The Silences of Home (32 page)

“Smoke,” she said, her thoughts swift and clear. “The river has underground branches that lead there, and there.” She pointed at another hill, and another, all the same, all breathing smoke from fires that had been recently quenched. “These are
houses
,” she said, and raised her sword.

At first Aldron helped her hack at the creepers and moss, but she motioned him away, panted, “No—they’ll try to escape into the river again—wait there.” He did, and she continued alone. The earth beneath the growing things was soft but very thick. She hacked at it and it sprayed around her until it lay like drifts of snow, and still she was not through. She dropped her sword and scrabbled with her hands. She hollowed out a hole and then hit a web of roots and picked up her sword once more.
Faster, Nara, faster, Nara
. She heard a ragged cheer go up from the other Queensfighters, far behind; she heard Aldron cry out, heard his spear in the water, but she did not pause. “Got one!” Aldron called, and the last root gave way in a shower of earth, and she stumbled forward, into darkness.

She stood with her sword held in front of her and breathed in moist, heavy air. As she did, she saw that the darkness was not complete. There was light coming in the hole she had made, of course, but there were also specks of it hovering in front of her—coloured specks, which winked and spun and showed her a pool of still water perhaps ten paces ahead. The lights began to spin faster and more erratically. When they blurred toward her, Lanara bent her head and shielded her face with her hand. For an instant her hair and skin felt brushed with warmth—silk or soft, soft fingertips—and her ears were filled with a low whirring. She lifted her head when these sounds and touches had passed. She did not glance behind her; she squinted ahead, saw the sheen of water and, as her eyes adjusted, moss smooth around it, and a clear stone place stacked with wood. She looked up and saw broad roots jutting from the earthen walls, shapes on these roots might have been bowls, cups, lengths of cloth.

She sheathed her sword, which was gritty with dirt, and drew her dagger from her belt. One step away from the outside light, and another—and then she was falling.

The moss was as gentle as some new wool she had touched in a cottage near the coastal road—but there were arms around her legs, and they were wrapped hard and fierce. She heaved onto her back, carrying the weight with her, and it was gone—it was a body rising up against the weak sunlight, an arm descending. She threw up her own arm and felt the quick heat of her flesh tearing open. She stabbed with the dagger she held in her good hand and heard a high, piercing scream. The body crumpled onto hers. She grunted as she rolled it off and onto its back.

A small one, like the shonyn small ones that play by the shore
. She heard the voice as clearly as if Nellyn had been beside her, and she shrank from it. The Sea Raider was young, but hardly a child; he was already tall, already strong enough to kill, or try to. His eyes stared up at the earth-and-roots ceiling, so far above that it was invisible in the half-darkness. His open mouth made a perfect circle, as a Queensboy’s never could. Lanara looked at his knife, which had fallen onto the moss; its blade was wet, and she held up her arm. The skin of her forearm gaped and bled, though not very much—strange, since she could see the shine of bone when she fingered one side of the wound. She tried, one-handed, to rip some cloth from the hem of her tunic. When this did not work, she grasped an end of cloth below the Raider’s shoulder and unwound it. His upper arm, bare, was quite slender. She held the cloth with her chin, pulled it as tightly as she could, round and round her wound. She tied it with fingers and teeth and spat, afterward into the moss. She knelt for a moment more beside him, because she had begun to shake—but then the light flickered and dimmed and Aldron shouted, “Nara—are you all right? Come outside and help us.” She rose, strong and steady, and walked again into the daylight.

There were only a few Queensfighters beneath the far tees now; the rest were digging at the hills, as she had. She followed Aldron to another one, though he did not allow her to work with him once he saw her arm and its darkening bandage. She stood and watched him and the others as, one by one, the tall hill houses were opened to sky and metal. A tangle of flying creatures burst out each time—not coloured any more, in the sun, but dun-brown. They were moths, Lanara saw, with broad, furred wings and fat bodies. They plummeted within seconds, to die among the torn vines and petals. She batted at them and pushed her way into another house, and another. She watched Aldron kill two Raiders by a pool and three more in the river. She managed to catch one in the back with her dagger; two others leapt into their pool before she could retrieve the dagger. She had thrown down her bow and arrows somewhere, sometime. She did not remember this, or indeed anything except running into darkness and out of it, and cheering with the other Queensfighters when another Raider died.

