Seeklight

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  His red face was wet with tears. “You better watch out! My father’ll getcha—he’s the subthane, and he’ll do it, too! Just you wait!”

  “Child,” said the woman, extending the tip of her stick towards him—it transfixed his glassy eyes, “you may have inherited your repellent nature from your father, but his is at least somewhat tempered with age. He knows what is expected of him, and better, what would happen to him should he forget.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the crowd behind her, including them in her speech. “There is a court in the capital, and this child—” The stick swung to indicate Daenek. “—is under its protection.” She turned to Daenek and spoke quietly to him: “Let’s to home.”

  The crowd parted, backing up against the stalls as the lady and the boy passed through them. The faces of the crowd were still set in their expressions of dull resentment and repressed anger. One of them found his voice, a tall youth dressed in the same black fabric as the boy who had thrown the fruit, but with a short, rust-pitted knife tucked in his belt. “Ah, Someday,” the youth whispered as they went by him, “his protection ends. And then he’ll get it like what his father did.”

  The Lady Marche either did not hear or chose to ignore him.

  She and Daenek reached the other side of the marketplace, the boy half-running to keep up with her quick strides. They passed quickly through the squat village buildings and out to the open spaces beyond.

  Chapter II

  Where the hills above the village levelled off, the narrow trail ran straight as a knife edge pressed into the ground. The fields were covered thick with weeds, taller than Daenek could reach, and dried stiff and golden by the summer sun. The stalks rustled in the wind and bent over the path.

  Daenek stopped and craned his neck to watch a field bat flap upwards, its belly yellow with pollen, like a fur sun. Then, cradling the net bag stuffed with the purchases from the marketplace, he hurried to catch up with the Lady Marche.

  “Fools,” he heard her say as he came up behind her on the path. With each step she planted the silver-headed stick firmly into the dirt. “A fortunate breed whose crime is its own punishment.”

  The words crime and punishment intrigued him. “Lady,” he spoke up—it was what he had always called her, could ever remember having called her. Not mother, although he knew that was what she was to him. “Is that part of the Descending Law? That there’s fools?”

  She stopped and looked for several seconds into the boy’s face, then sighed and went on, her steps a little slower. “No,” she said.

  Daenek could barely hear her words. “No law other than what the tragedies have.” She said nothing more all the way home, and Daenek knew better than to ask questions that would go unanswered.

  The Lady Marche did not turn as Daenek lagged a few paces behind, then plunged into the thick growth at one side of the path. The yellow stalks brushed over his head as he ran among them, carrying the net bag high up against his chest. A group of insects flew up in front of him, then re-united and drifted off in a lopsided O.

  The field ended at the edge of a cliff overlooking the quarry, an enormous rough-sided pit chewed into the center of the hill range, a concave world all to itself. It was quiet now, no noise or motion perceptible, as Daenek looked down into its grey depths.

  The quarriers had all gone into the village on their day off, to spend their wages on the street women or, with the old ones, for a few sweets to add to their bland dormitory meals. The unpainted doors of the metal-roofed buildings at one side of the quarry swung open, revealing their unlit spaces inside.

  Daenek’s gaze moved away from the floor of the quarry, with its clutter of rubble and machinery, all covered with the veined stone’s dust. He looked up the sides of the chasm until he finally spotted the figure for which he had been loooking. Squatting on the far edge of the quarry, seeming more like a boulder himself than anything human, was the hulking figure of the man the Lady Marche had driven away from the house. That had happened several weeks ago, but Daenek had known for a long time before that there was someone that hid in the fields and watched them and the house—he had even caught sight of the bulky, shambling figure, squatting or moving furtively among the weeds.

  But then the Lady Marche had found the watcher, sitting on his haunches at the edge of the cleared space around the house.

