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edenfallingThis is Susan's (belated) Christmas present, all 7,300 words of it.
If I ever decide to link another series of ficlets together, and I say "Oh, it'll be easy -- I already have most of it written!" somebody please smack me. You have no idea how much tweaking it took to make all the various snippets lie down and play nicely together.
Anyway, this is based on my Ekanu ficlets, from "Beginnings" through "Paths" -- in other words, from when she's twelve to the end of her first year in Estara. It includes one completely new scene, and something like 1500 words of new material squished into the existing stories. In some cases the new material replaces old stuff. In other cases, it's supplementary.
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Learning to Listen
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There is a rhythm to life in the north. Spring comes grudgingly, imperceptibly, until summer bursts over the tundra in a frenzy as the people move south. And when the long days begin to shorten and the flowers bury themselves for the dark times, the people move north to the Ice and the month-long nights of winter.
North and south, winter and summer, to hunt and to gather, in an endless, unbroken cycle. In the summer they trade their skins and ivory bones for food and cloth, glass and iron from the distant south. In winter they walk with the spirits and one year, alone and nameless on the Ice, a young girl became a half-woman on midwinter's night.
She took the third name Ekanu, "I Listen," because the wind spoke to her on her vision quest, calling her south past the tundra, past the tiny, huddled villages and trading-fairs of Mohrad, past the impossible to imagine forest -- who could believe that trees could grow hundreds of feet tall? Who could credit stories of life so lush all year round?
She was terrified of leaving, of stepping outside the rhythm of the people, but she couldn't close her ears to the wind. "I have to go," she told her parents. "I have to follow the wind," she told her sister and brother. "I can't stay," she told her friend Kadeotak.
But her father took her into their house, where the fire crackled and voices cut through the wind's call. "Wait a year or three," he said. "Learn the traders' language. Learn to be a woman so you don't forget yourself or the people in the south. Gather a store of furs and carvings to trade for passage."
And he was right, as he usually was, so Ekanu waited three years until, caught halfway between childhood and woman-making rites, she could ignore the wind no longer. She gave her dogs and her ice-knife to Kadeotak; when Kadeotak offered her lodestone charm in return, so they would be heart-sisters, Ekanu accepted even though they might never see each other again. "Remember me, idaya," Kadeotak said.
"I will," Ekanu promised. Then she left the camp of the people for the last time.
"I go south," she told one of the traders in the little she'd learned of their language, mixed with the pidgin the Mohradmen used to barter with the people. "You take with, yes? I give pay." Ekanu held forward the bundled furs in her arms, shook the pouches stitched with owl feathers that hung from her shoulders, and rattled the intricate, beaded bracelets on her wrists.
The man, a tall figure with a beard the color of rust, looked at her askance. "You want to go south with us, snow-girl?"
"Yes."
He shrugged. "Never seen one of you people leave the Ice, but there's a first time for everything, so I hear. Hand it over." He motioned to her bundle and pouches, and she laid them in his wagon, on wood and under the rough cloth the traders call canvas. "Wait a bit and I'll find you something to do -- nobody rides free even if you pay gold."
Ekanu nodded as if she understood his stream of words, and followed him into the tangle of wagons. Whatever he wanted her to do, within reason, she'd do. For the first time since her twelfth winter, the wind was silent, and she knew she was walking its path at last.
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The journey south passed in a haze of endless hours plodding along the trails and roads from the Summerlands to Estaria. Ekanu was easy while the traders' caravan moved through the tiny village-nations of Mohrad; the half-buried sod houses and their stringy, taciturn inhabitants were familiar to her from summer fairs.
The forest, once she acclimated herself to the impossible reality of trees that towered ten, twenty, a hundred times higher than her head, was comforting in its quiet rustling, and the way the leaves absorbed, muffled, and scattered the sounds of the caravan. Shouts, creaking wheels, and the protests of the mules were swallowed in the dim, green distance.
At first the forest peoples were like the people of Mohrad, blank-faced and silent, with a ready but grudging hospitality. But as the caravan moved ever southward, the people grew rounder and softer of face and body, and their villages sprouted clearings and planted fields that pushed back the trees. The rows of corn and beans, the gourds and vines and grains that fit together like puzzle shards to make the most of every scrap of land, fascinated Ekanu. This land was richer than her wildest dreams, and yet the people here still spoke of bad years, hard winters, and the need to keep everything balanced and stored against the lean times.
She understood them, these people, though they didn't move to follow the game and they lived in a silence colored green instead of white.
Estaria's differences were not apparent at first. The caravan left the deep forest and skirted Glenshadow, a place that Marcan, the rust-bearded trader, told her was a city. A strange word, that. She asked, and learned that in the south there were different names for a permanent camp, depending on how many lived there: village, town, city. "People number what live between city?" she asked. She frowned; that didn't sound quite right. "By city? Inside city?"
"Thousands," Marcan said. "Maybe even two hundred thousand, in the biggest ones like Estara."
Ekanu counted the numbers in her head, and then counted them out again with a stick to scratch lines in the earth. She couldn't see it. She couldn't see how so many people could exist, let alone all live squashed up against each other. And they were still traveling through farm country, on roads aiming southwest to Estara itself, the city at the heart of this land. She had seen a town -- a small town, the traders said, only two thousand -- and she thought a city might be like that, only with ten thousand. She thought ten thousand might live together and still be able to find food without traveling every moon.
Then, following a river, they moved into the hills that separated the central plains from the seaboard, and the towns grew. Ten thousand in one, twelve thousand in the next. The homes were built of stone as well as timber and plaster, and they rose as tall as trees. Three or four or even six rooms piled one on the other. Ekanu was beginning to grasp the image of a city, now.
When they reached Sorla, she had no warning. One moment the wagons creaked along the base of the hills, beside the river, and the next they rounded a jut of rock and a narrow valley opened before them, guarded by towering cliffs at the western end. In the shadow of the hills, a great, walled city sprawled beside the river, filled with towers and hazy with smoke from thousands on thousands of chimneys.
Ekanu stared, but she was able to move her feet, to keep walking beside the mules and not stop in shock. Her image, built slowly over the long journey, was close enough to the truth for that. What did stop her, though -- what sent her fleeing into Marcan's wagon once they entered the city gates -- was the noise, the sheer press of those tens of thousands of people swarming like the vicious flies of the tundra. They called and shouted and wailed, and the stone walls and streets of Sorla didn't swallow the noise like snow or trees or fields. They echoed and resounded, and the noise became a constant rush in her ears, a meaningless blare.
She couldn't find any silence in the stones. And if she couldn't find silence, how would she know if the wind spoke or not? How would she know if she stepped off the path? This couldn't be right, couldn't be a true path for one of the people.
Finally the caravan stopped for the night, in the trade district near the western walls. Ekanu stayed in the wagon; Marcan found her huddled against a stack of furs, eyes closed and hands pressed against her ears. Gently, he held her wrists and pulled her arms down. "Dinner's waiting, snow-girl," he said. "Don't be scared." He offered his hand and waited, silently, the way Kadeotak used to do.
Ekanu set her hand in his and let him pull her up. Slowly, he led her from the wagon and out of the warehouse the caravan had rented for the night. Its walls were timber, not stone, and it echoed less than she expected; Marcan smiled as her hand relaxed in his grip. The streets were quieter now as people went inside to eat, and vendors closed their boxes and carts and went home. The stones still echoed, but the sound didn't overwhelm her, didn't blot out thought. Even the noise in the tavern was more like a camp gathering than a wave crushing away her breath.
Ekanu ate quietly, thinking. She was used to silence, to the way snow swallowed sound, but that was only one face of the north. Ice roared when it cracked and fell into the sea. Birds could deafen a person with their screeching on the cliffs where the great flocks built their nests. The caribou thundered across the tundra, until the ground echoed and shook miles away from the herds. And the wind howled; it sang; and it shrieked. On midwinter's night it had whispered in her ears, but the wind could make itself heard over the whole wild cacophony of summer, if it wanted. A city wouldn't stop its voice.
Later, she left the tavern and looked upward to the stars. They were faint, seen through smoke and the gathered light of the city, and the Roof Star had slid from the center of the sky as the caravan traveled south, but the lesser stars still danced in stately circles around the rope between earth and sky. The spirits who looked down on her here were the same spirits who watched over the people in the Summerlands. Even if she never found silence in the stones, she wasn't alone.
Ekanu touched Kadeotak's lodestone and smiled.
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As the trade caravan left the hills for the farmlands of Westwatch, wending south and west toward Estara, Ekanu began to see a gap in her path. Before, she'd been too caught up in the unreality of the journey to consider its end. Now she realized that while the wind had told her to go south, it hadn't told her what to do in the south. She mulled this over for several days before asking Marcan what might become of her in Estara, after the caravan disbanded.
He answered absently, his attention focused on mending a broken rein. "Not much for a girl to do unless you speak the language. Can you clean rooms? Cook?"
