Jaele was alone, breathing as slowly as sleep. It was early afternoon; this she guessed from falling sun and shadow. She had left Dorin slumbering with his cheek pressed against his arm. They had made love as they did every day now, in the small cool hut or in the sand and wind of the desert. Often they were still half asleep, and she imagined that she was dreaming before he woke her with his hands, his hair in her mouth. She did not dream; she had not since their arrival in the village. She slept in darkness and opened her eyes as he trailed his fingers along her skin, singing, sometimes, under his breath. She did not remember the fear she had felt below the silga mountains as he had walked silently beside Serani’s wagon, his eyes shadowed and far away from her.
They ran less and less as time passed, although they continued to walk down the hill away from the river. “Jaele Jaele, Dorin Dorin,” he chanted one day, “running up a hill / Dorin Dorin, Jaele Jaele, catch her he never will.” Occasionally he walked by himself, and she woke alone and felt breathless in the silence. When he returned later, he always wrapped his arms around her; he did not speak, and she clutched him and thought, He’s back, he’s here. She did not remember that she had once needed to run, to pursue, to seek out blood and vengeance.
Now she was sitting with her back against the clay bench where, days ago, Saalless had told his story; by the river which could not have a name—not until Dorin was ready to walk beside her to the sea. She angled one side of her face into the hot afternoon light. Perhaps she slept. She started when a voice beside her said, “Greetings.”
A young voice, and the word was spoken thickly; she was strangely nervous as she turned to look at the person next to her. It was a girl, smooth-skinned and dark and smiling.
“Greetings,” Jaele replied. “You also speak the Queenstongue?”
The girl shrugged and sat down cross-legged on the ground. “Not well, and my accent is also not well. But I listen to Saalless and others speaking, and I practice alone. I am Lallan.”
Jaele smiled. “Lallan—although the name loses much in my language.”
Lallan snorted. “Saalless speaks so much. But his thoughts are true. I know,” she went on, “you are Jaele. Dorin is sleeping?”
“Yes. Like everyone else. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t sleep this morning, for the first time since we got here. The river is so beautiful when it’s empty,” she added, and Lallan nodded.
“I also feel awake today,” she said. “I hope not to bother, but can you speak? So I can listen to your voice.”
“Of course,” Jaele said. “But then you must speak, and maybe teach me some of your language. It sounds like water, to me.”
They did speak while others slept, and their words were awkward and they laughed at each other and at themselves. Lallan taught Jaele river, tree, earth, house, man and woman. Jaele repeated these words, and even then, at the first, they felt round and cool in her mouth. She listened to Lallan and corrected her: “Where are the trees—begin with where”, and the girl cried, “I see!” and they laughed and threw pebbles into the river.
As shadows lengthened toward the black trees, Lallan said, “No—this I do not truly see. This was and swam—or will be. I never understand when Saalless speaks these words, and now you speak them. Please explain.”
Jaele frowned. “I don’t know. They’re words for the past—and will is for the future—”
“Yes,” Lallan interrupted, “this idea! Past and future. Explain.”
Jaele opened her mouth, closed it. “I. . . .” she began, then took a deep breath. “It is difficult. Past and future are so important in my language. The past was long ago—or only recently, but still finished. And the future is what has not yet begun: what we do not yet know. Tomorrow is the future.”
Lallan’s eyes narrowed as they slid over Jaele’s face. “But this is strange. You think you know what is finished—or what is not, yet? You separate this time?”
Jaele held up her hands, then dropped them helplessly. “Yes. We do. Time is in parts, and so is our language. I cannot explain it well. But tell me: what do you say for a time that is finished? Like,” she continued quickly, “like Saalless’ childhood.”
“But that is not finished,” the other girl said. “No time is finished.”
“When someone dies? When someone is taken across the river to the trees?”
“No—not finished. Nothing.”
“But Saalless speaks of memory; that is past, over.”
“No. Not over: still. Your word now.”
