A Telling of Stars

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

  She wandered what seemed to be the main road. It wound down beside the river, branching into smaller streets that disappeared around corners or hillsides into gloom. Voices echoed and died. Carved faces leered above towering wooden doors. Occasionally there were smells: the salt, always, and rot, and cooking that made her stomach clench—fish, and once or twice seagreen. She breathed it in and felt sore.

  The wind raised bumps on her flesh. She remembered, trying not to, all places of warmth—even a winter clearing, snow on Aldreth’s hair in the morning. She stood still again as voices and footsteps behind her grew louder and shadows loomed on the walls. They sped past her, perhaps eight, black-clothed and open-mouthed. Not him—of course not, she thought; but as in the marketplace of Luhr and the Palace of Yagol, every shadow would be him.

  Street and river sloped toward the ocean. The buildings were lower now, and she could see that they were brightly painted, though bare in places. She heard creaking timbers and almost ran, her feet slipping over cobbles. Ahead of her she saw the river’s mouth, and a crumbling tower beside it—and then she burst from the street and onto harbour planks.

  It was a wide harbour, not as sheltered as her own. Across the river, Jaele saw nothing but empty water and dark shore. To her right was a row of houses and shuttered shops; before her were the docks.

  “Its harbour was so full of ships that it looked like a forest.” She walked slowly toward the four ships that rose and dipped with the waves. They were large, peeling, splintered, and their lashed sails flapped pale and gentle as distant wings. She leaned down to touch one. The ribbed salt wood was not the same—old and rotten—but still her breath caught in her throat. She put her fingers to her mouth and tasted sea. Then she lay on the knotholed deck, felt it hard against her backbone as she looked up at the stars and half-clouded moon that were so white and so arm’s-length clear: in the desert, yes, on the silga mountain, yes, but more and truer here. I have followed the Ladhra River to Fane. No need to look at her map, except to trace distance and wonder.

  She slept beneath the jutting window ledge of a tall house. It was set apart from the others, and its door opened onto the far end of the wharf. Slept, and woke to shouting and the red sun, huge over the rim of sea. The water shone flat and scarlet and she blinked, groaned as she moved. The shouting came from a few men who stood on the docks and boat decks, untying sails and knotting rope as thick as the trunks of young trees. As Jaele watched, crates and barrels were passed up by bulging arms already slick with sweat. These men called to one another in words she would have understood had she been closer. She thought it strange that there were only six or seven of them; stranger still that after all their bustling, only one of the ramshackle ships cast off and crawled northward out of the harbor.

  She crouched beneath the window after the ship had creaked out of sight. The remaining men clustered together, then drifted back into the town. She was again alone. As had happened the day before, she saw the dazzle of sun and water fade into blue sky that soon darkened. Only dawn and deepest night were vivid, she would discover; the rest was a shifting grey gauze that just sometimes was touched by brightness.

  As she was preparing to rise, easing her limbs outward, the door beside her swung open. A brightly clad man emerged and stared down at her. She squinted at his shades of red, green, yellow, and turned her gaze to his face. This was all nose and lips, framed by white-golden hair that stood out in short spikes from his head. He scowled down at her. Before she could shift or speak, he was gone, striding away with his blinding cloak blown like a sail behind him.

  Jaele stood up and went after him. He was so vivid, and he had looked at her, however briefly; she suddenly needed to keep him in sight, to follow him into the dark, tangled town. She walked behind him up a small alley, stopping to glance at the painted stores she had seen the night before. Pink with white lettering, silver with black, blue with gold: “Rope & Tw” “Fish Gre ns Shells” “Priceless Treasures From.” Words partially erased or gone which she read haltingly, trying to remember what her parents had taught her on cold, foggy nights. “Say this word now, Jaele. And again. See the shapes and hear them. . . .” People sat in the open doorways; old people mostly, leaning against the stone and looking at the harbour. They did not look at her.

