Lior and the Sea (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms)

  Diane Duane

  Tales of the Middle Kingdoms:

  LIOR AND THE SEA

  A Novella

  Lionhall Press

  County Wicklow, Ireland

  Lior and the Sea

  copyright © 1985 Diane Duane

  This novella was originally published

  in the 1986 tribute anthology

  Moonsinger's Friends:

  In Honor of André Norton,

  edited by Susan Schwartz

  and published by Tor Fantasy

  Cover image produced using Terragen 2.0

  Lior and the Sea

  Love enters in nowhere so readily as through the door of the already-broken heart.

  (Gnomics, 412)

  There is a stretch of the North Darthene coastline where the cliffs turn abruptly from brown granite to black basalt, the remains of some ancient lava flow. The beaches along this part of the Darthene Gulf are dark as night, starred with semiprecious stones carried from the gem-bearing headlands of Mimis by the westerly Gulf current. Perched on a bluff behind one of those beaches, two hundred feet above the semicircular cove that harbored its fishing vessels, was a little town called Daike. The huddle of slate-roofed houses was home to forty-eight fisherfolk, assorted dogs, cats, goats and chickens, and the town’s Rodmistress, Lior.

  On the face of it, it might seem odd that a twelve-house town, two hundred miles from anywhere, would have a resident Rodmistress. But Lior had been born in Daike, and fostered by the other fisherfolk there when her parents died of lunglock fever in her early childhood. She had grown up to be a quiet, self-sufficient little girl, her only notable characteristics a preference for her own company and a close-mouthed, matter-of-fact bravery which no one in Daike recognized for the resigned desperation of someone who has already lost everything there is to lose. But the circuit Rodmistress who came through Daike once a year caught the scent of the blue Fire in Lior, then twelve years old, and took the girl away to the Silent Precincts for training. Six years later, and standing high in Power among her yearsmates, Lior won her Rod, and was offered her choice of several prestigious practices. Instead, she went home.

  For all the tininess of the town, and all her Power, Lior was as busy in Daike as she might have been in any city. After the daily business of using her Fire to read the weather for the imminence of squalls or the troublesome Gulf waterspouts, there was the Sea itself to be read for the movements of silverspine or hack or brownbait, depending on the season. Once that was done, and her advice given to the boat crews, Lior would climb the winding trail back up the cliff and take the measure of her people with the same affectionate efficiency. There were ills to be treated, pains to be talked out, children to be held; cats to converse with, dogs to tell where to dig for bones. In between she usually found time to indulge her love of cooking—drowning in Lior’s soup kettle was widely considered to be the second best death available—so that a long morning of working on a child’s polio might be followed by an afternoon spent helping one of the neighbors find something different to do with brownbait. A touch of the band here, a pinch of saffron there, a flicker of the Fire somewhere else—that was the way Lior’s days went.

  Her evenings, though, were normally her own, and she spent them by herself. If asked why she so rarely attended the village’s social gathering she would only smile and say that she liked to be alone. No one pressed the point. The older villagers felt that a woman who could tell three days in advance where the hack would be running, talk a boat’s wood into patching its own holes, and bring the rain down when fresh water ran short, was entitled to a few quirks. Some of the young men and women she had grown up with would gaze after Lior’s solitary figure and sigh to themselves. But if Lior noticed this, she gave no sign of it.

  In the Precincts she had usually spent her evenings outside, meditating under the open sky; for Lior was one of those who had a particular love for the Goddess in Her aspect as Queen of Night, Mother of stars and dreams and moonlight. But since she had come home and started going down to the beach to meditate in the starlight, she had found another delight—the Sea itself. All through her childhood it had simply been a place to work, a dangerous environment as likely to give death without warning as life. But the many new senses that had come with Lior’s mastery of her inner Fire, the heightening of her old senses, were changing her mind, showing her that she had never really seen the Sea at all. The long nights she came to spend on the beach in moonlight or moondark, watching the ceaseless curl and roll of the water as one watches the light shift on a sculpture or the breathing of one’s sleeping love, taught Lior the Sea’s whims more surely than the oldest sailor in Daike could have.

