The Land's Whisper Page 7

  Colvin did not flinch, but peered knowingly at Darse. It was as though he had perceived the answer before Darse had even spoken.

  “Sim,” Murphy repeated and swallowed hard.

  “Sim,” whispered Spence. His bronzed face had paled.

  “Does that mean something?” Darse asked.

  “We really have no more time to discuss it.” Rook quickly began to stash items back into his ruck. “We’ve got to get moving.”

  Brenol’s eyes widened at the sudden haste. “Wait. Where?”

  Rook inhaled slowly, as if willing himself calm. “We are visiting the maralane.”

  “But what do we do? Where should we go?” protested Brenol.

  Rook glanced back to his companions. Following some kind of silent communication, he spoke, but a strange edginess continued to control his demeanor. “It is difficult.” He pointed up the steep slope. He peered at the boy, finally nodding. “If you wish, you may come.” Rook’s face was grim, but his tone was genuine in invitation.

  Brenol and Darse looked at each other and nodded their assent.

  Darse knew they had few alternatives. This at least seemed safe, despite the strange reactions to his lineage. They all brushed away any grass and returned to the path. As they moved forward, Darse observed Colvin with a wary appreciation: here was a creature who missed little.

  ~

  The path the visnati took was one that curved up and aside from their earlier trail. The ascent was demanding, but after some time, the visnati found their breath again and began to tell the two about Massada.

  “The maralane have lived in the spring-lake since the lands joined together in the beginning.”

  “When was the beginning?” queried Brenol.

  Spence’s nose wrinkled. “They’re not likely to tell us.”

  “You said something earlier about a place called the lugazzi?”

  “You’re standing on it right now. Anything that is neutral land is lugazzi. There is neutral land surrounding Ziel and at the borderlines of every terrisdan. Think of it like the rind of a fruit. The rind surrounds the fruit, but isn’t the important part. So it is with the lugazzi.” He moved his arm around in a strange gesture. “The lugazzi is usually several matroles wide. It is the only space where the land does not see you,” Spence answered.

  Brenol’s eyes widened. “The land sees?”

  Colvin nodded, his lips pursed tightly.

  “Where is the ocean?” Darse asked, pondering.

  It was Rook’s turn to furrow his brow. “Salt, right?”

  Darse nodded.

  “Well, we have a salt lake in the southeast…but Ziel is our largest body of water nearby. I’ve heard rumors, tales, of strange waters. Moving waters that roared. They say they are out east in the frozen lands past the terrisdans.” He glanced amusedly to his friends, seeming to not hold faith in such things.

  Brenol had seen the sea once, but it was not an experience he felt adept at framing with words. He merely smiled. “What are they like? The maralane.”

  “Serious. Don’t come up much. Stay to themselves and live down deep. Not interested in our world—the ‘upper banks’ or ‘upper world’ or whatever they’ve named us for the season. No, not so keen on us. They are just…well, free.”

  “Then why do you go see them? How do you know they’ll even come up?”

  Rook glanced to Colvin. “There’s been a forging between our people. Colvin’s kin saved one of ‘em a long while ago, and gratitude is enduring in their people.” He wrinkled his forehead. “Or at least something like it.”

  “That’s really the only reason why they keep coming up?” asked Darse.

  Spence nodded, but his face flickered with a momentary shadow. “They’re a good people. They may not seem interested in all that goes on up here, but everything in ‘em is about protecting Massada. They’d die for the world if they had to. They’re honorable, honest, loyal. Can’t say I know all the reasons for them coming up, but I can know it isn’t for evil.”

  Spence peered around as if to ensure their ears were the only in the vicinity and whispered, “You’ll realize in a breath that they’re dangerous.” He patted Brenol’s arm to alleviate any concern. “But they are good. They…well, you’ll see with your own eyes. They’re good.”

  ~

  The men trekked the lane and eventually turned off on a grassy patch. Brenol’s feet sank into the soft green turf, and he wiggled his toes gratefully. His bare heels were unaccustomed to such long journeys. They strode for several minutes across the smooth knoll, which soon curved gently downward and came upon a new section of Ziel’s glistening shore.

