by Tanith Lee
Were there birds here? Crows, maybe. No – those straight unflapping figures weren’t birds, blown up on the ice winds as we blew upwards. Come from nowhere, as always, the faithful statues from Peshamba that seem to be my ring’s servants – but are perhaps truly hers, now followed me to the place beyond the mountain ring. The morning sun gilded their masks, and all their eyes were open.
The air got thin.
I’d expected that, remembering it from high-flying before. But then a puff of richer air jetted out of somewhere on the nearest mountain. Released, presumably, to help us, or any other visitor.
And then we’re up above the snow-line, over the carved white and the bottomless drops, where mist stirs like powder. Casting our own tiny shadows.
And so up and over the crest.
Hanging in sky, and looking down and in, and there, all that way beneath, was this golden bowl.
It was all gold, gold with emerald. At first I didn’t know what it was, but it was things growing, fields of grain, wheat and paler barley, and corn still green, and the spangling of another river like a coiling snake. Normal things, here at the heart of all strangeness. Until a green hill lifted from the fields, one of several, with patterns of trees. But there on this hill, among those trees—
Even so high, I could see this thing really was gold, and it was, too, a huge face. A golden face, with wide dark caves for eyes, staring across the central valley inside the mountains.
We were descending. We’d already dropped some distance.
Now birds did rise – below.
A ribbon of cloud came by, covering and uncovering us, and puffed out more of the richer air, so I realized I’d given up breathing and had better start again.
‘Down,’ I said. ‘Faster.’ It was already happening.
We fell like a thunderbolt towards Ustareth’s final valley.
THE MASKED PALACE
She’s here.
That thought, really just that one, was ringing round and round in my head.
As I rode through the fields of tall gold grain.
(Thu kept to heel; the statues glided after, orderly, in single file, because the paths through the corn were narrow.)
One field gave on another. Now we went through barley.
We reached the fields’ edge, natural and unrailed, with a sloping way down to the next lower fields, which were of wheat. That crop was younger, and the stalks were only waist high. I could see this clearly, since someone was walking slowly through the wheat.
The first human figure I’ve seen in this land, apart from through the eyes of statues.
Long black hair, falling below her knees, I thought. A cream-coloured dress tied at the waist with a corn-gold sash. A woman. She wasn’t looking up here, not looking my way at all. She was looking at the wheat, feeling, testing it, with her slim dark hands.
We took the downslope – stupid, but the ring would protect us – at a gallop. I tore in between the feathery-headed wheat, crushing the stalks with Mirreen’s hoofs, Thu tearing alongside.
We pulled up just short of her, clods of soil, the white seed-mist, spraying around us.
She looked up. That was all. Just – looked up at me, still with one hand on the wheat.
‘Good morning, Claidi,’ she said.
It was Her.
When I went with Venn to her house at the village in the jungle, that was when I first saw her. Or, I saw the mechanical doll she’d left him, to be his ‘Mother’ in her place. She’d made the doll exactly like herself, and so, from seeing the doll, I recognized her now. Only, about nineteen, twenty years have passed since she made it.
She’s slimmer than then. And her jet-black, magnificent (it is) hair has some long white strands in it – just like Mirreen’s mane and tail.
Her smoky skin and black eyes – unchanged.
If anything, in a funny way, she looks younger than she did then. I supposed, standing there, seeing this, dumping everyone as soon as she got tired of them had helped to keep her fit.
Ustareth.
This is Ustareth.
‘Good morning, Ustareth,’ I said. Bitterly I said, ‘So sorry about trampling your wheat.’
‘Don’t trouble,’ said Ustareth.’ It soon springs up again. Look.’
It did.
‘You’ve bred it to do that,’ I accused.
She smiled.
When she smiled – I could see Argul. Yes, he has a real look of her. Venn, too? I think so.
‘It’s doing very well,’ she said of the wheat, as if we were holding an ordinary conversation. ‘The climate helps of course.’
