The Ghost Sister (2 page)

“Nonsense,” I said. “You're as young as the spring.”

She squinted up at me, trying not to smile. “And you, young man, have a tongue as smooth as those southern plays you're always reading … Now, what do you want down here? To do something useful for a change, I hope?”

I put out a hand to help her up. She leaned on the edge of the table, her old face creased with the pain of rising.

“I wanted a word with you,” I said.

“It's not about your interminable affair with that cousin of yours, is it? I've told you before, find someone whom you're not always arguing with. That's the trouble with you young people, you don't think you're having a proper romance unless it's racked with problems. Romance, indeed! It's all these modern poems giving people foolish ideas. In my day, we waited till the mating seasons brought the masques, and that was that.”

Wincing, I waited until she drew breath before mumbling, “No, it's not about Morrac. For once.” I supposed I couldn't blame her for being impatient; the whole saga of Morrac and me had been boring the family rigid for years. “It's my sister.”

“Mevennen?” Luta said, her irritability evaporating as she was presented with a real problem. She sighed. “She's no better, is she? I hoped once the winter was over and she'd slept, she might take a turn for healing.”

“So did I. And she did seem a bit better after hibernation—for a while, anyway. But she's just told me that the fits don't only come when she's outside the House defense, now. She's been having them indoors, too. She says they follow the tides.”

“The sea tides?” Luta said doubtfully. “She could be right, I suppose. We've had strong seas this year. The moons are shifting, you see. Next year, when the conjunction comes, it'll be migration time for all of us except the land-blind, and the tides are already changing.” She sighed. “Twelve years has come around so quickly. It hardly seems any time at all since I was worrying about the last migration and your sister.”

I held out my hands to the stove, to warm them. “I hate seeing her like this,” I muttered.

“Of course you do,” Luta said. She reached out to touch my face. “You're of the same birth, after all, but you and your brother are in balance with the world, and Mevennen is not. Perhaps your mother was never meant to bear girls … the other sister of your brood died at birth, you know.”

“Mevennen came home, though,” I argued, as I had been arguing to one member of the family or another ever since the day Mevennen had returned. “She came back from the wild, didn't she? She didn't die. She didn't become one of the
mehed.
”

“Well, I know
that
,” Luta said, impatiently. “But it's
a mystery how she ever made it back to her birthplace, isn't it?”

I had to agree with her, though I did not want to. When Mevennen had returned from the wilderness, the last of our brood to come home, it had been obvious almost immediately that she was landblind, a “ghost,” as we say in the north. I remembered the day she'd come back: the day of one of the worst storms ever to drive across the coast of Eluide. It was so bad that the House defense had fallen and the family had been forced to go out into the thunder and rain to carry Mevennen in. And of all my siblings, Mevennen had always been the most closely affected by the wild, confined to the House because the currents of the world beyond the defense made her nauseous. Yet she had not died out in the wilderness, nor had she joined the nomadic
mehed
and Luta said that this meant she was born to a destiny. I sometimes wondered whether Luta had said such a thing simply to keep Mevennen alive.

My sister was right. My family had talked about killing her. I remembered listening to them debate it—I'd not long returned from the wild myself, and I didn't have much in the way of language. I didn't understand everything they said, but I knew that my small, frail sister was in danger. And even though I shared some of that wish to kill—as we all do, when faced with weakness—I remember standing in front of her, hissing at them, while Luta reasoned and pleaded. Mevennen was, after all, the last girl whom Luta's own long-dead daughter would ever bear, and though lasting love for one's children is rare among us, it is more common among the
satahrachin.
who remember so much more.

Poor Mevennen
I thought. She sensed too much and, paradoxically, it was this that cut her off from the world, from normal senses. She was overwhelmed by the tides, and the metals, and the energy lines that ran beneath the earth, like someone being dazzled by the sun. Perhaps it would be
better if she died, but I wasn't going to let that happen, whatever dark desires might rise to haunt me. And then I had an idea. It seemed like a good one at the time; bad ideas always do.

I said to Luta, “If her fits are somehow connected to the sea, what if I were to take Mevennen south, away from the coast and the tides?”

