“Riaan, no!” Soukyan’s voice sounded like a knife skidding on bone. “On your life, do not touch him again! Look at him—he knows.”
The ghost had drawn sharply away, dodging Riaan as the boy had Cajli. Riaan stared back and forth defiantly before he lowered his head in a barely perceptible nod. He spread his right hand out before him—though by now he could not open it quite fully—studying the strange scars intently. “I’m glad I have these, anyway,” he said in a small, quiet voice. “I am.”
A faint breeze, bringing with it a rumor of the sea, brushed by Lal’s cheek on its way to morning. She said, “There is little time. We will go apart and wait for you.” Soukyan would have lingered in his fascination to observe the living son and long-dead father together, but Lal took his elbow and they moved away to stand on a muddy hummock in the damp loom of one of the enormous fern trees that grow only in the marshes north of Kulpai. Birds they could not see were waking in its frondy branches, and Lal could make out a few slim, slow clouds crossing the thinning stars. She realized absurdly that she was quite hungry.
“I told you,” Soukyan said quietly. “Better as it was.”
Lal shook her white head. “Never. Not for this one. This one has to know. Like you.”
Soukyan grunted, rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. He said only, “Look at them,” nodding toward Riaan and Eliath where they stood facing each other, not two feet apart. What they were saying could not be heard, but the yearning between them was plain even at that distance; for the night was ebbing swiftly now, leaving them naked to a watery sky. Riaan was still holding his right hand down and away from his body, moving it slightly as though he were quieting an animal.
“If I had never come to find you,” Soukyan said. “If we had never been to Kulpai—or if we had sailed to Kulpai, as we did that other time. If that bloody boy had kept his mouth shut and bred whomever they put him to. If we had only kept our mouths shut—”
Lal put her hand on his arm to stop him. She said, “If we had at last somehow managed, after all these years, to disown our hearts. To sell them, to pawn them, to leave them in a ditch and walk away fast. As often as we’ve tried, you would think….” She did not finish.
“Oh, you would think,” Soukyan agreed fervently. “You would think.” The ghost of Eliath was becoming more tenuous and filmy by the moment. From a certain angle it could not be seen at all, and Riaan might have been talking earnestly to a patch of moss on a fallen tree. Lal edged around slightly to put her back to the east, having an absurd notion of keeping the rising sun’s rays from touching Eliath for a few seconds more.
“He’s gone,” Soukyan said, but the ghost was not gone, not quite then. Lal could still discern even the thin whiplash scar down Eliath’s right cheek, looking itself like the ghost of a tear. But it faded as she focused on it, and Eliath faded around it, until all that was left of him was Riaan—Riaan and a soft, raw gasp of bereavement that could have come from either of them, or from Lal herself. She was never sure.
Both Soukyan and she started down the slope toward Riaan; then, without a word to one another, both of them turned quickly away. He came to them in his own time. His face was pale and dirty and very tired, but the rain-gray eyes were clear as the new morning, and he was smiling a little, in private, like a lover returning home.
“My father will come again if I have need,” he said. “But I will not.”
With its sour-smelling streets and its sullen folk in their narrow, lowering houses, Kulpai was exactly as unpleasant a place as Lal remembered. She found this remarkably comforting.
The inn that had offered the least dangerous beds and food was still standing, kept up by the widow of the old proprietor. Soukyan left Lal and Riaan asleep there on the morning following their arrival. She woke when the room door closed and stood at the window to watch the taut stride that had replaced his usual diffident amble taking him now toward the lockup under the city wall. When he passed from sight, she went back to bed and slept dreamlessly until midafternoon, and when she woke, Riaan was gone.
“Ah, no,” she said aloud. “Not today, child. You are on your own today.” She bathed and washed her hair in the questionable water provided, made a knowledgeable but vain attempt at cleaning her journeying clothes, then went downstairs and menaced the inn’s cook into producing something that came quite close to being a meal. After that, and after asking a number of questions of the landlady, she made her leisurely way down to the harbor.
