Memory

Chapter 5

“Wake up, Yaphet. Yaphet?”

I could see him asleep on his bed beneath the dim glow of a hanging lamp, its globe worked in tiles of colored glass to make flowers purple and yellow in color. The variegated light fell over him, illuminating the high points of his face, accenting the shadows. Sleep gives to some people a look of peace so profound it is almost inhuman. Yaphet had that look. In the shadows he seemed more a memory of an idealized past than a young man of this world.

“Yaphet.”

A week had passed since my adventure in the city and in that time I had been able to talk to Yaphet only twice. The market connection to Vesarevi was intermittent and rationed, and tonight the channels were especially bad. My father had called that morning to say he was leaving Xahiclan at last. He was to have called again from Temple Nathé where he would stay the night, but an antenna must have gone down along the highway because we’d had no word from him. So it was a wonder I’d reached Yaphet at all.

“Yaphet!”

He sat up abruptly, the peace on his face replaced by fear as he stared wide-eyed at the door of his room.

“Yaphet, it’s me. Jubilee.”

He turned to the sound of my voice. His gaze found the mimic screen of his savant, and as he focused on me, the tension went out of him. “Jubilee. I was dreaming. What time is it?”

“Late. It’s past midnight here.”

“Are you outside?”

I nodded. I’d come to sit on the lettered-stone wall that surrounds Temple Huacho. Silver filled all the vales that night, making islands of each hill. The gleaming surface of that nocturnal sea lay a hundred feet below me, disturbed by currents and restless waves that moved in no concerted direction, but it wasn’t rising. I breathed its fresh, invigorating scent (like newly made air, I thought). Its cool, clear light lit the night, spilling over the wall to touch the shapes of the trees in the orchard. Through their whispering leaves I could just see the pink glow of a lantern in the temple courtyard. Moki had come out with me. He lay now with his chin in my lap, breathing softly in a dreamless sleep. Overhead, the Bow of Heaven arched in faint luminescence across the stars.

Yaphet glanced again at his bedroom door. Then he spoke in a low voice. “I wish I were with you. Now.”

“Don’t come,” I warned him. “Not yet.” I was frightened at how quickly his feelings were changing. He’d been wary at our first meeting, but he’d been hungry at our second. After that there had been a row with his father, and by the anxious way he watched his door I guessed there had been another, but I didn’t ask.

“Don’t you want to be with me, Jubilee?”

In truth, I wasn’t sure. I liked Yaphet. I liked talking to him, and I would stay up hours for the chance of a few minutes of conversation. He was a puzzle to me, a fascination: How could it be that of all the players in the world, he was for me? Why should it be so? I wanted to understand this strange rule almost as much as I wanted to understand the silver.

But I also knew that if Yaphet left Vesarevi he would be taking away from me the years I had planned to spend wayfaring. I would be forced to wait for him at Temple Huacho and that I did not want to do.

So I mumbled some reassuring sentiment—“We’ll be together in time”—and went on to another subject. Yaphet had many interests, and it wasn’t hard yet to turn his mind onto other tracks.

I told him about the archaeologist from Halibury who had gone out to the ruined city. “I saw the report in the market—he came too late. There had been silver floods since I was there and they’d eaten away at the buildings. The base of the tower and the execution tree in the square were so badly eroded they’d toppled.”

I had seen pictures. The tower resembled a log drizzled with sugar frosting while the execution tree had become a long, thin, branching mound of no discernible purpose. I remembered my first impression of the city, the ephemeral feel of the pristine white buildings, and how I had wondered if they were made of salt. Now they were melting like salt structures lapped by a rising tide. It was strange—even disturbing—to think that Liam and I might have been the only players to see the city intact. Even my mother had never heard of a ruin so large, brought forth by the silver and consumed again with such speed. Everyone agreed we were lucky to have seen it, but I wondered… was it luck? The silver was said to act sometimes as if with a purpose: the dreaming goddess, waking briefly to accomplish some small task in the world. I was young enough to wonder if the goddess had somehow guided our visit to those ancient ruins.

“You were lucky it was quiet the night you were there,” Yaphet said.

I shrugged. “It’s a quiet region. There are only three or four floods a year.”

“It sounds like there were that many just in this last week.”

Was he criticizing me? I didn’t like the idea. “So Iwas lucky. I’m a lucky player. It’s what everyone says.”

He didn’t seem to notice my change of tone. “I wonder if there’s something in the ruins that draws the silver?”

“That bogy,” I suggested, only half facetiously. “Fiaccomo’s ghost probably wants it lost again.”

