DAY SPOKE FROM INSIDE THE LAND

1563 4D

Andrew jolted awake, staring. He stood unclothed in a grove of small trees and shrubs on the side of a vast incline, lighted by a pair of moons, far larger than the Lulith and the Visitor he knew, that flared huge pale words of bluish plasma across a star-choked midnight sky. Jeddin stood on his left, Leil on his right, their bare skins shining. Radiating soft yellow, two female figures clad only in shimmering light stood facing them, one round and voluptuous with her hands clasped at her waist, the other lithe and graceful with folded arms. The faces of the two women glowed orange in a way that made Andrew squint and shield his eyes, as if youvee and gammalight battered his optic nerves. Blinking, he glimpsed a smile on the round one’s face.

“I am Turiosten, and this is innerspace,” she said to Andrew and Leil. “Everything is possible here. We are in the time of joining, qaqanhialh, and during this time you may be here with Jeddin and the two of us.”

The lithe figure stretched her arms out straight, and yawned. “I am Onnhasshakh. We dance now.”

Andrew looked at Leil. Her face had smoothed out into a look of such peace and satisfaction that he wanted to kiss her, shout, dance, hold her; but her look kept him still, in awe. She looked around, then gazed up the slope. As if candled from within, her skin glowed with a soft rose light.

“This way,” Leil said, and took Andrew‘s hand, then Turiosten‘s. Leil‘s feet wove a pattern of gestures among tiny starlike flowers, sending a thrill of pollen rising into vapor. Notes, clouds, clots of music, hollow tones filling into blossoms of singing language, burst from each pollen-mote to fill Andrew‘s head with spice-scented wine.

Leil led them in a winding trail up the long slope among the thickets of song until they came to a vale clogged with trees, a nick in the slow smooth rise of the mountainside. Between leaves and branches, light streamed from the far end of the vale as if day spoke from inside the land; a wide clear stream, viscous with time moving adagio, meandered glistening out of the daylight to narrow and accelerate along the vale, to tumble down the moon-dimmed mountain slope.

“Here is where I leave you,” she said, her words spilling silver onto Andrew‘s skin, washing away the Arlen-traces. He raised his forearm; it glowed again, ruby-hot with the brand of the Darko Hejj now remembering itself through his skin.

Her words coiled around Andrew‘s heart, squeezed answering words from him. “No! You’re healed, you’re beautiful, see, now I’m whole again and you can come to me and we’re like we used to be.” He drew her close to him, suffused with a scent like the toasting of chrome in air.

“Dance with me, Andrew,” she said. Jeddin and Turiosten and the one called Onnhasshakh drew back toward the open night sky, the great moons spelling verses behind them as they stood shining. Andrew turned with longing to his wife. An arrow flew from Leil‘s eyes into his chest, exploding hot sugar deep in his throat. Languid music cast around him a thick cloak, velvet black and vibrant.

Just as he had done the very first time they had danced, in the smoky barhole in Poly Town with the warring Hejji and Astran cocks glaring each other hate across the empty floor, Andrew took Leil in his arms and made the first slow, halting steps of the sandrukha.

“Yes,” she whispered. “This is all I wanted, now. Just this. This I remember.”

“There’s so much more,” he murmured to her, bending left then right to the melody, her warmth soothing him, the whole world beating time as slowly as a stately heart. “The wedding, with the Astran women from Monford singing so high for you. The night Engel came and you cried and laughed when his head appeared, and he nearly jumped out into my hands, all wet and red, and you laughed when he screamed at me—“

“Sshh. No more, now. For you that is all here, out here, out in the City and in your mind and your heart.” Leil waved an arm at the sky above them, and then she pointed to the welling of daylight at the far end of the vale. “For me it is in there, and no other place. Andrew, let’s just dance. Come,” she said to the others.

Andrew turned Leil, and then again, and the vale spun past them until it faded below them in dimness. He looked up through the steady throb of the music, deep urging voices chanting. Approaching from above, a point of light spanned abruptly open, splitting the night to a midday sky; he and Leil danced now on the grasses of a far-wider mountain valley marked on one side by a great concave wall of black-laced granite, on the other by a long folded hump of brown rock shouldering upward, and at either end by ochred boulders where green fields fell away to emptiness.

The undertow of the dance urged them on. A flicker of white passed as they turned. Andrew caught it on the next turn: their painted wooden house, new, its windows open to the summer air, Engel chasing madly through tall grasses into the evergreens. A big white barn, its black lightpanels staring sunward from its roof, hulked behind the house.

