Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars)
Page 56
Stillness. The sleep, which Queen Athryn had troubled with her presence, deepened again.
Sometimes I heard the sea. Sometimes I heard soft singing. Mostly I heard nothing at all.
From outside, from all the places I knew to be outside, came the smell of rot and shade.
3
At first Drudaen came to me only in that realm, the non-place in which I floated. He could not see me but he knew where I must be. He wore the porcelain face of his ancestors and he spoke my name gently, as a cousin.
I can let you out of the room, I can set you free from sleep. You could return to your body if you would serve me. He spoke in no voice, only the ribbon of thought trailing through me, and the aura of his kind benevolence. I could always make use of someone who speaks Wyyvisar as well as you do.
But in the depth of my sleep he brought no trouble to me. I dreamed him, as I had dreamed everything, all of time. I could see the whole curve of him from beginning to end. What he offered me, the motion of the body, was nothing.
He crooned on as if I were listening, but the sea washed over his voice, the sea engulfed him and I listened to its pulse.
When he returned the next time, his voice was harsher, and I had the feeling he was nearby. For some reason, even in the deep folds of my somnolence, this thought troubled me. He spoke again, and I could almost hear the sound. I can let you out of the room, I can set you free from sleep. I can give you this gift willingly or I can wrench it from you by force. The choice is yours. Open and let me enter.
In my languor a wave of trouble began to resonate. I clutched at tatters of sleep but they fled.
I can let you out of the room, willing or no; and this seemed the uttermost cruelty to me, who had wanted nothing more than to lie here, who had conceded the whole world for this peace.
He began some song then, a thin sound of ungainly Words which I had heard before. The song troubled me some and so I sang a tune to drown it out.
This went on for a while. He would change his song and so would I, when it started to trouble me. Soon this became automatic and I spared it little thought. Sleep deepened some, in spite of the nettling noise of him, who refused to go away.
I had something he wanted. I remembered it but the thought left me indifferent. He went on singing and disturbing me and now and then I wondered why it was he thought he could offer me anything. After a time I wondered who he was altogether. I had this knowledge somewhere but I could hardly be troubled to recall it. His insistence surprised me, for it seemed to me, now that I had time to think about it, that a person was really better off without wanting things very much; and here was this voice insisting on something. Insisting that I cooperate. In some work. Some scheme of his. Which involved my waking.
He tried to find me forcibly. As if he stood battering at a door. Only the sound of the door kept blending with the sea. This was really too much, I thought, for him to go on like this; the songs were bad enough but now this bullying. Still, one did not have to wake up, not entirely, not to deal with such a small problem.
I knit up my sleep again and pulled it close. I drank its warmth and nestled into it. He was close to me and tried to harm me again but his touch hardly reached me. I understood, without much caring, that I had traveled very far from him, very far from all he wanted. His thirst seemed paltry to me, when compared with my own perfect and beautiful indifference.
It seemed to me this only took a little time. How time ran for him, I could hardly say. But finally, one day, I found myself drawn away from my kingdom of silence and rest to the room again, the chamber beneath the sea. Torches had been lit and shadows danced. My body lay motionless on the slab of stone. Drudaen Keerfax was there with me.
4
He had been in the room for a long time. The effort to travel here had told on him, and now he was afraid to come closer. He harbored a fear of the place, something terrible had happened to him in the vicinity. I realized, with a slow start, that the terror was connected with me.
No one had come with him. Wrapped in a drab cloak, hooded, he wore the weariness of the lone traveler, and I wondered at this since it hardly seemed his style. In the center of that room he stood, smelling of wind and horses. Aging. He was aging.
On the slab of stone I lay. On my body I wore only an earring, a ring and a bracelet, and each of those pieces of jewelry made him wary. Light clung to my skin, which was fair and soft. I had never thought of myself as beautiful but there, from the awful distance at which I watched myself, I saw differently. Dark curves framed my fine-boned, ivory face, the full cut of lip, the flare of graceful nostril, the heavy-lashed lid. It was finally this image that held him, this enchanted youth in deepest sleep.
What had he come to do? Even in his own mind his purpose remained unclear. He had come to kill me but now that he was close he couldn’t. He had come because he heard a rumor I was alive, and as long as I lived he still had something to fear. I read that thought easily. He had come a long way, and found me sleeping more deeply than his magic could reach. He also found he could not approach me with a single thought of harm in his head.
Murmuring. Beneath his breath he muttered the Words that presently guarded him. They were easy to hear and comprehend; I was surprised he considered himself defended when I could read his every thought so plainly. He moved toward me slowly — toward my body on the stone. Of me, of my disembodied presence, he had no inkling.
No malice in him. He had forgotten the thought that brought him here. He pulled back the hood and I saw how old he had become, this enemy of mine. But one could see, looking from the elder to the younger, that we shared blood. This was part of what troubled him: it was as if in seeing me he were seeing himself as a boy in the dawn of the world.