Ekanu shrugged, careful not to jerk the reins and disturb Marcan's mules; if he trusted her enough to let her drive the wagon, she wasn't going to disappoint him. "I... ah, keep dogs, I sew, I make with beads, I catch birds, I find plants, I will to learn stories and gods." She frowned, and said more carefully, "I learn stories and gods, but I did not finished. I will to learn more, to make... to make with gods, to talk." She gestured helplessly with her free hand.
"To do rituals? Well, there's not much call for talking to your gods down here. You could work for one of us, make those beaded gewgaws on commission. Or you could go to the University," Marcan said. "Don't think they have anyone who knows Snowtalk, and they're always buying up knowledge. You teach them Snowtalk, they'd take you in."
Ekanu grimaced at the persistent misnaming of her people's speech, but held her peace. "They want to know Arhadikim why?"
"Selindra's ravens break my bones if I know, snow-girl -- not like we talk to you people, just use the Mohradmen to translate. My cousin learned a bit of Ohdab from them, few years back, which helps. University people teach well enough, but it costs." Marcan examined the rein, ran his fingers along his stitches to seal the rejoined leather, and coiled it beside him on the driver's bench. He picked up another bit of torn harness and continued his work.
"Cost?" Ekanu asked, picking that out from his words. She twisted the slack end of the reins, worried. She'd already used up her furs, her feathers, most of her beadwork, and all but one of her carved bone and ivory pieces to pay for this journey.
"Not you," Marcan said. "You'd be paying them, see -- trade Snowtalk for a place to stay." He squinted at his needle, which seemed lost in his large, weather-beaten hands. "Think they take some students more permanent-like -- not for money, but you swear to serve them for a while, so I hear. Might work for you. It'd give you a place, let you learn Common."
"Oh," Ekanu said, considering. The wind had sent her south for a purpose. Perhaps this was it, to teach the southerners about her people and to learn from them in turn.
"You take me to University, yes? Please?"
Marcan grinned, his crooked teeth flashing through his thick beard. "Sure, snow-girl. I'll show you the way once we unload. Might even see clear to paying you a bit. Five days past Sorla, coming up on Berlis tomorrow... we should be in Estara in three six-days or less."
Ekanu glowed with anticipation.
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Estara was everything Marcan said it would be -- two hundred thousand people, maybe more, caught in a maze of stone and brick, plaster and wood where a great river spread wide as it approached the sea. The wagons rattled over stone-paved streets, peeling away one by one as the traders headed to their homes and warehouses. Ekanu helped Marcan unload his furs and other goods -- some from her people, and others he'd traded for during the journey -- and spent the night sleeping on a narrow bed he said would belong to an apprentice, if he had one.
The next morning, he took her to the University. They walked through crowded streets, making their way past fruit carts, vegetable stalls, flower girls, men with trays of jewelry or ribbons, women pushing wheelbarrows of fish and shellfish, street corner preachers, musicians, beggars, storytellers, and all the other people walking from place to place. Finally, they reached an oddly empty square built around a fountain shaped like a leaping fish; an imposing stone building ringed three sides of the square, making it a dead end. No vendors claimed space here, and the comparative quiet was startling.
"There you go, snow-girl," Marcan said, waving his hand as they walked past the fountain toward the central wing of the building. "The University. Just knock on the door, tell them you'll trade Snowtalk for a place to stay and someone to teach you proper Common."
"Thank you," Ekanu murmured, clutching Kadeotak's lodestone as the reality hit her. She was in Estara, the great city of the southern lands, and unless she wanted to make bead-work for the traders, this University was her only way to find honorable housing.
"Drop by the warehouse sometime," Marcan said, clapping her on the shoulder. "Tell me how you're doing -- if you want to get away, I'd hire you. Maybe not as an apprentice, but you do good work."
"Oh. Thank you." Ekanu held herself still against her sudden wish to take him up on that offer -- she was a daughter of the people and she had faced far worse than a stone building. She nodded to Marcan, walked forward, and knocked on the iron-bound door in the central wing.
"Just a minute!" a voice called from inside, and there was a series of clattering thumps. The door swung open, revealing a disheveled boy with brown hair flopping into his face. "Welcome to the Estaran chapterhouse of the University the home of knowledge my name is Denifar Rollesdun how may I help you?"
Ekanu blinked. She understood more Common than she could speak, but she'd grown accustomed to the slower, drawling accent of the traders, not this breathless jumble. "Slow, please?" she asked tentatively.
The boy shook himself into full awareness and peered at her. "Hey, you must be a foreigner -- sorry I talk so fast. I'm Denifar, and I'm on door duty this afternoon. Do you have an appointment with any of the Masters?"
Ekanu shook her head. "I come from north, from Ice. I want to learn Common. Marcan says I can to trade Arhadikim -- trade Snowtalk -- for sleep and food."
"Soro Sura live again, you're a Snow Person!" Denifar leaned forward, curiosity lighting his face. "I always thought the traders were pulling our legs, saying people lived up where it's always frozen. What's it like?" He paused. "Oh, and what's your name?"
"Our land is cold, and beautiful," Ekanu said, ignoring his strange talk of legs. "I am Sulila Ekanu sur Shima nem Koshva. I want to trade for sleep and food."
"Well, it would be cold if it's all ice," Denifar said, slouching against the doorframe and shoving a hand in his pocket. "You'll have to talk to the Masters about your arrangements, but I bet they'll give you anything you want if you'll teach someone Snowtalk. Follow me... what was your name again?"
"Sulila Ekanu sur Shima nem Koshva."
It was Denifar's turn to blink at a rush of syllables; satisfaction warmed Ekanu for a moment, before she scolded herself for taking pleasure in disorder. "Sorry, I didn't catch that," Denifar said. His eyes lit up again. "They say a lot of barbarians have names that mean things -- like words, not just names. Does yours mean anything?"
"My people are not barbarians," Ekanu said firmly, having had quite enough of that idea during her journey south. "But my name is words. I Listen, once Laughter, once Bright Like a Star, yes? In Thousand Birds family."
Denifar tilted his hand back and forth, as if he was balancing something invisible. "So... your name right now is 'Listen?'"
"'I Listen,' yes."
"What's that in your language?"
"Ekanu."
Denifar nodded to himself and dropped his hand. "Without your old names, you're Ekanu Thousandbirds. Do you mind if I call you that? It gets the first part right, at least." He grinned hopefully.
Ekanu consider this. Her name would most likely be mangled some way or other, and as Denifar said, at least this version kept her chosen name accurate. And the switched order would be easier for these people to remember. "Ekanu Thousandbirds. I keep for now."
"Great!" Denifar said. "Now I can introduce you to the Masters, instead of just saying, 'Hey, a girl from the Snow People showed up and wants a place to stay.' Follow me -- they'll sort out how to trade languages, and I'll get you a bed and something to eat." He motioned Ekanu through the doorway, into the shadowy interior of the building.
Sparing a final nod for Marcan, who'd waited patiently through her conversation, Ekanu followed Denifar into her new home.
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The University, the masters explained when they agreed to trade languages for food and shelter, was more than just a building in Estara. It was an organization with chapterhouses all over the world, all talking to each other and sharing knowledge. Someday, they hoped to know everything there was to know. So they sent people to travel and make maps. They collected books. They watched the stars and the weather. They cut open bodies and tested medicines. They listened, and they learned.
Some people took what they learned and put it together in new ways, and then others studied what happened. Denifar did that -- he built complicated jumbles of metal and wood that used fire and water to move and do work that people did. He said it was called mechanics, and he was a mechanist. Ekanu thought it was extraordinarily peculiar.
"It's like... do you have bows and arrows?" Denifar asked, trying to explain in between bites of his evening meal. Ekanu, her mouth full of bread, shook her head in confusion.
Denifar gave her an odd, sidelong look and tried again. "Well, knives -- you must have knives, at least." He raised his own as an example; at her nod, he continued. "Basically, a knife takes the force from your body and changes it into something more useful -- if you push down on meat with a knife, it slices, but if you push with your hand, all you do is squash your food flat. Machines and engines take the force of things like rivers and fires and change it into something useful. They're just a little more complicated than a knife."
Ekanu struggled to make sense of that, of the strange words. "Machines tell rivers, stop to be lazy, so people can to be lazy, yes?"
"More or less."
"Useful," Ekanu said. "But they are still strange."
Denifar threw up his hands in exasperation, drawing the amused attention of their neighbors in the University's huge eating room. "Fine. If you don't study mechanics, what will you study? Choose something interesting, at least, not literature or history."
Ekanu shrugged helplessly. "I do not know what to study. I learn Common, but..." She trailed off, unsure how to express her frustration in this awkward language. She could hear the wind, faintly, whispering around the stone walls of the University, and she knew there was something more she was meant to do.
"Well, what did you do at home?" Denifar asked. "You could keep doing that here, whatever it is. Or you could join some of the paying classes and listen to what the masters teach -- maybe something will catch your attention."