  Daenek had watched and listened as she had stood in front of the figure, his wide face turned with an odd, mute dignity up to hers as he sat on the ground. She pointed with her stick and spoke to the watcher in a language different from what she spoke with Daenek and the villagers. The words flowed, a sternly graceful song. Her voice lost the stiff intonation with which she had always spoken before. After a few moments of her talking—at the end the strange words became gentle, a blessing—the watcher nodded slowly, his eyes cast to the dust in front of him. Then he stood up and pushed his way through the field in the direction her stick had pointed, leaving a trampled path that slowly healed as the weeds sprang back.

  Over two months, and the Lady Marche had never explained who the man was or what she had said to him. Or what the language was. The buskers had their own tongue, Daenek knew, that they used only among themselves. And so did the mertzers, when they came every other year. But this had been neither of these.

  The words she had spoken stayed clear and solid in Daenek’s head. It seemed as if he could turn them over and examine them, like smooth stones taken from his pocket. Or maybe they were seeds—he’d lie in his bed awake at night and hold each syllable, trying to crack its hard shell and get to the soft meat inside.

  Maybe if I had more of them, he had decided, gazing out the room’s window at the night. There must be as many words as stars, a lot of them. And if I had them all . . .

  Since then, Daenek hadn’t seen the watching man—if that was the right word; he had seemed larger than just a man—in the fields around the house. A few days later, while lying on his stomach at the edge of the cliff overlooking the quarry, watching and listening to the stonecutters at work below, he had felt a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. He had looked up and spotted the watcher’s massive shape crouched on the far, opposite rim of the quarry, gazing back at Daenek with the same mute, unreadable expression as when he had listened to the Lady Marche’s words.

  Nearly every day Daenek went through the fields to the rim of the quarry. The watcher was not always to be found sitting on the other edge. Sometimes when he was not there, Daenek could pick him out, working with the others down on the floor of the quarry. The large figure moved about, gathering up scraps and chips of the valuable white-veined stone the quarriers cut out of the ground in great slabs. That was the most menial job of all, Daenek knew, requiring no skill but strength, the job the village youths started out at when they first became old enough to come to work in the rocks.

  An edge of pity, like an uncomfortable warmth in his throat, would mix with the other feelings Daenek had when he saw the watcher at work, filling up a bag slung over his shoulder with the little bits of rock. Daenek had never felt scared when he saw the brutish-looking figure.

  There was something intensely interesting about him, though—Daenek crouched down at the cliff’s edge, supporting the net bag on his knees, and studied the hulking man. There was something missing about the watcher, something cut out that both the villagers, and the Lady Marche and Daenek himself had in common. Something that laughed and spoke, and moved.

  But there was also something about the watcher that Daenek wasn’t sure of, that maybe only he and the Lady Marche also had. If there was a word for it, Daenek knew somehow it would be in that other language of which he had heard that little bit.

  The watcher cocked his large head to one side, and Daenek leaped to his feet. How long had he been sitting here? He clutched the net bag to his chest and plunged back into the field’s dry stalks. A quick glance over his shoulder showed the figure still watching him.

  The Lady Marche was almost t
o the house when Daenek reached the path. He ran along it, coming up behind her as she stepped up to the single door. The houses in the village were square and made of dark, unpainted boards, with corrugated metal roofs and small windows of wavy glass. This house, that he and the Lady Marche lived in, was round, a tower, and made of a seamless white stuff, smooth to the touch. Only the round-topped door showed from the outside, but once inside there were big sections of wall in every room that were as clear as glass.

  Once he overheard some old men in the village marketplace remembering to each other how the house had been lowered out of the sky onto the little cleared space in the field. Daenek couldn’t remember it, though. That was when I was a baby, he thought. Before I was really me.

  The door sighed and swung open when the Lady Marche pressed her palm near its edge. Daenek followed her into the cool, familiar interior. In the kitchen he stood on tip-toe and hefted the bag up onto the counter—made of the same shiny white stuff—beside the sink. She loosened its cord and her long fingers began to swiftly sort out the items.

