Wolf Star Rise: The Claidi Journals Book 2, Tanith Lee [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

Yinyay is a doll, a mechanism, obviously. The voice is just more female than male. Faultless. It even pauses as if taking a breath – as Jotto did. (As the Ustareth-doll must have done.)

The face of Yinyay is quite beautiful in its way, and surrounded by a long silky mop of tinsel ‘hair’. The hair is part of the mechanism. Sometimes it grows very long, shoots into a corner (the corners are rounded, but never mind), delicately pulls out a tiny beetle or snail, which has accidentally got into the Star (ship), then carefully puts it outside.

It chases moths away from the light the same way.

Venn and I both felt funny about going after Yinyay up the ramp, into Her Star-which-is-a-ship.

‘Will you take some tea?’ asked Yinyay.

‘No,’ said Venn.

‘Thanks anyway,’ I said.

‘It’s a machine,’ said Venn. ‘You don’t have to be polite to it.’

‘What about Jotto?’

‘That isn’t the same.’

Yinyay waited without comment as we argued, still on the threshold. Then it glided back inside the Star.

We stayed at the top of the ramp, staring in.

I’ll describe the Star now, I might as well.

Really it is only about the size of one very large room, that is, the top half is, but there’s the lower part, underneath, where machines are stored and the stuff that makes the Star able to move, to rise and ‘set’.

The upper room is mostly what Yinyay has said is the Deck (like on an ocean ship). It’s all made, walls, floor, ceiling, of this pearly metal – I think it’s metal, I haven’t asked.

The space is circular, and around three circular ‘sides’ are padded benches, with sort of metal desk-things against the walls. These are – or have – ‘controls’. Yinyay controls them … or they control themselves?

You can maybe almost guess I don’t understand at all, really.

Ustareth had a room/s here too, to conduct her experiments – I don’t know where that was. In the lower half perhaps. Unless it was all done at her house on the lake.

The strangest thing of all is that you can see out of the three round sides above the controls, but only when Yinyay does something to them. It’s possible to make them respond to just a voice, Yinyay says. At the moment they don’t.

When Yinyay told us this, it seemed to gaze expectantly at Venn. I asked myself if Yinyay somehow knows Venn is her son. I didn’t feel I could ask.

On the fourth rounded wall are doors which open when you go up to them and say ‘Open!’ These doors run sideways into the walls. (I’d never seen a door do that.)

Behind is an area with a couch, and something that supplies food, and a bathroom area, and some cupboards with books in them, and also ‘instruments’ – all of which look like nothing on earth to me. But Venn took hold of one weird thing and exclaimed, all pleased, ‘An Astolabe!’ However, I’ve no idea what he meant or what it is, or even if I’ve spelled it right.

Altogether though, there wasn’t that much to see, once we’d forced ourselves to go in.

Venn began to ask about the lower part under the floor (if it is a floor) and could he go down and see the machines in there. But Yinyay said it was sorry, but only it could worm through a special hatch. ‘The magnets are located there,’ announced Yinyay.

I have no notion what that is all about. But it seems the magnets make the ship able to ‘fly’ and to land.

Venn appeared to grasp this. No one explained. (And if they had, I doubt if I’d have understood, so didn’t nag.)

Then though, Venn asked the Huge Question.

‘This craft – can its direction be altered? Can you guide it across the sea, for example?’

‘Of course,’ said Yinyay. ‘That is this ship’s main purpose, Prince Venarion.’

(So Yinyay did know who he was. A little later, Venn said to me that Ustareth must have stored such information, and recognition, in the Star, and/or Yinyay.)

Mostly though, we were just astounded. Floored by the frightening simplicity of changing EVERYTHING.

As we were standing there, gawping at each other, Yinyay said it would now go and see to the something-or-other which I can’t remember properly. It glided off. Yinyay is also sensitive, I mean to human moods.

(I can’t go on saying ‘It’. Apart from anything else, it’s confusing – see what I mean? I’m afraid I refer to Yinyay as ‘she’. So, I’ll write Yinyay as she.)

Anyway Venn led me over to one of the benches and we sat down.

It was very quiet, but for birdsong outside. Below the ramp, in the open that Yinyay hadn’t closed up, the sun had risen. Little sparrows were pecking about only a foot or so from the Star.

Before Venn could speak, I said, ‘Could it be lying?’ (Yinyay was still it, then.)

‘The machine? No.’

‘Then – she did mean you to sail – fly – on this Star. She must have done.’

He looked at me. One of the long looks that sometimes he gave me, long, long looks, to make up for all the quick looks, the sidelong glances.

‘If she wanted that, it hasn’t happened.’

‘You don’t trust the Star.’

‘Oh, I trust the Star completely. And this doll-snake. I trust Yinyay.’

‘Then—’

‘For you. With you. I’d trust you to be safe. It’ll take you – home, Claidi.’

All this time, I hadn’t felt that. Probably I hadn’t believed it could happen. And even now I didn’t. Yet my heart sort of woke up and shook itself, with one great thud.

Home. The Hulta.

Argul. Argul.

I felt hot with joy, and then so cold, as if a fire had gone out inside me. I saw I was afraid of going back. Not the journey – but afraid of going back to my life as it had been. To him.

But why – why—

Why am I so afraid half the time I just won’t think of it. So I imagine seeing Teil and Dagger, of riding Siree, of laughing at some