The Silences of Home (9 page)

She is standing on the deck of the ship, looking west toward her home. Her bow is slung over her shoulder, and her brown bag is beside her, its buckle winking daylight at him. He calls her name, but his voice is lost in thunder. He tries to walk to her, but the boards of the deck are slick with lynanyn juice. The blue pours over his feet and spatters his legs, and he trips and begins to slide, past snakes of rope and rolled-up carpets and writing trays full of wooden blocks. He slides until he can no longer see her. Then he falls.

Nellyn lay with his arms and legs spread wide, feeling his heartbeats and the firmness of the bed. A soft bed, with cushions and a light sheet. He turned his head and saw a low table beside him with a candle on it. He had never seen a candle; it was her word, and he stared at the colours of its flame as the images of his sleep faded.

When his eyes had adjusted to the candlelit darkness, he saw a shape he knew on the table. He reached for it slowly, his fingers trembling until they touched it. It was nearly ripe, its skin barely yielding. Not one he would have scooped out of the river, one that should have been on a branch still. One he would have left to water and birds and fish. He cupped it on his chest and watched the flame turn it from blue to black.

“Would you like me to help you peel it?” She rose from the floor beside the table. He felt the sheet and cushions shift as she sat on the bed. She was wearing white, not blue and green. Her face and arms looked very dark.

“Yes,” he said—a whisper, because he could not imagine his voice yet in this room. He watched her fingertips, her nails, the skin bending and breaking away from the fruit. Juice droplets fell onto the sheet. Her head was lowered, and she was smiling. Shonyn time would hold her here, her skin and the wavering candlelight and the night-blue of the lynanyn. But he watched her and knew he could not keep this moment; it was slipping like the peel, curling away from him.

She took his hand in her own and they slid a bit, slick with juice. The lynanyn piece was firm—too firm, but he raised it to his mouth and bit. For just a breath the river sang and voices hummed around him.

“Thank you,” he said when he had eaten. “I did not take much lynanyn with me, only what I carried in both hands. But the journey was very long.”

“And you didn’t eat for most of it, by the looks of you.” She touched his hair, said, “Tell me about this journey, Nellyn.”

He spoke until his throat was dry. She gave him lynanyn juice in a cup and he spoke again. The words of past were echoes, shadows of what had been, and he was amazed at their distance and their strength. The wise ones’ faces turned away from the rail of the ship where he stood and could not move. Maarenn’s face, shining with tears, and her hand raised to him in a farewell for which she had no word. The village huts disappearing, the last flashes of silver from the lynanyn trees. Sleeplessness and fear. A kind Queenswoman who had led him from the boat to a caravan of merchants bound for Luhr. A desert with no river. Spires that looked like cacti from a distance he could not guess at; closer, closer still, and they were impossibly tall, their tips lost in cloud. Voices speaking languages he did not know; noises, creatures, stones he did not know. The palace, and her name, and an endless flight of stairs. Falling and darkness.

“And now you’re here,” she said when he fell silent. “With me.”

“With you,” he said, and felt a sudden, different fear. He had not thought of arrival. He had thought of her as she had been by his river, but not of her as she might be in her own place. The chill of a future that could not be known swept through him, and he looked away from her.

He heard a rustling of cloth, and the bed moved beneath him. She said his name. Her fingers brushed his cheek, his neck, the line of his shoulder, under his tunic. He shivered and closed his eyes, and she stroked his eyelids with her thumbs until he opened them again. She was on her side next to him, leaning on one elbow. The candlelight swam over her skin.

He raised his own fingers to her lips, and she smiled a new smile. Moments stilled and passed and stilled again, and he was dizzy but not afraid when she drew him up to her.

For a time Nellyn was giddy with strength. Lanara led him through the marketplace, and he looked about in wonder, and laughed, and squeezed her hand when she took his. Tents, flags, baskets, food, sleeping mats, ribbons, fur, scales, gems, wood, water: colours burned his eyes, but he blinked until he could see them and did not look away. He cried out questions to her above the din of music and voices, and when she answered him, her lips brushed his ear and then his neck.