The shadows of trees and hills were lengthening. Lanara looked for the sun and found it, low and red, caught among the highest branches. She shook her head, tried to swallow over the taste of rot she had not noticed until now. Queensfighters moved nearby—but not Aldron; she could not see him by the river or among the gaping houses. She had no voice to call his name, so she walked, as quickly as she could, her left arm hanging heavily at her side. When she came to the grove from which the Raiders had attacked, she heard someone say, “It’s over. The Queen is waiting for us.”
The Queen
, Lanara thought.
Ladhra, Luhr: how could I forget all this?
She staggered after the person who had spoken—just a shadow among all the other shadows—until the trees ended and red-gold light stopped her and flooded her eyes with tears.

It was a wide space, she soon saw, ringed with trees but flat and open. A large pool lay in its centre, reflecting the edges of the forest and the colours of the sky.
Like the Throne Room fountain
, Lanara thought, grasping at details that would anchor her here; but the fountain was not like this at all. This pool could never have shone beneath a desert sky, not even through the magic of a hundred queens. It had been born here, sprung from a river that also fed green things and flowers. Lanara shivered with longing and hatred. In the middle of the pool was a tall stone, light green and grey except for a darker patch halfway up. At first Lanara could make no sense of this darker patch—but then she saw that it was Leish, bound once more, even around his forehead. Above him was Queen Galha, standing very straight atop the stone.
Malhan
—Lanara remembered this name too, and glimpsed the man on a bench by the pool; one of a series of benches, she saw, and she went to join the Queensfighters who were already sitting or standing there. Some of them were laughing; most were bloody on clothes and skin.
They have no idea what will come now,
she thought,
but I do, and I am ready.

“People of the Queen!” Galha cried, and they quieted, gazing up at her. “Our victory is nearly complete. My daughter is almost avenged. There is but one punishment remaining.”

Lanara saw something move, beneath where the Queen was standing. Aldron. Lanara squinted at him, and he shimmered in her eyes before she forced them to focus. He was not looking at the Queen but around at the trees, down at the water, into the glow of the sun. Lanara did not recognize the expression on his face. Just as she thought,
I’ll go to him
, he disappeared behind the tall stone. She could not have risen in any case; her wound was throbbing from arm to shoulder to ears. It was so loud that she heard only its pulse and ache—but then Queen Galha lifted her hands and face to the crimson sky and opened her mouth. Sounds blazed at last from the months and months of silence, and Lanara cried out, hearing them, and knew that she had not been ready after all.

“Leish!” His father’s voice is faint, but Leish knows this is because Nasranesh’s song is so vivid today. It has not sparkled so since he was a boy, picking out all the strands for the first time: the ocean against the land, the river through the land, the living colours above and beneath, stretching all the way to the peaks that whispered snow. He hears these strands effortlessly now, together and separately, all of them as beloved as the voice that calls his name from the shore. Leish calls back to his father as he steps into the water, then onto the moss. He cannot recall ever having felt such welcome from the water before. Perhaps at birth, slipping from his mother’s body into his hearth pool—but of course he does not remember this.

He hears splashing: probably Mallesh coming out behind him, letting him be first to shore as always. As if Leish could ever really be faster than Mallesh, whose limbs are so much longer. Leish sometimes does best him beneath the water, when his boy’s body passes through smaller arches in the Old City and Mallesh is forced to take a different way—but that is all. And whenever he asks Mallesh not to let him win, his brother sputters and blusters and embarrasses them both—so Leish does not turn and speak to him about it. Not this time, when the water on his skin and the songs in his head are so sweet.

The trees welcome him too, wrapping him in green shade and gold. Vines brush his hair and the backs of his hands, and he smells moist petals, hears roots stretching beneath his feet. He follows a dazzle of notes to the gathering pool, where he stands and dozes a bit, until someone picks him up. His father, maybe (not his mother: Leish is too big for her to lift, except in water)—but he soon feels stone against his back and knows that it is Mallesh who has carried him. Leish will wait here at the bottom of the stone while Mallesh climbs it. Leish hears his feet scuffing and settling at the top. He will talk and talk—afterward as well, asking Leish what he thought of the speech, scanning his face for a lie. Leish presses his head and neck against the stone and prepares to listen, even though Mallesh’s words cannot possibly be as strong and clear as the song of Nasranesh today.