  The air was thin, but sweeter here than in the wooden thick, and Darse drew in the lovely scents as he gazed out upon the blue. The waters coruscated under the midday sun, but that was the only hint of movement. No waves lapped at this section of the rocky shore.

  The visnati paused along the beach and pointed to a thin strip of land. It was a narrow cut, about an arm span across, and extended out into the still like a long finger resting upon a table of blue glass. After about two hundred strides, the strip ended in a rounded tip that swelled out in a circle. The water was dark and very deep, and the visnati urged them earnestly to have caution while walking the peninsula.

  As they spoke and made ready, Brenol disinterestedly scooped up a few flat stones sparkling amidst the sand. Half listening, he arched his body sideways to achieve the right motion for skipping them across the surface. His face jolted with sudden surprise; Spence had snapped the boy’s arm into his own small grip with alarming speed.

  “No need to disturb the water,” Spence spoke mildly, but his glance was severe.

  Brenol dropped the stones into the soft, warm sand. Only then did the visnat remove his fingers from the boy’s arm. Brenol rubbed the abused site and glanced in bewilderment at Darse. Tendrils of unease snaked up the older man’s back at this second warning regarding the water, but he felt silenced before Spence’s strangely hard eyes.

  The visnati left the beach and trod across the finger of land with enviable ease. They had clearly maneuvered the strip numerous times before, and their short legs swept the small walkway in near nonchalance. Rook had already crossed the halfway point before Brenol even stepped onto the strip, but the boy bounded after in hot pursuit, copper hair bouncing. Darse inhaled and followed cautiously, wondering what truly lay under that screen of deep black-blue.

  Reaching the peninsula’s rim, Darse experienced the vulnerability of his position acutely; the water encompassed his vision, making him feel small. This tiny finger of mingled rock and earth rested mere digits from the surface of Ziel, and any amount of flooding would swallow it from the world of air and light. He twitched at the thought, realizing it would take little effort to grasp them all now.

  What are we doing? Darse brooded, staring back down the finger of land and pondering if he could shoulder Brenol back to the shore without mishap.

  He shook his head. Calm, Darse. Calm, he thought behind clenched jaw.

  The party shuffled about on the tip, which was roughly ten strides in each direction, circular, with several sitting rocks and a carved stone table. The stones were better suited to the height of visnati than to grown humans, so Brenol and Darse stood.

  “We don’t come often, maybe twice an orbit. This is our way of telling ‘em we’re here.” Spence held up his wooden bucket again in showcase, and then began to scoop handfuls of blossoms carefully out onto the lake, somehow never touching the water himself. The four visnati soon strewed the water’s surface with the beauty of nasturtiums, daffodils, tulips, lilies, orchids, hollyhocks, corn flowers, and other flowers unique to Massada. The strong scents, especially of the white lilies, created a pocket of perfume around the finger of land as the colors floated serenely out before them.

  The visnati waited silently, with still frames and somber expressions, and Brenol could not help but peer out upon the water with nervous expectation.

&n
bsp; Darse pursed his lips and watched the party, growing more uncomfortable as the moment built.

  Brenol’s quick vision spied the eyes first. Shudders played out in a dance upon his spine, and the boy was brought back several orbits to a time on Alatrice.

  Raptili.

  After a particularly heavy winter, Darse had taken him across the border for his annual purchase of feed. On the eighth day’s march, the flooding had been so great along the canal that the road was laden with stagnant water and thigh-high mud. He had nearly bounded in to cross when Darse’s strong arm had lunged forward and yanked him back with an unyielding grip. The boy had looked up—annoyed more than anything—only to see Darse’s grim expression. The man’s finger had flicked out in indication—one, two, three, and yes, four. He had bent and quietly rummaged in his pack, finally drawing out some leftover game from their previous meal. His eyes had met Brenol’s in an intense flash of blue before the boy’s gaze had followed the meat tossed to the road’s center. Scales and teeth had flashed in terrifying speed. Brenol’s gut had softened to pudding. He had not uttered a word as they had attempted to circumvent the area, nor later, when they had been waylaid for two septspan as the waters receded. And he certainly had never forgotten those eyes. The raptili. Even still, they haunted Brenol’s dreams, and he would wake smelling the odors of the stagnant marsh.