That drew a faint smile, but already our time was up. “Be safe,” he whispered. He raised his hand as if to touch me, and the link closed.

I lingered awhile on the wall, wondering at myself. Why didn’t I feel more grateful for my luck? To find a lover like Yaphet so easily, and so soon—it was unheard of. But my gratitude was mixed with resentment, and I began to worry that my ambivalence would extract some terrible price of its own.

I was immersed in these gloomy thoughts when Moki came suddenly awake. He raised his chin from my lap, his jackal ears pricked forward and a low growl in his throat. I turned to follow the direction of his gaze and was startled to see a dark figure walking up the switchback road from the vale. It was a man, but I knew at a glance it wasn’t Liam. The walk was wrong, the span of the shoulders, the manner of dress. This was a stranger.

But that wasn’t possible.

The silver lay only a few dozen feet behind him. All night it had encircled the hill. There was nowhere this man could have come from, unless he had been hiding in the brambles since nightfall.

Moki stood, growling again, louder and more menacing than before. I laid a hand on his back and felt his red fur standing stiff. “Quiet,” I whispered. “Let’s see who he is.”

I watched the stranger come up the path. The color of his skin was lost against the glow of the fog, but I could see he was a man of medium build, near my own height. He was dressed strangely, in wide, starched pants and a long tunic with starched sleeves. At first I thought he was wearing an odd hat, but as he drew nearer I saw it was his hair, long and thick and folded on itself in sleek black waves, pinned in place by silver clips.

I was sure he glimpsed me as he rounded the switchback but he did not call out a greeting. Neither did I. Little Moki gave up on his defense. He slunk behind me and lay down, his chin pressed against the lettered stone of the wall. The night was quiet, so that I could hear the stranger’s footsteps as he advanced up the road.

He bypassed the gate and walked across the grass until he drew even with me. Then, standing below the wall, he looked up.

The silver was behind him and I could not make out his features in any detail, but I thought his skin was pale. Certainly his eyes were dark, and his clothing too. Tiny silver sparkles danced about his eyes and in the dark spaces between his fingers. Horror touched me, for they were exactly like the silver sparkles that had hovered around Jolly in the seconds before he was taken. For a wild moment I wondered if this could be Jolly, grown into a man, for there was something hauntingly familiar about this stranger, as if I had known him before, in some other time, or some other life.

But he was not Jolly.

My heart beat faster, remembering a fear my mind had long forgotten. I started to rise.

He spoke then, in my own language, though it was not his native tongue. His voice was low, crisp, his words a distorted echo of my own thoughts: “I have come for your brother, Jolly. Command him to come forth now.”

I froze, half crouched upon the wall, the fine hairs of my neck standing on end just as Moki’s had. Jolly…? I could not think who this man might be, to ask after my brother. I could not think how to answer. Moki stirred, and I picked him up, cradling him close to my chest. “He’s gone.” It was all I could find to say.

“Lately gone?” the stranger inquired. Though he spoke softly, there was menace in his voice and the motes that danced about his hands grew brighter, so that a silver storm seemed ready to ignite around him… but surely that was impossible? If the motes were true silver, he should have already been consumed.

Perhaps it was the hour, or the dreadful sense of familiarity he stirred in me, but I felt the world shift, a crack in the boundaries of the possible opening the way for forbidden things to slip into the world. “Do I speak to a bogy?” I whispered. “Or a ghost?”

His teeth flashed white as he grinned. “Not a bogy,” he said, stepping closer to the wall. “But a ghost all right, dressed in flesh. Now tell me, girl, where is Jolly? Why does he hide from me? He should know that I am his father now.”

I rose to my feet, Moki clutched in one arm, and my savant in the other. I didn’t know who this stranger was or how he had come to Temple Huacho, but I did not like his tone or his manner. I didn’t like his cruel, taunting questions. And most of all, I didn’t like the strange, hot fear brewing in my chest. “Your manners are very poor,” I said, in the best imitation of my mother I could muster. “But if you would know, Jolly isn’t here.”

“Not here?” He cocked his head to one side, so that some trace of reflected light illuminated his face. I could just make out his thin, dark brows and his graceful cheeks above a goatee of black beard, though there was no mustache. Perhaps the truth of what I said showed on my face for he turned half away, looking dejected. “So he is lost again.”

He made as if to leave by the same road he had come despite the sea of silver that filled all the vale. “Wait!” I stepped along the wall to follow after him. “Who are you? Why have you come asking after my brother?”

He looked back over his shoulder, his face once again a mask of darkness. “Will you come find out?” He held his hand out to me.

Some traitorous part of me was tempted. “Come where?”

