Chapter Text
The wind has changed its tune. It rushes the same way, from west to east, through this pass. But it’s different on my lips; feels different on my skin. Our faces are bare and it chaffs against them. The wind here is a hedge to struggle through. It sings of Winter and its voice is bitter-cold. It aches in my ears and about my swollen eyes. I think:
This is what a border feels like. We’re crossing over. Here’s the rim. Beyond is only sky.
My aunt speaks to me but doesn’t turn her head. “No tears, Tam. Give this place a taste for them and it’ll only want more in years yet to come.”
My name is Tammunei, but I have other names.
I was Tammu in Blacklight to those who’d known my name for long enough to bite it shorter. Those I picked with at lowtide and fought with – over baubles of green glass worn smooth by the water – cribs of razor-clams with long wet beards – pieces of driftwood that looked like shalk or guar or familiar faces even before being carved.
But my secret name is Tam. It’s what my mother calls me, and has ever since she first gave me my natural name. Now it’s the name used by those who know me better than well. Who know more than the sound of my laughter or cast of my face but also secret things — the scent of my unwashed hair – the colour of my blood – the wordless words I say in my sleep – the taste of my tears.
It is the name my family calls me. My aunt and her half-daughter. And my half-sister and me. And the ghosts we have brought with us. Familiarity has let them shear it to the quick – one sound only – Tam.
I have seen eleven Summers. I have seen two lands. This one that is ahead of me – that I have already let taste my tears, stupid Tam – will be the third. And by the sound of the wind, and its feel on my face, I think:
I won’t see another Summer until I leave this place. It’s always Winter here.
Summer in Skyrim is always short and brittle. Shot through with hairline cracks, it breaks on occasion for days at a time — forgetting itself, it turns a kind of cold that only seems colder, because the sky is still blue and the sun is still bright but unsmiling. Then comes a warm night, or a breeze that smells like turned earth or new-grown grass, or the noise of gulls before dawn, and Summer remembers itself again.
But rhythms are strong things. The tides are a rhythm, as much as a heartbeat. The phasing moons dance to one. The seasons turn to one. You can’t stand against a strong rhythm — it’s like swimming against a river’s flow, or trying not to breathe. That’s what Tanet taught me.
So eventually there’ll always come a crack of cold like that in Summer, to settle over the land, then get into its bones. The nights get darker and longer. They gnaw at the edges of morning and evening till they’re good as gone — no more liminal time left in the day. Then the rains come. And on their trailing skirts, Autumn creeps in.
The Maze of Veils is hung in Delver’s Nook. In Blacklight we strung together spider-silks and fishing-nets, and real sheets of gauze. But here we don’t have the same luxuries we might have had once — not a one among us does. In the Grey Quarter we make do. Our Maze is cobbled together from drapes and dust-sheets and ash-stained hearthrugs, and we only hope the One of the Three we made it for won’t mind.
Today is the Spinner’s Summoning Day, among other things. Mostly it’s a day of rain.
There’s no sun in the sky to be seen, for it’s hidden behind a curtain of off-white cloud. Even so, the slabs that pave the Stone Quarter shine like polished pewter. I track mud across them — the streets and alleys I’ve come from are only paved with packed dirt, and the rain has turned nearly the whole Grey Quarter into a swamp more than a slum.
I pull my useless shawl round and over my head, but the rain’s already in all my clothes. It’s boggy-warm from being close to my body, like being swaddled in bathwater. I walk more carefully than usual — the slabs are slick and there are pools of rippling water to fall into where the stones are pockmarked or potholed.
My hair’s soaked to my scalp. Good, I think. It’s not so bright when it’s wet or damp. I’m up walking Nord-side of the city, where being mer is bad enough, and being Velothi is worse — but being both of those and memorable is worst of all. My hair is memorable.
I slip round a corner and into a square. All about the buildings are tall and old and built from blocks of basalt. They show their age by their smoothness, each saying but not quite saying how many rainy Autumns like this they’ve seen, to wash the roughness from them. This is the oldest city on the continent, so the Nords say, and it’s easy to believe their lies when the buildings back them up like this. But they’re lies nonetheless to those that know the truth: it might be the oldest city of men and nothing more.
A low dry-stone wall borders off a patch of common ground in the square’s center. The gate is wrought from iron, blackened so as not to rust with time. I give silent thanks to the rain for greasing its hinges. There’s no noise as I enter. Just grass, soft and waterlogged, and a spindly bay tree in the middle with arms upreached. Its lower branches are a mix of bare sprigs where the leaves have been plucked for the cook-pot, and new shoots where they’ve grown back.
What I’m looking for grows at the edges. Through the whole other half of the year, even I wouldn’t be able to tell the right shrubs from the wrong – dogrose maybe, or tanavian – but with the rains and the cold has come snowberry season. The stems are budding or else already ripe with fruit. For a moment I forget the rain.
