We Never Talk About My Brother Read online

  to keep him from running to death, as he wanted to run.

  Then my father was calling the men and the dogs to his side—

  oh, he was as angry as ever I saw him that day!—

  saying, “Fools, you are led by a fool, will you pay for my pride?

  There is only one way to capture a unicorn—only one way!”

  Fifth Tapestry

  I cannot remember her—

  when I try,

  I see only her handmaiden,

  sleek and sly.

  She may have been beautiful

  past belief—

  I thought her handmaiden

  looked like a thief.

  She may have been ugly,

  a fool, a boor—

  my father cared only

  that she be pure.

  She sat in a garden,

  quiet and alone.

  I would not have gone to her—

  I would have known.

  But the unicorn watched her

  with his seadeep stare.

  Perhaps he did know,

  and did not care.

  For he came to her call

  and put his head down,

  with a long white shiver,

  in the folds of her gown.

  She played with his mane,

  she stroked his head;

  and the dogs drew near,

  sniffing where he bled.

  He looked in her face—

  she was still as a wall—

  then he lay down beside her,

  looking strange and small.

  To see him so

  made my inside ache,

  but the handmaiden smiled

  like a sleeping snake,

  and she winked and she signed

  that the beast was tame.

  And a man blew a horn,

  and the hunters came.

  Sixth Tapestry

  I still can see the killing,

  as I saw it then:

  the wholeness broken by the grunting men,

  the beauty spilling,

  his eyes brilliant with hurt,

  neck starting to sag—

  then the dim horn plowing the dirt,

  and the dogs lapping his blood with their tails awag,

  his white breath stilling.

  His tongue hung out, all muddy, and his hide

  turned stone-gray as he died.

  They brought him to the castle, slung across

  a horse’s back, upon some sticks and moss.

  Dogs yapped, trappings rang,

  but no one sang.

  My mother waited there,

  and all her ladies with their crackly hair

  whispered like fire,

  and my father went to stand with her.

  I saw how proud and sorrowful they were.

  All my desire

  was to wake up and see

  him shining, fierce and free,

  as he was meant to be.

  And when they bore him past where I stood with Pepée,

  we looked away.

  Seventh Tapestry

  But oh, in the morning—

  Oh, in the morning!

  Oh, in the morning, when we came

  out to go walking, and saw him blaze

  up from the field like a shout of praise,

  shining and shining and shining,

  too bright, too living, to have a name.

  Pepée started barking and running in circles, and I—

  Oh, then I did cry.

  All in the morning, there he lay,

  collared and kept with a silver chain,

  red with the pomegranates’ sugary rain,

  shining and shining and shining,

  with a fence like a ribbon to make him stay.

  His horn was all sunset and spindrift, all rainbow and rose—

  Pepée licked his nose.

  All in the morning, feeling his breath

  play in my hair as he stamped and blew,

  just for a moment I knew what he knew,

  shining and shining and shining—

  that nothing could hold him, not even death;

  that no collars, no chains, no fences, as strong as they seem,

  can hold a dream.

  CHANDAIL

  One of the great pleasures for me in The Innkeeper’s Song—still my favorite of my own novels—is that it provided me with a world to sneak back to at the least opportunity, with characters new and old on hand to tell me their stories. This one came to me in the voice of my dear Lalkhamsin-khamsolal, also known as Sailor Lal, Swordcane Lal, Lal-Alone, Lal-after-dark... the black woman mercenary with, as she says sourly, an inconvenient conscience. She is an old woman now, long since returned to the life originally intended for her: that of a traditional storyteller, living alone in a desert hut, with an apprentice to provide for her and learn her ancient art. Here the story she shares concerns a mysterious sea creature and the one person Lal has hated all her life, for the best of reasons.

  Lal says. Cape Dylee is not like other places.

