City of Pearl

by Alys Clare

  Then all at once we emerged from the side of the mountain.

  The dark night sky arched above us, glittering with stars. The air was cold and fresh, and I thought it was the sweetest thing I had ever smelled.

  We descended a steep little path that twisted this way and that. Presently I saw a huddle of low buildings ahead, set in a valley beneath a long spur of mountain that shot out to the north, so that the valley faced west and a little south. There were fields around the buildings and some trees.

  One of the buildings had a light in the window.

  We approached it and the door opened to us. Inside there were low beds with thin mattresses, blankets and pillows. ‘Yours,’ the man on my right said, gently pushing me towards the bed set against the rear wall. Suddenly wondering if the robed figure with the bright eyes was still there, I spun round and stared out onto the darkness.

  The patch of worn ground before the dwelling was deserted.

  I stumbled towards the bed, fell onto it and lay down. The pillow was cool beneath my cheek. I closed my eyes. Someone drew a warm, soft blanket over me and I snuggled into it. Someone – perhaps the same person – took off my boots. There were voices speaking quietly but I didn’t trouble to listen. They were speaking a language I had never heard before.

  I was clutching my satchel to my chest and I thought I could feel inside it the hard, round shape of the shining stone in its wrappings and its bag. I thought it felt warm. It was probably only my imagination, but I was too far gone to care. The stone seemed to say very softly, Safe.

  It was enough. I let sleep take me.

  I woke to soft light and early morning silence.

  Several of the other beds were occupied, the occupants deeply asleep. The air was cold, the fire in the hearth now reduced to a few glowing embers in a mass of burned wood. The room was clean and, considering how many people appeared to live here, reasonably tidy. I looked round at the sleeping forms but could not tell whether or not one was Itzal. Couldn’t tell even if they were men or women, so well-wrapped in the covers were they.

  But I knew with absolute certainty that the robed figure who had welcomed me in the painted darkness last night wasn’t among them.

  I still had my satchel clasped to my breast. Carefully and silently I unfastened it, taking out the soft leather bag that held the shining stone. I removed the wool padding and held the stone in my hands. It was warm, just as my fuddled and exhausted mind had suggested it was last night.

  And, as it had done before in the stables on the far side of the mountain, in answer to my unspoken question it shot out a great burst of golden light. Hastily I tried to cover it, for sudden light can awaken sleepers just as noise can. I found that I was smiling, wanting to laugh. I had no idea why, unless the unexpected moment of joy had originated within the stone.

  I wrapped it – the light was beginning to fade now, but still very bright in the dim interior – then briefly held it to my breast. I could have sworn I felt it throb, in time with my heart. Then I put it in its bag and tucked it away in my satchel.

  Even as I did so, the door opened a crack and a deeply hooded figure peered in through the gap. ‘Come,’ a voice said softly.

  I got up, folded back the covers, put on my boots and picked up my satchel and my cloak. I moved on tiptoe across the floor, weaving a way between the beds. I pushed the door open just enough to go out, then closed it. All the time, the bright pale-brown eyes with the golden lights were watching my every move.

  The robed figure had moved away a little, and now, beckoning, went up a path leading back into the mountain’s lowest folds. I was too intent on following to spare a moment to look around me, but senses other than sight were informing me even as I panted after the robed figure. The air smelt wonderfully fresh, as if dew sparkled on new green grass and vegetation, and I detected a faint salt tang. And the air was warm on my face. I knew without looking that the snow had gone from this valley; that spring was near.

  After a short, hard climb, the figure stopped. We were on a small patch of level ground; a sort of platform that dipped into the rocky hillside to form a shelf. It was in deep shade, for a great shoulder of mountain stood between us and the rising sun in the east, but the cool was welcome after the climb.

  The robed figure turned, pushing back the deep hood to reveal the face.

  And I saw, as I think I had already known, that it was a woman.

  She perched on an outcrop of rock at the rear of the shelf, patting to the space beside her. ‘Sit,’ she said. I obeyed. She reached into her pack and produced fresh bread, a pat of soft goat’s cheese wrapped in a vine leaf and a flask of cold water. While she divided it between us, I looked around.

  The first surprise was that I could see the sea. It was some way off to the north, judging by the position of the sun. We were on the shoulders of the mountain range that ran along the coast, and the green of the plain below shone in the early light. The little settlement where I had spent the night was somewhere down in the foothills, invisible now beneath the pine-cladded lower slopes. I wondered if this track was the one by which we had descended the previous evening.

  We shared the food, and the woman did not speak until we had finished.

  ‘I am Luliwa,’ she said. I said nothing, merely nodded. You have had me brought here, I thought. It is for you to explain yourself.

  But I wondered if I might after all have spoken aloud, for she nodded, gave a brief, rueful smile, and said, ‘Yes, you do just as I would do myself if the positions were reversed. You wait for me to speak. To explain.’ She paused, then went on. ‘I will; of that you have my word. For now, though, let me merely say that you are safe. You are safer than at any time since you left the house in Cambridge, and possibly for a long time before that, but you already know this for your shining black companion has twice told you.’

