One morning, as they ran toward the rising sun that was still pale, they saw a distant mass of cloud. They stopped and stared. It seemed to be rolling toward them like a wall of water. “Rain!” Jaele cried, but Dorin frowned.
“I don’t think so.”
They stood close together. She watched his face and could feel it beneath her fingers, even though she was not touching him. The cloud sped; it was spreading and red-brown, shot through with light.
“Dorin. . . .?” she said uncertainly, and he clutched her hands.
“Listen to me. We’re going to go back to our packs. When we get there, we’ll hold on to them and each other, very tightly. Now run.”
As they raced back the way they had come, what little sunlight there was darkened again to night. Their packs were almost invisible against the ground; Dorin and Jaele fell to the sand. She drew the cloth bundles against her, and he wrapped his arms around her and said into her ear, “Try not to breathe through your mouth, and keep your face turned to the side.” They lay together and she remembered that it was not so long ago that they had huddled away from the sky.
The cloud swept over them and the air around them broke open in lightning. Jaele saw driving sand and boiling layers of darkness before she bent her head to her chest. She pressed herself against Dorin, curled like a leaf or a fist. When she felt the first wild lurch, she looked up.
Grit stung her eyes, and she blinked it furiously away, then screamed until the inside of her mouth was choked with sand. They were spinning high over the ground, and the dune-crested earth was slanting away, and the cloud around them was warm and groping and splintered into red like eyes. She saw the tilting earth—and suddenly a figure behind and below them, blurred by cloud and wind. He was looking up at them; she saw the paleness of his face. She screamed again. Then Dorin’s arms tightened so that her voice died and the sand clotting her tongue spat away. She twined her legs with his and watched—although she did not want to—as the darkness bore them upward and the ground disappeared.
Fingers grazed her skin: she was certain that if she looked, there would be wet, sinuous trails along her body, gummed in her hair. It was very warm and, when there was no lightning, as black as deep ocean, and there was a sound like snarling or teeth. The muscles of Dorin’s stomach tensed as he shouted, but she could not hear him. She felt very far away and still, and she later thought that she had closed her eyes.
Only when the descent began did Jaele shook herself again into consciousness. The fingers were digging now, kneading as the shadowed sand spun and dipped into sight through the thinning darkness. The red light blazed just before they fell, and she felt herself squeezed so sharply that her vision flattened to black. When she could see again, she was lying facing Dorin and the mass of cloud was flowing away above them.
They lay silent and unmoving for a time. She felt something on her skin and looked down. Desert creatures were streaming over her and Dorin—tiny lizards and scaly worms and blind, hairless rats, drawn in terror from their cool buried places and fleeing the sky. She and Dorin were coated in a gelatinous black wetness, and some of the animals stuck briefly, shrieking and waving their claws before they wrenched themselves free. But they melted away, and as they did, the sun began to shine faintly from the traces of cloud.
Dorin laid a hand on her cheek. After a moment she bent her fingers around it; when they moved to separate their hands, there was a loud liquid noise, and they smiled at each other. They sat up slowly and the black jelly fell off them in trembling lumps. Jaele spoke, though she did not want to.
“Dorin. While we were going up, and I could still see the ground, I saw someone below us. He was looking up at us. I think—I am almost certain—it was him.”
Dorin bit the inside of his cheek. “Surely,” he said after a moment, “the cloud was too thick and the height too great for you to be certain of this. Or perhaps it was your fear that made you see him?”
She looked at the sand behind them and noticed for the first time a thick black swath beneath where the cloud had carried them. A charred path. She shook her head slowly. She had seen an upturned face: pale, almost featureless with distance. But his face, his body shimmering flat against the dunes. She remembered the Throne Room, then—Dorin’s anger and her own—and was afraid. We must not fight again. She wrapped her slippery arms around her knees.
“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps.”
