A Telling of Stars

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

  “Telling is magic,” Nossi said after a moment. “Any Alilan will swear it. You will be free. But first,” she went on, leaning forward so that shadows leapt, “first you will have your revenge. This is something I understand. My own parents. . . .” She turned her face away, eyes and lips closed tight against. When she looked back and spoke again, her words were firm and even. “My own mother and father were killed in a battle with our ancient enemies, the Perona. They are a cruel desert tribe - I long to meet them again, to avenge myself and my parents, whom I hardly remember.”

  “I am so sorry,” Jaele said, and Nossi smiled at her.

  “You see why I understand you. I feel your need.”

  “Yes,” Jaele said, and she knew, suddenly and with joy, what Nossi—already, unbidden—would say next.

  “I will go with you,” Nossi said in a low, urgent voice. “I will share your journey. But,” she added as Jaele also sat forward on her bench, “I think that this revenge should be a larger thing than you have said. It is not one man only who should suffer.”

  “No,” Jaele said—light, dizzy, trembling. She understood. All words, all meetings, had led to this. “You are right. Queen Galha did not take her revenge only upon the man who killed her daughter. Of course not—upon a people instead. She cursed all of them.” She breathed deeply; the smoke outside was sweet, clean in starlight. “I spoke to Dorin once of asking for Queen Aldhra’s aid against them—but I was not really thinking about them, only about that one man. The Sea Raiders—all of them—were too big a thought, after that. I never dared. . . . Nossi,” she said more slowly, “we would only be two.”

  “No,” Nossi said, “not two—many, for all Alilan understand revenge and honour. Others will come with us: I am sure of it. I must get my horse and dagger first, so you would have to travel with us for a time. But when I do have horse and dagger, we will all ride east; we will overtake the Sea Raider and then go on to the ocean.” She paused. “Will you wait for this? Can you?”

  “I. . . .” Jaele began, then bit her lower lip. “He may die. The fishperson in Luhr told me he would sicken. If I wait with you and he dies and I never see him, never find him. . . . Nossi, he cut my mother’s throat. I need him—his blood.”

  Nossi nodded once, quickly. “Of course. If I had to choose between avenging myself upon the very ones who killed my parents or upon all the Perona, I would hesitate. The first choice would be so just, so satisfying . . . but the other, Jaele, would be so much larger—so much more daring and lasting and great.” She smiled again. Jaele thought that she was glittering, her eyes and teeth and hair, the planes of her skin and the copper at her throat and wrists. “You would be glad of the larger choice in the end. And in any case, your Raider may not die. We may find him; your circle may be completed. And,” she said, “you should not be alone in this. Please wait for me. For us.”

  I will find him, Jaele thought, certainty swelling in her as it had in Luhr. We will find them. “Yes,” she said. “Oh Nossi, yes: I will wait for you.”

  “Well, then,” Nossi said. “We will ride together to the ocean, and we will fight these Sea Raiders for the honour of your family.”

  Jaele closed her eyes, which were dry. “Thank you,” she said. She smiled as she opened them again. “You are very . . . passionate.”

  Nossi grinned back at her. “Yes. That is the goddess Alnila in me. She is fire. Her twin, Alneth, is earth; she is the stubbornness in me.”

  “Tell me more of these goddesses,” Jaele said. She wanted Nossi to talk, wanted to listen in this glow of flame and hope.

  “Alnila is the beginning and the end,” Nossi said, fingers rolling, rolling her plait. “Fire burns in a body struggling for birth and in a body struggling to leave at death. So fires are always tended at a birth, and the dead are always burned to ash. Alnila is this fire; she surrounds our livingtime. Alneth is Alnila’s sister. She is the solid earth to Alnila’s fire. She is the other half of birth: all the plants, all the animals, come from her and are fed from her. She is the other half of death: her soil holds all that has turned to ash. Alneth is the twin shaper of our livingtime.”

  Jaele thought, briefly, that she had sensed images beneath Nossi’s lilting words: earth and sparks, damp ashes blowing and then still. She shivered.

