The Silences of Home (29 page)

“This one is worse than the others,” Nellyn said. Lanara nodded and faced the sea again. “Do you know why?” Her shoulders were rigid. He went to stand behind her and put his hands on them lightly, until he felt them relax.

“He . . . the Queen has asked him to join in the voyage and the attack.” Nellyn pressed his fingertips against her neck and shoulders and she groaned. He knew she would be closing her eyes. She shifted a moment later and glanced back at him. “Aren’t you going to ask me if he’s agreed?”

“No. They would not be arguing if he had refused.”

She chuckled—a sound, he had discovered, that did not always indicate amusement. Someone was sobbing downstairs; Nellyn could not tell whether it was Aldron or Alea.

“Do you think it’s terrible of him,” she said after a moment. “leaving her now? He probably won’t be here when she has the baby.”

“I should not mind it,” he replied, reaching for the words, placing them carefully. “Shonyn children often do not know who their blood parents are: they are raised by many, spend time in different huts. And I understand that Aldron is not happy here and needs to find another place. But . . . Alea is not happy either, and she will only be more sad when he goes. I understand her sadness. She will lose him as I will lose—”

“Shush,” Lanara said. She swung toward him on the stool and slipped her arms around him. He laid his cheek against her hair and closed his eyes. Even so, the icemounts’ flames swam before him. Their colours were so intense now, but soon they would be weaker, lowering, leaving only open sea.

“We’ve talked about this day,” she said, her breath warm against his tunic, “unlike Aldron and Alea. I’ll come back—I keep telling you this, though I know I can’t make you believe it.” She propped her chin on his chest and looked up at him. “I wish you could think like a shonyn again now. You could be certain that there’s no change—just me going and coming and always being with you.”

He drew his fingers across her forehead and down her cheeks, to the hollow of her throat. “I wish the same thing, but only sometimes. You brought change to me and it is mine now, whether this causes me joy or sadness.”

Her arms tightened around him, and she lifted her head and kissed him. He had felt dread and sorrow weighing upon him these past days and weeks, and yet he stirred as she kissed him, and slid his hands under cloth, along the length of her thighs. She linked her ankles behind his legs and raised herself a bit against him, and he moaned and smiled at the same time—and then someone called her name.

The Queen was standing on the stairs. Nellyn blinked at her, as distant and slow as if he had been deeply asleep; but Lanara was standing, listening, nodding. “ . . . much to do before we sail,” he heard Galha say. “It would be best if we returned to town now.”

“Of course,” Lanara said. She held his hand on the steps down to their sleeping floor, then she let it go, bent to pick up the things she had readied for this moment, which he had hardly been able to look at: a bag of clothes, her dagger, her bow and quiver. He wanted to cry, “Take everything! Every vial and comb and length of cloth that belongs to you—leave nothing for me to see”—but he knew even as he thought this that he did not really desire it. He followed her down and down again, to the kitchen where Alea stood and Aldron slumped. They were silent now, their faces turned, pale and waiting, to the stairs.

“It is time,” Galha said, stepping from staircase to floor and into the cloak Malhan was holding out to her. The fishperson was there too, Nellyn saw, and the prisoner; he had not noticed them above.

“Fine,” Aldron said. “Good.” He walked to the door and took his own cloak from a peg beside it. Nellyn watched him fumble with the fastenings. He looked at Alea, who watched Aldron as well, just for a moment, before she walked to the stairs. She brushed past the Queen, past Lanara and her outstretched hand, past Nellyn. Alea went quickly up the steps, not holding onto the railing or the swell of her baby. By the time Aldron had arranged his cloak and turned again to the room, she was gone. His eyes darted and widened when they did not find her. His mouth moved without sound, and he raised a hand to his forehead.

“Come, then,” the Queen said. Aldron’s hand fell away from his face and he nodded. He looked over his shoulder at Nellyn as he went outside, and Nellyn held his gaze until Lanara's voice and arms drew him back.

“You must get help here: promise me you will. It’ll be too much work for you alone. Alea won’t be able to do any; she’s too uncomfortable already. The candles will be delivered next week. Stack them behind the ones in the shed—that way the freshest will be—”

He kissed her so that she would stop speaking, so that she would feel him close before she stepped away. “You haven’t changed your mind?” she said. He could feel the shape of each word against his lips. “About coming down to the harbour?”

