Starfire Saga, page 44
It disoriented me to hear him call it “talent” with the same ease he had used calling it “power.”
“What does one thing have to do with the other? There must be dozens of wilderworlds—”
All three men shook their heads. “Not inhabited ones,” said Ashkalin, and Jemeret went on, “We are the only inhabited human wilderworld. We are the only natural cradle of talent.”
“Why?” I was glad he’d refilled my mug. I needed it. The revelations kept on arriving. I kept trying to rationalize them with what I knew—what I thought I knew, at any rate—and it kept turning out that they didn’t fit; I didn’t know what I thought I knew.
Jemeret answered softly, “The starfire, love. The starfire creates talent. It created the Samothen; it created the High Lady legend to try to unite us.”
“Why? Why is it doing all this?” I kept wanting to get to the bottom, and there was no bottom.
Jemeret looked away from me, confronting Ashkalin squarely, as if he had been the one who asked the question. “It won’t tell us why until we have a High Lady.”
“Ah,” Ashkalin said. He put his mug down. “Get Venacrona in here.”
Jemeret made a signal to Coney, who set his own mug on the mantel and went out of the room.
I was still struggling. “If you were with me in the Com, how did I end up with the Honish?”
“I needed you to accept absolutely the reality of your being on this world,” Jemeret answered, “and your mind has been trained extensively to distrust simplicity. I needed a complex scenario to distract you from too much distrust. It happened that I’d recently bought the Meltress Lewannee’s gambling debt to try to start normalizing relations between us and the Honish. I built a scenario around it. If I hadn’t had it, I’d’ve developed another scenario.”
I felt like I might start crying again. He knew all the Com vocabulary; he had known it all along. I fought the tears. Even as I did, I recognized how far I’d come. There were anomalies all around me now, which meant I had no control of what was going on, and while it was uncomfortable, it was bearable. I had some absurd faith that I would come through it.
For the first time, I reached out with my sting and touched the Lord of the Marl. He was mourning. I knew the feeling, having felt it recently at the graveside on the hill above the Hall. He had just been told, as I had, that Kray was dead—for the grief was too fresh, too raw, to have been of long standing. I stirred myself on the window seat, got up and went to him, leaving my mug behind.
“My Lord Ashkalin, I’m very sorry I couldn’t love your son the way he wanted me to,” I said. I wanted to touch his arm, but I was uncertain if he’d want me to, and I held back.
He looked at me wearily. “My son was a fool,” he said. “He could have had a life, but he chose dishonor.”
“You don’t hate me for killing him?” My voice wavered badly.
“I might have,” he said, “if I hadn’t felt what you felt while it was happening and seen what you did to yourself because of it. You don’t need any more punishment from me.”
“Then—” I didn’t know if I dared to ask it, but I wanted to very much. “—will you let me grieve with you? I haven’t mourned him either, and I think I need to, very much.”
He stared at me, his eyes glittering as they had when he told Jemeret he wanted to challenge for me after the game of the Dibel. Then the glitter softened. “Yes,” he said. “I can’t mourn with his mare. She thinks he’s been dead for more than twenty years.”
I put my arms around him, reaching in to help him accept the grief, but also to mourn his son with him. From Jemeret, who had watched us from across the room, I felt an incredible surge of pride and love.
When we heard Coney returning with Venacrona, I let go of Ashkalin and stepped back, retrieving my mug and drinking some more of the liquor. It didn’t burn so much now.
Venacrona’s sharp black eyes flew from me to Ashkalin and back again several times before settling on the Lord of the Marl. “You asked to see me, my lord?” he said noncommittally.
“Set up the ceremony,” Ashkalin said, more abruptly than the etiquette of the Council usually permitted. “I’ll take care of Krenigo as soon as I’ve regrown my beard.”
Even as we watched him, the hair began to sprout on his cheeks and jaw. Venacrona nodded to him, glanced once, triumphantly, at Jemeret, and then hurried back out.
Jemeret relaxed and upended his mug.
