A Telling of Stars

by A Telling of Stars (v5. 0) (epub)

“But Queen Galha’s greatest pride was Luhr’s market, for there, in a space below the palace itself, gathered folk from all parts of the land. The fishfolk—who have always been goodand wise, unlike their Raider kin—whistled out of their small mouths as they sold the green fronds and shining orbs of their lakes and seas. The half-giants of the eastern islands stamped their feet and clacked their great teeth together as they showed their pots of dark clay and eels’scales. The iben seers—who had horns on their heads and talons instead of fingers—sang of the future in voices so beautiful that people who heard them wept in fear and joy. These iben can no longer be found at Luhr’s marketplace; they stopped making the long journey from their mountains and have not been seen by Queensfolk since. But the others are there still. There are booths and carts and tents and wooden stages, as there have been since Galha’s time.

  “You may travel to Luhr when you are older; you may follow the long path from our beach through forest and jungle. You too may hear, weaving through the other noises, the bone piping of the desert nomads, that high, sweet sound of red wind and sand.”

  She is slipping into the sand and it is just like water, and she hears the piping, far away—or perhaps it is her father’s voice.

  When Jaele woke on the edge of the jungle, she saw a wide and empty road that led into the desert; she saw bushes and clumps of rocks and grass; she saw the spires and walls of Luhr, soaring into the sun. It could not be real, of course. She remembered fainting, remembered half waking to find damp fur beneath her cheek. There had been a rolling motion like waves, and breathing that was not her own. I was carried, she thought dimly, and remembered dreaming her father’s voice as she lay slumped and almost sleeping. And now, somehow, she was here, sitting propped against a tree. When she peered around it, she saw only other trees, still and silent. She turned back; the spires remained. Everything was painfully vivid: the plants’ leaves, curling wrinkled veins and brittle; the rocks, shining crystalline, whorled with black and pink; the road, stretching flat and red beneath the cloudless sky. She sat and looked and was empty.

  When at last she stood, a dull pain bloomed in her head and up her back, and she wondered again what had brought her through the jungle. She moved onto the road, very slowly (days and nights of running, stumbling, needles and thorns); she walked and looked only ahead, at the water-glint of Luhr. She did not think of an ash hut, blood-clotted sand, ache of nails on stone; she thought only of the Sea Raider, and this city. One path through forest and jungle; one city only in this great desert. He will be hungry, she thought; he has come here as well. Certainty rose in her like tears. As she walked toward Luhr, Jaele’s hand closed around her sack, and her fingers traced the cloth-fattened edges of her father’s dagger.

  She walked alone for a time, but as the city grew large other paths met the main road, and figures trembled out of the heat to join her. He is already in the city, she thought again—so sure—as she looked at them. There were green-robed Devotees with their bats concealed beneath black-draped cages; children in wagons hung with tapestries and baskets full of tiny mice; Queensfighters with curved bows and tall desert horses. These last Jaele saw with a sudden sting of memory: she had played by the sea, Queen Galha on a donkey, legions of Queensfighters massing behind her on the sand. Her father’s voice and her mother’s shadow against the wall. Elic’s breath. Jaele saw the riders and forced it all away, the images and stories, and the terrible softness beneath her skin.

  There were songs and laughter on the road, and the sound of languages that were not hers. She listened carefully and felt safer. She glanced down after a time and saw a desert child walking beside her, swathed in white except for her eyes. Jaele gazed into the gold-flecked black of these eyes and smiled brittle glass. The girl danced in small light steps, and whirled so that her robes rose and fluttered. When Jaele smiled again (from a place far away and almost warm), the girl reached up and took her hand. The child’s hand was small and dry; Jaele clung to it. When they reached the steep and seamless walls of Luhr, they passed together beneath the silver portcullis.

  Trees towered silver-green, growing from impossibly dark earth that lay like an arrow in the middle of the gleaming main street. Other streets branched off into the city. Jaele saw houses of shining stone, fountains where children laughed and drank, shadowed archways where old people sat. Then she looked ahead and saw the palace: the heart, the home of the arrow, the tallest and slenderest of the spires and arches. She and her companion stopped where the road widened to form the great sweep of marketplace that stretched around the palace. There was a roar of noise and colour. People, animals, creatures she had never seen before—and somewhere, him. The little girl tugged at her hand and she walked forward.

