There was no doubt about what they were. Every human culture had them in folklore and myth. Ozzie stood in the middle of the giant wood, surrounded by elves. In the flesh they were bipeds, taller than humans, with long slender limbs and a strangely blunt torso. Their heads were proportionally larger than a human’s, but with a flat face, boasting wide feline eyes set above a thin nose with long narrow nostrils. They didn’t have a jaw as such, simply a round mouth containing three neat concentric circles of pointed teeth that could flex back and forth independently of each other, giving them the ability to claw food back into their gullet. As they were herbivores, the vegetation was swiftly shredded as it moved inward. It was the only aspect that defeated the whole notion of them as benign otherworldly entities; whenever they opened their lips the whole mouth looked savage.
Many skin shades had been seen since first contact, they had almost as much variety as the human race, except none of them were ever as pale as Nordic whites. Their skin was a lot tougher than a human’s though, with a leathery feel and a spun-silk shimmer. They wore their hair long; unbound it was like a cloak coming halfway down their backs, though more often they braided it into a single long tail with colorful leather thongs. Without exception they were clad in simple short toga robes made from a copper and gold cloth that shone with a satin gloss. None of them had shoes, their long feet ended in four hook toes with thick nail tips. Hands were similar, four fingers that seemed to bend in any direction, almost like miniature tentacles, giving them a fabulous dexterity.
“Quick,” Orion called. “Follow them, follow them!” He let go of the pony’s reins and slithered down the side. Then he was off, running into the trees.
“Wait,” Ozzie called, to no avail. The boy had reached the trees at the side of the path, and was running hell-for-leather after the laughing, dancing Silfen. “Goddamn.” He hurriedly swung a leg over the saddle, and half fell from Polly’s back. Hanging on to the reins, he pulled the horse along behind him, urging her into the forest proper. His quarry was soon out of sight, all he had to go on were the noises up ahead. Thick boughs stretched out ahead of him, always at head height, causing him to duck around the ends, with Polly whinnying in complaint. The ground underfoot became damp, causing his boots to sink in, slowing him still further.
After five minutes his face was glowing hot, he was breathing harshly and swearing fluently in four languages. But the singing was growing louder again. He was sure he heard Orion’s laughter. A minute later he burst into a clearing. It was fenced by great silver-bark trees, near-perfect hemispheres of dark vermilion leaves towering a hundred feet over the grassy meadow. A little stream gurgled through the center, to fall down a rocky ridge into a deep pool at the far end. As arboreal idylls went, it was heavenly.
The Silfen were all there, nearly seventy of them. Many were climbing up the trees, using hands and feet to grip the rumpled bark, scampering along the arching branches to reach the clusters of nuts that hung amid the fluttering leaves higher up the trees. Orion was jumping up and down beside one trunk, catching the nuts a Silfen was dropping to him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ozzie snapped. He was dimly aware of the song faltering in the background. Orion immediately hunched his shoulders, looking sullen and defensive. “What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t kept up? Where is your pony? How are you going to find it again? This is not a goddamn game, we’re in the middle of an unmapped forest that’s half as big as the planet. I’m not surprised you lost your parents if this is what you did before.”
Orion raised an arm, pointing behind Ozzie. His lips were quivering as he said, “The pony’s there, Ozzie.”
He swiveled around to see both the pony and the lontrus being led into the clearing by a Silfen. Instead of being relaxed and amused as the Ozzie-of-legend should have been, the sight simply deepened his anger. “For Christ’s sake.”
“This is a Silfen world, Ozzie,” Orion explained gently. “Bad things don’t happen here.”
Ozzie glowered at the boy, then turned and walked over to the Silfen holding the reins. Come on, he told himself, get a grip. He’s just a kid.
Who shouldn’t be here screwing up my project.
He started to dig down into the memory of Silfen language that had been implanted at the Augusta clinic. Nobody had ever taught the Silfen to speak any Commonwealth language. They weren’t interested.
“Thank you for collecting our animals,” he said; a messy collection of cooing sounds and impossible Welsh-style tongue-twister syllables that he was sure he’d got completely wrong.
The Silfen opened its mouth wide, showing its snakelike tongue wobbling in the center of the teeth rings. Ozzie wanted to turn and run before he was devoured—but his ancillary cultural memory reminded him it was a smile. An answering stream of gibberish flowed out, far more melodic than the clumsy sentence Ozzie had spoken. “It is our delight that we are met this fine day, dearest Ozzie. And your poor animals needed only guidance that they might be with you once more. Such teachings are but a trifle of all that we are. To give them is hardly onerous.”
“I am pleased and charmed that you remember me.” From another world, decades ago.
“Nothing so treasured should be lost to that which we are. And you are a splendid treasure, Ozzie. Ozzie, the human who taught humans their first steps along the true paths.”
“I had some help.” He bowed slightly and called to Orion. “Hey, let’s see you taking proper care of that pony, okay? It could do with a drink.”
Orion came over and took his animal from the Silfen, leading it away to the pool at the bottom of the small waterfall. Ozzie was thrown several disgruntled looks, obviously still not forgiven. A couple of the Silfen were already bathing, gliding through the clear water as easily as they climbed trees or ran. Orion soon joined them in the water.
“May I ask with whom I speak?” Ozzie asked.
“I am the flower that walks beneath the nine sky moons, the fissure of light that pierces the darkest glade at midnight, the spring that bubbles forth from the oasis; from all this I came.”
“Okeydokey,” He took a moment to compose a sentence. “I think I’ll just call you Nine Sky, if you don’t mind.”
“Evermore you hurry thus, unknowing of that which binds all into the joy which is tomorrow’s golden dawn.”
