The Stone of the Stars Read online

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course. Remember, the stories say that Trynisia lay in the far north, but they describe it as a warm country! And all that rot about dragons, and faeries, and buildings covered in gold and jewels! The king’s sent expeditions into the north sea, and they’ve found nothing up there but ice.”

  Nella waved her hand impatiently, as though at a bothersome fly. “Never mind all that nonsense. What is the news these days? Has the king’s daughter wed yet? And what of this new tyrant in Zimboura?”

  “Khalazar.” All the animation dropped from Jaimon’s face. “He’s overthrown King Jandar of Shurkana, so he rules all the Antipodes now. The sailors from the merchant service say he’ll make his way westward next, to the Southern Archipelago.”

  “He’s got his own people believing he’s some sort of god, hasn’t he?” Dannor commented.

  “So I hear. Power-mad, that’s what he is. He wants to rule the whole world.” Jaimon shook his head.

  “The world!” Jemma tightened her arms around baby Dani and looked with anxious eyes at her little boy Lem, who was sailing a toy boat across the worn planks of the floor.

  “Now, don’t you fret, my dear,” Aunt Betta soothed. “You know those heathens have been fighting each other since time began. It’s nothing to do with us.”

  There was a short silence broken only by the chimes of the old ship’s clock, ringing out the watches of a vanished vessel. Then Jaimon spoke again.

  “Things have changed, mam. The Shurkanese capital fell to the Zimbouran army in only three days. It’s these new cannons, they say: they’re a hundred times stronger than catapults or battering rams. Walls just crumple before them. You’re wrong if you think it doesn’t really affect us. Now that he’s got all of Shurkana’s lumber and pastureland, King Khalazar can afford to build a bigger fleet and feed his armies. Next he’ll take the Archipelagoes of Kaan, to harbor his Armada. And then he will be within sailing distance of our island.”

  He paused at this point to let his words sink in, but the faces turned toward him were blank. None of them could imagine anyone wanting Great Island. After a moment Dannor said as much.

  Jaimon raised his eyebrows. “No? It would make another fine base for his ships—one not so very far from the Continent.”

  “Oh, do you really think it will come to that?” cried Jemma in alarm. “Attacking the Continent?” The baby woke and began to mewl.

  Jaimon gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. “We’ll see. If he takes the Archipelagoes it will be a sign that he’s preparing for war against the Commonwealth. We can only hope our king will send warships to defend us.”

  “He will, if it comes to that,” opined Dannor in his slow, considered manner. “The Commonwealth protects its own. And I say this tyrant won’t dare touch a Commonwealth colony.”

  “Anyway, the fishing boats are coming in now, by the sound of it,” said Aunt Betta, turning toward the door. “I’m off to help with the catch, tyrant or no tyrant. Jemma, you just stay here and mind your little ones.”

  Nella looked over at Ailia. “Why don’t you help your aunt, Ailia? I’m sure she could use a hand. Leave the dishes to me.” She and Betta exchanged an odd, conspiratorial glance. It made Ailia feel uneasy.

  She followed her aunt down the well-worn dirt track that led to the harbor. The sun had gone in behind the hills, taking the golden light with it; in the west the sky was rimmed with rose, and to the east the line between sky and sea was already lost in shadow. Halfway to the wharves Ailia stopped short and gave an exclamation. “It’s much cooler down here by the water, isn’t it, Aunt Bett? I had better go back and get my shawl.”

  Before her aunt could say anything Ailia sprinted back along the path. Betta called after her, but she pretended not to hear.

  When she arrived at the house she slowed to a walk. Stealing up to the front door, she stood listening to the conversation within. The baby was now crying lustily and she had to strain to hear the adults’ voices. She felt guilty to be eavesdropping like this, and struggled to justify it to herself. She had to know what they were talking about in there. She was quite certain, from the looks she had seen her mother and aunt exchange, that it was not about wars or tyrant kings. It was about her.

  Finally she heard her name spoken. “Ah, this is foolishness, Nell,” said her father. “Tell Ailia. She’s got a right to know.”

