Under a Starless Sky

Chapter 4

“May I speak my world?” Lanore asked.

Tell bowed. Lanore took a sheet of silk paper and placed it on the table, and set Tell’s book on this, a

sign of respect for her world. She took her book and skipped the words on the first page, opening it to

the map behind it, which stretched from the 2nd and 3rd pages.

“Tamor,” Lanore said.

Tell laughed. “You have the entire world in your book?”

Lanore didn’t know how to respond. The study of Tell’s face revealed emotions. There was more than

humor. There was embarrassment for having laughed, a hardness that came after: serious control. She

wondered if the other side of the Sleeping Forest was a harsh world. She pointed to a place on the

map. “Easterly. Here.” Symbol for forests on either side of Easterly, extending from shore back to

mountains, and extended along the entire mountain as far north and south as the map could contain.

She turned the map to page four. Easterly was better defined. There was evident path extending

through the forest up to the mountain where another village was marked, which loosely followed a

meandering river. When Easterly’s first dome was solid, the river had been nearer. Since it had shifted

a bit north, and no longer broke over the cliffs into the bay. “Midelay.” On the other side of the mountain

was more forest, and another path. The Sleeping Forest owned both sides of the mountains, and only

one peak was known to be free of growth.

“You have made it over the mountains here?” Tell asked.

“I have not,” Lanore said. “The higher one goes, the thicker the forest. No one passes through the

Sleeping Forest.”

“But this is a path…”

“You must go through the mountain at Midelay in order to travel to Sinter,” Lanore said.

“You walk through mountains?” Tell asked.

“I have been on both sides,” Lanore said. “I have even been to Sinter.”

“You have not,” Sheen said.

Tell pointed a finger at the apprentice, snapping: “Speak out of turn again, there will be penalty.”

Lanore didn’t interfere with this.

“You come from Sinter?” Tell asked.

“I was schooled in Sinter. I was born in East Midelay. I was a child when the East was opened up to us.

I was not the first venture from Midelay, but I am the first to take roots and report back,” Lanore said.

“My village is small, but it thrives. I have made contact with water people.”

“So have I,” Tell said. “They are stranger looking than even you. We call them walking fishes. They can

stay submerged for nearly an entire hour glass of time.”

“Had I not experienced this myself, I would have thought this exaggeration,” Lanore agreed. “If I were

not seeing you with my own eyes and heart, I would say you were a myth.”

“You have never met someone my color?” Tell asked.

“I have met your dead opposite,” Lanore said.

Tell laughed. “A ghost?”

Lanore nodded.

“You’re serious?” Tell asked.

“She is whiter than rice,” Lanore said.

“Rice?” Tell asked.

“Tesh, bring rice. Cooked and uncooked,” Lanore said.

Lanore took a sheet of paper and drew an image of the water people. Tell agreed; these resembled the

Walking Fish she had met. She drew an image of Eirwen.

“How horrendous,” Tell said. “How could any people suffer her to live?”

“Her story is legend in Sinter. The legend of her doesn’t fit the reality of her. I suspect she was so

hideous her family tossed her out,” Lanore said.

“Not another child on a river story,” Tell complained.

“Child on a river?”

“You never heard how the first walker was found floating on a lotus down the river?”

“You mean like the first Queen of Sinter?” Lanore asked. “A baby put in a reed basket?”

“I do not know this story,” Tell said. “This ghost? Does she have powers?”

“No more than any of us,” Lanore said. “The story I heard from her own lips was that she was taken by

the Walking Bears when she was a child. She was recovered by people at about six, and raised in

Sinter. I brought her back to Midelay when I returned from school.”

“Walking Bears are myths,” Tell said.

Lanore pointed to a black and white tail that framed a dream catcher, hanging above the hearth.

“That is the tail of a Walking Bear,” Lanore said. “They are known to kidnap children and carry them in

their pouches.”

“Pouches?” Tell asked. “Like a purse?”

“I have not seen it,” Lanore said.

“Because it’s a myth,” Tell said. “Between Fire Snakes, dragons, darkness, and Sleeping Forests, we

don’t need another adversary in the Land.”

“I agree,” Lanore said.

“Did the water people give you a map?”

“They spoke of floating islands. They want me to believe Tamor is a just one island of among many,

floating. I think they have sea brain. They live and die on their boats, going where the wind and sea

take them. If they float and the islands floats, there could be no continuity.”

“I don’t trust them,” Tell admitted. “They must originate on land. How else could one make a boat as big

as theirs?”

“I don’t know. They called them coracles,” Lanore said. She turned her book to a page where she had

drawn the boat. It was huge, at least the circumference of her village. She revealed scale by placing

people on desk. She had views of it from impossible angles, revealing she had used her Heart to see it

fully. It was basic torus shape, the center opened to the sea. She had cut away views that revealed

chambers and sections, and the inner space was curtained by a net where bred their own fish. They

treated their home as if it were alive, just another entity on the sea. They claimed their villages never

crashed on the shore, but they could not convince her of this, as it was clearly subject to the whims of

the sea and the air. They used smaller boats and paddles to visit the shores to trade, but claimed to be

completely self-sufficient.