Riaan was where she had thought to find him, sitting on a stanchion at the end of the wharf. An unseasonably warm sun was turning the water a sparkling, slippery purple, and the squat little coasters were already setting out for a stolen night’s tejadi netting in the lee of the Unseen Islands. Three or four merchant ships lay at anchor just within the mole, tenders and lighters butting at their flanks like nursing marsh-goats, taking off cargo. A dozen fishermen, the crew of one of the deep-sea boats, had careened it on the beach, so that the leering demon face on the prow was half-buried in the sand. They began scraping a thick, stinking crop of scarlet fa-weed from its hull.
Lal dragged a coiled hawser up beside the stanchion and made herself comfortable, sitting cross-legged. She said, “You have been here all day.”
Riaan nodded without turning his head. Lal said, “The first time they took me to the sea, I thought it was a great green animal. I tried to pet it. They used to tell me—” She stopped herself, then finished lamely, “I believe I almost drowned.”
“I can swim in rivers and things,” Riaan said. “My mother taught me.” Now he looked at her, and she saw that his eyes were too wide, his face almost as transparent as his father’s. “Lal, it is too much,” he whispered. “Too much world beyond my village—too much sky—now this. It is too heavy for me. It crushes me even to think about it. I am so afraid, Lal.”
“You?” she said. “You have more courage than Soukyan and me together.” But Riaan would not be comforted. “What is to become of me? Where am I to go from Kulpai, Lal?”
“Where are any of us to go from Kulpai?” she asked gently. “Shall I return to telling stories in the desert? Is Soukyan to go on wandering like dust in the wind, with no more cause than seeing what happens next? He and I, we have never had a purpose in our lives beyond survival, beyond vengeance, or pride—yes, or atonement, why not? You’ll do better than that, take my word.” She reached up from where she sat and took light hold of his right hand, studying the unfading scars. “You know you can come along with us,” she said, “with either one, as you will. But I would wait if I were you. I would wait right here for the sea to speak to me.”
Riaan gave a short laugh that was too old for him and looked away again. “You are Sailor Lal, born on the water—the sea will always speak to you. Why should it bother with someone who never saw it until this morning?”
“I never know the sea’s reasons,” she answered him. “Wait, Riaan. The sea is looking at you right now, making up its mind. If it chooses, it will speak soon enough. Sit still now and listen.”
So they sat on the wharf for the rest of that day, as the coasters vanished in sparkling haze and small children chased the longlegged shore birds down the beach after the ebbing tide. They said very little, and no one said anything to them, though they drew glances from the women bringing buckets of red ale to the men scraping at the fishing boat. They watched the high, hooked dorsal fins of a pair of panyaras drifting lazily beyond the harbor mouth; and once Lal pointed out a great blue-gray bird endlessly quartering the sky. “Kulishai,” she told him. “They have no legs—they are born on the cliffs, and just roll into the air when their time comes. Scavengers they are, and always alone. People here believe that they never mate and never die.” Riaan did not answer.
When the children on the beach had been called home at sunset, when the fishermen had finished cleaning their boat’s bottom, and the merchant ships were riding high and light in the fire-flecked water because of their empty holds, and Soukyan h
ad not returned, they walked silently back to the inn and had their dinner. The landlady had already retired for the night, and a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman they had not seen before was serving in the taproom. Her red hair and bright throat scarf marked her as a Nounouri, and the handful of other diners called her Deshka.
The meal was long over, and the taproom empty except for Lal and Riaan, who could not yet bring themselves to go upstairs, when Soukyan came through the door. A breath of the cool, dry evening entered with him: even so, he looked as though he had been in the rain for a long time. He sat down at their table, saying no word, and Deshka brought him a cup of tamtha, the fierce, oily Kulpai brandy, without being asked. She had gone for a second drink when Soukyan finally said, “His name was Haruk. Haruk Butcher’s-Son, people called him. Some few remembered him, and liked him well enough and were sorry when he died. That was twenty-three years ago.”
