by Nancy Kress
Blackberries dangled plumply from the brambles in the forest clearing. They were a rich, juicy purple against the bright green of leaves that still sparkled with droplets from a recent shower. When Kirila dropped the berries into her basket, they made a fat plopping sound. She moved from bush to sweet-smelling bush, the nettles catching at her gown in a playful fashion, and presently she began to hum a little, a ballad Chessie had taught her. Closing her eyes in mock luxury, she popped a berry into her mouth and rolled it around on her tongue. Sun-warm juice spurted on the inside of her cheeks, spiced with tiny hard seeds.
When she opened her eyes, a female jer-falcon sat on a branch across the clearing. Sunlight waltzed over her white wings, and Kirila’s whole body tensed and tingled. The trees ringing the clearing stood out sharply, intensely, each with a special deep significance that she could feel with every nerve, that she was an integral part of, and almost had the words to explain. She took a step closer, dropping her basket, and she was close enough to see into the jer-falcon’s eyes. Mirrored in them were days of racing clouds and nights of colored stars wheeling overhead, and then stars wheeling below. Slowly Kirila held out her left fist, but the jer-falcon whirled and soared and was gone.
She looked around the clearing, dazed. Then her vision cleared and dispassionately she noted the watery spilled berries, the dull olive leaves, the bleached basket overturned on its side.
Mechanically she bent to pick up the berries.
●●●
“Llassth,” Kirila chanted softly, bent over the Chronicles by the fireplace. It had turned cold enough to light a fire every evening, filling the kitchen with cozy, companionable warmth and flickering bronze flames. “Slathen, jeelthen, sleyth.”
“No,” Polly Stark said quietly from her low stool. “Not ‘slathen’—‘sla’athen.’ ‘Sla’athen’ is the word for loyal courage in the face of personal danger. ‘Slather’ means butter-knife.”
Kirila sighed. “It would be easier if I could write it out. I did want to have this chapter learned by the next Meeting.” But there was no paper. No one in Rhuor wrote anything, although all could read at any early age the leather-bound copies of the Chronciles passed down carefully through the generations.
“Sla’athen,” Polly Stark said again, and Kirila repeated it, her pale face earnest. The ancient language tasted slippery, like very ripe fruit, or animal fat only half-cooked.
Chessie had gained back the weight he had lost, plus another three pounds. He had changed in other ways as well. His deep purple fur was thicker—the winter coat was growing in—and his whole body looked sleek and well-fed and powerful. Even his teeth seemed whiter and sharper, as though he were using them often on very hard substances. He rarely sat still, but swaggered restlessly while Kirila visited him, and took to offhand comments like, “Labrador retrievers rarely start fights, but we can finish them.” She wondered if he could possibly be courting a wolf. It didn’t seem likely, knowing Chessie, but these things happened in even the best of breeds.
She was visiting him less and less often. He didn’t want to hear about the Lielthien or the village Meetings to study the Chronicles, and he was very secretive about his own affairs. There didn’t seem to be much to say, except on the occasion of their only quarrel.
“We’ve got all the field crops in for the winter,” Kirila had remarked, after a long, awkward silence. She had a gray shawl pulled tightly around the shoulders of her gray gown, and she sat on the forest floor with her skirt pulled down over her knees and her hands motionless in her lap.
“How nice,” Chessie said, “that you turned out to be quite the little farmhand.” He was determined to provoke her; his light brown eyes were like boiling caramel.
“There’s plenty stored, and I’ll bring some out to you here if you still don’t want to winter in Rhuor.”
“Why do you keep looking up into the sky in that imbecile fashion? It isn’t going to rain!”
“Do you like brown bread?” she asked calmly. “Or maybe honey bread with dried apple? Polly Stark prepares that very well.”
“I wouldn’t eat anything cooked in Rhuor even if it were flavored with dried falcon!”
“That’s a cheap remark,” Kirila said. Suddenly she began to breathe hard and a little color rose in her gray cheeks, as if from some dammed source beneath the calm. Chessie watched her with covert hope.