  Most evenings, then, when Lior was free, she would leave the tiny cottage where she lived alone and take the path down the cliff. She would sit for hours on the jewelled black beach, feeling the soft shift of sand still warm from the day, tasting the savor of the salt wind. Slowly Lior began to perceive what lay behind the idioms of speech that portray the Sea as a living thing with moods; and as this perception grew in her, she began to listen to what the Sea had to say in its huge voice, and to tell it in return the things she could not share with anyone else.

  Some nights there was nothing much to say on either side, and Lior and the Sea would listen quietly to the sound of one another breathing, needing nothing more for their mutual peace. Some nights the Sea would toss wildly about on its shore, leaping up in foam and hissing; Lior would reach out with her Power and listen until the anger seemed spent and the Sea rested quietly again, stroking the beach in long curved apologetic gestures. Some nights Lior would rage silently over some death she couldn’t stop, or ought not, or over some village couple who were out of love with each other and intent on staying that way. The Sea would listen patiently, and eventually its immense soft voice whispering the same word again and again would remind Lior that no death is final, and no love the last love; that in life and love as in all else the Goddess endlessly and shamelessly repeats Herself. The Sea was good for her, Lior thought; and the merry way it would push a wave silently up the beach and pour it on her, after she had listened it out of a storm, made her think that she was probably good for the Sea too. It was a most satisfactory relationship.

  Three years into her practice, there came a day when a wild spring storm began to brew off the coast. It was a bad time for a nor’easter—the winter stores of dried fish were almost gone and the fleet needed to be out after the run of silverspine that would keep Daike in oil and food until the “Maiden’s Madness,” the unpredictable late spring weather, was fully broken. Lior began to smell the extraordinary violence of the impending storm in late afternoon and realized that it could go on for days if it went unchecked. Thinking to listen the Sea out of the storm, Lior went down to the dark shore. She flung an unseen net of her Power out through water and air and sandy bottom—seining, as it were, for some way to divert the growing wildness of ocean and sky. She found no adjustment within her ability to make—the storm had come up too fast. And talking to the Sea helped no more than listening had; all Lior got for her coaxing and cajoling was a growing feeling of destruction-to-be, far past her ability to handle.

  She went back up the cliff trail and met the townspeople at the boulder-flanked spot where it came out on top, wearing a grimmer face than anyone there had ever seen on her. The rising wind whipped Lior’s long dark hair about, and her brown cloak leaped and writhed like a live thing; her blue Rodmistress’s robe was plastered to her. The Flame streamed blinding blue-white down her Rod, visible indication of Power building to some purpose.

  “Get everyone inside and keep th
em there,” Lior said to the village elders. “I’m going to try something. If it doesn’t work, there’ll probably be storm for a tenday or more—so be ready to ration what food’s left. If this does work, though, we can have the fleet out tomorrow.” And, frowning, down she went to the beach again.

  She walked a couple of miles west of Daike’s cliff, listening with ears and underhearing to the rumbling threat of the rising storm. At last Lior picked a spot, stopped there, and peeled off her sodden cloak and her robe, draping them over a boulder far up on the beach. For a moment she stood and weighed her aspen Rod in her hand, considering—then shook her head and thrust it narrow-end-down into the sand, like a sword.

  Small and taut and naked, her hair whipping around her in the howling wind, Lior strode down to the surf line. For a few long minutes she paused there, listening hard in the storm-green dusk as the waves plunged and hammered around her. Nothing was listening back.

  “All right!” she cried into the gathering storm, and at her cry the clouds above her curdled and the wind began to scream, and the beach shuddered beneath the battering of the waves. “You’re going to have a tantrum, and you won’t let me stop it? Fine! But leave the boats and the town alone, and get it over with now! Do it all tonight, and do it here!”