  After a few paces they came to a red-tasselled tent, and the girl left her there with a swift hug and a flashing of black-gold eyes. Jaele watched her swung up off the ground by a tall veiled woman, and for the first time heard the child’s voice, high and laughing. Jaele turned away.

  A young man crouched beside her, bent over the shards of a broken pot. She knelt in front of him. “May I help?” she asked, her voice rough and jagged. Words and kneeling because she did not know, now that she was here, how to begin.

  He looked up. She knew him at once, even though she had not thought of him for so long. His eyes were as light as they had been, but his hair was darker, more like golden sand, now, than sunlight.

  “Dorin,” she said. He frowned and sat back on his heels. “Dorin,” she said again, then continued in a rush, “You don’t remember me, of course; we met a long time ago. On my beach. You had just left your home.”

  “Ah,” he said, beginning to smile, “the girl from the beach. There was a big stone there—the Giant’s something. . . .”

  “Club,” she said.

  “Club. And you are . . . Jaele. Yes?” He was smiling broadly now. She saw that his smile still lit his face, and that he was still sad.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You must forgive me for not recognizing you right away. It has been a long time—and you are a bit more grimy and tangled than you were then.”

  She did not realize she was trembling until her head was on his shoulder and his arms slipped around her. They crouched among the glinting clay pieces, and he rocked her and she shook but did not cry.

  “Dorin,” she said at last, lifting her head, “the Sea Raiders came to my beach, just as they did to your town. They killed my family. One ran. I chased him, but I couldn’t catch him, he was too fast . . . I am sure he is here. You know what they look like. Please, please say you have seen him. . . .”

  He made a low sound and took both of her hands in his own. She clung, nails pressing, skin white. “No,” he said quietly, “I have not. I am sorry. I am so sorry, Jaele.”

  They knelt for a moment more, silent in the shouting and singing of Luhr’s market. Then he said, “I will take you to a safe place,” and he helped her rise, slowly, gently.

  He led her through stalls and tents. She held his hand and watched her dirt-crusted feet moving against the ground. He stopped in front of a large wagon stacked high with pots and dangling jugs. There was a little room at the back of the wagon—red-gold cloth attached to wooden posts—and Dorin and Jaele ducked inside. A woman was sitting there, with a potter’s wheel before her. She did not look up when they entered; Jaele saw only her stooped back.

  “She’s deaf, and she can’t speak,” Dorin said, but there was something in his voice—a smile, a wink.

  He touched the woman’s shoulder and she raised her head. Her face was wrinkled, her eyes dark and piercing, and when they turned to her, Jaele felt a bit afraid.

  “This is Jaele,” he said as the woman watched his lips. She nodded and smiled. “Jaele,” he went on, one hand still on the potter’s shoulder, “this is Serani.”

  They sat together on the ground, smooth and light as the road outside, surrounded by wide-lipped bowls and swe
eping-necked jugs and pots of bright glaze. A small, round-doored oven stood in one corner of the room; two narrow reed pallets lay at either end. Sunlight streamed thick red through the cloth roof and walls; Jaele watched the colour shift and fade with the drifting of unseen clouds. She felt suddenly dizzy and Dorin, looking at her, said, “I’ll get you some food, and then you must sleep. Do not think of him—not now.”

  They ate slivered cheese and fleshy pink fruit and bread full of tiny holes, and she did not remember the green water, the fungus that had cracked in her hands.

  After she had eaten, Jaele peered at Dorin, who looked dim and soft in the light. The noise from outside faded. She blinked and moved her head, trying to shake off sleep. “Dorin,” she said as she at last curled up on the ground, “you went away. I went back to look for you, but you were gone.”

  He turned away from her. “I couldn’t stay,” he said. Sad—a boy’s eyes, his smile, so sad. “Now rest, Jaele. No more talking.”

