The Road Star

The little ruined rooms on the Pillar of Olohud are carved out of a dark stone and a hard stone, and in the miles near the city there are other stones like it; a few rise into the air like the Pillar, but most are flat and lie huge and black and flush against the grass. To birds they must look like lumps of pitch smeared across the hills.

Very long ago, in the time when human beings first learned to eat, they must have found that the flat stones of the hills were good to crush ground-fruit against, because by the time that Thmedir Nul was alive there were hundreds of dimples worked into the milling-slabs by the slow thuk, thuk, thuk of the pestle against the black stone. On the smoothness of the slab away from the dimples they would lay out the crushed fruit, smear it flat to dry in the sun, and that was flour for bread. The smell of the milling-slabs was always immense and heady; raw, unleached ground-fruit could make a person feverish, and the berries of the plant made a powerful sleeping medicine.

Thmedir had been very absent from her parents’ household in the weeks before she departed for the west, spending much time among the very old people, who paid her in basketfuls of flour for her company and her music. Her mood was restless; when she sang it was melancholy song, the music of wanderers lost in distant places, and she thought always of the gleaming road-star. She sang one of those songs on the day she left home, sitting there in the grass by the black stones. 

Far have I gone, far will I go

Into the mirror-shining sea,

And farther still I hope to row

Until my dread appears to me.

The sea is still, my oar is slow,

No breath but mine is stirring here,

But farther I can only go,

Far out to meet the thing I fear.

She only knew the first part of the melody and repeated it on her lap-harp as she sang; it sounded wrong to her, but it suited her mood better than the true song, which was one of the dozens of Storish sea-hero stories known in Olohud. 

So Thmedir sat again as she had on the Pillar, now in the daylight but still in the chill wind that blew forever across the world, blowing the sun through the sky. The air was very clear, and far to her west she saw the rising humps of the Ribs, the mountains of sorcery. There was snow there, white atop the greyish heaps.