I reach into a slit up the long skirt of my work-smock, and unhitch the wax-lined bag I have from where it’s been hidden, strapped to my thigh. My fingers are cold and clumsy, but I work quick as I can to pluck off the ripest fruit and slip them into the pouch, almost full now.
It goes back under my smock after that. These gardens are public, but not public to me or mine. I’m afraid of what the Nords would do if they found me. What I call foraging, they’d call theft. I hurry off through the rain, back to where I’ve come from; across the pewter pavements, back down into the deep shadowed damp.
I am barely born. Summer is high and hot. It shimmers in the air, like something woven all through the distance. My mother stands at the mouth of a long wide cleft through the mountains, and looks east through the thick haze the heat has made.
Towers of dust move across the land ahead. They sail the wastes by whirling, like dancers can move by whirling. These dancers made from dust shift across the wastes. They were not always wastes, but my mother does not remember them any other way. She never left the coastline she called home until my aunt told her:
“The sky will turn to fire. The air will turn to ash. These waters will boil and go bad. I’ve seen it now, but not early enough…”
And my mother said: “Perhaps there’s still time.”
I can’t see the wastes that once were highlands. I can’t see that they’re the colours of unfired clay. I can’t see that the sky is white and gold like broken eggs. I am wrapped tight and cradled. I am pinned to my mother’s chest. I am a small and sickly child, born too early. She thinks:
One breath of dust would choke him. One look at this place would break his heart, and what then? It would never grow right.
She had me partway through the pass. She birthed me drowned and awful onto what was once a good cloak. I was a sack of bones, and a few curls of crimson matted to a skull. She is pleased to see I have my grandfather’s hair.
I am barely born. These are not my rememberings. I know them in my bones.
The Morayat is crowded and cramped. Even when no-one walks the paths between the tents and their moorings, the wind sends ripples through the leather and waxed kresh-weave, and the pennants hung from our yurt-stays. So the place seems always alive. Like a breeze goes bristling through a forest. This is how the Morayat got its name: tent-forest; wood without trees.
Really it’s not large enough to deserve the name — more like a copse than a forest. It’s the plot given over to us in the Quarter who keep the old ways, each after our own fashion, and there are not many of us. Some in the Quarter were of the Clans before they came here, but once they reached Windhelm they dug themselves into the rock of the old quarry-gorge, just the same as the House Velothi. We few still live like those that came before us, under canopies that see the moons and stars each night. But we pitch not on the plains, or the wastes, or on the coast, but in the Morayat — here at the bottom of the steps that lead dockside, just before the river-gate.
Now the Morayat’s paths are busy for the night we give over to the Spinner’s use. The ground here slopes gently at each side. This space before the big river-gate was a dry-dock once, before it was given to us Clansmer. Mostly it goes inward and downward, shaped like a vaulted roof turned the wrong way up. Only the very bottom is flat, in a long narow channel toward the gate, and that’s the Morayat’s main causeway. Tonight it is thronged, even in the rain, and I throng through it, though the crowds make my heart feel pressed and bloodless-pale.
A mer sells oysters to passers-by. Another has a wide karahi set over a brazier. The creaking noise and floury-sweet scent of cooking chestnuts rise up from it. She is not shouting, but still the paths are livid with voices. There are more lanterns than usual overhead. Someone plays an ocarina and their song keeps a swarm of torchbugs circling above us.
I duck off the causeway and down a thin vein of path. Paths in the Morayat are like that — like a river when it spreads into delta; one channel and a thousand small streams.
Soon I stand before our yurt. I dip my fingers into the shalk-shell bowl by the doorway, filled with rainwater. I anoint my forehead, my wrists, the middle of my chest. I struggle to balance as I pull off my footwraps, then duck under the door-flap.
“Blessings on you,” I say.
I move into the customary rhythm of greetings like a habit old as walking. My aunt Nanrahamma is already home, sat cross-legged by our hearth with her pipe steadily fuming and the render-pot ready.
“And on you and yours,” she says. “What news of the world you’ve been walking?”
“Outside is an oyster-seller. He’s shucking them for those who’ll buy, and shouting in a voice like gravel when there’s no one who will.”
“And what does he say when he’s shouting?”
“‘Oysters! Oysters just out the river! — No sera, they’re not relk, but then again this ain’t home neither!’”
Nanrahamma’s face creases into the puzzle of lines I know to be her smile. Her laugh is like wet wood on a fire.
“What news from the hearth you’ve been tending?” I ask, still moving through the formalities.
“Only that it’s warm, and you’re not,” she cuts the ritual short. That’s the prerogative of age and wisdom. “Sit, sit! Before the wet and cold make a newt of you.”
I sit. The fumes from the render-pot are strong but familiar to me: Nanrahamma’s wood-alcohol. It’s not fit for drinking, but we use it to steep alchemies, to make extracts and strengthenings. I empty my pouch of snowberries into the pot. They steam, and the smell in the steam is tart and cool.