  Yes, it does resemble Leishai, Grannach Harbor and the Karpache headland in being almost perpetually cold and misty, clearing only when the shrill laschi winds of late summer dispel the haze for a little while. Myths and legends—gods, even—always seem to be born in such places, possibly because one’s vision is generally so clouded. But Cape Dylee is different, all the same.

  My full name is Lalkhamsin-khamsolal. In other times and lands I have been known by such names as Sailor Lal, Swordcane Lal, Lal-Alone and Lal-after-dark, but all that was very long ago. Now I am older than I ever expected to be, and I live here, in this desert hut, and I tell stories, which is what I was always meant to do, and people come far to hear them, as you have. Listen to me now, listen to an old woman, and perhaps I will make you very wise. Perhaps not.

  Cape Dylee is indeed different from all other peninsulas isolated at the backside of nowhere, and not merely because of the fishermen’s boots and trews and hooded capes for which it has become known. Cape Dylee is where you find the chandail.

  No, they are altogether of the sea. I too have heard the tales that have them walking on land like men, but this is fable. As many legs as they have, and not all of them together capable of supporting their great soft bodies out of water. They can climb, slowly, but surprisingly well, employing all four of those finny arms to haul themselves up on any jutting bit of rock, or even a wharf now and then. Origin of the mermaid legend? Naked half-women languidly combing their hair to lure poor sailors and fishermen? You have never seen a chandail.

  They are not shapeshifters, chandail, though it is easy to see why folk believe them so. Ugly, yes, marvelously horrific; yet if you look at them long enough, sometimes something happens to your sight, and you can actually see them becoming beautiful right before you, so beautiful that your eyes and mind hurt together, trying to take in such splendor. And yet they remain exactly what they are: dankly reeking multi-legged monsters, like some grotesque cross between a jellyfish and a centipede. One knows that... one always knows that... and yet more than once I have forgotten to breathe, watching that impossible alteration, feeling my eyes filling with tears that I cannot lift a hand to brush away. Do they know—do they realize what is going on in the humans who stare at them so helplessly, repelled and yearning by turns, watching them ripple and shift like rainbows? Some days I think one thing, some days another.

  You cannot ever tell from their faces. Oh, yes, they do have faces, in a sort of way; indeed, there are moments when they look heartbreakingly not quite human, nearly resembling plump-cheeked children, except for the huge slanted eyes (which are not really eyes) and the little parrot beak. Then—so subtly that you cannot tell where the transformation starts and ends—all features slide away, drift out of proportion into a shapelessness that the eye can never name or contain. What do they look like when that happens? Like clouds. Like massive, fleshy clouds, swollen with storm and stink. When t
he wind is right, you can smell them before you see them.

  No, they cannot speak. They do not need to.

  On Cape Dylee they say, “Ask advice of a wind in the grass—go to a rock-targ for comfort—but heed no word of the chandail.” Not that they chat with humans in words; you hear them inside. No, not in your head—I said inside, making pictures in your bones and belly and blood, pictures that you feel in the way that you feel who you are, without having to study or remember it. They can impart a wondrous truth in this manner—a truth that lives as far beyond language as I live beyond the place where I was born—or they can picture you such a lie that the word itself has no meaning, a lie you will forever exalt over the truth, knowing all the while, every minute, what it is. Believe this—oh, for your soul, believe it. Lal says.

  Being a storyteller myself, I have been drawn all my life to this thing the chandail can do; yet I am no closer to understanding its nature, or theirs, than I am to knowing, finally, what I am besides a storyteller, and a wanderer, and... someone my mother would not have liked very much. What I do know certainly is that the chandail are neither sea monsters nor magicians, nor mindreaders, as those to whom the exact name matters so often assume. You might call them soulreaders, if you choose. It is no more accurate than the other words, but it will do.

