Turning Darkness into Light

by Marie Brennan

  But I want to know if it was an eclipse or an eruption or something else Audrey and Kudshayn haven’t thought of. I want to know if the epic is describing something real this time. (Why can’t it just be one or the other? All made up, or all real? It seems to me like that would be much more useful. Then you would know whether you were supposed to be entertained or educated by what you were reading.)

  If I don’t ask Uncle, then I’m not technically disobeying him.

  I know perfectly well that this is a loophole. I’m already thinking about how to post the letter from Lower Stoke so that he won’t know I sent it and none of the servants can tell him, because if he has me reading Audrey’s and Kudshayn’s letters to make sure they aren’t breaking their promise, then he wouldn’t want me doing it myself. I know this is dishonest.

  I’m going to do it anyway.

  From: Annabelle Himpton, Lady Plimmer

  To: Marcus Fitzarthur, Lord Gleinleigh

  6 Floris

  Priorfield, Greffen

  Dear Marcus,

  I have tried to be patient, but weeks have gone by and it has become quite apparent that you are insensible to your duties to the neighbourhood. Surely, I thought, Lord Gleinleigh is not so much a part of this careless modern age as to ignore his responsibility to make his guests known to local society—but it is all too clear that you are indeed a modern sort, keeping entirely to yourself what ought to be the common pleasure of your neighbours.

  You may not have any care for such “out-of-date” proprieties, but I do. I have therefore determined to host a dinner, with dancing to follow. You are invited, as is your ward (twenty years old and still not out? Whatever can you be thinking?), and of course your guests. Yes, I mean both of them. Miss Camherst has been seen in town, but she has not come to call on me once! I understand the child was raised half feral on a ship, but she was presented to Society some years ago and really ought to know better. Naturally I expect no such thing of your other guest; indeed, I hardly know what to expect of him at all. But the neighbourhood of Lower Stoke has never played host to a Draconean before, nor are they likely to do so again in what remains of my lifetime, so we must not squander this opportunity.

  I will send my girl around tomorrow to speak with your housekeeper about suitable food for the Draconean. I expect your party to arrive promptly at six o’clock on the evening of the nineteenth. Should you fail to show, I think you will find that the people of Lower Stoke will not soon forget or forgive your selfishness in hiding your guests away from us all.

  Cordially,

  Annabelle Himpton

  Lady Plimmer

  FOR THE ARCHIVES OF THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS

  written by Kudshayn, son of Ahheke, daughter of Iztam

  I touch my hand to the earth, which once was called the Ever-Standing, Foundation of All, creator—if we are correctly interpreting the word āmu—of humankind.

  My hatching outside the Sanctuary means that I have spent as much of my life among humans as among my own kind. I know more of their ways than any other of our people, and there are many humans whom I call friend.

  Yet I am constantly aware that in their eyes—those of humanity as a whole, not those I am close to—I bear the weight of the ancient past. The slow pressure of time has deformed the recollection of history, both in human memory and our own, but my foremothers are known around the world as cruel tyrants who oppressed and enslaved their kind. Even those who do not wear the red mask of Hadamists often see me—see my scales and my wings—and recall that ancestral hatred.

  I fear Hadamists less than I fear those who hide behind a mask of moderation. Those attack without warning, with word or with deed, and against them it is harder to defend.

  If there is one common thread between the various stories of our origins, however, it is this: that our two species cannot be separated. Whether we played a role in creating humans or they played a role in creating us, we have been interconnected since the beginning. It is only in recent ages, when my people hid themselves away, that we have grown apart.

  Until more are hatched outside the Sanctuary and grow to better health, the duty of bridging that gap will fall heavily upon me. Infinite stone, give me the patience to fulfill that duty well. Teach me to understand the hearts of the people this tale says you once made.