  “Tell her what, Dann? That she won’t be going after all? Let her apply for the scholarship, you said. Give her something to hope for. I told you at the time I didn’t approve of giving her false hopes.”

  “I thought,” answered her husband after a pause, “that if she were to apply to the Royal Academy and be rejected, she’d resign herself to life here, instead of always thinking she’d have had a chance if only we’d let her try.”

  The letter! Ailia thought in dismay. Jaim brought it—why didn’t he tell me? Perhaps he couldn’t bear to break the bad news—

  “Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish!” Nella continued. “Just listen to this: ‘The essay was exceptionally well-written . . . a scholarship available as of this autumn . . .’ And ‘payment for your sea-passage and for the return trip of your chaperon.’”

  “The payment for the berths is here in this purse,” said Jaimon’s voice. “In money, of course—they don’t barter over there.”

  There was a rustle, a clinking sound, then silence. At last her mother spoke in a hushed voice. “I’ve never seen real coin. Is that silver? It’s so bright, so beautiful—and there’s so much of it!”

  Jaimon laughed. “Too much. Those Academy folks must think our island’s on the other side of the world. We could send the whole village to the Continent with that!”

  “Well, it must be sent back to them,” Nella said. “What a fix! Bless us all if the girl didn’t go and get herself accepted at the Academy, and what’s to be done when she finds she can’t go is beyond me. She’ll be even more miserable than she was before. Jaimon, this is all your doing. You’re the one who egged her on.”

  “Why can’t she go?” said Jaimon’s voice.

  There was a moment’s stunned silence. The heart of the eavesdropper leaped.

  “What’ll she do here?” continued Jaimon. “Marry some fisherman? Spend her life mending nets and gutting fish? She couldn’t bear to live like that, and you know it!”

  “Only because her head’s been filled up with foolishness out of books,” said Nella. “We should never have let her have them: they’ve given her wild ideas. As for marriage, you and Ailia used to get along so well, I’d thought you and she might make a match of it one day. Cousins do marry sometimes. But you up and went off to sea, and left her here all alone.”

  “Look here,” Jaimon said, “Ailia and I are good friends, always have been. But she doesn’t want to marry me, and why should she? Why marry at all, if she doesn’t want to? With what she learned over there she could be a teacher, or something.”

  “It’s out of the question,” Nella replied. “No Island woman’s ever gone away to be educated.”

  “You make it sound like something shocking, Aunt.”

  “She is our only child, Jaimon. And—if she goes she might never come back.”

  Her mother’s voice had changed—there was a hint of a quaver in it, and Ailia stood aghast, her heart wrung now as well as her conscience. As she began to back quietly away she heard Jaimon say, “I couldn’t wait to go to sea, but since I left there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought of this place and the folks at home. Ailia might love the Island more if she went away from it for a while.”

  But Nella had recovered herself. “I’ll not have her making an ocean voyage with the world in such a state. I’m amazed your parents will let you go to sea again—and you’re a man, not a slip of a girl. Ailia is not going anywhere alone, and that’s final.”

  There was no comment from Dannor, which could only mean that he agreed with his wife. Ailia turned away and headed down
the path, feeling dazed. She had never really believed she would be accepted at the Royal Academy, she realized now: it had just been a daydream, a faint hope that had nonetheless raised her spirits and made life endurable for a time. She had not allowed herself to think of what she would do when the rejection finally came. And, incredibly, it had not come after all: she had been accepted at the Academy—and she had not really thought what that would mean, either.

  My head was in the clouds, as usual. Me, travel across the sea—go live in another country all by myself! No, I wasn’t thinking. Of course they would never have let me.

  “Where’s your shawl then?” Aunt Bett demanded when Ailia joined her at the wharf.

  “Oh,” Ailia murmured. “I—I don’t really need it after all.”

