been trying to, but—”

  “No—listen. I hear something.”

  After a moment he did as well. A rumbling, drumming sound, too weak to be the wild horses, and anyway it was too early for that. Soon after, voices—some singing, some yelling. He and Alea stared northward with their hands shading their eyes.

  “It’s another caravan,” she said quickly, her voice strangely high, almost breaking.

  “Yes, so let’s go back. Except—wait—we forgot Old Aldira’s watersage. We’ll have to find some, maybe closer to the oasis. . . .”

  She was not listening to him. “Which caravan is it?” she said, but not really to him. She was straight and still, beginning to smile—and he knew with a suddenness like falling that she had not forgotten after all.

  Aldron walked around their wagon as if he had been there only the day before. He sat down on the third step and looked at them, one by one. He looked at Alea last and longest, Aldira noted, and she narrowed her eyes.