Lior and the Sea (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms) Read online

  The legend danced back a step, testing the healed leg, and hesitated, looking down at Lior. She gazed up enchanted into the silvershot eyes, not daring to reach out and break the dream. But the dream put its head down, slowly, tentatively, and touched her—a cool velvet brushing of cheek and nose against her bare neck and shoulder, and the touch spoke. Thank you, it said—and the seahorse wheeled and fled toward the Sea. Its hooves made no mark on the sand, its passing made no sound. In the time Lior could draw breath and whisper “Wait!”, it was in the Sea, and part of the Sea, and gone.

  After a long time Lior got up, trembling with wonder and confusion. The speech she’d heard through the seahorse’s touch had been cool as water, emotionless—yet there had been a look in its eyes that had stopped Lior’s breath somewhere south of her heart. Her uncertainty of what the look might mean bled her composure away until she was as weak as if wounded again.

  Eventually Lior started for home. The flavor of fear was gone from the air, and beside her the waves slid up and down with seeming nonchalance from a quieter Sea. But inside Lior there was no quiet at all.

  *

  She was back at that spot the next night, and the next, and each time was greeted by sea breeze and tide’s turn, but nothing else... not even a seagift. All her listening revealed nothing but a Sea that no more noticed Lior than it would notice one particular pebble among the millions it rolled up and down the beach. So, early on in the third night, Lior came to her senses. She laughed at herself in good-natured scorn and went up the cliff to her house and her bed, schooling herself to an indifference like the Sea’s. It was just water and sand, after all, she told herself; just a beach, like any other. She fell asleep, a few hours later, almost believing it.

  Much later, after Moonrise, someone knocked at Lior’s door. She rubbed her eyes, muttering at herself for not anticipating one of old Rai’s ulcer attacks, and climbed out of bed, fumbled about for her Rod, made her way to the door, and swung it open.

  The seahorse filled the whole doorway, gleaming in the moonlight like a statue of polished onyx. Its silvery eyes, looking down into hers, caught the Fire streaming about Lior’s Rod and revealed a blue haze like that of morning coming up over the water. Lior reached out slowly, still afraid of breaking the dream, and slid her fingers through the waving mane, down the silken neck. At her touch she felt the seahorse greet her inwardly, a cool and almost toneless thought; yet at the same time its eyes half-closed as if in pleasure, and Lior felt the sudden reopening of that wound of uncertainty. The contradiction….

  The seahorse dropped gracefully to its knees on the flagging of her doorstep, looking up sidewise at Lior, and leaned its head against her. The touch said, Will you ride?

  Without hesitation Lior knotted up her shift, slipping the Rod through the knot, and slid onto the seahorse’s back. It stood up, and wheeled about, and they rode.

  *

  Only the starlight and the flying Moon could have paced them on that first wild ride over a dark Sea slicked with liquid brilliance like silver oil. The water sang beneath the seahorse’s hooves, and Lior held her seat with one hand well wrapped in the satiny mane, scrubbing spray out of her eyes with the other. Out past three miles or so the waves grew huge, and the seahorse would throw its head back and charge up the sheer black slopes like the enchanted steeds of old tales, which could climb mountains of glass without a slip. Sometimes they would not reach the top of the wave before it broke, and the seahorse would plunge straight through the wave just under the down-curling crest. After the first time, Lior learned to enjoy this, for whenever they did it she came out dry.

  Then for a while they went more slowly, and Lior gazed down from the seahorse’s back at water that boiled with pale green luminescence. Through the light slid graceful dark shapes, the fish that fed on the glowing algae; and as the seahorse paced across the rocking water, a shape at first vague and then less so rose toward the surface near them, blocking away the brightness, swelling, until with a great rushing of water the golden whale broke surface. Waves churned around them as it rolled hugely over and blew. One small dark eye gazed at Lior and regarded her, mild and inscrutable. Another leisurely roll, and the whale sank away except for one languorous fluke forgotten in the air as it sounded; then that too slid beneath the surface.