  “Lady,” piped Daenek suddenly. He pushed his shoulder against a cupboard door. “What is it that’s the same about me and you, but different from everyone else?” He hadn’t meant for it to sound like an old riddle.

  Her hands stopped and she looked down at him, her face strangely altered by some emotion. “There’s nothing different about me,” she said quietly. “But you. Your—” she broke off, then, even softer: “There was someone once who could have told you.”

  She meant to say ‘your father,’ thought Daenek. The betrayer.

  She knelt down before him and brushed his dark hair over his ears with her long hands. “They see it in your face.” Her own eyes were shining as rain. “Anyone can.”

  He twisted away from her hands and ran out of the house. The confusion that yammered inside his skull seemed to be swelling too large to keep inside walls. Breathlessly, he plunged through the thick fields above the house, the ground curving upwards beneath his feet until it ended in the steeply clustered boulders of the hills’ upper reaches. Between the largest rocks there was just room for his small body to squeeze through. He clambered over other boulders, their flanks baking in the sun, until he came to the little open space he had found and told no one about, not even the Lady Marche.

  A tiny spring welled up and fed a small pool only a few yards across. A pair of low, gnarled trees had found root in the clefts of rock on either side and arched over the pool with their twisting branches, darkening the still water with their shade. His heart pounding from running up the hill, Daenek lowered himself down from atop one of the sheltering boulders. Squatting on the damp, moss-slick edge of the pool, he leaned over and studied his reflection in the black water.

  A child’s face. What was so different about that? He leaned closer, a lock of his hair falling down and inscribing an arc on the surface of the water. What was it that everyone else was able to see in it? He sighed and rocked back on his heels, his arms hugging his knees. Suddenly he scowled at what he saw as his gaze left the pool’s surface.

  A sociologist was floating towards him over the water. It’s long, brilliant-white robes trailed down to the water but did not touch. The enormous wings were folded against its back to pass between the trees. The golden ring hovering over its head glowed brighter as it came into the shade. Sometimes they carried tape recorders with microphones, but this one had only a clipboard held to its pale hands.

  “Go away!” shouted Daenek, his face darkening with genuine outrage. He had thought that only he knew of this place. “Get out of here!” He got to his feet with a green-slimed rock in his hand and threw it at the sociologist.

  The rock passed through its middle without rippling the dazzling robe. “Good shot,” smiled the sociologist as the stone splashed into the far end of the pool.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” Daenek’s mouth tightened with disgust. “Dumb questions, anyway.” It wasn’t his first encounter with one of them.

  The sociologist wearily expelled his breath. “Come on,” he pleaded. It had a very young face, a teenager’s, with pale, uncertain eyes. “I need it for my thesis.”

  “I don’t care,” muttered Daenek, squatting back down.

  Whatever a thesis was didn’t interest him.

  The sociologist, hovering a few feet before the boy, said something under its breath. “Why can’t you be like the villagers?” it said aloud. “It’s easy to get data from people who are scared of you.”

  Daenek looked up. “Is data the same thing as a thesis?”

  “Maybe.” The sociologist half-closed its eyes and looked crafty.

  “I’ll tell you if you answer my interview questions.”

  “No.” Daenek’s lower lip bloomed into an obstinate pout.

  “Some other stuff, too.”

  “We’re not supposed to tell you things.” A whisper through clenched teeth. The sociologist looked around wearily. “They could flunk me for doing that, you know.”

  Daenek remained silent, staring grimly at the water.

  “Oh, all right then.” It descended and sat down beside Daenek—though he could still see a little space between the figure and the wet ground, except where one rock showed through the robe, like a little mountain surrounded by snow. The sociologist reached over its head and pushed the glowing ring forward to cast more light on the clipboard. “OK, first question—”

  “No.” Daenek shook his head. “Me first.”

  The sociologist rolled its eyes upward. “Go ahead,” it said after a moment.