“Trade?” Tell scoffed. “They wanted us to gift them men.”

“They wanted that from us, too,” Lanore agreed. “I suspect they would have stolen it, if they could.”

“They lack Heart,” Tell said.

Lanore smiled. She understood. They can’t see in the dark.

“Perhaps they hope our men will give them the gift of Heart,” Tell said.

“I would have traded that Gift for the gift of breath holding,” Lanore said.

“They told me this isn’t something that is given, but acquired through living,” Tell said.

“They are very strange and secretive,” Lanore agreed. “They have a story that we all came here on

such a ship, one that carried pairs of every living thing so that the world could be as it is.”

“I heard. I asked why they brought Fire Snakes.”

“They snuck on board,” Lanore offered the explanation that was given her.

Lanore and Tell laughed.

“Teach me your world,” Lanore asked.

Tell walked her through the maps, describing deserts, plains with deer and elk, pictures of which were

in book. She would jump to picture in her book of creatures she had encountered in her journeys, some

of them very strange in appearance. Her recent journey was taking them along the coast, trying to go

around the Sleeping Forest. She described an artifact, maybe three days walk along the shore going

south and east from the far side of the Sleeping Forest- a spectacular rock formation lay, carved by

oceans, so the that the waves rushed through it. It was a great arch. It almost looked man made.

“I know this place,” Lanore said. “How did you get from there to this side of the forest?”

“Same as you?” Tell asked.

“I don’t understand,” Lanore said.

“We walked,” Tell said.

She took out a stick of graphite, wrapped with string; a pencil. She held it with her left hand, two fingers

and a thumb. Lanore drew a sheet of paper towards her, She moved the pencil as if she were drawing

on the air above the paper, before she commented to drawing a line. She brought the forest to the line.

She drew Easterly. She drew the rock where the ocean punched a hole through it. It was not drawn to

scale. “I suspect, six day walk through the thick of this. Can’t be done. Maybe it’s thinner here, but the

Forest comes to the cliff. You can’t skirt it. You can’t walk this cliff. Even the water people can’t swim

this distance, with all the waves and rocks. I have yet to discern a negotiable path through the forest.”

“But you know about the Eye of the Needle?” Tell said.

“Extended Breath,” Lanore said.

“No heart can see that far, even on the stillest day,” Tell said.

“Extended Breath can see beyond the Heart’s wall,” Lanore said.

“You’re a seer? Can you see anything?” Tell asked. “Can you see the path I walked?”

Lanore was quiet for a long moment. Everyone grew quiet, as if measuring with their hearts. Lanore

closed her eyes. So many ways to see things. The physical world tended to be hard, full of physicality

and artifacts. The social world was more malleable, but there were places that were harder than any

physical object. Words gave weight to things, making them more substantial and hard. There was the

imagination and abstract, and she believed this was a world and they were all connected to it, and

sometimes they had places that overlapped, just as sometimes the physical world overlapped, as hers

and Tell’s were doing with ‘Eye of the Needle.’ Tell’s heart light was bold, pronounced, and there was

no doubt she would be a fierce enemy, but there was no evidence of malice or anger. She opened her

eyes. She stared at her lap.

“I have filled books with things I have seen,” Lanore said. If it was dark, the tone of her voice might

have suggested they were going into a ghost story. “Inexplicable things. Things no one else has seen.

Flying things…”

“Dragons?” Sheen asked.

Tell didn’t correct her.

“Dragons. Birds. Mostly the things are nature. Maybe because I love nature. I have more flowers than I

can even count. I have seen people. I have seen cities made of glass and steel. I have seen islands in

the dark. I have seen things looking back at me from the dark,” Lanore said.

“If you can see it, it can see you,” Tell said.

Lanore brought her eyes up to her. “Truth. How did you cross the Sleeping Forest?”

“Tell me, Seer,” Tell said.

“You didn’t walk,” Lanore said.

Tell gave no indication that Lanore could discern, but Lanore didn’t try to rewrite her understanding;

‘she did not walk.’ People that slept in the forest did not wake up. The glow beetles and ants would

feast before a person would wake. Only the Walking Bear were known to resist the Sleep. That, and

the Birds and Thumper Birds that could make a person ‘Sleep’ faster than a misstep. Not even fire

snakes lived in the forest. Squirrels and rabbits avoided the Sleeping Forest. Lanore eyes narrowed.

She took up a new paper, and with a graphite stick, wrapped in colorful, tightly wound string, and began

drawing, first on air, then on paper. She drew a cloud. It wasn’t right, but she didn’t erase the cloud, just

drew a circle. The circle wasn’t quite right, either. She shaped it into an oval. She drew lines on it,

giving it shape. She retraced the lines making them darker. They seemed right. She hung something

from it, a basket. She drew a line from the basket down to an anchor. She attached the anchor to a

tree. She decided anchor wasn’t right. It was a bolt for a crossbow. No… That wasn’t right either.

Tell touched her hand. “Would you like to see it in person?”