  She knew about the shining stone. Of course she did.

  She was watching me. In the brief silence while she studied me – I could feel her bright eyes on me like a gentle warmth – I did the same to her.

  Her skin was light brown, and what I could see of the hair drawn back beneath the edge of the hood was darkest brown, or perhaps black, streaked at the temples with silver. The dark brows arched up over those extraordinary eyes, and the well-shaped, powerful nose bisected the lean cheeks like the prow of a ship. Her mouth was wide, and the lines around it suggested that she smiled more often than she frowned.

  But for all that there was a deep sadness in her face. I found myself staring into her eyes, quite unable to look away, and it seemed to me that the pupils slowly widened until they had eradicated the golden irises and become a deep, bottomless black. It was … it was like staring into a lightless cave. It was like – the thought came out of nowhere – looking into the past.

  And that profound black did not reflect light …

  I felt that I was tumbling, swirling and turning as I fell, and around me walls of hard rock flashed images at me. I saw those huge animals again, and now there were other pictures too, zigzags and dots and a grid pattern, and a great arc like the backward-turning horn of some enormous animal, jagged on one edge and smooth on the other. And then one side of my forehead exploded in a sudden stab of agony, for I had seen these images before, many times, in the onset of the dreadful half-brow headaches that I’d suffered for most of my life.

  Luliwa gave a soft sound of distress and instantly the images went away and so did the pain. I was left with the odd empty-headed sensation that always follows the terrible headaches – as if, with the cessation of the torment, the body in its huge relief doesn’t quite know what to do with itself – and then that too was gone.

  Luliwa reached out to take my hand. With her free hand she stroked my forehead, and her touch was cool, and my flesh seemed to lean into it.

  ‘I did not know,’ she said very gently. ‘I should have guessed, however, for so often the condition exists alongside.’ Just as I began to ask what she meant, she added,
‘I am sorry, Lassair.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. I hoped I didn’t sound as grumpy to her as I did to myself.

  She was looking at me anxiously. ‘Truly all right?’ she asked. ‘We have a hard path ahead, and at the end of it much will be demanded of you.’

  I stood up, managing to control the momentary dizziness. ‘Truly,’ I said. ‘Lead on.’

  Not long after we had resumed our climb we went inside the mountain.

  Just as on the southern side, I didn’t see the entrance until Luliwa was standing right in it, for all that this time I had been on the look-out for it. This portal was different from the long, narrow crack that Itzal had led me through, for it was low and in form like an almost perfectly-rounded arch. It was hidden behind a rocky outcrop, deep in the shadows and looking like nothing so much as a smooth lump of stone made black and shiny by a rivulet of water that flowed constantly over it. It was only when Luliwa went straight through it that my perception altered and I realized that what had looked like an outward-curving block of rock was actually a dark space.

  Luliwa waited while I crouched down and crawled in after her. She had lighted a lamp, and she held it up for me to see that we were in a passage, its roof lowering overhead. There was room to walk upright here, but I knew this would not be the case as we went on into the mountain. She met my eyes and I nodded to tell her I was ready. Then she turned and walked on.

  You lose all sense of time inside a mountain.

  I was aware of so many things, but the passage of time wasn’t among them. It seemed meaningless here, for such was the sense of antiquity – of being in a place that had been there unchanged since the world began – that whether I spent a day or a decade inside the mountain was quite irrelevant.

  Luliwa didn’t speak. I imagined she was leaving me to experience the impressions for myself.

  Once I had accepted the darkness, and the unyielding nature of the rock, and the silence, and the total unlikeliness of my being there at all, I began to sense other things.

  The first and most powerful of which was a feeling that Luliwa and I were not alone: that there were other consciousnesses in there close beside me, sending out feelers that penetrated deep inside me to discover what I was, what I wanted, why I was there. I let them come into me, for I was here at another’s wish, not my own, and I didn’t feel I had anything to hide. I was, I suppose, innocent.

  After a while I think this was understood, for I started to feel less like an intruder. I didn’t feel welcome – not yet – but it seemed that some sort of barrier that I’d sensed I was pushing against had begun to ease a little.

  And Luliwa, speaking for the first time since we’d come inside, said quietly, ‘Good.’

  We went on. Sometimes we climbed – once I had to cling onto a rope slung along one rocky wall, hand over hand up a cruelly precipitous little slope that I’d never have managed without aid – and sometimes we descended. At one point the way became a narrow tunnel, and we had to wriggle along it on our stomachs, bending almost in half to negotiate a tight bend.

  I was afraid then; terrified.

  And Luliwa, who had probably brought initiates this way before, knew it was the moment to give reassurance. ‘Nearly there,’ came her mellifluous voice from ahead. And, again, ‘You are safe.’

  And the terror faded.

  It was after negotiating a long set of rough-cut, steeply descending steps that I became aware the silence was no longer absolute. I could hear water, and in the instant that I did so I recalled hearing it when Itzal and I had made the journey the other way. In front of me Luliwa had reached the foot of the steps and she turned, waiting for me to join her.