She took him into the streets of the city, where Queensfolk gathered around wells and in doorways, and children sailed tiny wooden boats in fountains. Nellyn watched the children, and for a moment he felt a quiet settling upon him—but then they called to each other, and their strange names and voices shook him back to the cobbled square, and Lanara’s fingers laced with his.

They ate in shaded courtyards with many tables, on cushions in the marketplace, on the top step of the staircase outside her door. “Now try this,” she would say, leaning forward to watch his face as he chewed or drank. At first he needed lynanyn as well, before and after the rest. Very soon he did not. He ate her food only and felt his flesh stretching away from his bones, taking a shape that was larger.

He hardly slept. Once, she woke and turned to him and murmured, “Nellyn, you must sleep sometime—at night when I do, or during the day if that’s what you need still. But you must.”

“Why? I am not tired. See?” And he covered her waking, laughing mouth with his.

He lay beside her while she slept, or he sat at the table looking at the maps and cups and arrows and scrolls, all familiar now, in candlelight. He did not go outside until she did, when the sun was bright on stone.

“I can’t believe you aren’t exhausted,” she said one morning, almost frowning.

“I’m not,” he said, touching a finger to the skin between her eyes. “Not any more.”

“Nara?”

Lanara groaned and rolled away from Nellyn but did not wake. He slipped out of bed and drew one of his new tunics over his head. As he fumbled with the belt, the voice called out again.

She was standing inside the door, dark against the daylight. Nellyn blinked and began to see her: black hair pulled away from her face, wide eyes that looked green, mouth still open a bit on the name that had also been a question.

“I am Nellyn,” he said after a long silence.

“I know. I was there when the guard brought you to the garden.”

“I do not. . . .” He strained to find the word he needed, another new one, another sound that fractured time, “. . . remember. I do not remember you.” Only the water, and Lanara.

“Where is she?”

He was about to gesture to the bedchamber behind him when Lanara emerged, smiling, rubbing her hands over cheeks and hair and down her neck.

“Ladhra,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Ah.” Such a small word—but Lanara stopped walking, stopped smiling. “The Queen my mother wishes to see you. And him.” Ladhra did not glance at Nellyn. “Shouldn’t he be the one sleeping?”

“His name is Nellyn.” He recognized anger in the flatness of Lanara’s voice.

Ladhra turned and walked out of the house. “Come with me,” she said from the steps. “Now.”

Lanara’s fingers dug into the skin between his knuckles, but she did not look at him as they walked.
“I’ll take you to the Queen,”
she had said
, “when you’re rested and ready. She’ll be eager to meet you. And so will Ladhra.”
But now the woman Ladhra strode ahead of them, and Lanara too was angry, and the palace was closer, looming so far above that he could not lift his eyes to it. He felt weak, as he had not since his arrival. Lanara was bending away from him even as he clutched her hand.

When they entered the grove of trees, his dizziness passed in wonder. There were trees in the city, near fountains and lining the road into the marketplace, but not this many or this tall. The sky was leaves and branches, thicker than stars or even cloud. He stopped walking when the trunks had drawn around them, blocking out the walls behind and ahead. For a moment he felt the same stillness he had felt by the city fountain—but before he could breathe it in or push it away, Lanara tugged at his hand and drew him on.

The palace corridors were cool and dim, and lined with guards who raised their hands as Ladhra passed and sometimes spoke to her. She nodded at them but did not reply. Lanara and Nellyn followed her to a staircase that wound up and up, ringing with their footsteps. Soon Nellyn heard only his breath, which twisted his insides until he could hardly stand up straight. Lanara was a step ahead of him, holding his fingers. He could not lift his head to look at her. The walls pressed in toward him and the air darkened, and he tried to say her name.

“Ladhra!” Lanara’s voice was faint, emerging from beneath his own breathing. “Wait for us!
Wait!
”

He was sitting, though he did not remember doing this. Lanara was standing beside him; he felt her hand resting on his hair. As his breathing calmed, he heard footsteps coming slowly down to them.

“Ladhra.” Lanara spoke quietly now. “He isn’t accustomed to going so fast. Please wait for us.” Ladhra nodded and turned her head away, pressing her lips together so tightly that they whitened. “Don’t be angry with me,” Lanara said.