  It is not their mammalian nature that puzzles me most, nor their strange technologies. It is the complexity of their world: their numbers so numerous, like flakes of snow upon the mountaintops, the customs and laws necessary to keep themselves in order, and the variation of these things between one land and another. I am soon to enact a human ritual, a Scirling custom of attending a meal at the house of a local dignitary; we will participate even though none of those invited from this household wish to attend, because that is what custom requires. And I must learn from Audrey the proper behaviours for such an event—behaviours that are not the same as those practiced in Yelang or Tser-nga.

  There has been no such thing for my people within living memory, or even the middle past. We have been few in number, single in society. My own kindred find me strange when I visit the Sanctuary, because my behaviour has been shaped by my time outside of it; this, as much as my physical difficulties, is the sacrifice my mother made on my behalf when she chose to lay her clutch beyond the Sanctuary’s walls. Teslit, too frail to travel, finds her own species more alien than the Yelangese among whom she has spent her entire life. If we succeed in spreading beyond our borders, in hatching our children in far-distant lands, they will become strangers to each other, not only in acquaintance but in culture, as Tser-zhag are to Thiessois, Vidwathi to Vystrani.

  And so I find myself asking again: to what extent were these ancients my people? Audrey would not call the ancient humans of southern Anthiope any kin of hers. Is it only by contrast with humankind that we consider the Anevrai to be our ancestors?

  I began this work of translation expecting to feel a greater bond with my ancient foremothers as a result. Its effect has been quite the opposite.

  Precious earth, dark stillness, give me something to hold on to. Shelter me from this storm of change. In time I must emerge once more into the light of action, but for now let me rest in your embrace, protected from my own doubts.

  FROM THE DIARY OF AUDREY CAMHERST

  19 Floris

  I cannot believe that Lord Gleinleigh is forcing us to go to this dinner at Priorfield. Well, yes, I can; I’ve heard stories from relatives, the ones who live in Scirland all the time, about the way the countryside can be. Lady Plimmer is of Grandmama’s generation, and apparently she is the local dragon, the sort of person you cross at your peril. Lord Gleinleigh outranks her and has more money to boot, so if he were to refuse her, she couldn’t ruin him in Falchester society or break his fortune or anything like that . . . but he might find living here a good deal less pleasant: uncooperative merchants down in the village, inferior produce delivered to his house, delayed repairs on the road to the estate, vandalism by local children, that sort of thing. And while I believe he could brazen it out if he wanted to, in the end it’s much less effort to simply bow to the dragon every once in a while and do as she says.

  So we’re to go to a dinner, all four of us: Lord Gleinleigh, Cora, myself, and Kudshayn. He’s the real point of all this affair, of course; it hasn’t escaped my attention that I escaped Lady Plimmer’s attention until a Real Live Draconean arrived in the neighbourhood. Which means hours spent watching Kudshayn be treated like the zoo has come to town, and being saved from the same fate myself only because a “lizard-man” is far more exotic than a mere half-Erigan woman. Cora will loathe it, and I don’t think Lord Gleinleigh will enjoy it much more; that’s four people made miserable, just so Lady Plimmer can brag that she had a Draconean at her dinner table.

  I have the earl’s assurance, though, that when this is over, he won’t force me or Kudshayn to do anything social at all for at least a month. The next several tablets seem to involve the siblings desce
nding into the underworld to rescue the Maker of Above and Below; I’d far rather be reading about that than sitting through a tedious dinner.

  later

  I think I would cheerfully toss Lady Plimmer overboard if I had to spend more than an evening in her company, but must for the sake of my conscience rescind some of the suspicions I directed her way before. (Ugh, I’m even beginning to write like she talks.) She may be a fossilized old biddy who doesn’t understand why we can’t go back to the good old days of the turn of the century, but she had more up her sleeve than simply the desire to brag about her draconic dinner guest.

  It was all set to start off exactly as badly as I had feared. Lady Plimmer had invited everybody who is anybody in the neighbourhood, none of whom had ever set eyes on a Draconean in their lives; all they know of Kudshayn’s people is drawn from newspapers, magazines, and general gossip. They speculated as to whether he could understand them (with him standing right there!), and then fell about in utter shock when he spoke. They asked me how I taught him to do that—as if Kudshayn had not learned to speak Scirling when I was still in swaddling clothes! They marveled at his clothing, not quite coming out and saying that they were marveling to see that he wore it at all—as if modesty is something only humans understand!

