The Ghost Sister Read online

  FROM THE REALM BEYOND

  Mevennen closed the book that lay on her lap and looked out across the orchard. It was almost dark now. The sun was gone behind the ridge of the mountains and a star hung in the branches of the mothe tree. Eleres was fast asleep. And with a sudden start, Mevennen saw that a ghost was standing beneath the trees.

  Mevennen could see the ghost very clearly, as if the spirit were solid. Mevennen gaped at her. She did not think that the creature was a ghost in the same sense as herself; not shur'ei, landblind. This was surely a real spirit: she looked nothing like Mevennen's people. The ghost was tall, and at first Mevennen thought she was wearing some kind of helmet. Then she realized that what she had mistaken for metal was in fact hair: dark golden braids wound around her head. The ghost's skin, too, was gold, the color of the river shore, and she wore trousers beneath a knee-length robe-maybe indigo, though it was difficult to tell in the last of the light.

  Through a haze of amazement and alarm Mevennen wondered who the ghost might be, perhaps someone from the far past, when legend said that they had been a different people. We were not the same, the legends began, when we were magical. When we lived in Outreven, long ago …

  With thanks to …

  … Shawna McCarthy and Anne Groell for their patience and professionalism …

  … everyone in the Montpelier Writing Group (especially to Peter Garratt for the title and Neville Barnes for his invaluable criticism) …

  … to David Pringle,for the encouragement … … to Roger McMahon for putting up with the literary obsessions of his employee … … and most of all to my parents and to Charles.

  Prologue

  Eleres ai Mordha, journal

  It was the summer before my second migration, the summer in which Sereth killed the child, that I finally learned to hate and fear my own nature. And although it was so bitter at the time, I am glad that I wrote down what happened to us all, so that I can remember. Now that I am an old man, my memories slip by like drops of rain into the sea; I am neither satahrach nor shadowdrinker, and there are days when even my given name slides from my mind. I have to stare down at my hands, at the tattooed symbols which have become as blurred as my memory, learning myself all over again, as a child does when it is come newly home. Sereth's name swims up from the fading pages of my manuscript, and so do those of my ghost sister Mevennen, and Morrac and Jheru, but I find it hard sometimes to recall their faces, or who they really were. They run together, merging and changing. I remember Mevennen's death and then, with a catch of the heart, I realize that it was not Mevennen who died, not then, but Sereth, or maybe someone else. And I have to go back to the journal, and read all over again what really happened-or at least, what I and others wrote down. There are so many of the beloved dead, and if my fading memory signals that I am taking my first steps on the road to join them, I will not be too sorry. I have seen more than seven migrations; I am close to a century now. I have been to lost Outreven and back again, and I have spoken with ghosts. I have lived a long time, and the world is changing. Yet perhaps all who are old say such things, refusing to see that it is not the world that has changed, but they themselves.

  One

  Prophecies and Falling Stars

  1. Eleres

  I stepped into Mevennen's room to find my sister lying on the couch, her face drawn and lined with pain. The membrane flickered across her eyes in the pretense of sleep when she saw me, and she concealed something quickly beneath the folds of her dress. Her hand curled around it as she hid it away, but I could still see what it was: a handkerchief, spotted with blood.

  “Mevennen?” I said, trying to hide my dismay. “I've brought you some tea. The white kind, your favorite.”

  She gave me a look that was half gratitude and half shame, then whispered, “Thank you,” and turned her head away. I came to sit by her side. Her long hair, silvery like my own and with the same darker tips, fell untidily over her shoulders, and her skin seemed bleached by the dim light. We northerners are a pale people, our skin cloud-gray rather than the indigo of the south, but Mevennen was white as ashes now. I brushed her hair back from her forehead, and although I didn't want to shame her further, I gently prized the handkerchief from her hand. She had bitten through her lip, as sometimes happened in the throes of the seizures that she suffered, and the blood was welling up again; I could smell it. I reached out and wiped it with the handkerchief.