  “Ah,” said a new voice, “the story of Alneth and Alnila.” A young man was leaning against the door frame beside Jaele; she had not heard him come. He looked down at her and smiled. He was tall—would have to stoop to enter the wagon—and his blue gaze was the same as Nossi’s. Jaele noticed a scar, a thick white line that cut through his left eyebrow to the bridge of his nose. The flickering light turned this scar from white to gold.

  Nossi rolled her eyes. “Another timely entrance,” she said, and to Jaele, “This fine example of Alilan manhood is my brother, Aldreth. Aldreth, this is Jaele, who is also a traveller.”

  He smiled at her again, and she felt herself flushing beneath the flames and ivy. “Jaele,” he said, “it is good to meet you. And now I must add to Nossi’s excellent account of Alnila and Alneth by telling you that we always worship these goddesses. We love fire: we love battle and passions of the body, we love the spinning of dance and drink. And we love all this with the constancy and stubborn weight of the earth.”

  And so, Jaele quickly discovered, they did. In the morning the Alilan rose with clamour: shouting, singing, a clanging of pots. Daggers were drawn and used before dawn; the healer’s wagon was quickly surrounded by a collection of grim-faced youths nursing assorted cuts and bruises. The wagons began their daily journey slowly; children ran around and beneath them, screaming with laughter or challenge. The young women and men with their own horses, Aldreth among them, rode ahead, straining to best each other in speed and grace. And as soon as night began to fall—at the slightest hint of long shadows and thickening light—the wagons halted and the fires were lit. There was eating then, and storytelling, and of course dancing, that whirling and leaping through the fall of sparks.

  “Alnila’s tears,” Nossi’s grandmother, Alna, told Jaele, nodding at the orange-white sparks. She was smiling her toothless smile, stamping a brown and gnarled foot as the others danced. Jaele smiled back at her and turned again to the dancers.

  I was hungry for the sight of them, she says, much later. As hungry as all of you are, still, for my words of sunlight and freedom. I watched them: so many people, and so bright. I thought of Bienta and Serani, dipping, spinning in the wheat and corn; I remembered them, and felt so far away from Telon Plain.

  The wagons soon left the hills and rolled into the marshes beyond—northward, Jaele saw when she looked at her map and at the sun, hanging behind cloud. This land was a muted brown, dusted in the early morning with crackling white frost. The cold made the ground firmer than it was in summer; the horses walked without fear over peat that sank only slightly beneath their hoofs. Chunks of peat were thrown on the fires: the flames hissed and smoked and gave off a dark moist scent.

  North, not east. A longer journey, but I know it is right. I am as sure as if the iben had sung it to me. Their voices gentleness and comfort, lulling fear to sleep.

  “What is that?” Nossi was standing above her.

  Jaele looked up and smiled. “A map that shows where I want to go. The east.”

  Nossi frowned at the map as she sat down beside Jaele. “You plan to use this to find your way? To find the river and the sea?”

  “Yes. There is much on this map that I do not need or plan to see. But look—there are the hills, and here are the marshes. We are here . . . and this is where we want to be.”

  Nossi shook her head; the braid hanging over her shoulder swung back and forth. “It is pretty, I suppose, but we Alilan do not need such things. We could take you to that river riding backward on our horses.”

  “You know how to get there?” Jaele asked, and Nossi snorted.

  “The wide river that begins in the
desert? Of course we do! Put this map away. When it is time, we will find the river for you.” She stood again and gazed at the campfires around them, glowing, coiling smoke into a low and sunless sky. “I think,” she said, not turning to Jaele, “that you should speak of your journey to the others now. I have mentioned it to some; they are eager to see you, to listen to you. As many as possible should know—especially the young ones. Then you will be sure of your army, though it will not ride for a time. Aldreth!” she called, and her brother’s head emerged from the doorway of their wagon. “Could you ride through the camp and tell everyone that Jaele would like to speak to them here?”

  “I—” Jaele began, as Aldreth sketched a bow with mock gravity and intoned, “But of course: I am ever in the service of She Without a Horse.” He ducked to avoid the clod of earth Nossi had thrown, and chuckled as he jogged away from their fire, toward the line of horses.

