A Telling of Stars

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


  “No. An ancient map, drawn by someone who only set down places known and seen.”

  Jaele swallowed and turned away from Fane and its river. She found Luhr and the jungle, the forest—then the shore of the Southern Sea. An empty shore, whose shape she did not recognize: no Giant’s Club, no echoes of children laughing, loom clacking, oars dipping. She closed her eyes.

  “It will not be harmed by water,” Bienta said. “The parchment has a smooth finish that keeps it dry. I do not know how this was done. But it may be important when you reach the river.”

  “Thank you,” she said after a long silence. “Now I am truly ready.”

  “Take good care, my dear,” he said as they stood in front of the hut.

  She smiled at him as she closed her hand around the sack of food Serani had prepared for her. “I will,” she said.

  Serani laid her cheek against Jaele’s, then took her face in her hands; her fingers were hard and cool against Jaele’s skin. Bienta squeezed her until her bones ached. And then, before she could speak or sit down or stay there forever, Jaele set off alone in the wind, with the grass stretching like a road before her.

  IBEN

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jaele walked for days, almost without halting; the noise of her thoughts dimmed and she soon knew only that her legs were moving. The grass became shorter, coarser, and flat grey rocks appeared with stunted trees growing out of their fissures. Her feet, bare since Telon Plain’s soft, springy earth, now fell on prickly lichen and plants with dagger tips; she did not put her shoes on, and the soles of her feet grew thick and criss-crossed with lines. She saw a mountain range in the distance—a dark smudge along the northern horizon. Every morning, she took the map from her pouch and bent over it. I am here, she thought each day, as if she could see herself in the ink. And he?

  The moon swelled red and huge over the rock, then shrank again to darkness. The grass was replaced by slate and moss. Nights were whitely cold, and the wind sighed among the stones. Jaele’s food was gone, and there were no longer field plants or roots to eat. She stumbled on in exhaustion too great for fear. Somewhere beside or behind her, Dorin sang.

  At last, when the moon was black, Jaele came to the barrows. It was a cold, cold night. Rain was slicing the air around her, falling and leaping off the rock, twisting like folds of cloth in the wind. Lightning flickered, turning the rain to silver and the stones into looming white shadows. She was running, her head bent against the water. She was weak and bone-weary and ill, and did not realize where she was until everything—the rain, the wind, the lightning—stopped.

  She was standing within a circle of eight stones. At first she did not realize they were stones: they towered over her, carved into shapes that glowed faintly red. These stones ringed a moss-covered hillock. She looked out beyond the stones at the storm, which she could see but no longer hear or feel. As she looked, a figure appeared. It drifted, blew like smoke toward the stillness of the barrows. Jaele saw hair, black streaming in silent wind; she saw a wildly flaring dress or cloak. And she saw horns, two of them, curving above the hair. Lightning forked: the horns were closer, and talons flashed. A memory, quick and clear, of her father’s voice: “The iben seers—who had horns on their heads and talons instead of fingers—sang of the future in words so beautiful that people who heard them wept in fear and joy.”

  Jaele fell to her knees as the iben woman slipped within the ring of stones. Oh, father, she will tell me—she will speak to me of my journey’s end. The thought was slick with terror and relief.

  The woman’s talons were cool and smooth on Jaele’s arm. Jaele rose, supported. The woman led her to the tallest of the stones, then laid her palm upon the lightning-lit surface. There was a rushing—wind or water or blood—so loud that Jaele closed her eyes. She felt herself falling then, spinning down into darkness too deep for shadow. She screamed—but the talons gripped and guided her, and she met the ground softly. Lay whimpering, in black silence.

  “I can’t see,” she said at last, and her voice rasped. “Please—it is too dark.”

  The talon touch returned, this time on her forehead, and she shut her eyes again. “No light may be here,” said a low voice. “It is pain. You will see, as well—now and after. We will give you sight.”

  And all at once Jaele did see: the night-haired woman with horns and cool, smooth talons, smiling infinite tenderness and safety; seven others around her, faces hidden but smiling.

