Excerpt from The Silences of Home

PROLOGUE

It is only now, as I begin my chapter about Queen Galha, that the true enormity of my task has become clear. “Choose among the deeds of every queen,” my own Queen commanded me, “and craft for me one tome in which these will be documented. Do not linger overlong on any single queen, for the greatness of the line must be seen to have been shared equally.”

I have read consort-scribe Malhan's scrolls in the vast library that echoes with silence. I have watched children launching parchment ships in fountains, and listened to their chatter. All of these words, written and spoken, are of one queen only: Queen Galha, who led her fleet across the Eastern Sea in pursuit of vengeance; Queen Galha, only inheritor of Sarhenna the First's mindpowers; Queen Galha, whose reign saw the expansion of the Queensrealm to the very edges of the world. I do not know how I will be able to choose among these achievements. I have filled pages with writing, effortlessly, until now. Now I sit in the darkness of this empty library with an empty page before me and cannot make a beginning. She was too great, and I am too small, and my only desire is to read of her exploits again and again, until the morning finds me.

CHAPTER ONE

Leish was very young when he first heard the land beyond the sea. He was swimming with his brother Mallesh, darting and drifting among the bones of the abandoned city by the shore. Leish heard the familiar singing of this shallow water, and the land of earth and green above - a singing he had known from the time his body had slipped free of his mother's. He heard the thread of the river that twined inland; he heard the distant hills and forests he had never seen. These farther places were more difficult to find and hold, and some selkesh were well past childhood before they could do so. Leish had heard them before he spoke his first words - and he had heard other places, as well, which no one else could. But none of the singing of his life prepared him for what he heard that day in the Old City, in the sky-clear water at the edge of the great sea.

He was not trying to listen. He was stirring the water to froth behind him so that Mallesh would not be able to grip an ankle or foot; he was also giggling, sending bubbles dizzily up to break in the sunlight. And then, as he twisted around the porous pink of an ancient tower, he heard it and was still. Mallesh lunged up toward him, grinning and reaching; but he stopped when he saw his brother's face. “What?” he motioned; a few moments later, when they lay panting on the moss-patched sand, he said again, “Leish - what? What is wrong?”

Leish gazed up at the sky - his sky, brushed with leaves and blossoms and a wind that was always cool - and knew that he would not be able to explain. “I heard…” he said, and swallowed. He felt his limbs trembling, as if he had been swimming for days, or had dived too deep. “I heard a new place. A very…far away place.”

Mallesh sat up. “Really? Farther than the peaks, or the lakes old Radcian hears when it's storming?”

Leish looked up into Mallesh's face, which was dark because the sky behind it was so bright, nearly white with sun. “No - not that way. The other way. Across - there.” He was sitting now as well, pointing at the ocean that rolled gently and forever away. Or not always gently - but forever yes, this was known and told, this was a truth.

Mallesh blinked at Leish's finger. “But - ” he said - only that, for suddenly Leish was filled with words, none of them exactly right but all of them urgent.

“I heard sand - but not like this - and stone - but not like ours - and a place so dry that there is no green and hardly any water at all above the ground, except somewhere that is white and so tall…” He could not hear it now; even as he spoke he felt sand and stone and white-blue dazzle blurring, roar dwindling to trickle.

“We must tell this to everyone,” Mallesh said.

“No,” Leish said, for although the song was silence, he could still feel its power - coiled or crouching - and was afraid.

“Don't you realize what you've heard?” Mallesh demanded, standing up, gesturing at the water. “This is the song Nasran foretold, when she first led our people out of the sea. She said there would be another far-song, someday, and another leader who would bring our people to glory.”

Leish said, “No,” again, but Mallesh did not seem to hear him.

“Imagine what would have happened if Nasran had not told our people about the singing she heard! Where would we be?”

He was waiting for Leish to speak, now. He rose to stand beside his brother, licking his lips to moisten them, even though the salt taste made his tongue sting. “We'd still be down there, swimming all the time like the yllosh.”

Mallesh nodded. “We would never have ventured from water to land. We would never have heard all the songs of above and below. We would never have replaced yllosh -scales with this skin that is so soft and yet so strong.” Mallesh did not look at Leish as he spoke, but Leish looked at him. At his flushed cheeks, his lips that seemed to curl around words the way fingers curled around a stone. At his eyes. “Nasran heard the land and spoke of it, and a brave band followed her to it. She said there'd be another song of change, someday - and now you've heard it. You must speak, too.”

“I'm not Nasran,” Leish said as another fear began to hum beneath all the songs he knew.