“The boy,” Lal said. “What about his own son?” But Soukyan was already shaking his head. “One old man thought he married a woman from Arakli and moved there, but someone else said that he went to sea. No other opinions or memories, no other relations in all of Kulpai. So you were right, Lal, of course, you were right. Not even a cold trail, but no trail at all.”
“It was worth the doing, well worth it.” To her surprise, she found herself savoring the defiant absurdity of defending a completely absurd and pointless mission to its originator. “The journey itself was your apology—you know that and the journey knows that, and what else matters?” Riaan gazed wondering from one to the other of them.
“I suppose so,” Soukyan said wearily. “I suppose that’s true.” He said nothing further until Deshka was setting the second cup of tamtha before him. “The odd thing,” he said then, “is that no one at all seemed to recall our escape. Now we emptied an entire prison—such as it was, admitted—and that cannot be something that happens very often in Kulpai. Yet in a day’s searching, I couldn’t find a soul to remember it. As long as that time has lived with me, and Haruk Butcher’s-Son himself probably forgot to mention the whole wretched affair.”
The barmaid Deshka, who had started away from their table, halted and turned. “That was your doing?” she demanded. “A black woman and a tall brown man—you were the ones?”
The three of them gawked at her until she began to smile. “No,” she said, “no, I am no relation of Haruk’s, though I knew him a little when I was a girl. But my great-uncle Gauvarda was one of those you set free that day. He spoke of it often to me—as well he might have, who was an innocent man—”
“Weren’t we all?” Lal murmured, looking at the ceiling. Riaan giggled, and Deshka looked sharply at Lal for a moment before she went on. “Among the Nounos it is a great shame to be imprisoned, innocent or not. My great-uncle never forgot the two of you, and I know he would wish me to offer his gratitude, as I do now.” She set the empty cups she was carrying down carefully, and sank into a deep reverence, touching her hands and her brow to Lal and Soukyan’s knees, whispering a few words neither could catch, then rising swiftly to become her amiable, efficient self once more. “You’ll want more tamtha,” she said to Soukyan. “I can always tell.”
Soukyan was beginning to laugh, sounding as young as Riaan. “Yes,” he answered, “yes, I’m sure I will. Deshka, I came here from a far country, dragging these two good friends along with me, all to ask forgiveness of a man I dishonored half my life ago. I wanted to ask him, or his son, or a grandchild, ‘What may I do for you, how may I help you, that I may help myself to find peace?’ Now I learn that he is long gone from Kulpai, and his family gone as well, and the only person who halfway understands my idiot quest is the great-niece of—oh, let it go, let it go, just let it go.” He kept on laughing helplessly, trying to empty his cup, but spilling more of the brandy than he got down.
Lal rose. “Riaan, help me get him upstairs. He never did have any head for this buckle polish.”
But Deshka nodded in sympathy, saying, “Aye, atonement matters greatly to us, too. We all die unforgiven by someone, that can’t be helped. But penance at least is in ourselves.” She laughed herself, as a fancy plainly occurred to her. “Ah, too bad it wasn’t my family you offended, Master Soukyan. What with my son married and gone, and my husband short a hand at the tiller and the nets, even a grandsir like yourself would have come in useful. Gods, even a child with a bad hand.” She turned away abruptly, dismissing the notion. “Your pardon, my troubles are my troubles. I will be in the kitchen, should you require anything more.”
Riaan looked after her, and Lal looked at Riaan, and Soukyan wiped his mouth and stared at both of them as Lal said an odd thing. She said, “I think perhaps the sea just made up its mind.”
Riaan saw them off the next morning, coming out from behind the bar where he would be helping Deshka until her husband’s fishing boat returned. It was a cold morning, with thin frost crunching underfoot and a few hard gray snowflakes spilling over from a low sky. The churfas were champing their tusked mouths and drooling on everyone. Their winter fur was rapidly growing in, darker than their usual coats, and even fouler smelling. Riaan said shakily, “I hate saying good-bye like this.”
“There isn’t any good way,” Soukyan answered. “Lal and I would know by now if there were.” Riaan kissed them both, solemnly and tenderly, as one kisses one’s grandparents. He said, “You know that I will never be done thanking you.”
