The Ghost Sister (43 page)

I had spent the day in the little library, waiting out the
first of the autumn storms. I could hear the wind gathering strength again and when I placed my hand on the shuttered window I felt it vibrate. I turned back to the room, cast by the shuttered window into a green dimness. Lighting a lamp, I watched as it flared up into brightness until I could read the titles of the books in comfort. Lately, my hand tended to stray toward the row of volumes on the highest shelf, the metal pages of the Book of the Roads, which relates the history of my family, the only way that we can have any real remembrance. Every family will have such a Book, and ours consists of ninety volumes, written in a tiny script, and of the ninetieth volume the last leaves were blank, for history goes on. The last entry remembered the name of Sereth ai Dath, dead in the heart of summer. The brightness of the lamp flared up once more and reflections danced from the pages of the metal book, blurring my sight, but the edge of my grief had grown blunted with time, and only the love remained. I smiled as I read her name.

From the shadows, where she too had been reading, Shu said gently, “It's much too dark in here. You'll strain your eyes if you try to read in this light.”

“There's a storm on its way. I shuttered the windows.”

Shu lit a lamp. The obsidian surfaces of the library came into sharp relief. I shoved the rattling shutters tighter, but the metal pages of the Book of the Roads remained unmoved by drafts. I locked the book against memories and put it back on the shelf. The room was growing colder as the storm approached, and I drew my coat more closely about me. The storm closed around Aidi Mordha. I took down a book of plays. The wind strengthened, rushing over the peaked roofs like a wave. I couldn't concentrate on the plays and eventually I put down the book. With a murmured excuse to Shu, I went up onto the roof.

It was still raining, falling cold against my skin and dappling my dark clothes and the black fur of my collar with a fine mist of droplets. I could see no farther than the crags
which rose to Ailet, a tower of shadow upon shadow, and nothing visible beyond the edge of the mountains. I breathed the scent of damp stone and the sodden leaves of the woods below me. Looking out across the trees I thought,
Sereth
'
s daughter is out there somewhere, perhaps on her way home in time for winter, perhaps wandering south, forgetting.
I wondered what she was like.

Mevennen and Morrac were there before me. Meven-nen's unbraided hair snapped behind her like a banner in the winds. Her face was a small and pointed oval in the darkness, almost lost.

“How long have you been up here?” I asked. Between the fortress wall and the northern road, the defense almost seemed to glitter in the wind-driven dark.

Morrac yawned, and showed sharp teeth. “An hour? I've lost track of the time.” He hunched his shoulders, stretching tired muscles, then he turned his head and smiled. For a moment, he looked so like his dead sister that I caught my breath.

Looking down now through the damp branches I remembered Sereth: first memories, which may have been no more than dreams. I remembered a child with her face, seen somewhere under the moon in the mountains, a white wild face like the thin moon's own. I recall someone running, silently leaping over the rocks of the mountain streams. It may have been during that year that I first sensed the voice which called me back, so that the child that was myself, unnamed and unknown, began to realize who I was and where I should be. I must have walked the whole wide steppe of Eluide, skirting the mountains until the sea curve of the horizon slipped up before me and I understood that the high peaked roofs ahead were my own place.

After this, the world changed for me and the old animal life fell away. Some months later, a second lean, fierce child came resentfully home. It seemed to me then that things do not really change all that greatly, that time spirals around
itself, coming back to the same point again and again. The thought gave me some comfort.

Closing the membranes of my eyes, I could feel the defense lying in the generation place between old wood and dormant stone and the lines of the land. And in that place I saw Sereth, like the shared vision of the dead that we had experienced at the funeral. She stood in the gap between the worlds, dressed still in her gray funeral robe, her hair full of fire. She was half turned from me; I saw her face in profile, the narrow eyes and her fiery hair streaming behind her in the silence. She was watching the woods.

