The Land's Whisper (10 page)

“Those eyes,” muttered Rook under his
breath. “Every time.”

“Well met,” said the smaller woman.

Darse immediately liked her. She seemed as
shy as a turtle, but sweet-faced and serious, and her braided brown
and green locks circled her crown in simple but elegant beauty.
Like the other two, she wore a somber expression that thinned her
features to an eerie gauntness. It was a look that spoke plainly of
another world, but somehow in her it did not emanate ominous
power.

“Carest,” Rook said, dipping his head in
greeting.

She smiled, the first soft expression Brenol
had yet witnessed from the trio. “Yellow and orange,” she said.
“They are brighter than the greens of the lakebed.” She raised a
marigold up in a cupped hand and drew it to her nose. The hue
appeared even more vibrant against her pale skin.

The maralane man grunted ambiguously. His
shoulder-length hair was chestnut and green, smoothed back and
secured into a ponytail at the nape of the neck with a thin strip
of algae. His chest was thick with muscle. “Spring already?”

Murphy guffawed. “It seemed a longer winter
than normal, Helst.”

Helst frowned.

The first female pinched her lips together.
“Next you will be saying second summer is too hot.”

“Samest,” Murphy said, bowing his head.

“
Hitze
is too hot,” Rook
muttered.

The trio sliced through the remaining space
to the tract, staring unflinchingly at the party.

Brenol swallowed hard at his memories and
dreams merging too closely into the present.
Not raptili,
he
reminded himself.
Not.

Colvin ignored Rook’s murmurings and walked
casually to the waterside. He held up a single daffodil, and Carest
took it gingerly in her smooth hands. She thanked him with a
serious face, and he granted her a soft reply. The two conversed in
low tones, and, as he could not discern their words, Brenol shifted
his attention elsewhere.

“Friends, I see?” Samest asked coldly,
eyeing Darse and Brenol. Her eyes were fish-like: unblinking,
large, dark. “You are not customarily so free with invitations to
our meetings.”

Her tone was scornful, but Spence ignored
it, bowing respectfully as if in reply.

She nodded curtly. “For your sake,
then.”

Samest’s gaze now bore into Brenol, and she
spoke to him directly, “Young one, what is your name?”

“Bren,” he replied. Intrigue—and
trembling—had settled into every space of his heart. He watched
Samest with wonder, not noticing Rook leaning in to whisper to
Helst. The lake-man gave the boy a peculiar glance before his stoic
regard returned.

“This is your first encounter with the
maralane?” she asked. Her voice was soft from use only below the
waters, but nonetheless arresting and rich.

“It is. You are so interesting.” Brenol
blinked suddenly, realizing he had spoken aloud and blushing a
bright pink. “I’m sorry…am I allowed to say that?”

Her lips twitched at his candor, and her
speech gentled. “You may, Bren. Your kind has always fostered an
interest in our people. Somehow, it isn’t as taxing to hear it
spoken of so bluntly. Usually it comes out in the silly way of
humans trying to seduce us.” She rested her pale arms on the rock
and an additional set of gills became evident at her sides. Her
tails sliced through the surface behind her, for each limb ended in
a fanfare of fin about the span of two hands.

“You don’t have a true understanding of the
maralane, though, from the three of us. You will not find many
others shooting up to converse with visnati and gaze at
flowers.”

Brenol was amazed that
they
were
considered the light-hearted of their kind.

Darse’s voice rumbled in a gentle bass. “How
deep does the water go?” He had been ignored up until that moment,
but all three maralane now pinned their glassy eyes upon him.

“Deep,” Helst grumbled.

“Is there anything special about it? My
father seemed to think that there was something about the waters
here.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“I…I don’t know, really.” Darse felt the
urge to retreat from the tense circle, but there was nowhere to
flee. “I apologize…I’ve always been interested in the waters.”

Samest accepted his words with a brush of a
tail fin and was about to turn to her companions when she paused
and peered at his face with a new appraisal. “Wait. You are not
from here, are you?”

