by Karen Lord
“Irreverent youth! I did not think to live to see thee considered an elder of our people, but thou hast done well. Child!”
That last was addressed to me. I tried not to flinch. “Ma’am?”
“He is a good man, a dependable man, but when he tends to frivolity,” and she glared at Dllenahkh, “as he has in the past, thou must not encourage him.”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am,” I gasped, not so much overwhelmed by her command as utterly flabbergasted at the sudden realization that he had baited her and she was teasing him.
When she swept out again, I turned to him, eyebrows raised in amazement. “Friend of yours?”
He smiled slightly. “It is difficult to ascertain what that word means to Zhera. To me, she is a teacher of note from whom I learned much about the philosophy and science of the mind. To her, I am still the young acolyte who was sufficiently foolhardy to answer back once. She has never allowed me to forget it.”
“Why did you tell her about the euphoric projection?” I complained. “That was embarrassing.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Was the statement inaccurate?”
“Well, strictly speaking, no, but you certainly gave the impression that you had already experienced such a thing … conjugally.”
He pondered for a while. “I see. Perhaps not an untruth but certainly a misleading statement. I believe there is only one remedy.”
I looked at him in trepidation, wondering if he was going to speak up and make another public announcement about my alleged abilities.
“We must investigate thoroughly the potential truth of this statement.”
“Um,” I said, because although the words were quite innocently delivered, the look he was giving me was making my knees weak. “Yes. That would be entirely appropriate.”
“Might I recommend that we retire to our assigned chamber? The shielding built into the walls will ensure that no acoustic or mental noise will get in … or out.”
I was quite sure at this point that my bosom was heaving in maidenly confusion. “Um, that sounds lovely.”
He looked at me curiously and rested a finger lightly against the throbbing pulse in my throat. “You are agitated,” he said with grave interest.
“You are amused at my agitation,” I countered.
He inclined his head, acknowledging the touché. “I am experiencing a measure of excitement combined with increasing pleasure, which is perhaps manifesting as an expression of amusement.”
It was the first time he had ever used the scales to describe his emotions. “I love it when you talk dirty,” I whispered, and sealed the moment with a kiss.
Now
It was well before dawn, and Delarua was scrambling around in semidarkness, wrestling with her clothes and tripping over her own boots. Already dressed, Dllenahkh observed her from his seat at the one clear corner of the bed.
Hurry. We’ll be late.
As usual, she caught the meaning rather than the syntax. “In a minute!”
As usual, he listened to the undertone of apology rather than the tone of frustration. He glanced away to signal his patience and saw her handheld in the middle of the bed. He did not intend to read it, but his attention was caught by the title: The Homestead Years. Being the second volume of the draft memoirs of Grace Delarua (not famous yet though not through lack of trying, but hey, there’s still time).
“Don’t look!” She yanked it out of his line of sight and stuffed it in her satchel.
“My apologies,” he said. He doubted it contained anything that would surprise him, but with Delarua close bonding meant games of fake privacy and pretended ignorance. He found it oddly endearing.
“Ready,” she said breathlessly at last. “But I still don’t see why we can’t go in the car.”
“The car has nav installed,” he hinted with a raised eyebrow. “We neither need nor want nav where we’re going.”
She raised an eyebrow in turn, intrigued. “Lead the way, then.”
By the time they got the horses saddled up, a faint dawn light was beginning to glow. A few minutes’ easy walk was sufficient to take them out from under the trees at the heart of the homestead, through the outer pastures, and onto the main road. They journeyed for a while along their own boundary line in a silence that was companionable and more.
Delarua spoke only once. “We’re going down to the sea.”
“Yes,” he answered aloud.
She laughed. It was an adventure to her, an adventure and a mystery all wrapped up in anticipation. She radiated a warm, pleasant buzz, and several vivid pictures suddenly flickered through her mind. He thought for a moment, understood, and smiled at the compliment. She had imagined her mind would be bare before his, naked under a scorching desert sun, with neither shelter nor refuge. Instead, it was like playing hide-and-seek in the light and shadow of a forest, discovering and inventing a new language of double meaning, subtlety, poetry, and image. As a linguist, she was captivated; as a lover, she was enraptured. Nothing could be said the same way twice.
Their destination, a small bay earmarked for future Council development, was all sand and dry, unpopulated scrubland yet perfectly suited to the purpose. Pale, shallow water stretched for hundreds of meters up to the line where it met abruptly with depths of dark blue ocean. Dllenahkh scanned the darker colors carefully and sighed with relief. They were too late to witness the splashdown but in time for everything else. He dismounted, held the reins securely, and watched the horizon. After briefly eyeing him with curiosity, Delarua did the same.
