From behind one of the paint-stripped pillars, a huge bird emerged, with clear black eyes and white spots on her wings. She was just big enough, I supposed, to carry a child on her back.
“He told Sekka where he buried his raft, you know. If you bring him down, she’ll tell you.”
&
nbsp; “Why would I care where he stuck an old piece of wood?”
The loon Queen glided up to me. “You ask too many questions,” she said with a sigh. Her voice was low and sad, softer than the loon wails I had heard when the black-and-white birds gathered in my mother’s pond. I looked back over my shoulder at the long pale strand of beach, and the dark shape of Majo and her house-hunch surrounded by tall grass. She looked quite asleep.
Without another question, I climbed onto Sekka’s broad back, and put my arms around her slim neck. Her feathers smelled like scallop shells, and seaweed, and eggshells. She lifted us both up into the night.
“DO YOU NEED FOOD?” SIGRID SUDDENLY SAID, AS though it had only just occurred to her that folk occasion ally eat.
“I am a little hungry.”
The woman heaved her bulk onto her feet and disappeared inside the ship-tower. I was left in the last glow of the sun, the scent of the not-too-distant market in my nose: saffron and roasting meat and sour silk-dyes, sweat and barrels of still oil and molten metal poured into molds. Al-a-Nur was warm, and alive, and there was no snow or lichen or ice anywhere.
Sigrid reemerged with a wooden tray and dropped it unceremoniously at my feet. On it were a few brown squares, a single strip of desiccated meat, an iron flask, and an orange. “Hard tack, jerked vole, rum, and a bit of fruit to keep your teeth in your head. If you enter the Sainthood, it’s all you’ll have to eat for your first year, so learn to like it.” A lopsided smile crossed her creased brown face like a pale page turning in a beaten book. “For me, it still tastes as good as wine in crystal and doves stuffed with blackberries. The best stuff there is.”
I ate politely. It was hard and crumbly and tasteless as a shingle. The meat was like a solid strip of salt, and the rum bitter as fox bile. The orange alone was sweet and golden.
“So you believe in the Stars?” I asked tentatively.
She shrugged, like a mountain settling its boulders. “The Stars are here and there, whether we believe in them or not. I could believe in you or declare to all passersby that you are a lie and a silly story, but it wouldn’t change the fact that you’re sitting here, you mark the grass, you ate my food, you take up space. But the Stars don’t act. They give us no model for living. They teach us nothing. The first Sigrids looked for more than that. But that’s putting the stern before the bow. We’re hardly at the beginning of Saint Sigrid, but nearing the end of Tomomo…”
BENEATH ME, THE QUEEN OF THE LOONS WAS WARM. Above me, the night was cold as dead hands, and those hands pulled at me, at my thin nightrobe and my bare, unbound feet. I buried my face in her feathers.
“He doesn’t even speak anymore,” she crooned, and clouds whisked across her beak. “He just sits up there in the frost and stares. I don’t think you can do much, but I have hope. He’s heavy, so if you have to carry him, it’ll be tough going.”
“Did he speak much in the beginning?”
Sekka lowered her dark head. Her webbed feet opened and closed beneath her. “We talked all the way to the top of the mountain. Sweet things and soft things and sighing and whispering, and stories of the dark at the beginning of the world, stories of the eggs at the beginning of the season. Rakko doesn’t listen too well—except when I told him how to be King—but Itto listened, and I didn’t have to tell him any tricks just to get him to stop interrupting me like a fur-brained fool. And after I left him in the cold at the roof of the world, I used to fly back up when the drakes stopped squalling for mates, and then we’d sigh sweetly and whisper softly again, and tell stories about the dark and the eggs. But after a few seasons, I was the only one talking, and nothing about him was sweet or soft anymore. Now he sits on the rocks and there’s nothing but him holding his head together and looking at the black. I haven’t been back since the last girl Majo brought, who gave up after only an hour.”
“I won’t give up,” I whispered, soft and sweet.
I cannot say how long it took to reach the top of the mountain, though it seemed that some number of suns rose and set on my wind-whipped skin. At the peak, though, it was always night, as dark as the belly of a blackbird. And Sekka set me down in that endless murk, on the craggy summit. The summit of a mountain is smaller than you think, and there was hardly enough room for me and Itto—for there he was, knees drawn up to his chest, hands pressing two faces towards each other—to sit side by side. Sekka roosted on a lower rock and waited for me to fail.
“Hello,” I said, for lack of a better word.
The Star said nothing.
“I’ve come to get you down from here, away from here. It’s cold as still blood, and your Sekka wants you.”
The Star said nothing.
Well, she had said he wouldn’t. So I pulled at his limbs and tried to put him over my shoulder—I was skinny, but so was he, and not much larger than I was. I was sure I’d be able to do it. A fox carries a kit in her mouth, doesn’t she? But he was much heavier than he seemed, like a sack of iron slugs, and I could not budge him, no matter how I pushed and pulled.
The Star said nothing.
So I said nothing. I sat and looked where he was looking. It was a long expanse of black, marked with seven stars all in a tight cluster, leaning one against the other. It was very boring.
“I can do a trick; would you like to see?”
The Star said nothing, but his right eyes flickered a little. I gathered a lump of snow from the gray rock of the summit and warmed it in my hands till it became water. I held it out between us, and, leaning over the little pool in my palms, I showed him my fox face with its creamy tufts of fur at the ears, and smart black nose.
He laughed a little, a sound like water trickling off of high stones. “That’s a good trick,” he said, his throats hoarse from cold and silence, and he did speak, just as the otter said, in unison with himself, one voice high and one low.
“I’ve only just learned it,” I confessed, “and now that you’re speaking, won’t you please come off the mountain?”