  It was all like that, all salt dark and wonder and whispering night, until Lior felt likely to fall off the seahorse’s back from both fatigue and the sheer marvelousness of what was happening. It seemed only a few breaths later that she found herself standing on the beach, gazing in the morning twilight at the creature which had just risen from its knees beside her. Out of its darkness, the seahorse’s silvery eyes gazed back at her, and still in them was that curious look—longing, Lior thought now—that she wanted to understand better. She reached out to touch the seahorse one last time, but it danced away from her hand and melted away into the surf, swift and traceless as a retreating breaker.

  Lior went home to Daike. She did her work well enough that day, but the townspeople noticed that she seemed preoccupied, and all the young men and women looked at one another sidewise, wondering which of them had inspired such a fulfilled expression in their Rodmistress. Lior went musing about her work, and noticed nothing of this at all.

  That twilight she hurried down to the beach, and about the time the twelfth star came out, the seahorse came sliding out of the water to her. It bent down its head to breathe its silent greeting into her hair. Lior stroked it hesitantly on the softest place, the one just under the jawbone.

  No Rod? the seahorse said, its inner speech cool as always.

  “No,” Lior said. “It isn’t necessary.” She met its eyes. “My name is Lior, by the way.”

  She had hoped it would share a name with her in return, but the seahorse only bowed its head in grave acknowledgment and dropped to its knees. Without pressing the subject Lior mounted again, and again they rode.

  So matters went for many nights, as Lior was borne through wonders she had never dreamed of, marvels even to one who has passed through the mysteries of the Silent Precincts and so seen the Sun rise at midnight. Together she and the seahorse climbed high promontories to watch the beleaguered fleets of kings tack their way through the wild winds of the Darthene Gulf on their errantry. They stood off the Eorlhowe in the whispering water and caught the burnt-stone smell of Dragonfire blowing from the Howe peak in the wet breeze; they saw the air and land around the Howe fill with the huge black-winged shapes of thousands of Dragons assembled in Convocation, and heard their vast voices murmuring all through one long night, an incomprehensible music of breath and fire. Together Lior and the seahorse soft-footed it around the Isles of the North, skirting those shores where none of woman born may ever walk, so that Lior first of all humankind glimpsed through the mist the diamond spires of Entellen and heard across the water the music of crystal bells. The two of them were welcome in the dolphin-haunts off Teberkh, where the delphine poets made joking songs about the seahorse’s sudden lameness, and brought Lior schools of mackerel as presents. Together she and the seahorse climbed the cliffs of Eie, and there Lior was taught the word which prevents Eie’s Indweller from invoking the Untoward Circumstance—persuading it to show the beginning of the world rather than causing its end.

  Nor were their journeys limited to the surface. Lior, with the seahorse peering over her shoulder and a couple of lanternfish hanging by for light, would sift through drifted sand for the scattered cargo of some anciently sunken carrack— the dull glint of obsolete coinages, the gleam of jewels like dimmed eyes. The two of them visited drowned Sonacharre together and walked through its silent streets, noting how fish had nested in the coral-crusted trees and swaying weed had choked the chimes in the town’s gilded bell tower; they passed by the place where the Inhospitable lay bound for his wickedness, and Lior saw how his hating eyes followed her and the seahorse as they went away. Once the seahorse even leaped with Lior into the icy darkness of the Ureistine Trench, and toget
her they fell like a dark star until the water was no longer icy, but almost too hot to bear. There Lior made the acquaintance of those who do not understand light, but are to earth and water as Dragons are to air and fire. Lior came away staggered, her mind seared by the shadowy intelligences of the utter depths, her heart both darkened and delighted by perception of what she could not possibly understand.

  Through all this wild procession of wonders, the seahorse’s inward speech drifted into Lior’s mind now and again, dispassionately telling her the story of this wreck or that haunted cave; but its eyes were always lively with delight, and never more so than when she was delighted too. The difference between eyes and mind, the contradiction, puzzled Lior mightily. Her underhearing was no help to her, for all she could hear was a far-off rushing of feelings in the seahorse’s heart, discomfort and joy ebbing and flowing like the tide. She tried to conceal how this disturbed her, and suspected she was not doing too well, for over a number of journeys the seahorse began to acquire a look of sorrow that would not come out of its eyes.

