A Telling of Stars

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

  “Your strokes will lead you back,” said the fishperson. Others had gathered; their hands were echoes. Jaele tried to draw “yes” in the honeyed water. A small slender fishperson swam up to her; it held a blue bag. “Water and breath inside,” the head fishperson said. “Clean, to drink when you are far from our lands.”

  Jaele took the bag, which was smooth, made of sea plants, perhaps. There were two fronds at its short neck; she tied them to her belt. She felt borne up by her old bundle, by the bag on the other side. Now, she thought.

  The sea snake slid beneath her. She could feel its muscles bunching, and held tightly to the upturned scales. She looked at the fishfolk who were ranged around her in rings, below, beside, above, shining into the distance. “Thank you,” she said. Their hands cried out, “Your strokes will lead you back”—all of them, so that her ears and eyes were dazzled as the sea snake leapt upward to the darkness.

  Three spaces under the sea, she says later. The fishfolk realm with its shining sunlit plants and coral, rock that breathed and sprouted moss. Then a dark, ruined space—so dark that Jaele could hardly see the serpent below her, her iben-sight quenched as it had been beneath the fishfolk lake before the light. She clung, occasionally taking great gulps of air from the bag at her side. She felt crushed by water and the weight of silence.

  The blackness was broken by sudden bursts, weals of colour that lit the water. At first she cringed, ducking her head; after a time she squinted and tried to see. They were creatures, their bodies illuminated from within. Some were shaped like overturned bowls, trailing glowing streamers; others were thin, striped and whorled with veins. There would be utter darkness for an age, then a series of flashes and the hiss of bodies brushing by them like wind. The sea snake did not falter.

  Jaele learned to look below when the light ripped away blindness. She saw rows of volcanoes pluming smoke, ridging vast slopes and valleys. Crumbling stone buildings, arches fallen and scattered. A tower, once; they passed through its window and she saw a round table, a greened bronze pitcher on its side. Forests of bare trees still standing, covered in crescents of red fungus as large as her head. All this glimpsed in fragments so vivid they burned against her eyes long after the creatures’ light had passed.

  There was no time. She tried to imagine Fane—spring around the harbour, the kitchen door propped open to the sun—but the images bled away, so far below. She and the sea snake, alone, and the strange, brilliant moments that might be long or short—she was not even sure of this. Seagreen, when she thought of it; air now and then. She knew that they would not stop moving, that they would not break the surface of the ocean. It was swifter below, undisturbed by waves, circles of twilight, stars, dawn.

  She felt them change direction once. The next lightning flash revealed a hulking shelf of land on their left. An island, she thought, but they did not slow.

  And then the sea snake did stop. She felt the difference, but was not sure until the creatures’ light had flared twice. The same landscape of craters and dark mould and once-molten chasms. The sea snake was shaking; she bent toward its head. Sensed then, despite the dull roar of ocean and body, a presence gathering behind them; a swelling, shrieking darkness untouched by the glow, which did not come again. She clutched the sea snake’s scales, willing the drifting membranous veins to show what—but there was nothing. The advancing darkness; a smothering press of cold.

  When the sea snake burst away, she almost lost her grip. She was lifted off its back, her screaming filling her ears. Speed cracked her skin, her bones fissured and melted away; perhaps she was no longer on the sea snake but dissolving backward. The thing was still behind them, so close that smoke roiled the water. She needed breath—but no bag, no fingers, her lungs would be throbbing scarlet if she could look down—and just as she whimpered surrender, there was a light.

  A sigh—they know what this means.

  But not light as there was in the fishfolk realm. Not even the dim green light of the water in my bay. She falls silent, reaching for words.

  As soon as they plunged into the new place, she could sense that the pursuing force had not followed them. They were stunned into stillness, hovering on the other side of a curtain. Wincing against the light. But not light, Jaele thought as she drank breath from the bag. Her head, skin, blood bloomed until she wriggled.

  In the brown clarity she could see the sand bottom, flat and smooth. She tilted her head back and saw the water, which did not glint or shift. No movement at all, except where the sea snake’s tail was gently winding: tiny ripples, instantly swallowed. A tomb, she thought, and knew how close they were.

