A Telling of Stars

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

  The fishperson led her to an enormous slab of stone. There were many fishfolk here, gliding in and out of the cave that lay below the overhanging rock, and among them swam wingfish, swallowtails, blue skimmers. A very large fishperson held itself upright in the cave, running strands of lakegreen through its webbed hands. Jaele’s guide stopped before it and it turned. She unclasped her fingers to reveal the smooth red stone that had been given to her by the fishperson in Luhr. The creature before her bent and touched it, then straightened and nodded. It raised its hands and sketched sharp spires, flat desert; Jaele bubbled, “Yes”, recognizing the Queen’s City. The two fishfolk looked at each other, and she thought that they were sad, passing between them a vision of woven pallets lying by a well beneath a blistering sun.

  Small fishfolk leapt and wheeled around her. One of them gave her a ribbon of lakegreen to eat. Everything was sparkling and indistinct. She was so warm—it was inconceivable that above this water of honey and forest sun there was black and cold, and above that wind and snow. She thought she heard singing; she remembered the earth silga, and her need to speak to these fishfolk was as piercing as a blade.

  “You?” the largest fishperson motioned. “Where?”

  She swallowed and lifted her hands. Slowly, carefully, she began to sketch her own lines in the water: webbed fingers and toes (not fishfolk), boats, the sea. She saw with another stab of excitement that they understood. They were very still, and their wide eyes slipped from her hands to her face and back. Murtha and the earth silga had also watched her silently, in their chamber of green horns. There she had not spoken clearly enough of hatred and revenge. Take care, she told herself. This time must be different.

  “Daggers and blood,” she said with her hands. “Bodies falling. My mother, my father, my brother. Sea Raider boats and daggers and fire. One of them left behind, running, always before me. Me—walking, swimming. Carrying my own dagger to the ocean in the east, Alilan riders around me. Sea Raiders, me; blood and bodies falling.”

  She paused and breathed the golden-green. The largest fishperson nodded once; the others shifted in a rippling of scales and lakegreen. Her hands opened and closed, then swept out again. “Alilan riders—and you. The Sea Raiders are your kin—but you are so good, not like them. You must hate them as I do. Come with me, above; or travel by lakes and rivers, and find the place where the largest river meets the sea, at the tall houses of Fane. Come with me. Please.”

  She held her clasped hands before her for a long time. She felt their eyes, their stillness. Nothing rippled now—until the largest fishperson moved its head back and forth, back and forth. No beneath a mountain; no beneath a lake.

  Jaele shook her own head. “Why?” she shaped, hands savage in the water. The warmth of Alilan understanding receded before an older bitterness. “You must hate them, you should. . . .” The large fishperson shaped separateness, two halves drawn apart long ago, and she interrupted, sketching the spires of Luhr as it had, sketching a queen and a princess who had also lived long ago. “Long ago, but that does not matter: I understand them, they make me feel. . . .”

  Then the large fishperson drew the Sea Raider, and she too was silent. The Sea Raider—seen by other fishfolk, farther south. Beneath a different lake, a moon ago. The Sea Raider swimming, his strokes steady, though his steps on land were slow. Following the path of his ancestors. “He will die”—she heard the liquid voice of that other fishperson as this one said with its fingers and palms. “He will die without help from you or your dagger. Leave him. Do not follow.”

  I cannot wait after all, she thought; I must follow him now. For a moment she saw him so clearly: paces away from her, his lips drawn back, his forehead bloodied. His blood? Her mother’s? Rage and need returned to her for the first time since she had met the Alilan. She felt cold, weak, borne up only by golden water. Then she thought of Nossi and Aldreth and an army, blood among the stones of the Raiders’ Land. “You should not be alone in this,” Nossi had said. Jaele lifted her hands with difficulty—suddenly tired, trying not to tremble. “It is not only him—it is all of them. I must find them in their land, where Galha cursed them before.”

  No. No. In the silence that settled then, the fishperson who had led her down placed its hand gently on her arm. She spun away from it, exhaustion gone as quickly as it had come. She spun away from their eyes and their shaking heads, and pushed herself upward, kicking at the many hands that called after her. This time she swam alone in hard, straight strokes, up toward the darkness. The golden-green faded; she took one last water-breath and entered the black and airless cold of the winter lake. She met sky and snow with a cry and floundered for a moment, hearing the wind and Nossi’s calls from far away, and another voice much closer.

