Seeklight

Unaware of him watching, the Lady Marche pulled out of the trunk long, shimmering veils that seemed to float upward in the air without falling. She pressed them one by one against herself, the sheer fabric clinging to her ordinary clothing, the rough coveralls of the village woman. The song ended and, after a moment, the woman’s voice began another in the same language.

Daenek watched as she left the last veil, an iridescent blue like cold smoke, wrapped against herself.

She knelt down to the trunk, then stood up again with a necklace dangling from her hands. Its clustered gems blazed in the mirror like some strange, new constellation in the sky outside. With one hand she pulled down the collar of her clothing, showing the smooth length of her throat. She held the necklace up to the pale skin and stood for a long time looking at herself, while the singer’s voice moved through the lonely-sounding cadences.

He went back up the stairs even more cautiously than before—the slightest noise might shatter like a sphere of thin glass the world that had blossomed out of the trunk downstairs, and the Lady Marche might drown in this one, the ordinary one.

There had been an expression on her face he had never seen before. She is a lady, he thought. He lay in his bed, holding the singer’s foreign words, impenetrable crystal, in his head. Just before he fell asleep he realized that the singing voice was the Lady Marche’s, from years and a life ago.

When Daenek had just turned twelve, the mertzer came to the house. From where he had been sitting atop the hill’s largest boulder some distance above the house, Daenek caught sight of the stocky figure in the early morning sunlight. The weeds on either side of the narrow path brushed against the man as he mounted slowly up the hillside.

The man’s patched leather jacket and broadbilled cloth cap—Daenek could discern them plainly, even though the man was still far down the path—identified him as a mertzer. What’s he doing here? wondered Daenek. They all pulled out yesterday.

He had lain all day on his stomach at the edge of the cliff overlooking the quarry, watching them load the great slabs and blocks of stone into the holds of the caravans. The cranes and hoists would swing out over the wide metal decks and then dip their cables to the ground. The leather-jacketed mertzers would clamber over the massive veined facets and planes of rock—the men had looked like ants from where Daenek had watched them—fastening the cables around the blocks. Then, with a groaning noise, as if the machines were shouting their effort to each other, the blocks were lifted and deposited into the depths of the caravan’s holds.

Midway through the loading, one of the cranes had begun to stall as it lifted a huge cube of stone. A piercing screech had sounded and the mertzers had scrambled away to all sides as the block began to twist, dangling from the cables. When the cables finally gave way, the block struck the ground and shattered and a plume of white dust had shot up into the air from its heart. The mertzers had sauntered back and dragged the fragments off to one side of the loading area.

It had taken all day to load the two years’ accumulation of the quarriers labor. The mertzers were working in the illumination of the caravans’ great searchlights when the last blocks were grappled and hoisted aboard. The cranes had then folded back onto the decks, still at last.

Hours after Daenek had left the cliff’s edge and gone back to the house and the Lady Marche’s supper, he could hear the great engines roaring and coughing in the bellies of the caravan. The noises had faded as the machines pulled out of the quarry and back onto the wide road that led away from the vil-lage. There would be no return of the mertzers for another two years.

But now here was this one, trudging steadily through the fields—what was he doing here, off the decks of the huge machines mertzers called home? Daenek stood up on the boulder and shaded his eyes with one hand to see him better. The mertzer’s face was ruddy beneath the bill of his cap, pulled low over his eyes to shield them from the sun. A bushy grey beard brushed against the top of his chest. His blunt hands held the straps of the small pack on his shoulders.

Daenek jumped off the rock and ran down through the fields above the house as the mertzer approached the door. He cautiously moved sideways around the house’s curving exterior until, unobserved, he could see and hear the mertzer speak to the Lady Marche at the door.

The mertzer had let go of one of his pack’s straps and used the free hand to take off his cap. The top of his bald head was as red and shiny as his sweat-covered face. “They told me in the village,” he said in a deep, rumbling voice, “that I might find a place to sleep here.” He spoke in the villagers’ language, the words stiffly accented with the inflections of the mertzers’ guttural tongue.