  “How. . . .?” Jaele asked, and the woman said, “We have lived so long in darkness—we have learned how to see, as if in sun. It is a thing we can share, so that there will be no fear.”

  “You are iben,” Jaele whispered. “Why are you here? My father told me you lived on mountains.”

  The woman’s face turned away. “We are iben, far from our home. Captives, far from our home. So far—and still we must be, in darkness dreaming of sun.”

  “Why? Why captives?” Her own voice pulsed away from her like a line of waves.

  All eight were silent, breathless, until the woman said, “We cannot explain—we must wait, only, without explaining. Perhaps we will be free.”

  “How will you be free?” Jaele said, and they answered together, their words twining like roots beneath the stone.

  “Our freedom will be spoken without knowledge. A gift of air and footsteps, our beginning from an ending.”

  Jaele shivered; earthen walls and talons bent to warm her. “You have seen your future, then,” she said. “My father also told me that your people are seers. There was a story—you helped Queen Galha when she was just a girl, sick and afraid. And in Luhr’s marketplace you sang of time to come and people paid silver. . . . Please—I need. . . .” Her voice disappeared again in the strange dark light. Sing of my journey. Tell me I will find him.

  Talons on her brow, stroking her eyes until they closed. Silence, then a sound like sunlit rain, falling, dancing around her. The iben sang, and Jaele strained toward the words. She heard birds and waves and the heavy hum of darkness beneath ocean. Seagreen billowing, fish blurring, her own limbs weaving among them. She sank into the sounds, still straining; they swelled and slowly subsided. Her own ragged breathing echoed.

  “No,” she said. “I do not understand. I heard the ocean but nothing more, nothing important. Please sing again, in words that will help me.”

  The iben looked at each other. The one who had led her down turned to her and said, “We are sorry for your sadness—sorry we cannot help you in the way you desire.”

  Jaele turned her face away, to root and earth. “Let me go, then. Take me back up so that I may continue my journey.”

  The iben woman said, “Yes—I will do this, when the storm has passed. But now you can help us.”

  “Oh?” Jaele said, hardly noticing the eager stirring of the iben. Her sudden hope pressed away by cold and bitterness.

  “We need your eyes,” a man said, quick with yearning. “So long not to see; only Llana sees, when the moon is dark above. She walks above, beyond the circle of our prison, but there is skylight sometimes, and she has to return. She cannot tell us fully. You tell us your eyes.”

  Jaele felt a surge—understanding or future, streaks of sky and leaping. “My eyes,” she repeated, and the feeling ebbed. Later, she thought, know later. She did speak into the darkness, though at first the words were awkward and reluctant. But then they came more smoothly, faster, and her bitterness dissolved in longing. She spoke about the water of her bay: green as a serpent’s back near the shore, blue by the rocks below the sky. How this water, from below, smudged the sun so that it could almost be looked at. She spoke about voices and a single candle, brown hands on woven cloth, a baby laughing in the sea. Very slowly she spoke about strangers and her mother’s eyes, steel and blood and torches dancing into dark water, a man running into shadow. Her voice grew thick and dry.

  “Calm,” the woman Llana crooned as she faltered
. “Calm, child.”

  “Llana,” Jaele said when she knew she could not yet tell them more, “I am so tired—please tell me of your home. . . .”

  For a time their own strange language lit the cavern. Jaele slept as hours, days spun above the stone. Woke again and heard, “. . . but our families are many in number, almost countless members, and each print in the grass is known. So many, leaping and climbing, close to the face of the sky. So many voices, raised together in singing. Now we eight only are family. We speak to see again the faces and running of our kind; our songs too seem so briefly to bring us light. But our speaking alone is not enough. Not enough, though beautiful.”

  They sang. Jaele heard dawn and cold, the white-green of meadow frost. She heard the mountain peaks of jagged rock and dazzling, windy heights of sky. Heard the sun, burnishing horns and talons and ice-limned pools. She shivered at the yearning, the glow of beauty and remembering.