I called her name, but as in dreams where one speaks and cannot make oneself heard, my voice fell soundless into the gap. I thought of the chamber of Outreven, and how Shu had told me that the defense contains understanding and visions, but these thoughts did not last for long. The
sa-tahrachin
say that there is a wind which blows between the worlds, without heat, without cold, from nowhere, and it carries our thoughts away. Out of the smoking silence Sereth looked up at me. Then everything was gone—the dull fires, the smoldering earth of the dead road—and I looked out into the wet woods and knew that her daughter was coming home.

Morrac was leaning out over the balcony rail, oblivious to the rain. It made me uneasy, to see him so perilously balanced, and I gently pulled him back. His hair was slicked against his head, and water fringed his collar, glittering in the light, for someone had lit a lamp inside the house. Looking at him then, wet haired and beautiful, all my affection for him came back, in spite of everything. He turned his head to the north road and again I felt the pull of the land, the equinoctial tide rushing up through the damp earth and leaf mold, powering the defense. The air smelled of leaves and soil and rain. I sensed the people beside me, but then through all the familiar world a new call came, running closer, pulled by blood and the singing pattern of
the land. It was a clear and certain call, sense to sense; another living thing announcing its presence to us.

“I can't see her,” I said. I was straining to look into the darkness of the woods which covered the north road, but the rain had become too heavy.

“But I can hear her,” Morrac said. He held up a hand. “Listen.” And very faintly I heard someone moving through the undergrowth, coming steadily on with an animal's stealth. She was making very little noise, yet the sound of her coming was clear to those of us on the balcony, and shut out the other sounds of the world. The edges of the defense flickered in a misty fire across the damp ground. At the edge of the undergrowth, the figure paused, and now I could see her, a faint shape against the blackness.

“Come on,” I heard Morrac whisper beside me. “Come along,” as one might do to soothe a reluctant animal. He raised his head and gave a long low cry: the calling cry of a huntress, strange to hear in a man's voice. I was reminded with a shock of the day of the hunt, when Sereth had knelt in the dust and called the child to her death. It was seductive, whispering, and it fell thinly down the air.

The figure on the edge of the woods moved uncertainly forward. Morrac called again, and his voice awoke something in me, some remembrance of my own homecoming. It spoke of safety and security, after a long time of fear. It promised love. It was irresistible. The girl gave an aching answering call and ran forward, out of the undergrowth. She stumbled as she crossed the gleaming edge of the defense, and cried out as she fell. I caught my breath. Then she was over the defense, and safely through the gate of the courtyard.

Morrac and I were already running down the stairs.

When we reached the courtyard, the girl lay crumpled in a heap on the wet flags. I stood back, and let her uncle see to her. He crouched beside her, whispering, soothing, and she cried out again and struck at him. He caught her hands
with ease and turned her away from him. She whimpered with fright. Morrac picked her up in a bundle and took her into the house.

Mevennen joined us and murmured to her. She looked up into our faces with bewilderment. I wondered what she saw: pale-haired people with sea-deep eyes, unreadable, in a hot unknown room with a tamed fire. She did not yet have the language to describe what she saw, but I could see behind her eyes that she was aware, a human being, and I breathed a sigh of relief that left me almost faint.

In the firelight too I saw that the girl's resemblance to her mother was vivid in the lines of her face, even beneath the filth. I was unprepared for the pain, but after that came a deep and certain joy that, somehow, it had not all been for nothing. The girl was covered in earth and what looked and smelled like ash. Blood streaked her thighs—clearly her menstruation had begun—and the skin that was visible beneath her covering was scratched and torn by the run through the woods. She was wrapped in the remains of an uncured skin, something like erittera, the little spotted running beast of the high steppe, and it stank of its late owner. Luta, clucking in disapproval, wrestled it from her and threw it onto the fire where it blazed up in a sputter of grease and water. The girl wailed in protest and reached out to the fire before I could stop her. Then she jerked her hand away as she felt the heat and gasped in fright.

Luta said grimly, “Bath,” and led the protesting girl away. Morrac and I stayed by the fire.