  The sea snake swam almost hesitantly. She felt its uneasiness, watched it turn its head to the barely ruffled water. “Who gave you this mission?” she asked it, trying to form the words with her mouth so that she would not forget. “Unlucky creature. So kind, to help me—but if you had no choice?” The holes of its ears opened on her burbled sounds.

  At last they saw a shape in the distance. Jaele and the serpent strained together, closer, until it lay below them. The rib cage of a boat, belled white almost gleaming. They passed above it, Jaele hunkering closer to the gold. Another boat, a length away; another. A forest of bones. Search vessels, fishers’ coracles, Raiders’ craft. So close.

  Then—days, invisible moons later—the sea snake would not go forward. She waited, stubborn and hopeless. When it angled its head, she slid off. Her arms and legs churned at leaden water. She and the beast gazed at each other. She put a hand to its wedge-shaped cheek and watched its tongue flicker. No, take me back. I’m sorry to have brought you this far, but I cannot. . . . Come onto the shore with me; rise up on the end of your tail and strike. Be my army of silga and Queensfighters and Alilan, be Keeper and Bienta and Nossi and Aldreth and Dorin—beside me, touching me so my skin is warm as if brave.

  When she turned and swam away, she knew that the sea snake was still there, suspended above the skeleton ships. She flailed and thrust herself forward, so immediately exhausted that she could not remember diaphanous spinning. She thought she was moving upward—but maybe not. The water was unbroken, unchanging, and there seemed to be sand on all sides; sand under her eyelids, silting her throat. She was choking, thrashing as she never had, not even as a baby set free beside her mother’s boat. Writhing until pain lanced through her skull.

  There was stone—jagged as a blade, but she had to grasp it, had to pull. Through half-open eyes she saw blood branching from her fingers, blurring to cloud in the water. Sleepwalker scrabble up the rock. Alneth, Alnila, Mother in your boat, Father at your loom help me, I am slipping.

  The ocean broke around her head, but she did not breathe. She dragged herself farther, to where the dagger stone became earth—gritty, sticky, sealing her eyes shut. Then she breathed, spewing water salt choking, bile tears that only seeped.

  Jaele, bleeding and blind, curled on the shore of the Raiders’ Land.

  BOOK THREE

  THE RAIDERS’ LAND

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Thrust up on the sand, tender and bloodied as a baby, or something newly dead.

  The land outside Jaele’s closed eyes darkened and lightened several times; she knew this with her skin, which was sleeping. Sleeping on a beach drizzled with sunlight and ashes and wind-scattered smoke. A severed hand, a pain that turned her body white. A man gazing at her with shifting leaves behind him.

  One day her eyes opened, but she could not see. One day she told her arm to move and it did not; another day it did, and began to scrape the muck away. Her fingers were like stones sinking through water—except that the air was heavier than the sea. Flesh and innards grated, screamed swollen against the wind. A hot wind, the first thing she felt; nerve-endings like the tiny ocean creatures she had seen, advancing in pink wisps from their shells, retreating in fear or unreadiness from the current. Hot as the desert, but different. Even in the desert there was whispered green.

&nbs
p; Next the keening—the furnace wind driven over empty spaces, as she later knew. Then, just beginning to hear again, it was a sound of spines: piercing, embedded where she was most bruised. She began to quiver.

  Her eyelashes cracked apart, first one by one, then together, wrenched by tears and fingers. She wept, so much salt because the light was harsh and scalding

  they hiss in pain, and she feels their hands reaching to cover her, to touch her face and their own—We are sorry that our sight did not help—the lake, the enchanted fortress, the deep ocean—our vision weak in these places—and later you suffered as we do, in brightness

  then blinked her eyes clear. At first she could not understand—there was a maddened tilt of sky and hills. Then she knew that she was lying down, and that the hills were tiny mounds of dirt a finger’s breadth from her face. As soon as she realized this, the wind gave way to stones, to knubbled contours of earth that pressed into her woken body. She was bathed in heat and sores, awake, awake.