  She ducked beneath low archways and squeezed herself between steep close-set walls, and always she saw the man ahead, shimmering his own daylight. After a time she emerged into a wider street. The buildings here were also painted, but they were all houses. As she passed them, she caught glimpses of flowering vines splayed across stone, chipped dry fountains, other deeper columns and arches. She saw children leaping and screeching, racing around the fountains. She looked away from them to jump over runnels of filth that bubbled among the cobbles, and held her nose against the stench. Still she had him in view, above the other people who now thronged the street. They called to one another and hurried through the grey salt mist, clutching baskets, babies, loops of fishing net. And as she saw all this, she watched, still, for another man, tall and lean and bearded.

  The man with the cloak disappeared at last into a dark doorway between houses. When she stepped inside, she realized it was a tunnel: the stones of the roof curved only a short distance above her—he would have to be ducking—and a row of torches spat along both walls. The air was smotheringly damp; when she laid her fingers against the rock, they slid over spongy green moss.

  Footsteps clattered toward her and she pressed herself to the slippery, beaded wall. At first there was nothing but the sound—then a sudden pale face, and a bulk that was body and perhaps cloth, bound upon a shoulder. The man or woman nodded at her and there was a stale, dank brushing of wind. Retreat and echo and silence.

  She continued on, iben-sight grazing rock seams, brown curling among green—but shrinking from the flames. She could not look directly at the torches, and thought of Llana fleeing lightning in the red ring of the barrows. Words skittered in her head: Perhaps there is more in dark, puckered stone than torchlight?

  Her breath was hissing when she saw daylight. Another person brushed by her: a woman, also carrying a folded bolt of cloth on her back. She nodded as well, and Jaele stepped past her and out of the tunnel.

  The view here was the same: a narrow cobbled street that swung out of sight between rows of painted buildings. She stood for a moment, vaguely disappointed. Then she heard the noise: a low, steady clacking—dancing, stabbing, mocking so that she was hollow. She went forward, past the first few houses. The same courtyards, half hidden by flower-spotted creepers and partly open doors; but no fountains, no leaping children. Looms instead, four, six in each shadowed space. Bent heads, flying hands, shuttles and whirling threads. She walked on and saw that there was cloth hanging from outer walls—cloaks spread wide, blankets, sweeping lengths so vivid against the grey.

  She stopped where the street turned and found that it was a dead end: an ivy-thick wall rose from the cobbles. She looked back and watched people fingering cloth, crying out prices, arguing and laughing—and above it all, the looms. She was dizzy and cold, straining for voice and hands, sensing these things so briefly before they came gently, terribly apart in the noise and weaving of here.

  The cloaked man was holding a brilliantly blue and golden tunic. She fastened her eyes on him, so focused that the colours bled. He emptied a pouch into another man’s palm: silver and copper beads spilled out and were accepted. He slung the tunic over his shoulder and walked again toward the tunnel. Jaele could not move after he had gone; she felt as if she had been swimming, her limbs heavy and awkward. When she did rise and enter the tunnel, the sputtering darkness was empty. She traced the streets outside blindly, wending up and down and seeing nothing. Wood of walls and boat, mouths that smiled like smoke and words that sounded, but only in her own voice.

  Stars were pricking the sea when she walked again onto the planks of the wharf. The waves rolled slowly; she sat beneath his windo
w and listened, willing them to lull her away from her hunger. She wondered whether Nossi had seen the ocean as well as the river. Whether Aldreth had tried to Tell water and lowering sky. Wondered where he was—where Dorin was. Quickly back to Nossi, whom she missed so much, a silent gaping that she could trust. If she dreamed, she did not remember it.

  When the man glowered at her the next morning, she tried to speak, but the dryness in her mouth was stifling. He swept away, each step and twitch of his new tunic emanating annoyance. She did not follow him this time. She crouched in front of his house all day, waiting, because again—as in Luhr, kneeling beside pottery shards—she did not know how to continue; how to seek, now that the man who had drawn her to this place was so close. Get up, look for him—but fear and uncertainty kept her still. She stared at the deserted harbour. There were no sailors now, and none of the scraggly boats put out groaning toward the open water. Her stomach grumbled, and she scrabbled through her bundle and even her pouch. Her teeth gnashed imagined seagreen.