  “Is there something different about my face?” The other’s face turned and looked at him in surprise.

  “How much do you know?” it murmured.

  Daenek shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know how much you know.” A sad smile formed over the sociologist’s lips. “You’re quite a student of the human condition, yourself.” It angled its head and studied Daenek for several seconds. “A little on the narrow side,” it said finally.

  “High cheekbones. More than enough nose . . . Worried looking, too. Is that different enough for you?”

  “Something really different,” said Daenek.

  A few seconds of silence passed. The sociologist looked out over the pool’s dark water, then back at the boy. “Yes.” Its voice was muffled. “But I don’t know what it is. You’ll see it yourself, someday.”

  Daenek answered the sociologist’s list of questions, a dozen or so having to do with what happened at the marketplace with the son of the subthane and the rotten fruit. The questions seemed unimportant—he forgot them in a few minutes—and he didn’t even bother to ask the sociologist any more about thesis and data. He remained sitting by the water long after the sociologist had floated back up into the sky and disappeared, and his thoughts were without words.

  Chapter III

  Three years passed before he heard the Lady Marche’s other language again. Daenek woke up in the middle of the night, hearing a strange voice singing somewhere in the house. He slid out of bed and carefully, making no noise, crept down the first few steps of the staircase that spiralled through the center of the house.

  The Lady Marche was standing in front of one of the windows, but the little control at its lower edge had been adjusted so that it reflected her image, a perfect mirror. A little trunk that she kept locked in a downstairs closet lay with its lid flung back at her feet. The song, a woman’s voice sad and faint in the night’s stillness, came from a small cube nestled in the box. A dim radiance from the cube gave the scene its only illumination.

  Unaware of him watching, the Lady Marche pulled out of the trunk long, shimmering veils that seemed to float upward in the air without falling. She pressed them one by one against herself, the sheer fabric clinging to her ordinary clothing, the rough coveralls of the village woman. The song ended and, after a moment, the woman’s voice began another in the same language.

  Daenek wat
ched as she left the last veil, an iridescent blue like cold smoke, wrapped against herself.

  She knelt down to the trunk, then stood up again with a necklace dangling from her hands. Its clustered gems blazed in the mirror like some strange, new constellation in the sky outside. With one hand she pulled down the collar of her clothing, showing the smooth length of her throat. She held the necklace up to the pale skin and stood for a long time looking at herself, while the singer’s voice moved through the lonely-sounding cadences.

  He went back up the stairs even more cautiously than before—the slightest noise might shatter like a sphere of thin glass the world that had blossomed out of the trunk downstairs, and the Lady Marche might drown in this one, the ordinary one.

  There had been an expression on her face he had never seen before. She is a lady, he thought. He lay in his bed, holding the singer’s foreign words, impenetrable crystal, in his head. Just before he fell asleep he realized that the singing voice was the Lady Marche’s, from years and a life ago.

  When Daenek had just turned twelve, the mertzer came to the house. From where he had been sitting atop the hill’s largest boulder some distance above the house, Daenek caught sight of the stocky figure in the early morning sunlight. The weeds on either side of the narrow path brushed against the man as he mounted slowly up the hillside.

  The man’s patched leather jacket and broadbilled cloth cap—Daenek could discern them plainly, even though the man was still far down the path—identified him as a mertzer. What’s he doing here? wondered Daenek. They all pulled out yesterday.

  He had lain all day on his stomach at the edge of the cliff overlooking the quarry, watching them load the great slabs and blocks of stone into the holds of the caravans. The cranes and hoists would swing out over the wide metal decks and then dip their cables to the ground. The leather-jacketed mertzers would clamber over the massive veined facets and planes of rock—the men had looked like ants from where Daenek had watched them—fastening the cables around the blocks. Then, with a groaning noise, as if the machines were shouting their effort to each other, the blocks were lifted and deposited into the depths of the caravan’s holds.