Dllenahkh’s horse sidestepped nervously. He reassured it with a brief mental touch.
“What—what is that?” Delarua gasped.
A hectare of distant ocean was shifting. Solid grayness gradually emerged, surging up like a wave, but slowly, so slowly that barely a ripple chased over the water’s surface to the beach. Its center was stiff, ridged, and ponderous, but the edges curled and fanned delicately with exquisite control.
“Is it …?” she whispered softly, her mind a racket of thoughts and emotions.
“Yes,” he confirmed. Small, unharnessed, unladen, but unmistakable.
An aperture like a blowhole appeared on the back of the leviathan. Only then did its size become clear as a tiny human creature was ejected in a gentle rush of water to tumble over the side and into the ocean. Eyeless yet aware, the beast carefully washed its living cargo to shore with a lazy flap of its foremost fringe. Delarua kept her eyes fixed in fascination on the small dot traveling inland. Dllenahkh also watched until he sensed some other movement, another shifting patch of gray amid the blue that made him startle and stare … but the sea calmed and kept its secret.
No longer old but not yet young, Naraldi stepped out of the gentle surf, shaking salt water from his hair. It was just long enough to trouble his eyes, drenched-dark in hue with a few white streaks gleaming bright. His pilot suit flashed in the sun, bringing an image of Sayr to Delarua’s thoughts. She laughed out loud in sheer happiness, remembering, knowing.
“Dllenahkh! Grace!” Naraldi hailed them gladly. “Have you any space in your realm for a rootless wanderer?”
Dllenahkh felt a sensation of overwhelming, devastating déjà vu—another time, another beach, Naraldi rising up out of the ocean to destroy the universe with a few words. His mind had been punctured in that instant, leaving behind a fragmented, perilous memory that could spin him into endless orbit around nothingness. For his own sake, he had learned to forget that day. Now his mind fractured again to take in the reality that he was standing by the sea and hearing Naraldi’s voice, not merely without desolation but with actual gladness. Memory and moment combined violently, and he struggled to shield Delarua from the sudden maelstrom.
She did not look at him. She did not have to. She took firm hold of his hand and silently gave him her storm of joy to navigate instead.
“Welcome, Naraldi!” she cried. “Welcome home!”
References
Bradbury, Ray. 1950. “Way in the Middle of the Air,” in The Martian Chronicles. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Bradbury, Ray. 1951. “The Other Foot,” in The Illustrated Man. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Bradbury, Ray. 1959. “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” in A Medicine for Melancholy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Simon, Dvorah. 2008. Mercy. Santa Cruz, CA: Hanford Mead Publishers.
“Loss of Women Haunts Fishermen,” BBC, March 21, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/4360345.stm, accessed August 31, 2009.
“Most Tsunami Dead Female—Oxfam,” BBC, March 26, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/4383573.stm, accessed August 31, 2009.
For Dvorah, Gretchen, and Ruthy.
You know why.
Acknowledgments
“Golden,” the poem quoted in the chapter “The Faerie Queen,” is an unpublished work by Dvorah Simon and is used with the author’s permission.
The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004, will long be remembered for the devastation it wrought on many coastal communities. Months later, the BBC reported on a distressing side effect of the disaster; more women than men were killed by the tsunami, up to eighty percent in some of the hardest hit areas. These were women at home with their children on a Sunday while their husbands were fishing far out at sea or running errands inland; women waiting on the beach for the fishermen to return; and women who were not physically strong enough to hold on as the wave swept by. Representatives of aid organizations commented on the social impact of this gender imbalance, including psychiatric trauma in several newly bereaved men and “reports of rapes, harassment and forced marriages coming from emergency camps around the region” (“Loss of Women Haunts Fishermen,” BBC 2009). Professor Sivathambi of Colombo University in Sri Lanka noted, “Men are only the bread earners. Women are the backbone of the family. Take them out and it leads to instability” (“Most Tsunami Dead Female,” BBC 2009).
The Caribbean is to me the new cradle of humanity. It was easy for me to imagine an entire planet just like it, with people from every corner of the world. I was also influenced by stories of the real-life Pestalozzi Village and International Children’s Villages founded after World War II for war orphans of all nationalities. A third source of inspiration came from Ray Bradbury, not only his story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” which is referenced in the first chapter, but also “Way in the Middle of the Air” and “The Other Foot,” which depicted African Americans of the 1950s fleeing segregation and founding a colony on Mars.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAREN LORD has been a physics teacher, a diplomat, a part-time soldier, and an academic at various times and in various countries. She is now a writer and research consultant in Barbados. Her debut novel Redemption in Indigo won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award, and the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.