A Telling of Stars

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

  Birds circled, high and dark and sometimes ghostly in the white shadows of cloud. Downriver they glided lower; they hovered briefly and dove, heads then wings then all submerged before they reappeared, beating heavily upward as two, three fish lashed in beaks and claws.

  “Breathe, quiet one!” Lallan said to Dorin in his language. The smell was sharp and sweet, and Jaele half knew it, half named it before she realized it was not the sea.

  “Long ago,” Saalless began, ignoring Lallan’s groan, “the Queensships were billowing in now, after the rains—when the water was yet dark from storming, and the air was clear and scented. Laughing and singing on new wind, and flashings of metal—so strange. Brown skin, cloth of red and green and gold. The ships were like great creatures we had heard of, which rise above the ocean and rock for a time before falling back to be hidden.”

  Jaele heard her father’s voice, a layer of darkness and smiling over Saalless’s. She shook her head and sat down on one of the riverside benches. Dorin sat with her. The clay was cool, still damp.

  “Of course,” Saalless continued, “after the rains there was foolishness—shonyn men and women who desired Queenspeople—although most remained true.”

  “True?” Dorin asked, and the old man nodded.

  “Please imagine—but most probably you cannot. You and I are not the same, and this is why our people must be apart. Those shonyn who did desire went away on the large boats and were lost to us. Their children, I am sure, were never peaceful.”

  There was a sudden clenching in Jaele’s chest and throat. “But that’s a terrible thing to say!” she cried, and almost felt tears. “How can you be sure what those children felt? How do you know that the shonyn who left weren’t happy?”

  He looked at her and smiled a bit, and his eyes seemed very bright—or perhaps it was the sky, the unaccustomed sun. “Child,” he said only, “child.”

  Another dream—the images clearer—a hand in hers, strung hair and splinters of wood. She woke shaking again, and Dorin rolled over and put his arms around her. Murmuring until they both slept.

  The flatboats set off once more toward the lynanyn that bobbed thick and ripe beneath the silver leaves. Shonyn slept and talked and cooked the last of the fish. Jaele avoided eating any of this fish, and Lallan frowned and shook her head. “I do not understand,” she said as they sat again on dry earth. “It is so good, so different, as you say, and it is only for a short time—why do you not eat?”

  Jaele looked away, into a blur of light and water. “Because,” she replied, “I remember things.” Now, here, after rain and dreams. It is almost time, she thought. We must leave soon. We . . . She remembered fear.

  Lallan snorted and shifted onto her back. “Your remember. And it is only fish.”

  Jaele slept more as well, though not as deeply as before. She woke often and lay with the weight of Dorin’s arm across her chest. She lay very still, feeling her skin against his. In the silent latticed sunlight it was so important to be still.

  She and Lallan laughed again, and tossed pebbles into the river. Water cloud shore black wood looping time: the words left Jaele’s mouth like twilit air. Saalless and the other old shonyn talked and talked, their own words a low steady blooming. Dorin occasionally came down to the bank and sat with them. He never looked at Onnell, and only rarely at Lallan. Sometimes he did talk or rhyme or sing, which made them giggle; Jaele was strangely proud.

  “Your Dorin,” Lallan said one day when he was not there, “is strange and quiet, but when he speaks, he is suddenly friend-like.”

  “Oh, Lallan,” Jaele said, “just because you can’t imagine being quiet doesn’t mean it’s strange. He’s really not strange. Not at all.”

  Lallan peered at her. “I like him, dearest Queen’s one. But he is not maybe for you.”

  “No—don’t. . . .” She heard her own sadness, beneath thin, useless anger. “. . . don’t ever say such a thing, it’s not true, he is for me.”

  Lallan was drawing a strand of hair through her mouth; it curled and glistened. “Maybe you do not see what is clear. Maybe you discover. Maybe not. If you are contented now, that is all.”

  “Why don’t you come down with me more often? To the river, to talk to Lallan and Saalless and the others.” A long time since they had stumbled along the shore to the town; long since Saalless had laboured up the hill to speak to them. Since they had first whirled beneath the sky.