  Jaele looked down at the map in her hands but did not see it. Saw instead her own brother’s face, and heard his laughter and hers, their scoffing, with waves and wind beneath. No, she thought. Stop.

  “What were you going to say?” Nossi was still standing, and Jaele rose beside her.

  “I do not know if I can speak,” she said. “To so many people, that is. This is what I have been wanting, but now. . . .”

  “Then I will speak for you,” Nossi said. “If that would be easier. If you would not mind your tale coming from my mouth.”

  Jaele smiled. “No—I would not mind. All words sound stronger when you speak them.”

  Moments later Nossi climbed the wagon’s steps and turned to look out over the whispering crowd that had gathered. Jaele sat at her feet. She also looked at the Alilan, all of them young, only some of them familiar to her.

  “Thank you for your presence here,” Nossi began, and the whispering faded as gently as foam sinking into sand. “I am speaking now for my friend Jaele, who has come to us from a great distance.” Jaele nodded once. All the faces were blurred now, except for Aldreth’s. He smiled at her from his place in the first ring of people, and she willed her eyes, at least, to smile back at him.

  “Jaele is a traveller because her family was murdered by Raiders from beyond the Eastern Sea. These Raiders are the ancient enemies of her people, whose warrior queen, Galha, was known to our own ancestors. Jaele is alone. She is journeying to the sea now, following the same path of vengeance ridden by Queen Galha so long ago.” Jaele was biting the inside of her cheek; she tasted blood, warm salt dark, and swallowed convulsively.

  “We Alilan understand vengeance. It has been many seasons since we battled the Perona, yet our hatred only burns more strongly, and we yearn, always, to meet them in their desert of red and stone.” A murmur rose; the Alilan shifted and seemed to lean forward, straining toward Nossi’s words. Jaele did not move. She felt hot, as if the sun were blazing from an empty sky, as if there were sand beneath her bare feet. She shook her head and heard Nossi say, “We are many; Jaele is but one. Her desire and her courage are plain to me, and I wish—need—to aid her. I have promised that I will join her once I have my horse and dagger, and she has said that she will wait for me.” She gazed at the assembly for a moment; she was fierce in her stillness and her silence.

  “Who will come with us? It will be a long journey—but we Alilan journey every day for all our days. Jaele’s rage is hers alone—but rage has ever been the wood beneath our fires. Also,” she said, and her smile flashed, “it would be glorious. A tale Told by generations of Alilan. Who, then? Who among you will journey with us to the Eastern Sea?”

  Wood snapped and spat; a horse whickered. Aldreth was the first to step forward, lifting his dagger high above his head—and then other blades were drawn and held against the sky, and torches as well, so that many suns shone above the wagons and the cold grey marsh.

  “No,” Jaele protested feebly to a group of youths the following morning, “I don’t dance, really I don’t. I just watch. The only thing I do is run.” There had been an inn, once, smoky and candlelit, with a scarred wooden floor that buckled upward so that it felt as if it were moving as she danced. Her father had held her, laughing. She shook her head, and the memory—another too warm, too near—melted away.

  “Ah, you run!” Aldreth slid from his horse’s back, and Jaele flushed and stared at the ground. “If you run,” he continued, “you can also dance: it’s all in the way the soles of your feet meet the ground. But let’s see you run. A race to that rise, beyond the wagons?”

  As the people around her cheered, Jaele flushed more deeply. “Let’s go!” Nossi cried, leaping from foot to foot. “I’m ready! Anyone who dares, line up here. Alila, you give the signal.”

  Jaele found herself between tall Aldreth and his taller friend Alnon. They looked at one another knowingly above her head; at that moment her panic slipped away and into defiance. She tensed as the girl Alila raised a white kerchief. When the cloth came down, fluttering against the grey sky and orange-sputtering fires, Jaele hardly felt herself move. She sensed the men beside her launching themselves forward, and she heard the yells of the spectators; but she herself was stillness as soon as her feet began to fly beneath her.

  She was alone by the time she reached the rise. Aldreth was well behind her, and Nossi and Alnon were behind him. Jaele stood on the hillock, squeezing her toes into the springy peat, and watched them come. The stillness was about her yet when Aldreth arrived, panting, eyes wide.