“No,” he said, barely a whisper, and she held him so tightly that he knew he would stagger when she left him.

Dawn. Wind strong from the northwest, some waves with white tops. Icemounts gone, river and harbour water very high, perhaps because of melting. Sky clear, light cloud to the east. Queen Galha’s boats sailed shortly before dawn, are now spread out across open sea, moving quickly. Sails are bright and full of wind.

Nellyn is breathing in time with the lift and plunge of the poles. It is a rhythm he has forgotten, without his flatboat to stand on. Remember, forget: words he does not think of or even know, with the silver leaves ahead of him, the red huts behind, the dark blue lynanyn bobbing thick in the water around. There is no horizon—just the line of trees, the river bending in rock, the sand ridge behind the huts, and these views are blurred by dusk or dawn, not seen sharp in sunlight. He senses someone behind him: Maarenn, of course. She might think it strange if he turned and spoke to her, so he looks only ahead and breathes and dips his pole into the river that swells with stars.

Nellyn opened his eyes. They focused very slowly on the handprint of moss. The palm sharpened first, then the lengths of the fingers, then the surrounding rock. He breathed himself back, his hands spread on his thighs in the same way that the moss splayed across the cliff side. The moss was green now, springy and soft and dotted with tiny red flowers. The rock was warm wherever the sun touched it. Nellyn wore a light cloak when he came to sit here. Some days he did not even need the hood, since the wind was quite mild, if still occasionally strong.

He rose and stretched and yawned so widely that his jaw cracked. He was always tired—so much work to do and, despite Lanara’s urging, no one to help him with it. He enjoyed the solitude of the work, and its patterns. He enjoyed sitting at the windows in the darkness, climbing up to the lightroom at the same times every night to trim wicks and dab at fallen tallow. Dawn was his favourite time. He lowered the great candelabra, snuffed the candles, replaced the ones that had burned too low. Then he scraped at the hardened tallow and scrubbed the floor and windows and looked out at the sea, just once, before he climbed down the stairs to his bed. He slept less, and spent more energy while he was awake—but his body and mind were quiet, and his weariness did not bother him.

Today he found Alea in the kitchen, where he always found her at this hour. She was sitting at the table sorting through the baskets of fruit and greens and nuts that were delivered every two weeks. Nellyn had tried to go down to the town himself, but he had only succeeded once—enough to request the delivery services of a man he met in the fruit market. Nellyn’s legs had still been shaking. The man had laughed and said he would take pity on someone who was so clearly a stranger, and charge him a particularly fair price.

“A good batch,” Alea said. She smiled at him as he slid onto the bench across from her. “No rotten fruits and only a few bunches of mouldy greens. And look: your lips aren’t chapped after being outside for so long. It really must be spring.”

He touched a finger to his lips and felt them smile. “I am certain of it. I have not written about a storm in weeks.” No more howling snow or lashing sleet or driving sheets of rain; no waves that rose and boomed against their cliff, or fog that blotted the waves away. The rain was gentle now, when it came, and never lasted long. The stars were almost always bright, in the sky and in the water.

“What did you do today while I slept?” he asked.

She paused and frowned, though he could see her smile lingering around her eyes. “Well, now, let me try to remember . . . ah yes, I rested. First on my back, then on my side. Then, when I couldn’t rest any more, I waddled down here and inspected fruit. I think that’s everything.” She set down the sunfruit she was holding and leaned back a bit, so that her hair touched the wall. He watched her hands slip up over her belly and circle there for a moment. He watched her eyes close.

“A pain?” he said when she opened them again.

She nodded. She no longer tried to lie to him. “Yes. I’ve had a few today.” She picked up the sunfruit and turned it over and over in her palm. “Some days there are none, others many—but why, when it is so early? And the baby is always squirming—all arms and legs, and big ones at that. Did I not count the months correctly?” She dropped the sunfruit into a basket at her feet and did not reach for another.

“Perhaps you should consider moving into town to be near that birthing-woman I met. She would be able to help you, tell you what—”

“Nellyn,” she interrupted, “no. It was sweet of you to look for someone, and I know you worry, but I can’t live down there. And I don’t want a woman from there, no matter how wise, to aid me. I’ve learned to be without people—so I’ll do this alone too.”

“Not alone,” he said. “With me.”