“No.”

“Then you came through the portals?” she
asked with interest.

Darse nodded, “I did.” He hesitated a
moment, inhaled, and then gripped his belt as if it would grant him
courage. “And I have a request.”

The three maralane peered intensely at the
man.

“I need to send Bren back through.”

Carest shook her head, and Helst glared
coldly.

“No. It is forbidden,” Samest said with
finality.

Darse leaned forward in supplication.
“Please. I must get—”

“No. It will never happen.”

“But the portal,” Darse pleaded. “It goes
under my house. I just have to bring hi—”

“
Who
was your father?” Carest
interrupted.

“A song!” belted Rook in a jolt of motion,
and the visnati rushed to their instruments before Darse could
reply. Music erupted and a lively melody wove out from their
fingers. A wide-eyed glance between the small men wrung Darse’s
stomach in a strange way.

What do they know?
Darse brooded.
What?

The maralane peered at Darse silently, but
seemed content to leave the conversation unfinished. He did not
interrupt the song, knowing it was more likely he could discover
the truth with patience, but was resolved to finding it out in
time.

The visnati performed, and the maralane
listened with quiet attention. As the sun drew lower, the beams of
light reflected beautifully upon the agile fingers moving along the
lutes, flute, and fiddle. Colvin provided the vocals while he
strummed his lute. His voice was a deep bass baritone, handsome and
clean and staggering issuing forth from someone of such small
stature. He sang of lands, love, stories, myth, the water. The
visnati seemed to never weary, continuing their melodies and
forgetting all else.

The tangerine sun dipped down to nestle atop
the waters below a passion-pink sky. It streaked out with fiery
stripes of orange and lay so low and large that Brenol felt he
could reach out and touch it. The water glistened like satin under
light, and the water birds swept across the surface, singing a low
hymn of farewell to the passing day. Beauty was so thick that each
breast felt an almost tangible union with it. Carest still held a
single blossom in her white hand, attentive to the music. The other
maralane gazed undaunted at the fiery globe as the day melted into
the west.

The song ended as the day did, and the
maralane bent their heads, presumably in gratitude. They tugged up
three nets and resumed their pose of forearms upon the rocks while
the visnati hauled the catch up onto the landing. Brenol was
curious as to how they had held the nets without his notice, but in
the end cared little for such minor details; the maralane were
mysterious, and each new feat merely intensified his awe.

“Dinner! Murphy, do you have that firewood
to thumb?” Rook asked.

Murphy produced wood—apparently collected
and reserved at some previous time—and stacked it handily upon the
stone table. Within minutes, a roaring fire crackled and leaped and
heated the party to their toes. The maralane had spared no
delicacy, bringing treasures of the water of which most have never
even heard. Skewers were produced to cook food while the maralane
ate their supper raw, with tails flicking in protest against cheek
and teeth. Brenol’s stomach loosened into a queasy slither until he
trained his eyes away from the scene.

The group feasted until they had barely room
for breath, and even the maralane’s faces eased from their taut
seriousness. Darkness crept around and blanketed the peninsula,
turning the glassy screen a liquid black. The fire glowed on,
flickering light upon the party’s faces, as they discussed news and
travels, mostly of the “above” world, and the visnati’s laughter
and booming voices filled the night.

Here, in this casual fellowship, the eerie
lake-men made more sense to Darse. He still felt the keen sting of
their refusal, but was determined to find a different approach to
sending Brenol back. He must, and so he would manage a way. Like
the dread over the secret of his parents, he decided it would be
managed in time.

The conversation finally ebbed, and the
visnati drew up their instruments for one last song. Their fingers
danced as if in nimble salute to the night, and the fire crackled
as its final traces of fuel kissed out a soft, fading light.
Tranquility swept around them and drenched the moment before
releasing all in a gentle sigh.

The visnati bowed their heads in farewell,
and the maralane repeated the gesture. Their somber faces glistened
as their white heads bobbed in the dark waters.

