The Silences of Home (20 page)

“Leish,” he said, “is alive and safe. The Queen will keep him alive because she needs him—this is what Baldhron has told us, and I believe him. Baldhron has aided us and we will continue to require his aid—do not forget this.” He wanted to spit to clear his mouth of these last words, but he smiled instead, and waited for the men in front of him to smile back, reassured and strengthened by his own certainty.

“What if Baldhron is lying?” another of the men asked, still staring at his feet. “About Leish, about helping us? Why should we believe him? And,” he added, looking up and into Mallesh’s eyes, “what would we have done if we hadn’t met this person whom we now need so much?”

Mallesh imagined himself lunging across the water, grasping these men in his hands—their necks or forearms, twisting and wrenching until they cried out his name. But he stayed still, perfectly still, so that the raft would not tip. He breathed until he was sure his voice would not tremble.

“Nasran has blessed us. She has steered us to people who will aid us—but not because we could not have triumphed on our own. No: because now our triumph will be greater. We will rule this new land, and our scribes will record our greatness with writing implements and words so exact that they will never confuse those who come after us. Think of our carvings at home—the oldest of these are mysteries to us now. But this writing will give our people and our deeds a kind of permanence we selkesh have never before known. This is why we will wait, as Baldhron has urged us to.” They were all looking at him now. He saw their fear and awe, and he almost smiled. “If you do not wish to be part of our victory, go home. Go back to Nasranesh and sit by your hearth pools and try to hear the song of this city that is so beautiful and so great.”

They shook their heads one by one, but before any of them could speak, Mallesh dove. He sliced to the bottom of the pool and out into a tunnel, and there he swam faster, so that the stone walls blurred and the water seemed as thin as air.

He had left the chamber to allow his words to echo among the men—but also because hearing his own lie had shocked him. “This is why we will wait, as Baldhron has urged us to.”
Not entirely a lie,
he thought as he sped through the water
. But mostly. I tell my men to wait a bit and a bit more so that they will remember who it is that leads them. So that they will stop murmuring Leish’s name instead of mine.
This thought was believable, nearly forgivable. But as Mallesh swam, he heard other words, buried, half-formed. He cried out in streams of bubbles and hammered at the walls with his fists, as if pain could dissolve these words that grew clearer with every river-breath:
He may die he may die he may die. . . .

Leish hears nothing but singing. He hears so many songs: white stone and spray; ocean swells and blooming coral; even the quiet deep of his own hearth pool, ringed round with the sweetness of selkesh lifeblood. At first the songs of Nasranesh were faint, but they soon surged above the other notes, and he knew he was going home—back to the sunken city, to the river mud and the trailing vines and the leaves that smelled of mist at first light. He thinks he hears his mother and father and Mallesh, and even though he knows that he should not be able to hear their individual strands, he grasps at this singing and sends his own shining through the water toward them.
Home
, he sings, and he is washed in joy.

He hears his name. It is very clear, and he angles his head to this sound that is harsh and strange and spoken, not sung. “Leish, Leish”—the voice is not right, and it pulls him out of the water, spluttering and retching until the sea and all the songs are gone.

He opened his eyes and saw that she was with him, her dark hair falling around her face and shoulders. She held a golden horn crusted around its rim with jewels. She tipped it and he opened his mouth and tasted water. “Dallia,” he tried to say after he had drunk, “thank you—” but his voice was gone, and this woman, he now knew, was not Dallia. She was that other dark-haired woman, and he was lying in his own filth on hard dry stones, and he remembered everything, suddenly. He wanted to roll away from her as he had before, but the water kept flowing into his mouth, and he kept swallowing.

Wollshenyllosh,, the yllosh-woman, was kneeling beside him. He knew her name, though he did not remember when she had told it to him. He blinked at her, realized that it was she who held the drinking horn to his lips. The dark-haired woman was standing by the door. He felt dizzy and tried to focus his eyes on both of them in turn, to keep them motionless and solid.

The dark-haired woman spoke. “The Princess Ladhra bids you eat,” Wollshenyllosh said, and Leish saw his own hand reaching for the piece of fruit the yllosh-woman was extending to him. He bit, and his mouth filled with sweetness, and he cursed this pleasure and his heart, which still drummed within him.
Now she will ask me questions
, he thought, and waited again, sickness churning in his gut where the emptiness had been.

Long minutes later the chamber still rang with silence. He glanced at Ladhra through heavy-lidded eyes and saw that she was still standing beside the door, looking at him. She had not moved when his eyes closed fully.
Wait
, he thought weakly, already spinning into a sleep that would be dark and dreamless.