Dorin wound his fingers in her hair and drew her to him. “It is us now, Jaele,” he said after he had kissed her. “Not him. Not any more.” But there is still the sea, she thought quickly, before she layered silence over protest and fear.
The sun climbed and burned, and as it did, the wetness on their skin and on the cloth of their packs dried and cracked away until it lay on the sand like shattered pottery. Dorin sang, “A man in the desert held out his hand, but it like me was made of sand. . . .” She laughed, remembering the siri bird grove, the shining threads.
They began to walk. She did not think. She took small, unsteady steps and knew that Dorin’s hand was around hers.
Even when only a trickle of water and a few dried bits of food remained in their sacks, Jaele moved in joy that stripped away her skin and made her nerve-endings pulse against the air. There was a beautiful searing clarity to the sun on her skin and Dorin’s, and to the sweat that shone before it dried.
I forgot my journey: where I had been, where I had sworn to go. Everything I described to you, when first you asked for my words, and everything I have described this time—I forgot it all. I forgot you: your yearning, your ocean song, your kindness. You, and Murtha the earth silga. Aldreth’s voice, Nossi’s dying scream, the scar that puckered my own skin, beneath my hair. I forgot Keeper and the dome of coloured glass. And I forgot the Sea Raiders—even the one—and the ocean in the east. Rage and grief were silent beneath the singing of my new hunger.
She was powerful; she felt it as she walked, as they moved together. She watched his face when she was above him. He turned it to the side and closed his eyes, and he was so beautiful, so helpless, that she lifted her own face to the sky and laughed.
She would wake in night chill and find him leaning on one elbow, looking at her. In the moment before her eyes cleared, she saw such sadness; but when he bent to her, it was gone, and she was never sure, later, that she had seen it at all. She gazed at him as well, before dawn when he slept deeply. His eyelids fluttered as he dreamed.
“It amazes me,” he said once, touching her forehead, “that you are there and I,” touching his own, “am here.” She forgot her questions.
They walked with torn-up strips of one of Dorin’s shirts wrapped around their heads. They began to see water as the cloth tugged at their sweat-curled hair; it flashed dark and wet below the sun, and at first they cried out and tried to run. Even after they had watched these pools tuck into themselves and vanish, Jaele felt a thudding in her chest when she saw the next appeared. She could smell it and taste it—she wouldn’t swallow it right away, she would ease her tongue and teeth around it and swell green—and she could feel it beading on her, cool and quiet, as sweat and tears and sea were not. She whimpered at its imagined closeness to her mouth, to her angry red arms which were speckled with brown spots like someone else’s. She did not know if she cried. “We dream of beds and snow, as tramping on we go,” Dorin sang. Their bodies leaned into one another with a useless sodden weight. Only at night, when it was star-point clear and cold, did they wake and touch with desperate grasping speed. They did not look behind them.
They stood and gazed at each other, after they had tipped the last droplets of water into their mouths. “So,” Dorin said with his crooked smile, “now we must hope.”
“Yes,” she replied, and there were dizzy suns behind her eyes which blurred his outline and made her retch into the sand as he held her.
She stumbled blind, for a time. Later, he carried her, and her head knocked against hi
s collarbone in a bouncing rhythm that made her think of her father and her smaller, softer skin. He murmured to her, and sometimes she heard him. “Not long now . . . the sand is changing, I see sharp brown plants and everything is golden . . . there is a wind that smells like water. . . .”
And then he set her down and there was water on her face—but perhaps it was still just a yearning, like the pools that had melted on the sand. “Jaele,” he said, “wake up. Do you feel it?” The water slid across her cheeks and down her neck, and more dribbled between her lips, which she moved like old cracked bones. She opened her eyes. There were white clouds and the sky was bright, but not anguished as before. His face bent to her and she saw that he was thinner, that there were shadows beneath his skin and deep lines around his eyes and mouth. He smiled and raised her head and laid the waterskin against her lips. “Drink,” he said; “we are alive again. We have found a river.”