  Some of the fishermen’s boats were docked, others were just coming in to shore. She had once loved to see them glide in out of the deepening dusk, the lamps at their bows and mastheads glowing, returning to the safety of the harbor and leaving the dark and dangerous sea behind. Now she yearned to take a boat herself and sail away—far across the sea, to the distant horizon, to the End of the World. She watched dull-eyed as her Uncle Nedman brought his boat in and secured it to the wharf, and he and his son-in-law Arran Fisher hefted the nets to spill out their catch of herring in a large glistening pile. Ailia joined the fishermen and their families as they gathered by the boats in little knots, pulling fish from the piles, slitting them open with the long gutting knives and tossing the offal into the harbor, where a few lingering gulls fought over it in a flurry of wings and jabbing bills. The birds’ indignant screams drowned out the few murmured scraps of conversation; most of the men and women worked in a wordless day’s-end silence, seldom raising their eyes from their beslimed and bloodied hands. Beyond the docks the sea lipped the shingled shore and then fell back with deep sighs, as though it too were weary.

  In the absence of talk, Ailia was once more left to her troubling thoughts, and she looked about her for some distraction as she worked. The sky above the tossing forest of masts was now candled with stars, flickering as if a breath might blow them out: but though they wavered they shone undimmed, for the moon had not yet risen. In the north was a dance of light, shifting and shimmering like sun-ripples on a boat’s hull: the aurora borealis. Ailia remembered what an old fishwife had told her about it long ago: “’Tis the lights of the Fairfolk’s cities reflecting in the sky. They hold high revels in their kingdom tonight.” Perhaps Jaimon was wrong and Trynisia was real after all, and some Elei were still living there, and she would go look for them one day . . . Or perhaps she would sail west, follow the wheeling motion of sun and moon and stars to the Continent, and Maurainia . . . But these were only idle fancies and at last she knew it. She looked at the Sea Maid, swaying at anchor with sails furled, and she felt a stab of longing sharp as any physical pain. If only she had been born a man, like Jaim! Or anything but a woman! Birds could migrate each year to the southern isles, and perch in the carved eaves of heathen temples, seeing with their little ink-drop eyes wonders that she would never know. This island is the only place I will ever see. Only this, until I die.

  Averting her eyes from the scene before her, Ailia fixed her eyes on the stars instead and let her mind wander among them, far from the stench and slimy feel of the dead fish in her hands. Dannor had long ago taught her the names of the major stars and constellations—as a sailor, of course, he knew the night sky by heart. Her own name meant “Lodestar” in the old Elei tongue—an appropriate name for the daughter of a sailor, though she thought it quite romantic too. “Faranda—Berilion—Anatarva,” she murmured the star-names below her breath while she worked, as though incanting a spell. Two planets were visible tonight: yellow Iantha, high in the zenith like a spark flown out of a fire; and low in the west a great welling droplet of water-blue brilliance, brighter than anything else in the sky. That was Arainia, which old poems called the Morning Star, though sometimes it shone in the evening as now. Down on the point, in the squat stone tower where the sea-beacon burned, a statue of the goddess Elarainia still stood in a tall niche. She was carved of gray stone, one hand raised in a protective gesture as she gazed out to sea. Her face was worn away by storm and flying spray, but one could still make out the shape of a starry diadem above it. To sailors in olden times Elarainia was a guardian spirit: Almailia, Star of the Sea. The Patriarchs of the True Faith, however, disapproved of polytheism in general and female divinities in particular: her name had not been invoked on the Island for hundreds of years.

  Overhead the Merendalia, the Starry Way, laid its luminous track across the night, and to either side of it were arrayed the constellations of late summer: the Sphinx, the Centaur, the Dragon with his starry coils. As Ailia looked up at them her heart filled, as always, with a poignant yearning. To the ancients the constellations were not mere guides for navigators, but the dwelling places of their gods, stellar states within a Celestial Empire. And long ago the Elei (so the old tales said) had journeyed to this sky-country, the homeland of their divine ancestors, riding upon winged dragons or in magical flying ships.

  “What in the world?” exclaimed Aunt Betta, setting down her knife.

  Ailia, in the act of passing a fish to her aunt, turned to look at her in puzzlement. Aunt Bett was staring and pointing seaward, as were all of the other villagers. And now Ailia saw the lights shining out there on the darkened sea, dozens and dozens of them. More fishing boats approaching shore? But all the boats were in: and anyway Bayport’s entire fishing fleet wasn’t half so large. These lights might have belonged to a lamplight town adrift upon the waves. And they were drawing closer as she watched.

