Beyond the Waters of the World Read online

  Only according to Toni, the lace hid a tool that would help her to find him. Did he even want the Ayaissee ambassador to find him? Toni had abandoned him, after all. His future was out there, beyond the waters of the world, not behind him, in his home, with the house of Ishel and the woman from the stars.

  Kislan rubbed his bare scalp. It was strange how cold the skin felt with his head shaved, especially here in the harbor, where the sea winds did not have to hide behind the walls of buildings. He felt Toni's presence at his back, much more than that of Anash and Thuyene, women he had slept with, who had born children who were a part of the family of Ishel, children he played with on the house grounds or in the common rooms. But Toni had held out hope of change. And then snatched it away. When they arrived at the end of the pier, Lanrhel stepped forward, a man of Kislan's birth house. For the first time, Kislan wondered how Lanrhel felt about this particular duty.

  "Mukhaired ag Kislan bonaashali derladesh," Lanrhel pronounced to the watching masses on the pier and on the shore. Kislan's shame will now certainly be purged. Lanrhel then ordered Kislan to remove his clothes, the finest leather garments he possessed --he was not about to go through this ritual any more humbly than he had to.

  When he was naked, he dove into the water, not waiting for the two guards to push him. Besides, that way he could get farther out, faster.

  Only he had to wait to look for the lace.

  The cold water of the bay enclosed him, and he wished he could come up sooner than he knew was feasible. He was only glad it was late spring and not winter; he suspected that fewer survived who were returned to the sea in the cold months than in the warm. Kislan circled below the surface to see if Anash would fling the lace close to where he'd gone into the water. He couldn't afford to spend much time here --he had to get out to sea. But there it was, drifting down through the refracted light of the water. He swam to what was left of his life, tied it around his wrist, and began swimming out for deep water as quickly as he could.

  #

  After the fashar had been flung into the ocean, Toni gazed at the spot where Kislan had disappeared beneath the surface of the green-gray water, her tears drying on her cheeks. This was the second time she had participated in such a ceremony, and she hoped she never had to again, never had to witness it even.

  He had to be safe, probably was safe. The lung capacity of the Mejan went far beyond that of any other humans discovered thus far in the galaxy, and the slight webbing between their fingers and toes was further proof that they were much more at home in the water than humans on other planets.

  But if only she could have stopped it.

  #

  Kislan swam hard for the deep water beyond the bay. When he judged he was far enough out to sea, he surfaced, gulping deep breaths of air. Instinctively, he began to shake his head, but there was no longer any hair to shake out of the way.

  He was without braids and without home.

  He could still see the buildings of Edaru clustered around the bay in the distance, so he dove below the surface again and headed south and east, away from the Thirteen Cities and the life he had known. It would be some time before Zhoran could take the ship to find him without arousing suspicion.

  Kislan continued that way, diving and surfacing, diving and surfacing, until his arms began to tire. If he wasn't far enough away from shore now, it was his misfortune, because he had to rest. He rolled over on his back and allowed himself to drift on the ocean swells for a while. At least he was no longer cold: the physical exertion had warmed him, and now the late morning sun on the bare skin of his chest and thighs made him feel almost comfortable. When he was more rested, he continued to swim southeast, slower strokes on the surface this time, preserving his energy as much as possible, swimming with the tides and current whenever he could. If he could not find the atoll by nightfall, he would have to swim for shore as the rhythms of the sea allowed, even if he was not yet outside of the territory of Edaru. This far from the city, the chances were slight that someone would find him and bring him in

  --or slay him outright for being a braidless outcast, as the case might be. Kislan kept the shoreline within sight to his left and continued alternately swimming and resting. Not only did it help his orientation, as long as he could still see shore, the danger from a hungry sihla or ikas was not as great, those beasts of the deepest part of the ocean. As he swam and rested and swam again, time became like the water buoying him, and it was increasingly more difficult to hold on to a sense of its passing. He could still judge the progress of the day from the position of the sun in the sky in relation to the shoreline, but somehow it made no sense to him.

