The Silences of Home (13 page)

“So, sorcerer,” one of the men was saying, “will you show us a trick this time?”

“Quickly,” his female companion added, “before your pious friend can say it’s sacred to your goddesses and stop you.” They all glanced at Alea and laughed. Alea tried to laugh too, until they glanced away again.

Aldron looked around the room, his gaze slow and deliberate, and Alea’s nails dug into the underside of the table. “The fire,” he said after a moment, “look at it.”

The fireplace was large and deep, permanently soot-layered. The flames were high within it, their crackling audible beneath the noise of the room and the rain on the shutters. Alea looked back at Aldron. She watched his lips move and heard his voice, itself a pattern of rain or sparks, though she could not hear the words.

The fire died silently and completely. Something tugged at Alea—a protest, a wrongness that she did not try to name as she, like her companions at the table, gaped at Aldron. He smiled, especially at the woman Pareya. Then someone at another table called to the innkeeper, and a murmur of confusion rose.

“Can’t understand it,” the innkeeper muttered as he passed Alea. “Fine, dry wood, and there’s no smoke now. . . .”

Much, much later, Pareya said, “That was well done, but not very exciting.”

Alea did not know where they were. Somewhere deep within the town, with houses leaning in and strangers jostling. She stumbled when she looked at anything except her feet.
I am as drunk as the others
, she thought, quite coherently. She trailed behind the group, clumsy and slow for the first time she could remember. Every few steps Aldron fell back to find her. He pressed her into doorways, against walls still damp from the rain that had passed. He drew his fingers over her skin, each time a different place: her cheeks and her neck, her belly and thighs. She grasped his hands and made him clutch her, hard, so that she moaned—and then he laughed and pulled away again.

“Ah,” he said to Pareya now, as Alea drew closer to them, “you wanted excitement. Please be more precise next time you demand a trick.”

Pareya bit her lower lip very gently and raised one dark brow. “I demand another now,” she said. “Sorcerer.”

Someone whistled, and someone else said, “Look out, Medwel, you’re about to lose her to the horse man,” and Alea began to feel sick.

“Very well,” Aldron said. He seemed to look at Pareya for a long time—too long, the silence between them too thick. Alea took one unsteady step toward him. He turned just then and gazed at the buildings, the passersby, the small, distant sky.

“No.” Alea’s tongue felt swollen and dry against her teeth. No one looked at her. Perhaps she had not spoken.

Something rattled above their heads.
Pebbles
, she thought, peering up with the rest of them. Pebbles against wood—a shutter, which flew outward with a crash as a second handful of invisible stones danced against the wall.

“Who’s there?” a man called.

Aldron was standing with his face upturned, eyes almost closed. His lips were hardly moving. More pebbles spattered, against flesh this time as well as wood.

“You!” the man bellowed, his fists swinging above them. “Get away or I’ll—”

“Run!” one of Alea’s companions cried. She wrenched herself around so slowly, as if her feet were caught in bog, or tangled in the creepingvine that grew in the lake country. Pareya shrieked as she dodged away. Alea tried to order her limbs, her muscles, her wine-thick mind. She moved forward, and Aldron caught her hand and pulled her after him into an alley.

They pounded through darkness. She heard Aldron and the others ahead of her, tripping and cursing, laughing breathlessly. They pulled each other up over walls and wound through more alleys and streets, some empty and others scattered with people who shouted at them or joined them for a while before disappearing.

Everyone fell away, though Alea did not notice this until Aldron heaved her up and through a window, and she saw their inn chamber and him—only him—lurching toward the bed. She sat down heavily on the floor, which was still wet, and felt the rainwater spreading slow, dull cold into her skirt and skin.

“Well,” he said, “that was entertaining.” His voice sounded slurred or muffled. She thought,
Maybe still the drink in him—or me
, even though her own head felt abruptly, painfully clear.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”

He was on his back now, rolling his head on the pillow to look at her. “You pretend disapproval,” he said, his voice still strange, “when actually you’re thrilled to be included in these things.”

“No,” she said again, though his words sounded mostly, horribly true. “This—you—just make me tired.”

“I thought you liked that.” A whisper of mockery; he was barely smiling.

“I mean your tricks, your energy—the waste of it all.”

“So you’d have me create only pretty things, or useful things? Or—”

“Not create at all.” She got to her knees, resting her knuckles on the floor. “You toy with this power and use it to impress people, and you don’t seem to see how dangerous it might be.” His face was turned away. He was very still, one arm hanging off the bed, loose and heavy. “Aldron?” she said, starting to shiver. He had not Told a fire yet.

“I didn’t just create, tonight,” he said at last. “I’m disappointed that you failed to notice this.”

Alea’s teeth were chattering. She wrapped her arms around herself, for warmth and to keep herself from crawling to him. “The fire,” she said, and knew.
He’s right, I should have noticed instantly, but I was so distracted by those people. . . .
“You Told it away.”