  “Hold on to me—here—arms around my neck—Jaele, look at me.” She blinked away tears of air and daylight and saw Aldreth’s face, and she watched it as he pulled them both through the water and over the tooth-shaped ice, toward the shore where Nossi was waiting.

  “Jaele,” Nossi cried, bending over her, reaching for her hands and then her frozen hair, her cheeks, “I had to get him—I was so worried, you were gone for ages—not even a fish can hold its breath that long—have I mentioned that you’re a fool? A stubborn fool? Aldreth, hurry, get her to the wagon, and I’ll build up the fire. . . .”

  Nossi knelt beside her later. She and grandmother Alna had stripped Jaele’s clothes away and dressed her again, then piled blankets on top of her. “So,” Nossi said, “you were gone a very long time, as I may already have mentioned. Does this mean that you found them?”

  “Yes,” Jaele rasped. Her eyelids were heavy, drooping; she was shivering only sporadically now, easing into sleep. “They heard about the Raider. From other fishfolk somewhere . . . south of here. They will not join us. They do not hate. . . .”

  “Hmph,” said Nossi. “Well.” She added after a moment, “Perhaps this will be for the best. We will ride much faster than they would have swum.”

  Jaele wanted to laugh. Instead she slept, and dreamed of golden-green and rage.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Winter passed as the wagons turned south again, following the ancient Alilan path to the desert, where youths tamed their horses from the herds that ran wild. The desert where the Ladhra River was born. Aldreth wheeled and laughed in the sunlight beyond the first wagons. Jaele watched him, although she did not want to, and she occasionally looked from Alna’s fire and saw him standing in the darkness nearby. He had hardly spoken to her since the day at the fishfolk lake; she sometimes thought she must have imagined him holding her there. Excitement crackled as the wagons rolled on: young Alilan thought eagerly of their first horses and dreamed of skirmishes with the Perona beneath a sky-round sun. Jaele dreamed of an ocean she had never seen.

  She rose one morning and stood at the foot of the wagon’s steps. She gazed eastward, squinting into dawn light.

  “Well?” Nossi was beside her; Jaele saw her breath before she looked at her.

  “Well?” Jaele repeated, arching her brows.

  Nossi scowled as she wrapped her arms around herself beneath her thin spring cloak. “You know well enough what I mean. What is wrong? You’ve been so much quieter, since the fishfolk lake. So distant.”

  Jaele turned to the wagons that ringed theirs. She watched morning smoke, morning light on painted wood and horses’ harnesses. “Under the lake,” she said slowly, “when the fishfolk told me the Sea Raider had been seen, I wanted to run after him. I wanted this so suddenly and strongly—it was like a pain. But then I remembered you and Aldreth and our army, and the desire left me.”

  “And now it is back?” asked Nossi. “You want to follow him again?”

  Jaele drew a long breath. “I keep thinking about how much time is passing. He is so real to me again—I can see him, with that blood across his forehead. . . .”

  “Jaele,” Nossi said, leaning toward her as she had in the
wagon, that first night among the autumn trees. “He is still alive. Just ahead—one man, walking, while you and I are travelling with horses and wagons. We will find him. I am so sure of this—it is as if the goddesses had shown me our future. On our horses we will reach him before he reaches the sea.” Jaele, looking east again, felt Nossi take her hand and squeeze it. “Do not leave us, Jaele. I would miss you too much.”

  Jaele smiled, though Nossi shimmered through tears that had risen in her eyes. “I will not leave,” she said. “How could I?”

  “Good,” Nossi said briskly. “Good. Because I think we will need you, too. This may be the Season—we may meet the Perona again. And I will have my horse and dagger, and Aldreth will Tell the battle by Alnila’s light, as he will Tell the Raiders’ Land, someday.”

  “No, child.” Alna was standing behind them with a cook pot in her hand. She placed her other hand—root-bent—on Nossi’s arm. “Do not be so certain of these Tellings, or of your desire for them.”

  “But you’re old, grandmother,” Nossi said. “You probably don’t remember—and battles must be frightening for people who can’t fight.”

