A Telling of Stars

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

  When Ilario came into sight again, the path was beginning to wind down toward the water. She ran, almost tripped. His cloak darted blue and yellow, and she could see snow clustered like berries in the spikes of his hair. The waves were louder, and she felt spray needling her skin. She saw, peripherally, the glittering side of an icemount. She slithered and gasped; and he was gone.

  When Jaele reached the point on the path at which he had vanished, she found a slender fissure in the rock. Grey stone flecked with silver; the dry stalks and leaves of cliff-sprung plants straining in the wind; darkness and echo. She drew a breath and slipped inside.

  There was no air or light. Rock dragged at her hair and scraped against her knees and toes. She crept along sideways, and as she did, her iben-sight bloomed and she saw glistening whorls of moisture and crystal, long-legged insects that skittered away from her, deep red moss in shapes of land or faces. Her ears rang with breathing, and she was sure that Ilario would hear her and wait and reach out to grasp her arm—but she shuffled on alone, down and down again. As usual in small dark places, she could not feel time pass; only by her heartbeat did she know, and by the changing patterns of moss.

  The passage opened so abruptly that she twisted and fell, blinking against light—streaming, pulsing light of every shade, coming not from sky but from a great forest of stalagmites that jutted from a sea of thick, waveless white. Jaele knelt on a rocky ledge and thought, No, they are too tall, taller than the cliff. They are icemounts, trapped away from the ocean. She clutched at the stone, afraid of the motionless white liquid below her and of the shapes that sent their colours glancing like lightning off the walls.

  Ilario was climbing up a violet stalagmite a leap’s distance from the passage. He was stretched wide, as slender and tiny as one of the insects. He passed through swathes of different colours; sometimes she could not see him in the blaze. At last he came to a particularly wide ledge and stopped. For a moment he hung there. Then, in a shimmer, a ripple, he slipped away. Inside, she thought in terror; it is water and he is within, bubbles whirling and breaking at a surface he cannot reach.

  She knelt and did not move. There was no sound, though there should have been a steady dripping. She knew that her knees would be patterned with the marks of stones. Fear—such fear that she had lost the flint grey winter sky and the wind that tore her voice—but still she did not move.

  Ilario emerged from the stalagmite as suddenly as he had entered it. This time he slid, almost fell, down the polished side. He crouched for a time at its base before leaping to the path. She heard his breath then: it rasped from one wall to the next until she was surrounded, cowering. As he stumbled toward her, she tried to stand. His bent head lifted and he saw her.

  He stood motionless; even his breathing was quiet. His face was white except for a smudge of blood on either cheek. Jaele opened her mouth—his name, or a wordless sound—and he moved again, limping around her into the passageway.

  She was not sure how much time passed before she forced herself to follow him. The narrow tunnel was silent but for her own scrabbling. Her fingers pushed against the moss, the slippery stone, willing them to be yielding earth or water.

  I felt desperate, trapped. How must you have felt, when you were first prisoners? Did you press yourselves against the earthen walls and rip your talons, your flesh, with clawing?

  She burst into the air, her eyes dazzled and filling with tears. Icemounts and snow-crusted path; wind that stirred her hair against her cheeks. Thunder of waves.

  She ran this time—sent herself flying along the trail, desperate for a glimpse of him. Only when she turned the final corner into the harbour did she see him. He was walking swiftly, head held high as ever. She slowed and watched him stride along the wharf and into the house. When she reached the door, she hesitated. When she opened it, he was there.

  “I cannot find the words I need,” he said from his seat at the round table. His voice was low and measured. “You have trespassed. You have meddled. You are a fool!” Now he was shouting, straining up from his chair to loom over her. “Away! Get away from here before I do you harm!”

  She stumbled up the stairs and along the corridor to her room; lay on her bed and trembled as the daylight faded. Annial came in with a tray of food. She set it down by the bed and stood looking at her. “What has happened?” she demanded. “Ilario paces and you lie moody as a child. Tell me.”

  “I cannot,” Jaele answered, without turning her head. “I do not know. Truly, I do not.”