Ladhra came to him many times after this, most often alone, though occasionally with her mother and the silent, brown-clad man who always stood by the door. The Queen seldom visited Leish now, and when she did, she did not linger long. He noticed, as he grew stronger, that Ladhra did not look at him when she was with the Queen; she studied the floor or the wall above his head. She never spoke. Only Queen Galha spoke, in short, sharp words that Wollshenyllosh hardly needed to translate for him. Leish would shake his head and press his lips together, and the Queen would turn on her heel and sweep past the guards and her daughter, who still would not look at him.

But then Ladhra would come to the stone chamber on her own and stand by the door as Wollshenyllosh gave him water and food.
Perhaps she and her mother expect me to break because of the water and the silence
, he thought, but he did not believe this. There was no challenge in Ladhra’s eyes and no expectancy in her limbs. She simply stood and watched him as he watched her.

He waited for her. At first this was because of the jewelled horn and the fruit or bread or cheese; soon it was because of the woman who brought them. He sat up against the wall when she entered, even though his stiff skin cracked and bled a bit each time he did so.
She looks like the sky
, he thought once,
or a living tree in a place that has been burned
. He waited for her and pulled himself taller when she came and he forgot, while she was with him, that he should hate her.

One day she pointed at him and spoke. Wollshenyllosh said, “The Princess Ladhra wishes to know why your skin bleeds.”

Leish said in his new, splintered voice, “Tell her, then.”

Wollshenyllosh blinked and curled her own webbed hands against her sides before she turned to Ladhra. The yllosh-woman did not look back at Leish, after had finished speaking.

Ladhra left soon after, though she had not been with him very long. He lay down and slept and woke much later in the stone silence he had determined was the palace at night. Ladhra was kneeling beside him with a torch in her hand. He rolled his head on the ground and saw, blurrily at first, then more clearly, that he and Ladhra were alone in the chamber, and that the door was open.

“Come,” she said thickly in the yllosh language. “Leish—come with me.”

She had memorized the night palace as a child, slinking around corners, running so lightly that her bare feet made no sound on the moonlit flagstones. There were fewer guards at night, fewer torches and lanterns—and more shadows and wells of darkness that drowned familiar shapes. Lanara had always been worried that Creont would discover her empty bed; Ladhra had prowled alone.

The moon was nearly full tonight. She waited until it rose to the level of her tower window before she opened her door. She stepped carefully down the stairs, holding an unlit torch in her left hand, trailing her right along the wall for balance. She pressed her ear to the thick door at the bottom of the stairs and waited until she heard the guard’s footsteps advance and retreat twice, regular and measured. The third time they retreated, she pushed the door open, pulled it smoothly closed and turned to her right. She did not glance left; the guard’s back would still be to her, but only for a few more paces. She ran to the corridor’s turning, her bare feet as silent on the stone as they had been when she was a child.

She had never been afraid before, on these nights: nervous, yes, that she would round a corner and bump into a Queensguard—but never afraid. Tonight the fear seemed to creep like cold, up from the floor and into her flesh, from toes to belly. She shivered with it, and with the excitement to which it was joined.
My mother does not know. No one does, except me—and him, soon. . . .

She had planned to visit him once—to give him water and relish the absence of guards and Queen. And she had done this. She had watched the fishperson tipping water against his chapped lips, had enjoyed his relief because she alone had given it to him. His convulsive swallowing had sounded very loud in the chamber and the empty corridor outside. She had offered silent thanks for her mother’s decision to leave the prisoner’s door locked but unguarded. After he had eaten the piece of scarlet mang, he had looked at her. She had held his gaze until his eyes closed. Then she had ordered the fishperson to remove all traces of water and fruit from his skin, and she had left the chamber.

She had returned the next day, and the next. Day after day, thinking each time,
Just once more
; each day staying longer, to stretch her dizzy exhilaration further.

She tried to remember, as she ran through the darkness, when she had begun truly to see him. Perhaps the first time Galha had requested her company for “another attempt on the prisoner,” when Ladhra had stood beside her mother and met his eyes. Their round whiteness had been so unexpectedly familiar that she had had to look away.
He knows me now
, she had thought.
I know him.
Even though this could not be; how could it, when he was a stranger who did not understand her language? A stranger like the one Galha had killed, rightly, in the Throne Chamber, the one for whom Ladhra had felt no pity. Yet she had seen Leish’s eyes so clearly that day, and she had flinched when her mother ordered a Queensguard to beat him until he lay like a bloodied animal on the floor.

Ladhra had shuddered in her bed that night.
I will not go to him again. I swear by the First that I will not.

But she had, of course, again and again, and she had seen his seeping skin and his filthy clothes and his strange, hollow eyes as if she had been looking on them for the first time. She realized that the straightening of his mouth when she entered was a smile. She noticed that he sat up now, and smoothed his long, lank hair behind his ears. But he only did this when she came alone. When the Queensguards thrust open his door for Galha and her daughter, he stayed curled on the floor, his eyes half closed and his limbs heavy.