"I trained dogs," Ekanu said, "to hunt and pull sleds. I sew, I decorate with beads, I learned woman-- learned to be woman. After I hear the wind, I learned spirits, to listen, to understand. Marcan says rituals." She slapped the table in frustration as the words slipped away from her tongue. "I want to learn something new! I learn old things, home things, then I come south why?"
"That makes sense. So tell the masters you want to sit in on their classes until you figure out what you want to study -- you can go on teaching Mistress Hasimmon how to speak Snowtalk while you think. Actually, I'll tell Master Farling to make you a schedule of classes. That should make things easier." Denifar jammed a piece of bread into his mouth and looked satisfied.
When she worked through his words, Ekanu decided it would be too much effort to argue, especially since he was being helpful. Besides, she wanted a friend. She missed Kadeotak.
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Estara was vastly different from the Ice or the Summerlands, but after several months, Ekanu was settling in. She could make herself understood in casual conversation and she was slowly correcting her grammar, despite the strange way Estarians strung their words together. She had watched people and talked to Denifar until she knew about the three Estarian gods, the rules of clothing, and how to eat without offending people. She had listened to lectures on history, politics, medicine, money, farming, theories of magic, reading ocean currents, training messenger pigeons, pictographic writing systems, and musical theory.
That last had been a revelation. She'd walked into the room, heard the rhythmic thrum and dancing arpeggios of a guitar as the master demonstrated different types of modal harmony, and stopped in shock as the wind eased aside in her soul, making room for a new sound. When the lesson ended, she'd asked to touch the guitar, and it had felt right in her hands.
"Music? Well, at least you'll be doing something instead of burying yourself in old books," was Denifar's reaction. "Master Sintarris will take charge of you now."
And so Master Sintarris had, to the extent of moving Ekanu out of the guest quarters and into the wing that held the practice rooms, the small concert hall, and the workshop for instrument repair and construction. Ekanu was grateful for her new permanent status in the University, even though she now lived on the opposite side of the complex from Denifar.
All in all, Ekanu thought she'd learned to fit in fairly well. But the small things, the ones she'd never even thought about because that's just the way things were, still made her stumble and wonder why the wind had set her on such a strange path.
Denifar walked into her room one autumn afternoon, whistling cheerfully. "Hey, Ekanu," he said.
"E sok," she told him, not acknowledging him with her eyes, and returned to her work. She was trying to read a basic primer on musical theory, with a dictionary and a few scraps of paper by her hand for reference.
"What's that mean?" Denifar asked, walking over and leaning on the edge of her desk.
She wasn't listening; she was alone.
"Hey, Ekanu? What's it mean, 'ay-sok'?" Denifar reached over and waved his hand over the pages, blurring the words she tried so hard to make sense of.
Ekanu closed the book, calmly, and glared at the boy. "E sok," she said. "I am alone. I say, then you make quiet, yes? Not interrupt!"
Denifar leaned back, raising his hands. "Hey, sorry, I didn't know. That's not how we do things here. If you want to be alone, you should close your door."
Ekanu blinked.
Denifar grinned. "It's your room. If you don't want people to come in, just close the door. Of course, I'll probably come in anyway, but I'm not a good example."
It had never occurred to Ekanu that this room was hers, to treat however she wanted. She was shocked when Master Sintarris first showed her where she would sleep and work during her years as his pledged student -- the single stone room was bigger than half of her people's summer houses, and certainly bigger than an ice house. And now Denifar said that she was allowed to close the door. She'd seen closed doors, but she thought people were simply trying to keep out the breeze or hold heat in. That was what doors were for... except Denifar said otherwise.
"When you are alone, you must be body alone?" she asked, hoping she had the concept.
Denifar looked at her oddly, that sidelong glance she'd learned to associate with the times they fell into one of the gaps between their peoples. "That's what alone means," he said. "Away from other people."
"Oh. My people, alone is in the mind -- we are not body alone," Ekanu said, trying to put bone-deep knowledge into foreign words. "We have no space, you see? Unless we go out ice or water, then we are body alone. We say, e sok, then people know we are alone. They do not see, hear. Pretend? I think you say we pretend we do not see."
"Strange," Denifar said. "If I tried that in the mechanists' hall, nobody would ever take me seriously. You have to find somewhere away from people."
"I will remember. Thank you," Ekanu said carefully. "When I am alone, I will close my door."
Denifar grinned again. "I'll come in anyway, you know."
Ekanu shook her head. Denifar was a good friend, but he was nothing like Kadeotak, and he was much more confusing than Estara.
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The day before midwinter, Denifar stole her guitar, shoved her books under her bed, and dragged her to a tavern. "It's Liar's Night, when the Serpent swallows the Star -- tomorrow the Star will burn through the Serpent's gut and chase away the darkness. But tonight we get drunk," he said, and he bought two glasses of beer and a pitcher to refill them.
Ekanu looked doubtfully at her glass. She'd only drunk alcohol four times, once for her spirit walk, and then once each year in the ice-break ceremonies when the people broke camp and turned south toward the Summerlands. Her people didn't have much alcohol -- they didn't have much to ferment, just berries gathered at the northern edges of Mohrad, where brambles grew thick in the soggy hollows -- so they used it sparingly, even in rituals. Mostly they drank melted ice, or blood.
She told this to Denifar, and laughed at the shock on his face. "Blood is life," she said. "Rich, it warms you. We don't waste life, don't waste anything. Winter kills if you waste."
"I guess," Denifar said doubtfully. "But it's still disgusting. Doesn't it clot?"
"No, no, is a treat! Fresh. When we make the kill, the blood is to celebrate. Life for life, you see? We can't wait, it doesn't keep. Not like this... this piss-water." Ekanu frowned at the glass of beer sitting on the table before her.
Denifar shook his head. "Sounds exciting, really, blood and death and all, but that's not for me. I'll stick to Estara and beer, thanks anyway. And it does not taste like piss!"
Ekanu smiled slyly. "You know this how? You have tasted both?"
"No! Ekanu!" Denifar reached across the table to swat at his friend. She ducked, laughing, and he drew back before he smacked a server weaving her way between crowded tables.
"This beer, it's thin, sour," Ekanu said after Denifar sat back again. "When my people make spirit-water-- make alcohol," she corrected herself, "we make it strong. Ours burns. Ours is thick with life, not like piss-water."
Now Denifar grinned. "Yes, but that's the beauty of it. If you drink whiskey or gin, you'll be drunk in no time. Beer lets you keep your head longer, so you can laugh at everyone else getting drunk. Also, it's cheap!"
"Cheap like piss," Ekanu muttered, but she raised her glass along with him and knocked back another swallow of the yellowish-brown liquid. It was just like everything else in the south, thinned-out and spread wide for all to see, not thick and rich and hidden against the killing cold. Here people didn't have to cram life into every moment, didn't have to listen for every word the spirits whispered. Here they could relax, could wait for the spirits to float along on rivers of thin beer and shout in their ears.
She was fairly sure Denifar didn't know the true purpose of drinking on midwinter's night, but then, he didn't need visions; he already had a calling. He didn't need to summon life with blood or alcohol; he bubbled over every moment, all of himself.
She'd make an offering for him tomorrow, nonetheless. Denifar was her friend, almost a heart-brother, and she wouldn't feel right without asking the spirits to see him truly and touch him gently. But until then, she'd join him in Estara's wilder, less focused celebration.
Ekanu sat in the raucous, smoke-filled tavern, glass cradled between her hands, and watched her friend get drunk on life.
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"Kayeyalo yamkua
Kunimshal solit, gapud, geme
Re kufoch; yelim gapad fimal
Ral solit, geme, vav."
Ekanu lowered the guitar and stared pensively at the stone floor, wishing absently that she'd let Denifar talk her into buying a wool rug to cut the late winter chill. Then she shook her head to clear away distractions.
It was her favorite song for as long as she could remember. One of her earliest memories, in fact, was listening to her mother sing her to sleep with the song. And she couldn't translate it.
"It's pretty," Denifar said from where he lounged in her doorway. "Where's it from?"
Ekanu frowned. How did he keep opening her door without her notice? After nearly four months, she should have learned to hear him, unless sneaking up on people was his magic, the way mending was Marcan's and calling the four directions was Kadeotak's.
Still, she was getting nowhere; she might as well give in to the distraction. "The song is from my people," she said, laying the guitar beside her on the narrow bed. "I want to translate it for Master Sintarris, but the words don't fit. I miss something always."
Denifar tilted his hand back and forth, equivocating. "Master Sintarris will go easy on you -- it's not as if he knows what you're translating from, after all. With Mistress Hasimmon gone to Banicia, nobody here really speaks Snowtalk but you."
"Not Snowtalk--"
"Arhadikim," Denifar finished with her, grinning. "I know, I know, the True Speech of the People, you're not a barbarian, and all Estarians are full of ourselves. We've danced that dance." He pushed himself off the doorframe and perched on the corner of her writing table, carelessly shoving the ink and blotter aside. "So what's the song about? Not all the deep stuff, and please don't go on about melodic traditions. Just tell me the story."