Lal snorted like a churfa herself. “That sounds remarkably dull. If by chance you ever do get over that, send to us and we will come and see you then.” She embraced Riaan quickly, squeezed Butterfly’s nostrils to make the churfa kneel, and swung up onto the broad, furry back. Soukyan said over his shoulder as he mounted, “Be careful on that bloody boat, that’s all. Boats try to kill you; things swing around and hit you on the head. Never trust a bloody boat.”
Riaan cried out sadly, “But how will I know where you are?”
Lal and Soukyan looked at each other without answering. Lal said finally, “Ask the sailors. Some will always know. Farewell, Eliath’s Riaan.”
They were well clear of dreary Kulpai before Soukyan said quietly, “You could have told the boy you would be returning home to your desert, your little house, your stories. What harm in that?”
“Because I am not returning home,” she said. Soukyan stared at her. Lal said, “No, not to that home. I am about to do something more lunatic even than your chase after an impossible forgiveness. Knowing so much better, I am going back to the place where I was born.” Soukyan was astonished to see tears forming in the golden eyes and freezing instantly on her eyelashes. “It plagues me, Soukyan,” she whispered. “That land I never think of, that language I never speak. There are ghosts and ghosts, I told Riaan that. It is time, long past time, for me to turn and face mine.”
Soukyan reached out to grip her forearm tightly as they rode. “And if the same thing happens to you? If there is no one left to know you, no one to rejoice with, to remember with, no one there who still wonders whatever became of little Lal? What then?”
“Then?” Lal shrugged. “Then there are other places I always meant to see, and perhaps one or two more things that always meant to happen to me. So much forgotten, so much of myself laid by, until you beguiled me into this very foolish journey. I will take ship at Ilu; it’s less than two days’ ride “ She frowned as a practical matter crossed her mind. “Choushi-wai,” she said. “I can’t have her spending the rest of her life in that hut, waiting for me to return. She’ll do it, too, that child. I forgot about Choushi-wai.”
“Well,” Soukyan said, and then nothing more for some time as the churfas tramped on through the stinging little flakes. “Well,” he said in time, “I could go back and tell her.”
Lal hauled Butterfly to a stop and gaped at him as blankly as Riaan ever had. Soukyan said, “I thought I might rest there, perhaps for rather a while. You have some roaming yet to do, after all, while I seem to be at last coming to a stop inside myself. I ne
ed stillness now, Lal.”
She continued to stare until he slapped her shoulder, not lightly. “Come on, keep moving, it’s too cold to stand here. Come on, bloody Butterfly.”
They were not traveling on the levee road by which they had entered Kulpai, but on a narrower path along the coast, though the sea was all but hidden by the mist and flying snow. Half a day ahead lay a tributary of the Queen’s Road, at which they had separated once before. They went on in a silence broken only by the bitter complaining of the churfas, until Soukyan asked, “Do you think they would mind? In the village, I mean.”
“No,” she said, “no, I don’t see why they would. You’ve tales of your own to tell them, and those would certainly be a change from my old warhorses.” She laughed suddenly, the tone bright both with irony and a curious relief. “And Choushi-wai would be thrilled right down to her bootsoles, if she ever wore boots. She’ll teach you everything you need to know, and feed you into the bargain until you look like a jejebhai being fattened for Thieves’ Day. By all means, I think you should do that. A splendid idea.”
“So, then. At the small end of our lives, we trade places?”
“Yes, why not? It does seem the most natural thing in the world. As you say.”
“Then why are you so angry?” Even through the snow she could see that he was regarding her in a way she had always hated, because its piercing affection left her no privacy. When she did not reply, Soukyan said, “Old friend. My old impossible friend. I have a right to know this.”
“I am angry because we will never see each other again,” she burst out. “You know it, and I know it, and there’s no help for it, and there it is. Forty years’ worth of farewells is enough for anyone—I told you that when you came to me—and still I let myself in for one more.” When he reached for her hand, she snatched it violently away. “I am angry at myself, just let it be, Soukyan.”