  A night came, as others had, when Lior was too tired to wander. She sat in her usual place on the beach instead, with the seahorse beside her, its legs folded under it like a foal’s. Lior leaned on her companion, one arm around its neck, resting in its warmth and nearness.

  “There must be some reason I can’t hear your thoughts directly,” she said, stroking its neck and gazing into the darkness. “It doesn’t feel like a self-imposed block. Are you under a spell, I wonder?” She looked down; the seahorse met her eyes with that look of mute pain. “You are…? Well, there has to be a way to break it. There’s always a way, every spell has its loophole… When it’s broken, Iimagine your friends and relatives will be glad to have you back again. Or your loved… do you have a loved, I wonder?”

  This time the seahorse would not meet her eyes at all. Suspicion flared in Lior, for most well-wrought spells have inhibitors set in them to keep the victim from revealing the breaker, if he knows it, or from thinking much about the problem if he doesn’t. Lior reached around, turning the seahorse’s warm face toward her so that she could read its silvery eyes. “Yes,” she said. “There is someone—”

  Then she saw the answer, and the old wound of uncertainty tore wide and deep, leaving her momentarily speechless with consternation and pain. The seahorse gave a great shudder and scrambled to its feet. Lior did too, and as she reached for it again, her companion lowered its beautiful head and shocked her still by speaking. “Lior,” it croaked, just one painful word in a voice that went into Lior like a knife, for she knew it from somewhere. The agony in its eyes blurred her own with tears as the seahorse leaned its head against her arm. I must go, it said through its touch, its voice unmoved; but oh, its eyes— I cannot come again.

  And it turned and fled into the water. Lior’s own anguish and confusion left her no strength to do more than watch the seahorse melt into the breakers and vanish.

  She stood on the beach for a long time, listening to the waves. Slowly the sky started to lighten, the Sea turned all one color of pewter-gray, and still Lior stood there, alone.

  “I don’t even know your name,” she whispered to the wind and the waves, and finally turned away toward home, confused again, for she could not remember the last time she had cried.

  *

  She walked through the weeks that followed with such an air of bewildered desolation and anger about her that the villagers drew away from Lior and left her lonelier still. More than anything she wanted to go off searching for the seahorse; but she had responsibilities here, and could go nowhere. Lior was furious with herself for having driven the seahorse away; and the near-familiarity of its voice nagged at her until she couldn’t sleep nights. Not that she could have slept anyway, for her mind was going around in circles. Who ever heard of a woman having a seahorse for a loved? Even if it came back, what could she do? Heart’s love she could give it, certainly, but no more. Her own ideas of a loved did not exactly include a horse. Yet how could she refuse anything to the soul behind those silver eyes? It was all hopeless, useless, mad—

  She did not spend her time on the beach meditating anymore. Lior began pushing her Fire harder than she had ever dared, threading it tenuously through air and earth and water and stretching her othersenses out along the strands of the web until she was tempting extrasensory collapse. With all her Power she listened and felt for anything that seemed like the seahorse. Lior knew she was unlikely to find it without even an outer name to go on, and of its feelings nothing but that dim internal tumult. Nevertheless she kept trying, using what perceptions she had, incomplete though they were. Lior found nothing, but she would not give up. Night after night the rough gems and wet stones of the beach glistened blue in the light from her blazing Rod; and when the fog came in the people looking curiously down from the cliff could see the Fire blooming through the mist, like a strayed star washed up on the beach.

  Then came one early evening when the watchers saw the light blaze suddenly brighter than usual, and from the bottom of the cliff Lior shouted at them, “Get a boat, get a boat, there’s someone drowning out there!” One villager ran to pound on the sailing-master’s door, and the men and women who were skippers and crew ran down the trail to the cove. Shipwreck was common enough in those waters, where unwary ships sometimes drove onto the Seafangs to the east. The westerly Gulf current frequently bore the flotsam past Daike, and the villagers had a sharp eye for floating timbers and the people who might be clinging to them. So they found the survivor of this particular wreck, stark naked and blue as a cod with cold, clasping half a splintered mast close as a lover. The fisherfolk pried him loose, wrapped him in a blanket, and brought him home to the cove and Lior.