  “Well then,” Annial said, and left the room.

  Jaele slept for a time, dreaming of a milk-white ocean roiling, reaching spume and heat. She woke in darkness to the low hum of icemount song and Ilario, sitting on the floor beneath her window.

  She struggled to sit up, tugging at a blanket until it covered her knees. “Don’t be afraid,” he said in a strange, rough voice, and she let out a gust of breath.

  “I am afraid, and sorry—so sorry. I don’t know why I followed you . . . I should have called to you. I am so thoughtless.”

  There was light—silver, star—shifting on his face. She saw him smile. “I do enjoy your nattering, you know. You have made me want to listen, again, to words.”

  She snorted, pushed tangled hair behind her ear. “You enjoy? Of course—I’ve noticed how you seek me out and linger to speak to me.”

  “You do not understand, Jaele. Listen to me now, when it is night and I am weary or helpless enough to speak.” He was silent then, for so long that she thought he had forgotten her. When he finally continued, it was barely above a whisper. “I am dying.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it. The air, their skin, so still.

  “Annial hasn’t told you?” he went on. “How alarming, or reassuring, that her tales have not wandered to my plight. Yes, so young, and now the last of a venerable line.”

  “How?” Jaele asked. Perhaps a dream, like the white sea, like Nossi’s hair.

  “How.” He laughed hollowly. “That I cannot tell you. Only that I am sure.”

  She noticed that there was snow, spinning like points of whitest flame in the path of the moon she could not see. She watched it, and his face blurred at the corners of her eyes. She bit at her lower lip until it stung. Then she said, “Sea Raiders murdered my parents and brother. I followed one of them here—or he followed me. If I do not find him, I will go across the sea to the Raiders’ Land. In the spring.” She thought that Ilario’s eyebrows arched, and felt relief like warmth in her blood.

  “So we trade confidences at last, my unexpected guest.” After a moment he said, “Where did you live, you and your family?”

  “A small harbour—tiny, really—only us, in a wooden hut.” She talked on as she had not done since she lay beside Nossi, watching sparks and the slow swinging of the stars. But this time she did not tell of Dorin; this time the sheen of washed sand, the clacking of the loom, the path that led through scrub and trees to the town whose name she never knew. Her brother, chubby and unsteady on the beach, holding out his arms to her. Her mother’s hair, dark and thick, sweeping the water as she bent with her net. All of these images leading to the end—of course. The end. Throats opening beneath blades; a man who had run into darkness and trees. “And he is here,” she said at last, her hand closing over the brooch that lay beside her pillow. “Or he was. Perhaps he has had to cross already. I know nothing—nothing at all. I began by following him, and then for a time he seemed to be following me—and now I do not know. Sometimes I feel that I am mad. Or dreaming.”

  “Ah,” Ilario said, “you see? We are alike, you and I.” In the silence the icemounts’ song rose to sweetness. The snow drifted and wove. “I am sorry for your pain,” he said finally.

  She replied, suddenly awkward, “And I for yours,” and continued, rushing, “Where do you go each morning, then? If I may know. You need not—”

  Ilario held up a hand, grinning, and her c
lenched muscles relaxed. “You may know the gist of it, my girl. Each day, I rise and strike out on some pilgrimage, as I have for what seems an age. I read, you see; I comb my books for ancient lore, and it lifts my heart, for a time. I go in search of herbs and roots and sacred trees; hermit healers and mad children said to cure all with one long look from their wild eyes. And this morning, as you saw, I attempted to tap the power of the deep earth. Each day a quest, even though my friends draw away and vanish. Even though I know that the sickness continues and grows, and I am weaker with every dawn.”

  “You do not seem weak,” Jaele said. “You walk with such vigour I can hardly keep pace with you.”

  “As does Annial. Yet she is old—older than I can guess—and when she is alone, I know that she bows with pain. She and I are also alike, in this.”

  Jaele leaned against the wall, which was cold. She felt the fading of their voices and thought they spoke so differently, she and Ilario. Her words and his, effortless, warm. She could almost heard a loom and the dip of oars.