  “What is it, Mevennen? What's wrong?”

  “You know what's wrong, Eleres. The same thing that's always wrong.”

  I took her hand, but she tried to pull it away.

  “Look,” I murmured. “You shouldn't be ashamed of being ill.”

  She didn't answer for a moment, and when she finally spoke, I could barely hear her.

  She said, “It's not just my … my weakness. It's the fits. They're getting worse.”

  “Worse? But you haven't been outside, have you?” I knew that Luta, the satahrach, had told her to stay in the House. But even though the outdoors was so hard for her, Mevennen hated being cooped up and I could sympathize if she'd felt the need to slip out for some fresh air.

  “No … I stayed indoors—Luta would have been furious if I'd gone out. But I've still been having the fits, for nearly a week now. I think the storms bring them, on the tide. I can hear the sea rushing up the inlet against the wind, and then the lamp seems to spin and everything just … goes away from me. This spring is the worst it's ever been. I've never had fits like this before …” Her voice trailed away and she sipped her tea. Her face was damp with sweat. “Eleres …” Her voice was a frightened whisper. “Everyone keeps telling me that maybe I'll get better, but I've been back from the wild nearly fifteen years now. How long is this going to go on?” And then I felt her hand clutch mine, in panic. “How long do you think I'm going to live?”

  “Oh, Mevennen,” I said. I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to me. “Mevennen, I know it's hard. But you'll live to be as old as the satahrach herself, I'm sure of it.” The words were barely out of my mouth before I realized what a cruel thing it had been to say.

  She looked up into my face and her eyes were bleak. She said, “It would be better if one of you had killed me, that first day, when I came home. That was what the family was going to do, wasn't it, until you and Luta stopped them? Don't think I don't know.” Her hand slackened in my own and she closed her eyes. She murmured, “And you and Luta shouldn't have to look after me all the time. No one else bothers, after all. Why should you?”

  She looked so vulnerable, but to my utter dismay I sensed something beneath my love and pity; something old and insistent and dark, that called for death … My vision blackened and I looked abruptly down into the nightmare of the bloodmind. I took a deep, shaky breath. The room felt suddenly stifling. Rising, I went quickly to the window and flung it open, to gaze out through the falling mist across the waters of the inlet to the islands.

  The evening sky had lightened to a pale and watery green. A gap in the towering rainclouds revealed the red sun's light and touched the edge of the cumulus with an icy whiteness. The sea heaved, swollen with rain and oily in the last of the spring. Across the Straits, the wooded island peaks rose, dim and obscured by the trailing streamers of rain. I closed my eyes for a moment and immediately I became aware of the world beyond: the great weight of water that lay before me, my consciousness sinking into it for a moment so that I could feel the currents that swirled below, and the pull of the moon-drawn tides. I directed my awareness away from the sea, seeking the familiar sense of the rocky land that lay behind the Clan House: the iron taste of the little spring that ran out from the base of the cliffs, and the wells and runnels of water beneath the earth.

  Wat
er sensitive that I am, the sense of the metals that seamed the rocks was less strong, but I could still feel them, and beyond, the great ley of energy that banded beneath the northern lands. It filled my senses for a moment: sharp and tingling, as though I'd laid a hand on one of the great sea rays that stun with a single touch. Then I sensed another awareness, as some predator crossed the ley. Its thirst for prey made me shiver and I opened my eyes abruptly, letting my awareness of the world sink back into the normal background consciousness. I did not want to feed the bloodmind further. What could it be like, I wondered, for Mevennen to lack such basic senses, to suffer such terrible disorientation whenever she went outside that she couldn't feel even the freshest spring beneath the earth? It must be dreadful, to be so cut off from the world …

  I watched as a great veil of water swept up the Straits, concealing the islands and chasing the wind before it to snatch at the shutters. The sudden gust tore the window frame from my hand and slammed it back against the house wall. I leaned out to catch it and breathed in water, fresh and salty in the rising wind, then snatched at the window and pulled it shut as the wind hit us.