  They bowed their heads when the song was done. She looked at them, and spoke through her own sorrow. “Long ago your people travelled to Luhr. I too have seen it.” The spires, stretching blue-white among scatterings of cloud. Then sunrise over sand, and sunset over dancing stalks of grass and corn. She faltered a bit. Suddenly she felt her eyes, and the emptiness of her body. “Yes,” they urged her, “yes, you are nearly finished—be strong,” and she spoke of root tunnels and wet, singing stone, of threads spun among branches tiny, sun-pricked hairs on the back of a neck.

  “And the house, the cat . . . the lapping blue river. And that is . . . all, only the lightning on the slate and stones. I ran, and I was so hungry . . . the rain was like ice, and I pushed against it until I was within the stones and . . . there was silence. Silence, then Llana and here, beneath. . . .” She felt the weight of the darkness and of her hunger, and cried out.

  “Please,” she said, when the pain had passed. “Sing to me of where I am going. I am sure that you could tell me more: I beg you to tell me.”

  Llana said, “No, little one: it is for you to tell. For us to ask you—what is next?”

  Jaele remembered Bienta, who had asked the same question in a room of sunlight and flowers. “My journey,” she said at last, over the sting of regret and fear. “Like Queen Galha’s. I have a map: I will find the Ladhra River and the Eastern Sea, for he is going there. The Sea Raider . . . I will find him.” She was dizzy with sleep and words.

  “Now this part is done.” Iben voices far away, rich as earth. This part? Jaele wanted to say. I still do not understand. “Go, Jaele, and we will wait.” Before she slipped away beneath Llana’s song, she heard sighs, rippling joy and tears.

  ALILAN

  CHAPTER SIX

  The sun was round and golden above the slate when Jaele opened her eyes. She was lying down; two of the twisted barrow stones rose above her. She blinked, squeezed her eyes shut against the light. Far up in the green-blue sky a bird called.

  The air was clear and sparkling now that the storm was over. Shadows stained the rocks: dark wet patches, leftover rain. Jaele sat up, hearing her bones, her blood, feeling her skin, warm and aching against the air. Turning her head, she saw a bag of grey cloth lying beside her bundle on the stone. It was full of berries, roots, green fronds that smelled of spices. She remembered darkness and cool talons, singing that had told her nothing of time to come. She clutched the cloth in her hands.

  Dusk gathered, and still she sat on a rock outside the barrows. The moon rose full and red, and when she saw its light on the stones, she knew that Llana would not come. Jaele did not sleep: she was vividly awake, almost in pain. She twined her dark hair between her fingers, waiting for dawn.

  When she set off eastward in the sunlight, she did not look back at the red-stained stones. “I have seen the iben,” she said aloud—and again the feeling, the almost-knowledge of a return and more words beneath the earth. “Dorin,” she said, and longed to tell him.

  She walked for days over the slate, knowing from her map that she would soon find the hills. She began to see tiny flowers among the moss, and more small, warped trees. The sun rose before her and set behind, and the night rain fell cool and gently. She filled her empty grey cloth again with roots and yellow berries, thinking of Serani. And when the sun hung deep in the sky, she ran, bare feet falling on grass and soft earth.

  The moon dimmed from full to crescent to sliver, until one night there was only star-lined darkness. For her, though, it was not just darkness. “You will see, as well—now and after,” Llana had said—and on that night without a moon Jaele discovered the truth of these words. She saw shapes and details in the black, as she had beneath the iben stones, and she did not stumble as she walked. In the days that followed, this iben-sight came to her only in complete blackness; the merest hint of dawn would rip it away, leaving her eyes awash with tears. Gradually it strengthened, until on nights and days that came much later—in shadowed rooms and tunnels, and beneath the sky—it was no longer as sensitive to the light of flame or moon. On that first moonless night she thought, with wonder and tenderness, Oh, Llana—and, immediately after, Not the help I wanted—not what I needed. . . .