“A river?” she repeated, after she had drunk. “The wide river that begins in the desert? We could take you to that river riding backward on our horses.” She shook her head to silence the voice, but the river was there, blue and smooth and low in its banks. No, she thought, this is not it. We are lost and will find it later. Later.
They spread their cloaks over a collection of boulders and slept in the shade from sun-up to dusk. Dorin slept without moving. Jaele woke often and watched him, as she had before, but now it was different; there had been a change as he carried her. She traced a finger along his jutting cheekbone and wanted to kiss him there, where he was sleeping beneath his sun-stretched skin.
They made love again, slowly now, and afterward they swam and slipped against each other and floated on their backs in silence. Jaele did not dive to see the silty bottom, did not hang suspended below the water’s surface and look at the formless sun. She took short shallow strokes and reached for Dorin’s arms.
When they were rested and the burning of their flesh had cooled somewhat, they began to walk. They followed the river as it twisted and bent; they drank ceaselessly but ate almost nothing. Short green plants grew on the riverbank, and occasionally they chewed on the small leaves, but these were sour and they always spat them out quickly.
“I’m so hungry,” Dorin said one day, “that I can’t feel it any more.” Then he smiled. “Stew and fruit, salt and sweet, we can’t have enough to eat / Bread and wine, hunger and thirst, we will gorge until we burst.”
Jaele moaned and splashed him. “Stop,” she said, “please stop.”
On the fifth day they saw the shonyn village. They had been stumbling knee-deep in water, talking about food. “There was the sweetmoss in Luhr—do you remember?” Dorin asked, and Jaele sighed.
“Of course. And the bread Serani fed me that first day—so light and full of holes, it shrank into air on my tongue but it tasted. . . . What? What is it?”
“I’m not sure.” He was shading his eyes. She looked too, but saw only the river flashing against brown and sky. “Do you see silver there, or maybe on the opposite bank?”
She frowned and rubbed her right foot up and down her other leg; sand trailed and clung. “I don’t think so. Just the water, and we’re half sunstruck, aren’t we?”
They walked on, fingers tracing circles in each other’s palms, until Jaele stopped and squinted. “You’re right,” she said, “I see it now. Something shining over there . . . and little hills?” Small red mounds, they saw later; they also saw the trees, and the deep blue shadows of fruit on the river.
As the sun slanted and their own darkness fell on the wet sand beside them, they watched brown figures emerge from the mounds. They gathered by the water, and Jaele and Dorin heard their voices, drifting along a sudden wind. The words were strange, and she turned to him, laying the back of her hand against his cheek. “Well?” she said, and he drew in his breath and let it out in a sigh.
“We’re hungry,” he said, “and we won’t survive much longer like this. Let’s approach them with our hands held out.”
As they did approach and dark, seamed faces turned to them, Jaele remembered other hands outstretched and empty above sand, other words that were confusion, a plea that ended in blood.
There was silence as they drew closer. The openings of the mounds were hung with cloth. A child stood on a slab of black wood, holding a length of string in his hand. The wind blew their hair across their mouths; the water surged and rushed against its banks. Jaele and Dorin walked slowly. When they were near enough to see the people blinking steadily, they lowered their packs to the ground and took a few last paces forward.
She supposed she was smiling. She lifted her blister-scarred palms and tried to hold her fingers still. Her blood was thin with hunger, and she filled her lungs with air that was almost, but not quite, the sweetness of fruit. She could just see Dorin beside her; his hands wavered, and she realized that she would always know the creases inside his fingers, and the brown spot below the thumb of his right hand.
A man and a woman stepped toward them. Their mouths opened on words, and Jaele shook her head carefully, so that she would not be too dizzy. They came so close that she could feel the man’s breath on her face. “Jaele,” she said, turning a hand up to point at herself.
