The Silences of Home Read Online Free PDF

rise. He does not sleep when he lies again beneath his own red walls.
    That night he listens to the wise ones’ voices as if they can take his fear away, and they do, a bit, then a bit more as the nights pass. He does not go again to the tents, except for his lessons. Soral smiles at him sometimes and looks as if he wants to speak to him alone, but Nellyn stays with the other small shonyn and does not meet his eyes. Then Soral goes away on a Queensship and another teacher comes, and this one never smiles.
    Nellyn sits at the wise ones’ feet and listens to their stories: shonyn stories, looping and changeless. It is the same again. Sleep and stirring and sleep, words and paddles lulling him away from wonder, to safety. The same until another Queensship drops its anchor in the river, and a woman smiles at him.

FOUR
    “Nellyn, we are here.” The words are far away, like wind in the leaves of the lynanyn trees. “Nellyn. Put the pole down. We are here.”
    Nellyn lifts his head and blinks at the trees and the dark water beneath his flatboat. It is deep night. Leaves and river are speckled with stars. The shore behind is a shadow. He sets his pole down carefully and turns to Maarenn, his gathering companion, who is looking steadily at him.
    “You are strange now,” she says. “You are hardly here.”
    “Yes, I am . . . thinking. But I am ready to gather.” He kneels on the wet wood and leans out, skimming his hands over the river’s skin, before she can say anything else. He feels a lynanyn, scoops it up in one expertly cupped hand, lays it on the flatboat. Maarenn begins to do the same thing, on the other side. He turns and sees star- and water-light rippling on her bent back. Her curls, also, are shining.
    Thinking
. The wrong word, and he knows it—but he has spoken this word to Maarenn, and it has to be truth now.
    The Queensship looked like all the others: enormous, formed of red-brown wood that curved, topped with a sail of green and blue. The sounds of creaking timbers and splashing oars reached the village long before the ship itself was in sight. Nellyn stood at the foot of the Queensfolk ridge and watched until he could see it clearly against the reddening sky. He had just woken up. Other shonyn were emerging from their own huts, rubbing their eyes, stretching, calling to each other.
    The anchor screamed, and even the wise ones fell briefly silent. Queensfolk lined the side. Nellyn looked at them from his distance and saw only one clearly. She was standing with the others, but while they gestured and shifted, she was still. Still enough to be a shonyn, though her skin was red-brown like the boat’s wood and her hair curled so closely to her head that he could see the lines of her neck. She gazed down at the shore and the shonyn sitting there. Then a man took her arm and they both climbed down a rope ladder into a smaller boat. She picked up oars and rowed, and Nellyn thought that she was still even now, as her arms and back stretched beneath green-wound cloth.
    When she drew closer, walking toward him with the man at her side, Nellyn saw that he had been wrong: there was nothing of the shonyn about her bearing or her face. The lines of her body were hard and tight, as if she walked with aching muscles. Her eyes were wide and nearly unblinking. They darted and leapt, barely resting.
She is amazed
, Nellyn thought suddenly. “Amazement is the seed of change,” the wise ones would say after the children had returned from their studies on the sand ridge. “They wish for you to be amazed, surprised, excited by what they tell you. These are words we hardly use, because they are so strange to us. We shonyn are not amazed. We look and speak and live our days as always.” Nellyn had nodded with the rest—but now he looked at her and saw her, wondering and new, and he remembered Soral’s tent, the eddying daylight, the colours of the carpet. He swallowed and felt his fingers pressing into his palms. She