The Silences of Home

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

  One afternoon, about a week after he had begun, he was drawing a swath of green up and around, dipping his brush again and again. He would soon need to go down to Fane for more paint, though he was nearly done. Another few days, and then he would—

  “Nellyn.” The word was low and breathless. He heard it, then wondered if he had. He waited, craning his head so that he would hear her better if she called again. “Nellyn, come here”—each word louder, rising and tight—“come here—help me”—and the paint fell and flowed across the floor as he ran to her.

  THIRTY-TWO

  It was to Ladhra I last wrote, and although it was so long ago, my hand still wants to make all its letters and lines for her. But I’ll write to you now, and hope that you’ll read these words someday. Perhaps we’ll read them together, with our backs against the tower stone and the cliffs beside us covered in flowers. I try to imagine your spring, and what you’re writing of in the log, but it’s difficult; I’m so far away. Has your ocean been as calm as mine these past two months?

  It’s strange. The Queen’s most experienced ocean captains warned her, in Fane, that we would be sure to encounter fierce storms on our journey east. They spoke of winds that could crack the thickest mast, waves so high that the biggest boat would spin about like a twig in a puddle. But such violence has never found us. We’ve had a few minor storms, which even the smallest vessels have ridden out without much damage. I’ve heard other Queensfighters (for that’s what the Queen calls us now, ever since we left Fane) murmuring about the blessings of the First upon our fleet and its mission. I am certain they are right, for the Queen has spoken to me, in Fane and on this ship, and I know that she is Sarhenna’s chosen heir. Our way has been smooth, and we will prevail when we reach our destination.

  Leish was seasick. He had not been before, on the journey west with his people or on the river that led to Fane—but here, surging atop the ocean in this enormous boat, he was ceaselessly, violently ill. Early in the voyage, lying spent after vomiting bile or retching nothing, he had thought, A selkesh, ill with the motion of the waves! and felt a thin, miserable amusement. After a time he hardly noticed the sickness; it was just a layer of wretchedness among all the others. He writhed in hunger and thirst and sleeplessness, and sometimes he convulsed with vomiting too. It was all the same.

  But as his body quailed, his mind grew light and steady. Nasranesh sang to him. He did not have to grasp at the sounds from far away or conjure them himself from memory; they flowed to him across the space between them, which was closing. He did not need to look at the sea when the guard took him up on deck twice a day. He did not need his eyes at all. He heard the notes of his home, and they were so beautiful that he had no fear any more about what would come. No fear—until Wollshenyllosh’s voice reached him through the singing, as it had long ago, in a different prison.

  “Leish! Leish, hear me: we are entering the waters of my kin.”

  He tried to open his eyes. She had rarely spoken on the voyage—only sometimes when she bathed him with the water the Queensfolk gave them every few days, or when Galha came to question him. Usually he barely heard Wollshenyllosh’s words. She murmured them, and some were entirely strange to him. But he heard her now, and felt her as well, holding his shoulders with her scale-edged hands.

  “My home waters, Leish. Look at me!”

  It was darker in their tiny cabin than it had been behind his eyelids. He had seen blossoms and treetops there, and the ruffled, sunlit surface of the gathering pool. Here there was just a wan grey light; no torch or lantern, he remembered, because they could be used as clubs or to start fires. Wollshenyllosh’s scales hardly shone at all when she bent over him.

  “I can take us there, I think. We need to try.”

  He mumbled up at her, then moaned as the cabin tipped and she slid briefly out of his sight. “To try?” he whispered between his torn lips, and then she was above him again, pressing her fingers into his flesh so that he could not return to the comfort of his song.

  “We will both die in your land, Leish. She will kill us there. We must get off this ship. We would be safe in my waters.”

  The quiet was gone from his head. The weight of his brittle body returned, and he saw very clearly the squalour of the cabin, and the silver-white of Wollshenyllosh’s eyes. “You are afraid,” he said, and her fingerscales dug as if she would pierce him through.

  “Of course I am afraid,” she said. “I know how strongly your land calls to you, for I hear mine also—but listen to me: she will kill us.”