  The moon had waxed and waned several times when Jaele came within view of the hills. They rose tall and rounded out of the grass; they were covered with trees that shone scarlet, orange, yellow, silver-green. When the first line of hills grew close she ran—ran until she was standing in the fragrant shade of the trees. For the first time since leaving the mountains, she heard birdsong and the rustling of leaves.

  The light filtering down around her deepened to bronze. She wandered among the hills, breathing in earth and cool shadow. Then, when dusk had finally fallen, she smelled wood burning. After a long moment she followed the smell, iben-sight leading her around trees and over roots. The scent grew stronger; as it did, she heard steady pounding, and voices, many of them, raised in shouts and laughter and singing. She hesitated, especially when she saw the orange of the fire flickering through the trees. But then, as the laughter echoed, she walked ahead and into a clearing.

  At first, as her iben-sight was wrenched away in light, she saw nothing but tear-blurred colour—flurries of colour which gradually sharpened into bright skirts flying wide, flashes of copper arm and neck rings, brown skin, white kerchiefs and billowing shirts. Drums sounded; bare feet flattened the grass; limbs wove through the sparks of the fire. Hands clapped in time with the feet and drums, and horses stamped.

  As she stood, blinking and overwhelmed, one of the dancers spun into her and sent them both sprawling. Jaele struggled to her knees found herself looking into the flashing-eyed face of a girl.

  “What were you doing, standing here like a sunstruck horse? You’ve ruined my dance! Who are you? Can you speak?”

  Jaele gaped, her throat too dry and constricted for words. The girl’s face was thin and dark brown, and she had a decidedly turned-up nose covered by a smattering of freckles. But most striking were her eyes, which shone a clear, bright blue.

  She was rebraiding her black hair, which had come undone in the fall. As her fingers flew, she said, “Perhaps you don’t speak? I’m sorry. My name is Alnossila, but everyone calls me Nossi. Maybe you could write your name in the earth with a stick?”

  Jaele laughed. Nossi, after the shock of hearing her, laughed as well. As the dance ended, Jaele took a gasping breath. She picked up a twig and, as she traced letters in the ground, said, “I am Jaele.”

  “Well, Jaele,” Nossi said at last as they wiped at their eyes, “are you hungry? Thirsty? You can nod: it is quicker and easier than writing in the earth.”

  Jaele chuckled. “Yes,” she said, “to both.”

  Nossi led her among the fires and Jaele looked at them, at cook pots simmering, at the young people, polishing daggers, who clustered around the horses. She saw wagons standing among the fires, wheels large and still and crusted with earth. “This is my family’s wagon,” Nossi said, gesturing. “And over there is our
fire. Let me take you to them—I will introduce you.”

  “No,” Jaele said hastily, “please—could we just sit in your wagon for now? I am . . . tired.” Noises and people still too beautiful, too strong after solitude.

  “Tired as well as hungry and thirsty,” Nossi said, and smiled. “Very well. Come inside.”

  They ate bread and soup and laughed again, and Jaele felt a fullness like tears, warming, spreading into spaces of loneliness. When she had finished eating, she looked up through the lantern-lit darkness at the wagon’s ceiling. It was painted in greens and reds: twisting ivy and grass and licking flame.

  “I suppose,” she said after a silence, “that you want to know why I am here, alone.”

  Nossi shrugged. “We Alilan say that there is a time for every telling. You do not have to tell me this now, if you do not want to.”

  Jaele thought of the young people outside, with their horses and daggers. She thought of the wagons and the drums and Nossi’s quick laughter. Jaele said, “But I do. I do want to tell you now.”

  Nossi leaned back against the wall across from her. “Then I will listen,” she said.

  Jaele remembered the words she had spoken beneath the barrow stones; now she spoke them again, sitting in a wagon as Alilan danced outside. Nossi listened and did not move, except to roll the end of her braid over and over between her fingers. Jaele felt a familiar weight settling in her stomach—the bruising and tears which she clenched her fist around. When there were no more words, she too eased herself back against the wagon’s wall. She could see out the open door to the sky; the moon was just a fragment, a silver-blue curve among ribbons of cloud.

 

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