I said, ‘You fixed the weather here. Stole it from everywhere else.’
‘I don’t need to do that,’ she said reasonably. ‘I simply draw the energy to run everything from all the power-sources available. Sun-power, wave-power from the sea, power from the earth itself. And the volcanoes are a prime source. They were here before I was.’
‘What if they erupt?’
‘They won’t. Now their force is always channelled.’
I didn’t really understand, only that somehow she can control Everything. Which I’d already known.
Can she control us? Me?
She said, ‘Let’s walk up to my house.’
What could I do? I’d come to see her, hadn’t I.
‘Right,’ I said.
I swung off Mirreen, and led her, and Thu trotted with us. The statues were still there too. She made no comment.
As we walked, she just said the occasional thing about the fields, what this crop was, and that one (some were not wheat or corn or anything like that). Then we came out on the slope of the hill, and went up through apple orchards and a vineyard. There were a couple of lions sunning themselves on the roof of a shed-building there, but otherwise nothing much peculiar.
She’s like a lion herself. I’d thought that before.
Above us, between the lime trees and poplars, the golden mask-head appeared, very large.
‘What’s that?’ I sounded sullen – no, worse, interested.
‘The house.’
‘You live inside a golden face.’
No comment on that either.
Through the trees was a garden, not formal, wild flowers and white-blossoming trees, some sheep quietly grazing. At a pool, a young woman with a pointy face was standing in the sunlight, who startled me nearly into a shout. But she was more shocked than I was – she flung round and bolted away along the hill.
Ustareth said, ‘Yes, that was Jade Leaf.’
‘How did – she get—’
‘I’ll tell you soon,’ said Ustareth, ‘when we speak about all the other things.’
Just then the golden head on the hilltop did this amazing trick. Two eyes appeared in the cave-like eye spaces. They were grass green and they blinked, once. Then the whole golden face swung upward and tilted over to become the roof of a gleaming, round, house. A palace. It had deep blue pillars, standing on a white marble terrace, that opened and led into cool marble rooms beyond, where sun shafts fell like curtains.
A grapevine grew among the pillars.
There was a table there, with a cold jug of lemonade. I could see it. There were two glasses.
‘You must be thirsty,’ she said. ‘I am.’
We sat down on the two chairs, she and I. Ustareth poured the lemonade with her beautiful hand that made things. She offered me a plate of biscuits and grapes. And I saw the plate wasn’t glassy or gold – it was old and chipped, with a faded, glorious design. A Peshamban plate.
Down the hill, the thirteen statues had stopped in their neatest line. Their eyes had shut now.
Thu hadn’t come up, even for the biscuits. He was sitting there watching us, by the dark blue robed female statue he seems to prefer. Mirreen, hitched to the post Ustareth had shown me, was quietly nibbling the grass like the sheep.
‘Am I the only one here?’ I said. ‘I mean apart from Jade Leaf.’
‘Yes. The first to arrive.’
I felt I knew her. It’s because of Argul. But it made things more awkward. I wanted to hate her. I needed to be wary.
‘Claidi,’ she said. (Of course, since she watches everyone, she knows the value of calling me by the only name I can accept as mine.) ‘Shall I tell you everything now?’
‘Tell me first why you left Argul and his father.’
‘Ah,’ she said.
I said, ‘Abandoning Venn when he was two I understood, though I think you were scum to do it. They’d forced you to do what the Towers wanted. You felt you had to rebel, to escape. But Argul? You said you loved his father. You even took a Hulta name. Argul thought you loved him. Why?’
‘Oh, Claidi,’ she said. She sighed.
She had no right to sigh.
‘No reason then, you just got bored—’
She held up her hand.
It really was a wonderful hand. Calloused from working in fields and orchards despite all the clever machines she must have here. A working hand, graceful from use. And it was too the hand of a great woman, a Ruler. Not royalty – but real true importance. The kind that has nothing to do with anything but the person who has it.