  “Us?” he repeated, his thoughts even more sluggish than his tongue. “It is me she hates.”

  Wollshenyllosh let go of him. He felt for a moment as if he were falling, and swallowed over another wave of sickness. “She needed me in Luhr, even in Fane—but she will have no such need once this boat finds land.” She was on her knees, reaching behind her with both hands. “I was about to leave. I met your brother and his Queensman companion and I told them I would leave—but I was curious about the attack and I lingered, and when I finally tried to take the water tunnel your people used, she was there before me; she had blocked the way. . . .”

  Leish thought, I have heard this before—she told me this on the river journey to Fane, and again in the house by the water. She had been so calm in Luhr—and now she repeated her own words as if she had never spoken them before, and her eyes were wild, and she scrabbled at something behind her back, desperately, her scales striking each other like music.

  “And what then?” he asked. “What will happen when we reach your waters?”

  She was still at last, and her gaze was unwavering on him. “I will tell my people what she has done to yours. When they know, they will help. They will fight her boats in the sea and keep them from reaching your shores.”

  He sat up slowly. The room spun, but he ignored it. “Very well. How will we do this thing?”

  “Here,” she said, her hands working again, “here, on my back, there’s a scale—the longest on my body, and the sharpest. I’ve been loosening it for days, but I’ll need you to pull it out. . . .”

  He shuffled around her on his knees, feeling the dampness of sea water and his own sickness, and smelling these things suddenly as he had not for so many weeks. He saw the scale, eased her fingers away from it. He ran his own hands over it and felt it lift away from her body, except for its widest part, which stuck. He moved it up and around and she stiffened. “Pull,” she said when he hesitated. He drew in a breath—through his mouth, not his nose—and wrapped fingers and webs tightly around the scale’s slippery length, and braced one foot against her hip. He breathed out and pulled.

  The scale ripped free and he heard the sound it made, briefly, before she began to scream. She screamed once, twice, then in a long, unbroken line. She doubled over so that her forehead touched the floor. Leish looked down at the scale, which was sharp and smooth at its tip, and dark with clotted blood and flesh at its base. He noticed that his own hands were bleeding. He did not look at the place where the scale had been. Her screaming wavered into a lower keening. She shifted on the floor, one hand groping behind her. He set the scale in it and watched her draw herself to her feet and lurch to the door. She went quiet there. She stood and panted and raised the scale above her head.

  The door latch was rattling. “What’s all the noise?” The Queensguard outside, fumbling for a key, likely surprised: these two never gave trouble. “Here, now—don’t try—” He was ducking into the cabin, his eyes on Leish—only Leish, kneeling, staring back at him. The guard grunted, “Where’s the fish-thing, now?” and started to turn his head—and Wollshenyllosh’s arm descended, found his neck before he had truly seen her. He grunted and gurgled and fell, hard.

  For a moment Leish saw only the scale, half-buried in the man’s skin. Then Wollshenyllosh tore it out and stepped through the arcing blood. “Come, Leish,” she rasped.

  He followed her, tho
ugh he could not believe his legs were supporting him. Their cabin was directly below the deck—not far to go, and he could tell from the light in the passageway that it was dawn, or evening. Perhaps the deck would be empty and a quick stride or two would bring them to the sea. . . .

  She led him the length of the ship, to a ladder and a hatch above it. She climbed up two rungs and turned back to him. “Follow close behind me, on the deck and also in the sea. It will be very dark just before we reach my waters.”

  He nodded at her. Her scales seemed to shine more here, even the ones that were spattered with blood. He reached up to touch her, very lightly, where her scales were bright and clean. He imagined what Mallesh would say if he could see this—but it was a fleeting imagining, a shadow of another time, another Leish. “I will follow,” he said, and she pushed the hatch open.

  Leish saw nothing clearly at first, just a great burning glow that was the open sky. Daylight. Not dawn, not dusk: daylight, muffled by fog but as shocking as it always was, after the cabin’s gloom. “There are people,” Wollshenyllosh whispered as he rubbed the tears from his eyes, “but no one has seen us.” She was squatting to the right of the hatch, her eyes darting. He pulled himself up to crouch beside her. His teeth were chattering and his limbs were shaking, and he gagged a bit and swallowed the bile down again.

