Part 2 (1/2)
”They profess to know nothing,” Kurgan said.
Chron grunted. ”Even though you are regent, you kowtow to Gyrgon.”
Kurgan knew he meant no offense. In fact, it was a simple statement of truth. And yet, Kurgan found himself offended, as if he had been belittled in the crew's eyes.
”This is our caste system, the way it has always been,” he said. ”Your council, the Orieniad, do they not also sometimes give you orders which you are bound to follow?”
”Enough,” the first mate said, stepping forward. ”We are here to perform the Last Honors for our captain and our friend.” He held out his hand. ”The winding-sh.e.l.l.”
Kelyx shook his head. ”We believe Captain would want Kurgan Sto-gggul to have that responsibility.”
A leaden silence reigned aboard the Omaline. Water slapped against the curved hull, sluiced through its scuppers. The onsh.o.r.e wind rocked the s.h.i.+p. Grey clouds studded the noonday sky like alloy bolts.
The crew shuffled while Chron's face went pale. His fists clenched and unclenched.
Kurgan knew he must quickly break the impa.s.se. ”Courion has bade me help say good-bye, Kelyx, from across the Great Sea of Death. I am honored to comply.”
There was a palpable sigh from the a.s.sembly as Kurgan responded the way a Sarakkon would. No one would oppose him now or even think ill of him, even Chron, whose face had returned to its normal rich pomegranate color.
Kelyx nodded. ”Spoken well and true, as is a friend's duty.” He opened his hand to reveal a heavily banded sienna-and-cream-colored sh.e.l.l, long and spiraled. The whorl inside a delicate pink. ”Hold out your hand.”
Kurgan did as he was asked. From inside the winding-sh.e.l.l emerged a pink tongue. But when touched it felt cool and smooth and hard, just as a sh.e.l.l would.
”The winding-sh.e.l.l is used to shroud the body before it is consigned to the deep,” Kelyx explained for Kurgan's benefit. ”In the absence of Captain's body, we will use this.” He produced a beautifully made dirk with a curved forged blade and a handle of pebbled s.h.a.green. A cab-ochon star sapphire capped the b.u.t.t end. ”Captain's favorite sea dirk.”
He placed the weapon on the band of pink sh.e.l.l, and it immediately turned sienna and cream. In an instant, it began to spiral around the dirk, winding it in its peculiar shroud.
”From the sea we came, from the sea we return,” Kelyx intoned. ”In the bosom of the ocean, where all life begins, there is no ending, there is no regret, there are only new beginnings.”
He nodded to Kurgan, who threw the shrouded dirk into the waves. It sank out of sight without even the vestige of a splash, vanis.h.i.+ng as its master had vanished, without a trace.
Kurgan, watching the rolling sea, tried to think of Courion, as he had done for the entire time he was on the s.h.i.+p, but his thoughts were tangled up in the lies he was bound to tell the Sarakkon. If he had known himself better, he would have understood that he was caught up in the lies he had been telling himself ever since he returned from Za Hara-at. But he was a Stogggul; he could not know himself better.
And so, instead of thinking about Za Hara-at and what had transpired there, instead of thinking of her, he had come down to Harborside, to Courion's funeral, to get away from feelings that were, in the end, impossible to deny. That did not stop him from trying. But, of course, even among the Sarakkon, he could not elude them. They darted, silver and gold, like fish beneath the waves, and made it difficult for him to feel anything for the Sarakkon captain he had called friend.
”It is over,” Kelyx said. ”Now our captain is part of history.”The crew dispersed, taking up, in twos and threes, their appointed ch.o.r.es.
”We sail within the half hour,” Chron said.
Kurgan nodded. ”I understand.” And turned toward the gangplank.
”You are welcome to sail with us, Kurgan Stogggul,” Kelyx said.
Kurgan paused. ”My regrets, s.h.i.+p's Surgeon.” He gave a fastidious smile. ”Another time it will be my pleasure.” There was nothing he wanted less.
What are they doing in there?” Eleana stalking back and forth in the enormous cavern that led to Rappa territory. They looked out on semidarkness, overflowing with the murmurous conversations of the Rappa, so curious about everything, not the least of which this gathering of folk of neither their kind nor kin.
The Nawatir, thick blond hair and close-cropped beard, high cheekbones and wide mouth set in a globular Kundalan skull, glanced at her. ”We will find out soon enough.”
Her grey-green eyes clouded over. ”If they tell us anything.”
”Did you have such impatience when you were in the Resistance?”
”In truth, it is the Resistance I cannot get out of my mind,” she said simply. ”Each day that goes by the Khagggun kill more of them. What are we doing here?”
”I do not know.”
