Red Country by Sylvia Kelso Page B

rational mind. It was not simply the silence of Hethria, which had lapped the caravan from our first day beyond the Gebros, a vast sea about a passing boat. This was a more potent quiet: a listening, aching emptiness, an awareness of loss and vacancy, a stillness all but sentient. I found myself minded of graveyards, whose hush is not tranquility but a vacuum crying the absence of the dead.
    When that image came to mind I almost stopped. Then I shook myself, surveyed the grass slopes, the rocks abrim with light, told myself not to be everything I most despised, and went on.
    The springhead was beside the mound, a still tinier cup bedded among huge old untended plants of mint. So I knew someone had lived there, before I turned to the mound and made out, under fallen beams and a creeper’s profusion of black and scarlet bloom, the ground-plan of a house.
    It was lost now, only humps and mounds to mark its dissolution, under the rampant vines. The wind had dropped. The spring ran without a sound. No birds came to drink. Hethria, the outer perimeter, was utterly quiet. There was a cave behind the creepers, but I did not go in. Telling myself that I had found the spring, that Beryx was naturally not here, there were no wizards, and that whoever had lived here could no longer resent or gainsay my visit, I went to look at the flowers.
    They grew on a sort of bed raised from the hill-slope, a dozen desert plants with silver gray leguminous leaves and clusters of the most amazing blooms. At each blossom’s center a silky, grape-black spot capped the knot of the two petals, which resembled a vertically set double-pointed canoe. But those petals were a shade like living ruby, brighter than heart’s blood, the very essence and idea of Red.
    I had gone on my knees to examine them, marveling at the bizarre shape, the juxtaposed colors, the sheer wonder of such flamboyance on the dowdy gray plants, and had just decided to pick one in case a Sathel could identify it, when I perceived, and recognized, the nature of their bed. Six feet long, four feet wide, raised a foot or so above the ground.
    I was kneeling on a grave.
    At times the most rational of us lose our heads. I jumped up and backed away, I only just managed not to turn and run. Then my eyes lifted from the flowers.
    He was facing me across the grave. He wore a blue desert robe and black turban, pulled down to hang in loops about his neck in the Sathel way. A young man about my own age, clean-shaven, with untidy light-brown hair, a square jaw, and gray eyes so air-clear and pure they seemed to come right out of his sunburnt face.
    I did not think, a ghost, a wizard, Beryx, salvation, how did he get here, is he dangerous? I could not think at all.
    Heartbeats went by, and I heard every one. My heart was a giant drum right up in the base of my throat; it was so loud I thought the very walls of Eskan Helken must begin to shake.
    â€œHer name was Fengthira,” he said.
    The silence parted to receive his voice, and closed again behind it; I had a stupid fancy that it welcomed his speech as much as it would have resented any words of mine.
    â€œThe flowers are morrethans. Desert fire. We planted them for her.”
    My tongue moved at last, uttering the first words, sensible or not, that rose to mind.
    â€œYour eyes,” I said stupidly, “are gray.”
    Though they were so clear as to seem transparent, that clarity was an illusion. They were actually translucent, clear but depthless, and light moved in them like the patternings of air made visible.
    â€œNo, I’m not Beryx,” he said.
    I think I choked.
    He watched me impassively. Then he said, “I don’t live here. One of us just comes up each moon to tend the grave.”
    That time I know I choked. It is more than eerie to have your questions answered before they reach mental words.
    â€œI saw your mare,” he said. “But it’s no matter. With you, Fengthira wouldn’t