The Silences of Home by Caitlin Sweet Read Free Book Online

head although it is not really a question.
    “Not that I have seen, no. Though there are fruit vendors there who sell lynanyn. Some say it is their most prized and beautiful fruit. And there are breads and sweets, plants from beneath the sea, berries from the mountains. Such a wonderful variety of everything: people, food, music, clothing.”
    He sees her eyes sweeping over the empty river and the heat-curled plants and the red huts. He says, “This place is too quiet for you. Too small. But for me it is enough.”
    She narrows her eyes at him. “Is it?”
    He cannot say the word that should be spoken. Her head is tilted to one side, as if she is listening to his silence.
    “So tell me about this place, then,” she says, and his voice returns. He tells her about the richness of uses to which lynanyn is put: food, yes, but also dye for clothing and pottery, materials for cloth and threads and rope, medicine for fevers and wounds. He tells her one of the wise ones’ tales, of shonyn who cut lynanyn trees and watch them die; of shonyn who cross the river to settle on this bank so that the trees can grow again.
    “When was this?” she asks, her writing stick poised above the parchment she brings with her every day.
    He looks at the black marks she has already made on the page. “It is always,” he says, “and now, in these words.”
    She opens her mouth, then closes it again. “Mmm,” she says, and does not write anything.
    She is a part of his pattern, now, but this does not comfort him. The wise ones speak and he hears her voice, talking of mountains and spires and breads—strange words for things he cannot imagine, but they are her words, and they come to him even when he is not with her. He watches her walk up to the tents. When he pulls himself onto his flatboat, he sees that she watches him from her ridge, though he does not know why.
    “You talk to her,” Maarenn says one night as Nellyn is trying not to look back at the shore.
    “Who?” he asks, and she sighs.
    “Nellyn. You know who I mean. What do you talk about?”
    He listens to the laughter of the small ones who are clustered on the bank, sailing flatboats made of lynanyn-tree twigs. They laugh and splash, and he aches to be there with them, ankle-deep in warm river water. “She asks questions about our life, and I answer them. She writes what I say.”
    “Ah,” Maarenn says. “She is very friendly. She tries to speak to us in our language. And she is lovely. In a strange way, but still lovely.”
    He says, “Yes,” and feels his pain loosen, just a bit, as if he has shared it.
    The night after that, Lanara walks back down to the bank as the flatboats are setting off. He starts when he turns and sees her there, instead of on the ridge. She waves at him. He thinks,
She looks sad
. Then,
She comes to see me off
—and he smiles at her across the water, as Maarenn’s pole dips and soars. Lanara’s mouth opens in a surprised circle, and he smiles more broadly, so easily now that he has begun. She clutches her hands to her heart in what he knows is mock alarm, since she too is smiling now. He wants to wade back to where she is standing, to let the flatboats go on without him.
    Suddenly he is dizzy. There is a humming in his head that feels like the fear and pain he knows but also something else, something he cannot name or grasp. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, carefully, and the humming subsides. When he looks again at the shore, Lanara is kneeling on the ground, talking to a wise one.
    The next day he wakes early and waits for her by his hut. She does not come. On that day and others that follow, he sits alone on the sun-crumbled bank beside the shrivelled plants. He hears thunder, so far away that it is more pulse than sound. The sky is dry and blue, except in the west, where there is a smudge of low, angry purple. The night wind smells of rain.

SIX
    At first the hoof beats sounded like thunder. Lanara looked up from the letter she