Lallan curled her right hand into a fist. “I also cannot explain,” she said at last. “It is darkness to you.”
They were silent. Lallan scratched at the dry red earth with a stone so that there were furrows; she filled these in with the palms of her hands, stroking until even the marks of her fingers were gone. Finally she sighed and threw the stone high and arching into the river, and it sank while waves became ripples and ripples clouds.
“I do not understand how Saalless knows,” Lallan said after a time. “He and the others—they speak like you, without difficulty. Perhaps because in . . . childhood, they hear the words often. This childhood you speak of.” She turned to Jaele and smiled slightly.
“Well,” Jaele said, “it’s obvious that this will be demanding. But I wish to talk with you again. If you do.”
“Oh, yes,” Lallan said. “Even if I do not understand, and I am. . . .”
“Frustrated?” Jaele finished, and Lallan nodded.
“Yes.” She stood up and stretched into the sunlight. Jaele could not see her face. Then she moved away, ankle-deep and slow in the water.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There was a time of quiet, before the rains.
All my days with the shonyn were vivid, but this time was so much more brilliant. I remember it now as a slow unspooling of my father’s brightest threads. I know how desperately you yearn for words of air and light and happiness. I must speak carefully when I describe this time to you. You must see.
Mornings with Saalless and others, watching the flatboats return, dark over silver.
Lallan and a young man are standing together on a flatboat, poling water that looks like rain where it falls. They smile and talk sometimes, and sit very close on shore.
“Do you love Onnell?” Jaele asks, and Lallan raises an eyebrow.
“We do not speak of love so much, but I am with him now.”
Days and nights shift—the water starred or white blazing, swelling in sleep and dusk. Sleep, now as much as shonyn; sleep through sunlight, and stretching walking down in afternoon violet. The cadence of speech slowing until words roll and fade away.
“The river’s beauty, and the blue of the fruit,” Jaele says in her new language, and the roundness in her mouth very soon is not strange. She repeats the words, murmurs them beneath the low red ceiling as Dorin makes spirals on her skin and maybe listens.
“Ah yes,” Saalless replies, “we fashion our pottery from clay, dyed with the blue juices of lynanyn. We fashion and reap, only in this small town. You must be thinking this place primitive, being of the Queen’s stock—you with your cities and towers.”
“No,” Jaele says, “not primitive,” and her voice disappears. She no longer thinks about words for past and future: she is drawing in the new, Lallan’s still and now.
“Dorin, you are very quiet,” Lallan says, peering into his face, which is turned away.
“Yes,” Onnell says. “Why so?”
Dorin shrugs where he is sitting, on the edge of people and wet earth. “I do not like words,” he says, not looking at them. Moments later he walks away. His hand slips through Jaele’s hair and she smiles.
Sometimes Jaele talks to Lallan or the old ones, and Dorin is alone. But always the circle back—to clay walls, to desert sand that skitters over their feet and fills their outspread, tangled hair. No fear and no urgency, and the circle seems closed, tenderness of eye
s that do not look away.
“Lallan is overly impatient,” Saalless says, and shakes his head. Jaele watches the creases of his face open like dark, dry flowers, like gorges. There is slow detail to her vision, now. “She is quick. This is not a shonyn trait. I cannot match her to blood parents.”
“Blood parents?” Dorin asks, and the old man turns to him.
“You will not be familiar with this. Our children belong to all, from the time of their birth. Many women sustain with milk. Babies grow among many parents.”
Jaele sees that the skin of Saalless’s throat and chest is not dry—more like the palm of a young hand. She raises a fistful of lynanyn seeds to her mouth and squeezes them slowly, teeth and tongue cool bitter blue.
“Saalless has told me about the rains,” Jaele says. Lallan is drawing a piece of fallen green along Onnell’s wrist. He reaches up and grasps her hair, eyes half lidded and smiling. “Tell me what you think of these rains,” Jaele continues.