  When she sat up, her gut heaved: she vomited sea and mucus, wiped her eyes, stared at the wet ground. Earth that was yellow-brown, coated in black dust. A few stones—rounded or broken-apart sharp. Only stones, but she looked away from them. Stood before she could think, rising into a smell of old burning.

  Yellow-brown dirt and rock angled down to the sea. Rock slightly sloping, like the empty shells of sea creatures. She saw jagged and shattered shale where the waves rasped, the water so dark she could not imagine being beneath. She wrapped her torn arms around herself, gripping the sodden pieces of the tunic which had seen the desert and Keeper’s hands. Her head was full of air, lifting her slowly away.

  The sea was ridged with walls of water taller than she was, but the thunderclap noise of their breaking was dampened by the wind. She turned her head into this wind—turned herself around so that she was facing the land. It was flat except for the mounds of rock. The black dust blew, soot and dirt shifting like rivers over the stone. There was nothing in the distance except sky, dun-coloured and crushingly empty. No paths, no boats pulled up on the shale, no webbed prints in the dust. She too was empty. Numb, now that she was standing on this shore. She tried to summon rage, grief, blood-need that would drive her inland—but could not. Even fear was still.

  You are here—now walk. Her own voice, distant—and she did walk. Her feet dragged over the ground, over the lumped stone. She felt desperately clumsy; her bones had rent and fused again at alien angles, the ocean had warped her, she was carrying other bodies through the dust. She did not look up, concentrated on her shredded shoes and rip-nailed toes and the patches of earth around them. The wind whipped her hair into her eyes and mouth, and she stopped to bind it with a strip of her leggings. Hair still damp and clotted with sea.

  She trudged for a long time with her gaze trained below. Gradually, there were more rocks, sharper, and different notes in the wind. She could no longer hear the sea, and looked up when she stopped walking.

  Behind her was the flat expanse she had crossed, no view of ocean. In front was a line of hills, ragged piles of rock over which she could not see. She began to climb. Her hands wrists knees opened instantly, the barely knit wounds of her shore crawl coursing fresh blood. She crawled here too, struggling over rocks that fell away beneath and clattered hollowly down. Her head echoed. There was darkness in her eyes; when she rested, she realized that the sky was deepening. Stars flickered among the soot that still hung in the air like mist.

  She slept, stretched on the pointed stones. Her body jerked and twisted, heart quiet then hammering, and she woke in half-night. Her skin tiny white pebbles under the wind. She shifted and crouched, reaching to climb again.

  It was day. She did not remember the change, but the wind was stifling and the sky yellow, and the side of the rock hill fell away below her. She could see the summit, wobbling in the dust that was suddenly thicker, and in moments she was there. She knelt and coughed until her lungs burned. Then she rose.

  There were countless stones here as well, but flatter and packed more closely together. She walked a few steps before halting. Bent to look, uncertain because of the soot—but it was there, a shallow pool of water, what had to be water, though it lay among the stones like squid’s ink. It was warm and still; even her fingers breathed no ripples.

  There would be water, stagnant, just enough to sustain them. They could voyage across the sea, but would die if they drank the water of other lands. Tepid black pool, then, motionless in rock, without reflection of sky or faces.

  She remembered the fishfolk bag; for the first time since reaching the Raiders’ Land, she felt it resting against her leg. She raised it to her mouth. Her lips were broken and edged as earth; water flowed over and in. The honeyed, clear water that had also been breath. She felt sunlit veins and blossoming, and moaned as she drank. She stopped herself—too soon, her thirst vast—because perhaps there would be an end, a bottom to the magic.

  She ate seagreen—strands and strands, still tasting of fresh ocean. With each bite she felt a sharpening. The sky, distinct behind the dust; firm knobs of earth; her hands and limbs and skin and heart hardening like iron, but so light. She stood after her meal and began to slither down the slope beyond the pool—propelled, throbbing with rage and direction. I am here for vengeance. The words glittered with joy and knowledge. She was unafraid. Please: a village, a line of faces above webbed hands, him. She would run toward them all, crying Reddac Lyalla Elic. Sea Raider blood would soak this dust. Her father’s dagger was cool in her palm; the cloak he had woven hung heavy, filthy, dazzling from her shoulders, held there by her mother’s brooch of net and boat.