“Mmm. Destroyed it. Wasn’t sure I’d be able to, and the words were so different—but it was easy, once I’d started. It made me tired, though—I don’t know how I walked for that long—and then Telling those pebbles, and the running. . . .”

“No.” Now that she wanted to go to him, she could not, so she spoke instead, quickly, and it was fear that finally warmed her. “Stop this. All of it. You’ll hurt yourself or someone else—you’ll change things beyond what’s permitted—”

“Permitted?” He was looking at her again, his eyes steady and unblinking. “You’re no different from all the others—only concerned about conformity.”

“That’s not true: I’m concerned about you. Look at you! You can’t even move now. Imagine what will happen if you stretch your power any more. Please—turn your Telling back to what’s right and good. I’ll help you—”

“Go.” The fingers of his right hand twitched once and remained slightly bent, gripping air. “Go back to Aliser. He’s an amazing man, never asks questions, always Tells nice, safe pictures and maybe a wind or a storm, but only if the Goddesses wish it. He’ll make you very happy.”

Alea rose, clenching her teeth against stiffness and tears, and walked to the door. She opened it and stepped out, closed it as quietly as if he had been sleeping, though she wanted, suddenly, to shake the inn with slamming.

The plain was bright with Alilan fires. She skirted them and went instead to the line of horses behind the wagons of her caravan. She whistled four notes and heard an answering snort, and she almost smiled as she found her Ralan in the darkness. She murmured into his mane, reaching around his neck to bury her fingers in it. She touched something, not horsehair, and her words trailed away. As Ralan nuzzled her, she drew the flowers out from where they had been tangled: two heartflowers, leaves and stems twined together, petals velvet and slightly creased, as if they had just opened. Alea held them to her face and breathed in their scent of sun and spices. Then she slipped them into her skirt waist and walked toward the fires where the Alilan danced, beneath their endless sky.

Aliser found Alea just before the leaping. She was standing with her mother and youngest sister, though she had not been there a moment before, had not, in fact, been anywhere near the oasis for most of the day. Alea was holding one side of her skirt up, fanning her legs with it. As he watched, she twisted her hair up as well, lifting it away from her neck.

“Where’ve you been?” he said, after he had slipped unnoticed to her side. That question—the words of it so old and thin and useless that he swore, one more time, never to say or even think them again. But then, as always, he heard her answer and the lie in it, and knew he would keep asking until she spoke the truth.

“I went to pick watersage,” she said, taking his hand and holding it to her cheek. Her skin was dry and fever-hot. “And I practiced Telling for a bit.”

“On your own,” he said, marvelling at the flatness of his voice, “as usual.”

Alea leaned over and kissed him. “Yes,” she said against his lips. “And now,” she went on, drawing her face away, “I’m back, since it’s almost time.”

The horses were coming. The youths atop the leaping place were all looking northward, so high above the oasis that they could see the herd. The Alilan gathered on the ground and on the smaller rock outcrops could only hear and feel the approach. The sand shuddered, and Alea gripped his hand, and Aliser allowed these things to dull the edge of his anger.

The horses emerged from the dazzle of distance and heat, and he sucked in his breath, remembering when he had stood far above the camp, awaiting his own leaping with Alea beside him. He watched as the horses’ colours bloomed—bay and black, white with red patches—and gasped with the other Alilan when the herd swerved as if it had been one animal, thundering toward the leaping place.

One of the youths above screamed. Very few people looked up; someone always cried out, just before the leaping. Often there was a cluster of them left, after the others had jumped. They would slither down the rock, alone or with someone else close beside, faces turned away from their families and the horses. This time, though, there was another scream, and another, and words began to form and fall.

“Goddesses, no—
no
!” Aliser heard, and he looked back at the horses that were not just horses any more.

Riders dotted the herd. As Aliser watched, more appeared, swinging up from beneath the horses. Cloth veils and robes cracked, and new voices screamed blood and exultation into the wind. “Swords!” Alea cried, and he saw them—three-pointed like arcs frozen in descent—and he shouted, “Perona!” before he turned and ran.

Aldira no longer watched the leaping. The beauty of white cloth against brown limbs against desert sky and rock was too small and fleeting a thing; it was the horror of crushed bones and lashing, bleeding bodies that remained each time, like a Telling that would not fade. So she stayed in her wagon now, waiting for nightfall, when she would join the other Tellers on the sand ridge. It was easier to Tell glory in the dark.

She heard the first screams and closed her eyes briefly.
A bad one, this season,
she thought as the screams continued. She heard the drumming of hoofs—and then voices, so unexpected and familiar that she ran to her wagon’s door.