In the end, Mallesh spoke for him. He stood on the green stone that rose from the gathering pool; Leish sat on the moss at the pool's edge. The tiers of half-circle benches were scattered with people - mostly other children, but some parents, as well, including Mallesh and Leish's. They had not allowed Mallesh to invite anyone else. “If everyone came to each of your speeches,” their mother Danna had said, “no one would ever leave the gathering pool. I am amazed that your father and I get anything done.” She and Noral were sitting on the bench closest to Leish. He did not look at them; he stared at the carvings in the wood beneath them. Scenes of Nasran and her descendants, images of near places and far ones, heard and carved by generations of selkesh.

Mallesh looked quite small atop the great stone, but his words were loud and firm, and the children stopped their whispering to listen. (Like they always do when he talks, Leish thought, with envy and admiration that were already old.) He spoke for much longer than he had earlier that day. Of Nasran, of course, who had heard the song of earth and trees and rivers and inflamed her followers with a desire for change and greatness. She had led these brave followers out of the sea depths. They breathed the air and still breathed the water, still heard the singing that none of the drylanders could hear. They fought battles with these drylanders, who had been on the hard earth before them, and despite their lesser numbers and their newness to the air, the selkesh won these battles. They had lived well ever since, along the sea coast and the rivers that branched inland. Never since Nasran, though, had there been one who could hear songs of great distance.

Leish shifted as his own name was spoken once, twice, over and over. He wanted to slip into the pool and circle quietly beneath until Mallesh had finished; he wanted to leap to his feet and cry out that he had heard nothing, really, that the strange noises of his mind had only seemed like singing. He also wanted to stand beside Mallesh on the stone and nod and look wise and perhaps describe a snippet of the song in order to amaze the children, and his parents. Instead he listened, only, and gazed at the bench carvings, and tried to silence his fear.

“It could be,” Mallesh said, so slowly and precisely that those assembled knew his speech was drawing to a close, “that this song will lead the selkesh to a new place. Somewhere exciting and strange, where our lives will change. Leish will be our guide to this place. He will hear the song again. We must be ready when he does.”

The children clapped, then began to drift away. A few of them lingered, muttering and glancing at Leish, but no one approached him. Some of Mallesh's friends leapt onto the stone and declaimed loudly about nothing, until Mallesh threw pebbles at them. Then they all disappeared into the nearby river.

“Leish.” He looked up at his father. His mother, he suddenly saw, was kneeling on the moss beside him. “I sometimes fear that Mallesh loves the sound of his own voice more than he loves the truth. So tell us - was there much truth in his words, today?” Leish had no voice at all, now. He swallowed hard and nodded, and as his mother laid her palm against his cheek he began to cry.

*

The wind is hot, the sand is hot - hot as flame, or ocean roaring with volcanic steam. The stone, too, must be hot, though it sounds cool: white-blue or clear, ringing and chiming and sighing where the water touches it. Water, bubbling from so far below that its song has no beginning - only a gentle faint murmur, where it winds in sand, and then a slow blooming, a faster rush like birds' wings, and it bursts into the basins and troughs that lie in the sun beneath the towers.

The towers are too tall, rising up and up to the thin keening of sky and cloud. And there are so many of them, clustered thick as anemones, as the houses are below. Too many, too tall, too hot -

Leish woke in dawn stillness and lay shaking, sweating, as if he had been spread out upon the sun-beaten stone of that other place. He heard it frequently now, but although many years had passed since that first hearing, he still could not control or anticipate it. It surprised him, left him weak and wrung with fear, and desire that led to more fear. He mostly heard it while he slept, when his attempts to twist away were slower. He often woke like this, in deep or paling darkness, and lay trembling.

There were starmoths clustered around the hearth pool; Leish sat with his legs in the water and watched the green, gold, scarlet, blue flickering of their wings. He breathed deeply and listened to the pool and its soft familiar path to the river's mud and rock. He sank into the old singing and almost believed it was enough.

“You heard it again.” Mallesh was beside him. The starmoths' colours looked like embers in the darks of his eyes. When Leish did not reply, Mallesh said, “You know that you will have no peace until you see it, Leish. We must go.”

“I…” Leish said, and was silent.

Mallesh stood very tall atop the gathering pool stone, the next day. The tiers of benches rippled with people. He still spoke of Nasran and her hearings and the first glorious change of the selkesh, as he had when he and Leish had been boys. Now he also spoke of boats and weapons of metal and wood. “We have not had need of weapons since first we emerged from the sea and confronted the land-dwellers - and we have never had need of boats. But this sea journey may be longer and harsher than we can imagine: perhaps our bodies will tire and collapse. We will need to build boats. And I will ask the mountain selkesh to forge new weapons - for we will need them. Leish has heard the people of the land across, and they are hard and fierce.”