  By the time she reached the bottom of the hill, darkness had fallen. A sallow moon rose, but its glow did not touch the ground. She had glimpsed nothing, while she was descending (black dust thick as rain); now a fog was obscuring hill and earth and her own feet. She sat with her arms around her knees and did not sleep.

  Daylight thinned the fog to mist. She saw a runnel of water beading the rock face, gathering in another dark pool; she heard a steady dripping when the wind was quiet. There was a smell of old vegetation rotted and dead, though she could see only water.

  She moved and a large stone tumbled away from her foot. She winced, then leaned forward to look more closely at the stone. It was a deep, polished amber, smooth on all sides except one, which was covered with raised black lines. Thin and thick, spiralling, curling. She stared at the shape. After a moment she knew: a creature that had swum—the tiny slender bones of fins, skull, tail. A fish from the green and blue before Queen Galha’s curse.

  She touched the marks and sadness threaded unexpectedly through the weaving of her strength. She rose and began to walk swiftly, the mist parting around her (perhaps they closed their mouths on this fog, yearning). She was looking at her feet again; other fossils lay gleaming on the ground. A trail, deliberately made: each of the fossil-bearing sides had been laid up, so that she saw their dark shapes as she passed. There were bones and scales—also fern, fronds pressed and moulded, ghostly in black.

  When she lifted her eyes, the last of the mist had burned away. She halted: in the clarity she saw a garden. It was many long paces ahead of her, so lifelike that at first she did not notice the absence of colour. A stand of trees, boughs heavy with fruit and vines; flowers with petals wide and soft; tall grasses gently bent by a breeze.

  She stepped toward the place and saw that it was stone. She heard herself whimper, but kept walking. The stone was cool, smoothed white; somehow there was no black dust. Veins of leaves and stems, folds of bark, roughness of moss and lichen, grass tufts covered in the fuzz of seed: all bleached and silent, yet living—until her fingers met rock. She stood in the waist-high grass and turned so that she could see the rock hill behind her, the angled, empty land ahead. Their webbed hands have carved and stroked in memory. Stories of vibrant leaves and streams, told by grandparents who had never seen, to children who would neve
r see?

  She walked on and emerged from the grass at a lake, wide and long. Most of the surface was puckered with imagined rain; near the shore was the tail fin of a plunging fish. At the far end, though, water again became rock and dirt, and there was no more carving. She could see the place where the work had stopped—suddenly, a ripple half-done. She sat down there.

  No numbness, no rage and eagerness—gone, swallowed like bones by rock. Soundlessly, graspingly, she cried out to remember. As if the force of the noise in her head could show it to her again: the boats, the blood, the leader’s hands, fire streaking through the thatch. The faces of her family. Bring me their faces at least—let me see again. But no. No.

  It was night, so soon. She slept by the unfinished lake. Dreamed of sounds: pound, pulse, trickle, drip. Rustle as well, and hiss. When she woke, her mouth was gaping and the hot wind was howling through the stones.

  She left the garden and walked on because it seemed she must. She ate some seagreen and drank two swallows of water. Soot and shattered rock on yellow ground—she did not turn back to look at the trees and plants. That night she dreamed that she was floating, suspended in water warmer than any she had ever felt. Even the fishfolk water had not been like this. Like liquid sun—her bones soft beneath her skin.

  She drank deeply after she woke, no longer caring if she reached the bottom of the fishfolk bag. When she was finished, she tilted it, wincing at the cold coursing of the water over her breasts and stomach. She followed the water with her eyes; wet and dark down her body, drops of it falling from the hem of her tunic to the earth, where they hissed and vanished. She poured a stream from the bag—the hiss was louder, and it seemed for a moment as if there was smoke—and the ground remained dry.