He did not stir now, though the door swung open with a slow, climbing screech. She knelt beside him and touched his shoulder. When his eyes blinked open, she spoke some of the fishfolk words she had learned—and she spoke his name. She watched him listen to her voice. He looked at the door and back at her, and she crouched so that she would be able to support him.

He was heavy, and much taller than she was. She slipped an arm around his waist and willed him to stand on his own. He did, after their first shambling steps, and by the time they were halfway up the tunnel, she was holding on to him only lightly. The torchlight showed her new black patches on his already stained clothing. She felt the blood as well, a slow, wet warmth against her fingertips and palm and wrist.

It took them a very long time to reach the door behind the thrones. Both of Ladhra’s arms were numb, one from carrying the torch and the other from half-carrying him after his initial strength had ebbed. They leaned together against the door. When their gasping had subsided, she took a key from her belt.

The Throne Chamber was layered with white and silver and shadow. The moon was hanging directly above the glass tower. Ladhra noted its position, calculated how much time they had and drew him quickly on. She urged him across the winking flagstones to the edge of the vast central fountain. Only when they were standing with their feet at the edge of the pool did she notice his trembling and look up into his face.

He’s listening to something
, she thought. His eyes were open but unfocused; his head was bent, but he did not seem to be looking at the water. The webs joining his fingers and toes were stretched taut and thin. After a time he turned to her, and she knew that he saw her, that he hoped and questioned and feared because she had brought him to this place.

“Swim,” she said, relieved that she remembered the word, and “Please,” because she wanted him to know that this was something wished, not commanded.

Leish was shaking so violently that she expected him to fall into the water. He stood for a moment longer, his toes now curled over the rim of the pool. Then he leapt up and in, his long body a gentle, silent arrow. She saw rings expanding and receding where he had entered the water, saw fish pebbling the surface in surprised flight. And then, for almost an hour, there was nothing. She sat with her legs in the pool and waited for his head to appear, but it did not.
Perhaps he was too weak for this
, she thought, and imagined plunging in herself to grapple his body into the air.
Perhaps he can’t breathe
. But she knew that the selkesh were fishfolk kin, that he would be able to breathe as easily underwater as above it, and so she waited as the moon’s path shifted on the water and the gems and the backs of drifting lake creatures.

He emerged at last with a roar. Not his own voice—that of something beneath, something large and powerful and invisible whose bellow tore the water into waves. Ladhra flung up a hand to shield her eyes from the spray. When she looked back at the pool Leish was there, bobbing close enough to touch. He drew himself over to her, and she clenched her limbs still.
O First Queen, First Mother, what have I done, he is changed, he is strong and sure as a warrior
. . . . 

She lifted her chin when he slid from pool to stone. His dark skin glowed; the water hung upon it like a net of beads. When he raised his hands, she flinched just a little. He gestured to her left hand with his fingertips and she turned it up. Her palm looked soft and fleshy; she tried to close her fingers over it, but he gestured again and she left it as it was. He extended his other hand—a fist, she noticed—and eased it slowly open above hers.

At first she thought that the four hard smooth objects that fell into her palm were stones. When she held them out into the moonlight, though, she saw that they were shells, two round and two straight. They were translucent, thin as the webs between Leish’s fingers, because there were no living creatures within to darken them. She smiled at him, wondered whether he would know what this meant. He smiled at her.

He did not need her help, on the way back to his prison. He walked in long strides and she followed, watching the torchlight on his skin that looked now like scales. When they reached his door, he turned to her. “Thank you,” he said slowly and clearly, “Ladhra.”

She waited for him to speak again, or move toward her, but he did not. She stepped forward and touched her cheek to the damp cloth over his chest. She placed her hands lightly on his hips and closed her eyes. His heartbeat was rapid and very loud. After a long, motionless moment he eased himself away from her, back into the empty room.

Baldhron hardly ever slept any more. Luckily, sleep had never been something he’d had much of, or needed. For the past many years there had been lessons to attend in the mornings; Ladhra to seek out in the afternoons (when the student scribes were expected to study independently in their library); the Scribesrealm to visit at night. He had not slept a full night in his bed in the Scribestower since he was a child, though he had always been careful to begin and end the night there.

He was less careful now. He knew that his absence from his bed would be noted, perhaps commented upon, and he made sure to mention to his chamber fellows that he had several women, both in the palace and in the town, who required his presence on a consistent and wearying basis. He explained his occasional absences from lessons the same way. “Tired,” he said to one of his teachers, “worn out—must tell those insatiable women that I need some rest. . . .” Because he had always been a gifted student and would soon be finished his long training, his teacher sighed and rolled his eyes and allowed Baldhron’s frequent truancy to continue.