He did the strangest thing. Using the water from his flask, with the tips of his fingers he pressed the slight moisture into my cool, nearly lifeless flesh. The touch returned me, aching, to the shadow of life: I felt it even at a distance: I could not escape that much. The memory of other hands.
He performed this work and stood silently beside me. I had needed the moisture, I was far away. But he was murmuring still, ignoring my gratitude, as if the proximity of my flesh placed him in the gravest danger. Without malice he watched me. He bent to kiss my brow, and the touch of his lips on my cool skin resounded.
What a curious enemy, so tender! Some sound from far above alarmed him, and he moved away. Stones tumbling, stones falling to the ground. He had brought an army of workmen to pull down what was left of Aerfax stone by stone. He returned to the center of the chamber and stood murmuring.
He meant to bury me. He could not harm me with his hands or even with his magic, so great was his fear of what I had become. But he had thought of another way. He had come to build a tomb over me.
A sound distracted him, and finally fear took him over. At the exit he hesitated, turning to my body on the stone a last time. Babbling that nonsense that I could have taken from him with the merest touch. So I did touch him, once, in the lightest way, through the layers of his protection; I lay my fingers on the beating of his heart and said into his ear See? I’m still here, Drudaen. Go and don’t come back.
Such was my delicacy that he almost thought he had imagined the moment. He closed the door and locked it carefully, from the outside, as if that gesture were important.
Patient, I waited, in the same room with my body if not actually inside the flesh. Presently one heard the thunder of his voice and the shaking of those ancient stones. There are stories people sailed in pleasure boats from Ivyssa to watch. Favorites of his. He pulled down the wreck of Aerfax and what remained of Senecaur. Places more ancient and holy than can be recounted, leveled stone by stone. He shook the ground, hoping to crack the foundations of Senecaur, where I slept. But he had warned me of his intentions with his ill-considered visit. When he came to kill me and found he could not keep the thought in his head. My chamber survived.
Soon he left the place; he had come to hate it
anyway. Silence, and the sea again. But my sleep had been too thoroughly troubled. I began to dream of the world.
5
One day I began to sing.
I dreamed I lay over my body on the stone and sang, at first with no voice, but an ancient song, the Wyyvisar song of making, and I was suddenly in Jiiviisn Field in the sunlight and this was Vithilonyi; I danced and sang and felt the brightness of the field. True dawn resounded through my bones, and I, aching for light, basked in plenty. I sang the song and the sun rose over the horizon.
Into the field the Sisters rode, richly dressed, on fine horses; but they failed to see me, at first. It frightened me, that I could come so close to them and yet be invisible. When had I got to be made of such thin stuff?
But when I joined the song, Commyna heard me.
She stood bolt upright in the middle of the song and searched the field. I was there in front of her and she could not see. But she heard.
So did Vella and Vissyn, when she signed them. All this, and they never faltered a single note in the song; nor did I. I stood in front of them and sang, and they could hardly find me. I stood so close to death. I wept and stood in front of them and sang. Finally they found me, they watched me, and they were weeping too.
That dream ended too soon. But they saw me. They knew I was alive.
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One day, maybe even the same one, I dreamed I stood on Ellebren High Place, and the Rock of Ellebren burned beneath my hand. Out of the Rock I called fire, and light, and many colors burned over Arthen. I had heard someone calling for me. A voice too painful to recognize. So I stood on the High Place, as much of me as I could muster, and the Rock answered me, flashed fire and burned. Once I wakened the Tower, I remembered more and more. Over the Eyestone I sat, warming my hands as if at a fire. Once I had sat there with a man, fair and clean; once I had sat there with Kirith Kirin…
That dream, once begun, never ended.
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Voices. Or was there a torch first?
One is at the end of a long wait. The dream of a summer day. A hand has been rattling the door but it could be the wind, or rocks settling. One has been sleeping for a long time and many noises have become familiar. The careful dream of dawn on a seacoast. The fragile coloring of dawn under shadow, the ghostly glimmering of water. And a hand, rattling the cage door, the chamber door, the prison cell battered by the ocean.
The realization came to me, along with a feeling of leaden weight. This was a real noise. Someone was rattling the door. And me, I was hearing the noise. I was in the body again, and I was hearing.
A torch. The glimmering of shadow beneath the door. Haunted voices. Suddenly the ache of the body rose and warmth, real warmth, rushed into the spaces between the molecules and cells. Someone was battering the door. I am at the end of a long wait.
Torchlight slanting. The heavy door eased inward. I counted the breaths and footsteps. “Jessex,” said the voice, and I knew it. Torchlight on my face. “Oh god,” he said, and set the torch in a bracket over the stone where I lay.
