ground. With a hand net, Yen Olass fished a dozen kellings out of the confines of the fish-garth, and placed them in a string carry. Hearst, hungry, snatched another from the water, and ate it raw. His hand hovered, poised to snatch one more.
'Hey!' said Yen Olass. 'Ease up!’
'Breaking into next week's rations, am I?’
'Something like that,' said Yen Olass.
'Now that's what I call poverty,' said Hearst. 'How would you like to earn some money?’
'This is a proposition? If you want my body… a hundred crowns to you. And ten more for not telling Resbit.’
'And Monogail?’
'For five crowns you can have her. And her pet dragon. But seriously…’
'Yes,' said Hearst. 'Seriously… who or what is the Silent One?’
'The what?’
'The Silent One. Of the Sisterhood.' 'Oh…’
Yen Olass got to her feet. With a dozen dripping quick-kicking fish in her string carry, she set off toward Skyhaven, with Hearst walking along beside her. When they came in sight of the house, they saw Monogail running over the sand, pulling along a piece of twiner vine. Quelaquix was chasing it. They settled down in the shelter of a saltwater pine and watched.
'She's a very vigorous child,' said Hearst.
'Yes,' said Yen Olass. 'And a virgin.’
'A virgin?’
'Don't sound so surprised!’
'Sorry,' said Hearst. 'It's an odd thing to say, that's all. You don't really think I…’
'You might want her when she's older,' said Yen Olass. 'But I spoke of virginity because you asked about the Silent One. She's a virgin. She's head of the Sisterhood.
Head of all the oracles. And an oracle is… well, a storyteller, if anything. Sometimes an oracle shows people the hidden side of themselves. Sometimes she shows… possibilities.' 'Possibilities?’
'An oracle sometimes describes a possible future. She shows the consequences of actions.' 'For what purpose?' 'To discipline the lives of men.’
'She sounds like the kind of person I could live without,' said Hearst.
'You could,' said Yen Olass. 'You can. You do. But the Collosnon Empire needs this… this secular priesthood. If you had a week to spare, I could teach you why. But I don't know that I could feed a big hungry man like you for that long. Come on, let's go inside.’
Yen Olass cooked breakfast, and they ate together. Unlike the Yarglat, the Rovac saw nothing odd in sharing a meal with a woman.
When breakfast was over, Yen Olass bullied Hearst into helping her bring some driftwood back from the piles cached along the beach. While they were about this labour, Hearst reviewed, aloud, what he knew about Yen Olass. He had heard some of her life from her own lips, and had got much of the rest from Resbit. He knew the outlines of her life reasonably well. He knew of the three apples she had shared with the Lord Emperor Khmar.
'Do I know what I know?' said Hearst, when he had finished his story. 'Or have I been fed a fantasy?’
'It's true enough,' said Yen Olass, vaguely, watching the falling tide.
Soon the flats would be exposed, and it would be time for her to begin her day's work.
'Then I've got a proposition for you,' said Hearst.
'A hundred crowns then,' said Yen Olass. 'I told you that before. Kisses are extra.’
'No,' said Hearst. 'This is not a game. Listen: I want you to be the Silent One.’
'Too late for that,' said Yen Olass. 'I've lost my virginity long ago.’
'Let me explain,' said Hearst.
'You want your own Sisterhood in Brennan?' said Yen Olass. 'You're crazy. Why don't you have your own Rite of Purification as well? We could make ceramic tiles, just like all the Collosnon soldiers wear, paint them with spiders and-’
'Yen Olass.’
'All right,' said Yen Olass. 'Tell me what you really want.’
And she listened as he talked. When he had finished, she gave her answer: 'No.’
When Hearst tried to argue, she elaborated: 'This time, you really are crazy. It'll never work. And I'm not going to have any part of it. There are much easier ways to die much closer to home.’
And a little later, she watched him set off for Brennan, limping a little from the wound he had taken in the battle of Razorwind Pass. He was a professional hero, and would be until he died. He had other battles ahead of him – storms to fight, dragons to kill, kingdoms to win, fortunes to gain and world-conquering powers to subdue. But she was a woman with a five-year-old child to raise, and so could not venture her life in such frivolity.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Living by the sea, Yen Olass had to take special care to prevent her fingernails rusting away. She painted them with imported lacquer and wore gloves when she was working out on the flats.
Shortly after Morgan Hearst had departed, she was following the receding tide out over the flats. She was armed with a probing spike, a digging stick and a swatching knife; on her back she carried a pack.
As always, there was a certain excitement in discovering what the sea had left behind it. Sometimes, in water channels gouged between sandbanks, there were big fish which she could hunt down, using the probing spike as a spear. Sometimes, after a hard blow from the west, there would be scallops lying exposed on the sand, although usually three or four days of constant storm was needed to force the scallops that far shorewards.
Today, scanning each new wave-shaped vein of shell-shatter, Yen Olass was glad to be able to dedicate herself to her work, and forget Hearst's hero-talk, so heavily larded with disturbing names from the distant past: Celadric, Meddon, York, Draven, and, most surprising of all, Eldegen Terzanagel…
Hunking over a big sclop of dark sea-smelling seaweed, Yen Olass found its roots clutching a lump of coal. She knifed away the seaweed and put the coal, knobbled with big pink carbuncular barnacles, into her pack. Rooting itself in the seabed, seaweed often clung to interesting things which were then brought to the flats when storm turbulence uprooted them. Once, in the winter just gone, Yen Olass had even found a glass bottle knotted in the clutches of a mass of seaweed; it was hidden away in her sand scully while she waited for an opportune time to market it.
When she had first come to Carawell, she had been frightened by these tidal flats, so different from the modest littoral zones she had seen at Favanosin and Skua. Now, after two years, she thought of this as an esssentially friendly environment arranged very much for her own wellbeing and comfort – storms to recruit scallops for her kitchen, seaweed to mine the depths of the sea for her, ocean currents to bring in an endlessly renewing supply of driftwood all year round.
The further she got from the shore, the more life there was on the flats. There were holes in the sand, in which lurked funny little creatures like centipedes; swimming over the flats in the warm days of summer, she had sometimes seen them venture briefly from their holes. She saw the feeding holes of wedges and tullies; hard- shelled sand snails wormed their way across the sandflats in places where a thin slick of water still persisted; little sea anemones grew on dead shells, as did the convoluted white loops of odd little worms which, when submerged, would extend multicoloured fans – finer than eyelashes and brighter than peacocks – out into the water around them.
Yen Olass squatted down and dug enough wedges for lunch and dinner. There was an endless supply of these small shellfish; they were a little bit tasteless, but it took very little time to gather enough for a meal. She also picked up two horse mussels and threw them into the pack. Twice the size of her hand, these oversized shellfish were too rubbery for her taste, but Quelaquix would eat them if they were chopped up fine. (And if not, then not – the lyre-cat knew exactly what he liked, and would turn up his nose at anything not prepared according to his taste.)