  The herring slipped through her fingers to the ground. Could it be King Khalazar? she wondered, and felt her heart lurch beneath her ribs as she sprang up. Was Jaim right—is the Armada coming here?

  As the fisher folk stood gesturing and exclaiming to one another she turned and fled back up the path toward her home.

  THE VILLAGE WAS IN AN UPROAR. People streamed down to the harbor, lanterns in hand, and somewhere a man’s voice was shouting—the town crier, probably. Staring out through one of the kitchen windows, Ailia could see the lights swarming around the wharf, and imposed upon them the transparent reflection of her mother’s figure as Nella rushed to and fro, flinging clothes and pots and loaves of bread into an old sea chest of Dannor’s.

  “What are you doing, Aunt?” Jaimon demanded, coming in the front door with Betta and Dannor.

  “We must go,” Nella babbled, “away from the sea. We’ll go inland, to the barrens—”

  “Be easy, Nell,” her husband interrupted. “The ships are not Zimbouran after all. They’re Kaanish.”

  “Kaans!” Ailia cried. “But why have they come here, Papa? Does this mean the Archipelagoes are—”

  “The southern islands are taken,” Jaimon told her. “They say Khalazar has annexed them, and the Northern Archipelago will be next. It’s just as I said: the Armada is on the move.”

  Ailia darted past him out the open door and stood at the top of the path, staring down at the harbor and the alien vessels there. There was one large ship, but most were not much larger than the fishing boats of the Islanders. All looked weather-beaten, some lying low in the water as though they had sprung leaks, with waves lapping at the staring eyes painted on their prows. Their ribbed sails were tattered, and their decks crowded with people.

  She hastened back inside again. Jaimon was arguing with her mother. “Aunt Nell, if the Zimbourans come here they will take the whole island. Coast and barrens and all. It’s no use hiding out in the wilds. They’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

  Nella made no reply, only put her hand to her heart. Jaim swept a grim gaze about the room. “The Kaans are only stopping here to get a few supplies, and mend their ships if they can. But even if they can’t, they’re still sailing on—as soon as possible. They would rather risk drowning at sea in those rotting tubs than wait here for the Armada. Now
do you understand?”

  “But what can we do, Jaimon?” wailed Aunt Betta. “We can’t leave the Island.”

  “No,” Jaimon admitted. “Not right away, at any rate. You should go to the Continent, to Maurainia; but fishing boats will never cross the ocean, and the Kaans’ boats are overcrowded as it is. That leaves only the Sea Maid, and my captain says he doesn’t believe in the danger. He has a cargo to pick up in the Northern Archipelago, and he’ll not change his course—not unless he’s paid in money. The fool!”

  “But we have money!” Ailia cried, leaping forward. “We’ve got all that silver coin from the Academy.”

  Her mother stared. “How did you know—”

  “I overheard,” Ailia interrupted, and turned to Jaimon. “There was enough to send the whole village, you said.”

  He looked a little taken aback. “I was only joking. The silver’s meant to buy passage for two.”

  “But on a proper passenger ship, Jaim, with cabins and everything. Wouldn’t a cargo ship cost less? Your captain might take more of us for the same amount.” Ailia faced her father. “Please, Papa! I’m sure the Academy people won’t mind us using it, in an emergency like this. We needn’t stay in Maurainia forever: only until the danger is over, and we’ve earned enough money to come back again. And the Kaans must come with us too—they will never make the crossing in those leaky boats of theirs. If we haven’t enough money for all of them couldn’t we pay the captain the silver we’ve got, and promise him the rest on arrival? We can earn it when we get there. And anyway someone must get a message to the king. Once we’re on the Continent we can tell him what’s happening, and ask him to send some more ships to pick up the other Islanders. Or even some warships, to defend the Island. We must take the Sea Maid to Maurainia—” Ailia was obliged to stop at this point, as she had run out of breath, but her eyes remained fastened on her father’s.

  “I’m not leaving,” said Dannor, his face set in obstinate lines. “The Island’s my home. I told you, Khalazar won’t dare touch it.”