  Faintly Lior sensed a wavering of purpose out there. She thought one last time of going back for her Rod, her Power’s focus. Empty-handed, she was greatly weakened. With the Rod to channel and direct her considerable Fire, she would have some slight advantage… But no. The Sea faced her with nothing that was not part of itself. She would be fair to her friend, her adversary.

  The wind seemed to be dropping off a bit now, moaning with uncertainty, but Lior didn’t trust the shift in mood. So much potential force couldn’t be built up without discharging, and her challenge might make the storm-blow fall harder on some other innocent village. “Come on!” she yelled scornfully. “Me against you! Just the two of us! Or are you afraid?”

  The wind spat spray in Lior’s eyes, and the salt stung them half blind. But Lior stood there with her fists clenched and her head high, watching the first terrible wave rise up and impossibly up before her, leaning, towering, the sudden slicing rain whipping its crest gray-white—until, drowning the windroar in the crash of its own uncontrollable anger, tremendously it fell… and Lior beneath it.

  *

  All that night the townspeople of Daike peered out their doors in unease at the wild weather. Though the boats in the deepwater cove rocked and groaned in churning water, the disturbance seemed only backwash spreading from a spot some miles upcoast. There lightnings struck and thunder tore across a tattering sky, and the maddened Sea beat itself against the cliffs until their cracked faces wept brine in rivers and the wind howled in pain.

  That same mourning wind drove the clouds away around daybreak, and then fell silent under a clear sky. When the villagers went down to look for Lior, they found her tossed wet and limp as a wrung-out rag on the black beach—pale with shock, blue with bruises, gasping shallowly from two broken ribs, her left forearm greenstick-snapped and lying wrong like the arm of a broken doll. But she opened her eyes and greeted her people as they lifted her to take her back to Daike. Hoarsely but politely Lior asked them to first carry her up the beach a ways, and from the litter made of their linked arms and clasped wrists she reached out with her good hand to pluck her white Rod from the sand. All the way home Lior gripped it tight, smiling with closed eyes what seemed a smile of relief and pride.

  And all that week, until her fever broke and her arm and ribs began to mend, the wind spoke no louder than a whisper around Daike, and beneath unclouded sunlight the Sea was still as a pond.

  *

  Everybody knows what terrible convalescents Rodmistresses make, and Lior was no exception. There was no keeping her in bed for more than a day or so. By the end of the week, when her Power was approaching normal levels again, she had begun to force her own healing with the same cold-eyed professionalism she had used on goats and crying children so many times before. Seven days after the storm, bones knit and bruises gone, Lior was busy around the village, tending to her people—though their attitude toward her wasn’t what it had been. Before, she had just been Lior, who despite her solitary nature and her training in the Precincts was, after all, just another villager. Now, at least behind her back, she was “the woman who fought with the Sea, and won.” Since turned backs and whispers mean nothing to a Rodmistress’s underhearing, Lior heard that remark more than once and went away smiling, for they had it all wrong. She didn’t bother to argue the point. Sooner or later the awe would wear off and life would go back to normal.

  In the meantime she went back to spending her evenings by the Sea. The odd stillness of the water ceased when Lior started coming down the cliff again, and the waves were behaving normally once more, bubbling and sighing and stretching toward her. Yet at the same time Lior began to wonder if her brief illness had somehow made her more observant, for the Sea seemed to be bringing her gifts more frequently than before. Often enough in the past something had been pushed up to her feet or poured playfully into her lap by an unexpected wave: a bright shell, a gracefully curved piece of driftwood, a very surprised fish. She had always accepted these gifts with thanks and taken them home (except for the fish, which she would slide into the next wave before it overstayed its welcome in the air).