He nodded downslope. I followed his gaze, to see the silver washing up the path where he had walked only a minute before, moving toward him in a swift tide. Moki whined and wriggled in my arms so that I had to stoop to put him down. He jumped off the wall and disappeared toward the temple. “You must come inside,” I said. “Quickly. Come in through the gate before the silver reaches it.”

“It’s too late, I think.” He raised his arm to the silver, and the shimmering motes that danced about his hand brightened again. Then the silver rushed to him. Never had I seen it move so quickly. It flowed like water released from a dam, sweeping across the grass to wash past his calves, his hips, rising up around him in a great halo of gleaming light that revealed his cold smile, but only for a moment. The silver rushed over his body, sheathing him in a second skin just as it had done to Jolly long ago, but he was still alive under that terrible armor, because his shape reached for me, and I thought I heard his voice, speaking in a lower octave than before, so low it was barely audible. It was as if the world itself were speaking,Come find out.

“Jubilee!”

It was my mother, shouting from the temple. The sound of her voice broke whatever trance had held me on the wall. The silver was only a few feet away and rising fast. I stumbled back, forgetting for a moment where I stood so that I half fell, half jumped off the wall. It was six feet down on the uphill side and I hit hard. Pain lanced my ankle. I hissed and glanced over my shoulder to see silver pouring over the wall where I had just been, and flowing unimpeded through the open gate.

“Run!” my mother screamed. “Hurry! Hurry!”

She was racing down the hill to meet me. I could not bear that. I could not bear to think of her being taken by the silver. So I broke for the temple, ignoring the pain in my ankle and running hard. She met me and we ran together for the courtyard, illuminated by crossing lines of paper lanterns. Liam was there and he swung the gate shut as we entered. It closed with a sigh and a click, making a perfect seal.

In the courtyard the air was sweet with the scent of the guardian kobolds that were spawned each day in our well, living out their single night of existence in the ground or in the temple walls. Their vapor protected us. It had a mechanism about it that would not let the silver pass. I breathed it in gratefully, my heart beating hard.

But my mother was furious. “What were you doing out there? Did you fall asleep on the wall? Didn’t you see the silver rising? Jubilee, you could be dead.”

“But there was—” I stopped as tears started in her eyes.Tears? But there was nothing to cry over. I was safe inside the temple.

Then Liam touched my arm. “We have had news of your father.” He said it in a voice hardly more than a whisper. “He was taken by the silver this evening, outside Temple Nathé on the highway from Xahiclan.”

“No.”I shook my head. I would not believe it, but my mother nodded and the tears spilled from her eyes so I knew it must be true. She held me, and we cried together, until Liam finally made us go inside.

I sat up with my mother all that night. She was a silhouette beside her bedroom window, listening to the glassy tinkle of the fountain in the courtyard. I sat in the rocking chair. The runners whispered against the floor as I rocked myself in a slow, even rhythm. “I nursed you in that chair,” she said, without turning her head.

“You nursed each one of us.”

Starlight glimmered in her eyes. I caught the soft exhalation of her sigh. “Lie down on the bed, Jubilee. Try to sleep.”

I lay down, but sleep did not come. My mind would not rest. The same questions kept returning to me, over and over again: How had my father come to be on the road at dusk? Who was the stranger beyond the wall? Why had he given himself to the silver on the same night my father was taken? And why had he asked about my brother as if he were still alive?

Jolly should know that I am his father now.

It wasn’t possible to survive the silver. Was it?

Was the legend of Fiaccomo real?

By dawn all these mysteries had become one in my mind. Somehow the stranger had caused my father’s death. I was sure of it. And maybe he had caused Jolly’s too, and perhaps… it wasn’t over yet? Should I tell my mother what I had seen?

Or what I thought I had seen. When I tried to put it into words it sounded absurd. My mother would certainly say I’d been asleep on the wall, that I’d been dreaming, but it had been no dream.

Real then. It had been real and reality leaves tracks—but where to look for them? Where else but in the experience of others? I would visit the market, and inquire.

With this resolution made, I sat up. My mother turned from her post in the window. Behind her the sky was just beginning to lighten. “Jubilee,” she whispered, fear carried in a high overnote.

I went to her, and I took her hands. “Mama?”

“Jubilee, don’t—”

Don’t go.I knew that was what she wanted to say. Don’t go wayfaring. Stay home. Stay away from the silver. Be safe. Don’t make me sit this vigil for you. But she did not say it. She kissed my forehead and told me instead, “Wake your brothers and sisters. All but the baby. Send them to me.”

I nodded. My mother was wise.