  They laid him on the shelf bed in her cottage, and Lior changed the boat’s blanket for one of her own and shooed the fishers out. When she got a fire started and saw that he was young, she was relieved, for he was in bad shape.

  She had no sooner touched him with hands and Fire to check his life level than she discovered there was more to this man’s unconsciousness than simple exposure. Her othersenses told her that his body’s internal balances and functions were fluctuating insanely; and when she tried to hear what his undermind was doing, all she could make out was a confused babble, no one image clearer than any other. This was probably a result of the high fever the man immediately began to run, but there was no clear cause for the rest of his problem. Lior set her body to making soup, while with mind and Fire she began working on the body itself.

  With hours’ passage the man only got worse. He tossed and moaned in the grip of the fever, which refused to break despite much fish broth poured down him and the hundreds of delicate adjustments Lior made in his blood and tissues with the Fire. Then he began to convulse, and the seizures led in turn to his heart stopping three times in an hour. Lior began to despair of keeping him alive. “Mother and Queen,” she muttered in desperate annoyance as his heart stopped the fourth time, “only save me this man’s life and I will give You what You most desire from me!” She pounded on the man’s breastbone again, fisting the bolt of blue Fire straight into the tiny nerve-node that regulates heartbeat, and this time felt the heart rhythm jitter abruptly back to normal. The man’s body arched on the bed and then settled back again, and Lior swallowed dryly, realizing that she had been heard. It was an uncomfortable realization. The Goddess does not waste energy, and never fails to call in Her debts.

  Lior sat down by the man to watch him, and as the night slid by, the adjustments she had made in his blood and his lungs gradually began to maintain themselves. Gradually the twitching of muscles overloaded with their own wastes began to decrease, and nerves stopped misfiring. Lior noticed that the man’s color seemed to be improving, and then realized that the house was filling with dawn, and things were acquiring shapes and shadows.

  She had been so preoccupied by her client’s internal workings that she had given his outsides no more than passing notice. Now, as ligh
t grew and his breathing deepened, Lior relaxed and regarded him with weary interest. He seemed young—no more than her own age, surely—well-muscled, built strong and compact: dark haired, with the beginnings of a beard. A seaman, perhaps; or if he had been a passenger on the wrecked ship, then possibly an athlete of some kind. Eyes downturned at the corners, a sweet-looking mouth with a wisp of smile about it even in sleep. His family would be glad to have him back home safe… The man made a small sound, and as Lior looked down at him, his eyes opened.

  ...Silver-gray eyes with a hazy blue note exactly that of morning coming up over the water. As her own eyes widened in astonishment, he spoke one word. “Lior,” he said—his voice more a croak than proper speech, but still the same as the seahorse’s voice, half-familiar, longed for. No longer half-familiar, though... for hearing it through a human throat, Lior knew it at last. It was the voice of the Sea.

  *

  Her name was the only word he knew. She couldn’t hear his thoughts at all for the rushing, unceasing tumult that filled his undermind; but Lior understood now what that sound was. She took to pointing at objects in her house and naming them, and when she ran out of inside words, she turned her guest over to the village’s children. They were fascinated by the prospect of an adult who couldn’t speak Darthene, and would crowd around him for hours as he sat on Lior’s doorstep in his baggy borrowed clothes. He would listen with grave courtesy to everything they told him, useful or not, and he never needed more than one try to get a word or phrase right.

  Lior called him Aren, that being an old Darthene word for something the waves have washed up, and she gave out that he would be staying with her until he was fully recovered. When he could walk easily, she took Aren around the village, introducing him to the elders, and after that began taking him along on her rounds too. For some days he watched and listened to everything intently, but said almost nothing. Lior did not press him. She went about her business, cooking and talking and healing and maintaining, every day more aware of the silent presence behind her which seemed to be waiting until it had enough words.