  They were sitting now where the ground was flat and the river hidden. The rains had drawn colour from the sand: green shoots, pink and yellow petals, red stalks that swayed tall and dagger-tipped from knotted roots. The wind was rising cool with dusk.

  “Because they’re your friends.”

  “That’s not true,” Jaele said. “They like you; they wonder why you don’t join us more.”

  Dorin dug his heels into the sand, savagely, with a dull sound that made her flinch. “They like me, do they? I wonder why. They have nothing at all in common with me.” He paused. “Perhaps no one does.”

  “Oh,” she cried, and leapt up and away from him, striding circles as sand flew. “You are so selfish, you have no idea what people are like—you dismiss them, you dismiss me—but I understand you, I do. I do and you won’t believe it.” She was crying, trembling, too far away to touch. He sat and gazed up at her—haunted, shrunken, incandescent with sadness. “Let me know you,” she whispered, and dropped to her knees. “It is breaking me.”

  Dorin made a sound and stretched out a hand. “You can’t know. What I am—it is too far from what you are, it would mean an ending for us.”

  “And you don’t think,” she said, “that this is an ending?” She added, “I thought you were happier, you seemed happier. But you are the same as ever.” And I? she thought, quickly.

  He looked down at his knuckles, straining pale while the rest was so still. “I don’t know why you would think otherwise—why you hope as you do.”

  “So you’re not happy. Not at all.” She was hot, stinging salt and dust.

  He drew a breath. “I am. Sometimes so much that I think I am reborn. So happy that I don’t even fear. But.”

  They sat. She was not sure who began to laugh first. Quietly, as they crawled toward each other. Laughing tears and touching as if skin were new.

  Aldreth is Telling blood, easing his mouth along her stomach. Her fingers are knotted in his hair and she is screaming. Horses are rearing around her, flailing and spewing flame, and she cannot see Nossi although she can hear her cries through smoke and sand and heavy thud of bodies, strange boats.

  Dorin was sitting up, dark against the shifting curtain. “Not again.” She realized she was clutching his hands. “I can’t share this with you, Jaele. Whatever it is. Whoever.” He pulled his hands free and slipped outside.

  She listened to her own thin whimpering as she rocked herself gently, sore bones and flesh.

  So fragile, now—reflections of sun or cloud in water that moved and broke into scatterings of colour. Tender, clear air. His arm lying terrible, golden across her breasts. The ladder of his naked curved back. Bent head; sleeping, softly open mouth. She lay motionless and watched. Raged against danger and hope and the beauty of his face; against the dreams that opened her like a scar.

  The plants by the bank were waist-high and feverishly green. Lallan had drawn a frond down to her face and was tickling it; she brushed it over Jaele’s cheeks. Jaele laughed. It was almost dawn. The flatboats were returning slowly, heavy with lynanyn.

  “You sometimes look like someone else, to me,” Jaele said in the shonyn language. “You remind me of someone else,” she repeated in her own.

  Lallan raised her eyebrows. “Explain.”

  “A friend I had. Nossi.” Speaking it a sigh, a slow thread of blood. “She was a dancer. Her eyes were blue. And she rode a horse named Sarla.”

  Lallan said, “Why are you sad now, thinking of this friend Nossi?�
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  Jaele rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. “Because she’s dead. She was killed in a battle. I had travelled with her, and we were like sisters.” After a moment she went on, “But in many ways you are not like her. Perhaps I’m just thinking about her now, so I see her in you. I don’t know.”

  Lallan groaned. “Again I do not understand. You are sad that she is dead? That she is your sister? That I am like her but not like her?”

  “Yes. All of those.” She concentrated on the silver, blurred dip and spray of the poles.

  “Do you have family?” Lallan asked, and Jaele laughed shakily.

  “Strange you should ask. They are also dead. My mother, my father and brother. Also killed.” Not spoken of since she had lain next to Nossi, beneath stars. She looked down at the river with a princess’s name and felt the stirrings of an old and desperate need.

  Lallan sat up. “Stop. Stop this sadness I do not comprehend.”

  “I can’t,” Jaele said.

  “So listen to me: these people are in your mind, your life. They are here, present.”