  “Mmm,” she mumbled, and closed her eyes. He sat beside her, humming softly—voice rising, falling, sending her to darkness and forgetting.

  Jaele woke to red light and the piercing, wild sunsong of the desert nomads. She lay still, at first not recognizing the shapes and colours, the sound of voices outside or the soft whirring near her head. After a few moments she remembered—a rushing like water—and knew that the whirring was Serani’s wheel. She sat up, slow with bruises, and watched the old woman. She was sitting on a low stool at the wheel, head bent over a lump of clay that was spinning into curves before her. Serani looked up and smiled at her with her dark eyes, and Jaele felt herself smiling back—safe, in silence, from the raggedness of her new voice. As she stood, Dorin’s head appeared through the folds of the doorway.

  “So,” he said with that grin that Jaele already loved, “the sleeper returns to us.”

  She followed him through the hanging cloth and into the shade of the wagon. Pots and jars swung and stood cluttered; some of them, sun-lanced, shone brilliant red, blue, yellow. Jaele stepped out beyond the awning and looked up at the sky, huge and empty except for Luhr’s spires and mist-thin traces of cloud.

  “I must look for him,” she said.

  “First you’ll wash,” Dorin said from behind her. “And you can wear one of Serani’s tunics while she cleans yours. Then we’ll take a walk—I’ll close up for a while.” He motioned to the marketplace around them. “It’s a hundred worlds, a thousand. I’ll show you—and you can look for him.”

  And so—after sun-warmed water on her skin, and cloth that smelled like clay—they walked together through the heat and noise of morning in Luhr. They watched the half-giants clacking and stringing eels’ scales; sun-black nomads polishing the bone and sand of their pipes; acrobats dangling from their own long legs. Jaele slowed as they passed the tasselled tent of the desert tribe, but she did not see the little girl with the black eyes. They walked over carpets and rushes and cobblestones, around urns and stages and prayer mats. They did not see anything more than once, although she felt as if they were going in circles. A four-armed starfish lay on its back in a tray of water, juggling snail shells, and she looked at it with a stinging dryness in her chest. “It’s beautiful,” she said to Dorin, then walked away quickly, quickly, as he turned to her.

  She craned to see faces, hair, eyes, hands. Tall men glimpsed from behind, or walking toward and past her made her blood roar as it had on her beach, when she had looked at him and the wind had moved silently in the trees. But these men were strangers. Most, she saw when she drew closer to them, did not resemble him at all. Be calm, she told herself as Dorin led her among the changing shadows of the spires. He is here; there will be time to find him.

  They ate spongy sweetmoss and watched a play. Jaele could not understand the words, and Dorin said, “The actors are from the north. They live mostly underground: see how small their eyes are?”

  Jaele looked at him, remembering the boy. “Did you ever find the golden sea snakes?” Her words slipped out, away; she heard them, echoing and strange, even as he said, “Or trees as tall as the sky?” and smiled slightly. “Not yet. We’ll see.”

  They returned to Serani’s wagon as the sun climbed higher. Around the marketplace, tent flaps slapped shut and sleeping rugs were unrolled. Jaele could not sleep. As Dorin and Serani rested, she sat among the pots and jugs and breathed in great lungfuls of hot air. She watched coloured cloth moving in the dry wind that rose and fell, carrying the scent of the desert. She looked up from the pots and cloth, to the palace towers and the balconies that belled like blazing fishing nets against the sky.

  The market stirred again as shadows lengthened. Jaele and Dorin sold Serani’s wares, paid for with shells, coins, arrows, flowers, while the potter stood beside them. Darkness, when it came, was deep blue. Jaele remembered looking up from beneath water that was golden-green in the sun and blue-dark at night. She thought she should be wet; she could almost feel the scarred rock beneath her fingers.

  “It’s like the sea, isn’t it?” Dorin asked quietly from beside her.

  Jaele blinked, looked at him. “Yes. I was thinking that.” For a time they did not speak. Then she said, “Dorin . . . they did the same thing to you, to your village. You must still be angry, even though it was so long ago.”