Ekanu sighed and ran her hands through her shamefully unbound hair, raking the strands from her face. "The story is short. A woman catches a piece of snow to give her lover, but it melts. They marry, they birth children, one day they see daughter of them catch snow-piece for her lover. A soft song, quiet life. My people sing of spirits, hunts, death, history. Not this. This song is... is yasvemakopoas, family song, for children, for lovers. Song speaks of paths, of patterns. Circles."
Denifar quirked an eyebrow. "Your Common slips when you think about home," he said dryly. "You should watch that."
"Yaaaah! I think of my people, I think with Arhadikim, not Common. I can't say the song in Common. It slips through my fingers, like the snow-pieces." Ekanu thumped the bed in frustration, startling soft twangs from the guitar. She glowered at the instrument. "I need a flute, not this misshapen whale. The song needs a flute, needs bone and sinew, not wood and metal."
Denifar ambled over and picked up the guitar, plucking a few idle notes; Ekanu winced as his fingernails dug into the wooden neck. "Don't use strings up north, do you?" he said. "That makes sense -- they'd warp or snap in the cold. And I think the word you want is snowflake, not snow-piece."
"Flake?"
"Yes. It means a small piece of something, thin -- like a chip, but generally flatter."
"Snowflake." Ekanu turned the word in her mouth, tasting it. It didn't sound as nice as snow-piece -- didn't have the nice resonance with peace and therefore harmony and therefore patterns, or peace and belonging -- but if it was the proper word, that would help with Master Sintarris.
"Give me," she said, holding out her hands for the guitar. Denifar laid the instrument in her arms and returned to the doorway, waiting.
"I think... snowflakes... your people make pictures, snow patterns, yes?"
"What, in the snow, or of the snow?" Denifar asked.
"Of, I think. Not with or in."
"Yes. Snowflakes have six sides, you know, sacred six." Denifar tilted his head sideways, considering. "There's a cathedral to Nesta in her aspect of Rain, somewhere in Rhence, that's supposed to have a snowflake chapel. You could ask Mistress Irruan -- Master Farling says she's been on pilgrimage all over Estaria, collecting sacred songs -- she might have seen it."
Ekanu shook her head. "Your gods are not mine. I enjoy to find pieces of my people among yours, that's all. Six is sacred. Things connect, as the song tells." She smiled at Denifar. "Now I have hope again that I will translate it."
"Sacred six? Is this a holy song?"
"Is life holy?" Ekanu countered.
Denifar tilted his hand. "Depends on who you ask, and what parts of life you mean."
Ekanu grinned. "Things connect, things do not connect. How can life have pieces? Snow has pieces, a life has no pieces. But each life is a piece. You see?"
"Maybe," Denifar said, shrugging. "A person's all one thing, but a group of people together make something else, is that what you mean? Hey, like a group of snowflakes make a storm! Is that what your song is about?"
"Yes. The song says, 'Kayeyalo yamkua kunimshal solit, gapud, geme. Re kufoch; yelim gapad fimal. Ral solit, geme, vav.' It means dry snow-pieces -- snowflakes -- dance in? dance with? on? I think in. They dance in the wind and make patterns. When one falls, another makes a new pattern. We also dance, make patterns, as we walk through life. So pieces change, but the pattern remains. Nothing is lost." Ekanu absently picked out the melody on the guitar as she spoke, not yet able to fit the words to the notes. "You see?"
Denifar nodded. "Master Sintarris should like it when you're finished -- it sounds pretty and it's philosophical. What do you call it, anyway?"
"Oh, Solutyamikach, 'Winter Dance.' But I think in Common, 'Snowflakes.'"
Denifar tipped back his head and laughed.
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Ekanu sat on the small decorative ledge at the top of the University clock tower, leaning back against the steeply pitched roof. Denifar stood beside her, arms spread wide for balance and face fixed in a scowl of concentration.
The late afternoon sun shone brightly in the cloudless summer sky, beating down on the stone and brick buildings of Estara, gleaming on the glass windows, and making the scattered gardens glow with color. The gilded dome of the Temple blazed downriver to their left, while the tiled roofs and mosaic walls of the old Imperial Palace reflected hints of orange and rose to their right. The shingles of the clock tower's roof soaked up the heat, keeping Ekanu's back warm despite the brisk wind that blew up here in the sky.
"Sit before you fall," she told Denifar.
He shuffled one step closer, but remained standing. "I won't fall -- that's not the way my death will come. Besides, I can see more than you can."
Ekanu shrugged. "If I want to see the rest of the city, I will move to different side of the tower, but this side has the best view. We picked it because of this, you remember? Sit." She tapped his shoe, lightly.
Denifar groaned but reached back to catch the roof with his hand, and lowered himself until he was seated beside her. "It was your idea to climb up here. Why are you getting cold feet now?"
"Cold feet?"
"Oh, getting scared, backing out."
Ekanu stored the phrase in her memory. "I don't have cold feet," she said. "I see no reason to ask death to notice, that's all. And I'm tired."
"I wasn't tempting death," Denifar said, scowling again.
Ekanu sat up a bit, frowning at her friend. "What bothers you, Denifar? You've scowled for days now, always in my room talking instead of in the mechanists' hall. I thought being apart might help, but you still scowl."
Denifar didn't answer for nearly a minute, but Ekanu had learned patience on the Ice. She knew how to listen.
Finally he pried a corner of loose shingle from the roof and hurled it off the tower, aiming for the wall of the chapterhouse compound. "My Aunt Ella -- Mistress Elisura Calera, you know, who studies the history of the Empire -- left for Merua last sixday. She said I'm old enough I don't need her hanging around all the time anymore."
Ekanu hummed in the back of her throat, but didn't say anything.
Denifar tossed another bit of shingle and continued. "She's my only family. And she says I don't need her, that we'll do better without each other." He yanked up an entire shingle, viciously, and began tearing it into pieces. "My parents died yesterday, six years ago. She didn't even stay to visit their graves."
Ekanu shifted a few inches closer, until her leg brushed against his. "People leave, but they also return. Few people leave home forever."
"But she's going home already -- she's from Merua -- and she's never liked Estara. I don't think she'll be back." Denifar dug his fingers under the edge of another shingle, working it loose. "Everyone leaves, you know. They die or they go to other cities -- the University doesn't let you settle down until you're old. I don't want to leave Estara. It's my home."
"To leave home is hard," Ekanu agreed, as she helped Denifar pry the shingle free.
He winced. "Sorry. You fit in well enough it's hard sometimes to remember that you're not from Estara. Hey, what was it like, leaving the Ice? Nobody's ever come from there before -- why did you leave?"
"I followed my path, that's all. On midwinter's night, in the midday dark, we give back our child names and ask the spirits who we are, what we should do. The wind spoke to me, said, 'Go south. Learn new words, learn new ways.' So I am Ekanu, because I listened to the wind. And now I am here." If it was hard for Denifar to remember that she was a foreigner, Ekanu reflected, sometimes it was equally hard for her to remember how different her life had been just one year ago. She hoped that was a sign of favor from the spirits, to ease her way.
"Huh," Denifar said, bracing himself as he tugged on the shingle. "You really think the wind talked to you? Maybe you just wanted to leave and imagined it."
The shingle came loose and Ekanu let go, giving it to Denifar. "No. I didn't want to leave. I felt only... I was empty, searching. The wind told me where to search." She fixed him with a stern look. "You don't lie about your gods. I don't lie about the spirits."
"Sorry. Your spirits are really different from the Three, that's all." Denifar tore the shingle in half and gave one piece back to Ekanu. "There -- thanks for helping me get it loose. And hey, maybe someday I'll hear a god and know what to do with my life. You'll help me figure out what it means if that happens, right?"
If they still traveled along the same path, of course she would, though she thought Denifar had already heard his spirit, even if he didn't realize that. Nobody had his passion unless they were walking a spirit path; someday, he might even look into his heart and find the words that had set his feet toward his machines. But there was no guarantee she and Denifar would be close when that day came -- even heart-siblings could lose each other in the snows -- which was probably not a good thing to tell him when he was upset about his aunt leaving.
"Yes," Ekanu said, touching the lodestone around her neck. "I will help, idaya."
"Thanks," he said, and his face said everything else he didn't have words for.
Ekanu nudged his leg and held up her half of the shingle. "Together?" She listened to her heart-brother count to four, and flung her half of the shingle into the air at the same time he did. Then she leaned over the edge, watching, and prayed for a sign. Let this be the right path. Let her not lose a second home, a second friend.
The two black flakes spun in the wind, weaving around each other as they fell, until they were lost from sight.
Ekanu leaned into Denifar's arm and smiled.
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End
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aichmetes, will you tell me if I'm rambling and being an idiot in any of the transitions? Also, I think I might get your story finished by this weekend... or at least by February. *headdesk* Dunno who I'll get to edit it, though (Vicky will be far too busy settling into Budapest) so you may have to put up with my unmediated quirks, rambling, and bizarre narrative voices. Sorry!
ETA: Nevermind -- I tweaked it some and printed a clean copy. Don't worry about any edits.
