A Telling of Stars

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

  Nossi landed on a red-brown back. She scrambled, wrapped her arms around the thick-veined neck and clung, and moments later she was almost sitting, one hand raised to the sky. Jaele saw long-limbed Alin lying backward on a silver horse; somehow he did not fall. But even as she gasped in relief, she heard screams and saw blood against white cloth and sand, and she watched as hoofs passed over bodies and left them motionless among the stones.

  Jaele sat alone and stared at the camp, the bloody sand, the distant place where the young Alilan and their horses had slid blindingly in and out of her vision and then disappeared. She saw the limp bodies being wrapped in red cloth and carried away. She saw the Alilan taking wood from the wagons they had stocked before entering the desert; they laid it out away from the rocks, in silence, as a hot, breathless wind began to stir the sand. Someone was weeping.

  Jaele did not eat that day, and she smelled no cook fires below. By midday she was sun-blind; by nightfall she was shivering. Only when she heard the thunder of returning hoof beats did she crawl down the stone. She lurched back to the camp and stood with the Alilan who were waiting for the riders. She watched them approach through smoke as the blood roared in her ears.

  Nossi was one of the first. Her hair was unbound now, flowing above her horse’s mane. She was not smiling, but her eyes were bright, glittering, and Jaele looked away. The horses were shining with foam, and their eyes rolled white when they halted. A few reared, front legs churning, but soon all were calm, their breath blowing mist against the sky.

  The Alilan elders stepped forward and extended their hands, and the youths slipped quietly from their horses and onto the sand. When the elders turned, the others followed with the horses. Jaele walked behind them all. They went out beyond the stones, into the dunes hissing wind and invisible night creatures. The horses stepped silently, and the sand closed over the shell marks of their hoofs. The Alilan halted at the wood that stood tall and dark; the young dead were there, still and glowing gently red beneath. Jaele heard weeping again, choked and dry.

  Aldreth and Alna were standing on a dune above the unlit fire. Alna’s head was bent, but Aldreth was lifting his face to the wind, eyes open wide. When Jaele looked at him she felt a sudden ache. Dorin, she thought.

  The Telling began in darkness. Alna’s words of desert cold and fear, of bodies huddled together below rock, shrinking as the earth shook. The first Alilan in this place, lost in edgeless sand, footsore and thirsty even in the bone-stripping air of dawn. And the sound pounding closer: they did not know, yet, what would come, the slashing legs and teeth and blood. But then they saw the horses, and suddenly shadows rose, young and defiant, and they crawled up the rock, two, four, eight, until the sky was stroked liquid white. Aldreth’s voice joined Alna’s—Jaele strained toward it, to hold it in cupped palms or open mouth—and the horses approached as light broke, and it was both the beginning and this day, for there was Nossi, standing at the edge of the rock. So many youths, stretching like wave foam back into the breaking light, and horses streaming thick, too many horses, and the leaping. Jaele’s breath was ripped away as she fell, and the air filled her eyes and ears and mouth as she screamed wild terror and ecstasy.

  Light blazed, and the voices—spouted words with fire—looped tails and the desert flowed away in spinning colour as Jaele clenched her hands around hot, coarse hair. She saw daggers and wind-blown sparks and incandescent manes, young limbs gripping and trembling blood—and beneath the glow, a current like music. She closed her eyes against the light and felt the horse’s heart and the earth, and as the words grew softer and faded, she cried out.

  She swam up through darkness and flame. Drums were sounding, and the scarlet bodies of the dead were rippling, blinding soft curves and slowly black. She swallowed over rising sickness and looked at Aldreth, who was kneeling on the sand with his head bent. Alna stood very tall above him; for a moment Jaele did not recognize her straight back and long white hair. The Alilan were rising to their feet, the old ones quiet, the young ones whooping and laughing and thrusting their new daggers toward the darkness, stretching out their arms to the horses that stood calmly fire-dappled nearby.