Leish stood by the gathering pool and shook his head once, quickly. He had heard them: their pride and strength and will. He had also heard, humming like blood beneath, their joy. Or beauty. He was not sure: these notes were as strange and confusing as those of the land and towers. And they were not creatures of water as well as earth, as the selkesh were - so there was a warping to the song, an extra strangeness he could not understand. But he understood enough to know that they were not one thing only; and he looked up and wondered again at the ways in which his brother's words changed the song a bit, a bit more, until it was more a shaping of his than Leish's.

“And why,” one of the oldest selkesh asked, her voice tremulous as a breaking wave, “should we do all this? Build boats and weapons and risk our lives for this far land. Why? Do not,” she went on more firmly, holding up a knobbled hand to stop Mallesh from speaking, “tell us again about Nasran's triumphant journey and her prophecy of another to come. Those are merely tales. Talk to us of what is real.”

Leish saw Mallesh clench his jaw and his fists, and for a moment he held his breath, waiting for the rush of his brother's anger. But when Mallesh spoke, his words were slow and quiet.

“The song is real. Leish's torment is real. Young selkesh are told to follow the songs that draw them, and this is what Leish must do. I do not think that he should do it alone.” He paused. “And there are many others like me,” he continued, and the young people in the front rows stirred, “who see this journey as an opportunity for all selkesh, as well as a necessity for Leish. Though you have commanded me not to speak in such terms,” he said, smiling slightly at the old woman, “I must say that I feel a new age approaching. A second era of change and advancement. We have lived here in Nasranesh for a long, contented time - and now we must seek out other shores, other places to inhabit and hear and know. We must follow this song.”

Leish could hear the waves, in the silence that fell. The sea was high, today, with swells that climbed and broke like thunder on the moss-lined shore. Even the gathering pool was ridged and hissing.

“And Leish?” asked an old man who had taught Leish and Mallesh how to harvest long-necked snails from the coral. “What does he say? What do you say?” he repeated. Leish looked back at him, then away at nothing. At the clouds and treetops, the creepers, the wind-stripped blossoms.

“I must follow this song,” he said, his words too soft, not at all like Mallesh's hard ground stones. “Others must choose for themselves.” He could sense his brother looking down at him, and knew he would be frowning, just a little, so no one else would see it. You are too timid, Mallesh had cried when they were boys; “You have no determination, no dreams - you could be happy sunk in the mud at the bottom of the river.” Leish saw his parents on the lowest bench: his father gazing up at Mallesh, his mother sitting very straight, her hands clasped in her lap, looking at Leish. He wanted to smile at her, or shrug - something helpless and gentle. His eyes slid away instead, back to the trees and the sky that was heavy with rain.

*

The river is bleeding. He hears it: deep pulsing red, cries like torn flesh and sawing bone. The trees, as well, and all the pools, all the places beneath the sky and water. Bleeding, rending, gaping - not even a song, just a confusion, as if hundreds, thousands of people are screaming together, in their separate voices. Like a current beneath are the drum-hollow sounds of sand and white stone. And another, higher twisting: words, a voice calling the blood -

“Leish - quiet, quiet, be still…” Someone was curled around the knot of his own body, her skin and breath warm against him, easing him back. She smoothed sweat and hair from his eyes and he looked at her, in the light of the starmoths above the pool.

“Dallia,” he said, his voice a rasp, as if all the screaming had been his own. She smiled.

“Yes, my dear. Welcome home.” He saw her lips form the words, but could not hear her: his ears still echoed with blood.

“This one was very bad?” she said, frowning now, and he nodded.

“It was…here,” he said, when he knew his voice would be strong enough. “Here, and everything was bleeding and dying, and the song of the land across was here, as well, and someone was speaking, such terrible words. Everything was dying.” He felt her arms wind and tighten around his ribs - but they were not enough to keep him still, to keep him from dissolving into the silence where the song waited.

“Dallia,” he whispered, “this is what will come. This is what will come of Mallesh's boats and weapons. And it is my doing. If I had never spoken of this song - ”

“If you had never spoken of this song,” she interrupted, “Mallesh would be mounting an expedition inland with boats and weapons and you would be mad. Do not talk of meaningless 'if's. Do not talk at all” - and she kissed him until he smiled and wove his own arms around her.

“Now follow me,” she said suddenly, drawing away as he moaned and reached for her. She slipped into the pool and he did follow, swimming down into darkness beyond starlight. She led him from pool to river and from river to sea, where the bones of the Old City glowed with opening night plants and ancient, breathing coral. Leish and Dallia spun slowly, trailing fingers, long strokes of skin that almost felt, again, like scales. He watched her breathing, and yearned to hear her, only her - but singing, hearing, were deeper and broader than one person. He saw her dappled silver and blue, saw her hair and felt it wrapping around him before they moved apart. Then he closed his eyes and listened to the songs of his land, above and below, and he ached for the sea distance in his heart.