  The fishermen there have more ancient legends and superstitions about the chandail than they have about fish. Depending on where you drink and with whom, you can hear that the First Chandail fashioned a world before this one of ours: gloriously beautiful, by all accounts, but crafted all of water, which was no problem until the Second Chandail made the sun. More wondrous yet, that must have been for a while, what with the new, new light bending and shattering so dazzlingly through those endless droplets—a rainbow creation, surely. Except, of course, that it melted away, by and by, and sank back into empty dark until the world we know came to be. I have been told, over many a tankard of the equally legendary Cape Dylee Black, that the chandail grieve still for that lost wonder, and would gladly call it back to drown ours, if they could. A sailor I know tells me that he can hear them planning in the night, in the little waves that chime and murmur against the sides of his ship. He says that they will never give up.

  Another tale has it that the chandail could speak once, when they were first born, at the beginning of things. They were given the waters of this world for their dwelling by the fishermen’s god, Minjanka, who instructed them not to be greedy, to share the catch with their neighbors, and always to warn the humans when they sensed a storm coming. The legend says that for a time the chandail did as they were ordered; but presently they become restless and mischievous, and began sending the fishermen off with word of vast shoals of herring and lankash and roe-laden jariliya to be found along the south shore, while they gorged themselves giddy half a mile west. In the same manner, they would divert the fish from their usual sea-roads, teasing and cozening them to flee this unseen predator, or swarm in search of that promised prey. Fish are quite naïve, and lack humor.

  The same could be said for gods, I have often thought. Minjanka grew angry at this and took speech from the chandail, which was a mistake, more of a mistake than perhaps even a god could have known. Silent and patient, forced to find some other way of communicating, the chandail learned to lie in pictures, in images—in waking dreams—and found themselves newly able to deceive human beings to a depth and a degree that words could never have achieved, while the great Minjanka remained as ignorant as a fish. Gods can send dreams themselves, but they cannot eavesdrop. Always remember this; it’s the only true privacy we have. Lal says.

  I am not sure, even now, whether the chandail actually understand the difference between our flawed reality and the perfection of falsehood. Why should they, when we ourselves hardly do? See now, I tell the old stories, and train a young disciple to tell them as they should be told, as she will tell them after me. But no one knows better than I that what I teach through those tales is not truth, not as you and I know what that word is supposed to mean. My truth is told through illusion, through fraudulence, through purest mendacity—why should it be any different with the chandail? In that way, if in no other, we may be kin.

  They are sociable, in their way: it is not uncommon for a chandail—or several, for that matter—to follow a boat for days, keeping pace effortlessly while they babble to the crew in outlandish hallucinations, flooding them with antique gossip of the sea lanes, with uncanny fancies and foreshadowings, with memories most likely not their own. But they feel like our own—oh, that they surely do, even if one knows better. They feel like the memories we should have had, the dreams that belong to us, though we had no hand in their shaping. Even now, merely speaking of them, a dozen lives later, I can smell those memories. I can taste them.

  I was very young when I met the chandail—at least it seems so to me now. It came about some time after I parted from the man I ever afterward called my friend, the wizard who took in, and sheltered, and trained, and loved (though he never once used the word) a child newly escaped from slavery and half-mad with terror. I had no desire ever to leave him. Indeed, I pleaded against it with all my heart. But he judged it time, and there never was any arguing with him. So I bundled what I owned, along with the gifts he gave me (not all of which needed to be packed up, or could be), and I set off along the road he recommended, which in time took me to Leishai, on the west coast. He always knew what I needed, that infuriating old man.

  At Leishai I found work on a fishing boat called simply The Polite Lady. I was at home on that pitching, yawing deck the instant I set foot there, as though I had been bred and raised fishing day and night for jariliya and never coming ashore, like the families I used to see in the bustling harbor of Khaidun, where I was born. I did what I was told, scrubbing and shining, patching and sluicing down, and when I was ordered to lend a hand with the halyards or the anchor or the nets, I did that too, and felt as though I had come home. No... no, I do not mean that, not as it sounds. I already knew that I could never go home.

  I was stolen and sold when I was very young. I never saw my family again. Perhaps they sought me and still do; perhaps they shrugged. The one thing I know is that they never found me. I was sure that they would, for a long time.