  The dancing that night was endless, grief and celebration and flying, stinging sand. Jaele watched with from the shadows; she saw Alin leaping, Aldreth moving in graceful silence, Nossi dancing alone with her eyes closed, and Alnon standing apart, gazing at her. Jaele watched and did not move, and no one came to her. After a time she rose and returned to her tent shelter. She sat for a while with her bundle on her knees. Without touching it, she felt her father’s dagger warm against her flesh, and the shapes of red pebble, green rock from beneath a mountain forest. I have stayed because of Nossi, because of an army. I have waited—and again she remembered the Sea Raider’s face, and his body disappearing into forest. Again she wanted to run, despite vows of vengeance and aid—east, in his footsteps, in a queen’s. She thought: Nossi will not miss me after all. I will go: the river is nearby, I will find it alone.

  She lay down on her side. Too weary for flight; too empty, suddenly, for rage or grief or memory. She fell asleep near dawn as the drums sang and the sparks fell like stars.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Wake up, Jaele! Come with me and meet Sarla.” Nossi’s face smiling above her was so familiar that Jaele smiled as well before she felt the stab of returning memory. It was already hot; the red sand throbbed and she closed her eyes. “Are you coming or not? She’s beautiful—I never could have imagined her so perfect.”

  The horse was pawing in the shadow of the rocks. When Nossi reached out to touch her mane, she lowered her head and whinnied softly. Jaele hung back until Nossi guided her hand to Sarla’s neck. She thought of Whingey—sad-eyed on the silga mountain, contented and bony on Telon Plain—and her hand pressed against Sarla’s glossy warmth.

  Nossi did not notice Jaele’s silence during the morning meal. She talked of battle and wind and steel, and her eyes darted over the heat-bent camp. When she rose and said, “Now I have something else to show you,” Jaele followed her, still without speaking.

  Jaele heaved herself clumsily up onto the horse’s back and put her arms around Nossi’s stomach, which tightened and strained when Sarla burst away. Jaele clamped her thighs and felt a surge of power which was not Whingey, not even Aldreth’s Nilen. The desert flew scarlet around them, and the hot air battered their cheeks and eyes; Jaele’s skin breathed and glistened and ignored her strangling fear. Nossi’s voice cried words Jaele did not understand, and the dunes sharpened into peaks higher than mountains. When the horse’s pace slowed, Jaele heard her own ragged breathing and Nossi’s laughter.

  Sarla reared and snorted as Nossi urged her to a stop. They were in a hollow place among the drifts: waves frozen at the moment before thundering, shifting only as the slow wind stirred sand along crests and down slopes. Jaele slithered off Sarla’s back and her legs crumpled under her. Nossi spoke into her mount’s cocked ear and rubbed her lathered neck. She turned to Jaele with a new smile. “She’s amazing, isn’t she? Now wait while I find it.”

  She looked carefully at each dune, then moved swiftly toward one as Jaele wobbled behind. Nossi dug at the sand wall until black stone gleamed beneath the red. “What. . . .?” Jaele asked, although she had not intended to speak.

  Nossi grinned at her over her shoulder. “Yes: the only black rock in this whole ocean of sand, as far as I know. This is a special place. Now help me get the sand off.” Jaele scrabbled too, until her fingernails stung and bent against the rock.

  After minutes of digging, a door emerged. It was very low, and imbedded in it was what looked like a golden claw, its talons pointing toward the ground. Nossi pulled on the claw, her feet buried and pushing, and the slab swung slowly outward with a gusting of cool, dark air. Jaele’s legs trembled again, but she followed Nossi quickly beneath the doorway, her body bent almost double. The door gaped open behind them.

  Small steps led down,
and the desert light that had shivered around them inside the doorway faded as they descended. Nossi went forward slowly, but after only a moment Jaele saw the fissured walls and the uneven stairs and the layers of darkness. Again she remembered the sorrowful dreaming voices of the iben, who had somehow given her this gift, this vision in black places. Her breath caught as she thought of their talons and stones, then of the green tunnels of the earth silga; for a moment she remembered when she had wandered alone. Remembered also that she had almost run, last night. Alone.