I let another question surface, strangely poignant. “Jemeret, do I have a family among the Boru?”
“Shenefta is your niece,” he said. “Her mare was your older sister.”
“How could you not tell me?” It was a whisper.
“I just did,” he said. “At the first possible moment.”
“What else haven’t you told me?”
He put his mug next to the decanter, watching me out of the corner of his eye. “All right,” he said. “I’m the one who broke your arm, cracked your ribs, slashed your ankle, and a few other things. We landed here together. And I’m the one who blew up the lander.”
I was gaping again. Every answer I got sank into the turmoil of how everything was changing, and raised further questions. I began to think I’d never find my way through it all. I shook my head, momentarily overwhelmed.
Jemeret put his arm across my shoulders. “I know it’s too much,” he said, “but you’re handling it. And I’m here.”
“You were there, too!” Suddenly I was frowning at him. “When you were gone before Coney came, you were off-world, weren’t you? How?”
“There’s a fully equipped station in polar orbit above us,” Jemeret said. “There has been since the Com first took a child from the Samothen.”
The time scale was wrong. “Wait,” I said slowly. “That’s not possible. The starfire made its arrangement with Venacrona in your great-great-grandfather’s time, which would be, what, a hundred and fifty years ago? The Com has records of Class A talent dating back more than five hundred years.”
“The Com,” Jemeret said quietly, “told you you were born on Steressor.”
And I gasped, counting myself stupid beyond my capacity to imagine it. The Com had lied to me—to us—consistently. Our Com training was propaganda, not history. Our loyalty had been to false traditions and doubtful ideals, and I’d accepted it all. I covered my mouth with one hand. I couldn’t ask “why” again. This was a precipice over which I was not ready to leap.
I looked at Coney, and he was watching me with such compassion that I wondered if he had known all along. I dropped my hand from my mouth and asked him.
He cleared his throat. “Jemeret and I spent a lot of time together while he was trying to heal you, up on the station,” he said. “I thought I’d lost both of you, you see, you and Kray. He helped me through it. We talked for months, and I learned a great deal.”
“Is that why they sent you here? Or did they?” I realized that there was no part of my knowledge of the Com that I could depend on any longer, that most of my assumptions were vapor.
“They did,” Coney answered quickly, “but not because of that.”
Sandalari put her head in past the storm wall. “We’re largely ready out here,” she said. “I’m afraid my Lord Krenigo doesn’t quite believe it yet, and he said he was going to leave.”
“Did he?” Ashkalin asked, fingering his new beard to make sure it was the right length.
Sandalari smiled a little embarrassedly, glancing at Coney. “He took one step toward his tivong, and Tynnanna pushed him over and sat on him.”
Jemeret laughed. I said, “Oh,” and jumped up to get Tynnanna off the Lord of the Vylk. I thought I probably ought to apologize for my cat’s behavior.
Jemeret caught my arm. “We’ll all go,” he said.
Outside, the Councillors and their entourages had been finishing the grog and fruit, along with some of the dried biscuits that formed a staple of the seagoing diet. When we reached the square, everyone was watching Tynnanna carefully hold Lord Krenigo down without crushing him. I was somehow surprised that the world looked the same as it had when we went in, because everything else had changed.
Tynnanna moved aside, and Ashkalin pushed past Jemeret and held out his hand to help Krenigo to his feet. They talked briefly in low voices. I was sure that Krenigo asked the same question at least three times before he was satisfied with Ashkalin’s answer.
Venacrona had sent the priest of the Marl to the village temple to bring out the starfire bowl, and now he asked to borrow the younger man’s robes. I realized I had begun clinging to Jemeret again, and I deliberately made myself let go of his tunic. By the time I had gotten myself more under control in the shifting truths of the world, Venacrona was raising the starfire bowl, and Sandalari and the Marl priest, both unrobed, went to stand at his shoulders. But only Venacrona chanted, because it was not a prayer that had ever been sung before, and the others didn’t know it. At its end, he set the bowl down. “I am Venacrona and this is Sandalari. We speak for the stars, and we declare for the Lady Ronica as High Lady of the Samothen.” The formality of the Inner Council introductions went on, pausing only when they reached Jemeret and me.