If I ever decide to link another series of ficlets together, and I say "Oh, it'll be easy -- I already have most of it written!" somebody please smack me. You have no idea how much tweaking it took to make all the various snippets lie down and play nicely together.
Anyway, this is based on my Ekanu ficlets, from "Beginnings" through "Paths" -- in other words, from when she's twelve to the end of her first year in Estara. It includes one completely new scene, and something like 1500 words of new material squished into the existing stories. In some cases the new material replaces old stuff. In other cases, it's supplementary.
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Learning to Listen
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There is a rhythm to life in the north. Spring comes grudgingly, imperceptibly, until summer bursts over the tundra in a frenzy as the people move south. And when the long days begin to shorten and the flowers bury themselves for the dark times, the people move north to the Ice and the month-long nights of winter.
North and south, winter and summer, to hunt and to gather, in an endless, unbroken cycle. In the summer they trade their skins and ivory bones for food and cloth, glass and iron from the distant south. In winter they walk with the spirits and one year, alone and nameless on the Ice, a young girl became a half-woman on midwinter's night.
She took the third name Ekanu, "I Listen," because the wind spoke to her on her vision quest, calling her south past the tundra, past the tiny, huddled villages and trading-fairs of Mohrad, past the impossible to imagine forest -- who could believe that trees could grow hundreds of feet tall? Who could credit stories of life so lush all year round?
She was terrified of leaving, of stepping outside the rhythm of the people, but she couldn't close her ears to the wind. "I have to go," she told her parents. "I have to follow the wind," she told her sister and brother. "I can't stay," she told her friend Kadeotak.
But her father took her into their house, where the fire crackled and voices cut through the wind's call. "Wait a year or three," he said. "Learn the traders' language. Learn to be a woman so you don't forget yourself or the people in the south. Gather a store of furs and carvings to trade for passage."
And he was right, as he usually was, so Ekanu waited three years until, caught halfway between childhood and woman-making rites, she could ignore the wind no longer. She gave her dogs and her ice-knife to Kadeotak; when Kadeotak offered her lodestone charm in return, so they would be heart-sisters, Ekanu accepted even though they might never see each other again. "Remember me, idaya," Kadeotak said.
"I will," Ekanu promised. Then she left the camp of the people for the last time.
"I go south," she told one of the traders in the little she'd learned of their language, mixed with the pidgin the Mohradmen used to barter with the people. "You take with, yes? I give pay." Ekanu held forward the bundled furs in her arms, shook the pouches stitched with owl feathers that hung from her shoulders, and rattled the intricate, beaded bracelets on her wrists.
The man, a tall figure with a beard the color of rust, looked at her askance. "You want to go south with us, snow-girl?"
"Yes."
He shrugged. "Never seen one of you people leave the Ice, but there's a first time for everything, so I hear. Hand it over." He motioned to her bundle and pouches, and she laid them in his wagon, on wood and under the rough cloth the traders call canvas. "Wait a bit and I'll find you something to do -- nobody rides free even if you pay gold."
Ekanu nodded as if she understood his stream of words, and followed him into the tangle of wagons. Whatever he wanted her to do, within reason, she'd do. For the first time since her twelfth winter, the wind was silent, and she knew she was walking its path at last.
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The journey south passed in a haze of endless hours plodding along the trails and roads from the Summerlands to Estaria. Ekanu was easy while the traders' caravan moved through the tiny village-nations of Mohrad; the half-buried sod houses and their stringy, taciturn inhabitants were familiar to her from summer fairs.
The forest, once she acclimated herself to the impossible reality of trees that towered ten, twenty, a hundred times higher than her head, was comforting in its quiet rustling, and the way the leaves absorbed, muffled, and scattered the sounds of the caravan. Shouts, creaking wheels, and the protests of the mules were swallowed in the dim, green distance.
At first the forest peoples were like the people of Mohrad, blank-faced and silent, with a ready but grudging hospitality. But as the caravan moved ever southward, the people grew rounder and softer of face and body, and their villages sprouted clearings and planted fields that pushed back the trees. The rows of corn and beans, the gourds and vines and grains that fit together like puzzle shards to make the most of every scrap of land, fascinated Ekanu. This land was richer than her wildest dreams, and yet the people here still spoke of bad years, hard winters, and the need to keep everything balanced and stored against the lean times.
She understood them, these people, though they didn't move to follow the game and they lived in a silence colored green instead of white.
Estaria's differences were not apparent at first. The caravan left the deep forest and skirted Glenshadow, a place that Marcan, the rust-bearded trader, told her was a city. A strange word, that. She asked, and learned that in the south there were different names for a permanent camp, depending on how many lived there: village, town, city. "People number what live between city?" she asked. She frowned; that didn't sound quite right. "By city? Inside city?"
"Thousands," Marcan said. "Maybe even two hundred thousand, in the biggest ones like Estara."
Ekanu counted the numbers in her head, and then counted them out again with a stick to scratch lines in the earth. She couldn't see it. She couldn't see how so many people could exist, let alone all live squashed up against each other. And they were still traveling through farm country, on roads aiming southwest to Estara itself, the city at the heart of this land. She had seen a town -- a small town, the traders said, only two thousand -- and she thought a city might be like that, only with ten thousand. She thought ten thousand might live together and still be able to find food without traveling every moon.
Then, following a river, they moved into the hills that separated the central plains from the seaboard, and the towns grew. Ten thousand in one, twelve thousand in the next. The homes were built of stone as well as timber and plaster, and they rose as tall as trees. Three or four or even six rooms piled one on the other. Ekanu was beginning to grasp the image of a city, now.
When they reached Sorla, she had no warning. One moment the wagons creaked along the base of the hills, beside the river, and the next they rounded a jut of rock and a narrow valley opened before them, guarded by towering cliffs at the western end. In the shadow of the hills, a great, walled city sprawled beside the river, filled with towers and hazy with smoke from thousands on thousands of chimneys.
Ekanu stared, but she was able to move her feet, to keep walking beside the mules and not stop in shock. Her image, built slowly over the long journey, was close enough to the truth for that. What did stop her, though -- what sent her fleeing into Marcan's wagon once they entered the city gates -- was the noise, the sheer press of those tens of thousands of people swarming like the vicious flies of the tundra. They called and shouted and wailed, and the stone walls and streets of Sorla didn't swallow the noise like snow or trees or fields. They echoed and resounded, and the noise became a constant rush in her ears, a meaningless blare.
She couldn't find any silence in the stones. And if she couldn't find silence, how would she know if the wind spoke or not? How would she know if she stepped off the path? This couldn't be right, couldn't be a true path for one of the people.
Finally the caravan stopped for the night, in the trade district near the western walls. Ekanu stayed in the wagon; Marcan found her huddled against a stack of furs, eyes closed and hands pressed against her ears. Gently, he held her wrists and pulled her arms down. "Dinner's waiting, snow-girl," he said. "Don't be scared." He offered his hand and waited, silently, the way Kadeotak used to do.
Ekanu set her hand in his and let him pull her up. Slowly, he led her from the wagon and out of the warehouse the caravan had rented for the night. Its walls were timber, not stone, and it echoed less than she expected; Marcan smiled as her hand relaxed in his grip. The streets were quieter now as people went inside to eat, and vendors closed their boxes and carts and went home. The stones still echoed, but the sound didn't overwhelm her, didn't blot out thought. Even the noise in the tavern was more like a camp gathering than a wave crushing away her breath.
Ekanu ate quietly, thinking. She was used to silence, to the way snow swallowed sound, but that was only one face of the north. Ice roared when it cracked and fell into the sea. Birds could deafen a person with their screeching on the cliffs where the great flocks built their nests. The caribou thundered across the tundra, until the ground echoed and shook miles away from the herds. And the wind howled; it sang; and it shrieked. On midwinter's night it had whispered in her ears, but the wind could make itself heard over the whole wild cacophony of summer, if it wanted. A city wouldn't stop its voice.
Later, she left the tavern and looked upward to the stars. They were faint, seen through smoke and the gathered light of the city, and the Roof Star had slid from the center of the sky as the caravan traveled south, but the lesser stars still danced in stately circles around the rope between earth and sky. The spirits who looked down on her here were the same spirits who watched over the people in the Summerlands. Even if she never found silence in the stones, she wasn't alone.
Ekanu touched Kadeotak's lodestone and smiled.
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As the trade caravan left the hills for the farmlands of Westwatch, wending south and west toward Estara, Ekanu began to see a gap in her path. Before, she'd been too caught up in the unreality of the journey to consider its end. Now she realized that while the wind had told her to go south, it hadn't told her what to do in the south. She mulled this over for several days before asking Marcan what might become of her in Estara, after the caravan disbanded.
He answered absently, his attention focused on mending a broken rein. "Not much for a girl to do unless you speak the language. Can you clean rooms? Cook?"