  And then one fellow (Mr. Bradford, the local barrister) correctly identified Kudshayn’s high-collared robe as being a modified Yelangese style. “Yes,” Kudshayn said, tipping him a little Yelangese-flavored bow. “Many of my people have visited Yelang, and we have found that this style is far more convenient to us than an Anthiopean-style shirt, as we can fasten it at the neck and then leave the back open to more easily accommodate our wings.”

  Mr. Bradford opened his mouth again, and I swear to you, diary, I saw the question rising up from his throat. Do you also have to accommodate your tail? People always think Draconeans have tails, and they always ask.

  But! This is where, against my will, I began to like Lady Plimmer. Because one advantage of visiting the house of a fossilized old biddy is, she has absolutely no tolerance for impropriety—and asking a guest about his hidden body parts is decidedly improper. Plus—as I know well from Grandmama—once a lady reaches a certain age, she has no compunctions about what she says or does. So I had the distinct pleasure of watching our hostess lay into Mr. Bradford until he was red-faced and shuffling like a schoolboy (and he’s sixty if he’s a day). And after that, people were a good deal more circumspect about what they said to—and around—Kudshayn.

  Things really got interesting later on, though, when we had all sat down to dinner. (Starting with the fact that she’d thoughtfully provided a stool for Kudshayn, so he needn’t endure the discomfort of a chair back.) I expected Lady Plimmer to be one of those types who forbids talk of politics at her table, but no sooner had the first course been laid out than she turned to Kudshayn and embarked upon the most extraordinary speech. I won’t be able to re-create it word for word, but it went something like this:

  “Mr. Kudshayn—is that an acceptable fashion for addressing you?” (Kudshayn said that it was.) “Thank you. I confess I knew little to nothing about your people prior to your arrival in the neighbourhood, but it is a poor hostess indeed who invites a guest to dinner without first ensuring that she will be able to make proper conversation when he comes. I have therefore done a good deal of reading in the last few weeks—a task made easier, I must say, by this congress scheduled to take place in Falchester next winter, as it has persuaded any number of publishers to put out books and educational pamphlets on the subject. Of course a great many of these are of inferior quality, but I acquired some that have been well spoken of and put myself to work reading them.”

  (Here Kudshayn said something polite and noncommittal. I could tell he was just as baffled as I was by her manner, which owed something to the behaviour of a sheepdog very determinedly herding its charge toward an unidentifiable destination.)

  “My impression,” Lady Plimmer said, “and do correct me if I am wrong, is that this congress was originally meant to be a simple vote in the Synedrion to determine what would become of our caeliger base in your homeland, which was established as part of the original Sanctuary Alliance. No, no, I am misremembering already: it was the second Sanctuary Alliance, or the revised alliance—there is a deplorable lack of consistency in how it is referred to—the agreement that was formed later, not the early and haphazard thing Miss Camherst’s grandmother helped to broker.” (Here she nodded to me.) “With of course no offense intended to Miss Camherst or her lady grandmother, as I am sure it was difficult to broker anything at all under the circumstances, what with nearly freezing to death and the shock of finding out your people were real and so forth—and for all her skills as a naturalist, I cannot say she is renowned as a diplomat. But it would be impolite to recall how many countries she has been deported from. Where was I?”

  (At this point I believe the entire table was gaping at her, and a team of expert navigators armed with all the latest maps could not have answered her question: we were united in being wholly lost.)

