Lutha did not reply. She stalked out past Leelson, Leely trotting along at her side, sometimes moistly kissing Lutha’s wounded wrist, sometimes petting her arm. They passed Jiacare Lostre as he returned empty-handed from the sea, and Mitigan, who sat quietly on a rock, his face flushed with sunset, both of them looking like shiny new people. Lutha lusted for water, much water, and for clean air after all those hours of tasting rottenness in the claustrophobic stone chamber. She wanted to wash it away! She wanted to wash Leelson away!
Leely tugged at her hand, leading her over the ridge and down toward the scarlet shine of water and sky. The first line of shaggies seemed a safe distance away. At the shore, Leely peeled his trousers off and waded into the water to do his business. He liked to do that, whenever water was available. He’d been born able to swim. She watched him paddle, sometimes diving, feet in air, taking mouthfuls of water and spurting them like the legendary whale, he all silver and rose like the waters, like the sky. She took off her filthy clothes and waded in far enough that she could dunk all of herself. The water was cleansing, not very salty, but chill. She scrubbed at her body with handfuls of the powdery bottom sand, then waded out and sat like a monument on a pedestal of stone, letting the soft wind dry her while her filthy clothing soaked in the nearest pool.
Leely came up a good way out, clutching a fish, laughing. Not far beyond him, a shaggy lowered its tentacles. Leely took a bite out of the flapping fish, then threw the remainder into the lowered tentacles. Lutha shuddered, again aware of her son’s surpassing strangeness. For years this uncanny presence had shared her days, clear as noon, while she denied and refused to see that he wasn’t just a little boy, not just a child, not just her beloved son. She had been like Saluez, facing the unbearable, rejecting it.
“You’re very beautiful.”
Leelson was standing behind her, staring at her, looking wistful. Leelson never looked wistful!
“You used to say so,” she said, swallowing deeply as she grabbed up the sodden robes and draped them around her shoulders, trying to put revelation and seduction both aside. She didn’t want to talk, not about the two of them, not about Leely, not about anything.
Fastigats paid no attention to that! With them, nothing could remain unsaid, undefined, unfulfilled. “You really think Bernesohn Famber designed … that?” He gestured toward the splashing child. “Why isn’t he intelligent?”
His expression was very much like Limia’s had been. Stubborn. Dismissive. Lutha swallowed again and said stubbornly, “We don’t know that he isn’t.”
It rang false, even to her. Why not say it? Why not get it over with?
“It’s because Bernesohn had the same expectations as your mother, Leelson! He expected you to beget with a woman from Fastiga, not some … outsider! If you’d had a Fastigat woman, Leely would have been all right.” The bitterness boiled to the surface, shaming her. She couldn’t control it. It wasn’t fair. None of it.
He ignored her tone. “I wonder if Tospia knew? When she left here, when she had the twins, Tospiann and Paniwar, I wonder if she knew one or both of them had been designed by Bernesohn.”
“If they were, he forgot to plan on redundancy. Twin children, one of whom—was it your great-grandmama?—had only one child. And your grandpa, and your father.”
He nodded. “It’s true Great-grandmother Tospiann had only one child, but Paniwar had an acknowledged son and a number of daughters, in addition to at least one … escapade.”
“Improper fathering,” she said, quoting the two dowagers in Fastiga.
He made a rueful face. “An early dalliance with a member of a traveling troupe. On one of the Nantask planets. He was little more than a boy at the time, and she was twice his age.” He was watching Lutha closely, digging at her.
Déjàvu. She herself had told this story, as Leelson had told it to her before. She wanted to change the subject, but he wouldn’t let her.
“Her name was Dasalum,” he said. “She was a celebrity, a superb actress. It was her fault Paniwar committed improper fathering. She went off in a temper and the Fambers never did find out what happened to the child.” He watched me, waiting.
A long silence. She could feel him, probing, probing. He’d brought this up for a reason. She resisted, resisted, then cracked, letting in the light. Her revelation hadn’t gone far enough. And she couldn’t lie to him. He’d know if she did.
She said, “In Nantaskan, her name was D’ahslum T’bir, which means bonetree. Skeleton.” She looked at her hand, surprised. All on its own it was drawing a lineage chart in the sand.
“And?” asked Leelson.
“She bore a daughter whose name was Nitha Bone-tree.”
“How do you know?”
“I didn’t until just now. But it’s the only thing that makes sense.” Lutha looked away, willing him to let it alone, willing him to stop!
He wouldn’t stop. “And why is that?”
“Because Nitha Bonetree was my great-grandmother.”
He didn’t change expressions. She had told him all about her family when they were together. In the last little while he’d figured everything out, everything she hadn’t put together until now. She looked down at the chart she’d drawn:
She didn’t add Leely’s name. He was out there splashing, making bright fountains. The sun bulged on the sea, a fire blister, scarlet veins bleeding along the horizon. The shaggies reeled in fish, flapping silhouettes against the glow. She wanted to scream, yell, throw things, but the moment was too precarious. Not as she had thought. Not as she had thought at all.
“Now we know how Bernesohn managed to do it,” Leelson said at last. “That’s