She had often told him of the Alilan way: the lighting of the birthing fire; the gathering of grandmothers, aunts, sisters, mother; the slow, unfolding dance that did not end until the baby cried and breathed. She had explained all this, sometimes tearfully, sometimes angrily; he was sure that it would not help her to know that he—not her family, not Aldron—would be the one with her when her own birthing time came. But she reached across the table and put her fingertips on the back of his hand and said, “Yes, of course—and I am so glad of it.” She sat back and kneaded the left side of her belly—one of her happy motions, when the baby greeted her and she greeted the baby.

Nellyn heard a bird singing in their silence; it must have been directly outside. There were so many different birds now, which he had not seen in the winter. Some—small and yellow with crimson beaks—were building nests in the rock behind the signal tower.

“Let’s go down to Fane,” Alea said. She saw his confusion—she always did—and continued, “I know I just insisted I could never live there, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be enjoyable to visit for a day. Soon I’ll be so enormous that I won’t have a choice. It’s spring, Nellyn. You’ll enjoy the walk, once I help you down the path.”

He thought,
Maybe this is just another of her excited ideas, another that will wither once this mood changes
. But two days later she held his arm as they shuffled over the moist, muddy track and then, lower down, over the stones Aldron had laid. She stopped and looked at these, which were flat and pink-tinged. “So,” she said at last, “this is what he did, while I sat in the tower. Part of what he did.” Nellyn looked for anger in her face, listened for it in her words. He still did this even though the rage with which she used to speak of Aldron seemed to have passed with the winter. He saw and heard only sadness now.

“Listen!” she said as she stepped from the path to the wharf, gripping his hand for balance. From here Fane was a muddled roar; only closer did individual sounds become clear. Clanging pots, screeching children, the ripple and crack of carpets being beaten with brooms or oars. Music—fiddles and flutes, all manner of voices—and feet pounding on wood or hissing over cobbles. The creaking of the few boats anchored in the harbour, whose water rose and fell against pilings and stone like a heartbeat.

“These people,” said Alea, gesturing to the docks, “I don’t remember them being here when we arrived.”

“They came with the boats. And now they are here waiting for the boats to return.” Women with babies, old men, youths, all clustered around fires shielded by cloth or wooden windbreaks. Nellyn could see their fires from the tower, winking in the darkness like a strand of signal lights. He thought that Lanara would have written of them—their constancy and pattern, and who might be tending them—but he did not.

“So they’ve been here all winter.” Alea’s eyes darted from face to face as she walked among them. Some nodded or spoke words of greeting. One old woman reached up and touched Alea’s belly. “Hurry,” Alea said, and Nellyn felt her fingers weave among his and tighten. “There are too many of them—too many fires. . . .”

The makeshift dwellings extended up into the wide streets beyond the wharf; only when these streets narrowed did the tents and lean-tos thin away. Alea was panting by the time they reached a quiet, empty laneway. She had not let go of Nellyn’s hand, and she held it still when they walked on. Her fingertips were slightly rough and her skin was cool; he touched it very lightly with his own.

All of Fane gleamed: stones and paint, tiles, the water that ran down among the cobbles, the leaves, new-green, that fluttered from trees and clung to walls. The river was high and brilliant between its banks of rock.
My river
, Nellyn thought when he saw it—but he did not believe this even now, so long after he had ceased to be shonyn. This river surged and foamed, reflected roofs and bridges and strangers.
“
The Sarhenna River
”
: he heard Lanara’s voice and remembered his own confusion, and he thought,
Yes, this is the Sarhenna River
.

They found the jewellers’ quarter by chance, as they had found everything else that afternoon. At first Alea did not know what the place was; she merely stood and gaped at the metal and stones that hung from hooks set in walls and around windows and doors. Pendants and earrings and bracelets—and, by one doorway, a shining row of armrings. She walked over to them and looked through the doorway, into an open courtyard with a fountain and flowers and people bent over small tables, linking pieces of metal, setting gems, polishing with pieces of bright cloth. Copper and silver and gold, red and blue stones—all of them caught the sun and sang to her in voices she had forgotten.

“Do you like these?” Nellyn was behind her, looking over her shoulder at the armrings. She touched one, despite the shrilling of the voice within her that she had always heeded until now.
Don’t look, don’t touch. You’ll remember if you do, and it will hurt you
. . . . She laid her fingers against the copper and felt its warmth, and the grooves of its design, and the edges that would press into her flesh just enough to leave the faintest crease.

