The Stone of the Stars Read online

  At the memory Ailia both smiled and sighed. Those childhood friends had grown up, grown away from her. Jemma was a wife and mother now, Jaimon a sailor on a merchant ship traveling distant seas. Loneliness overwhelmed her suddenly, and with it a feeling akin to desperation. I almost wish that there could be a war. At least it would be a change—

  Kevan Carpenter gave a sudden shout. “Sail—sail! The packet’s coming!” He jumped up on a tree stump and pointed.

  Ailia swung around, the kindling spilling from her apron. Far away on the western sea a mass of white canvas scudded like a cloud. One of the sailing ships that brought Great Island its mail and goods and news of the world was approaching the bay.

  With a little cry she darted forward, outrunning even the fleet-footed children in her haste to reach the wharf. Would there be any mail for her? A letter from Cousin Jaimon perhaps, telling of his voyages on the high seas? Or perhaps even the letter—the one from the Royal Academy in Maurainia, stamped with its official seal? Her heart pounded in time with her footsteps as she swept through the little village and on toward the harbor.

  THE CROWD AT THE WHARF was a motley one, and as shrilly excited as the gulls that wheeled above it. With refugees pouring in from the Antipodes to seek haven here, Great Island at times was like the world made small. First had come the westerners, Maurainian and Marakite and Rialainish merchants and missionaries, returning in haste to the Continent. Then as summer ripened, native Antipodeans began to flow out of the southeast to Great Island’s shores: Zimbourans with their sallow faces and coal-black hair, robed and turbaned Shurkas, even a few dark-skinned Mohara people out of the desert lands; they had all fled to this, the most far-flung of the Commonwealth’s colonies, a stepping-stone to freedom. Many of the refugees could not afford to go on to the Continent, however, and had to stop here. They already filled the only inn to capacity.

  To this inn Ailia came whenever she was able. Her parents would never permit her to enter its common-room full of rowdy sailors, but she liked to linger outside it on mild summer evenings. Perching on an empty keg or packing-crate, she listened eagerly to scraps of conversation that wafted out of the windows along with the reek of tobacco and the sour yeasty smell of stale beer. There were songs and tales of the sea and alien lands: stories of whales and pirate ships; of the strange pale lights—said to be ghosts of drowned men—that glimmered upon the rigging of ships in southern seas; of wrecks and buried treasure. With the arrival of the refugees, the tales had become more dramatic than ever before. There were harrowing accounts of the civil war in Zimboura, of the legions of the God-king storming cities and of the blasts of cannon fire that sent people screaming and running like panicked beasts. There were tales of perilous flights across the ocean in cramped and wallowing vessels, of tragic partings and families divided. She felt a pang of sympathy for these unlucky people, driven so far from their homes; but she could not help feeling a certain fascination too. What must it be like to live through such times? And the fugitives brought with them an aura of foreignness: tantalizing hints of their exotic homelands were revealed in their faces, their clothing, their accented speech.

  Ailia ran up to join the crowd on the wharf, squeezing between the tightly packed bodies as she gazed with hungry eyes at the packet. The ship was a fine new one, square-rigged, with a sea-green hull. The figurehead was a mermaid, wide-tailed and golden-haired, and the ship’s name was proudly proclaimed in gilt letters at the bows: Sea Maid. Ailia gave a long sigh of blended envy and rapture. To think that this very vessel had sailed distant reaches of the ocean, visited far-off ports of call! How glorious to be a sailor and roam the world!

  And then the sight of a sandy-haired young man striding along the ship’s deck made her spring forward with a cry of incredulous delight.

  “Jaim! Jaim!”

  The young sailor turned at her call and waved to her. “Hello there, coz!”

  She struggled past the people in front of her and bounded up the gangplank. “Jaim! We’ve not had a letter from you for so long! When did you sign on with this ship? Are you on shore leave now? Did you get to Maurainia, and the Academy? They hadn’t any message for me there, had they?”

  “One question at a time.” He smiled, swinging his haversack onto his shoulder.

  So that was that; had there been any news he would have given it to her right away. Swallowing her disappointment, Ailia continued with her interrogation. “But the books, Jaim? Did you bring me some books? You promised, in your last letter—”

  Jaimon grinned. “And here I thought it was myself you were so happy to see.” He lowered the sack again and rummaged in it. “Here you are—I couldn’t find the complete works of the Bard of Blyssion, but here are his ballads anyway—and the Annals of the Kings—”

  With a little squeal Ailia seized the two shabby old volumes, hugging them to her chest. “Oh, thank you, Jaim! You don’t know what this means to me. I’d give anything to be a scholar. I’d hoped to hear from the Academy by now, whether I was to be accepted or not.”

  Jaimon looked troubled at that, and did not meet her eager eyes. “Well, Ailia—you know it’s hard to get accepted there, even for men,” he said. “And it’s fashionable right now among wealthy folk to have an educated daughter. Only the ones with money get in, as a rule.”