  “Oh, yes—the caeliger base.” She had her sails trimmed and was off again. “My reading has been most educational, Mr. Kudshayn, but it has left me with a number of questions. I was hoping you might oblige me by answering a few of them. To begin with, do your people not want Scirling military protection any longer? Do you now favour your alliance with Yelang over your connections with Scirland? I cannot see how it is that your people can expect to thrive as an in de pen dent nation, not after so long in isolation and with so little wealth, as I do not imagine yaks are terribly profitable. And is it true that you have ambitions to expand? I confess I do not quite understand how you can do so, since my impression is that you are not able to survive in other regions, though of course your presence here at my dinner table suggests that is not as true as I have been led to believe. But Scirland is not Akhia, and is it in fact the case that you wish to re-establish your homeland there? How do you expect to do that? Are your people quite warlike? Our Scriptures tell us your ancestors were, but then my great-grandfather was a sheep farmer, so it is folly to assume the apple would fall so close to a tree thousands of years in the past.”

  It took me several moments to realize she had finished speaking. All around the table, people exchanged uncertain looks. Poor Kudshayn: he has been asked all those questions and more in the past, and although he is by preference a scholar, he has to serve as an ambassador for his people wherever he goes. But I don’t think he has ever been asked all those questions at once before, all in a jumble, so that it was hardly possible to remember where Lady Plimmer’s interrogation had begun.

  Kudshayn bravely sallied forth. “We are of course grateful for the protection we have received from both the Scirling and Yelangese governments since the alliance was formed. As you said, many people remember the tale told in your Scriptures, and hold us accountable for what sins our ancestors may have committed.”

  I held my breath, waiting to see if anyone would call out his careful phrasing. Modern Draconeans tell their own stories of the Downfall, which make the Anevrai out to be far better and humans far worse than our Scriptures and other remembrances do. Arguments over the truth of it have been raging for decades. But Cora told me Lady Plimmer is not on good terms with the local magister, so he was not at the table, and no one else took up the cause.

  “The caeliger base was quite useful for defending us in the early days,” Kudshayn said. “But we cannot live within the shelter of another country’s wings forever. The longer the base remains there, the easier it becomes to view the Sanctuary as a Scirling colony.”

  “Better that than a Yelangese colony,” Lady Plimmer said with a sniff. Being of Grandmama’s generation, she remembers the days when we weren’t on such friendly terms with that country.

  Kudshayn refrained from pointing out that he’s spent more than half his life in Yelang. “We have no desire to be anyone’s colony. For us, this congress represents ou
r people taking our first formal steps into the world of international diplomacy—not as a protectorate of other nations, but as a nation in our own right.”

  “To what end? What is it your people hope for?”

  “Not conquest,” he said. “It is true that we wish to expand—but that is because, for us to safely travel the world, we must bear our hatchlings in other lands. If we remain in the Sanctuary, we remain trapped.”

  I added, “And as long as they’re trapped in the Sanctuary, where very few people see them, it’s all too easy for them to remain the monsters of legend. Did your readings mention, Lady Plimmer, that only two countries class an attack against a Draconean as equivalent to assaulting a human being? Scirland and Yelang. Everywhere else in the world, it’s on a par with cruelty to an animal.”

  Lady Plimmer blanched, one hand rising to her breast. “Oh, my dear—how dreadful! And quite unacceptable. How anyone could speak with a courteous and erudite creature such as Mr. Kudshayn and believe him to be a mere animal is quite beyond me. Not to mention the beautiful artwork the ancients made; the most my cat has ever achieved is an intriguing tangle of yarn. I have considered purchasing an antiquity of some sort to decorate the drawing room—just a small piece, you understand, nothing ostentatious. What is the best way to go about doing that?”

  Kudshayn gave me an infinitesimal nod. It’s a sore point for them, watching people like Lady Plimmer (not to mention Lord Gleinleigh) buy up artifacts from his people’s past. But at the same time, those artifacts are scattered across the world, in such quantity that even if the Draconeans could afford to gather all those things themselves, they would fill the entire valley of the Sanctuary from one mountain wall to the other. Kudshayn saves his battles for the important pieces—things like this epic—instead of trying to stop the whole trade, which would only drive it further underground. When it comes to the standard answer, he’d rather I be the one to parrot it.