  “No. They are gone, past. I will never see them again, so I will forget. Slowly, but it will happen.” Her voice was high and tremulous, and she cleared her throat roughly.

  “We shonyn do not forget.”

  “Well, then, you are lucky,” Jaele almost spat, “because I do—I will. That is why this past of mine is so important, so sad and lonely: because no one wants to hear about it. Not Dorin. Not you. It sits in me and rots.”

  The muscles in her neck and shoulders were humming. Lallan touched her again with the plant: along her forehead, green shadows over her eyes. “You are angry now. Different.”

  “Yes. I was happy when we came—more than that. And this place was so peaceful. Sleepy and slow.”

  “Too slow for a Queenswoman, as Saalless says?”

  Jaele shook her head. “Not that. I don’t think so. It was perfect. Days unfolding, all the same. It was safety. But long before I came here, I had a . . . purpose. A journey to make. This peace is not for me.” She tried to smile. “You may have been right about the rains.”

  “For us they are dangerous because they separate us. They change our days, as Saalless tells you.”

  “But,” Jaele said, leaning forward, “maybe change is good? Saalless says you are impatient. Do you never want to go away, see other places? Do something different, even if you end up where you started?”

  Lallan was frowning. “No. I am here. I do not change my feeling, like you. I seek nothing more.”

  “Then perhaps it is because I am a Queenswoman. I think—” she said, and felt tears, “I think that this time is almost over.”

  They were quiet. The boats were ashore. Hands held gleaming, dripping fruit, voices murmured as ever, other time and all time, all children and all old. When Lallan spoke again, golden light was streaming through the cloud, and the trees were glinting day.

  “Though I do not understand,” she said, “I can aid you. With lynanyn and whatever more you need.”

  Jaele nodded and closed her eyes. After a time she rose and walked away through water that was still cold.

  They were sitting outside the hut, Jaele against the wall and Dorin against her. The hottest, brightest, emptiest part of the day. “Let’s leave,” she said, her lips touching the skin behind his ear. “Move on toward the sea. . . .”

  He stirred and drew away, half turning to face her. She crossed her arms over her chest. “The sea? You’re not still thinking about your plan, are you?”

  “No,” she said, and the lie came clipped and fast, “no, not at all. I only said that because I still find the ocean beautiful, I miss it. But we could go anywhere, anywhere you can think of.” Her voice echoed like the heat, pulsing and fading, and afterward an exhausted dampness.

  “No.” His eyes were almost closed. His hair was golden, some strands white, others red. “I don’t think we should do that. I’m happier here now than before.”

  “But you don’t really speak to anyone, you’re not a part—”

  “I’m fine here. Better than elsewhere. I think we should stay.” He paused, then said more quietly, “We have an island here, remember? We can run in the desert or sleep with the sun on the ground. We are alone together.” Another silence. “But if you want to leave, please do. It would hurry the inevitable, which might be merciful.”

  Jaele shook her head. “The inevitable. Listen to your own words. You’re happy now?”

  Dorin snorted. “Difficult to believe, isn’t it?” He slipped his hand into her hair, cupped her head. “Jaele. Please stay. I will try to be happier.” He drew her in. He was shaking, and she held him, smoothed her palms across his back.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and she said, “No, no—don’t cry, love, we’ll try,” and she kissed him, the salt beneath his eyes, his brown stomach, as insects droned in the sunlight above the river and the silver trees.

  She dreamed and woke crying out; reached for fingers, even if torn away, but there was nothing except air, cloudy and cool.

  “Saalless,” Jaele said, “would you understand if I explained my past to you?”

  The old man sighed. “I speak the Queenstongue surpassingly well,” he said, “and now and then I feel an entering into the mind of this language—thanks to the great boats and visitors of my own ‘past.’ Nonetheless, I am unable to truly enter its heart. So I might listen to you and offer certainly wise and meaningful words, but I would not feel your pain. If it is pain you are wishing to communicate.”