  “But I applied for a scholarship,” Ailia replied. “Though lots of people apply for those too, I suppose. It isn’t fair, Jaim. I want so much to know all about history, and the poets, and philosophy. I’ve read all of Papa’s books ten times over, and no one else here has any that are worth reading. And reading is as close as I can come to seeing the world.” She was silent for a moment, feeling the ship’s deck rolling and swaying beneath her feet, moving with the sea’s own rhythm. “If only I were a boy, I’d stow away on the Sea Maid, and sail off with you.” She spoke in a light tone, but at her own words a fierce longing filled her.

  “You wouldn’t want to be a boy,” said Jaimon, tweaking one of her straggling locks. “There’d be no hair-ribands for you then, no sighing over romantic ballads—”

  “Yes—well,” Ailia amended as they descended the gangway together, “I just wish that girls could do all the things that boys do. Look at you, going off to be a cabin boy when you were only fifteen—sailing all over the world, when all I can do is stop here at home!” She glanced over her shoulder at the ship. “I’ve half a mind to do it. Stow away, I mean.”

  Jaimon chuckled. “You wouldn’t like it. When they caught you they’d put you to work in the galley.”

  She laughed with him. “Well then, I’ll disguise myself in male attire, and become a sailor.”

  “Even worse! They’d have you swabbing the decks. Believe me, a life at sea is no life at all.”

  “You don’t seem to be suffering, Jaimon Seaman!” She thumped him on the shoulder with one of the books. “Oh well: I must go home now, I suppose. I’d invite you to supper, Jaim, only it’s my turn to make it and you know my cooking is awful. Mamma has tried her best to domesticate me but it’s been an uphill battle for her. Anyway, Aunt Bett will want you to sup with her, of course. But you and she might drop by afterwards—and Uncle, too, if he’s back from fishing. Will you, Jaim? It would be such fun—like old times. And I do so want to hear all your news.”

  “Of course. Tell Aunt Nella to expect us. There’s something I must talk to you all about.”

  “Really? What is it, Jaim?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” He smiled again, but it seemed to her now that there was something not quite right about the smile—it seemed stiff and forced. He turned away, and reluctantly she left him. After a few paces she halted and turned back to ask him yet another question. But it never left her lips. Her cousin was standing motionless, staring out to sea: he was facing, she saw, south and east to where Zimboura lay.

  AILIA’S HOME WAS A peculiar structure, assembled by her father out of the odds and ends of his shipbuilding trade. Some of its windows were small round portho
les, and its roof was made of an old ship’s hull, the inverted keel serving for a ridgepole while the gunwales formed the eaves. Perched atop a gray granite outcropping not far from the shore, the house looked for all the world like a piece of sea wrack deposited by a high tide.

  Ailia sat in her little bedroom, her mind filled with gloom as she gazed about her. The wooden bedstead, one chair, night table, and washstand all stood in the exact same places they had occupied since her earliest childhood. Her books were neatly lined up on the bookshelf that her father had made from planks propped up on stones: even with the two new additions they were so few in number that she was forced to fill up the empty space with other things. There were treasures gleaned from the tidepools: seashells, pebbles, crabs’ carapaces, some hollow glass globes of the kind fishermen used to float their nets. Above the shelf was a round porthole-window, framing a view of meadow and sea. The latter’s gentle heave-and-sigh had lulled her to sleep at night and filled her days until the sound seemed a very part of herself, like the pulse of blood in her ears. Any changes in the order of life on the Island were cyclical, not permanent: the turning of the tides and of the seasons, the transits of sun and moon.

  She sighed and took up her comb. Her hair was inconstant in more than its hue: it changed its moods like the sea, on some days lying straight and smooth, on others rolling in waves. At the moment, however, its color was unmistakably mousy, and it had arranged itself in a mass of involved and intricate tangles that caught in the teeth of the comb. As she struggled to plait it she was aware of a growing frustration. I always wanted hair like the princesses’ in faerie tales, golden hair that was long enough to sit upon. It was one more item in the long list of things life had denied her. Adventure was another. Why did she crave it so? Adventures, when they happened at all, happened to men and boys. For a girl there were but two possible destinies, housewifery and spinsterhood: and both meant a life confined to the home.

  Sighing at the injustice, she left the bedroom and went down the small narrow passage to the main room of the house. Its rustic simplicity was strangely adorned by her father’s collection of exotic objects, gathered by him in foreign lands back when he was a sailor on a merchant ship. There was a sextant and a brass ship’s clock; the polished shell of a sea turtle; the huge white egg of a moa on a carved wooden stand. From the west wall stared an ebony ceremonial mask from Mohara-land, curiously elongated and with narrow slits for the eyes, which Ailia had found rather frightening when she was small. There was a magnificent conch from the Archipelagoes of Kaan that made the mussel and scallop shells in her own collection seem shabby little things, and a great spire of ivory that looked exactly like the horn of the unicorn in Bendulus’s Bestiary, though her father said it was really a whale’s tusk. There were several framed sea charts and maps of exotic lands hanging on the walls, some that her father had been to, some that even he had never seen.

  Her mother stood by the fieldstone hearth, stirring the pot that hung bubbling over the fire. She dipped out a mouthful and tasted it, grimacing slightly. “Is something wrong with the chowder, Mamma?” Ailia asked. “Did I forget the onions again? Or is the cod not cooked through?”

