The Silences of Home (6 page)

“Yes,” she said, “I will.”

Lanara woke with a start. The light in her tent was grey and thick—a cloudy dawn, too early to be waking. At first she heard only the hammering of her own heart. As it calmed, she heard the river and the quiet hum of shonyn voices, carried on wind. Then another sound, much closer. She sat up and called, “Who’s there?” to the shadow in her half-open door flap.

“Maarenn,” said a voice, and a young shonyn woman ducked inside. She hesitated, looking down at her feet.

Lanara said, “Please come closer. I can’t see you very well.”

Maarenn took three steps toward the bed and stopped. “I am sorry. I know this is your sleeping time, but I can only come now. I. . . .” She finally looked up. Lanara saw dark eyes, curly hair tied back but falling over one shoulder. “I need to speak to you. Of Nellyn.”

Lanara wrapped her blanket around her and sat on the edge of the bed. She motioned Maarenn to the chair. After a long moment she sat, very stiffly. Lanara said, “What about Nellyn?”

In the silence, she heard someone laugh in the village below. Maarenn turned to the door flap. Lanara thought she saw her smile before she looked back at the room. She spoke then, quite quickly, as if she had practiced the words.

“Nellyn stays alone in an empty hut, far away from his sleeping companions. He does not join me on our flatboat, even though we are gathering companions. He takes a different one and gathers alone. He speaks to no one.”

Lanara ran a hand over her hair and down her neck and closed her eyes, which felt gritty from too little sleep. “And you have come to me,” she said, opening her eyes, “because you think this is my fault?”

“Fault?” Maarenn repeated. “I do not understand this. I come to you to say he is dear to me and many others. He suffers with change. Perhaps you do not see this. So I speak to you.”

Lanara shook her head. “No—he is happy. I know he is. Confused, maybe, because he
is
changing—but this confusion will pass.”

“Pass? No. There is no return for him, with you here.”

Lanara stared at Maarenn. “You
are
blaming me,” she said, her voice rising. “And you’re telling me to leave him alone, yes? As if it’s any of your business. It’s his choice—all of it. Not yours.”

Maarenn shook her head again. She rose from the chair and stood with her hands upturned. “I am sorry—I do not know. . . . He tells me you want to understand us, so I try to help you do this. And I try to help him. He cannot give you understanding of shonyn; you must talk to someone else for this. And you must let him find us again.”

Lanara rose as well, still holding her blanket close around her. She was taller than Maarenn, and this was her tent, but she felt awkward as her anger dissipated. “I appreciate your concern for Nellyn and for me. But please be reassured: I won’t hurt him. I am his friend, as you are.”

“No,” Maarenn said, “no.” She turned and left the tent, as silent as all shonyn were on the sand. Lanara did not watch her go. She lay on her bed as the grey light turned to gold, and longed once more for home.

Nellyn pushed his flatboat, and it did not move. He pushed again, grunting with the effort, and it edged down the bank.

“There are reasons why we do not take our flatboats out alone.”

Nellyn straightened and turned. “Wise one,” he said to the woman behind him. The shonyn words felt strange on his tongue. “Please—do not stand here. Return to your stone and sit with the others.”

She said, “No, tall one. I talk to you now.”

Water slapped against flatboat wood. Across the river, a lynanyn fell with a muffled splash. Nellyn heard other flatboats, other shonyn pushing them and talking and picking up their poles.

“Tell me why,” the wise one said. He looked at the river, dappled with low sun and growing shadows.

“Why . . . ?”

“Why we do not take our flatboats out alone. Tell me this.”

Nellyn shifted on the sand. He should be sitting at the wise one’s feet; he should be listening and nodding, wrapped in words. For a moment he yearned for this so keenly that he sucked in his breath, but then he saw his own hut and remembered Lanara’s laughter, and the yearning became a different ache. “We do not take them out alone because they are heavy. It is easier with two.” He answered as he had when he was a child sitting in the Queensfolk teaching tent.

“Yes, that is one reason. But there is a larger one beneath it. You know this one, also. Remember, Nellyn. Remember that we cannot be strong or good alone.”