  My sister gasped and I heard the tea bowl shatter as it hit the floor. I turned swiftly and she cried, “Don't look at me! Don't look!” —but I ran to the couch and knelt by Mevennen's side as she twisted in the sudden grip of the fit, forcing the handkerchief between her teeth so that she wouldn't choke. And then when the fit was over I held her as she wept for her weakness, and her lack of balance with the world. I did not leave her until she finally lapsed into sleep, and then I slipped quietly from the room and went downstairs to look for the satahrach.

  I found Luta in the stoveroom, tending the fire. The sea-wood burned blue in the heart of the iron stove, which was formed in the shape of a bulbous-eyed face to distract spirits who, like insects, are drawn to fire. On the table, a bag of rosy red simmets had spilled out and rolled out across the wooden surface, a memory of the previous autumn. I picked one out. It reminded me of the sun, its wrinkled skin almost transparent in the light of the fire.

  “Morrac brought them for me when he was last here,” Luta said when I asked her. “He knows how much I like them.”

  Our satahrach came from the south of Eluide, from the farmland near Daritsay and Memeth, where there were orchards and wide rivers, and where the great houses were made of ocher brick. She was, perhaps, my grandmother, and the only satahrach still living from that generation; her sister and brother were dead. And though my cousin Morrac treated me who loved him as an unwelcome distraction he carried simmets a hundred ei for an old woman. He had his good points, I admitted reluctantly. I smiled at her and put all the fruit back into the bag with care. Luta fed another piece of wood into the stove.

  “It's the last of the winter drifod,” Luta murmured. The wood that she held was ancient and gray, grooved from its time in the sea. The satahrach waved it at me. “Look at that,” Luta said, rather sourly. “Doesn't that remind you of me?”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “You're as young as the spring.”

  She squinted up at me, trying not to smile. “And you, young man, have a tongue as smooth as those southern plays you're always reading … Now, what do you want down here? To do something useful for a change, I hope?”

  I put out a hand to help her up. She leaned on the edge of the table, her old face creased with the pain of rising.

  “I wanted a word with you,” I said.

  “It's not about your interminable affair with that cousin of yours, is it? I've told you before, find someone whom you're not always arguing with. That's the trouble with you young people, you don't think you're having a proper romance unless it's racked with problems. Romance, indeed! It's all these modern poems giving people foolish ideas. In my day, we waited till the mating seasons brought the masques, and that was that.”

  Wincing, I waited until she drew breath before mumbling, “No, it's not about Morrac. For once.” I supposed I couldn't blame her for being impatient; the whole saga of Morrac and me had been boring the family rigid for years. “It's my sister.”

  “Mevennen?” Luta said, her irritability evaporating as she was presented with a real problem. She sighed. “She's no better, is she? I hoped once the winter was over and she'd slept, she might take a turn for healing.”

  “So did I. And she did seem a bit better after hibernation—for a while, anyway. But she's just told me that the fits don't only come when she's outside the House defense, now. She's been having them indoors, too. She says they follow the tides.”

  “The sea tides?” Luta said doubtfully. “She could be right, I suppose. We've had strong seas this year. The moons are shifting, you see. Next year, when the conjunction comes, it'll be migration time for all of us except the land-blind, and the tides are already changing.” She sighed. “Twelve years has come around so quickly. It hardly seems any time at all since I was worrying about the last migration and your sister.”

  I held out my hands to the stove, to warm them. “I hate seeing her like this,” I muttered.

  “Of course you do,” Luta said. She reached out to touch my face. “You're of the same birth, after all, but you and your brother are in balance with the world, and Mevennen is not. Perhaps your mother was never meant to bear girls … the other sister of your brood died at birth, you know.”

  “Mevennen came home, though,” I argued, as I had been arguing to one member of the family or another ever since the day Mevennen had returned. “She came back from the wild, didn't she? She didn't die. She didn't become one of the mehed.”