He fell across me. The welcome weight of him sighed against my ribs. When I had seen him last he had been nearly dead. For all that time I had hardly dared endure the thought of him. Now here he was, and his hands caressed my face. I knew him by his whole being. The sleep ended. He kissed me, and I was awake.
Chapter 24: IVYSSA
1
We faced each other in torchlight. Even after such a long time, his face seemed a familiar and comfortable object.
Presently he asked, “Can you move? Can you walk?”
“I don’t know. How long have I been here?”
He shook his head, looking to the doorway. He said, still in the soft voice, “I brought some friends.”
“Who?”
Smiling, but signaling me to speak more quietly. “Not so loud. You’re rather heavily guarded.”
“Am I?”
He pointed upward. I had no idea how far upward he meant.
He had brought leggings and a tunic, boots in my size and good cotton underclothing. Everything felt strange on my body, and it was only when I started dressing that I realized I had been naked on the stone, except for the Laeredon ring, the bracelet he had given me, and the earring I had put in Ellebren, before riding away to fight for Laeredon Tower. My body hardly responded to commands; he helped me to save time. He kept checking the door. Presently a slim shadow slipped through the arch and I recognized Karsten by the highlights of her hair.
Kirith Kirin said, “He’s awake. He’s fine.”
She froze at his words. I could not see her face but I could sense her agitation. Rushing to the stone where I had lain, she touched me as if I were fine glass.
We were soon in tears. I began to understand, from the desperation of her reaction, that we had been apart a very long time. But I declined to ask again. They finished dressing me, Karsten lacing my shin-high boots when it became clear my numbed fingers could not do the trick.
I’d no memory of the corridor outside, nor of any passage to this room at all. Outside the cell lay a guardroom full of cobwebs, stairs leading upward. We bypassed these, however, and slipped down a narrow passageway which led to a small armory. When I could not move quickly enough, Kirith Kirin carried me.
A concealed doorway sprang open and we entered another narrow corridor. Karsten concealed the entrance and we moved quickly through this tunnel and into others. More distinctly sounded rushing waves against rocks over our heads.
Up a spiral stairway we climbed, Karsten ahead of us. Soon I could see daylight; it hurt my eyes and I closed them. But I smelled fresh air and heard Imral’s voice. I said his name when I saw him. He lay the flat of his hand on my face.
A boat awaited us, slim and sleek, with a sail of transparent viis. Even I could tell we had emerged into the full of Aeryn winter. Cold wind bit through the layers of blanket; the sky lowered like slate. The motion of the boat disoriented me some; I had never ridden in a boat before, and I remember the thought striking me as funny. Wind filled the sail and Karsten guided us with the tiller. The west wind carried us away from the Spur, into mist.
When I looked back, what I saw shocked me. The Tower was gone, the rock spur sheered off. A pile of stones where Aerfax had stood, her only remains the sea gates that had opened, that opened now, in my memory of that long ago.
Over us, tattered and brown, the stuff of shadow. I could already feel him, Drudaen, everywhere.
Kirith Kirin told me to lie down, I was too wobbly to be standing in the boat, so I did. The smell of fish permeated even the planks of the deck, and the sharp sting of salt spray stung my nose as waves crashed against the prow. When I got tired of lying down, I huddled near the tiller wrapped in a plain brown cloak. The walk to the boat had exhausted me and I sagged to the deck, watching the swing of the sail. The others were moving grimly, silently.
We passed a dark, rocky island on the top of which stood old fortifications. That was Kmur Island, where the treasury was, or had been, and the ruins were Dernhang, a mortal palace, never meant to last forever. But the Queen had been living at Dernhang when we headed south. Now the place had fallen down, or been burned, maybe, judging from the look of it. How long ago? Suddenly I was afraid to ask.
The rocking of the boat and my body’s confusion combined to make me sick to my stomach, and I lay along the deck, half soaked with spray. By then I started to feel feverish on top of the sickness and would have thrown up but I had eaten nothing, so I heaved instead, and felt perfectly miserable.
We were a long time in the water, all day and night. They took turns sitting with me, afraid to leave me alone. We hardly talked. Fever came on me full blown, to be expected after so long a trance as had befallen me. I felt hot and sick through the night, drowsing, with the sound of their voices for company. At some point we had stopped sailing and were lying adrift.
Near dawn we began to sail again, and I saw the shape of a city emerging out of the mists on the shore.
We left the boat docked on one of the inland canals and never saw it again. We dressed in rags from the bottom of the boat, stuff I had been lying on, and we began to move through narrow streets and along dark canals and waterways. I was hot with fever and followed only part of what was happening, but the city was brown, the light thin, hardly a spot of green growing anywhere, and the people we passed seemed misshapen or discolored or sick or worse. Streets twisted, rose and fell, we crossed a canal and vanished into side streets. People were looking at us because we did not look like any of the rest of them. I put one foot in front of another, the best I could do.