Under a Starless Sky novel 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.

“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?”