Ekanu shrugged, careful not to jerk the reins and disturb Marcan's mules; if he trusted her enough to let her drive the wagon, she wasn't going to disappoint him. "I... ah, keep dogs, I sew, I make with beads, I catch birds, I find plants, I will to learn stories and gods." She frowned, and said more carefully, "I learn stories and gods, but I did not finished. I will to learn more, to make... to make with gods, to talk." She gestured helplessly with her free hand.
"To do rituals? Well, there's not much call for talking to your gods down here. You could work for one of us, make those beaded gewgaws on commission. Or you could go to the University," Marcan said. "Don't think they have anyone who knows Snowtalk, and they're always buying up knowledge. You teach them Snowtalk, they'd take you in."
Ekanu grimaced at the persistent misnaming of her people's speech, but held her peace. "They want to know Arhadikim why?"
"Selindra's ravens break my bones if I know, snow-girl -- not like we talk to you people, just use the Mohradmen to translate. My cousin learned a bit of Ohdab from them, few years back, which helps. University people teach well enough, but it costs." Marcan examined the rein, ran his fingers along his stitches to seal the rejoined leather, and coiled it beside him on the driver's bench. He picked up another bit of torn harness and continued his work.
"Cost?" Ekanu asked, picking that out from his words. She twisted the slack end of the reins, worried. She'd already used up her furs, her feathers, most of her beadwork, and all but one of her carved bone and ivory pieces to pay for this journey.
"Not you," Marcan said. "You'd be paying them, see -- trade Snowtalk for a place to stay." He squinted at his needle, which seemed lost in his large, weather-beaten hands. "Think they take some students more permanent-like -- not for money, but you swear to serve them for a while, so I hear. Might work for you. It'd give you a place, let you learn Common."
"Oh," Ekanu said, considering. The wind had sent her south for a purpose. Perhaps this was it, to teach the southerners about her people and to learn from them in turn.
"You take me to University, yes? Please?"
Marcan grinned, his crooked teeth flashing through his thick beard. "Sure, snow-girl. I'll show you the way once we unload. Might even see clear to paying you a bit. Five days past Sorla, coming up on Berlis tomorrow... we should be in Estara in three six-days or less."
Ekanu glowed with anticipation.
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Estara was everything Marcan said it would be -- two hundred thousand people, maybe more, caught in a maze of stone and brick, plaster and wood where a great river spread wide as it approached the sea. The wagons rattled over stone-paved streets, peeling away one by one as the traders headed to their homes and warehouses. Ekanu helped Marcan unload his furs and other goods -- some from her people, and others he'd traded for during the journey -- and spent the night sleeping on a narrow bed he said would belong to an apprentice, if he had one.
The next morning, he took her to the University. They walked through crowded streets, making their way past fruit carts, vegetable stalls, flower girls, men with trays of jewelry or ribbons, women pushing wheelbarrows of fish and shellfish, street corner preachers, musicians, beggars, storytellers, and all the other people walking from place to place. Finally, they reached an oddly empty square built around a fountain shaped like a leaping fish; an imposing stone building ringed three sides of the square, making it a dead end. No vendors claimed space here, and the comparative quiet was startling.
"There you go, snow-girl," Marcan said, waving his hand as they walked past the fountain toward the central wing of the building. "The University. Just knock on the door, tell them you'll trade Snowtalk for a place to stay and someone to teach you proper Common."
"Thank you," Ekanu murmured, clutching Kadeotak's lodestone as the reality hit her. She was in Estara, the great city of the southern lands, and unless she wanted to make bead-work for the traders, this University was her only way to find honorable housing.
"Drop by the warehouse sometime," Marcan said, clapping her on the shoulder. "Tell me how you're doing -- if you want to get away, I'd hire you. Maybe not as an apprentice, but you do good work."
"Oh. Thank you." Ekanu held herself still against her sudden wish to take him up on that offer -- she was a daughter of the people and she had faced far worse than a stone building. She nodded to Marcan, walked forward, and knocked on the iron-bound door in the central wing.
"Just a minute!" a voice called from inside, and there was a series of clattering thumps. The door swung open, revealing a disheveled boy with brown hair flopping into his face. "Welcome to the Estaran chapterhouse of the University the home of knowledge my name is Denifar Rollesdun how may I help you?"
Ekanu blinked. She understood more Common than she could speak, but she'd grown accustomed to the slower, drawling accent of the traders, not this breathless jumble. "Slow, please?" she asked tentatively.
The boy shook himself into full awareness and peered at her. "Hey, you must be a foreigner -- sorry I talk so fast. I'm Denifar, and I'm on door duty this afternoon. Do you have an appointment with any of the Masters?"
Ekanu shook her head. "I come from north, from Ice. I want to learn Common. Marcan says I can to trade Arhadikim -- trade Snowtalk -- for sleep and food."
"Soro Sura live again, you're a Snow Person!" Denifar leaned forward, curiosity lighting his face. "I always thought the traders were pulling our legs, saying people lived up where it's always frozen. What's it like?" He paused. "Oh, and what's your name?"
"Our land is cold, and beautiful," Ekanu said, ignoring his strange talk of legs. "I am Sulila Ekanu sur Shima nem Koshva. I want to trade for sleep and food."
"Well, it would be cold if it's all ice," Denifar said, slouching against the doorframe and shoving a hand in his pocket. "You'll have to talk to the Masters about your arrangements, but I bet they'll give you anything you want if you'll teach someone Snowtalk. Follow me... what was your name again?"
"Sulila Ekanu sur Shima nem Koshva."
It was Denifar's turn to blink at a rush of syllables; satisfaction warmed Ekanu for a moment, before she scolded herself for taking pleasure in disorder. "Sorry, I didn't catch that," Denifar said. His eyes lit up again. "They say a lot of barbarians have names that mean things -- like words, not just names. Does yours mean anything?"
"My people are not barbarians," Ekanu said firmly, having had quite enough of that idea during her journey south. "But my name is words. I Listen, once Laughter, once Bright Like a Star, yes? In Thousand Birds family."
Denifar tilted his hand back and forth, as if he was balancing something invisible. "So... your name right now is 'Listen?'"
"'I Listen,' yes."
"What's that in your language?"
"Ekanu."
Denifar nodded to himself and dropped his hand. "Without your old names, you're Ekanu Thousandbirds. Do you mind if I call you that? It gets the first part right, at least." He grinned hopefully.
Ekanu consider this. Her name would most likely be mangled some way or other, and as Denifar said, at least this version kept her chosen name accurate. And the switched order would be easier for these people to remember. "Ekanu Thousandbirds. I keep for now."
"Great!" Denifar said. "Now I can introduce you to the Masters, instead of just saying, 'Hey, a girl from the Snow People showed up and wants a place to stay.' Follow me -- they'll sort out how to trade languages, and I'll get you a bed and something to eat." He motioned Ekanu through the doorway, into the shadowy interior of the building.
Sparing a final nod for Marcan, who'd waited patiently through her conversation, Ekanu followed Denifar into her new home.
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The University, the masters explained when they agreed to trade languages for food and shelter, was more than just a building in Estara. It was an organization with chapterhouses all over the world, all talking to each other and sharing knowledge. Someday, they hoped to know everything there was to know. So they sent people to travel and make maps. They collected books. They watched the stars and the weather. They cut open bodies and tested medicines. They listened, and they learned.
Some people took what they learned and put it together in new ways, and then others studied what happened. Denifar did that -- he built complicated jumbles of metal and wood that used fire and water to move and do work that people did. He said it was called mechanics, and he was a mechanist. Ekanu thought it was extraordinarily peculiar.
"It's like... do you have bows and arrows?" Denifar asked, trying to explain in between bites of his evening meal. Ekanu, her mouth full of bread, shook her head in confusion.
Denifar gave her an odd, sidelong look and tried again. "Well, knives -- you must have knives, at least." He raised his own as an example; at her nod, he continued. "Basically, a knife takes the force from your body and changes it into something more useful -- if you push down on meat with a knife, it slices, but if you push with your hand, all you do is squash your food flat. Machines and engines take the force of things like rivers and fires and change it into something useful. They're just a little more complicated than a knife."
Ekanu struggled to make sense of that, of the strange words. "Machines tell rivers, stop to be lazy, so people can to be lazy, yes?"
"More or less."
"Useful," Ekanu said. "But they are still strange."
Denifar threw up his hands in exasperation, drawing the amused attention of their neighbors in the University's huge eating room. "Fine. If you don't study mechanics, what will you study? Choose something interesting, at least, not literature or history."
Ekanu shrugged helplessly. "I do not know what to study. I learn Common, but..." She trailed off, unsure how to express her frustration in this awkward language. She could hear the wind, faintly, whispering around the stone walls of the University, and she knew there was something more she was meant to do.
"Well, what did you do at home?" Denifar asked. "You could keep doing that here, whatever it is. Or you could join some of the paying classes and listen to what the masters teach -- maybe something will catch your attention."
"I trained dogs," Ekanu said, "to hunt and pull sleds. I sew, I decorate with beads, I learned woman-- learned to be woman. After I hear the wind, I learned spirits, to listen, to understand. Marcan says rituals." She slapped the table in frustration as the words slipped away from her tongue. "I want to learn something new! I learn old things, home things, then I come south why?"
