They had only just lain down that night, all too weary to extend the evening beyond the bare necessities of food and shaking out the blankets, when they came up off the floor as though alerted by some bone-deep klaxon.
Lutha felt a surge of adrenaline, then that stopped-up-ears feeling she sometimes got when swimming, that muffled, gurgling-in-one’s-head effect. She yawned widely, momentarily surprised to see the others yawning too. Obviously, it had affected them all. Snark had her fingers in her ears; Mitigan was gaping like a fish; they all looked apologetically at one another as they tried to clear a way for sound that should be there but was not. The sea was a shush, and the wind a hush, and the birds a shrill tee-tee-tee, all flat, muffled, without resonance.
“It’s happening again,” mouthed Snark, grasping Lutha by the shoulder. “Like the night you first came!”
Flinching at the strength of her grip, Lutha nodded. It was very much like what had happened before, only more so. There was a panicky breathlessness along with the soundlessness. They gathered around Saluez’s recumbent form while the effect went on, still with no discernible cause. Mitigan’s hands were busy with his weapons, which rather increased their apprehension.
Far off, a muted thunder. Though Lutha considered it an odd-sounding thunder, it was more like thunder than it was like an avalanche or a volcano. She shared significant looks with the others, looks meaning more or less, “Did you hear what I heard?” mouthing the word “Thunder?” following this with agreeable nods. Yes. Thunder.
None of them really believed it. First Leelson grimaced, then the others, for it hadn’t been thunder and they all knew it. Through the cracks among the stones the stars shone clearly in an unclouded sky.
Again the stones around them shuddered, the soil beneath them trembled. This pulse repeated at long intervals, two, three, four, five times. Then nothing. Still the flat sound, the muted uncanniness, the breathlessness. Saluez gasped, her eyes still closed. Lutha felt as she had at the Nodders: terrified of something without knowing what. As the Nodders had been unnatural, so this was unnatural.
“At his feet the mountains skip,” whispered Saluez. “At his step the worlds tremble. See him treading down the star trails, the Gracious One, potent and victorious.” Tears were running beside her nose, at the corners of her mouth, dripping from her jaw. Lutha apprehended her words clearly, though she had no sensation of hearing her.
“What?” breathed the ex-king, falling to his knees beside Saluez.
“A songfather hymn,” whispered Snark, her hand on Jiacare’s shoulder, her eyes fixed on the stone above them. “From Dinadh.”
Songfather hymn or not, Lutha couldn’t stop the words from repeating in her mind, over and over. At his feet the mountains skip. As on a screen, the letters moved right to left, then started over as her body tensed in rhythm with the thudding of those feet. As her lungs gasped for air, so her ears gasped for something to hear, inventing sounds where there were none, creating them, labeling them, recognizing them though she had never sensed them before:
Touch of hooved feet upon mountains, crack of horn upon horn, rasp of battle breath, slow drumbeat of heart and sinew, final bellow of supremacy. Pad of soft toes through jungles, herb scent slipping between parted jaws to flow across the tongue, night-tasting, prey-finding, huff of soft nostrils flared, whisker tips tracing the night, spotted hide sleeking like silk among the grasses, low rumble in the throat like a bass string bowed, ominous, peremptory. Shuffle of nailed feet below mighty legs, thewed as a tree grown up with vines, billowed dust blown over hides thick as boards, ears wide as doors, massive movers, a trumpet call across tree-bowered stone-speckled savannas. Water surging along slick hides, flick of fins, eyes in the depth turned upward toward liquid-trembling gray light. Beaks cleaving air, chill along the quills, knife edge of wind-buffeting wing, steel grip of talons, amber-slitted horizon-compassing eye.
Blood on the stone. Whether from the deep or the height, whether from mountain or jungle, whether from claw or talon, beak or fang, blood on the stone, rising up to live again. The very soundlessness was their sound—its sound—and all the other senses as well. They stretched, reaching for being. In silence, sound. In darkness, sight. In nothingness, touch.
The sacrifice, it says. All living is by sacrifice. For one creature to live, another one must die. What will you give me? Where is mine?
It speaks to her! It says: Oh, feel how you have unvoiced us. See how you have cut us down. Hear our silent cries! Our worlds were full of the murmur and clatter of being, now listen to the silence we inhabit, all our spirits, still!
“Lutha?” Leelson, holding out his hand.
“Nothing,” she said in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own. “It’s nothing.”
What was it? Not nothing. What were these visions? Things she had seen as a child in sensurround? Fairy tales? Stories of olden times? Creatures out of dream? Creatures come out of time?
Silence, silence, silence, even while the voice spoke, saying: So you may remember, we give you silence. Where we should be, but are not, there is silence.
What was this listening? Attenuated, the sense stretching itself outward, begging for something to fill it? Feeling one’s own eyes rattling in their sockets, twitching every way, seeking an out, an escape. Why were they here, shielded from the sky? Why was this stone all around them? Why were they not there, at the sea’s edge, crawling out of that salty womb onto the shore in company with the creatures of their common birth?
“Lutha!”
“Nothing,” she cried again.
He shook her. “Lutha.”
Lutha saw him then. Felt his violence transmitted to her own body as he ragged her to and fro, not gently.
“Leelson!” Urgently she called