Lallan frowns a bit, as if her words will be strange. “The river folds and rises. Sometimes our huts are wet inside. We do not use boats: lynanyn cross the river and flow over the banks. There are even fish. And it is dark, dark.”
“We sleep less,” Onnell adds in a low heavy voice. “In darkness it is difficult.”
“Yes,” Lallan says, “it is a change. We think there is danger in it.”
“Change,” Jaele says. “Danger.” She wants to go to Dorin, to climb into the warmth of his sleeping limbs.
“Lallan—do animals live among the lynanyn trees?” The silver looks like copper now, in the light of dusk.
“Not many, and all small.”
“And shonyn never walk on the other shore?”
Lallan turns to her with raised brows. “Never. Why these questions?”
Jaele lies down so that she sees only sky. “Today I thought I saw something moving in the trees. Perhaps it was just wind and cloud shadows.”
“Saalless’s skin is blue, and Lallan’s is blue too—but blue for us won’t do. . . .”
“It does do,” Jaele murmurs, her cheek above his heart, so close to sleep.
Moments unravelling formless, until the clouds.
“Dark,” Lallan said in the Queen’s language, and Jaele looked up past her pointing finger. The clouds were massed high and far away; they were like unformed clay, twisting and climbing and suddenly changed. “The wind comes soon,” Lallan continued, and it did, thrusting the murky steel sky and bodies that bent.
It was cold. Jaele flinched as her skin rose, as the river scurried white. Her eyes felt wide, and something—awake?—that was unfamiliar. “Will there be danger for me as well?” she asked
“Perhaps,” Lallan said. “Feel. It is different air. But wait—it passes. Only hold the sunlight and you are the same.”
Jaele ran up the hill to wake Dorin. She felt her body’s awkward speed, its aching. “Come!” she cried as she parted the curtain. He was sitting against a wall. For a moment both were very still.
“What is it?” he said at last.
“The rain,” she replied hesitantly. “It’s coming: the clouds are so fast. Everyone is gathering below to watch.”
“Oh,” said Dorin. He pulled a hand through his hair. When he kissed her, his lips slid away and into the strands beside her ear.
They walked down through shifting patches of silver and muddy gold. There was a crackling; Jaele lifted her arms and saw the down stretching, quivering desperately. Lallan beckoned to them from the bank and they waded toward her, through wind that ripped the breath from opening mouths and reached farther, down into glistening and bone.
The distance had disappeared behind black water. Jaele remembered rain in livid walls above the ocean, advancing over the headland rocks and then reached for them—she and Elic stumbling laughing for the hut, their father drawing them into a blanket, his arms. She closed her eyes; in this place of safety a memory, whole and bright. She clutched Dorin’s hand and shrank before the wind.
They were soaked, flattened: clothing, skin and hair, eyelids. The faces upturned—blue running darkness—and fingers spread apart, cupped in fear or abandon. Jaele took a step forward. She felt a terrible pure recognition, and recoiled. Dorin’s hands slipped like seagreen ribbons over her skin.
The river leapt as if beaten by pebbles. Soon it was roiling warm and white over their feet. Some of the brown plants by the shore tore silently, swept into someday sunlight and covering sand. The other bank—silver leaves and fruit and choked bones of houses—was lost.
The shonyn scrabbled away, small wet creatures bowed to the earth that shifted and coursed beneath them. Jaele and Dorin ran until they were inside, naked and grasping below the rain.
The dark water rose and fell, chewing at the sand until it collapsed in mud and washed roaring away. No flatboats set out over the churning river; after the first cloudburst no one sat or stood outside.
“This is our island,” Dorin said one morning or evening as they gazed through a gap in the curtain. “Our island, and when the rain passes, there will be only us.”
Jaele pressed her face to the hollow of his throat and breathed in deeply. His smell still hurt her.
“And we will be surrounded by all sorts of creatures,” he continued, “short and tall and scaly and flat, who will smile at us and be our friends.” They laughed.