  In the late afternoon the wind rose. The waves crashed, rearing high before thundering over stone and docks, then ebbing in foam. The sky was a dense, lightning-punched yellow that thickened as she cowered against the wall. The rain began almost immediately; splinters lashed her body and the ships shrieked in their moorings.

  He emerged from the murky distance. She watched the colours of him ripple and run. She did not see his face until he was directly above her. For a moment he gazed down at her; she felt herself trembling but did not otherwise move. Then one of his hands plunged toward her and hoisted her up, and he dragged her into the house.

  The heavy door slammed and jarred her eyes, her jaw, her streaming, pooling limbs. He called, “Annial!” and turned to her, hands squarely on his hips. “Well, I have no idea who you are, or why you are so taken with my house, but I’m certainly not going to let you sicken and shiver on my doorstep like a pathetic beast. Wait here.” He spun away from her and she stood alone, collapsed against the smoothness of the door.

  Lanterns hung from stakes in the walls; they flickered over a mess of wine-coloured chairs, a huge round table, goblets, scythes and spears, and carved heads like the ones above several door frames in Fane. Among, on top of and beneath everything else were books: thick leather-bound books, and scrolls curled like new leaves, littered everywhere so that surfaces (floor and table, even chairs) could be seen only in patches. A wooden staircase spiralled up from all of this, to a second level that was dark.

  Jaele did not move. An old woman shuffled toward her, through bands of fire and shadow. Her sandalled feet slapped flagstones, the crimson carpet, and somehow avoided the books. Scrolls angled slowly as she passed.

  “Don’t mind him,” she said in a voice that grated like sand and rocks. She was standing paces in front of Jaele, peering up at her from wizened smallness. “He seems rough as the breakers off the cliffs,” she continued, “but isn’t.”

  They regarded one another, and Jaele was again aware of her clothes. Keeper’s fingers on thread and leather; stains of desert, river, lynanyn.

  “He’s let you in,” the old woman said at last. “Now I suppose I shall try to mend your damages—as I do his.”

  “Annial?” Jaele said, and cleared her throat. Her voice uneasy, as it had been so often since Luhr.

  “To be certain,” Annial replied. “And he is Ilario. I am not, as you may be imagining, his servant—” She was walking, leading Jaele surprisingly swiftly up the stairs and speaking over her shoulder. “—although I do cook for him, as I did for his parents and theirs and theirs, in my girlhood. No, I am a friend—always have been, since my girlhood. Did I mention that? A friend of his great-grandmother’s. We couldn’t bear to be separated, and I lived here with them when Fane was prosperous and the tall ships crossed from the islands.” They had turned the last curve and were standing in a hallway that was torchlit at the end, where there were three closed doors. Thunder rocked the house.

  “The time of tall ships that crowded the harbour, and Queensfighters who galloped down our streets, so colourful and handsome—the women too—and me a girl living by the sea with Hania and her man.” Jaele’s breath caught; here, after so long, words which warmed and welcomed her. “Then their children, and theirs. Then Ilario, and he will be the last.”

  Jaele sensed a pause and spoke quickly. “The last of his line? Or the last you will take care of?”

  Annial’s white brows drew together, and she laid her palm against the burnished handle in the centre of the farthest door. “Both, child, for he will father no sons or daughters, and I am far from girlhood, though girlhood is very clear to me. Clear as water, the pictures of myself and Hania and the handsome Queensfighter who slid from his horse to give me flowers bound with golden thread. The tall ships. I have not seen you before?”

  “No,” Jaele said, and the tiny woman’s eyes were clouded green and puzzled. “You have not. I am Jaele.”

  “Good. Very good. Perhaps we shall meet for sweets with the children, later, when the storm has passed. I fear for sailors on such nights—tossed and bent off course, too close to the Raiders’ Land.”