  But now hardly an evening went by without a flattened, creeping wave nudging something up against her knee, and the gifts were stranger. One night it was the hugest piece of Dragon’s-eye opal she had ever seen, a stone round and smooth as a skua’s egg. She spent all that evening turning it over in her hands, contemplating its fires, like a crystallized sunset, which shifted with every movement. Other gifts were less collectible. Another evening’s meditation was interrupted by a high-running breaker that soaked Lior to the waist. This by itself wasn’t unusual, but when she looked down at her lap she found it occupied by eight or nine blueback crabs, all of which stared at Lior with stalky obsidian eyes and waved their claws testily at her. Lior broke down in uncontrollable laughter, and the crabs one by one clambered over her knees and sidled off down the beach, looking offended.

  The night after that, something came which was not precisely a gift.

  The water was restless that night, and so was Lior. She went walking, aimlessly she thought, up the coast in the moonlight, while beside her the Sea shifted and tossed in its bed like someone trapped in uneasy dreams. Lior moved at a gentle, half-aware stroll among half-buried boulders and across packed sand, until something in the feel of the place to which she had come stopped her. She looked around with eyes and Fire, and realized that this was the place where she had fought the Sea. Lior stood there on the moon-silvered beach, smelling the spray and remembering: that first awful wave that fell on her with a sound like all dooms—and the next, and the next…

  But there was a scentless flavor on the wind tonight that hadn’t been there, that other evening. Lior breathed it deep and frowned. Fear? At least it would have meant that if she had sensed it in a person—but the Sea afraid?

  “What’s the matter?” she said to the roiling water. “What could make you afraid?”

  The answer didn’t come in words. Down close to the water, one of the big black rocks moved—shifted, and was still again.

  Lior had not been much afraid of anything since she was little; fear had just made life hurt worse than it already did, and so she had broken herself of the habit. A moving rock merely surprised her. She pulled her Rod out of her belt and went straight over to the big dark shape. It turned out not to be a boulder at all. It was a seahorse.

  Lior knelt beside the creature, too concerned with the bizarre angle at which one of its forefeet lay to worry much about the prospect of working on a mythical beast. The seahorse was darker than the beach or the cliffs, but its eyes were pale; one of them rolled silverly at her in the moonlight, its depths vague with pain. The seahorse’s nostrils shuddered
and flared as the breath went in and out. Lior put her hands on the twisted leg, and kept them there though the seahorse grunted and tried to kick away from her. Her othersenses showed her, through the touch, feelings like a simple fracture of the main bone below the knee, a dislocated knee joint, and some twisted ligaments and pinched nerves.

  Lior tucked her Rod out of the way between her arm and her side while she pushed her Fire out of her, into the seahorse, and down into the leg nerves to block them. That done, she held the seahorse’s leg bones together with her hands while forcing the odd dense marrow to knit through itself again, and making new bone grow over the break. Probably, Lior thought, the creature had been racing along the seashore as the undersea horses were supposed to love to do on moonlit nights, and had put its foot in a hole. The idea was odd. It had never occurred to her that one of these creatures might be able to hurt itself, to fall or get a stone in its foot like any unicorn or yale.

  Lior unpinched and repositioned one nerve which she judged otherwise undamaged, relocated the knee joint, restrung its ligaments, and tightened the muscles back into place. Then she sat back on her heels to think, for normally the next step would be to send the injured person to sleep. But the seahorse took that problem out of her hands. A heave, a shudder, and it was on its feet again—and Lior came fully to herself and realized that she was looking up at a legend. The seahorse’s mane and tail would have reached almost to the sand, had they not been curling and swirling about it as if caught in some unseen ocean current. Mane and tail and coat were all black as a secret thought, yet the seahorse gleamed with moonlight and some other faint brilliance not as identifiable, and it looked too graceful for dry land to bear its presence long. Here it was, right in front of her, one of the creatures that dance on the waves in the midnights of deep summer and come out of the Sea on nights of moon to sire wonderful foals on the mares of men: a legend…