  “Nearly there,” Nossi said as the steps ended. They walked stooping along a short corridor until they came to another door. Jaele saw the glint of Nossi’s eyes as she put a hand to the golden claw. “At first it won’t look like much,” she said, “but I’ll show you.”

  Beyond the door even Jaele, with her iben-sight, saw only darkness. She stepped forward onto cool sand and heard Nossi pull the door shut behind them. There was a wind, and Jaele felt a tendril of her friend’s hair brushing sun-warm along her arm. She took another step and Nossi murmured, “Find the walls and draw your hands over them.” A few more paces and there was stone beneath her fingers—cut shapes, smooth and jagged, which stretched from floor to curving ceiling. As she touched the shapes, they seemed to warm; a moment later the darkness began to glow blue. At first it was faint—fingerprints of thin light—and she closed her eyes and opened them again. “Don’t close your eyes,” Nossi said from across the room. “Keep touching the walls, and watch.”

  Colour bloomed beneath Jaele’s fingers. It caught at cracks and peaks and spilled onto the sand. She and Nossi turned to each other in the trembling underwater light.

  “It’s beautiful!” Jaele said. “How. . . .?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nossi replied, standing on her toes and easing her hands along the ceiling. “Something to do with stone and warm skin perhaps. Aldreth and I found this place together, and it’s still exactly the same: the buried door, the claws, this room.”

  It was like the water close to the shore: clear, with darkness underneath and beyond; cool, but not cold and lung-crushing as it was farther out, past the rocks. Jaele touched the stone; it was wet. She watched the blue slip through her spread fingers and the long ends of her hair. She heard the muffled silence—pressure on her ears, the echoed sweeping of her limbs. She sank until the sand drifted over her toes and ankles and held her still.

  When she opened her eyes, she was sitting, and Nossi was beside her. “Jaele,” Nossi said quietly, “we haven’t talked for a while, not really. I’ve missed it. Talking to you. Falling asleep while you’re talking to me. I feel a bit mad. Please ask me something, tell me something.”

  “Well,” Jaele said, “you could tell me what it’s like to feel your horse below you for the first time, or how it is that, when you return after that first ride, the horses aren’t wild any more—or are you not allowed to discuss this with me?” She felt slow, beneath the bitterness. She kicked her feet and reached into the blue, but it was out before her, darting away.

  Nossi turned to her. Her eyes were round and dark, even in the fluttering air. She did not speak. Jaele whispered, “I’m sorry—truly, truly. When you turned me back at the stone and said ‘ours,’ I suddenly felt so alone. For the first time since I met you.”

  “No.” Nossi’s voice was distant; she was facing away, her cheek on her drawn-up knees. “I shouldn’t have been so careless. I didn’t mean to say you were different.”

  “But I am!” Jaele cried, laughing, crackling. “I am. I am not one of you. I am alone, and have been since I ran after the Raider, away from my beach. Since Dorin left me in the mountains.” She was shaking, gripping her own ribs hard as rows of tiny frozen waves.

  Nossi slid across the sand and drew her close. Jaele shook violently, then more slowly, then not at all. Nossi stroked her hair.

  “The terrible thing,” Jaele said at last, “is that I should be asking you how you are. Alnon, and the baby. Sarla. I do want to know. Please tell me.” She smiled a bit, and felt Nossi chuckle. Sand filling in a footprint, softly and silently and mostly unnoticed.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” Nossi said as they drew apart. “Sarla you know about. My only joy, now.”

  Her face was turned away again—Nossi, whose voice changed only in darkness, when her eyes could not be seen. Her fingers were flying, plaiting in the blue light. “Let me,” Jaele said, and sat behind her, weaving and separating the strands herself.

  “I miss him,” Nossi went on. “I looked for him, when I was standing on that ledge. I couldn’t see him, and it was horrible, cold.”

  “And the dancing?” Jaele asked softly.

