“What did you mean about the owl?” Chert asked as they made their way down the steps. “What owl?”
“You asked that man where the owl was, the owl that had been in his room.”
Flint shrugged. His legs were longer than Chert’s and he did not need to look down at the steps, so he was watching the afternoon sky. “I don’t know.” He frowned, staring at something above him. The morning’s clouds had passed. Chert could see nothing but a faint sliver of moon, -white as a seashell, hanging in the blue sky. “He had stars on his walls.”
Chert recalled the tapestries covered with jeweled constellations. “He did, yes.”
“The Leaf, the Singers, the White Root—I know a song about them.” He pondered, his frown deepening. “No, I can’t remember it.”
“The Leaf… ?” Chert was puzzled. “The White Root? What are you talking about?”
“The stars—don’t you know their names?” Flint had reached the cobblestones at the base of the steps and was walking faster, so that Chert, still moving carefully down the tall steps, could barely make out what he said. “There’s the Honeycomb and the Waterfall… but I can’t remember the rest.” He stopped and turned. His face beneath the shock of almost white hair was full of sad confusion, so that he looked like a little old man. “I can’t remember.”
Chert caught up to him, out of breath and troubled. “I’ve never heard those names before. The Honeycomb? Where did you learn that, boy?”
Flint was walking again. “I used to know a song about the stars. I know one about the moon, too.” He hummed a snatch of melody that Chert could barely make out, but whose mournful sweetness made the hairs lift on the back of his neck. “I can’t remember the words,” Flint said. “But they tell about how the moon came down to find the arrows he had shot at the stars…”
“But the moon’s a woman—isn’t that what all you big folk believe?” A moment of sour amusement at his own words—the boy was but Chert’s own height, even a little shorter—did not puncture his confusion. “Mesiya, the moon-goddess?”
Flint laughed with a child’s pure enjoyment at the foolishness of adults. “No, he’s the sun’s little brother. Everyone knows that.”
He skipped ahead, enjoying the excitement of a street full of people and interesting sights, so that Chert had to hurry to catch up with him again, certain that something had just happened—something important—but he could not for the life of him imagine what it might have been.
6. Blood Ties
A HIDDEN PLACE:
Walls of straw, walls of hair
Each room can hold three breaths
Each breath an hour
—from The Bonefall Oracles
She did not make her dwelling in the ancient, labyrinthine city of Qul-na-Qar, although she had long claim to a place of honor there, by her blood and by her deeds—and by deeds of blood as well. Instead, she made her home on a high ridgetop in the mountains called Reheq-s’Lai, which meant Wanderwind, or something close to it. Her house, although large enough to cover most of the ridge, was a plain thing from most angles, as was the lady herself Only when the sunlight was in the right quarter, and a watcher’s face turned just so, could crystal and sky-stone be seen gleaming among the dark wall stones. In one way at least her house was like great Qul-na-Qar: it extended deep into the rocky ridge, with many rooms below the light of day and a profusion of tunnels extending beyond them like the roots of an old, old tree. Above the ground the windows were always shuttered, or seemed that way. Her servants were silent and she seldom had visitors.
Some of the younger Qar, who had heard of her madness for privacy, but of course had never seen her, called her Lady Porcupine. Others who knew her better could not help shuddering at the accidental truth of the name—they had seen how in moments of fury a nimbus of prickly shadow bloomed about her, a shroud of phantom thorns.
Her granted name was Yasammez, but few knew it. Her true name was known to only two or three living beings. The lady’s high house was called Shehen, which meant “Weeping.” Because it was a s’a-Qar word, it meant other things, too—it carried the intimation of an unexpected ending, and a suggestion of the scent of the plant that in the sunlight lands was called myrtle—but more than anything else, it meant “Weeping.”
It was said that Yasammez had only laughed twice in all her long life, the first time when, as a child, she first saw a battlefield and smelled the blood and the smoke from the fires. The second time had been when she had first been exiled, sent away from Qul-na-Qar for crimes or deeds of arrogance long since forgotten by most of the living. “You cannot hide me, or hide from me,” she is said to have told her accusers, “because you cannot find me. I was lost when I first drew breath “ Yasammez was made for war and death, all agreed, as a sword is made, a thing whose true beauty can only be seen when it brings destruction.
It was also said that she would laugh for the third time only when the last mortal died, or when she herself took her final breath.
None of the stories said anything about the sound of her laughter, except that it was terrible.
Yasammez stood in her garden of low, dark plants and tall gray rocks shaped like the shadows of terrified dreamers, and looked out over her steep lands. The wind was as fierce as ever, wrapping her cloak tightly around her, blowing her hair loose from the bone pins that held it, but was still not strong enough to disperse the mist lurking in the ravines that gouged the hillside below like claw-scratches. Still, it blew loudly enough that even if any of her pale servants had been standing beside her they would not have been able to hear the melody Lady Yasammez was singing to herself, nor would they even have believed their mistress might do such a thing. They certainly would not have known the song, which had been old before the mountain on which she stood had risen from the earth.
A voice began to speak in her ear and the ancient music stopped. She did not turn because she knew the voice came from no one in the stark garden or high house. Secretive, angry, and solitary as she was, Yasammez still knew this voice almost better than she knew her own. It was the only voice that ever called her by her true name.
It called that name again now.
“I hear, O my heart,” said Lady Porcupine, speaking without words.
“I must know.”
“It has already begun,” the mistress of the ridgetop house replied, but it stabbed her to hear such disquiet in the thoughts of her beloved, her great ruler, the single star in her dark, cold sky. After all, this was the time for wills to become stony, for hearts to grow thorns. “All has been put into motion. As you wished. As you commanded.”
“There is no turning back, then.”
It almost seemed a question, but Yasammez knew it could not be. “No turning back,” she agreed. “So, then. In the full raveling of time we will see what new pages will be written in the Book.” “We shall.” She yearned to say more, to ask why this sudden concern that almost seemed like weakness in the one who was not just her ruler but her teacher as well, but the words did not come; she could not form the question even in the silence of shared thought. Words had never been friends to Yasammez; in this, they were like almost everything else beneath the moon or sun.