The Ghost Sister (8 page)

Her musings were interrupted by Bel.

“Dia suggests we go exploring again,” the girl said, crouching down by Shu's side. “But not back to the ruins. To the west, to see what might lie there.”

Shu nodded. Grimacing, she stood and stretched, shaking the dust out of the folds of her jacket. She looked out at the glare of the sun, filtered by dust, as it fell over the edge of the steppe, and sighed.

“Well,” she said. “Hopefully, it's somewhere nicer than here.”

It was very quiet, there in the orchard beneath the trees. The sun had sunk low and its light spilled through the branches, drawing shadows across the dark skirt that Mevennen wore. She could only go as far as the edges of the orchard, since even the soft tides of this gentle land were overwhelming. Yesterday, she had found herself drifting away, lost in the world and incapable of speech or movement. But she had suffered from no more fits, and she did not want to stay in the stuffy tower, and so Mevennen had come back to the orchard with her sedative on hand and a journal, from Setry in the north. Eleres had come with her, just to sit in the sunlight among the trees, he said, and she did not want to think why he had brought his sword.

The woman who wrote the journal lived among her sisters. Every year, so Mevennen read, she would go out into the wastes before the fall of winter to see what the land had to say, and once she had made the twelve-yearly migration, walking with the
mehed and
her family, halfway round the world and back again.

The writer was a strong woman, wearing a hard life patiently and then stopping to write it all down. It seemed extraordinary to Mevennen, not so much because of the
unfamiliar places it described, but just as the record of an ordinary life. She was so intent on her book that she had almost forgotten where she was, and was mildly surprised when at last it became too dark to read and she looked up to find herself surrounded by the dappled evening shade. She was back in the orchard, no longer in the northern port of Setry and basking in the long days along the coast; no longer a woman who was able to come and go as she pleased and walk in the wilds of the world without confusion or pain.

What would it be like
, Mevennen wondered,
to live without pain?
To be normal, to live in the world and feel its currents, its watercourses, to know where you were and what lay beneath your feet without the roaring, rushing torrent of confusion from which she suffered so much … For her, being outside was like being deafened and blinded at once, as though the world itself was shouting in her ear and shining bright lamps in her eyes: exploding in sparks inside her head. It wasn't so bad here, not with the help of the sedatives, but she could still feel it: waves of light and dark, everything too much, though now, mercifully, it was muted and distant. But Luta had said that the sedatives themselves were not good if they were taken over too long a span of time …

She glanced down at her brother, dozing with his back to a tree and his sword resting by his side. Even Eleres sometimes treated her with the brittle delicacy that Mevennen so resented. It was why she hated being ill. Not so much the sickness itself, which she was used to and could bear, but the constant kindness on the part of those who loved her most. At the heart of it, it was really being a burden on everyone, always having to be cared for, that she detested so much. And most of that burden fell on her brother and Luta. She knew that the rest of the family tried to avoid her, and she couldn't blame them. It wasn't as though they were unkind,
she told herself, and it was natural enough not to want to be constantly confronted by the sick.

At least, she thought, guilty at her own ingratitude, Eleres always behaved as though she were a real person. To Sereth, so beautiful and so vivid, Mevennen was certain that she hardly existed. She had watched Sereth and Eleres on the journey here; riding out together, always bickering, and then Sereth asleep in his arms. Mevennen didn't begrudge the happiness of either one, but she envied Sereth, and that had always been there, too. She remembered watching Sereth before the masque last year, knowing that in a little while she would have to shut herself in her room, out of the way. It was as if all the humiliations were returning to her now, drifting down through the branches.

And now, everyone except Mevennen was waiting for the spring, when they would all be drawn away to walk south to Heleth and perhaps Temmerar on the Great Migration, following the twelve-year lunar tide. That was, she knew, one of the reasons why Eleres had brought her here: to see if she could be cured before the migration came around again. She remembered the last time the clan had migrated, and she had stayed behind—the only landblind woman in Ulleet, haunting the silent house until her family came home, ragged and weary and themselves again. And she had wondered what no one else ever seemed to think about:
why
did they migrate? Luta just shrugged and said it was to do with the moons, and if Mevennen couldn't feel it then there wasn't a lot of point in trying to explain it to her. It was just something people did, that was all—obeying the pull of the moons, just as the sea did. But why? Mevennen wondered all the same. No one ever really talked about it, and it was drawing closer now, hanging unspoken on the air at mealtimes.

