The Silences of Home (4 page)

Lanara sat on her bed with a thin stack of parchment in front of her. “Trees,” she read, squinting at Cannin’s spidery scrawl. “Food . . . Pottery . . . Climate.” She rested her fingertip beside the last word.

Climate:

Hot and dry. Rains once a year, lasting about seven days. Winds high during rains, moderate at other times. No lynanyn gathering during rains.

Lanara glared down at the page. “That is
all
?” she said, then glanced up to see if anyone had heard her.
As if shonyn would be up here now
, she thought.
Still, I am talking to myself. I must alert Ladhra that I am already going mad
.

She set the parchment down on the carpet beside her bed and went to open the door flap. There were long shadows on the sand: dark, distorted tents and listless banners. The shonyn would soon crawl out of their mud houses to sit by the river. Nellyn would be among the first, Lanara knew; she had watched the village every day, though she had not gone down to it.
Patience
, she had told herself, attempting Creont’s sternness.
Be as slow as they are. Watch and learn.
But she could not, today—not with Cannin’s infuriatingly brief document behind her, and the shadows lengthening into yet another gentle twilight. Lanara offered silent apologies to her father as she descended the ridge and sat down to wait in the shade of Nellyn’s house.

He ducked out minutes later—the first to do so, as she had anticipated. He had stood and was starting to stretch when he saw her. She quelled a triumphant smile at his surprise. His arms and fingers froze and his eyes widened until she could see white around their darkness.

“Walk with me, Nellyn,” she said as she rose. “To the riverbank, past the sitting stones. And do not try to leap in and swim away from me.”

“I do not swim,” he said, and she sighed.

“Ah. Of course you don’t.”

They walked slowly among houses that were still quiet and sat where the bank was thick with plants. “They do grow crops,” Cannin had told her, “after a fashion. A little plot of herbs and vegetables that has apparently been there since the village began, whenever that was.” Lanara saw that some of these plants were brittle, their fronds brown-tipped and shrivelled. She looked from them to the shallow river and said, “Tell me why the shonyn are afraid of the rains.”

After a predictable pause Nellyn said, “The Queensman Cannin does not record this with his writing stick?”

She peered at him, wondering whether shonyn were capable of sarcasm and finding no answer in his face. “No,” she replied. “And anyway, I want to find these things out from a shonyn. You. So—the rains.”

He turned to look upstream. The stones where the old ones sat were hidden behind the plants. “The rains bring change. We fear this.”

She frowned. “Only that? And do these rains not come every year? Are they not a part of your . . . pattern?”

“Yes, they do come, always—but they are never the same. And we cannot leave our houses or gather lynanyn. Lynanyn fall without being ready. It is very dark, even during our sleeping. It is a very. . . .” For the first time she saw him hesitate, “. . . strange time. So we fear it.”

“I see,” Lanara said. She put her elbows on her drawn-up knees and stared at the lynanyn trees across the river. The leaves glinted violet as the sun slipped westward.

“No,” he said, surprising her again, “you do not see. You do not understand what change is, to shonyn. It is not so terrible for you. And you do not live by patterns. You hardly seem to have stories.”

Lanara arched her brows at him. “Apparently, while Cannin was learning nothing about shonyn, you were coming to a full understanding of Queensfolk.”

They looked at each other until he looked away.

She is angry. He sees it in the set of her jaw and shoulders. He wants to say he is sorry, to tell her that he actually knows nothing at all of Queensfolk, but he does not, since his words might anger or confuse her again. He waits in silence, looking across the river but still seeing her beside him, her blue and green tunic and the brown of her long, slender hands.

He understands shonyn women. He has touched one or two, lying in houses dim before dawn. Smooth blue skin and curls that cling to his fingers; voices that murmur with the river. He has felt desire as a slow, steady warmth, ebbing and flowing in the circle of his nights. He does not recognize what he feels now. It is pain without a place on his skin.

“I am sorry,” she says into their long silence. “I should not have spoken to you that way. We obviously have much to learn from each other.” She smiles at him as if she is tired. “I would like to talk with you again. Perhaps we could meet here every day at this time, before the children come for their lessons. Would you agree to this?”

Nellyn hears shonyn voices, though the words are indistinct. They are gathering now, to tell their tales and to listen. And he does not want to join them; he acknowledges this with a rush of terror and relief. “Yes,” he says to Lanara, and feels the pain prickling in his bones and blood. “I agree to this.”

