Read The Silences of Home for Free Online Page B

rains not come every year? Are they not a part of your . . . pattern?”
    “Yes, they do come, always—but they are never the same. And we cannot leave our houses or gather lynanyn. Lynanyn fall without being ready. It is very dark, even during our sleeping. It is a very. . . .” For the first time she saw him hesitate, “. . . strange time. So we fear it.”
    “I see,” Lanara said. She put her elbows on her drawn-up knees and stared at the lynanyn trees across the river. The leaves glinted violet as the sun slipped westward.
    “No,” he said, surprising her again, “you do not see. You do not understand what change is, to shonyn. It is not so terrible for you. And you do not live by patterns. You hardly seem to have stories.”
    Lanara arched her brows at him. “Apparently, while Cannin was learning nothing about shonyn, you were coming to a full understanding of Queensfolk.”
    They looked at each other until he looked away.
    She is angry. He sees it in the set of her jaw and shoulders. He wants to say he is sorry, to tell her that he actually knows nothing at all of Queensfolk, but he does not, since his words might anger or confuse her again. He waits in silence, looking across the river but still seeing her beside him, her blue and green tunic and the brown of her long, slender hands.
    He understands shonyn women. He has touched one or two, lying in houses dim before dawn. Smooth blue skin and curls that cling to his fingers; voices that murmur with the river. He has felt desire as a slow, steady warmth, ebbing and flowing in the circle of his nights. He does not recognize what he feels now. It is pain without a place on his skin.
    “I am sorry,” she says into their long silence. “I should not have spoken to you that way. We obviously have much to learn from each other.” She smiles at him as if she is tired. “I would like to talk with you again. Perhaps we could meet here every day at this time, before the children come for their lessons. Would you agree to this?”
    Nellyn hears shonyn voices, though the words are indistinct. They are gathering now, to tell their tales and to listen. And he does not want to join them; he acknowledges this with a rush of terror and relief. “Yes,” he says to Lanara, and feels the pain prickling in his bones and blood. “I agree to this.”
    She tries, from that day on, like Soral, to teach him time. “There is a beginning, middle and end to all things. Lives, experiences—this river,” she adds, tracing a long sinuous line in the sand with her finger. “We call it the Sarhenna, after the queen who discovered it. See—this is its shape. Its source is here, deep in the desert. Here is your village. And here is the river’s end, at the town of Fane, on the Eastern Sea.”
    Nellyn looks at the line, and at her finger. There is sand beneath its nail. “The river is,” he says. “It flows here, always.”
    She nods. “Yes, of course—but ‘here’ is only one part of the river.”
    “I do not understand. The river here is all,” he says, thinking she might frown—but instead she smiles.
    “You should come with me. We’ll get on a boat and sail to the sea and I’ll make you understand
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    He feels blood rushing to his cheeks and looks away from her abruptly.
    “I am joking,” she says. “Being . . . light-hearted with you.” After a moment she says, “Smile at me, Nellyn.”
    He gazes at the drawn-up flatboats until they blur into one black stain on the riverbank. “I apologize,” she says at last. “Again. I feel so clumsy sometimes, talking to you.”
    “I also am sorry for this.”
    She says briskly, “Well then, if we’re done apologizing to each other, let’s continue.”
    When it becomes apparent that she will not be able to explain time to Nellyn, they talk of other things: Luhr’s spires and fountains and the marketplace where people from all over the land gather. “But no shonyn,” he says, and she shakes her