  Jaele looked at Alna, and she remembered Elic and her father and a sunlit beach. “Never again,” Reddac had said, grinding words, then strode away from them along the edge of water. Never again. And yet there had been a running man and a blood promise and a desert of three-pointed stars.

  The wagons were rumbling through scrub and red, blown dust only days from the sea of sand when Nossi danced with a man who was not Alnon. It was a huge empty night, and a dry wind was stroking the fires tall. The dancing was slow; men and women moved in a cooling of sweat and stirring hair. Jaele was dancing with Alin, whose knees were like jutting stones against her thighs. Nossi was with Alnon, at first, limb-wrapped as always. After he slipped away, she stood alone for a moment, head upturned to the wind. When Jaele looked at her again, she was smiling at another young man, one who rode with a group Jaele hardly knew. He put his fingers to Nossi’s hair, twining out of its knot. She looked quickly around before she stepped into his arms. They were swaying close when Alnon returned. Jaele saw him start and raise a hand in a small, helpless motion. Then he gripped Nossi’s arm and pulled her roughly away and into the night beyond the fires.

  Nossi crept back to their wagon much later, and Jaele started from a dream in which she had been awake and waiting. “Nossi,” she said thickly, and the girl looked at her with black, glinting eyes. “Nossi,” she repeated, and sat up.

  Nossi turned her head away. The wind was still grasping at her hair, lifting it like seagreen billows in water. “I have never seen him so angry,” she said, and her voice tore on the words. “He thinks this may be the end for us—imagine! Just once I dance with someone else—and was it so terrible? Was it?”

  Jaele rubbed a hand across her eyes. “Well, you were very close to him, and Alnon wasn’t prepared—”

  “And why should it matter?” hissed Nossi, leaning forward until Jaele saw herself—thrusting head and fading body—suspended in the darkness of her eyes. “I am an Alilan woman: I am Alnila’s daughter, wild, free, bound by no man. I am young and beautiful, and tonight I was happy, differently happy.”

  Jaele put a hand on her friend’s shoulder; she was trembling. “But you love Alnon,” she said, and Nossi made a sound like laughter.

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered, “yes. And there’s something else: the healer’s herbs seem to have failed.” She did begin to laugh then, softly, the drone of insects or grief. “A baby!” she gasped at last. “A baby! By the Twins, I am lost. . . .” Jaele reached for Nossi’s hand and held it tightly as her laughter turned to tears. “Tell me a story,” Nossi said at last. “Something that has nothing to do with us or this place.”

  “Well,” Jaele began, “this may remind you of Alilan custom, but it is an amusing tale. About Galha and her horse, a creature everyone had claimed could not be ridden. But long before she was a queen, when she was just a girl, she set off to tame this horse, taking with her only an apple and her own hair comb. . . .”

  Nossi chuckled and sniffed, then quieted. She turned her braid around and around in her fingers. Jaele smiled and kept talking. She finished the story even though she knew that Nossi was asleep.

  Jaele was not prepared for the desert. “It’s terrifying and ugly and glorious,” Nossi had told her once, and Jaele had nodded absently, thinking of the Ladhra River. “It seems,” Nossi had continued, “as if the desert will never end, as if there couldn’t possibly be any other place. That is why it is wrong that on your map it is just a small red patch.” Only when the Alilan wagons halted atop a stony ridge and the desert lay beneath them did Jaele understand Nossi’s words.

  The sand here was not smooth and golden like the sand on her beach: this was angry crimson, thrust into ridges that buckled and jutted against a sky which was also red, and endless. The Ladhra River is near and we will find it together, soon, Jaele thought, and could not believe it, though her heart pounded with excitement. She squinted but could see no horizon, only a frenzied shimmering, far away where earth and sky bowed together. The sand was pierced with rocks, squat and defiant, scarlet, orange, laced with blue. When the Alilan drew nearer to them, Jaele realized that some of these rocks were towering, unbearably slender; she thought of the iben, and Luhr, and yearned for water.

  The Alilan set up camp beside the first in a string of stone-marked wells that would lead them across the desert. They draped white cloaks and blankets among the wagons, and sat in shade that could not dull the thick pulsing of the air. “And now?” Jaele asked, with breath that was squeezed dry and small.