”Neither do I, and that is my point.” A swirl of luxuriant nut-brown hair, this is what defined her, and a full, generous mouth, leading to a face, overall, of defiance, of crafty stratagems, of moving forward in the advent of adversity. It was so bold you could not help but ask yourself what lay beneath. ”Doesn't it ever concern you that the two of them- Riane and Giyan-keep so many secrets?”
”Yes. When it comes to Giyan it bothers me deeply.” He was clad in dark red crosshatched tunic and trousers of a supple and l.u.s.trous fabric unknown on Kundala. From a thick belt hung two swords, their scabbards incised with Miina's runes. The long, gleaming blades, etched down their lengths, thrummed like beaten ba.s.s drums when he drew them.
”What is it, then? Do they not trust us enough?”
The Nawatir, his tongue seized up, said nothing. But Eleana, who knew his silence for brooding, would not let him be, and at length he gave in, not because he was weak, but because he did not want to keep secret the thorn in his heart.
”Perhaps it is a matter of love. I love Giyan so, and she says she loves me.” He started out slow and halting, feeling his way, and Eleana stepped closer to him, and his strange, semisentient cloak curled around her protectively. He had told her that it was like a companion or a familiar. ”But I ask myself how it can be so. I was a Khagggun Pack-Commander when she met me. I had pursued her charge, Annon Ash-era, into these very hills, to her home at Stone Border. And when Annon died, she brought him out to me so that I would stop the killing of innocent Kundalan. I wonder now how I could have done those things. But having done them, I wonder how she could love me. Were our situation reversed-were I the Kundalan and she the V'ornn-I could not.”
He stopped, a little dazed by how much he had revealed.
”And now you wonder whether her love for you is real?”
”How can it be?” he asked, anguished. ”How can she forget who I was, what I did to her? No sooner had she delivered her dead charge to me than I took her as concubine. How she fought me. How she. . .
But he could not go on. He turned away from Eleana, and she put her hand out to rea.s.sure him, but thought better of it, and dug a hole in the pocket of her jerkin instead.
Eleana sighed to herself and shook her head. It pained her to see her friend in such an agony of despair. She understood all too well his longings and desperate fears. In Za Hara-at, she had said to Riane, We must not be afraid to say what is in our hearts. When I see you I cannot cool my body down. I have never felt this way about anyone. For she had come to know with the ineluctable suretyof those in love that her beloved Annon was still alive, that somehow, by whatever sorcery, he abided inside Riane.
”I wonder at what you say because of late the question of love has been much in my mind.” She spoke softly to the Nawatir's broad back. ”Love is an insolvable mystery, where it comes from, why it strikes us, how it grabs hold and never lets go. We will never understand its nature. And here is all that can be fathomed of it. It is love that transforms us, not V'ornn technomancy or Kundalan sorcery, because it does so completely from the heart. But I also know the longing that springs from wanting to go back to the way you once were. As much as I love being a member of the band of outsiders, that very name triggers desires in me, for I miss desperately my life in the Resistance, where every day I could see the difference I was making in the cause of Kundalan freedom against the V'ornn.”
He said nothing, his back and shoulders a heavily defended wall.
”We never know what we will become, Rekkk. Look at you, born a V'ornn of Khagggun caste, trained from birth to be a warrior, to kill and maim, to do the bidding of the Gyrgon. And yet you stopped. You questioned everything. Your love for Giyan transformed you. From that moment on, you were in a sense no longer truly V'ornn. Why do you question the similar transformation in her?”
She knew the answer, of course. His guilt at what he had done plagued him. If she had learned anything during her time with the Resistance is was this: the spectre of the past made the present unendurable.
”It is true that I have been transformed again. When I look into a mirror I do not even recognize myself. I am the Nawatir, but I am only slowly beginning to explore the powers I have been given. This cloak is sorcerous, yet I do not yet know the extent of its magic.” He shook his head in bewilderment. ”It is all so new, all so mysterious, and I am not comfortable with secrets and mysteries.” He was huge, and yet now he seemed to have been swallowed by his cloak. His face was a clenched fist, cheekbones like bared white knuckles, ready to put someone, anyone, on their back. ”What if she doesn't love me, after all. What if she is just using me, if this is some sort of revenge she has schemed.”
”Surely you cannot believe that.”
”It is what, above all else, I fear.”
He frightened her when he was like this. She worried he was digging a grave for himself but felt helpless, unable to grab the shovel from his gripShe turned with relief at the sound of nails clacking on stone. Thig-pen was trotting toward them across the cavern floor-Thigpen, made voluble by her own anger, her own sense of abiding injustice that ran through the entire species like a rip current. Thigpen, who started telling them about banestones and couldn't stop.
2
A Host of Questions