  The sun was already slanting low towards the horizon, and he still had not found the atoll Zhoran had spoken of. But if he made for shore, there would no longer be any chance that Zhoran could bring him to the land of the Tusalis.

  Kislan began to tread water, turning slowly in a circle. It had been at least half a day since he had been returned to the sea. Perhaps he had missed it, swimming too close to shore?

  And then, to his relief, he saw a ship emerging through the changing light. He continued to tread water, occasionally lifting an arm to signal as the ship drew near. It was a good thing his house brother was on the lookout for him and knew the direction he had gone, even if he had not found the atoll --an ocean was a big place to search for a single man. When they threw the ropes over and pulled him up the side of the vessel, Kislan couldn't believe how exhausted he was. His arms and legs ached with the exertion of swimming almost constantly for over half a day, and he was colder than he could ever remember being. The warmth provided by the movement of his muscles was gone, and when the evening air hit his bare, wet skin, he began to shiver so hard he couldn't stop.

  "Blankets!" Zhoran called out. Kislan was bundled up so quickly, he assumed they'd brought them to the deck as soon as they sighted him. But then, Zhoran had said he'd pulled more than one man out of the sea, so he must know what was needed by this time. Once Kislan was covered up and drying off, another sailor brought him hot tea, and Zhoran lead him into the captain's chambers. "What is it you have around your wrist, my friend?" his house brother asked, indicating the sodden piece of lace.

  Kislan grimaced. "My fashar."

  Zhoran laughed out loud. "I have never heard of one returned to the sea actually retrieving the record of the life he left behind. But then you would do things differently, wouldn't you, Kislan?"

  Even though he was still shaking with cold and exhaustion, Kislan was still awake enough to wonder that Zhoran actually seemed to expect him to do the unexpected. But as soon as he had bedded down on the bunk he was led to, he was aware of nothing at all for a very long time.

  #

  After Toni returned to Contact House Two from the ceremony, she couldn't stop berating herself. She had gone over everything in her head so many times, and she could come up with nothing she feasibly could have done differently --except never to have taught Kislan their way of writing in the first place.

  Somehow, she couldn't regard that as wrong.

  But before she went back to work, as she knew she must, she called up her computer.

  "System, show me the location of tracking sensor six," she said as she shucked her fine leather cape, wondering if she would have the heart to ever wear it again. The holo well produced a map of the coastline of the Kailazh supercontinent, with a small blinking dot out to sea just south of Edaru. Moving. At least that. But he had not made for land yet.

  She wouldn't think about the possibility that moving in water might mean the tracer was now showing her the location of a sihla.

  During the day, she checked the location of the tracking sensor every time she had a chance to get back to the "women's house" of the first contact team --and every time it was still out to sea. Following the coast, which made it unlikely he'd been swallowed by a sea monster, but still not on land.

  Which meant she couldn't go out in a skycar to find him and bring him
back to the landing base where he would be safe.

  If she only knew what had happened to him.

  #

  "Kislan, get up finally! The ship of Yondago draws near!" Kislan opened his eyes reluctantly and pushed himself up on his elbows. "How long have I slept?"

  Zhoran grinned. "Near a day, friend. Come, we must clothe you, unless you want to go to a new home wearing nothing but your skin."

  At the words "new home," Kislan's courage nearly abandoned him. He did not want a new home, he wanted the old, the place where he had grown up and lived his entire life, the people who had always surrounded him --and the people who had entered the world of Edaru from so far away that his imagination was unable to encompass the distance. Toni.

  Zhoran gave him a simple leather tunic and sandals, and he slipped them on after washing the sleep from his eyes in a basin of water standing on a side table. His muscles still ached from the long swim of the day before, but otherwise he felt surprisingly refreshed.

  "Ready, brother?" Zhoran asked.

  Kislan nodded.