She tries, from that day on, like Soral, to teach him time. “There is a beginning, middle and end to all things. Lives, experiences—this river,” she adds, tracing a long sinuous line in the sand with her finger. “We call it the Sarhenna, after the queen who discovered it. See—this is its shape. Its source is here, deep in the desert. Here is your village. And here is the river’s end, at the town of Fane, on the Eastern Sea.”

Nellyn looks at the line, and at her finger. There is sand beneath its nail. “The river is,” he says. “It flows here, always.”

She nods. “Yes, of course—but ‘here’ is only one part of the river.”

“I do not understand. The river here is all,” he says, thinking she might frown—but instead she smiles.

“You should come with me. We’ll get on a boat and sail to the sea and I’ll make you understand
end
.”

He feels blood rushing to his cheeks and looks away from her abruptly.

“I am joking,” she says. “Being . . . light-hearted with you.” After a moment she says, “Smile at me, Nellyn.”

He gazes at the drawn-up flatboats until they blur into one black stain on the riverbank. “I apologize,” she says at last. “Again. I feel so clumsy sometimes, talking to you.”

“I also am sorry for this.”

She says briskly, “Well then, if we’re done apologizing to each other, let’s continue.”

When it becomes apparent that she will not be able to explain time to Nellyn, they talk of other things: Luhr’s spires and fountains and the marketplace where people from all over the land gather. “But no shonyn,” he says, and she shakes her head although it is not really a question.

“Not that I have seen, no. Though there are fruit vendors there who sell lynanyn. Some say it is their most prized and beautiful fruit. And there are breads and sweets, plants from beneath the sea, berries from the mountains. Such a wonderful variety of everything: people, food, music, clothing.”

He sees her eyes sweeping over the empty river and the heat-curled plants and the red huts. He says, “This place is too quiet for you. Too small. But for me it is enough.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Is it?”

He cannot say the word that should be spoken. Her head is tilted to one side, as if she is listening to his silence.

“So tell me about this place, then,” she says, and his voice returns. He tells her about the richness of uses to which lynanyn is put: food, yes, but also dye for clothing and pottery, materials for cloth and threads and rope, medicine for fevers and wounds. He tells her one of the wise ones’ tales, of shonyn who cut lynanyn trees and watch them die; of shonyn who cross the river to settle on this bank so that the trees can grow again.

“When was this?” she asks, her writing stick poised above the parchment she brings with her every day.

He looks at the black marks she has already made on the page. “It is always,” he says, “and now, in these words.”

She opens her mouth, then closes it again. “Mmm,” she says, and does not write anything.

She is a part of his pattern, now, but this does not comfort him. The wise ones speak and he hears her voice, talking of mountains and spires and breads—strange words for things he cannot imagine, but they are her words, and they come to him even when he is not with her. He watches her walk up to the tents. When he pulls himself onto his flatboat, he sees that she watches him from her ridge, though he does not know why.

“You talk to her,” Maarenn says one night as Nellyn is trying not to look back at the shore.

“Who?” he asks, and she sighs.

“Nellyn. You know who I mean. What do you talk about?”

He listens to the laughter of the small ones who are clustered on the bank, sailing flatboats made of lynanyn-tree twigs. They laugh and splash, and he aches to be there with them, ankle-deep in warm river water. “She asks questions about our life, and I answer them. She writes what I say.”

“Ah,” Maarenn says. “She is very friendly. She tries to speak to us in our language. And she is lovely. In a strange way, but still lovely.”

He says, “Yes,” and feels his pain loosen, just a bit, as if he has shared it.

The night after that, Lanara walks back down to the bank as the flatboats are setting off. He starts when he turns and sees her there, instead of on the ridge. She waves at him. He thinks,
She looks sad
. Then,
She comes to see me off
—and he smiles at her across the water, as Maarenn’s pole dips and soars. Lanara’s mouth opens in a surprised circle, and he smiles more broadly, so easily now that he has begun. She clutches her hands to her heart in what he knows is mock alarm, since she too is smiling now. He wants to wade back to where she is standing, to let the flatboats go on without him.

Suddenly he is dizzy. There is a humming in his head that feels like the fear and pain he knows but also something else, something he cannot name or grasp. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, carefully, and the humming subsides. When he looks again at the shore, Lanara is kneeling on the ground, talking to a wise one.

The next day he wakes early and waits for her by his hut. She does not come. On that day and others that follow, he sits alone on the sun-crumbled bank beside the shrivelled plants. He hears thunder, so far away that it is more pulse than sound. The sky is dry and blue, except in the west, where there is a smudge of low, angry purple. The night wind smells of rain.