They ate the lynanyn Lallan had told them to save for the rains. Their bodies stuck and slithered in juice, and they crawled outside and held up their arms and watched blue flowing like blood. Wet earth scent sank into their hair and the tiny threads of their fingertips.
Each day was distinct in light or sky or wind. Jaele saw white-grey clouds driven low; she saw others hanging still, bulbous and purple. There were no lengthening shadows—only a glowering that sometimes began to shine, perhaps with far-off day. The rain lashed or spattered on the clay. It was almost peace, almost a different kind of lulling.
Then she dreamed, one day or night, and woke trembling. She remembered nothing—no images, no sounds—only a sense of clawing, hands and limbs knotted and torn apart beseeching. She was moaning and curled tightly around some place in her stomach, her chest. Dorin was stroking her, but she could not feel him. “What? Jaele . . . what. . . .” But he was already asleep, and she lay alone while he breathed and muttered and turned in the darkness.
“I hate this!” Jaele hissed. “I hate this sound, this rain.”
Dorin wound his arms around her and pulled her toward him. “Why?” he asked, touching a finger to the smooth skin by her eye. “This is our island, yes?”
She wriggled; he drew his finger down her face to her chin, which he tilted up. “Yes,” she said, and felt a loosening. “It is. I’m just restless, and I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“But you’re happy?” A child’s voice—but never before, never even at the Giant’s Club, by the clear pool full of snails.
“Of course I am,” she said, and held him, clutched him in remembered sun.
One morning Jaele woke to silence. She lay with her eyes closed, sinking, wrapped in air that was still and golden. Light seeping, burnishing the insides of her eyelids—and Dorin’s breath in and out where before there had been only rain.
She was blind, kneeling in the doorway; there was sun and searing blue and leaves that pulsed, and she ground her fists into a blaze of tears. She waited a moment before waking him. Her hair stirred in a cool dry wind. She could hear the swollen river lapping slowly as a heart against the bank.
“It’s over,” she whispered when she went back to him. He stretched up and into her arms. She spoke with her lips against the place where neck curved into shoulder. “The danger is past.”
He shifted and leaned back on his elbows. “Danger? What does that mean?”
She shrugged; she could feel the sun on her bare skin. “Don’t you remember what Saalless told us? Lallan said it too. Ther
e’s danger during the rains. Some kind of change—perhaps for minds or hearts.”
He sat without moving. “Change. Ah, yes—I remember. An interesting idea.” He smiled—the twisting she had pushed away—and Jaele began to draw on her clothes.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, looking at a green thread that was straggling from her tunic, over her thigh.
“Wrong?” he replied. “Why would you think that?”
She too smiled, crooked and disappearing. “I don’t know,” she said, thinking, Your eyes in sunset above a sea of trees. The sadness that never leaves you. She ducked out beneath the curtain.
There were shonyn outside now, walking carefully over the churned earth toward the water. Jaele and Dorin joined them; steps from the hut their fingers caught and twined. Lallan waved from where she was standing beside Onnell and Saalless. “How are you, rain stranger?” she cried.
Jaele called back, in the shonyn language, “I survive, I think.” Saalless turned and looked at her, without smiling.
The river was high, and still murky brown from heaving of rain and wind. There were silver-green dartings in the brown. Jaele pointed and Lallan said, “Those are the fish. Watch.” Young shonyn waded into the water, hands poised then plunging, and drew out fish that shone and wriggled and gaped.
“Yes,” Saalless said, “we will cook the fish tonight and several nights after, then not again until the rains return.”
“Saalless,” Jaele said, “I still don’t understand why you don’t fish all the time. Especially if you enjoy the taste, which must be so different from lynanyn.”
“It is this,” he said. “We do not hunt out our food. The lynanyn ripen and we harvest them, and our grains we transported long ago. You might be saying that we shonyn are finders rather than seekers. Thusly are we different from most others.”
“Oh, stop talking!” Lallan said as she rolled her eyes skyward. “There is too much to see.”
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