He hesitated, as if waiting to see if I would speak first, according me that right. I smiled at him a little, and barely shook my head. I didn’t know how I could declare for myself and be believed. He spoke the introduction, once again placing myself equal to him, and declaring that I was already High Lady of the Boru.
The feeling around the Council circle was very different from my previous experience of Councils—subdued, the rivalries under the surface rather than flung at one another—and a current of excitement rippled through the assembly.
“We have gathered here, extraordinarily, for the purpose of the Fulfillment,” Venacrona said, his voice rich with satisfaction. “In bringing forward this candidate as prospective High Lady of the Samothen, we call upon the stars to bless our efforts and confirm or deny the rightness of our choice.”
Almost before the last word was spoken the column of starfire shot upward from the bowl with a whoosh that seemed deafening, until its leading end vanished above us without ever giving us the feeling that it had stopped climbing. A sudden dazzle before my eyes made me realize my brow-crown was glowing in response to the column.
Venacrona cried, “The stars declare that the Lady Ronica is High Lady of the Samothen!”
Jemeret said instantly, “The Boru stand with the stars in this.” And, one by one, the others confirmed what all had now agreed to, even Krenigo, who managed not to sound entirely reluctant. With a loud hum the starfire sank back into the bowl.
In the silence that followed, they all looked at me. I knew I had to say something, and with my mind still awash in the series of revelations and the heap of unanswered questions, I wasn’t certain what I could say that would be meaningful or even coherent. But I would have to speak. I looked around the circle at all of them.
“It is a great moment when people join their lives to one another,” I said at last. “It is a moment for rejoicing. But even in our joy, we have much work to do. We must formulate a common law which respects most of each tribe’s individuality, even while setting a foundation of sameness for each and for all. We must learn to celebrate one another, and to respect the ways we differ without letting them tear us apart. We must treasure the ways in which we are alike without letting them blind us to our differences. None of us can build the edifice of our unity alone. Therefore, we will meet again in Convalee in the summer, as if four years had passed instead of one. And there, we will begin to learn who we will become.” It echoed inside me. At Convalee, I had begun to learn who I would become.
I hoped I had done all right. I glanced at Jemeret, even as he touched me with his approval. Then Tynnanna, who had been lying quietly on his side outside the circle, got lazily to his feet and walked into the center, sitting down beside the bowl.
From the center of the bowl a single tendril rose, pure white, and swayed back and forth for a few seconds before it elongated and came to me, beckoning me to step into the center of the circle. I did, immediately. The tendril left me and beckoned to Venacrona, then to Sandalari, Jemeret, Sabaran, and Ashkalin—everyone who knew this world had a great many more secrets than was first apparent, except Coney.
By the time they were all assembled, I fully expected the starfire to rise around us, blocking out the rest of the world, so when it did, I was unsurprised. Then I watched the klawit as his fiery eyes once again took on the increased presence of an additional consciousness.
“You have done well,” the rumble said to us.
Ashkalin swore under his breath; Sabaran gave a bark of astonished laughter, and Sandalari sank gracefully to her knees, watching with awe.
“Why don’t you speak through one of us?” I asked it.
The burning eyes seemed amused. “Your minds are too complex to host us without comment, and comment means alteration. The klawit creates no such problems.”
“We have a High Lady,” Jemeret said.
“And not only you,” said the starfire through the cat.
“The Honish, too?” Venacrona guessed. “We’re to try to unite with the Honish?”
“And not only the Honish,” the rumble said, and Tynnanna turned back to me. “You accepted the responsibilities of High Lady. Now we tell you that they are more than you know. You are High Lady of your entire species—and there is much we will ask you to do, because there is much that is needed.”
“I don’t know how much more I can deal with at this exact moment,” I said shakily.