  “It tastes well enough, but it’s watery. You’ll never get yourself a man if your cooking doesn’t improve.” Nella glanced at Ailia’s neat braids. “And you really should be wearing your hair up now—that’s proper for a grown woman. It’s high time you started acting your age, miss.”

  “I hate being my age,” Ailia answered, not angrily but with a quiet sadness. She looked away from her mother and ran her hand up and down the smooth polished ivory of the whale’s tusk.

  Nella’s earth-colored eyes dwelt thoughtfully on her daughter. “Ailia, you know it’s time,” she said. “Time to be seeking a man, and a home and family of your own.”

  Ailia made no response to this statement, too often heard of late. The only men she knew really well were Jaimon and her father and uncle. She thought of the village fishermen and shipwrights, of their bellowing voices, the brutish strength of their backs and arms as they hauled on nets, or hefted loads of imported lumber from the dockyards, or hammered away on whale-ribbed skeletons of ships. She had dreams, fostered by faerie tales, of romances with handsome princes: but they were dreams only, and she preferred it so.

  Nella turned to her husband in appeal. But Dannor Shipwright was as always imperturbable, his sea-gray eyes watching without expression as Ailia ladled chowder into his bowl. “There’s young Kurth Fisher,” Nella continued, taking her own seat at the table. “He’s got a boat of his own now, and no sweetheart yet. And then there’s Armyn Cartwright, widowed only last year: a better, kinder man you’ll never find—”

  The ladle halted in midair. “But—he’s so much older than I am!” Ailia exclaimed. “As old as Papa—and I couldn’t look after all those children of his!”

  “Why, you like little ones—telling them tales—”

  “That’s different!”

  “You must learn to care for children, Ailia, or how will you manage when you’ve infants of your own? Your cousin Jemma’s only a couple of years older than you, and she’s got two babes already.”

  Ailia sat down and stared into space. The figure of a woman floated before her like a ghost: a grim-faced graying fishwife with crying children tugging at her skirts. Ailia saw many such women in the village, but this one was different: her eyes held a hunger keener than a knife’s edge, a hunger that had nothing to do with food. It filled Ailia with fear, for the woman was herself.

  “I don’t want to get married,” she said quietly, “ever.”

  “And what do you plan to do then, miss? Enter a nunnery? You can’t live with your father and me forever. You came to us rather late in life, you know, and I want to see you settled. It’s of your own good I’m thinking.”

  Again Ailia made no reply: there was a peculiar lump in her throat that made both speaking and eating difficult. Her mother said no more. Three different silences—placid, affronted, and dismayed—blended over the tabletop with the steam from the chowder-bowls. As soon as the meal was over Ailia leaped up in haste to gather and wash the dishes.

  “Hello in there!” came a shout at the door, to Ailia’s vast relief. Jaimon stood in the open doorway, the mead-mellow light of early evening spilling in around him, and behind him were Aunt Betta and cousin Jemma with her two little sons. As they entered in a babble of conversation Ailia felt her mood lighten. Her father and Jaimon now dominated the conversation, with their tales of ocean voyages. As she scrubbed the chowder-pot she listened to the men’s talk, journeying with them to faraway places: to bath-warm seas where the fish were bright as butterflies and the Archipelagoes lay in long necklaces of emerald; to the coast of Mohara-land, where crocodiles sunned themselves on the mud flats of the deltas and dark women stooped to fill clay pots with river-water. Even the stars were different here, and the moon hung upside down. The men’s talk moved northward along the Antipodean coast, and she followed them to Zimboura. Ships of the Commonwealth had once put into the ports of that heathen land to load the wares of the desert caravans, silk and incense and ivory; but even the sea-weary sailors never cared to linger in its teeming, violent cities. Farther to the north lay rocky and rugged Shurkana, where the elephants and rhinoceri grew woolly pelts, and the fierce proud Shurka people dwelt in their mountain fortresses.

  The conversation crossed the ocean then, traveling to the great western Continent: moving along the sunny southern coasts of Marakor with its vineyards and fragrant orange groves, then north again to the storied forests and mountains of Maurainia. There crumbling ruins—towers, temples, aqueducts—bore mute testimony to the ancient reign of the Elei.

  “The Elei claimed to be descended from their own gods,” Jaimon explained to her mother. “The gods came down to Earth from the skies, they said, and took human wives and husbands, and taught them how to read and write and build and farm.”

  “Imagine!” said Nella. “They were
as heathen as the Zimbourans, then.”

  “They had a great civilization, though, Aunt Nell,” her nephew told her. “Its art, its buildings—we’ve nothing to match it, nowadays. And they had it when our forefathers were dressing in skins and hunting with spears.”

  “The stories say the Elei came from the island of Trynisia,” put in Ailia, all pretense at dishwashing abandoned, “way up north. It was full of beautiful palaces and gardens.” Again she felt a little thrill of delight at her own words.

  “Trynisia’s only a story, Ailia,” said Jaimon. “No one has ever found it. It was just an imaginary country.”