  On deck, the sea breeze prickled the skin of his scalp, reminding him that he was now braidless as a baby. He glanced down at the bedraggled strip of lace looped around his wrist: braidless perhaps, but he still had the record of his life --and whatever tool of following Toni had hidden in it before she had allowed him to be returned to the sea. Another braidless man waited for them, in garb the color of dried blood, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

  "Yondago," Zhoran said, "this is Kislan. Kislan, Yondago."

  "Yöndahko," the other man corrected, extending his fist. "If you are to be one of us, you must learn to speak the language of the pirates."

  Kislan stared at the fist for a moment, not knowing what to do with it, and then looked into the other man's gray-blue eyes above a nose that looked like it had once been broken but displayed no scar. The man wore his gray hair past his shoulders, but it was free of colored braids.

  Kislan extended his own fist. "Zhoran told me you were no pirate." The one with the name so hard to say knocked the fist Kislan held out. He turned to face the ship's captain, chuckling. "Zhoran, someday you must begin to teach those you fish out of the sea." He turned back to Kislan. "This word --'pirate' --it is the old word for 'men' in the language used among the Tusalis and the Kishudiu. This was before those who called themselves 'the people' left with almost everything that remained of kaiseem culture." Yöndahko --a name full of sounds Kislan was vaguely familiar with, sounds from earliest childhood. This braidless man with the iron-gray hair of experience faced him down with words he did not know and sounds he had almost forgotten.

  Kislan crossed his arms in front of his chest, mirroring the stance of the pirate. "Since I have no knowledge either of pirates or kaiseem culture, you will have to teach me." Yöndahko threw back his head and laughed, then stepped forward and slapped Kislan on the shoulder. "You will do well, young man."

  #

  Kislan had been less than two ten-days among the pirates before he understood what Yöndahko had really meant during that exchange before they had crossed the gangplank to board the pirate ship and head for the east.

  You will do well, young slave.

  Not that his house brother Zhoran had given him into slavery with Yöndahko --as the crew of the Jofaano explained to him amidst a welter of laughter and coarse sexual descriptions, the word for "man" in Alnar ag Ledar was related to the word for "slave" in the language of the Tusalis. When the women of the Mejan had fled the wars that nearly destroyed their world, the only male survivors among them had been slaves. Men had been replaced by slaves --and the men of the Tusalis found it funny that Mejan men knew no other word for themselves. Despite Kislan's pride in the culture of his birth, it was not enough to protect him from humiliation.

  If he had thought his world turned upside-down by being returned to the sea, the journey south and then north again on the ship of Yöndahko turned it over yet again and shook it up for good measure. Kislan had recovered from the half-a-day's swim better than he could recover from the attitudes and assumptions of the men on the Jofaano. Not the least of which was that the word "kaiseem" was not a kind of culture like "Mejan" --it was a word denoting ownership in some way.

  Many of the sailors spoke the language of Kislan's birth, the language of the sea, but most of the time they didn't bother. He was thrown like a small child into the surf, struggling for understanding like air. He had to pull his weight on the ship, hoisting sails and fastening cables and keeping watch, but often he did not understand what was wanted of him. Many words sounded familiar, but all of them together made no sense, and he was forced to piece together meanings, to slowly comprehend the language of the Tusalis. The Tusalis were the stuff of legend for Kislan, the ancient people who had nearly warred themselves into extinction fighting the Kishudiu before the Mejan left this part of the world and founded Edaru and the other cities along the western coast. Kislan didn't know how much truth there was to it, but these sailors and traders regarded themselves as the descendants of that legendary nation --and they were proud of it.