  Alin grinned and drizzled sand from his fist onto her leg, slowly, like snow. “We’re here,” he said. “This is the place. It’s the same every Season: we make camp at this well, close to those rocks that form a narrow passage—”

  “And we wait,” Nossi interrupted, ducking under the sand Alin tossed at her. He was with them more, now that Alnon was not. “It won’t be long: it’s as if the horses know we’re here. We’ll hear them before we see them We’ll have to sleep very lightly, because if they come at night, it’s very dangerous.”

  “And then,” Alin resumed, “we young Alilan climb the rocks and leap.”

  Jaele sat up. “You leap?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at the jagged stone outcroppings nearby. “From those? Why didn’t you tell me this before? Are you all sunstruck? Are you not afraid?”

  Nossi laughed, but her blue eyes were quiet. “I am afraid—people die every Season—but when I imagine. . . . They say the dry, windy fall is almost beyond Telling, but Aldreth will Tell it. It’s what comes after that is never Told: the joining, the taming ride. These things are so sacred that they are silent.”

  Jaele felt Nossi’s words glistening, briefly, into golden water that slipped through her fingers and hair. She closed her eyes and heard a piece of cloth flapping, and the steady, tired murmur of voices.

  The horses found them at dawn on their third day in the desert. Nossi shook her from sleep. “Wake up,” she hissed as her fingers dug tiny moons into Jaele’s flesh, “they’re coming.” And we will go, afterward—my army will ride, even half asleep, Jaele thought this, and trembled.

  It was still dark. A silver mist clung to the sand, the wagons, the bodies moving like shadows toward the black rocks. Jaele blew hot breath into her hands as Nossi whispered, “Listen.” At first, nothing: cold desert silence and sand footsteps. Then, as she rose to follow Nossi, a tremor—far away, like the unseen ripple that becomes a wave. By the time they reached the foot of the rocks, it was closer. The Alilan elders had climbed onto a low stone and were drumming, and the two rumblings joined and ached against the soles of Jaele’s bare feet. She stood beside Nossi as the mist shivered into gently reddening sky. When she put a foot to the notched cliff face, Nossi touched her arm.

  “No,” she said, “I’m sorry. This is ours.”
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br />   “Ours?” Jaele repeated, then understood. “Wait!” she cried as Nossi began to climb. “Nossi—I meant to ask before—what about the baby? What if you are hurt?” Her friend looked down at her with glittering eyes.

  “I am with the goddesses,” she called back. “I do not care.”

  Jaele felt cold as she watched Nossi’s plait swinging dark against the stone. Her eyes burned and stung; she stumbled to the rock where the other Alilan were gathered. Someone grasped her wrist and pulled her up to stand among the drums above the shaking sand.

  Just before the horses appeared, she looked around desperately—for a face, a hand, a voice that would call her “ours.” She saw strangers, smudges in the red light. She saw Aldreth standing with Alna pressed against his right side, and their eyes were dark mirrors before the Telling that would come with the hoofbeats through the stones. Jaele turned away from them and dove into green ocean while her brother called from the shore and her father’s loom sang threads and her mother laughed in the boat that she could see if she looked up toward the light. At last, here, the full and twisting warmth of memory. Tears coiled slowly down her cheeks, but she did not feel them.

  At first the horses were water or blood, pouring black over the dunes. Then the lightening sky struck their flowing manes copper, their flanks slick, their nostrils open wide as mouths. The sand was spray rising thick beneath hoofs; Jaele saw their glint, like dagger steel, and her beach receded in a great sweeping of fear. She looked away from the pounding, rippling sand, toward the highest rocks. The young Alilan were standing dark and still, so close to the empty space of air and falling.

  The sun rose suddenly, pushing crimson from the curve of dark sand, and the white Alilan tunics blazed as the horses streamed toward them. Jaele looked for Nossi’s shining braid and could not find it: the girls had bound their hair close to their heads so they would not be caught and dragged. The drumming was behind her eyes, scraping along her bones. She could see the horses’ foam and sweat and gleaming, flattened ears, and she looked again for Nossi and saw her at last, poised above the entrance to the pass. Then the horses were between the stone walls and Nossi was falling still a dancer into the golden light and others fell around her until the air was white and even though it seemed so slow their bodies met the horses in a moment and were joined.