  ‘There’s water nearby,’ I said very softly.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. There is a little river which has its source to the south of the mountains, where it appears as a sparkling stream issuing out of a spring, bringing life to the plateau. But it disappears when it reaches the mountains, and men believe it is swallowed up by the earth. Another river emerges on the northern side of the range and makes its way to the sea, by which time it is wide and full with the water that penetrates down through the rocks. Few realize that it is the same river that disappears to the south, but it is.’

  She was looking at me with a strange expression. She seemed to be expectant; excited, almost, as if she was waiting for me to gasp in amazement and make some profound comment.

  I shrugged.

  ‘I don’t—’ I began.

  But then I saw an image.

  And it was the last thing I had expected.

  But then moments from my own past seemed to join with it.

  I was sitting beside the man I later discovered was my grandfather and he was telling me a tale of his own past, although I didn’t know at the time that the sailor called the Silver Dragon was in fact himself. He had taken his ship and his loyal crew into danger; Into many adventures as they followed the routes discovered by their forefathers – I could hear his deep, solemn voice – always pushing on, always discovering new lands. Knowing that the path was becoming increasingly perilous, he persisted in following it when he should have turned back.

  And then, even as I was setting out on my long journey all those weeks – months – ago, he had said of my destination, It is a land full of marvels and magic. When I asked him if he’d been there, he said, I have been everywhere.

  And he had told me not to leave the shining stone behind.

  It had been the last thing he said.

  I sneaked my hand inside my satchel and sought out the stone. My fingers loosened the drawstrings of the leather bag and I reached under the soft wool to touch it. Just for a heartbeat, Thorfinn was suddenly right there with me.

  ‘He was here,’ I breathed. ‘He came in his ship – in his beautiful fierce ship that was the original Malice-striker, and that now lies on the shores of the land where it came into being. The ship whose noble name now belongs to another …’

  Luliwa, studying me, smiled but said nothing.

  We went on. Sometimes we walked beside the underground river, and it was dark, and full of power, and I was afraid of it. Luliwa offered me no comfort now. She seemed to be implying that the time had come for me to deal with my fear by myself.

  Then we were climbing again, and the noise of the water faded and disappeared. We stopped to drink and to eat sparingly.

  A long, long time later, we stopped.

  I realized, even as I bent to catch my breath and then stretched this way and that to relieve my aching back – we’d been crouched down in a low-roofed tunnel for a long time before emerging into this space – that this was somewhere Luliwa and her people visited regularly. She reached up onto a shelf and her hand went straight to the lamps, which she lit. The soft light waxed, and I stared around me with astonishment.

  I had expected the vivid images on the walls, for I had seen some of them last night, although at times I’d wondered if I’d dreamt it.

  Some of the animals were here too. There was a massive bull, and a horse whose head seemed to emerge from the wall, for whoever had painted its beautiful lines had made use of an outcrop of rock in precisely the right place and of just the right shape. There were other horses, many of them, their heads and necks dense black and their hindquarters light, patterned with dark spots. Their legs and feet seemed to melt away, giving the illusion they were standing in some medium other than the firm ground. And now there were other images too: a wall of handprints and another area where paint had been applied – sprayed, I thought – around the outline of hands. I looked from one to the other, positive image and negative image, and they seemed to move.

  I shook my head, dizzy suddenly, as the painted walls came alive all around me.

  ‘Sit,’ Luliwa said, guiding me to a shelf of rock that might have been put there for this very purpose. She reached into her bag and withdrew a small silver flask, unstoppering it and handing it to me. I took a sip, and knew it to be alcohol. It was delicious but
potent. I took another sip, and then with a smile she took it away.

  After a moment I said, ‘Who did this? Did you?’

  ‘I?’ She shook her head, and a look of wonder – of fear, even – crossed her face. ‘Oh, no. Not I, not any of my people, although perhaps – just perhaps – it could have been our long-distant ancestors, for our legends and our tales tell us that we have inhabited these isolated lands from far, far back in time.’

  ‘They are old, then? The pictures?’

  She stared at me, her pupils wide, and once again I had the sensation that I was looking into a deep, black cave. This time, however, I was ready. I was still fearful but I knew I could not turn away.

  ‘They are old, Lassair,’ Luliwa said distantly. ‘So very old. Always here, alone, hidden away through the centuries, the millennia, their power waiting to awaken when the time was right.’

  ‘And you – someone discovered that they were here?’

  ‘I, yes, it was I,’ she said. She sighed, settling beside me. ‘I was running away, fleeing from—’ She stopped. ‘Evil had been done,’ she went on, ‘to me and by me, and I was furious at that done to me and already beginning to feel the painful stirring of guilt over that done by me.’

  ‘What did—?’ I began.

  But she went on as if she hadn’t heard.

  ‘I was searching for power – for magic, perhaps you might phrase it, although I did not – and I believe that it was this that summoned me here. The force that lay hidden in the mountains needed to be found, and I needed to find it. The two halves knew each other, and they drew together. I was led’ – she emphasized the word – ‘to the crack through which you were admitted yesterday, for, like you, I came from the south.’