  "The women of the Thirteen Cities have distorted everything, you know," Yöndahko explained to him one day after they had rounded the tip of the continent. The winds were right, and the captain had some time to lean against the railing and watch lands pass by nearly barren of the thick spring vegetation of Edaru, with its reds and ochres and oranges. "The Tusalis are not evil. But your women hate us so much, they deny that we even exist. To them, we are only the outcasts, a bastard culture unable to exist without preying on them." The speech of the Tusalis was full of concepts Kislan struggled with, even when he had begun to make sense of the words. As he traveled with the Jofaano and the days had grown hotter and then colder again, he had learned the words of possession, but still kad janu - " your women" in the language of Yöndahko --was almost beyond comprehension. And "bastard," djakan, Kislan understood well enough as a negative term when one of Yöndahko's crew shouted it at him when he was too slow hoisting a sail or passing a bottle of shabezh. But when the ship's mate Gorazh had tried to explain it to him, Kislan's mind could not get around the concept; according to what he said, every child of the Mejan would be this vile thing. The Tusalis assumptions as to honorable birth were so different from his own that the mere idea made no sense.

  They had been sailing north for a complete exchange of the moons when the wind filling their sails began to grow cooler. And less than a ten-day more, the port of Belraash came into view.

  Ancient stone ruins bordered the harbor town, wide pillars no longer carrying roofs straining towards the sky. Kislan stood at the railing, watching buildings older than the memories of his people slip by. While walls of a number of tall, impressive structures still stood, much of the dead city had obviously been used as a quarry.

  The living city of Belraash was much smaller than the dead, but to Kislan's eyes it looked barely better. It stood just past the ruins on the entrance to a huge bay so wide, to the northeast the land on the opposite side was no longer visible. Kislan twisted the length of fashar around his wrist. He felt as if he were sailing into legend -he was about to enter one of the cities destroyed by the great, unending wars of Mejan myth.

  And that mythical place would be his home now.

  #

  Toni paced the veranda of Contact House One. "How am I going to get to him, Sam? He's on the other side of the bleeding supercontinent!"

  Sam shrugged. "Or else a sihla is."

  "Not funny, Sam."

  "Maybe not, but you have to consider the possibility, Toni." No, she couldn't think that way, couldn't contemplate that the tracking sensor might be giving her the coordinates of something other than Kislan.

  But of course she already had.

  "What I have to consider is how to get over there and find him."

  "Well, then, how?"

  Toni crossed her arms in front of her chest. "We could combine it with work."

  "W
e?"

  It hadn't occurred to Toni until this moment, but suddenly she realized that if she could enlist Sam for an expedition, she had a chance of getting to Kislan, reassuring herself that he was safe. She could hardly hijack a skycar and disappear by herself for days, but if she went through the proper channels, applied for its use for a research trip, there was a good chance she would get it.

  "Come on, Sam. We've been talking about visiting the cultures on the eastern coast of the continent for months now. And it looks like that's where Kislan is headed, for the ruins of the old civilization, in one of the cities of the so-called pirates."

  "We've also been talking about how we don't have the funding or the personnel for that kind of expedition." But she could see the way his eyes lit up at the prospect of another unknown culture to explore, new mores to investigate.

  She had almost won. "Not a true expedition, just --an exploratory field trip. We don't need much funding for just the two of us to make a short visit to the other side of the continent." Sam grinned. "Has anyone ever told you you're stubborn, Donato?" Toni grinned back. "Plenty of times. So, are you in?"

  "Of course I'm in. Would I pass up an opportunity to examine an unknown culture?" She heaved a sigh of relief. She was almost sure that Kislan was safe, with the tracking sensor nearing the most logical place for a man given back to the sea to go. But she couldn't forget that she had promised to find him as long as he kept the lace with him, his fashar. Which he obviously had.

  And if he had retrieved a scrap of lace from the ocean in order for her to be able to come after him, she couldn't let him down again.

  Even if she wouldn't be able to fulfill her promise until AIRA and AIC bureaucracy had run its course.

  #

  Kislan didn't understand how it had happened, since he had not been traveling with Yöndahko long enough for such a radical change in seasons, but while it had been late spring in Edaru when he left, snow had already begun to cover the mountains to the west when he arrived in Belraash. Now, after five exchanges of the moons, the days were growing noticeably longer again and the nights not quite as cold.