“You never even gave Rhuor a chance, Chessie,” Kirila said, and her voice began to pick up speed and resonance. “You know what you remind me of? A story my Wizard once told me. There was this knight—no, wait, it was a king who would drink only completely pure water, and he offered a huge reward to anyone who would find him a completely pure spring. Dozens—no, make that hundreds—tried, but he always found some fault or other with the water!”
“Such as what?” Chessie asked in what he hoped was an insolent drawl. Kirila looked more like her old self than she had in months: more alive, almost focused enough for the trance-shattering reckless exhilaration of becoming really furious. If he could anger her enough—Chessie tried to look provoking.
“Such as the taste of copper, or a faint tinge of sulphur, or a hint of iron that no one else could detect—all sorts of so-called impurities! But finally someone found a pure spring, really pure, and the knight—”
“You said it was a king!”
“Whatever! The king drank only from that one source, and do you know what happened to him, Chessie? Do you?
“What?” He was delighted; she was panting and flushed and her voice had lost its uninflected monotone and risen almost to a shout. She hadn’t glanced once at the sky.
“The king died of mineral deficiency!”
Chessie laughed, and then said tauntingly, “You tell a story very badly, Kirila!”
She opened her mouth to retort, and then slowly closed it again. Blinking once or twice, she glanced around, puzzled, the high color seeping from her cheeks. She looked at her hands, clenched in front of her, and unclenched them with a wondering tentativeness, as though they belonged to someone else. The vivid diagonal scowl melted off her eyebrows, and her face resumed its orderly gray stillness, as a garden trampled by a hunting party will afterwards rise back into precise rows of utilitarian vegetables.
Chessie was frantic. He shouted desperately, “And you can’t sing, either!” Then, feeling this to be a less than telling blow, he launched into a passionate denunciation of the Lielthien -- “freak buzzards with delusions of grandeur and constipated eyeballs” -- slanderous tracings of Kirila’s entire family tree, and aspersions upon her character, dignity, and handwriting. She ignored it all calmly, smiling at him with a smile so gentle, so inlaid with pity, that he almost bit her.
●●●
Kirila and Polly Stark picked the year’s apple harvest— actually, there were only six trees, huddled together in a clearing in the woods—on a day of fretful weather. Wind gusted from the east, veered around to the north, and suddenly blew cold from the southeast. The sky grew so dark that they gave up trying to finish before the storm and climbed down from the branches, Polly Stark’s skirt gathered up in one hand. Then the sun broke forth to lay timid claim to the khaki-colored apples and olive grass, and they climbed back up again. Slowly the baskets below the six trees filled with scentless fruit.
An immense clap of thunder directly overhead made them both jump. Hail began to hurl down, jagged icy rocks as big as the apples themselves. The cold wind gusted and howled, driving the hail stones sideways. Kirila scrambled down from her tree, shielding her head with one hand.
“The apples!” she cried. “They’ll be ruined!”
Polly Stark’s bland face looked more agitated than Kirila had ever seen it, which was to say that there was one shallow ridge across her forehead and her eyes looked concerned, but only in the corners. A shelf in the larder had been cleared expressly for the apples. They were expected, planned for, and if they didn’t go on that shelf then the shelf would not have apples on it. Polly
Stark raised her right arm, a diminutive gray figure in the center of the clearing, and Kirila gasped.
No hail fell in the clearing. The stones fell all around it in a neat circle, and a few lumps ricocheted in along the ground at the circle’s edge, but none fell in directly. Overhead the hail stones could be seen to hurtle down to a point six inches above the tallest apple tree, bounce up a short way, then slowly roll along a radius of the circle until they came to the sharply-defined invisible edge, after which they fell to the ground in a concentrated rush, as from a gutter. The forest floor began to accumulate a low circular wall of ice.
Abruptly the storm passed. Polly Stark smoothed her wool skirt—the wind had taken liberties—and quietly gazed at the sky.
“I don’t think there’s any more hail due. If we hurry, dear, we can finish by sundown.”