Slowly, Mevennen closed the book that lay on her lap and looked out across the orchard. It was almost dark now. The sun was gone behind the ridge of the mountains and a
star hung in the branches of the mothe tree. Eleres was fast asleep. And with a sudden start, Mevennen saw that a ghost was standing beneath the trees. Mevennen could see the ghost very clearly, as if the spirit were solid. Mevennen gaped at her. She did not think that the creature was a ghost in the same sense as herself; not
shur
'
ei
, landblind. This was surely a real spirit: she looked nothing like Mevennen's people. The ghost was tall, and at first Mevennen thought she was wearing some kind of helmet. Then she realized that what she had mistaken for metal was in fact hair: dark golden braids wound around her head. The ghost's skin too was gold, the color of the river shore, and she wore trousers beneath a knee-length robe—maybe indigo, though it was difficult to tell in the last of the light. Through a haze of amazement and alarm Mevennen wondered who the ghost might be, perhaps someone from the far past, when legend said that they had been a different people.
We were not the same
, the legends began,
when we were magical. When we lived in Outreven, long ago …

Very cautiously, the ghost walked forward. When she was a few feet away from Mevennen, she crouched down in the long grass and took something from her pocket. It was some kind of box, and it hummed like an insect. Mevennen watched her with curious suspicion. She had once been told by a shadowdrinker in Ulleet that this would be part of her illness, to see spirits as real flesh, but it had never happened before. She could hardly believe that it was happening now, even though they said that if you saw a ghost, it meant that someone had cursed you. Surely she was cursed enough already …

The ghost's eyes were dark and odd, and its fingers seemed stumpy without the long nails of her people. Then Mevennen remembered one of the old tales that Luta used to tell, about a spirit named Telluhar, whose hair was the color of gold and who came from the east with her clan, from Outreven—a woman with magical powers who could
summon a great bird down from the sky. When she was younger, Mevennen had told herself stories abut Outreven, and dreamed that someone might one day come and rescue her, but now that a ghost was really standing before her she was both suspicious and afraid, and she felt a strong pang of regret for those young and foolish fantasies, in case she had summoned the creature up. She remembered the words of the shadowdrinker that Eleres had taken her to visit in an earlier, fruitless search for a cure.

“
They don
'
t experience the world in the same way. You can tell it by the way they move. It
'
s because they
'
ve left their bodies behind them, journeying into
eresthahan.
They are only half there.
”

“
I don
'
t hear the world, either, not properly
,”
Mevennen said.
“
It
'
s as though it
'
s so loud that it deafens me. Does that mean I
'
m not real, too?
”
She did not realize that she had spoken aloud until Eleres dropped to his knees in front of her and took her hands, ig
noring the shadowdrinker
'
s smile.

“
Of course you are
,”
he had said fiercely into her ear.
“
Of course you are, Mevennen.
”

Remembering this, Mevennen said cautiously to the ghost, “Are you real?” as one might speak to an animal, never expecting it to reply. The ghost looked up, startled. The box she held in her hands hummed and rattled, and then it spoke.

“Real?” the box said. The word was so dreadfully accented that Mevennen hardly understood it, but it was recognizably Khalti, just about.

“Yes, real,” she whispered. She could hardly force out the words through the tightening of her throat.

The ghost's lips moved, but it was the box that produced a garbled torrent of words.

“No, I don't understand,” Mevennen said. “Slower.”

“I
am
real. My name is Bel Zhur Ushorn,” the box said, spacing the words out. Mevennen tried hard to grasp the name.

“Bel Zhur?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“And what are you called?” she said warily, to the ghost.

“That's my name,” the box said, patiently. “This” —the ghost held up the box—” is my—voice. It speaks your language for me. We are not separate beings.”