  She started awake, not aware that she had been sleeping. The light had changed—now greyness, dawn, cobwebs strung over Ilario’s open eyes. She stirred, and he slid over the floor to the carpet.

  “Look,” he said softly, and pointed. “Look, and show me your harbour.”

  “Mmm,” she replied, “I can show you, but there’s nothing. . . .”

  The water of her bay was dark with seagreen, and there were names—Reddac, Lyalla, Elic—curling over the shore. She touched them, remembering her mother’s slender fingers drawing the letters in sand, saying, “Look—this is your name, and Elic’s; these are sounds you can see”—and she bent her head so that the tears fell hot on the backs of her hands.

  Ilario was sitting at the round table when Jaele finally emerged from her room. She had slept again, her closed eyes stinging. When she woke, it was all even more of a dream, except for the lovely black curves of the names.

  He glanced up at her briefly, then returned to his reading. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You came to tell me something last night, and I ended up talking, crying. It was insensitive.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, and set his book down on the table. “Or perhaps it is not so simple as one pain. And you, my girl, are decidedly too sensitive. I have no idea how you’ve come so far, with all your shrinking and apologizing.” He smiled, but there were edges in his voice, a strange sharp discomfort.

  “Tell me about the carpet,” she said, and sat down with him.

  He shifted in his chair. “I have told you—I do not speak well during the day.”

  “Ah, I see. You will creep up to my room in the middle of the night and wake me whenever you wish to talk. Shall I expect you tonight, around moonrise?”

  He chuckled, and she finally saw his eyes. “There, you see? I was wrong. You are entirely insensitive.” He paused, tracing with four fingers the sweep of an embossed letter. “The carpet. I don’t know much. It’s been here for so long, and your room has always been for travellers who told of journeys and homes. I used to crouch by the fireplace and listen, and when each guest had moved on, I scurried upstairs to gawk at the new names and try to say them myself. I don’t know where the carpet came from. Perhaps, long ago, one of these travellers brought it and left it as a gift.” He raised his eyebrows at her, in mock surprise. “Why, I can speak! Daylight, and I can speak! You are a foul sorceress, to loosen my tongue thus.” They smiled at each other.

  When they entered the kitchen, Annial was drawing fresh loaves from the ovens. She placed them on wooden racks, then looked up quizzically. “Together for breakfast, I see,” she began uncertainly, almost hopefully.

  Ilario went to her and bent down to kiss the top of her head. “She knows, Anni,” he said quietly, “I’ve told her.”

  The old woman said nothing. She gazed at Jaele, and her eyes were dark with tears.

  The days and nights of deep winter passed tormented. The wind shrieked and clutched the sea into ice-topped swells; sleet lashed windows and clung there, frozen into lattice so thick that it was impossible to see out. The markets were closed, the streets empty even of children. Fane hunkered grey and still except for dirty smoke that was swallowed by storm. The words of Jaele’s father were truth, now that there was no dawn and the icemounts lay smothered and dull.

  Jaele rarely left the house, though sometimes she did wind herself in cloaks and scarves and walk into the town. She did not see the Sea Raider; she did not truly expect to. He will be somewhere deep and warm, if he is still here at all. If he did not swim, before the snow. Despite this thought, she wished that she could see out her window to the docks and the harbour. As if he might be standing there, looking up.

  Ilario too slowly ceased his daily journeyings. He had continued them for a time, also venturing out with his head and body wrapped in glowing cloaks. Jaele and Annial would hear him return, blowing and cursing, and they made no comments as they passed him hot herb water. He soon left the house for shorter periods; eventually, not at all. “I have never been impeded by winter before,” he snapped one day, “but this one is too much, even for me.”

  “This is half-truth,” Annial said to Jaele later, when they were alone in the kitchen.

  “Oh?” Jaele asked. “And what is the other half?”

  Annial peeled the husk from a green lyna in one deft motion and laid it beside the rest. “This house is not his prison now that you are here. He is more content.”