Kirila stood open-mouthed. “But what...how...what did you ?”
“The hail would have damaged the apples, dear.”
“Yes, of course, but how...I didn’t know you could...are you a Wizard?”
“Oh, my, no. Just a farmer. Bruised apples won’t keep as well, you know.”
“But, if you can...if there’s magic at your command...that was magic?”
“I suppose it was.”
“Then why don’t you do all the farmwork that way?”
“Why would I want to do that, dear?”
“It would be easier! You could save time!”
Folly Stark’s face had the tactful look of someone giving consideration to a sincere but obviously preposterous viewpoint. “But why should I want it easier, or quicker? The Lielthens come so rarely, and for such short Visits, and we all learn the Chronicles at a very early age. They’re not so very long, you know. What should we do with our time while we waited for each Waiting? And, of course, the farmwork keeps us outdoors, where we’re less likely to miss a Visit.”
Kirila stared at her, unconsciously reaching for a tress of hair to chew. But all her hair was pinned back into a bun, and she stopped the gesture half way, substituting the quick upward glance into the sky that had grown into a constant automatic rhythm all her waking hours. There was nothing there but dark clouds, but her puzzled expression had begun to fade even before her neck had finished swinging back upright, and slowly she nodded at Polly Stark. “Yes. I see.”
They went back to picking apples in the hail-trampled forest.
●●●
Autumn finished its strip-tease, ending as usual with nothing more exciting than a bunch of bare branches. It grew colder, and the sky became permanently overcast with low, mean clouds. In early December there was a pig-slaughter, at which all the villagers of Rhuor worked efficiently and humanely to slaughter the shoats and smoke the pork. As a child, Kirila had loved the bustle and shouting of the pig-slaughters at Castle Kiril -- the smell of the hickory fires in the smoking sheds; playing a squealing game of catch with the pig’s bladder, blown up and knotted; all the empty clean barrels to hide in and charge out of waving mock swords. But now she shuddered faintly when the pigs were stuck, and then calmly followed Polly Stark’s quiet directions on meat smoking. The children of Rhuor carried baskets of hickory chips from the woodpile to the fire, back and forth, glancing upwards.
They had almost finished when a jer-falcon glided into the yard and perched on an empty barrel.
Kirila laughed joyfully as all around the falcon the world caught color, the brilliant hues -- so much more brilliant than had ever before existed! -- radiating out from him and setting fire to the yard. Crimson berries hung from a spiked holly bush in miracles of individual grace. Rich black earth, nourishing and vital, lay beneath her feet, and above was a living sky of silver and pearl. The sharp air shimmered with blue smoke and multi-colored meaning that rushed into her with every exuberant breath. The smell of roasted pork cracklings made her mouth fill with sweet water, and her delighted ears tingled with the whispered secrets on the wind, the gay epigrams of the snapping fire, and Polly Stark’s free, ecstatic laugh.
Then the Lielthen took wing, and in a moment the barnyard had blanched pallid and winter-bare. After a confused moment during which everyone looked around as though he were on the verge of saying something but had forgotten just what it was, work resumed, and Kirila calmly went on salting pork.
None of the Lielthien were seen in Rhuor for the rest of the month. December wore on, damp and gray and steadily darker, until the darkest day of the year, and the Waiting.
Eleven
The winter solstice dawned clear and calm and undistinguished. A little after sunrise, when their short shad-ows still sprawled enormous, the villagers began to straggle out of their thatched cottages to a huge ancient oak at the eastern edge of the forest. They carried picnic hampers and old blankets and three-legged stools for the elderly and babies wrapped in so many quilts and comforters and old rugs that their sleeping wrinkled faces looked as small as prunes. The oak, in the perverse manner of its kind, had hung on to its dead leaves, and these drooped brown and dry, fussing with every slight breeze.