Mevennen was still not quite sure whether they were two things or one, but she was suddenly excited, as well as alarmed, at being able to understand the spirit.

“I come from another place,” the ghost said now, through the box. “Another world.”

“
Eresthahan.
” Mevennen said. “I know. I can't see it, but that's where you're from. What's it like, the land of the dead?”

“I'm not a ghost,” the ghost said, frowning. Mevennen knew about this. Desperate to return to life, summoned by a curse, the spirit would try to trick you into thinking it was a person, and once you acknowledged them as a real human you gave them a little piece of the world. And that took part of the Long Road from them and further delayed them from their journey to the land of the dead. So Mevennen said nothing.

“What's your name?” the ghost asked.

This could do no harm. “I'm called Mevennen ai Mordha. Mevennen,” she added, since the spirit's own name was so short.

The ghost repeated it, as she herself had done. A small green light was blinking on the ghost's wrist like a little star. She raised it to her mouth and spoke.

“I've got to go,” she said, through the box. “My friend's calling me. Will you be here tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” Mevennen said, still wary. The ghost, almost invisible now, touched her wrist and a narrow beam of light sprang outward. Eleres stirred, murmuring awake. His eyes glittered in the light, and so did the sword as he grasped automatically for its hilt. Bel Zhur gasped.

“It's only my brother,” Mevennen said, but the spirit
started to run into the darkness beneath the trees, and in a moment she was gone.

Eleres murmured, “Mevennen? Did you say something?” But she answered quickly, “No. Nothing at all.”

Bel Zhur studied her face in the water below. She seemed to have become pale and remote, like the ghost Mevennen had called her. The reflection of her hair, caught up in its acolyte's braids, merged with the image of the overhanging trees until Bel's face peered out from a mask of amber-green. Bel Zhur smiled: the Goddess, reminding her that however strange this world might be, she was still in some way a part of it. But it was no use pretending that this was Irie St Syre, or that she enjoyed the same harmony with this new world as she had done with her own. At least this place was gentler land than the steppe. She had been unprepared for the sense of relief she had felt when she and Shu had crossed the eastern mountains on the previous day and found themselves gliding over this kinder country, leaving the ruins of the city to Sylvian. That relief had been matched only by the first signs of life: the dark tower among the trees with smoke rising from its roof, and then the most wonderful thing of all—a frail unhuman woman reading in an alien orchard. Such an unexpected scene, and yet one that had revived all Bel's hopes for this lost world and her own future.

But still, how strange, Bel thought for the hundredth time, to leave a world untouched in this way; untended and uncared for, like a garden left to the weeds. She remembered her mother's voice, so calm, so assured, echoing through the gathering hall:
We
'
ve learned from the mistakes we made on old Earth. The air contaminated by pollution, the coasts flooded by rising sea levels and tainted with radiation, everyone forced
underground or offworld as the atmosphere decayed. That
'
s why our ancestral mothers took such a risk in traveling to Me St Syre, and starting over. It
'
s our duty to make sure we
'
ll never make those mistakes again. If we can
'
t see the world that bore us as sacred, then how can we safeguard the future?

And then her mother's voice faded, to be replaced by Eve's soft northern voice murmuring:
I
'
ve been dreaming, Bel.
Eve's voice was so vivid that for an instant Bel thought she had really heard it, and she blinked back sudden, sharp tears. Strange to think that Eve's death now lay over a hundred years in the past. It still seemed like yesterday to Bel.
Maybe it always will…

Shoving the thought away, Bel sat back on her heels and looked warily around her. There were no predators on Irie St Syre, and despite the injury that she had suffered back in the ruins, she was still not used to looking over her shoulder. She rose to her feet and began walking in the direction of the trees, hoping that Mevennen would be there, but the orchard was empty. Bel leaned against the black bark of a gnarled tree and tried not to feel disappointed. But Mevennen had been their first contact—
her
first contact—and Bel had stayed awake for most of the previous night, thinking about her. Mevennen seemed so fragile, so strange; smiling as though she saw things that weren't there.
Like Eve.