  Jaele almost stumbled as she stepped past Annial and into the room. Lightning-raked but otherwise dark; a cushioned seat below the glass-paned window. Heartbeat glimpses of devouring black ocean. A small grated fireplace lined with drifts of ashes. A low bed with carved claw feet; before it a carpet which, when lit, revealed a map: islands, coastline, jagged black and pale creased water. Like her own map, but not; she did not look closely. Tomorrow, she thought, dizzy with exhaustion and relief.

  “Sleep here, Jaele. You seem cold, but then winter is coming—you can see it in the colour of the air. You may light a fire in your hearth if you like. Rest well.” Annial thrust her face back around the door frame as she left. “Your hair is the same as hers.” The door closed with a click.

  Jaele did not light a fire. She drank cold water, poured from a red-glazed pitcher into a shallow cup. The pottery was smooth and somehow warm, and she held it to her lips, thinking for a thunder-space of food eaten in a chamber beneath the sand, and then of a bowl that had been blue within. She slipped into bed—a bed, not since the desert—and her body’s quivering warmed her under the blanket.

  Lightning, hunger or water’s roar, looms and the blurring edges of the map.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The morning was silver, and there were flames swaying against the old black chimney stone. Jaele sat up and dragged her fingers through her knotted hair. She looked out the window and remembered that Annial had mentioned winter.

  A tunic and leggings lay folded beside the water jug, and she eased herself into them, sighing skin and blue cloth. She stood for a moment by the window, gazing through bubbled glass at white sea, low, thick cloud, the dark line of cliffs that curved away, ringing the harbour to her right. The same empty boats tossed and creaked.

  The stairs groaned when her feet touched them; she hesitated on each, listening for sounds from below and hearing none. What she did hear, when she finally reached the book-filled room, was singing. A young woman’s voice, indistinct words: wind, shadowed eyes, ribbons of wine. She followed the voice along a back corridor which led into a cluttered kitchen. She stood in the doorway and stared.

  Copper pots of all sizes hung from a low central beam and dangled perilously close to Jaele’s head. There were earthen jugs and bowls, some glazed and others river-brown. Wooden spoons and baking paddles as long as oars, knives with metal hilts that gleamed like swords. Baskets brimming with green fronds, fruit, jutting ends of bread. Small pots, large ones, packed with earth that sprouted green and yellow shoots. A row of stone-lined ovens with heavy iron doors, neat stacks of wood beside them. There were scattered stools and chairs, and several cushion-strewn ledges that seemed to have been formed out of the walls themselves. Four round windows were set in the far wall, each slightly higher than the one before (“the risi
ng moon,” Annial said later). There was a small door beside these, and it stood open on a walled space of frenzied leaves and blossoms.

  Jaele sat down heavily on a stool by the hall door. She felt transparent, hunger-stretched, breathless with warmth and scent and the bumpy crusts of bread. The lovely singing stopped and Annial exclaimed, “Who’s there?” as she emerged from the clutter brandishing a huge pair of clippers. She gazed at Jaele, wide-eyed, then smiled. “The girl Jaele. From the storm. Ilario brought you in, and I took you upstairs. You are hungry now, I have no doubt. Here, child,” she said, and whirled among the cutting tables and low straining shelves, then spun back to the stool with her brittle arms stretched around bread and sweetmoss and even seagreen. “Wait, now,” she cried, and soon a cup of herb water was steaming between Jaele’s hands.

  Jaele trembled as she raised the food to her mouth and felt it there, ridged or yielding, and so familiar that she shut her eyes.

  Annial moved off, her head a finger’s span from the pots. “I know I should close the door,” she was saying, “but too soon it will be bitter cold, and the icemounts will be crawling past the harbour, and we will yearn for this time of temperate air. Even Ilario, who now moans and complains about the chill creeping around his cloak.”

  “Where is he?” Jaele asked, mumbling around seagreen and hardly hearing herself. A part of her grieving, sunk in taste and ocean darkness.

  “Oh, somewhere about; he does travel in a day. Walks the streets or cliffs or other places he does not speak of. Walks and walks like no other of his family, although I know he has reason.” She stood still, her head turned to the open door.