The Road Star

It was sunset above the carven pillar of Olohud when Thmedir Nul saw the procession of the Road Star. The golden grass of early autumn was almost the color of the darkening sky and the city was spread wide beneath her, houses of wood and river-clay and worked stone and so many knots of people and dogs and horses swirling between them, their chatter rising up to meet her atop the stone. The air was smoky with the odor of a thousand suppers in a thousand little households. She sat cross-legged on the uneven rock of the pillar with her lap-harp on her knees, hands pressing the strings into silence.

The moon shone bright, and it was the first thing in the sky to draw her vision. As the sun fell below the curve of Maraun its aspect changed; what was a dim, lustrous circle in the daylight became like a portal, a hole through which sunlight pierced the wall of night. The color of the moon only grew more striking as the sky around it blackened until Thmedir could see even the continent-sized storms of swirling dust moving slowly across its equator, cloud-walls made visible by the subtle difference in hue, urine-colored sulfuric dust against the tepid gray-green of its cooler air.

The Road Star appeared minutes before the sun passed down, so bright it shone clear in the purple sky. As the air around the star became dimmer its siblings appeared trailing after it: the caravan-stars walking sideways across the dome of the sky with the turning of the world, making a line that moved in a slow circle around the still, southern point of the Road Star. 

It should be said that Thmedir was a dribad, which is a kind of talekeeper in the land of Hudam. In the northern places of the planet Maraun she might be called a bard, but in Hudam, where scrolls and books are scant, there is more to a song than its sweetness. Only on the voices of the thadribad were the deeds of Tumun recorded, and many such a dribad has been the subject of hero-stories in their own right.

Now the sky was truly dark and the people of Olohud had gone into their homes to sleep. Thmedir lifted her hands from the strings of the lap-harp and saw that they had made little red lines across her fingers, which were stiff and cold from sitting still on the cold top of the stony pillar. The wind of night came blowing across the board of her lap-harp, striking her harshly in the face, passing over the strings and making them thrum softly: the first note of a mystery-song.

Thmedir clapped her hands to warm them and set them over the strings, and she began to play and sing:

The wind has come from far away

Beyond the night and past the day,

Out from the silence and the cold,

The wind is crafty, quick and old.

She began to sing the next part, but her stiff fingers faltered on the lap-harp and made an ugly sound, and there was nobody to hear her sing, here atop the pillar where her voice would be carried away by the wind. She lifted the harp up and laid it across her back with the hair-woven strap light against her chest and began to go along the carven stair that went down from the pillar of Olohud, crouching against the sheer drop to the city-plain below.