"That makes sense. So tell the masters you want to sit in on their classes until you figure out what you want to study -- you can go on teaching Mistress Hasimmon how to speak Snowtalk while you think. Actually, I'll tell Master Farling to make you a schedule of classes. That should make things easier." Denifar jammed a piece of bread into his mouth and looked satisfied.
When she worked through his words, Ekanu decided it would be too much effort to argue, especially since he was being helpful. Besides, she wanted a friend. She missed Kadeotak.
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Estara was vastly different from the Ice or the Summerlands, but after several months, Ekanu was settling in. She could make herself understood in casual conversation and she was slowly correcting her grammar, despite the strange way Estarians strung their words together. She had watched people and talked to Denifar until she knew about the three Estarian gods, the rules of clothing, and how to eat without offending people. She had listened to lectures on history, politics, medicine, money, farming, theories of magic, reading ocean currents, training messenger pigeons, pictographic writing systems, and musical theory.
That last had been a revelation. She'd walked into the room, heard the rhythmic thrum and dancing arpeggios of a guitar as the master demonstrated different types of modal harmony, and stopped in shock as the wind eased aside in her soul, making room for a new sound. When the lesson ended, she'd asked to touch the guitar, and it had felt right in her hands.
"Music? Well, at least you'll be doing something instead of burying yourself in old books," was Denifar's reaction. "Master Sintarris will take charge of you now."
And so Master Sintarris had, to the extent of moving Ekanu out of the guest quarters and into the wing that held the practice rooms, the small concert hall, and the workshop for instrument repair and construction. Ekanu was grateful for her new permanent status in the University, even though she now lived on the opposite side of the complex from Denifar.
All in all, Ekanu thought she'd learned to fit in fairly well. But the small things, the ones she'd never even thought about because that's just the way things were, still made her stumble and wonder why the wind had set her on such a strange path.
Denifar walked into her room one autumn afternoon, whistling cheerfully. "Hey, Ekanu," he said.
"E sok," she told him, not acknowledging him with her eyes, and returned to her work. She was trying to read a basic primer on musical theory, with a dictionary and a few scraps of paper by her hand for reference.
"What's that mean?" Denifar asked, walking over and leaning on the edge of her desk.
She wasn't listening; she was alone.
"Hey, Ekanu? What's it mean, 'ay-sok'?" Denifar reached over and waved his hand over the pages, blurring the words she tried so hard to make sense of.
Ekanu closed the book, calmly, and glared at the boy. "E sok," she said. "I am alone. I say, then you make quiet, yes? Not interrupt!"
Denifar leaned back, raising his hands. "Hey, sorry, I didn't know. That's not how we do things here. If you want to be alone, you should close your door."
Ekanu blinked.
Denifar grinned. "It's your room. If you don't want people to come in, just close the door. Of course, I'll probably come in anyway, but I'm not a good example."
It had never occurred to Ekanu that this room was hers, to treat however she wanted. She was shocked when Master Sintarris first showed her where she would sleep and work during her years as his pledged student -- the single stone room was bigger than half of her people's summer houses, and certainly bigger than an ice house. And now Denifar said that she was allowed to close the door. She'd seen closed doors, but she thought people were simply trying to keep out the breeze or hold heat in. That was what doors were for... except Denifar said otherwise.
"When you are alone, you must be body alone?" she asked, hoping she had the concept.
Denifar looked at her oddly, that sidelong glance she'd learned to associate with the times they fell into one of the gaps between their peoples. "That's what alone means," he said. "Away from other people."
"Oh. My people, alone is in the mind -- we are not body alone," Ekanu said, trying to put bone-deep knowledge into foreign words. "We have no space, you see? Unless we go out ice or water, then we are body alone. We say, e sok, then people know we are alone. They do not see, hear. Pretend? I think you say we pretend we do not see."
"Strange," Denifar said. "If I tried that in the mechanists' hall, nobody would ever take me seriously. You have to find somewhere away from people."
"I will remember. Thank you," Ekanu said carefully. "When I am alone, I will close my door."
Denifar grinned again. "I'll come in anyway, you know."
Ekanu shook her head. Denifar was a good friend, but he was nothing like Kadeotak, and he was much more confusing than Estara.
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The day before midwinter, Denifar stole her guitar, shoved her books under her bed, and dragged her to a tavern. "It's Liar's Night, when the Serpent swallows the Star -- tomorrow the Star will burn through the Serpent's gut and chase away the darkness. But tonight we get drunk," he said, and he bought two glasses of beer and a pitcher to refill them.
Ekanu looked doubtfully at her glass. She'd only drunk alcohol four times, once for her spirit walk, and then once each year in the ice-break ceremonies when the people broke camp and turned south toward the Summerlands. Her people didn't have much alcohol -- they didn't have much to ferment, just berries gathered at the northern edges of Mohrad, where brambles grew thick in the soggy hollows -- so they used it sparingly, even in rituals. Mostly they drank melted ice, or blood.
She told this to Denifar, and laughed at the shock on his face. "Blood is life," she said. "Rich, it warms you. We don't waste life, don't waste anything. Winter kills if you waste."
"I guess," Denifar said doubtfully. "But it's still disgusting. Doesn't it clot?"
"No, no, is a treat! Fresh. When we make the kill, the blood is to celebrate. Life for life, you see? We can't wait, it doesn't keep. Not like this... this piss-water." Ekanu frowned at the glass of beer sitting on the table before her.
Denifar shook his head. "Sounds exciting, really, blood and death and all, but that's not for me. I'll stick to Estara and beer, thanks anyway. And it does not taste like piss!"
Ekanu smiled slyly. "You know this how? You have tasted both?"
"No! Ekanu!" Denifar reached across the table to swat at his friend. She ducked, laughing, and he drew back before he smacked a server weaving her way between crowded tables.
"This beer, it's thin, sour," Ekanu said after Denifar sat back again. "When my people make spirit-water-- make alcohol," she corrected herself, "we make it strong. Ours burns. Ours is thick with life, not like piss-water."
Now Denifar grinned. "Yes, but that's the beauty of it. If you drink whiskey or gin, you'll be drunk in no time. Beer lets you keep your head longer, so you can laugh at everyone else getting drunk. Also, it's cheap!"
"Cheap like piss," Ekanu muttered, but she raised her glass along with him and knocked back another swallow of the yellowish-brown liquid. It was just like everything else in the south, thinned-out and spread wide for all to see, not thick and rich and hidden against the killing cold. Here people didn't have to cram life into every moment, didn't have to listen for every word the spirits whispered. Here they could relax, could wait for the spirits to float along on rivers of thin beer and shout in their ears.
She was fairly sure Denifar didn't know the true purpose of drinking on midwinter's night, but then, he didn't need visions; he already had a calling. He didn't need to summon life with blood or alcohol; he bubbled over every moment, all of himself.
She'd make an offering for him tomorrow, nonetheless. Denifar was her friend, almost a heart-brother, and she wouldn't feel right without asking the spirits to see him truly and touch him gently. But until then, she'd join him in Estara's wilder, less focused celebration.
Ekanu sat in the raucous, smoke-filled tavern, glass cradled between her hands, and watched her friend get drunk on life.
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"Kayeyalo yamkua
Kunimshal solit, gapud, geme
Re kufoch; yelim gapad fimal
Ral solit, geme, vav."
Ekanu lowered the guitar and stared pensively at the stone floor, wishing absently that she'd let Denifar talk her into buying a wool rug to cut the late winter chill. Then she shook her head to clear away distractions.
It was her favorite song for as long as she could remember. One of her earliest memories, in fact, was listening to her mother sing her to sleep with the song. And she couldn't translate it.
"It's pretty," Denifar said from where he lounged in her doorway. "Where's it from?"
Ekanu frowned. How did he keep opening her door without her notice? After nearly four months, she should have learned to hear him, unless sneaking up on people was his magic, the way mending was Marcan's and calling the four directions was Kadeotak's.
Still, she was getting nowhere; she might as well give in to the distraction. "The song is from my people," she said, laying the guitar beside her on the narrow bed. "I want to translate it for Master Sintarris, but the words don't fit. I miss something always."
Denifar tilted his hand back and forth, equivocating. "Master Sintarris will go easy on you -- it's not as if he knows what you're translating from, after all. With Mistress Hasimmon gone to Banicia, nobody here really speaks Snowtalk but you."
"Not Snowtalk--"
"Arhadikim," Denifar finished with her, grinning. "I know, I know, the True Speech of the People, you're not a barbarian, and all Estarians are full of ourselves. We've danced that dance." He pushed himself off the doorframe and perched on the corner of her writing table, carelessly shoving the ink and blotter aside. "So what's the song about? Not all the deep stuff, and please don't go on about melodic traditions. Just tell me the story."