“Dorin,” said his voice to her left, and after a moment the man and woman raised their own hands and turned them up. Jaele looked at the man’s, tough and lined as snakeskin, and felt her knees buckle relief and weakness. She knelt on moist sand and arms reached for her, carried her, and the earth tipped beyond her swinging strands of hair.
They lowered her gently inside a small hut that stood just beyond the central cluster. Dorin crouched next to her and ran his hand along her arm so that she shivered and smiled and turned to him. The hut was cool, and the hanging cloth blew inward like a sail. At first they were alone. Then the same man and woman slipped through the door, holding plain earthen bowls. There was steam, and a smell which made Jaele’s innards cringe with desire. They laid the bowls on the ground by the door and rested on their knees, waiting. Jaele and Dorin glanced at one another as they picked up the food. It was a kind of mash—green and reddish stems mixed into a creamy broth—which she sucked into her mouth with a clay cylinder. It was thick and warm. As she ate, Jaele noticed that, although the outside of the bowl was plain red clay, the inside was a deep blue; when she had finished, she turned it around in her hands.
After she and Dorin had placed the bowls on the ground, the two who still watched from the door passed them a wide-lipped jug. Jaele lifted it to her mouth. The water was achingly cold and slightly bitter. She handed it to Dorin and sat without moving.
The man and woman rose and stooped beneath the rounded doorway. Before they backed into the twilight, they pointed at each other and out to those gathered silently by the water. “Shonyn,” they said together, and then the curtain whispered down and there was darkness.
Jaele and Dorin lay down together on a thick cloth mat and covered themselves with a blanket; these were the same dark blue as the insides of the bowls. There was nothing else in the hut. They murmured and kissed lightly as cloud. They fell asleep quickly, and so did not hear boats being pushed into the river and long poles plunging and lifting, ever fainter, toward the other shore.
When they woke, there was sunlight on the ground, wavering around the shape of the curtain. At first Jaele was surprised at her body, which felt warm and slow and satisfied; then she remembered the food, and she smiled and arched her skin against Dorin’s. He held her hips and breathed into the hair by her ear until she giggled.
Two more bowls were lying outside their doorway when they parted the curtain. In them were slices of blue fruit and a collection of fat, round seeds. The fruit was thick and dribbled juice down their chins; the seeds were tough and meaty and bitter. They ate everything, then sat on the ground looking down at the village. The shonyn were gathered by the river, but none of them glanced at Jaele and Dorin, and none came to retrieve the
bowls. Jaele and Dorin watched, close together, their backs against cool red clay.
“Look across the river,” Jaele said, “by the silver trees. What are those shonyn doing?” A line of them stood or knelt on gently bobbing flats of wood. Jaele squinted. “I’ve never seen such boats before, if that’s what they are.”
“I don’t know,” Dorin said, “maybe they’re fishing? Or gathering fruit?” The flatboats were too far away, and silver leaves flashed light from the water. Jaele and Dorin saw people stretch and bend and turn, but could make out nothing more.
The boats glided back as dawn sun slid to mid-morning white. Two people on each craft held long black poles which they swung smoothly into the river. Many shonyn lined the shore now; when the boats nudged aground, they lifted their arms for the glistening fruit that was handed down to them. There was some laughter and lazy whistling.
“Should we go down?” Jaele asked.
“No,” Dorin replied, “not yet. Let’s just keep watching—perhaps we’ll learn something. They seem to have forgotten us.”
Knives glinted; a child squeezed juice into a bowl; a woman reached back to bind her hair with a strip of cloth. Voices rose and fell against the dark, wet earth and the still water and the sky. “I’m sleepy,” Jaele murmured, turning her face so that her cheek touched the rough wall. “I just woke up, but I’m so sleepy. . . .”
When she opened her eyes, shadows threaded her skin and hair and Dorin’s outflung arm. Two more bowls of food steamed beside them on the ground. Sunlight fell cloud-scattered on the village huts. There was no one by the river; the curtains blew gently around silence.
A Telling of Stars Page 17