“Look,” he said to Leil, “that’s our place.”

“I see it all. It’s beautiful,” she said, smiling at him.

Over the slow beat came a sprightly triple-time, skimming above the swells of the sandrukha like an insect on the wind. Three dancers whirled in a tornado of light drawn from the high sun, zigzagging across the grass, voices angular and manic, throwing off sparks that flew up and vanished in the blue sky like shards of mica in a storm: Jeddin and Turiosten and Onnhasshakh. They shed light as if it were autumn leaves, their bodies incandescent; cries of joy and desire and wonder splashed fast-fading colors on the grass and the granite and the white painted walls of the house in the high sun. Leil laughed.

“We can go back,” Andrew said. “We can start again, in the City. I found Janny, and Engel‘s there, and who knows? Maiji‘s probably there too. I found you, and I got you out and away from Arlen. You know? It’ll be all right.” The pauses of the sandrukha came; he stopped and held her still, then moved her in a slow circle around him, then stopped again as the music gathered for a series of long strides.

She looked level into his eyes, her lips set in a straight line, her eyes open wide and steady. She’d made up her mind. This would be hard. When she smiled, he knew it would be harder than ever.

“Leil, I came through everything, your name brought me through everything, the torture, the war, the killing. I never forgot you, I never gave up. Don’t give up on me now. Come back with me.”

Leil‘s eyes widened. “You left me alone. You went with the Hejj cocks that first night, to fight the Astran guys, my folks, after we danced. You left me so you could go and fight for what you really wanted. Or did you just want to fight, like you always did, and that was all?” Her softly-spoken words stabbed Andrew.

He opened his mouth and closed it. Yes, he had forgotten that first night, coming back to her bloody and grinning, five Astran and Hejj lying dead in the understreets. And he’d left her at the farm and gone to Arlen. His feet stopped moving. Another Leil, older and plainly dressed for work, strode from the barn toward the house, her arms loaded with fruit.

“Leil, look. See, that’s you, and there’s Janny following you. Come and look.”

Young Leil drew him closer. “Andrew, listen to the music. It’s so beautiful. Dance with me. This is all we have, now.” He bowed his head and stepped once more into the sandrukha‘s steady meandering river. “Thank you,” Leil whispered. Her hair brushed his cheek. In the noon distance, ten-year-old Engel and a friend scrambled over the humpback of rock, waving long sticks at each other.

Andrew stopped his feet and stared. On the front steps of his house, just outside the tiny porch roofed and sidewalled against the sometime gales, a child stood and watched him. A shiver went down his spine, and without thinking he let go of Leil and turned to face this little person not one of theirs. His memory-family disappeared. The music faded.

The child stood half-height, boy or girl it might have been, long brown curls tousling around its soft round pale face and tumbling down over narrow shoulders. Its eyes, shining blue-black and violet, pulled Andrew; he started to walk toward it, hardly aware that his feet carried him. He came up to stand on the ground just below the first step to his porch, that first step with the soft spot he never had braced properly, and he gazed into those eyes.

Their pain clenched Andrew‘s tongue with thorns and vinegar and silent words. We were blinded. And we grew to see again. Many times. Do you want to know what we have seen?

Andrew looked down. The stiffness left his spine, and his shoulders bowed. The andros drifting on the ends of their cords in the vats appeared in his mind. “No.”

The child’s small hands, hanging relaxed at its sides, came to life. We were severed. And we returned to point and write and heal again. Do you want to know what we have done?

The words came before Andrew could stop them. “Would you make Leil whole again for me?”

“No, Andrew.” A high little voice, three fluted notes as gentle as feathers.

Andrew could not raise his head to see that face again. He swallowed.

“Andrew, you have work to do. It’s time.”

“Yes.” While he wondered, he knew. As if drawn in by a mighty force, an unrolled gleaming line stretching to a huge horizon, embroidered and knotted with deaths and lives and deeds yet unmade, coiled itself up into him with a snap. “But I want Leil to be—" He finally succeeded in looking up.

The child had vanished. He whirled, afraid; once again, he had left Leil by herself. Leil was gone. Turning once more, searching for her, he felt the returning slow stride of the sandrukha. No Leil.

Andrew dropped to his knees and buried his face in the sweet sunlit grass, deep in many layers of dream and fear and nightmare. When all the layers peeled themselves back, and the gleaming line unrolled again, all this could be untrue.

Maybe the ashes would assemble once more from the wind.