So when she did that, I couldn’t say anything.
Instead I glared, and gulped the lemonade.
‘Claidi, I agree that leaving Venn was unforgiveable. He never will ever forgive me, nor would I expect him to. Yes, I felt everything you said. That I must escape the Law and the rule of the Towers. But I could have taken my little son with me, couldn’t I? I didn’t. I was a young woman, not much older than you are, now, and I felt I was a slave. You’ll know very well what I mean. This isn’t an excuse for what I did. Only the reason.’
‘All right. But then you were free and with the Hulta – so why leave Argul—’
Her eyes held mine. She has thinking eyes – no, dreamer’s. But she can make the dreams real.
‘Why would you think,’ she said, ‘what possible reason could I have had?’
‘You told them you were ill and you’d die. Then you tricked them somehow. I don’t know how, if it wasn’t one of your dolls they buried—’
She said simply, ‘It was a medicine I knew how to make. I took that, and it made me seem for some while to be dead. I left careful instructions for the burial. The Hulta obeyed them. I had them put one of my mechanical servants, a very little creature, with me into the grave. Once I came to, it tunnelled a route out for me under the ground. I emerged quite a distance away. The grave-site wasn’t even disturbed.’
‘Awfully clever.’
Her eyes after all flashed – a flare of temper, like her volcanoes. But then she shook her head and was calm. And again, that’s like Argul, her self-control.
‘Yes, I am clever. But Claidi, why do you think I went to so much effort to convince them all I’d died? Just to make an easy getaway?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘You’ll say for some reason you had no choice.’
The sheep bleated. I saw the two lions were swaggering up from the orchard, the sheep running over and butting at them. Old friends.
Ustareth folded her hands together.
‘I shall tell you,’ she said again, ‘everything.’
‘My first husband, Narsident, was a cruel and disgusting man. I won’t say much about him. He deserves no words of mine. To my pleasure, I see nothing of him in Venarion – Venn. Except, perhaps, Venn’s irritable side.
‘I did what I was sent to do at the Rise, and in the waste-land to which the Towers – the Wolf Tower – had exiled me. It was their mockery, really. As they said, I’d taught myself science, and could make things grow. Since I wouldn’t obey them at home, I could go and try that, see if I could. They expected me to fail. I didn’t. I succeeded.’ (Remembered triumph lit her face.) ‘Didn’t I! And then – I just ran away. I tried to leave Venn someone to care for him. But I was so impatient to go, so selfish. I hadn’t had much chance to be, before then.
‘When I met Argul’s father – don’t you know his name? He was called Kirad – when I met Kirad, I was in love. You know what that’s like. He was like Argul. You see? Very like him. The strength and honour in that man, how he cared for his people – I was so happy, Claidi. And I did everything I could to serve the Hulta too. I developed my skills as a healer, setting broken bones perfectly, making salves for wounds and bruises that could cure swiftly and leave no scar. And for many illnesses, too, I made cures. They got used to me, to my machines – although I let them see very few of those. I hid so much of what I could do – oh, even from my husband. I didn’t want to burden them with all that. Or frighten them – I was afraid they’d stop liking me. They called me the Magician anyway.
‘When Argul arrived, that was the second great happiness. Poor Venn – after his father, it was difficult for me to love him. But then, I never really tried. With Argul I didn’t have to try. From the first, he was mine, mine and Kirad’s.
‘So then why did I go?
‘You know that I was still experimenting, learning, testing everything. Not the Hulta – I didn’t abuse their trust. You know too that I visited Ironel, my mother, and Twilight Star in her winter country. Sometimes I needed that companionship, women who knew me as I was. I was a friend to Twilight. But finally I saw her as a fool. Why else have I never told her I’m alive, and here? She was a woman of the Towers, and still is. Ritual, royalty, rules, playing with people. You think that I do that. But if I did, never as Twilight would like to. Her values – are absurd. That plan to create a super-human – a Wolf Queen – and she told you it was my plan, too. Claidi, in my mind, it was something I’d thought about, not as something to cause, but something that might happen on its own. Naturally.’