Aldira stood for one long moment on the top step. She saw in one glance that the Perona rode this time without their usual trappings of metal and leather. The horses seemed bare and wild, but they moved beneath their robed riders with the grace and restraint of long training. She saw the Perona riders sweep the Alilan before them. She saw scattered Alilan running to the wagons for their weapons or their sleeping children, and others pressing on to where their own horses stood. They were too far away, the Perona too close. She saw Alilan falling beneath swords and hoofs, and she sprang down the steps and flew, her body young with fear.

Closer to the riders there was only chaos, images blurred and meaningless. An arm lying without a body; a toppled horse; a gout of blood that came from nowhere. Aldira stabbed with her dagger but did not feel it sink into flesh. Pain burned along the length of her left leg. She fell to one knee, her own cries louder than the battle. Suddenly Alea was above her, her arms encircling and firm. Aldira bent her head into Alea’s shoulder. She listened to the hammer of hoofs and death, and wept for the Alilan’s breaking.

She felt Alea stiffen. “Listen, Aldira,” she said. “By the Twins—listen to him!”

At first Aldira heard only the same screams, of horse and human and metal. “To whom?” she cried to Alea, who was straining to her feet, eyes seeking and wild. As Aldira too tried to stand (her left leg numb now, though she did not look at it to see why), different shrieks began. They were distant—at the rear of the Perona army—but the noise and motion of the battle broke for a moment, as if the fighters were listening. And Aldira heard him for a moment before she heard his words: a man’s voice, but still also a boy’s, rising in a passion and power beyond the Alilan and their Goddesses.

The Perona horses reared and twisted, trying to evade showers of thorns and clouds of biting insects. Their riders clawed at their faces, tearing veils away to reveal blisters and open sores, as if each had been struck at once by the same disease. Their swords fell unheeded to the sand and many Perona followed, pinned by arrows and daggers that had come from no hand.

The Alilan watched, motionless and mute, as Aldron drove the Perona back into the desert. Shrieks and blood and torn cloth billowed behind them, but soon there was only a pall of dust, and silence. Still the Alilan stared.

Alea moved first. Aldira heard her make a strangled sound. She turned, somehow, and watched Alea run to the foot of the leaping place. She tucked the ends of her skirt up into its waist and climbed, swift and sure. When she reached the top, she knelt, and all Aldira could see was her bent head, her black, shining hair. Moments later, Aliser joined her. He climbed down soon after, edging from handhold to toehold with Aldron slung over a shoulder. The descent was very slow, and all of the Alilan had drawn together below by the time Aliser lowered Aldron to the sand.

Aldira reached them last. There was a deep cut from her thigh to the back of her knee and down to her ankle. She clutched the top of her leg as if this would stem the bleeding, and dragged it after her like a piece of wood. She felt no pain from the wound; it was the place behind her eyes that throbbed.

Aliser was standing above Alea, who was sitting cross-legged with Aldron’s head in her lap. Aldira limped toward them, and people made way for her soundlessly. When at last she halted, someone began to bind her leg wound. She leaned on this person and winced as the dressings were drawn tight, but she did not look away from Aldron.

His eyes were open, fixed on sky. His arms and legs lay straight, but they twitched constantly. The ground beneath him was scored with the shapes of his fingers, his heels, his sweeping calves and forearms. His skin looked yellow.
Fever
, Aldira thought, though she did not touch him to see if this was so.

The sun sank. Aliser still stood; Alea still bent over Aldron; the Alilan who waited were still silent. Others had left to tend to the injured or to build fires for the dead. Aldira heard muffled weeping and cries, and saw the flames rising, a red-orange glow at the edge of her vision. And then it was dark, and torches were distributed, and as Aldira reached for hers, Aldron turned his head and vomited onto the sand.

Alea wiped his mouth and he groaned, his heels gouging hollows. His fingers clawed at his own face. Alea grasped and held them until he calmed. She bent and murmured something Aldira could not hear. Aldron answered: two words, low and rough and unrecognizable.

“Speak.” Aliser’s voice was loud and steady. “Speak to all of us before we cast you out.”

“Aliser!” Aldira hissed. “Wait for—”

“Cast me out.” Aldron’s words were ragged but very clear. “Cast me out, when I’ve just saved you.”

Aliser lunged for Aldron, holding Alea away from both of them with one tendon-corded arm. “You,” Aliser said, drawing Aldron up until he was nearly standing, “have broken our Goddesses’ only law. But you knew this. You knew it, and yet you proceeded.”

“Look behind you,” Aldron said. “Our dead are burning. There would have been more if I hadn’t broken this law. Even you might have been among them.”

Aliser took a step back. Aldron crumpled to his knees, and Alea slipped her arm around his waist.

“I would gladly have died,” Aliser said, “fighting among the Alilan of all the caravans, with my dagger and the strength of my body. That is how Alneth and Alnila commanded us to meet our enemies—not with a cowardly, twisted Telling.”