  “. . . sick of maggots in my bread,” said a voice from just beyond the row of barrels that hid Leish and Wollshenyllosh from the boat’s prow. Two Queensmen passed the barrels. Leish looked only at their legs, as if this would keep them from glancing down and seeing him. “I hear the Queen has her own private store—wine and cured meats, even some fruit still,” said a different voice, and then the men were gone.

  Wollshenyllosh covered both of Leish’s hands with her own. “Run with me now,” she said. “And after we run, our strokes will lead us home.”

  Queenswoman Grelhal’s giggle was so high that it sounded like the screech of a gull. A hysterical gull, Lanara thought, glancing at Aldron, which has been circling around us since we left Fane’s harbour. “Are all of your people so witty?” Grelhal was gasping, her giggling over with, for the moment.

  “My my, no!” he exclaimed. He had been nearly as giddy as Grelhal on the journey, though Lanara had also seen him go silent and still, as if he were somewhere alone, far away from all of them. “Our Goddesses decreed, back when time began, that only one Alilan in each caravan could have the gift of wit, for they feared there would be chaos if. . . .”

  “If?” prompted Grelhal, but Aldron did not speak again. Lanara watched his eyes narrow. As she turned to follow his gaze, she heard shouting from the deck behind them.

  She had never before seen a fishperson move quickly. They stood or lay in the marketplace, stepped delicately to the wells and fountains where they often floated when the sun was high. She had seen this one at the signal tower and here on deck, stooped and shuffling beneath the Sea Raider’s weight. But now it was running in long, ragged strides that did not resemble at all the fishfolk’s usual graceful, gliding walk. It was already past a group of sailors, who were looking after it, too slowly—halfway to the side of the ship, and no one else had tried to stop it.

  Lanara cried out and began to run as well, though she would never catch it; it would plunge over the side and be lost—and if it had escaped, where was the Sea Raider? She sped over the boards, over rope and canvas and fallen barrels—and as she did, something sliced past her with a whistle of speed.

  One of the fishperson’s hands was touching the ship’s side when the dagger found it. Its arms flew up against the sky. Even in this murky light, its scales flashed, iridescent as the wings of countless lacemoths. Then it slumped to the deck, and its scales were dim, and Lanara ran with all the others to stare down at its twisted limbs and at the place where the dagger had lodged.

  “There was already a wound there,” someone said, as someone else prodded the fishperson with a booted foot.

  “And that’s what I aimed for.” They all turned to Aldron, who knelt and fingered the hilt of his dagger. “How else could I have wounded the creature?” he went on, looking up at the faces of those around him. “These scales are like armour. It was a lucky thing, this other wound.” He pulled the dagger free, and the fishperson moaned and jerked so that fresh blood spouted onto the deck.

  “What about the other one?” Grelhal said. “Weren’t they imprisoned together?”

  Lanara was already moving away from the gathering at the side. She followed the thin trail of blood the fishperson had left, in its flight, followed it to the small hatch near the prow. The Sea Raider was there, sitting with his arms around his knees. He looked up at her. She saw his body’s shaking, the blood that dripped from his clenched hands, his wide eyes, so shocking in the horrible, cracked darkness of his face.

  “Coward,” she spat as if her words could also be metal. “Filth.”

  “It was a fine throw,” Galha said.

  Lanara turned from the sunset she was watching through the thick windows of the Queen’s cabin. Aldron and Galha were sitting at the table in the middle of the cabin, a replica of the table in her tower study, though not nearly as large. Aldron’s dagger was lying on the dark red wood. He was holding it with two fingers so that it would not slide with the motion of the ship.

  “Thank you,” he said. He lowered his eyes to the dagger. “I didn’t intend to kill the thing,” he continued, very quickly. As if he were confessing guilt, Lanara thought, or apologizing for it. She frowned, even as the Queen smiled.

  “Do not reproach yourself,” Galha said. “The creature was ill—we all knew that. Too ill in body and mind to have survived the voyage to the Raiders’ Land, or indeed to its own home. You delivered it from suffering, Aldron. I am very glad I gave you that dagger in Fane.”