The flatboats had all been launched. He could see them upstream, glistening with spray and the last of the daylight. The full moon was already high in the sky. Nellyn looked at it and did not speak.
We are all alone
, he thought
. Beneath the stories is our own breathing. One breathing only
. He turned back to her to say this, or something else—but she was gone.

He was still gazing down at her footprints when Lanara touched him lightly on the shoulder.

“Thinking, I see,” she said as he blinked at her. “You were still here, so I came back down. Is anything wrong?”

He shook his head. “No. My flatboat is heavy—that is all. That was all. I go—I will go. Now.”

“Let me help you,” she said, and they bent together with their hands on the wood. He looked at her when he was crouched on the flatboat. She was standing up to her shins in water, smiling. “Come with me,” he said, and felt suddenly breathless, as if he had fallen.

She said, “Really? Do you . . . ?”

“Come,” he said, and held out his hand.

Lanara had never seen such darkness. Luhr’s streets were lit with lanterns at night, and the palace’s tower windows were always bright. On her journey to the Sarhenna River she had set torches outside her tent to frighten away curious desert creatures. And on the Queensship she had slept through the deepest part of the night. Now, sitting cross-legged on Nellyn’s flatboat, she could almost feel the blackness around her. The stars still flickered in the sky and on the river, but the moon had set. River, flatboat, Nellyn, lynanyn, herself: all edges were water, in this darkness. Her eyelids were heavy, but she did not sleep.

They had not spoken since he had started gathering lynanyn. She listened to his hand brushing the water and the gentle thud of the fruits as he set them on the wood, then his pole, scattering drops as it rose and fell, pulling them slowly back to the shadows of the village.

The darkness had thinned to dawn when the flatboat ground to a halt on the bank. Neither of them moved. “Lanara,” he said, and she looked up at him through the mist that was rising from the river. “Let us do what you said before. Let us go down the river.”

She shook her head. “I was joking. Not being serious. Remember?”

“We do not have to go to the end. Just a small distance. I get you a pole and you can help me—” and he was gone, slipping away along the bank. Moments later he returned with another pole. As she lifted it from his hands, she said, “Are you sure?”

He bent and pushed the flatboat out again into the current.

At first neither of them used their poles. The river grasped the flatboat and turned it slowly around. As it drifted downstream, the mist burned away, and Lanara saw the banks on either side of them and the red houses of the village shrinking behind. The lynanyn trees too were dwindling, replaced by leafless bushes whose thorn-covered branches arched over the water.

The river bent, and the flatboat began to angle toward the far bank. Before Nellyn could reach for his pole, Lanara stood up. She balanced at the front, holding her arms out. “Let me steer,” she said, and laughed as the river rocked her off her feet. “Really,” she added, picking up a pole and leaning on it, “I want to try. And I want you to be able to look around.”

She swiftly found the rhythm of pole and water. It was almost like riding a horse: the clenching and easing of muscles, the motion of something wild and living. Dip, raise, turn, dip, raise, turn. She laughed again and shook the spray from her hair and face.

She set her pole down when the river calmed, in a place between rock walls. Nellyn was staring at the rock, his eyes wide and nearly black. “I do not know this,” he said as she sat down facing him. “This kind of bank. This water.”

“No, of course you don’t. But you must have expected it to be strange, away from your village.”

He swallowed and turned his dark eyes on her. “How can I expect? This is another first time. I have never seen banks like this, that are not sand. And the lines in them—they sparkle, maybe like your towers in Luhr? And this water is dark green and still. How can it be that this is the river I know?”

“It is part of your river. There are many parts to know. But it is all the same river, as you have said to me.”

“I said this, yes, but I did not see. I had not seen.” His one hand was clenched white around his pole. The other was twitching, fingers opening and closing on nothing.

“Nellyn.” She leaned forward and put her hands over his. “Don’t be afraid. You will become accustomed to these new things. And you are not alone—I am here to help.”

He pressed her fingers until they were numb.
He needs me
, she thought, and felt a rush of warmth. He drew his hands away and held them to his cheeks. “Not alone? But I am not all shonyn now. And I never will be a Queensman. How can you say I am not alone?”

She looked over his head at the red rock. There
were
bands in it: crystal, white and clear and light green. “Your shonyn friends are worried about you,” she said. “They want you to return to them.”