  Jaele snorted and said, “Content? He is a short-tempered misery!” She knew that there was happiness in her voice, and that Annial heard it.

  Ilario woke early every day and stomped down the stairs to the kitchen, where he clanged pots and dropped spoons and uttered loud oaths. He then paced: around the front room, through the kitchen, back again. Up the stairs, along the hallway, into his room, down the stairs. “Sit!” Jaele would cry, and he would growl from the floor above.

  “Please,” she begged him once, from her seat at the round table. “I am trying to read this history of Fane, and I am a poor enough reader without your stamping and blustering.”

  He looked down at her with narrowed eyes. The silence where his steps had been was like a roar. “Poor reader, are you? And you’re attempting Magon’s Account of Fane? No, no—I will not accept this. If your reading skills are inadequate, that book will surely murder you with tedium.” He went to the shelves and examined them; he knelt on the floor and swept his hands through parchment and leather. At last he held up a thin volume whose pages were edged with green and blue. “A meditation on the sea, by one of my ancestors. A bit delirious, but it will interest you.” Jaele took it, and he rose to pace again.

  “Wait,” she said, and he turned. “Help me. Teach me. Sit down.”

  So began their reading and writing time, which saved them from the winter and made walls and ceiling into firelit safety. They started on that first day with The Sea, My Home. Ilario opened it gently and smoothed its pages. “By Elmorden Flint. An unlikely name. She also produced the artwork.”

  Jaele reached out to touch what looked like gold-encrusted waves, cascades of murky green, a rocky headland half-obscured by spray.

  “Now read,” he commanded, “and I will see how much work we require.”

  She began shyly, so that the words twisted from her mouth like living creatures, surprised. After a few phrases she grew calmer and slower. Ilario corrected her softly, interjecting with a word or syllable but never stopping her. There was a flow; even as she strained to read, she felt it.

  “The sea, my home

  My home is salt and fury

  Is crest and bleak

  Is sudden gold and still.”

  When she came to the end of the page, Jaele halted. Ilario said, “You see—it’s gaudy stuff. But you read well: a credit to your first teacher. It is words like this, though, that give you trouble. . . .”

  Jaele’s reading impr
oved swiftly, as did her writing. She and Ilario soon took turns choosing poems or histories or longer tales that spun out over the evenings. Annial began to join them at the round table. She was quiet, nodding sometimes as she listened. When they were finished, she would sigh and stir and say, “Beautiful.”—even, as Ilario laughed to Jaele, if they had been reading from Warfare of Ancient Societies or Scourges and Diseases of the Lower Desert.

  The winter passed, and the three of them read and listened and cooked together as snow thickened on the round windows. Ilario grew thinner. His bright clothing hung from his shoulders and hips; his collarbone seemed suddenly to be jutting, thrusting at skin until it whitened. He coughed—at first a tickle, then a stubborn rasp, then a wracking that bent him over and brought blood like fine mist to his fingers. Sometimes, while Jaele read, he would go to the window and look out at the harbour, leaning his forehead against the glass. She paused the first time he did this, and he snapped, “Over-vigilant girl! I am still listening.” He was shaking; his tunic shifted, as if in a breath of wind.

  “You should write a story,” Ilario said. He was sitting on a stool, peeling sourfruit skins delicately away with the tips of his fingers.

  “What do you mean?” Jaele asked, handing the fruit to Annial.

  He coughed, pressing his mouth against his shoulder. “A story—surely you understand this? I thought you moderately quick-witted. A tale of some sort. Fantastic or true or both, as you wish. It would occupy your mind after we have finished reading. Spring is still distant, as you know.”

  Later he gave her a thick sheaf of paper and a black writing stick. She sat cross-legged on her bed and gazed at the snow drifted on her windowsill. A fire crackled in the grate; a candle stood on the floor below her. She wrote, “The sun blazed down on the sand. Queen Galha rode from the gates of Luhr on her white horse, and her army followed. Her people stood silent and afraid, because she was going across the wide sea in the east.”