Leish was choking. Water poured down his throat and he had no breath. There were fingers on his nose, pinching and gouging, and in his hair, pulling so viciously that his head snapped up and his streaming eyes opened. Even before they did and he saw the person beside him on the stone’s base, he remembered. He remembered the pain of his body; he remembered every note of sea and jungle and city and river and tower and ship. He gagged and hacked, looked into the eyes of one of the Queensmen who had been with him since the day Dashran had died, on palace stones. Since the day Leish had first seen Ladhra, as his own people starved and stank beneath them.

He heard truth now, not dream or memory. The song of his land was splintering, its sounds rising and sharp with empty spaces. And above the changing song were other sounds: screams and breaking boughs, whoops and the pounding of feet. He listened as the Queensman bound rope around his forehead and tugged it taut. Leish felt the skin there crack open as the rest of his skin already had. They had carried him here—the Queensman had probably stepped on the flat rocks that lay just below the pool—so that he would have no relief from the water, and now he cracked and bled, and he did not care. Malhan was sitting on the first bench, and Queensfolk were milling around the others. Leish saw the blood on these Queensfolk and knew it was mostly not their own. This he did care about—this made him struggle against the ropes and moan, though he longed to shout so loudly that his people would hear his shame and sorrow, and his love. So that his mother and father and Dallia and even Mallesh would hear him.

The Queen spoke, from the top of the stone. “Queen” and “daughter” was all he understood, though Wollshenyllosh had taught him so many words. Galha was silent for a moment afterward. Leish looked at the last of the sunlight, among the highest leaves—not at the Queensfolk who sat on the benches, with their carvings of Nasran and the land she had found. He and Mallesh and the other children had carved some of these. Leish had chipped out a fallen drylander because Mallesh had laughed at the fish he had begun first.

Blood dripped and beaded on Leish’s eyelashes and he blinked it away. He heard the Queen say, “
Now
,” her voice low and harsh and very close, as if she were directing this word downward to him. He heard his breath, in and out—and then he heard the sounds of a dream he had had long ago. Dallia had woken him, held him and steadied him afterward. He whispered her name once before this waking horror took him.

The roots are the first to scream. They tear from the earth and strangle in air, too high for the touch of water or burrowing creatures. The trees fall one by one, until there is no forest, no dome above the river. The cries of the bark are long and deep; the leaves chatter and flutter and slow, crushed against the ground. They turn from green to brown and brown to yellow—not autumn, which they have never known, but a separate season that withers them to dust in a moment. The vines among them rot to threads. The flowers crumble and scatter before the wind of words and dying. Moss curls into earth that cannot hold it. Hill houses split and flatten. The wind boils over the shore and into the sea, where coral bleeds to smooth white and plant stems keen and sliver away. Fish spin and struggle toward the water beyond the wind. Animals crawl and fly and slither among the toppled trees—but there is fire now. The flames hiss over the wood and through it; they roar into the sea. The Old City burns. The moss blackens on the shore and by the hearth pools, which cry out in shrinking foam. The river courses with flame, from the sea to the vanishing pools and past them all, up and on to where the peaks weep snow. The fire thunders close around the gathering pool, against a sky livid with colours that no longer live below.

All the waters of Nasranesh sing as they die. They sing beneath the flames, softer and broken, until only a whisper remains. Selkesh walk into this whisper, long lines of selkesh, their skin pale and dry, their bodies transparent, so that rock and blowing ash show through them. They crouch or lie still or stagger; they bend over black puddles and tear at the flesh of unrecognizeable beasts. Some of these selkesh stand by the shore and look out across the wide salt water. They are motionless and stooped. Such pale, diseased skin and such twisted bodies—but their song is familiar. Weak and warped with change and distance, yet still selkesh. They shimmer in the light of the lowering fire, and then they tremble into air. Their song lingers on the cooling wind, but is soon lost, dissolved by louder noises. Hissing ash and drumming stone; slow faint water; and silence, vast and empty. The end is silence.