  She smiled at him and could not speak. He laid a blue hand on her knee. “Oh, child,” he said, “I see it. But if I felt it, I would no longer be shonyn. You must seek out another for this understanding.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but I am afraid.” Again. She covered his hand with hers; the bones of it were solid and round, like stones.

  Jaele woke with a start one afternoon. She was shivering, although she could not recall having dreamed. She sat up and gazed at Dorin, sleeping curled and slightly smiling. The river’s song was loud in the silence, and she went out to it, down to sit against the bench. Alone in the sunlight as a hot wind hissed in the silver leaves. She wanted to stay awake—wanted to feel again the rhythm of her body in sunlight—but could not. She lay down in the shade on the side of the bench that faced the houses, not the river. Slept in shallow darkness until the sounds woke her.

  One splash, two—quiet noises at dusk, but now, in the deep stillness of shonyn day, Jaele opened her eyes and sat up. She looked around the bench and across the river—and she saw the Sea Raider. He was wading into the water beneath the lynanyn trees; reaching for a bobbing fruit with fingers that she saw were already stained with blue. “Perhaps just wind and cloud shadows”: she remembered her own lazy words as she watched him walk deeper, deeper, until only his head and arms and the upper part of his chest were visible. His shadow among the trees. His face upturned beneath a cloud of darkness and red eyes. She breathed once, ragged as tears—another noise that seemed to echo—but he did not lift his own head as he had in the garden, long ago. Jaele breathed again, quietly. Watched him, because she could not yet move.

  His hair was much longer than before, and it clung to his neck and cheeks. Hollower cheeks, beneath the straggle of beard; leaner, paler than in Keeper’s garden and kitchen and carvings. His lips and fingers were soaked with fresh blue, and blue coiled darkly in the water around him. There had been crimson before, dripping from mouth to chin to grass. She heard the wetness of his mouth on the fruit and imagined teeth, sinking and discoloured. The lynanyn husk floated away on the water. He swam in one stroke to the sweeping branches of a tree and reached up. She watched his fingers grip and twist, watched him gnaw and heard him suck. She was shaking now. Her teeth chattered; she bit down on her lip and did not taste the blood that welled. No dagger, she thought as he edged deeper into the shadows of the bra
nches. The dagger wrapped in folds of cloth, in her bundle. In a hut where Dorin was sleeping—far behind her, up a hill brilliant with sun.

  She did not stand and run up the hill. She slid down, instead—silently down the bank and into the river. Each limb eased into water with such care that there were no bubbles, no ripples—only, in her own ears, a sound like sighing. She did not think of purpose or need or fury; she felt them, deep as the source of breath. She thought of nothing as she drew herself gently, gently across the river toward the shadows of the branches and the man beneath.

  She stopped swimming when she could see him clearly. She saw water beading on his neck, patches of white skin beneath his beard, his blue-grimed webs and nails and fingertips. Three strokes more and she could have touched him—but she remained three strokes away; watching still, hungry for the close, sharp details of him.

  He was looking up into the trees. She watched him wrench another fruit down, watched him wipe savagely at the water that fell from his lifted arm to his mouth. Then a ripe lynanyn dropped from a tree farther along the bank. The splash was sudden; there was no time for her to breathe deeply and sink away beneath. He raised his head from the torn lynanyn he held and turn toward the sound, toward her.

  He saw her. Blinked rapidly, several times, and narrowed his eyes. His lips drew back over his yellow-blue teeth. Beach, garden, kitchen, river—in each place a moment of stillness. Stillness of mind and limbs and eyes; even the water and leaves unmoving. Then he lunged, both hands straining forward, his body slicing the water into waves. She choked and flailed, twisting away from him and from the waves. She spun, beneath, her eyes open on churning brown, and waited for his hands to find her.

  The water cleared and she surfaced, coughing. She looked at the place where he had been, at the bank, the river around and behind her. She slipped beneath once more, sure that he would be there now, reaching. She swam in widening circles through the empty water and began again to think. He had lunged toward her, as he had in the chamber of ivy and stone. He had run from her there; he had swum, here, as she had choked and lashed. He had swum from her, webbed hands and feet pushing him swiftly away. Now there was only water, and a blue fruit bleeding slowly beneath the trees.