At first the hoof beats sounded like thunder. Lanara looked up from the letter she was writing and squinted at the desert to the south of her tent. She saw heat shimmer, broken by dark cacti with branches like beseeching arms—and another dark shape, this one moving. She rose as it drew closer, its trembling lines hardening into a rider on a white horse. Even from a distance she could see his tunic’s green and blue. She raised her arms, though he was riding directly toward her.

“Queenswoman,” he gasped when he had reined his horse to a rearing halt, “thank the First I have found you.” His face and hands were crusted with sand and sweat. Beneath this grime, his skin was a peeling red. “I fled a battle,” he said as they tethered his horse in the shade of the provisions tent. “And then I got lost. My food and water ran out yesterday. But how rude I am,” he said, turning to her with a smile. His teeth were even and white in his tangle of beard. “I am Gwinent of Sordinna, a tiny hamlet you’ve probably never heard of, to the west of Luhr.”

“And I am Lanara of Luhr.”

He arched one eyebrow and gave a low whistle. “A real Luhran. I had no idea they could be so attractive.”

Lanara laughed. “High praise from a man who’s been lost in the desert. Come and have a drink. And a wash.”

“Why not a swim,” he said, “to take care of both?”

They walked upstream, away from the shonyn village. When they went down to the river he drank first, in deep, silent gulps. Then he waded slowly in, wincing as the water touched his raw skin and the cuts that crisscrossed his arms and legs.

“How did you get those?” she asked.

He surveyed his arms as he bobbed, chest-deep. “A sandstorm. Bits of cactus and stone everywhere. Not a very dramatic reason. Would you be impressed if I said something about the battle? Or predatory birds?”

Lanara laughed again, then fell silent. She watched her tunic darkening in the water.

“What’s wrong?” he said, his legs slicing him in one long glide toward her.

“Wrong? Oh, just that you
know
something’s wrong. And you can understand me when I talk at a normal speed. And you’re awake in the middle of the day. All of which makes me realize how homesick I’ve been.”

“For Luhr?” he demanded. “Stodgy, stuck-up, smelly Luhr?” He dodged her splash with ease.

“For a man who’s been lost in the desert,” she said, “you’re entirely too energetic.”

She told him about the shonyn as they lay drying on the bank and later, eating slices of lynanyn and hard bread soaked in lynanyn juice.

“These shonyn have good taste,” Gwinent said as he chewed. “And I’m not just saying that as a man who’s been lost in the desert.”

She chuckled. “Mmm. But I miss
fresh
bread. And sweets. And vegetable soup. I know I shouldn’t. I’m here at the Queen’s command, after all, doing important work.”

He made a sour face. “And when has doing important work ever been a cure for loneliness?”

She curled her fingers around bread crust and did not look at him. She had called it homesickness, but he had named it truly. Loneliness: the spreading chill in her gut that she had not expected. She wrote to Ladhra and her hand shook with the need to see her, to walk with her among the trees of the Queenswood and laugh at nothing. She wrote to her father—though not as often—and tried desperately to see their small, sunlit house. Just as desperately, she tried not to see it.
I am failing Queen Galha
, she thought.
And myself
.

“Thank you,” she said to Gwinent. “I suppose I’ve been foolish. It sounds so simple and sensible, the way you phrase it.”

“Hardly. But you’re welcome.” He touched the back of her hand lightly. She watched his fingers, with their blunt nails and their cuts.

“Tell me about the battle you fled,” she said. She did not move her hand.

“Don’t you have to teach soon?” he asked, and she saw that the sky was pink and the sun was low.

“Yes,” she replied. “But not for a while. Talk to me until the children arrive. Please.”

His forefinger drew lazy circles around each of her knuckles. “I’ll be happy to. As long as I’m not keeping you from your important work.”

She could not see the houses or the river or the lengthening shadows. She could not see if there was anyone waiting for her by the plants. “Talk to me,” she said again, and smiled at him.

“Serran.” The child looks up at Nellyn as he puts his hand on her shoulder. “Tell me—your teacher is here? Not . . . gone away?”

Serran shakes her head. “She is here.”

He nods and looks again at the tents on the ridge. Already they are difficult to see: the sky is blotted with clouds. Not rain clouds; those are behind, advancing with the thunder.

“May I play?” the girl asks, and he turns back to her and smiles.