  “By the Twins,” he said, doubling over but lifting his head to look at her, “I can hardly wait to see you dance.”

  And that night, despite her resolve, she did. Aldreth and Alnon sat at grandmother Alna’s fire (“Well, well,” Nossi had hissed, clutching Jaele’s arm, “Alnon has come too. Isn’t he handsome? I will fight beside him, someday”), and they brought with them a burning drink of honey and spices.

  “To the winner of the race,” Aldreth said with a grin, lifting his wooden goblet. “May she dance as lightly.” Jaele drank. The liquid was sweet and smooth, and slid warmly down her throat to her stomach. Somehow her goblet was always full after that, and she drank until the flames blurred and the drums were her own pulse.

  Dimly, she felt Nossi tug at her hand. She stood and whooped at the mad tilting of the earth. People were already spinning and clapping, and Jaele saw Nossi join the widening circle. She had watched her friend dance every night, and each time had felt full of yearning as Nossi’s limbs and braided then unbound hair became river and flame. But this night Jaele too was fire, and Aldreth was beside her, laughing; she leapt past him and into a fall of sparks.

  It was like running, except that there were so many people, so many voices and bodies which she sensed, even when her eyes were half closed. She danced on her own; later she danced with Aldreth, turning in the circle of his arms. She heard Nossi’s laughter over the drums and stamping, and saw her wiry friend Alin leaping head over heels around his own small fire. But these faces swept by; the next day Jaele remembered only the flames reaching into the darkness, and the heart-thud of earth and drums and blood.

  After the race and Jaele’s first dance, Aldreth and Alnon came often to sit by Alna’s fire. Nossi’s eyes would flash and her hair would toss, black waves in the light. Alnon braided it; Jaele watched his fingers stroking and drawing the strands apart, but she could not watch for long. The next day the boy Alin would wag his finger at Nossi, mock severe. “My dear,” he would say, “you are breaking my heart. If Alnon weren’t so big, I’d knock him right off his horse’s back.”

  Jaele watched them; she listened to them fighting with smiles in their voices, and saw their faces when they looked furtively at each other. She was awake the first time Nossi stole away in the darkest, stillest part of the night, and she woke again when her friend crept back at dawn. And though she tried to laugh as Alin did, all she felt was a spreading emptiness. Dorin returned to her then.

  “Jaele,” Nossi whispered one night
, many days after the race, “I was wrong about your being mute, but I am sure that you’re blind.”

  “Oh?” Jaele said, watching her breath curl smoke into the darkness. “How am I blind?”

  Nossi half rose and leaned on one elbow. “Don’t be such a misery! Open your eyes and look away from Alnon and me for a change. When you do, you’ll see Alnila’s flame in someone else’s eyes.” There was a silence. After a moment Nossi lay back with a thump. “You’re as stubborn and fiery as we are, Jaele, the way you love Dorin. But he’s not here, nor is he ever likely to be.”

  Jaele closed her eyes and began to breathe slowly and deeply. Nossi growled, “Alneth bury you, you foolish girl! And,” she hissed, “I know you’re not asleep.”

  The next day the two avoided each other. The sun was shining, though not warmly; the sky was thick and grey. “It will snow soon,” Aldreth said, coming up quietly behind Jaele as she stood outside the cluster of wagons. When she did not reply, he smiled. “Come with me—I’ll take you for a ride on Nilen.”

  “No,” Jaele protested as he led her to the horses, “I haven’t had much luck with horses—I don’t think they like me.” Within moments they were galloping away from the fires; moments after that, Jaele was laughing.

  “Nossi told me you fall more than you ride,” she said to him later, somewhat shakily, as he slid off Nilen’s back.

  He snorted and held up a hand to help her down. “She’s just jealous. What else has she told you that I can clarify?”

  Jaele sat down on a pitted boulder. Although she attempted to stop them, her legs were trembling. She still felt the pounding beneath her, against her thighs and up into her stomach.

  “Well,” she said as Aldreth sat below her, “this is perhaps too serious a response, but she hasn’t told me much about what happened to your parents. Just that they died when she was young, in a battle with the Perona, and that she doesn’t remember it very well.”