Aldron laughed. “You’re just furious that it was my power that saved you. My power, which is greater than any you’ll ever know.”

“Great power?” Aldira had to lean forward to hear Aliser’s voice. She saw Alea’s fingers dig into Aldron’s side. “Look at you. You can’t stand. If you weren’t leaning on her, you’d be face down in the sand. You may have power, but they’re punishing you for it—our Goddesses, who are no longer yours.”

Aldron swallowed; Aldira thought she heard it, in the silence. Even the cries of the wounded and the grieving had thinned to nothing in the falling darkness.

“And do the Goddesses speak often to you, Aliser? Was it they who gave you the right to pronounce judgment on me?” Aldron shook his head. “I cannot accept this judgment from you. You know nothing of—”

“Aliser is right.” Alea glanced up at Aldira. She looked ten years old again, her eyes wide and helpless, her mouth open. Aliser nodded once and crossed his arms over his chest.

Aldira kept speaking. She felt tears around the hard edges of her words and was too weary to be surprised. “You have always known what should and should not be, and you have always made light of this knowledge. Your power may indeed be considerable, but it grows uglier every time you misuse it.”

Aldron drew a quick breath, and Aldira held up a hand. “No—listen to me now. You may have saved us today. Tomorrow you may ruin us—even if you do not intend to. So you must never Tell change or destruction or creation again. If you are to remain among us, you must swear this.”

Aliser said, “Don’t give him this chance! And don’t believe any oath of his: he’s a liar who cannot feel remorse.”

“Aliser.” The crowd shifted after Alea spoke. Aldira noticed that Alea’s parents and sisters were in the first ring of onlookers. Her brother pushed his way forward to stand with them as Aldira watched.

Alea rose, though she kept her left hand on Aldron’s shoulder. “You’re angrier at me than you are at him. Let Old Aldira decide what should be done.”

Aldira felt them all looking at her, rustling and muttering as they craned to see her better. She remembered, in the moment before she spoke, that she had once relished being the one to decide. “Perhaps I am too lenient, but I say again: swear that you will never use your Telling power to effect any sort of change in the world. Swear this, and stay among us.”

Aldron put his hand up to Alea’s and their fingers knit and held. “I cannot,” he said, gazing up at Alea. She looked steadily back at him, her face pale beneath the light of the new stars.

Aldira waited for him to say more. She was suddenly dizzy.
My wound
, she thought, and knew that this was only partly true. But he did not speak again. He rose, holding both of Alea’s hands, and stood before them all.

“Then you will leave the Alilan,” Aldira said, loudly, slipping with relief into the space where only words existed. “You will leave and never again be welcome among us. And we will never speak your name—not even to curse it. You will be a silence to us. Beginning now.”

She turned away from him and from Alea, and for a moment her eyes were filled with darkness. The person who had been supporting her—Alon, she saw when her vision cleared, only a boy, whose Tellings were sloppy and too quick—stood and took her arm. She leaned on him, and he led her away, back among the crowd, which parted again then closed behind and followed. The Alilan of all the caravans walked together to the fires of their dead, and Aldira led them, holding a torch that guttered slightly, as if a wind had touched it.

“No.”

Alea thrust a tunic into an embroidered sack and did not look at her mother.

“Alea—no. Do not go with this . . . person.”

“Sleep here with us tonight,” Alea’s father said, and she shrank from the confusion and tenderness that tangled in his words. “Decisions hastily made one day can be unmade the next. Stay with your family, little foal.”

A belt, a pair of hide boots, a copper armring. Her mother’s hands fastened on the armring and pulled it away. “If you truly mean to go, you will not take Alilan finery with you. You will take nothing except what you must wear or use.” Aldana’s voice was flat and edged, both, like a dagger, and Alea lowered her head over her sack.

“Very well,” she said, so softly that she could hardly hear herself.

“Why?” her father demanded. She heard him pace to the wagon door and back toward her bed. He would be grinding his fingers through his red beard.

“Because,” Alea said, “I love him.”

Her mother grasped Alea’s jaw and turned her round to face them. “For how long?”

Alea’s throat was ash, and when she swallowed it was ash as well, rough and dry. “Since we were children, I think.”

“But you never spoke to us of this,” Aldill said. “Not even to your sisters. How could you keep this . . . love to yourself?”

Alea laughed. It was the only sound she could make that would be contained by the wood above her, and the air, and the distant net of stars. “And what if I had told you? ‘There’s a young man with no family and a dangerous power—may he eat at our fire tonight?’ You would have forbidden me to love him.”

“We would not.” Aldill put a hand to her cheek and held it there, his palm a hollow warmth. “We would have worried, yes, and perhaps tried to guide you to a more suitable young man—”

“Like Aliser.” She pulled herself away from him and walked to the door, which she opened.