The whole populace of Rhuor spread their blankets on the ground a little way from the oak and settled in for the day. In another few weeks the winter rains would begin and the clearing become a muddy bog, but now it was still dry enough so that it was not uncomfortable to pass the slow hours munching on dried apples and cheese sandwiches, idly gathering acorns, reading aloud from the Chronicles, chatting quietly about unimportant subjects, or stretching out for an afternoon nap in the pale sunlight, until desultory clouds covered up the sun. The Waiting ceremony, whatever it was, was never mentioned directly, and the only difference in the villagers’ behavior that Kirila could see was that the upward glancing at the sky had become almost continuous. The whole day passed in this fashion without anything happening, except that several people got cricks in their necks. The sun set as though it were bored with the whole thing, and a cold slow wind began to blow. Some small fires were built. Everyone wrapped up in thick gray wool cloaks, and went on waiting. Kirila began to grow sleepy.
Sometime after dark, the night air tautened and shivered. An electric murmur leaped among the villagers. Bent backs straightened, bowed heads jerked up, and drowsing babies woke and stared with wondering dark eyes. There was the sound of a torrent of wings, rushing with the fearful inevitability of a closing flash flood, and then the clearing under the hoary oak exploded with white jer-falcons.
Twenty-one of them, as suddenly still as white marble statues in moonlight, formed a semi-circle facing the silent people of Rhuor in their rough gray clothes. At the center sat the tiercel whose legs were bound with jesses of unborn calf. Kirila had the confused feeling that there were more than twenty-one, more that were motionless and watching in the darkness beyond the clearing, and around them all, seen and unseen, the forest sparkled and shone and swayed, every movement eloquent with wordless secrets and sudden cloudless starlight. The wind whispered and murmured and teased, promiscuously promising everything. In their proud marble heads, the black eyes of the jer-falcons reflected the starlight as only silver is supposed to do.
Slowly, in front of the tiercel, the air began to spin and glow, until there was a whirling circle of white light enclosing the night. It spun faster and faster and all eyes, human and Lielthen, watched it raptly. The jer-falcons began to chant in low, terrible voices: Ay l’endith melan kel. Ay l’endith melan kel. The lighted circle spun.
None of the villagers moved; all were as frozen as the Liethien themselves. Then, slowly, Kirila rose, and a sighing ripple ran over the people: aaahhhh.
She was being tugged toward the circle, but a gentle tugging, no more than the light pull of a baby’s clasp on a proffered finger. Her feet didn’t feel the ground under her. The night wind took up the chant, and the dead leaves on the oak tree whispered jealously.
Ay l’endith melan kel! “Two years ago, on a Midsummer’s Eve—then it was my brother.” Ay l’endith melan kel! “When they take one of us.”
U
nfaltering, her eyes fixed widely, Kirila moved toward the spinning circle.
A black shape hurtled toward her out of the darkness, seemed to hit a barrier clear and solid as plexiglass, and fell to the ground. But Chessie was up a second later, looking dangerous if a little dazed, and his voice cut with the sharp clarity of an ax ringing on live timber.
“Princess Kirila! You have sworn a True Quest, and a princess of the blood royal may never break a true-sworn Vow!”
Kirila kept moving toward the circle.
“My Lady! Yon Circle is a False Portent!”
Now she stretched out her left hand, and the circle stopped spinning and parted in front, like a bracelet unclasping.
“Kirila! No! I need you!” Chessie howled, throwing himself against the supernatural plexiglass. Kirila stopped and looked around, her face dazed and white in the glow of the waiting circle. For a second she hesitated, then turned back and took another step forward. The jer-falcons chanted: Ay l’endith melan kel, Ay l’endith melan kel, and their vibrant voices drowned out the dim sound of some dog howling far in the distance. She could see a whole universe now in the parted circle, an endless touchable sky of suns and stars and throbbing misty clouds and deep holes darker than death. Stars were born, and died, and were born again from their own writhing death throes, and between their birth and their rebirth no time passed. A strange rushing filled her head and her armpits tingled, as if they powered great pulsing wings. Slowly her hand entered the circle.
And touched the heart of an alien world, a world no more human, no more made for humans, than the shadowy world of the dead.