“Well, that's that,” Morrac said. He stretched out his legs to the blaze; he was shivering with the cold, and with reaction. Before I could stop myself I put an arm around his shoulders and he leaned against me. He sounded relieved. “It makes up for in it in a way,” he murmured, as if hoping I might agree. I did not reply, but my arm tightened around him, my cousin and my friend.

We remained like this until Mevennen came back with
Sereth's daughter. The girl looked sullen; I imagine the bath had not been a welcome experience. Now that the filth had gone, she was already more human. Her hair, which had been a single matted knot, had been cut to waist length and shone, falling down her back in a cloudy mass. Her eyes, like mine—like her mother's—were silvery. Mevennen had clipped her overgrown nails, but her teeth were still too long; we would have to see to that tomorrow. She ate untidily as a result, and looked around her as she did so, fearful that we might steal her meal from her. I left her in the women's care and took myself to bed. She was too much like her dead mother for me to be able to look at her for long, but it was done, at last. She was home.

Shu Gho came to see me that night, slipping in through the doorway. I woke to find her sitting by the side of the bed.

“Eleres?” she said in a whisper. “Do you mind me being here? I couldn't sleep. Bad dreams.”

“I don't mind,” I said. We talked for a time, and then I took her hand in mine and led her to her own small chamber. I lit the fire.

“There,” I said gently. “Would you like me to sit here until you go to sleep?”

She looked up at me. She had to crame her neck, and for a moment she reminded me of Luta, who was, perhaps, my grandmother.

“Thank you,” she said. “Eleres? What will you do, now? Are you planning to go journeying again?”

“No,” I said. “I'm staying here for the winter. I've had enough of traveling for a while, and there'll be the migration in the spring, anyway.”

Shu glanced at me, quizzically. “Do you think there'll still be a migration?”

“Why wouldn't there be? Unless the moons fall out of the sky.”

“Eleres—I'm not sure that your people's migrations have
anything to do with the moons, even if they seem to. I know that Luta talks of the twelve-yearly conjunction, but according to my calculations the moons fall into that pattern every couple of years and you don't all get the urge to rush off then.”

“The twelve-yearly conjunction's the important one, though.” I frowned. It was something I'd never questioned before.

Shu did not look convinced. “Well, maybe. But I think you've all been searching for Outreven. Drawn back to it, like birds to the nest. Or a child to its home.”

“But migrations don't end in Outreven.”

“No, because if you're on foot, the Gulf of Temmerar and the mountains are in the way, and you come to a natural halt—just as well, or you'd end up in the sea. But I'm sure that Outreven's what your people have been looking for, even if you don't know it.”

I considered this. “Perhaps we have,” I conceded. “But even if Outreven no longer affects us quite in the way it once did, that doesn't mean we won't still keep looking for it, even if we don't know that's what we're doing. People need myths, Shu. They need meaning, and dreams to draw them together. And Outreven is still the first and greatest dream of all.”

She looked at me for a moment. “You'd have made a good anthropologist, Eleres.”

“A what?”

“It doesn't matter,” she murmured. Her eyes drifted shut. I waited until she passed into dreaming. And as she slept, she smiled.

The family ghost came with us on the migration that spring. Now, so many years later, I do not remember much about the migration but imagination supplies the lack. In my mind's sight, I see a stream of people heading out across the plains, walking southeast. The mountains are a mass of shadow in the distance, snow peaked, and the new grass springing beneath our feet. I watch us walking, led by the landlines all the way to the far coast of Temmerar, all the way to the edge of the world. And I see us standing together on the cliff's edge—ghost and human; child and adult; the living and the dead—with the green seas of the world spanning before us and the sun coming up over the islands.

LIZ
WILLIAMS is the daughter of a stage magician and a Gothic novelist, and currently lives in Brighton, England. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Cambridge and her career since ranges from reading tarot cards on Brighton pier to teaching in Central Asia. She has had short fiction published in
Asimov
'
s, Interzone, The Third Alternative
and
Visionary Tongue
, among others, and is coeditor of the recent anthology
Fabulous Brighton.
She is also the current secretary of the Milford UK SF Writers' Workshop.
The Ghost Sister
is her first novel. She is currently working on her second.