  Brenol blinked, yet the image did not subside to mere memory. Slowly, so slowly, two foreheads emerged from the glistening screen, and steely dark eyes bore into him. Soft, concentric circles rippled out from the two heads, and soon a third. Brenol heard a slight gasp as Darse finally spotted them.

  The maralane pressed through the sea of color, the blossoms crowding their indifferent white faces. They approached the land in a line, like a brood trailing their mother, only fanning out at the last moment. Each maralane was the general size of an adult human, but the fierce eyes were plainly alien.

  The first maralane surfaced up to her chest, and the others—a man and a smaller woman—followed suit in lithe, slick movements. She had hair in several shades of green and blond, as though tresses and seaweed both grew from her damp scalp. It was regally braided in a crown upon her head, and her face was thin and very beautiful. The maralane’s skin was beyond pale, yet it was becoming on her. A pair of gills flashed at her neck. She had slender arms and hands with webbing stretching between the fingers from the knuckles up. Her form was shaped much like a human body, though clothed with a thin layer of scales. The scales appeared almost as attire, beginning on her chest and extending down her frame, and were an iridescent hue of smoky green.

  Darse sucked air between his teeth; beauty and power and otherness all seemed to mingle in the creature past the point of reconcile. Brenol simply stared.

  “Those eyes,” muttered Rook under his breath. “Every time.”

  “Well met,” said the smaller woman.

  Darse immediately liked her. She seemed as shy as a turtle, but sweet-faced and serious, and her braided brown and green locks circled her crown in simple but elegant beauty. Like the other two, she wore a somber expression that thinned her features to an eerie gauntness. It was a look that spoke plainly of another world, but somehow in her it did not emanate ominous power.

  “Carest,” Rook said, dipping his head in greeting.

  She smiled, the first soft expression Brenol had yet witnessed from the trio. “Yellow and orange,” she said. “They are brighter than the greens of the lakebed.” She raised a marigold up in a cupped hand and drew it to her nose. The hue appeared even more vibrant against her pale skin.

  The maralane man grunted ambiguously. His shoulder-length hair was chestnut and green, smoothed back and secured into a ponytail at the nape of the neck with a thin strip of algae. His chest was thick with muscle. “Spring already?”

  Murphy guffawed. “It seemed a longer winter than normal, Helst.”

  Helst frowned.

  The first female pinched her lips together. “Next you will be saying second summer is too hot.”

  “Samest,” Murphy said, bowing his head.

  “Hitze is too hot,” Rook muttered.

  The trio sliced through the remaining space to the tract, staring unflinchingly at the party.

  Brenol swallowed hard at his memories and dreams merging too closely into the present. Not raptili, he reminded himself. Not.

  Colvin ignored Rook’s murmurings and walked casually to the waterside. He held up a single daffodil, and Carest took it gingerly in her smooth hands. She thanked him with a serious face, and he granted her a soft reply. The two conversed in low tones, and, as he could not discern their words, Brenol shifted his attention elsewhere.

  “Friends, I see?” Samest asked coldly, eyeing Darse and Brenol. Her eyes were fish-like: unblinking, large, dark. “You are not customarily so free with invitations to our meetings.”

  Her tone was scornful, but Spence ignored it, bowing respectfully as if in reply.

  She nodded curtly. “For your sake, then.”

  Samest’s gaze now bore into Brenol, and she spoke to him directly, “Young one, what is your name?”

  “Bren,” he replied. Intrigue—and trembling—had settled into every space of his heart. He watched Samest with wonder, not noticing Rook leaning in to whisper to Helst. The lake-man gave the boy a peculiar glance before his stoic regard returned.

  “This is your first encounter with the maralane?” she asked. Her voice was soft from use only below the waters, but nonetheless arresting and rich.

  “It is. You are so interesting.” Brenol blinked suddenly, realizing he had spoken aloud and blushing a bright pink. “I’m sorry…am I allowed to say that?”