Luta frowned. “She's hardly been out of Ulleet since she came home … Is she fit to ride? And where were you thinking of taking her?”

I considered this, and had another idea. Not far to the south of Ulleet lay the old summer tower; the place that the ai Mordha had used in years past, when we were a larger clan and had more herds. It had not fallen into ruin, protected as it was behind its defense, and the land in which it lay was a river valley, a gentle, sheltered place even though it lay on the edge of the steppe. I mentioned this to Luta.

“The summer tower?” She frowned again. “It's at least two days'journey, Eleres. I know the Memmet valley's soft country, but Mevennen will still be out in the wild on the way, and she's very frail. I know you want to help, but you might end up making her worse, not better.”

“I know. But she seems to be getting worse anyway, and if it is linked with the sea … Maybe that's been the problem all along.” I was clutching at straws and we both knew it. What my sister was suffering from could not be cured, only alleviated.

“Well,” Luta said, doubtfully. “You can suggest it to her, I suppose.”

And so I did, later on when I took Mevennen her tea.

My sister was silent for a long time, then she said, “It seems to me, Eleres, that I'm cursed if I stay, and cursed if I don't. And yet …” She sighed, listening as the rain hammered at the windows. “It would be good to be in a gentler place, away from the sea. It's as though it hates me, you
know. It batters at my senses … I'll go south with you, then. To the summer tower.”

A day later, Mevennen and I, accompanied by our huntress cousins Eiru and Sereth, left the House of Aidi Mordha sealed behind its high unseen defense and headed south toward the Memmet River valley and the summer tower. The morning on which we set out was rainwashed fair, the air a mild pearly gray, the red sun concealed behind a faint haze. Mevennen, sedated for the journey, swayed in the high saddle as the murai padded silently through the stone streets. We took the sea road, and I watched as the water and the horizon's edge became alternatively hidden and revealed by the openings in the cliffs. As the day wore on, the islands of the Zheray fell behind, to be replaced by the many peaks and crags which scattered the sea off the coasts of Eluide.

We saw no one for many
ei.
The northern provinces of Mondhile are empty, and we of the north are always threatened: by our weather, by our wildernesses, and perhaps most of all by each other. Leaving Mevennen in silent Eiru's capable charge, my cousin Sereth and I rode ahead to scout the country. The murai stamped and hissed, glad to run. I had to hold back my black mount, Vevey which didn't please her. She twisted her long snaking neck and tried to bite, but her sharp teeth glanced off the saddleguard and I cuffed her across the ears. Sereth grinned; she'd always said that men made poor riders. She sat with easy elegance on her own mount, her silvery hair streaming out behind her in the wind and her dark eyes narrowed in amusement. Feeling self-conscious, I put my hand on the animal's thick ruff and scratched in an effort to quieten her. She needed brushing; I could feel the weals of insect bites underneath the soft, dense mane.Vevey allowed herself to be mollified,
so much so that she stood stock-still and swayed from foot to foot.

“Oh, Eleres, come
on.
” Sereth shouted back impatiently, and turned her mount away, but Vevey wouldn't budge. Then suddenly, beneath my hand, I felt her mane begin to rise. She took a skittering step backward, and made a sound that I had never heard from the throat of a mur. Bewildered, I realized that Vevey was afraid.

“Sereth?” I called. Looking over, I saw to my surprise that Sereth was also having trouble with her mount: it balked and sidled. The air seemed to sing with energy, as though I could sense all the lines beneath the land at once. My skin prickled with sparks, like wool in the winter cold.
Mevennen
, I thought in dismay, and with a desperate tug I tried to turn Vevey so that I could ride back to my sister. But then I saw something that drove all thought from my mind.

In the gray distance of the steppe, a star was falling. It did not burn and blaze like the one I had once seen in the high mountains, but drifted as gently as a fallen leaf. It seemed to twist in the air, as though it were made up of two great turning vanes, which glowed crimson as they caught the last light of the fallen sun. It settled at the foot of the mountains and winked out. Sereth sat upright on her mount, as rigid as the bright blade in her hand.

