A story of yearning
I yearned, see. This feeling that nameway people express with a verb. But you nameway do not mark the direction of yearning, leaving it meaningless, floundering. My yearning came from below, from the deep-down where the souls of the ancestors were. I heard a song of red that reached me from the depths, surfacing through countless generations, and it beckoned to me and disturbed me.
I am of the Stone storyline. Song people sing our stories, reminding us of who we are; Fish people catch the fish; and Moss people maintain the moss which the Feeder people make into food to sustain our bodies. Weaver people make some of the moss into garments to warm us in the cold, long winters. Each storyline has a purpose, but Stone is barely needed now. Seventy-six generations ago, when the ancestors lifted the isles, the Stone storyline was tasked with chiseling shallow dwellings in the newly surfaced rock for all of us, so that we could find shelter there. Dwellings that would hold water to let us breathe easy when we sank down to sleep, and dwellings that let us surface and inhale the air when we awoke.
Ulín interrupts me to speak. “I myself used to live underwater.”
I ask, “How would you, a nameway, live underwater? You do not have a siltway body—and I have not heard—”
She whispers, “Among the dreamway.”
I am not sure I understand, and I am confused, but she shakes her head. “I will tell you my story when yours is done.”
I say, “All right . . . Where was I? Yes—the Stone storyline.”
Long ago, the purpose of people within our storyline was to fashion dwellings out of the body of stone. But that purpose was exhausted long ago. It existed for one generation only.
What, then, was the purpose of Stone? What was our labor, beyond helping the other storylines and being diminished with each generation? I worried about it as I lay in the shallow stone cavern fashioned by my ancestors, generations ago. I lay in darkness, breathing the tide, my body sinking deeper into the watery pool of the bed. My eyes closed. I called on the magic of my two deepnames, and with their power extended, I saw a glittering web. The bonds spooled out of me like moss-yarn in water, showing me how I was tied to my people. Among the living I was bonded to Old Song, an elder of the Song storyline, who was at that time on an island quite a distance away from my dwelling. And among the dead I was bonded to the one who birthed me. My mother, a nameway would say, but we do not mark these genders, and so we do not have these words like the nameway do.
Through the one that birthed me, who also had two deepnames, I was connected to many generations deepening into the Shoal. Through my bond with Old Song, who had three deepnames, I was connected to the living and dead souls of Song, Moss, Stone, and Weaver storylines, and through these souls to every one of us, making up a star.
The Star of the Shoal flared in my sleepy vision, shining gently underwater—ancestor souls like slim, silvery fish waving in a gentle current, whole undulating woven sheets of them, and above them a slim shining layer of us, of the living.
This is how I would fall asleep every night. But this time, through my connection to Old Song that led me back to the oldest of Stone, I perceived a glimmer of red.
Ulín asks, “What happens to those without deepnames, if they cannot bond?” Her voice is curious, a bit broken. I was taught to listen to such things.
I say, “Oh, they bond. Those without magic are held by the others. They are mortar.” As I speak, I watch Ulín’s face, the minute changes in it—pain, regret. Resignation. How did I not notice this before? I speak again. “You, yourself, have no deepnames.” It is not a question.
Ulín’s face goes pale, and I notice things, just as the Headmaster taught me; I notice what should have been obvious if I paid better attention. “I should have noticed before—you are magicless—and yet, you are not mortar. Your deepnames have been torn from you by violence!”
She turns her face away from me. This, this is why she is here. This is a great crime, a terrible misfortune. Someone must pay, and I will gladly collect. “So you’re here to purchase a contract on your assailant.”
“Please,” she says. “Please stop.”
I, too, am too curious for my own good. It was silly of me to think that part of me ended. “Forgive me, Ulín. I just wanted to understand.”
She does not answer. I have pried too much, and she has pried too much, but I do not want her to be silent. I want her to ask me questions and I want to ask her, too.
The silence weighs me down until I blurt out, “You’re different from other clients. You do not call me a fish under your breath, you do not look away from my face.”
She frowns. “Why would I?”
“Even Ladder thought I was strange, before he trained me and steeled himself to my appearance.”
She speaks quietly. “I think you’re wonderful, Stone Orphan.”
Her words grate on me. This word, wonderful, it does not belong here. “You want something,” I say. “I already said I’ll consider your contract. No need to flatter me.”
“I’m probably here to purchase a contract. But mostly, I am trying to understand.” Ulín closes her eyes and begins to speak smoothly and slowly in the language of the desert. She speaks as if she is singing. “This is something I always want—something that brings me to ruin and yet this something is mine—not simple curiosity, but a thirst for deep knowledge, a joy in the shape and branching of it. I want to know how language is formed between people, how language precedes and survives us. I think—I believe—I know that language is a living creature that changes and writhes between us, that ascends from the ancestors and rises through us toward all the future people who wait, yet unborn, to speak it . . .”