  Her lips twitched at his candor, and her speech gentled. “You may, Bren. Your kind has always fostered an interest in our people. Somehow, it isn’t as taxing to hear it spoken of so bluntly. Usually it comes out in the silly way of humans trying to seduce us.” She rested her pale arms on the rock and an additional set of gills became evident at her sides. Her tails sliced through the surface behind her, for each limb ended in a fanfare of fin about the span of two hands.

  “You don’t have a true understanding of the maralane, though, from the three of us. You will not find many others shooting up to converse with visnati and gaze at flowers.”

  Brenol was amazed that they were considered the light-hearted of their kind.

  Darse’s voice rumbled in a gentle bass. “How deep does the water go?” He had been ignored up until that moment, but all three maralane now pinned their glassy eyes upon him.

  “Deep,” Helst grumbled.

  “Is there anything special about it? My father seemed to think that there was something about the waters here.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “I…I don’t know, really.” Darse felt the urge to retreat from the tense circle, but there was nowhere to flee. “I apologize…I’ve always been interested in the waters.”

  Samest accepted his words with a brush of a tail fin and was about to turn to her companions when she paused and peered at his face with a new appraisal. “Wait. You are not from here, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you came through the portals?” she asked with interest.

  Darse nodded, “I did.” He hesitated a moment, inhaled, and then gripped his belt as if it would grant him courage. “And I have a request.”

  The three maralane peered intensely at the man.

  “I need to send Bren back through.”

  Carest shook her head, and Helst glared coldly.

  “No. It is forbidden,” Samest said with finality.

  Darse leaned forward in supplication. “Please. I must get—”

  “No. It will never happen.”

  “But the portal,” Darse pleaded. “It goes under my house. I just have to bring hi—”

  “Who was your father?” Carest interrupted.

  “A song!” belted Rook in a jolt of motion, and the visnati rushed to their
instruments before Darse could reply. Music erupted and a lively melody wove out from their fingers. A wide-eyed glance between the small men wrung Darse’s stomach in a strange way.

  What do they know? Darse brooded. What?

  The maralane peered at Darse silently, but seemed content to leave the conversation unfinished. He did not interrupt the song, knowing it was more likely he could discover the truth with patience, but was resolved to finding it out in time.

  The visnati performed, and the maralane listened with quiet attention. As the sun drew lower, the beams of light reflected beautifully upon the agile fingers moving along the lutes, flute, and fiddle. Colvin provided the vocals while he strummed his lute. His voice was a deep bass baritone, handsome and clean and staggering issuing forth from someone of such small stature. He sang of lands, love, stories, myth, the water. The visnati seemed to never weary, continuing their melodies and forgetting all else.

  The tangerine sun dipped down to nestle atop the waters below a passion-pink sky. It streaked out with fiery stripes of orange and lay so low and large that Brenol felt he could reach out and touch it. The water glistened like satin under light, and the water birds swept across the surface, singing a low hymn of farewell to the passing day. Beauty was so thick that each breast felt an almost tangible union with it. Carest still held a single blossom in her white hand, attentive to the music. The other maralane gazed undaunted at the fiery globe as the day melted into the west.

  The song ended as the day did, and the maralane bent their heads, presumably in gratitude. They tugged up three nets and resumed their pose of forearms upon the rocks while the visnati hauled the catch up onto the landing. Brenol was curious as to how they had held the nets without his notice, but in the end cared little for such minor details; the maralane were mysterious, and each new feat merely intensified his awe.

  “Dinner! Murphy, do you have that firewood to thumb?” Rook asked.

  Murphy produced wood—apparently collected and reserved at some previous time—and stacked it handily upon the stone table. Within minutes, a roaring fire crackled and leaped and heated the party to their toes. The maralane had spared no delicacy, bringing treasures of the water of which most have never even heard. Skewers were produced to cook food while the maralane ate their supper raw, with tails flicking in protest against cheek and teeth. Brenol’s stomach loosened into a queasy slither until he trained his eyes away from the scene.