  When that passed, between one moment and the next—I was cleaning fish at the rail, just abaft the galley, as I recall—then I became Lal, there on the spot, Lal-Alone. Nothing dramatic about it; hardly even any sorrow or pain. All done, that, all gone over the side with the fish guts, gone with the salt spray wind-whipped across my face. I barely noticed, to tell you the truth.

  But the chandail did—at all events, they began calling to me that same night. Coincidence it very well may be. I am only telling you what happened.

  It may have been only one chandail—you never do know—but at the time there was no way I could have believed that a single creature could overwhelm me so with visions of my parents and the lost life already so far behind me. I dropped all the fish and sagged against a bulkhead, weeping as I never had—never—when certain things were being done to me. Because these were no ghostly, wispy, transparent glimpses of scenes remembered wrongly: no, these were real, and more than real—beloved faces and voices and bodies, all pressing so close, so desperately joyous to have me back at last. My little brother’s nose was running, as it always was, and my mother was already fussing with my hair, and my father called me Precious. He had other pet names for his other children, but I was Precious.

  It was not an illusion. Whatever I know today about the powers of the chandail, I will die believing that it was no illusion. Lal says—oh, Lal says.

  And yet... and yet, even then I did know that it could not be—that they were not real here, in this place where I was, alone on The Polite Lady with my blood-slick fish, my shipmates and the featureless, slow-heaving sea. I tried to tell them. With my arms around as many as I could hold—and I felt and bumped and smelled them all—I cried out to them, “Go away, I
love you so, go away, go away!” But they stayed.

  It was the Captain who finally came to my aid. She was a stocky, red-haired, middle-aged woman, an easterner who spoke with the strange, thick Grije accent that seems to swallow half the vowels. She marched through the crowd around me as though they were none of them there—which, of course, for her they weren’t—and she lifted me roughly to my feet with one calloused brown hand, saying, “So, so, girl, and now you have know chandail. Welcome aboard.”

  I could not speak for the tears. The Captain took me down to her cabin—no more than a bunk that she had for herself, while the rest of us slept in hammocks—and she gave me a full schooner of barleywine and waited patiently until I grew quiet, only sniffling a little, before she said, “They will do it again. You must accustom.”

  “No,” I said. “No, I cannot bear it. I will have to get off, get off the boat.”

  The Captain smiled. “Then no fishing ever here, no fishing anywhere near—you will go east, where folk talk like me, and no chandail. But you like here, yes?”

  I nodded. I was sold east, the first time, and I swore before all the gods of my people that I would never in my life return there. I did, though, later on.

  “So,” the Captain said again. “So you learn not to listen. Must learn,” and she caught me by the wrist, peering hard into my face with her hard blue eyes. “Chandail mean not much harm, not much good either. To them, our minds like—” she groped for a word—“like toyshop, like a playroom, our minds. Everything they find,” and now she made a gesture and a face as though happily tossing invisible objects into the air with both hands, “play. You understand? All for them, no matter the rest, no matter us. You cry now—listen, we all cry over chandail, one time. One time, no more. You understand?” She waited until I nodded again. “Got to be, or we can’t live. No cry no more—back on deck now, best thing.” She slapped my shoulder heartily, and we went up together.

  But I cried a good deal more before I finally became immune to the sendings from the sea. The worst of it, in a way, was not the faces, racking as it was to feel myself surrounded again and again by all the loves of my amputated innocence, knowing beyond any self-deception that even though I could actually touch and hold them, I could not touch them, if you see what I mean. That was bad enough; but my particular horror was of the places—the sudden dazing visitations from gardens I had toddled through, woods where I had slipped away from my brothers, giggling happily to myself as I heard them shouting for me; the wharves and harbors where the sea-wonder had first taken hold of me. I was a long time learning not to see them, those hideaways of my heart. But the Captain knew. I did learn, like the others, because I had to.