Ladhra let out a long, slow breath. “I haven’t seen you for so long,” she said, “and I knew you wouldn’t notice how long it was.” She glared at the tower wall. “I wanted to be angry for much longer than this.” Lanara laughed, and Ladhra looked down at her and smiled.

“We’ve never been very good at sustained anger,” Lanara said, “thankfully. I’m sorry I disappeared.”

Nellyn stood up and Lanara asked, “Better?”

There was still a darkness at the edge of his vision, and his legs still trembled a bit—but he said yes because he did not want her to worry about him now that she was happy again.

They climbed the rest of the stairs very slowly. “Here,” Ladhra said at last as the tower ended in another hallway, much wider and brighter than the one below.

Nellyn stood gasping in the sunlight that fell onto the flagstones and turned them pink. “In here,” Lanara said, and drew him to a door flanked by guards.

Nellyn took a step back when the door opened. He blinked against even more brilliant sunlight and a breaking wave of voices. He saw more guards, and women sitting at small round tables, eating grapes and bread. He heard music, maybe a stringed instrument he had seen in the marketplace, whose name he had forgotten. The marketplace, where no one turned to look at him.

The voices and music fell silent as he and Lanara followed Ladhra into the chamber. He tried to stare only ahead, but could not. He saw lengths of silk against the floor, and brown hands plucking grapes from stems. Glass goblets full of sparkling crimson. Eyes and lips, blurred with the speed of his gaze, but still there, clustered and close.

A woman was standing beneath an arched doorway. “Welcome, Lanara,” she said, and for a moment he thought he heard a wise one; her voice was slow and rich, and there was water flowing somewhere nearby, almost river.

“And welcome also to you, Nellyn,” she went on, and he was closer, and saw her clearly. She was smiling at him, though Lanara and Ladhra were raising their hands to her, their fingers pressed together. He did not speak.
“She is so beautiful
,
”
Lanara had told him.
“And so strong. I love her as I would love my mother if she were living—and you will love her too
.
”
Nellyn followed Queen Galha out beneath the doorway.

At first he was relieved to have left the crowded room, but then he glanced around and felt his breath leave him again. They were suspended in sky, fastened to the stone of the palace only by a slender metal railing. “Come and look,” he heard Lanara say as she guided him around fountains and blossoming plants. “Ladhra and I would come here and sit. . . .” They reached the rail, and her words vanished in wind.

For a moment he saw the city, flat and heat-blistered beneath them, and a gleaming snake of wall. Beyond that was a haze of sand that did not end. Lanara’s hands were resting on the silver metal. He looked at them as if they could soothe the rising sickness of his fear.

“Sit here by me,” the Queen called from behind him, and he did. The chair was soft and faced the railing. Ladhra and Lanara sat, and there were others as well: a man dressed in brown, who sat beside but a bit behind the Queen, and a woman holding the stringed instrument whose name Nellyn could not remember.

“Nellyn,” Galha said, “we are honoured that you have chosen to be here with us. Let me name those here, so that you can begin to know them.”

There was a goblet in his hand. He took a sip as the Queen spoke on, and coughed as the crimson liquid seared his throat.

Lanara watched water falling in the fountain. She could not yet watch Galha or Nellyn. “You are the first of your kind to come within the circle of my friends,” Galha was saying. She was pitching her voice higher so that her words would be clear to him. “Speak to me, Nellyn. I want to hear your voice.”

The wind scattered the water like rain. Wind so strong, this high, that if you leaned out over the balcony railing you felt tugged, hands slipping, cries torn away. Lanara turned to Nellyn as the silence continued.

“But I am being so vague,” the Queen said more slowly, with a gentle laugh. “Please forgive me. Let me ask you, so that you will be able to talk more easily. . . . What do you think of our city?”

Nellyn was staring at the blue jewel in the Queen’s hair. The goblet in his hand began to tip. Lanara reached over and righted it. He did not look at her.

“Your city has no river,” he said at last, “but the fountains are beautiful.”

Well done, Nellyn
, Lanara thought. She rested her fingertips on his hand—such a slight gesture, when what she really wanted was to put her arms around him and hold him, strengthen him as she knew she could. Tenderness had ached in her ever since he had come, so weak and beautiful, to find her.