  “Well, I know that,” Luta said, impatiently. “But it's a mystery how she ever made it back to her birthplace, isn't it?”

  I had to agree with her, though I did not want to. When Mevennen had returned from the wilderness, the last of our brood to come home, it had been obvious almost immediately that she was landblind, a “ghost,” as we say in the north. I remembered the day she'd come back: the day of one of the worst storms ever to drive across the coast of Eluide. It was so bad that the House defense had fallen and the family had been forced to go out into the thunder and rain to carry Mevennen in. And of all my siblings, Mevennen had always been the most closely affected by the wild, confined to the House because the currents of the world beyond the defense made her nauseous. Yet she had not died out in the wilderness, nor had she joined the nomadic mehed and Luta said that this meant she was born to a destiny. I sometimes wondered whether Luta had said such a thing simply to keep Mevennen alive.

  My sister was right. My family had talked about killing her. I remembered listening to them debate it—I'd not long returned from the wild myself, and I didn't have much in the way of language. I didn't understand everything they said, but I knew that my small, frail sister was in danger. And even though I shared some of that wish to kill—as we all do, when faced with weakness—I remember standing in front of her, hissing at them, while Luta reasoned and pleaded. Mevennen was, after all, the last girl whom Luta's own long-dead daughter would ever bear, and though lasting love for one's children is rare among us, it is more common among the satahrachin. who remember so much more.

  Poor Mevennen I thought. She sensed too much and, paradoxically, it was this that cut her off from the world, from normal senses. She was overwhelmed by the tides, and the metals, and the energy lines that ran beneath the earth, like someone being dazzled by the sun. Perhaps it would be better if she died, but I wasn't going to let that happen, whatever dark desires might rise to haunt me. And then I had an idea. It seemed like a good one at the time; bad ideas always do.

  I said to Luta, “If her fits are somehow connected to the sea, what if I were to take Mevennen south, away from the coast and the tides?”

  Luta frowned. “She's hardly been out of Ulleet since she came home … Is she fit to ride? And where were you thinking of taking her?”

  I considered this, and had another idea. Not far to the south of Ulleet lay the old summer tower; the place that the ai Mordha ha
d used in years past, when we were a larger clan and had more herds. It had not fallen into ruin, protected as it was behind its defense, and the land in which it lay was a river valley, a gentle, sheltered place even though it lay on the edge of the steppe. I mentioned this to Luta.

  “The summer tower?” She frowned again. “It's at least two days'journey, Eleres. I know the Memmet valley's soft country, but Mevennen will still be out in the wild on the way, and she's very frail. I know you want to help, but you might end up making her worse, not better.”

  “I know. But she seems to be getting worse anyway, and if it is linked with the sea … Maybe that's been the problem all along.” I was clutching at straws and we both knew it. What my sister was suffering from could not be cured, only alleviated.

  “Well,” Luta said, doubtfully. “You can suggest it to her, I suppose.”

  And so I did, later on when I took Mevennen her tea.

  My sister was silent for a long time, then she said, “It seems to me, Eleres, that I'm cursed if I stay, and cursed if I don't. And yet …” She sighed, listening as the rain hammered at the windows. “It would be good to be in a gentler place, away from the sea. It's as though it hates me, you know. It batters at my senses … I'll go south with you, then. To the summer tower.”

  2. Eleres

  A day later, Mevennen and I, accompanied by our huntress cousins Eiru and Sereth, left the House of Aidi Mordha sealed behind its high unseen defense and headed south toward the Memmet River valley and the summer tower. The morning on which we set out was rainwashed fair, the air a mild pearly gray, the red sun concealed behind a faint haze. Mevennen, sedated for the journey, swayed in the high saddle as the murai padded silently through the stone streets. We took the sea road, and I watched as the water and the horizon's edge became alternatively hidden and revealed by the openings in the cliffs. As the day wore on, the islands of the Zheray fell behind, to be replaced by the many peaks and crags which scattered the sea off the coasts of Eluide.