“First summer, then? Or second?” Samest
asked.

“
Hitze,
” replied Rook.

Samest nodded.

Colvin bent down to the water’s edge, to
Carest’s unmoving figure. She smiled briefly, then raised her hand
to meet his. They touched for the briefest of moments before she
slid her graceful form back from the thin strip of land. Her tails
surfaced in a fluid cut across the screen, and, suspended in the
dim light, she waited for the others to join her. Brenol could not
help but stare upon her lovely face. She was like a perfect
porcelain doll, with every feature even and smooth.

The maralane then slipped under the water,
leaving only black ripples to mark their departure.

~

The return trip to Coltair, the visnati
town, was a trek of several hours, but it passed easily in the cool
silence. The path descended rapidly at times, yet it was
well-trodden and even in the dark could not prove treacherous. The
dual moons—one so large it seemed to Brenol like a hot air balloon
about to lift—caressed them with soft light. The universe had
rarely seen his lips so still. He had eyes only for the heavenly
orbs.

Darse and Brenol arrived at the visnati
grounds well into the night and found themselves bedded down in a
warm barn before they could even tap a toe. Their tired minds sank
into sleep as they lay in the peaceful dark of Garnoble.

A relationship with the land is never one-sided. It
is a dance, even if a perilous one.

-Genesifin

“Darse?” Brenol whispered. It was not the
first time, and he had grown progressively louder to rouse the
older man.

“Huh?” Darse squinted into the dense
darkness. He ached in exhaustion, but his mind sharpened readily
into alertness. “What is it? Are you well?”

“I feel
funny
.”

Darse sat up and furrowed his brows. He
peered in the direction of Brenol’s voice. They could not have been
sleeping for more than an hour, possibly two. He rubbed his eyes.
“What do you mean?”

“I…Tell me more about the whole terrisdan
thing,” he replied.

Darse fell back onto his makeshift bed.
“What’s going on, Bren?”

“Please?”

The man let out a long exhalation. “Ok…well,
the lands are alive.”

“The whole thing again. Please.”

What is he thinking about?
Darse
wondered, but began regardless.

His words rippled out, and packed in them he
found the memory of his father with neat white hair, recounting the
genesis of the terrisdans like a story from a book. He let his own
voice roll with the cadence of his predecessor, and it gave him a
quiet joy.

“Water covered the world of Massada. It
teemed with fish and water creatures, sweetness and warmth. The
water had so much life that in its depths, lands began to grow and
form. After some time, the lands emerged from the surface like
seedlings poking out from the soil.

“There were thirteen different land
‘seedlings,’ and each matured into a terrisdan. They grew and
eventually merged into one, or at least their pieces met to form a
single solid ground. They drank so deeply of the water’s life that
only the spring-lake was left. Yet from this, all of the lands
continued to find nourishment.

“While the terrisdans were young and new,
they held a bursting power for life. And in that, they birthed
people. These people were the start of the varied races.

“Every man had a specific connection with
his home terrisdan. It was a mysterious and real connection. He
could talk to and know the land as though it were any other person.
And like people, each terrisdan was unique: having likes, dislikes,
opinions, and more.

“Gradually over time, as the lands grew
older, men began to move across terrisdan borders, settling in the
land that was neutral and without personality: the lugazzi. The
connections in turn grew weaker. There remained only a strange and
select few who still possessed the ability to communicate with the
terrisdans. They were called the
nuresti
.”

Darse realized after several minutes that he
had been silent in his own reverie. He had not recalled that memory
for many orbits, and to be here in Massada thinking of his father
was a slaking experience; while it was not much, it was infinitely
more than the reticent walls of his father’s home. The nightmare
and voice he had heard back in Alatrice suddenly seemed but a silly
dream, for the visnati were good creatures and not likely to attack
Brenol. Alatrice and Brenol’s mother were his greatest
concerns.

He cleared his throat. “Did you just want a
bedtime story? Or is something going on?”

“Yeah, sorry. I just was thinking things
through and wanted some company.”