I spoke. ‘Just as it’s all so natural, isn’t it, here. The trees making food, the animals not needing to hunt—’
‘Here,’ she said sharply, ‘that is natural. Yes. Do you prefer the other system? Starving for want of food, and a tiger that kills and eats a deer, and next you? Yes, I like the fact that doesn’t happen here. That if I see an animal racing along, it’s doing it because it likes to, not because it must. Think of it, perhaps, as another Broken Law. Animals aren’t people, Claidi. That’s why one must be more sensitive and courteous in their treatment. They’re another race – many races – and we don’t speak their language.’
‘What about the sharks?’ I cried.
‘Let me come to that,’ she said. ‘For now, I’ll only say, I don’t play with – or experiment on or breed human things, even for their own good. Now, let me continue.
‘I was with the Hulta, and happy. Then one day, I learnt something new. And this was about myself.’ She paused. She looked away from me for the first time, as if ashamed. She said, ‘I learned I’d become ill, with a disease which would end my life, horribly and quite swiftly. I, the Clever One.
‘Listen to me carefully, and try to believe now what I say. You know what I can do – Ustareth-Zeera, the Scientist-Magician. Was it arrogance? Perhaps. I thought I might be able to cure myself, although I knew very well my illness was reckoned incurable, and there was no one else in the world who could. But nor could I work the cure if I stayed among the Hulta. It would be impossible to do what I must, there. Because the cure I and my machines developed, though it alone might be successful, was almost more terrible than the disease itself.’
We sat in silence, under the mountains.
(Thu had lain down, and slept.)
‘Besides, if this awful cure didn’t succeed, I would still die. That too made me sure I must go away at once. I didn’t want Kirad to see my struggle, perhaps see me lose it – let alone Argul, who was still a child. I thought, Since I may well die anyway, I shall pretend to die now. Then they’re free of all this horror, and I can fight with it alone, and better. That then was what I did.’
Another long silence.
‘Your cure worked,’ I said.
‘Yes. As you see
. It was an ordeal I’d wish on no one – but I wanted to live.’
I burst out, ‘But if you were cured, why didn’t you go back to them then?’
‘Claidi – I had to be sure I was cured. The disease was such, I couldn’t be certain for a great while – years – that I was safe. What was I to do? Return from the dead to Kirad, only to die in front of him again? No. I kept myself from them. I worked alone. I found and came to this barren continent, empty of almost anything. A blank canvas. I made it into what it is now. And by the time I’d finished, I knew too that I was whole and would survive. And by then also, of course, I knew that my husband was dead, my son an adult, and the Hulta leader. And I had no place there any more.’
‘You’d watched them,’ I said. ‘How else could you know all that?’
‘Claidi, I think you, too, if you’d been able, would have watched them in my circumstances. They were my family. My husband and my son.’
I went red. Did I believe her – about any of it? Yes … No?
As if I’d said this, she added, ‘Try also to believe this, now is the first time I’ve had the courage to call my sons back to me. And that, Claidi, in a way, is because of you.’
So now, the rest of her story, her words to me.
She said she left the diamond ring and the ‘charm’ for Argul. So he could be sure the woman he wanted most – that he and she were right for each other. Ustareth told me that wasn’t because she meant it to be Winter Raven. Apparently that was Twilight’s idea. Ustareth said that she had thought quite early on that Argul had a certain ‘natural’ gift which neither she, nor his father, had had. ‘If that were so, Claidi, then the woman he spent his life with might need to have it also. And it was that the ‘charm’ showed him, your natural ability. Yes, even more than the chemistry of your being right for him and he for you.’
I was offended by that. The ‘charm’ then hadn’t shown love? It showed – Natural Ability – what did she mean? But she was going on.
The diamond, she said, was to help the woman Argul married. It would give great powers, but only to one who could use it.