“I do not know,” he said. “Maybe I cannot return.” He rolled his pole over. The wood beneath it was wet. “Help me, since you say you can. Tell me what I will do.”

Lanara did not speak for a long time.
I am a Queenswoman
, she thought.
I have brought about this situation, and I must resolve it wisely. The queen sent me here for this
. She drew a deep breath. “You must make a choice. Sometime you will have to choose how to live, and with whom.”

“Choose,” he repeated, as if he had never heard the word before. He lay slowly down on his side, facing away from her, and drew his legs up to his chest.

When he did not move, she eased herself down behind him. She stared at the smooth place at the base of his skull and wondered suddenly what blue skin would feel like. She raised her fingers but did not touch him, though she was warm again with her own need. She fell asleep, curled in the shadow of the rock.

When she woke, the shade was gone and the flatboat bobbed in blinding sun. Nellyn had turned toward her; his sleeping face swam into focus as she blinked herself fully awake. She moved her head and arm and leg and groaned. Her skin was burned, stretched too tightly over her bones. She sat up carefully and groaned again, and his eyes opened.

“Don’t move,” she said between her teeth. “We’ve done a foolish thing, and we can never move again.”

“What is wrong?” he asked, and she snorted.

“Isn’t it obvious? Look at my skin. I’m sunburned.” As soon as the words were spoken, she thought,
Lanara, you fool
.

Nellyn said, “I do not know about this, since shonyn do not go out in day sun.” He smiled. “But your skin is very red, on that side. Like a kind of fish.”

She gave an incredulous laugh. “Indeed?”

He nodded and reached for one of the lynanyn he had piled on the flatboat during the night. “Yes. But I will help you.”

“Ah, yes—the miraculous lynanyn,” she said as he made a hole in one end with his thumbnail.

“Put your arm like this,” he told her, and squeezed the fruit until juice dribbled, then flowed.

She gasped. It was very cool and stung a bit before it numbed. “You aren’t burned,” she said as he held the lynanyn over her leg. “Maybe because you’re darker skinned than I am. Quite unfair.” She wriggled as juice fell on her neck. “Wait, Nellyn, that tickles. . . .”

Her voice died when she saw his face. He was very still. The green river lifted them once, twice, before she said, “Let’s go back now.” He smiled, and she looked away from its gentleness and its pain. She thought,
Don’t touch him. Don’t make things more difficult
. She rose and took up her pole. She knew his eyes were on her, and she felt light with strength and the certainty of desire.

Nellyn felt as if he had been shaking since dawn, from too much strangeness and too much sun, and a light sleep riddled with dreams he could not remember. Her skin, also, streaked with blue and sweat. And then the effort of their journey back to the village, both of them straining against the current.

“I’d like to lie down here,” Lanara said when they were standing on the bank he knew, near the red huts. “But I probably wouldn’t be able to get up again. And I don’t want to burn any more than I already have.”

“Yes,” he said, the word forced from a jaw that was locked and sore. He saw that his pole was trembling and tried to hold it more tightly.

“See you this evening,” she said, “if we manage to wake up.”

He watched her make her slow way up the ridge and remembered when he had first seen her.
She looks shonyn again
, he thought, and was amazed that he had ever truly thought this.

He groaned as he crawled into his hut. He drank cold water from a jug and ate five lynanyn seeds. Then he slept and dreamed the sounds of sails and oars and anchor. He dreamed her voice as well, and her fingertips on the nape of his neck.

“Nellyn. Nellyn—please wake up.”

He struggled to lean on his elbows. She was above him, dark against the amber light outside. “What?” he mumbled, dragging himself out of sleep as if he were walking through water.

“There is a Queensboat here. I must go now, and I had to come to you to tell you. To say goodbye.”

He could see her now. She was crying, or perhaps she had been. He lifted his hand to her face. He could do this, somehow, now that she had said these words to him. She turned her head briefly, so that her cheek rested on his hand, then she backed out beneath the curtain.

“Come with me. Please—walk with me to the boat.”

“Explain,” he said, when they were both standing by the hut. She slung her bow over her shoulder and picked up a brown leather bag.