“Yes,” she said. He stepped up beside her and she turned to him, since she knew he would want to see her face. She watched him observe her tears and her smile, and she smiled all the wider because he was so serious and so gentle.

“We will buy one, then,” he said.

“No.” She forced her hand back to her side. “It would remind me too much of my people. And Aldron and I promised each other that we would leave behind all such trappings. . . .”

“Would it comfort you, to be reminded?”

She looked back at the armring. There were straight lines incised in it, and whorls, like wood with flames and smoke above. “Yes,” she said. Her baby pushed at her with a palm or a heel and she stroked the place with her thumb. “It was easier to deny myself such comfort when Aldron was with me. But now that he’s not, and with my birthing time coming, I need it. Comfort, reminders—I don’t know. . . .” It was so clear, suddenly: the hatefulness of her drab living floor and her rough, colourless clothing. She felt weak acknowledging it—and then there was another pain, tightening her belly from bottom to top, and she had to sit on a low wall to wait for it to pass. It did, and was not followed by another, and she looked up.

Nellyn was walking toward her, holding the armring carefully in his left hand. She closed her own fingers around it, clutched it as she would have clutched the reins of her Ralan, galloping.

“Now,” Nellyn said, “tell me what else would give you comfort”—and the laughter rose in her like a loosening, from stomach to throat; like a smooth untangling of wool.

“Are you sure I can’t stay here?”

Nellyn smiled over his shoulder at Alea, who was standing on the stairs. “I am sure, yes—you can come back when I am finished. Though I am glad you
want
to be here, now.”

She sighed dramatically as he turned back to the wall and the row of paint jars at his feet. “Very well. I’ll retreat to the kitchen and lay my pallet out in front of the fire and—no, no, don’t urge me to return—then I’ll”—her voice was fading as she descended the stairs—“just settle in and listen to my skin expanding. . . .”

He laughed. He had laughed often in the two weeks since their visit to Fane. Alea had been relentlessly, effortlessly cheerful. She seemed to be having fewer pains, and she had been busy transforming her sleeping floor. The brown rug had been rolled up and propped against the wall of the shed; in its place was a multicoloured carpet, small (since Nellyn had had to carry it back), but so vividly and intricately patterned that it swam in his vision when sun- or candlelight shone on it. Glazed bowls lined the windowsills and the low table beside her bed; there were earrings within, and bracelets, and stones not set in any metal, which she had chosen for their hues of fire and earth.

“The walls,” Nellyn had said a few days ago, and she had frowned at him.

“What about them?”

“They are so bare. Could we not colour them too?” And now here he sat, on a low stool, gazing down at red, green, orange and brown paints, smooth in their deep clay pots. She had told him which colours to get in town; she had not told him what, exactly, to paint. “You know Alneth and Alnila’s symbols now,” she had said, and he had nodded and begun to think. Two days of thinking; he had even planned as he slept, his dreams shaded scarlet and ivy-green.

He dipped his brush into the brown paint and lifted it up, still dripping. It did not smell like the lynanyn juice he used to mix with water for dyeing cloth, or with red earth to brush over river clay. This paint smelled thick and new. He touched the brush to the white stone and moved his hand once, again, slowly.

“Nellyn!” He started and blinked and saw that the light around him had faded. “Come and eat—it’ll soon be time to light the candles. . . .” He eased himself up off the stool, reluctant and stiff, feeling the colours leave the air and the place where he had held them, in his eyes.

“I did not expect to be so absorbed in it,” he told her later, when they were sitting together at the table.

She traced a smudge of green paint from his middle finger to his forearm. “So you’re an artist. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise us. I can’t wait to see what you’re doing—couldn’t I peek . . . ?”

He did not allow her up the stairs, no matter how sweetly or stormily she begged him to. He painted and ate, whenever she called up the stairs to remind him, and he tended the light, thinking about painting all the time. He painted when he used to sleep—and, when he tried to sleep, his head throbbed with colours and shapes and anticipation. He would go to her, lead her up when the sunlight was clear and strong, probably around three hours after dawn. She would stand and turn around, looking; but here his imagining faltered. Would she smile and speak, or would she frown, even just with her eyes?
I know nothing of this or any other future. I do not know what her expression will be, or whether the boats will ever come back across the sea
. Only when he stood before the curving stone where he painted did he feel quiet.