“Yes, small one. Thank you.” He watches her walk to where the other small shonyn are, gathered by the dry bank below the wise ones’ stones. The river is very low; the flatboat poles are hardly wet, when he and the others raise them up. Lynanyn they do not pick from the water lie on the opposite bank, their skins split and oozing into the dust.

Nellyn has not seen Lanara from the bank or the village, and he has not gone up to the tents. He wonders whether a Queensship has come during the day and taken her away again—but he knows that this cannot have happened so quickly and silently.
Because she does not come to me, I think she must be gone
, he thinks, and sighs at his own foolishness.

“A man is here,” Maarenn says later as the flatboat rocks beneath them. Nellyn kneels facing her and does not speak. “A Queensman,” she continues, “with Lanara Queenswoman. I hear his voice at sundown, and there is a small tent with an animal inside.” He feels her eyes on him in the cloud-thickened darkness. “She does not speak to you now?”

“No,” Nellyn says, and tries to smile. “You are curious about these things, even though ‘their doings are of no interest to you.’” His voice deepens and slows. She laughs at his imitation of a wise one.

“Even though,” she agrees. “And you too are curious, gathering companion, though you do not speak of it and only stare at her tent with large eyes.” She rolls a lynanyn toward him. It bumps his knee gently. “Take care,” she says quietly. “Remember who you are.”

He does not sleep at all that day. The sunlight on his walls is muted, almost grey. When he ducks outside, he sees that the bank of cloud in the west is crackling with white light. The sand beneath his feet is warm, not hot as it was on the day he went up to Soral’s tent. But as on that day, Nellyn hears voices. Hers and a man’s, low and laughing—and with them another sound, like someone striking a flatboat pole repeatedly into the sand.

They are standing beyond the third tent; Nellyn stays behind it and watches them. Lanara is holding her bow, pulling back a string and an arrow very slowly. When she opens her right hand, the arrow sings, then sinks into a tall cactus. The cactus tips slightly. It is supported by several rocks, not by roots, and Nellyn thinks,
That man tears it from the earth and brings it here.
The man is beside Lanara. He too wears blue and green, though the colours are more faded than hers. He grins down at her, his teeth glinting suddenly from the hair around his mouth. “Not bad,” Nellyn hears him say, “for a Luhran female.” She pretends to shove him and he pretends to stumble. Nellyn sees her smile and turns away.

He still does not sleep. He lies with his eyes closed, he lies with them open. “Our sleep is our strength,” the wise ones say—and he realizes the truth of this as he bends to gather lynanyn with fumbling hands. His limbs feel heavy and clumsy. His eyes ache until he rubs them, and then they burn. When he speaks, his tongue drags over his teeth.

He listens to the breathing of his sleeping companions and thinks of the Queensman. He imagines he can hear his voice rumbling beneath the hammering of his own heart and the boom of approaching thunder. The dizziness that struck him on the flatboat when he smiled at Lanara returns. Sometimes he feels as if he is falling, and his fingers claw at the sand or the wood of the flatboat.

He is awake when the rain begins. At first he thinks the sound is in his head, and he sits up carefully, waiting for it to abate. It does not, and thunder cracks, very close.
It is here
, he thinks, rubbing his hands across his forehead and over his cheeks. Lightning, thunder, the hard patter of rain. His vision blurs and darkens. He sees the Queensman’s grin and Lanara’s fingernail, crusted with sand. Soral’s wooden blocks falling in sunlight that eddies like water
.
The Queensman looking down at her—looking, smiling, reaching. These things are not real, but he sees them anyway, so clearly that he groans and grinds his fists against his eyes.
What is this?
he thinks as he scrambles to his feet.
I am not the same. Something is new
.

He runs over rain-blotched sand. Bile rises in his throat, and everything around him spins, but his feet pound up the path to the ridge. He sees Lanara and the Queensman standing in the door flap of her sleeping tent. He hears the man’s voice and watches his lips: “So your little blue people are afraid of a bit of rain, are they?” Words and skin swim in the muddy light. Nellyn tries to keep the man still, just for a few more steps, just until he can reach him with all the force of his running and his need.

“Nellyn!” Lanara cries. The Queensman turns to him. Nellyn sees his lips part in surprise, scorn, pain. Nellyn’s body holds them both on the ground for a moment. He sees his own hands gripping the man’s tunic. “Nellyn!” Lanara cries again, and he sees her reaching for him. He wants to touch her hair and the skin of her neck and the hollow of her throat. He shouts as he raises his arm and twists back to the man. The man’s fist rises—and then pain blazed and the world changed its shape, and Nellyn understood.