“What in the name of the land do you think that was?” she said.

I shook my head. “I don't know.”

The air seemed hushed in the star's wake, a great silence falling over the world. It was broken by a rustle in the scrub. Something bolted out from the low bushes and dashed for the sanctuary of a nearby outcrop of rocks. Vevey reared, almost throwing me out of the saddle, and I glimpsed a small, pale form vanishing between the stones. Regaining my balance with difficulty, I drew up the saddle pole.

“Eleres? What is it?” Sereth called.

“Something's up there.” I kicked Vevey's sides and, surprised, the mur scrambled up the slope toward the rocks. A skitter of stones bounced down the slope as something scuttled for cover. I swung the pole across my knees, with the sharpened point downward, and nudged Vevey so that she skirted the outcrop.

Something hissed.

Vevey backed up, snarling, and nearly threw me off again. As I was fighting to control her, the thing bolted from beneath the rocks and away to the edge of the outcrop, where it sat gazing at me. It was filthy and wrapped in a scrap of blanket. It was a child. It hissed again. Vevey flattened her plumed ears. I didn't blame her. I kept the pole up, in case the child had thoughts of attacking, but as soon as I moved it disappeared into the rocks.

Sereth rode up by my side.

“What was it?” she echoed. Her hair was bristling at the back of her neck. Light glinted behind her eyes. Something tugged at me inside my mind, a sudden longing for blood; for something captive under my hands and my teeth meeting in its throat as it died … Need blotted out everything else and the world grew red, but something at the back of my mind cried out for control. I was not yet too far gone for that. I drew a long, slow breath.

“It's nothing. Only a child,” I replied, and saw her relax. “Must have been startled by that thing we saw—” I was about to turn Vevey back and ride down into the valley, but someone stepped into the circle of the rocks.

This time, it was no child.

The figure who stood before me was one of the
mehedin
nomads. He was a man in his seventies or thereabouts, dressed in a flapping assembly of skins. His hair, loosely braided and woven with grasses, hung down to his knees. He carried on his forehead a faded red tattoo of Marahan, the faintest of the stars at the horizon's edge. Further tattooed bands around his fingers showed that he had once
been
bantreda
like ourselves: a person who belonged to a House and a caste. The bloodmind state which so afflicts us must once have driven him from home and family, led him to walk the world with the rest of the nomadic
mehed
, to lose spoken speech. He had let his nails grow, and they reached a length of several inches. His top incisors curved out like tusks, and furrowed the lower lip. Though we were armed and mounted, and he was twenty years or so older, I was still wary. The strong smell of earth and sweat, with an underlying bloody note of carrion, came from him.

Vevey shifted uneasily and flared her nostrils. I greeted him with a gesture to the east, where the star Marahan was rising, glowing almost indiscernibly behind the bone-colored clouds. The
mehedin
cocked his head as if listening. A breath of wind lifted my hair and brushed my cheek. I looked at the ground to show respect. Sereth rode up behind and slowed to a stop. The
mehedin
looked up, looked away, then at Sereth and myself. We held out our hands, palms upward, denoting
bantreda
status. He bent and scuffed his hands in the earth, masking the tattoos. Making the signs of the journey, we showed him where we had come from: first the coast, then the cliff road. In turn, he indicated the east, his left hand bringing us the sense of the edge of the steppe: from the lakelands in the high Attraith, all the way down across the Ottara Path and following the Eluiden line. With the preliminaries out of the way, conversation could begin.

The
mehedin
gestured toward Sereth, to say:
this one.
We sat straighter to show attention. The
mehedin
pointed at his crotch, then to his stomach, then back to Sereth. Meaning flowed through the air, communicated by the movement of his hands and the meanings that he exuded. Sereth turned up her hand:
Yes. I have had a child.
He drew a line in the air from her head to her mounted feet.
Yes, a daughter, one like me.
The long nailed hand covered his eyes, he turned his head away.

“You're saying my daughter's alive,” Sereth cried, gesturing in turn.

Yes.

“But you're trying to tell me—what? That she will not live? That I won't see her? That she won't come back from the wild?”