Ekanu sighed and ran her hands through her shamefully unbound hair, raking the strands from her face. "The story is short. A woman catches a piece of snow to give her lover, but it melts. They marry, they birth children, one day they see daughter of them catch snow-piece for her lover. A soft song, quiet life. My people sing of spirits, hunts, death, history. Not this. This song is... is yasvemakopoas, family song, for children, for lovers. Song speaks of paths, of patterns. Circles."
Denifar quirked an eyebrow. "Your Common slips when you think about home," he said dryly. "You should watch that."
"Yaaaah! I think of my people, I think with Arhadikim, not Common. I can't say the song in Common. It slips through my fingers, like the snow-pieces." Ekanu thumped the bed in frustration, startling soft twangs from the guitar. She glowered at the instrument. "I need a flute, not this misshapen whale. The song needs a flute, needs bone and sinew, not wood and metal."
Denifar ambled over and picked up the guitar, plucking a few idle notes; Ekanu winced as his fingernails dug into the wooden neck. "Don't use strings up north, do you?" he said. "That makes sense -- they'd warp or snap in the cold. And I think the word you want is snowflake, not snow-piece."
"Flake?"
"Yes. It means a small piece of something, thin -- like a chip, but generally flatter."
"Snowflake." Ekanu turned the word in her mouth, tasting it. It didn't sound as nice as snow-piece -- didn't have the nice resonance with peace and therefore harmony and therefore patterns, or peace and belonging -- but if it was the proper word, that would help with Master Sintarris.
"Give me," she said, holding out her hands for the guitar. Denifar laid the instrument in her arms and returned to the doorway, waiting.
"I think... snowflakes... your people make pictures, snow patterns, yes?"
"What, in the snow, or of the snow?" Denifar asked.
"Of, I think. Not with or in."
"Yes. Snowflakes have six sides, you know, sacred six." Denifar tilted his head sideways, considering. "There's a cathedral to Nesta in her aspect of Rain, somewhere in Rhence, that's supposed to have a snowflake chapel. You could ask Mistress Irruan -- Master Farling says she's been on pilgrimage all over Estaria, collecting sacred songs -- she might have seen it."
Ekanu shook her head. "Your gods are not mine. I enjoy to find pieces of my people among yours, that's all. Six is sacred. Things connect, as the song tells." She smiled at Denifar. "Now I have hope again that I will translate it."
"Sacred six? Is this a holy song?"
"Is life holy?" Ekanu countered.
Denifar tilted his hand. "Depends on who you ask, and what parts of life you mean."
Ekanu grinned. "Things connect, things do not connect. How can life have pieces? Snow has pieces, a life has no pieces. But each life is a piece. You see?"
"Maybe," Denifar said, shrugging. "A person's all one thing, but a group of people together make something else, is that what you mean? Hey, like a group of snowflakes make a storm! Is that what your song is about?"
"Yes. The song says, 'Kayeyalo yamkua kunimshal solit, gapud, geme. Re kufoch; yelim gapad fimal. Ral solit, geme, vav.' It means dry snow-pieces -- snowflakes -- dance in? dance with? on? I think in. They dance in the wind and make patterns. When one falls, another makes a new pattern. We also dance, make patterns, as we walk through life. So pieces change, but the pattern remains. Nothing is lost." Ekanu absently picked out the melody on the guitar as she spoke, not yet able to fit the words to the notes. "You see?"
Denifar nodded. "Master Sintarris should like it when you're finished -- it sounds pretty and it's philosophical. What do you call it, anyway?"
"Oh, Solutyamikach, 'Winter Dance.' But I think in Common, 'Snowflakes.'"
Denifar tipped back his head and laughed.
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Ekanu sat on the small decorative ledge at the top of the University clock tower, leaning back against the steeply pitched roof. Denifar stood beside her, arms spread wide for balance and face fixed in a scowl of concentration.
The late afternoon sun shone brightly in the cloudless summer sky, beating down on the stone and brick buildings of Estara, gleaming on the glass windows, and making the scattered gardens glow with color. The gilded dome of the Temple blazed downriver to their left, while the tiled roofs and mosaic walls of the old Imperial Palace reflected hints of orange and rose to their right. The shingles of the clock tower's roof soaked up the heat, keeping Ekanu's back warm despite the brisk wind that blew up here in the sky.
"Sit before you fall," she told Denifar.
He shuffled one step closer, but remained standing. "I won't fall -- that's not the way my death will come. Besides, I can see more than you can."
Ekanu shrugged. "If I want to see the rest of the city, I will move to different side of the tower, but this side has the best view. We picked it because of this, you remember? Sit." She tapped his shoe, lightly.
Denifar groaned but reached back to catch the roof with his hand, and lowered himself until he was seated beside her. "It was your idea to climb up here. Why are you getting cold feet now?"
"Cold feet?"
"Oh, getting scared, backing out."
Ekanu stored the phrase in her memory. "I don't have cold feet," she said. "I see no reason to ask death to notice, that's all. And I'm tired."
"I wasn't tempting death," Denifar said, scowling again.
Ekanu sat up a bit, frowning at her friend. "What bothers you, Denifar? You've scowled for days now, always in my room talking instead of in the mechanists' hall. I thought being apart might help, but you still scowl."
Denifar didn't answer for nearly a minute, but Ekanu had learned patience on the Ice. She knew how to listen.
Finally he pried a corner of loose shingle from the roof and hurled it off the tower, aiming for the wall of the chapterhouse compound. "My Aunt Ella -- Mistress Elisura Calera, you know, who studies the history of the Empire -- left for Merua last sixday. She said I'm old enough I don't need her hanging around all the time anymore."
Ekanu hummed in the back of her throat, but didn't say anything.
Denifar tossed another bit of shingle and continued. "She's my only family. And she says I don't need her, that we'll do better without each other." He yanked up an entire shingle, viciously, and began tearing it into pieces. "My parents died yesterday, six years ago. She didn't even stay to visit their graves."
Ekanu shifted a few inches closer, until her leg brushed against his. "People leave, but they also return. Few people leave home forever."
"But she's going home already -- she's from Merua -- and she's never liked Estara. I don't think she'll be back." Denifar dug his fingers under the edge of another shingle, working it loose. "Everyone leaves, you know. They die or they go to other cities -- the University doesn't let you settle down until you're old. I don't want to leave Estara. It's my home."
"To leave home is hard," Ekanu agreed, as she helped Denifar pry the shingle free.
He winced. "Sorry. You fit in well enough it's hard sometimes to remember that you're not from Estara. Hey, what was it like, leaving the Ice? Nobody's ever come from there before -- why did you leave?"
"I followed my path, that's all. On midwinter's night, in the midday dark, we give back our child names and ask the spirits who we are, what we should do. The wind spoke to me, said, 'Go south. Learn new words, learn new ways.' So I am Ekanu, because I listened to the wind. And now I am here." If it was hard for Denifar to remember that she was a foreigner, Ekanu reflected, sometimes it was equally hard for her to remember how different her life had been just one year ago. She hoped that was a sign of favor from the spirits, to ease her way.
"Huh," Denifar said, bracing himself as he tugged on the shingle. "You really think the wind talked to you? Maybe you just wanted to leave and imagined it."
The shingle came loose and Ekanu let go, giving it to Denifar. "No. I didn't want to leave. I felt only... I was empty, searching. The wind told me where to search." She fixed him with a stern look. "You don't lie about your gods. I don't lie about the spirits."
"Sorry. Your spirits are really different from the Three, that's all." Denifar tore the shingle in half and gave one piece back to Ekanu. "There -- thanks for helping me get it loose. And hey, maybe someday I'll hear a god and know what to do with my life. You'll help me figure out what it means if that happens, right?"
If they still traveled along the same path, of course she would, though she thought Denifar had already heard his spirit, even if he didn't realize that. Nobody had his passion unless they were walking a spirit path; someday, he might even look into his heart and find the words that had set his feet toward his machines. But there was no guarantee she and Denifar would be close when that day came -- even heart-siblings could lose each other in the snows -- which was probably not a good thing to tell him when he was upset about his aunt leaving.
"Yes," Ekanu said, touching the lodestone around her neck. "I will help, idaya."
"Thanks," he said, and his face said everything else he didn't have words for.
Ekanu nudged his leg and held up her half of the shingle. "Together?" She listened to her heart-brother count to four, and flung her half of the shingle into the air at the same time he did. Then she leaned over the edge, watching, and prayed for a sign. Let this be the right path. Let her not lose a second home, a second friend.
The two black flakes spun in the wind, weaving around each other as they fell, until they were lost from sight.
Ekanu leaned into Denifar's arm and smiled.
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End
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aichmetes, will you tell me if I'm rambling and being an idiot in any of the transitions? Also, I think I might get your story finished by this weekend... or at least by February. *headdesk* Dunno who I'll get to edit it, though (Vicky will be far too busy settling into Budapest) so you may have to put up with my unmediated quirks, rambling, and bizarre narrative voices. Sorry!ETA: Nevermind -- I tweaked it some and printed a clean copy. Don't worry about any edits.