  He turned his face away and wrapped his arms around himself. The wind was blowing night cold. “They did not do the same thing to me,” he said. “I didn’t tell you that.”

  “But,” she said, “you told me that the Sea Raiders had attacked your town—you left—I thought that your family had been killed.”

  He bit the inside of his cheek. “The Sea Raiders came, yes. Ten of them, in two boats. They stole some livestock and burned some houses and struck down a woman who tried to stop them. I do not know if she died. I left the village the next day, while the elders were giving speeches about the necessity of improved preparation and defences.” He paused and drew a deep breath. “I had no family. I had been planning to leave before the Raiders came. So no—they did not do the same thing to me.”

  “Oh,” Jaele said as emptiness spread through her like cold. I am alone, she thought. He gazed at him and wanted to grip his hand again, until hers was white.

  They stood a while longer in the marketplace, which was silent except for the wind, and very dark. The only light was from the palace, fire that shivered in the highest towers. “Let’s go inside,” Dorin said at last, quietly, and she nodded.

  She lay awake for a long time as he sang softly into the cold and the stillness.

  The next day, when the sun was high and Dorin and Serani lay sleeping, Jaele left the wagon with her dagger in her belt. She walked among the empty stages and booths, looking at the others who were sleeping and at the few who, like her, were not. She was calmer in this bright silence. She walked and looked and waited, with the dagger firm against her hip.

  A bend, another bend, and she could no longer see Serani’s wagon behind her. She stepped around a cushioned bench and over a wall of round green stones, and then she heard water. A splash, a creak of rope, a murmur of voices. She walked more swiftly, until she came to the fishfolk who were also awake in the blaze of afternoon.

  They were not like the Sea Raiders: she saw this immediately. Their bodies were green and blue scaled, their eyes round and white and nearly unblinking. But though they were not like the tall, sharp-angled men who had killed, she stood with her heart stilled, then frantic. The fishfolk were Raider kin; they were also—like the Queensfighters, like Luhr—words spoken by her father. She watched them at their well, drawing water, which they poured dark over their scales and mats. She watched them weaving green sea fronds together into shapes that were fluid or tangled. Jaele stood unmoving, until at last one of the fishfolk approached her.

  “You have been here for a long time,” it said, speaking her language with a hissing and bubbling of breath, and Jaele smiled uncertainly.
/>   “Yes,” she said.

  “Would you like to purchase something?” it asked. She shook her head and the fishperson made a sound. “I did not think so. What is it you want?”

  “I . . . I lived near the sea,” she began, and her voice went soft and steadied. Not the words she had expected, but she spoke on. “It is wonderful to see you here, with your water.” Again she felt the strangeness of speaking. Suddenly, standing with the fishperson who also loved the sea, she thought that words could not be the same without loom or oars or the deeds of Galha and her groom. She forced the thought away, and, since the fishperson had not replied, she continued, “It must be so difficult for you to be in this place.”

  The fishperson’s little mouth twitched, and Jaele hoped it was smiling. “Indeed,” it said, and glided back toward the well.

  A moment later it returned, carrying a plait of seagreen. Jaele took it in her hands and bent her head. She could almost feel it, unbound and billowing against her skin in cold grey water.

  “The greens you eat,” it said, “as you know.”

  She nodded, knowing also that she would not—could not—eat them. “I must ask you something,” she said quickly, ready now. “I need you to tell me about the Sea Raiders. Please.”

  It gazed at her, its white eyes steady on her face. Please, she said again, silently, and then it spoke.

  “We swam together, long ago, when the seas were one and there was no land. Then the land rose above the water, and our strokes parted. They lived more and more above, and we remained beneath, though we did know each other still. But they became strangers, as time passed. Their desires for land space were not clear to us.” The fishperson blinked. “The rest you have heard, I think. All Queensfolk have.”

  Jaele nodded and looked away briefly. . I have seen.

  Then it said, “Strange, that you ask this now,” and Jaele turned back to it.

  “Why?” she asked, though she knew what it would say. She shivered, and her hand gripped the hilt of her dagger.