“There will be time.”
I found myself overwhelmingly grateful for those four words.
“Why do you change us?” Jemeret asked.
“You were destined to change yourselves,” the starfire said. “But it did not happen, and you were long overdue when we chose to try to help. If you do not grow, if you do not evolve, you will die.”
Jemeret’s voice was hard. “As a species?”
The starfire didn’t answer that question directly. “We believe it can be avoided. We believe you will be the best possible instruments to accomplish that avoidance. We will contact you later, when we are nearer the nexus.”
“Wait!” I couldn’t let it just vanish, sigh away, when we knew so little more than we had. “What are we to do in the meantime?”
“Go on living,” Tynnanna said. “You have obligations; meet them. It will not be long before we speak with you again. You have done well.”
The wall dropped, the possession withdrew from the klawit like the withdrawing of the sting, and we were all of us back in view of the others.
For a time, none of us spoke. Sabaran reached down and helped raise Sandalari to her feet. Then Ashkalin shook himself as if awakening. “Stay the night. You’ve come a long way.”
Jemeret nodded, saying softly, “And we have a long way still to go.”
We sat up quite late that night, after the singing and dancing, after the feast of rather sparse winter fare. We camped in the square and on the docks, with small fires in fire pans donated by the Marl from their fleet. For the first time, Coney and Sandalari shared our fire, and we kept our voices very low, so no one would overhear. It was instinct; Jemeret had bubbled us all before we began speaking.
“Early in the winter,” Coney said, clasping his raised knees with his arms, “Pel Nostro wanted to see if they could get you back. The government never wanted Jemeret to bring you down here in the first place, and Pel fought against it, but eventually he gave in.”
“To whom?” I still didn’t understand how Jemeret had gotten involved in all this. I found it nearly impossible to believe that he could use even such power as his to go against the full weight of the Com.
“Actually,” Jemeret said, stroking my hair, “the MIs forced him to accede. I knew I had to have you here to heal you completely. You couldn’t have been brought back safely in the environment that nearly destroyed you. Pel thought about the failed talent they’d dumped here and feared he’d never see you again.”
“Will he?” I was amazed that the question didn’t stick in my throat.
Jemeret was silent for a long moment. “Yes, he will. As soon as we get back to Stronghome, we’re leaving Caryldon. We need to go back first because I have to prepare the tribe for a lengthy absence, but also because the spaceport is in the mountains above Stronghome.”
I took a breath to protest, but Coney said quickly, “You’re still under Com oath, Ronnie. Jemeret had to swear he’d bring you back if you healed.”
I took a minute to absorb that. “How does it happen,” I asked my lord then, “that you and the Com are on such terms of intimacy?” I gathered and held myself hard, trying not to yield to trembling. Nothing was making any sense yet. The ground under my feet was still shifting treacherously.
“I was one of the children taken from Caryldon.” He watched me, his hand still moving lightly on my hair. “I was trained on Werd for more than ten years. By Mortel John.”
I had never lived with uncertainty until I awoke on this world. I had always known—in the most minute detail—who I was, what was expected of me, and who I would become. And I had been wrong. Now I was adrift in a sea of unknowns, larger than the sea on which Salthome sat, and with enough unanswered questions to fill the void between Caryldon and Werd. I had little control over events I had always thought I would be controlling completely. How was it that I was not running around shrieking from one place to another?
That brought me up short. I had done that. I was through with it. I leaned back against Jemeret’s broad chest and tucked my head under his chin. He shifted his body a little to help me be more comfortable. Across the slowly dying fire, I saw Coney put his arm around Sandalari and draw her closer. She smiled at me. “You aren’t going alone, you know.”
“Jemeret has to come with me,” I told her. “He promised he would be with me, and I intend to hold him to it.”
“Coney and I are coming, too,” she said, the smile widening. “He has to go back, and I want them to see what became of some of the failed talent they threw away. Jemeret agreed to let me come with you just a couple of days ago.”