  Nossi laughed, and glanced at Jaele over her shoulder. Her eyes were filled with smoke shadows. “It was thrilling. Another body—seeing myself in his gaze like a stranger. My skin felt different. I was so aware of it: the air on it, the fire warmth, his hands. But I miss him. I can’t even speak his name.”

  Jaele said, “He watches you, you know. All the time. He’s sick, wanting you. And you haven’t even told him about the baby.”

  “I know. I know. I can’t seem to say anything; it must be Alneth’s stubbornness in me. But I will tell him. And he’ll have to apologize too, by the Twins!”

  “Apologize?”

  Jaele and Nossi started. When the door opened, they scrambled to their feet. The blue wavered against the darkness of the passage, and they saw the two tall forms very clearly. “Apologize?” Aldreth said again, more loudly this time, as he and Alnon stepped into the chamber. “I don’t know what my friend Alnon will think of that.”

  Nossi and Alnon stood motionless. Jaele could not look at their eyes. She looked instead at Aldreth, who was smiling at her slightly, gently, like a question—or perhaps it was the weaving of shadows and light. She turned back to her friend.

  Nossi slowly shifted her gaze from Alnon to her brother. “I think,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, “that I will ask him what he thinks. Alnon,” she went on, and Jaele, at least, heard the softening, “come outside.” They did not touch each other as they left. The door closed behind them.

  “Shall we sit?” Aldreth was no longer smiling. They sat paces away from one another.

  She was surprised when she spoke first. “Your Telling was beautiful,” she said, and felt her words stumbling, rushing. “I saw such wonderful images—wild ones, colours, the sky spun. . . .”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She touched the wall beside her: more blue, more light against his face. A fear dissolved as she looked at his sad, bright eyes, at the dark branches across his cheeks and the line of his neck.

  “You didn’t dance, last night,” he said quietly. “I looked for you.”

  She felt warmth and did not knot it away. “No. I was . . . very sad. I even thought about leaving.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “The desert would have buried me,” she said. “I wasn’t that sad.” They smiled. “And I promised I would fight beside you, and you promised you would fight beside me.” She paused. “And.”

  She stood. She watched him as she walked to where he was, sitting against the landscape of stone and light. She slipped down so that he was behind her and his arms were wound around her chest, her ribs, tight and still.

  They did not speak. She felt the softness of his lips, his breath, his hair on her neck. Legs and stomach, skin over blood she could sense, beneath. The blue water-air. And it was not now her water, her sand, her rocks and seagreen; it was new, and theirs. She closed her eyes and slept in the silence.

  “Jaele.” Aldreth was shifting arms and legs. “I didn’t want to move,” he said, “not ever. But I can’t feel my legs.”

  They sat facing each other again, though closer this time. “Let’s not go out,” Jaele said. “The sand will blow over the door and we’ll stay here.” She spoke quickly, layering words over regret and silence a
nd the sudden, surprising shape of her leaving (No—he will come with me, to the river and beyond; they will all come with me. . . .).

  He lifted his hand to rub his scar; she put her fingers there first. The skin soft and cool, a puckered ridge.

  “You do this often,” she said, still touching. “When you’re sad? Worried?”

  “Or tired,” he said, smiling. “Also when I’m pining for a girl who pines for someone else.”

  “How did you get it?” she asked—not only to cover his last words.

  “Alnon,” he said. “He told me he would court Nossi someday. We were only about twelve. I told him he wasn’t good enough, even though he was my best friend. I defended her honour and he defended his—with his mother’s dagger, which unfortunately had been left nearby.” He chuckled. “He cried and I fainted. Mighty warriors, even at twelve.”

  He did touch his scar then, twining his fingers with hers. “You’re worried now?” she said. “Or sad?”

  “No,” he said. “Yes.”

  After a moment she said, “Aldreth—no matter what—”

  There was a knocking then, and they turned to the door as it opened. “Excuse us,” said Nossi’s voice from the corridor, and Jaele heard her smile.

  Aldreth rolled his eyes and murmured, “Thank the Twins, it is done.”