  He smiled—his usual confident smile—and said, “I wish you could have seen me use it.”

  “As do I,” the Queen said. “But there will be many opportunities for that, soon. We are nearly there, nearly at Nasranesh—aren’t we?”

  Lanara followed Galha’s gaze to the thick wooden pillar that stood by the cabin door. The prisoner was there, lashed to it as he had been to the mast, months before. He did not open his eyes when the Queen spoke to him. There was no need for him to answer her; shore birds had been sighted that morning flitting among the larger gulls. Tiny birds, brightly coloured, skimming over the water as lightly as insects. And the water itself was changing, deep green-grey shifting to a clearer blue. Lanara thought she had smelled growing things, too, as she stood on the deck with Aldron and Grelhal: a scent of green, like Queenswood trees—but different, and so fleeting that she had not been able to catch it again before the fishperson had run and died.

  “We are very close now,” Galha said, leaning in toward the Sea Raider. “Close enough that I have posted extra guards on every deck and porthole on every one of my vessels. Your people will not take my ships the way they tried to take my city.” She stayed near him for a moment, looking at his closed eyes. Then she turned and said, “Aldron, come here with me—I have a finer dagger for you, one I should have given you in Fane. . . .”

  They went together to a long case across the cabin, by the hanging that hid her bed. Lanara watched them, listened to the low hum of their words, which she could not hear. She wandered away from the windows, her hands hovering over the furniture that would brace her if the ship tilted. She would return to the deck, or to her own cabin, to continue writing to Nellyn—but she slowed as she passed the pillar, and stopped when she saw that the Sea Raider’s eyes were open.

  “Ladhra.” He whispered it, but Lanara started so sharply that he might have shouted. “Ladhra tell me: friend Lanara,” he went on. She struggled to untangle his sounds even as she thought, Walk by. Don’t listen or even look. . . . “Ladhra friend Lanara—Ladhra friend Leish.” His lips were flecked with bloody spittle. His shoulders strained against the rope that he
ld him.

  Lanara stepped so close to him that his features blurred. He oozed decay—she smelled it and saw it and trembled with disgust. Disgust, she told herself, nothing else. “You will not speak her name,” she said slowly, so that he would hear and feel every word. Then she walked away from him.

  Ladhra friend Leish—she heard it standing at the ship’s side, gulping air, and later, curled in her bunk, sleepless and cold. A line of unwanted music, circling with more and more intensity—and why? Why allow the words to echo when they were a lie? I cannot see him again, she thought. I’ll tell the Queen some half-truth about fearing him—and this decision let her sleep at last, with nothing in her head but the sound of creaking timbers.

  “Nara.” She scrambled out of her covers, one hand reaching for her knife—but then she blinked against torchlight and saw Aldron. “It’s just after dawn,” he hissed. “There’s land ahead—wait, wait,” he said, grasping her wrist as she tried to stand. “Listen: the watch on the oardeck just reported activity outside. Creatures crawling up the sides of this ship and several others. Creatures from the water. They’ve come to us—they imagine they’ll take us by surprise. . . .”

  “You’re shaking,” she said. She herself felt heavy and strong now that this moment had come. She would be strong for all the Queensfighters when they quailed before Queen Galha’s mindpowers.

  He let go of her wrist. “Of course I am,” he said, and his voice trembled now as well. “This is battle. This is what I came for.”

  The deck was thick with Queensfighters. They stood in rows, silent except for the occasional sound, quickly muffled, of metal sliding against metal. The Queen was at the prow, her bow held loosely, pointing toward the empty railing to her right. Lanara slipped through the rows until she was a few paces from the side. She looked behind her, at faces and swords; she looked beyond the prow at the shadows of the other boats, and the still water, and the eastern sky that was clear and silver, except for a dark, rolling line of land. The wind rose; canvas and cloaks snapped. After it had died down again, there was another gusting: bodies slithering up and over, and falling to the deck—and the stillness shattered into shouts and singing arrows and the first hard thrusts of swords.