“Well,” Ozzie muttered to himself in English, “it was never going to be easy.” He let Polly rummage through the light lavender grass that covered the clearing. The Silfen were congregating on the edge of the pool. Flasks were produced and passed around as they munched on the nuts and berries they’d gathered. Ozzie stuck close to Nine Sky; while Orion came back to sit by his side, snacking on his own food.
“We walk the paths,” Ozzie said.
That seemed to amuse the Silfen; they laughed their warbling laugh, a remarkably human sound.
“Others of our kind have,” he reminded them. “Seekers of beauty and strangeness, for are we not all that in the end.”
“Many have walked,” Nine Sky replied. “Willful and skillful their footfalls echo fast upon hallowed lands, came them far, go them farther. Round and round in merry dance.”
“Which paths did they tread?” Ozzie asked. He thought he was getting a handle on the conversation.
“All paths are one, Ozzie, they lead to themselves. To start is to finish.”
“To start where?”
“To start here amid the gladness of the children and twittering of birds and pesky merriness of the terinda as they frolic over dale and gale. All we bid go in music and light.”
“I am starting here, where must I go?”
“Ozzie comes, Ozzie goes, Ozzie flies, Ozzie sees many stars, Ozzie lives in a cave, Ozzie leaves a cave, Ozzie sees trees, Ozzie comes. The circle is one.”
The hair on the back of Ozzie’s neck pricked up at the mention of living in a cave. “You know where the wonders live, you walk to the wonders, you see the wonders, you live th
e wonders, you go. Ozzie envies you. Ozzie goes with you.”
That brought another round of loud laughter, the tips of their vibrating tongues just protruding into the air.
“Ozzie walks away,” Nine Sky said. His head came forward, big black eyes staring at the human. “Embrace what you be, afraid show you not, long the seasons are among us, love you we do, for is not all stardust in the end as it begat us all. So that all is joined in eternity which turns again and again.”
“What do you become; for is it not greatness and the nobility? What do any of us become between the twin times of stardust? It is the greatness out among the stars that burn now where I walk.”
“Walk you without joy strumming its song upon your heart, travel you far without knowing will your fate unfold. For to walk among the forests is to live. See us in glory now, for this fate we ache to be.”
“Do you walk the forests of the planet whence we came?”
“All forests we walk, those of darkness and those of light.”
“And those of greatness? Walk you those?”
“Light and dark, and those alone. Strike you not the black and the gold for it leaves a terrible mark upon the sky at the height of day. Heed you loud the ides of winterfall.”
Ozzie ran that through his mind, fearing he was losing track of what was being said. But then that was always the way when you talked to the Silfen. “All of humanity needs to see what you become. I walk for them to that place. Where is the path?”
“Knowing is in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat; rejoice for it is yours as much as ours, to live among it is glorious. Look to nature in the fullest of bloom, bend the sky and the ground to your bidding if you truly can, for what will be has also been. Fond farewells and fond joinings are all part of the endless turn of worlds upon worlds, and who are we to cry judge upon which is the jolliest of all.”
“This child weeps nightly for his lost father and mother.”
“We all weep together, huddled in the breath of this iciest of winds in fell consequence we do ignore, for who has lost who in this benighted time asunder.”
The Silfen began to get up.
“Well thanks, man,” Ozzie said in English. “It’s been unreal.”
“Hasten us as the quarral flies to its nest amid the lonely lake beyond dale and tonight’s river.”
“I hope you reach it okay.”
Nine Sky sprang to his feet. He and all the other Silfen were running now, hurrying around the side of the pool. Their wild strange song filled the air again. Then they were gone, vanishing into the quiet spaces between the tree trunks.
Ozzie let out a long breath. He looked down at the boy, who wore an expression of troubled wonder. “You okay there, man?”
“They’re so … different,” Orion said slowly.
“Could be,” Ozzie said. “They’re either stoned the whole time, or my memory is nothing like as good as the warranty claims. Whatever it is, they don’t make a lot of sense.”
“I don’t think they’re supposed to make sense, Ozzie. They’re elves, mortals aren’t part of their world. We’ll never be able to understand them.”
“They’re as real as we are, maybe more so if I’m right about them. But I can certainly see why all our dippy hippies love them. They know things they shouldn’t. One little glimpse of forbidden knowledge amid all the gibberish, and they’re instant messiahs.”
“What do you mean?”
“Where I live, for a start. That was more than enough to convince me I’m on the right track—pardon the pun.”
“What track?”
“I’m trying to find where the Silfen go after they leave their forests.”
“Why?”
“I have a question for the thing they become.”
“What thing?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s silly.”
“Yeah, man. Put it like that, I guess it is a bit.”
“Will we find Mom and Dad on the way?”
“Honestly: I doubt it.”
“Nine Sky didn’t seem to know where they were, did he?” Orion said.
“You understood all of that?”
“Some of it. You speak Silfen really well.”
He gave the boy a wink. “That’s because I cheat. It’s the only way to get through life.”
“So where do we go now?”
“Same place as before,” Ozzie said; he glanced around the big clearing, unsure where they’d come in. “Down the first path we find, and without a clue.”
NINE
Legend has it that the asteroid was a lump of pure gold, the core of which remained intact and now lies buried deep beneath the castle. Whatever the actual composition was, it certainly had an above average density. When it hit Lothian’s southern continent, a couple of centuries before humans arrived, it carved out a perfectly circular crater three kilometers across. The rim wall was over one hundred meters high, with quite a steep inner face; the central peak rose to nearly four hundred meters.
The first settlers, all from Scotland, had a large Edinburgh contingent among them, nostalgic for the old town and dynamic in their approach to their new homeworld. Their bigger and better attitude was given an aggressive outlet when it came to building the new capital, Leithpool, with the crater as its nucleus. An entire river, the High Forth, was diverted for eleven kilometers along a newly built aqueduct embankment to pour over the crater’s rim wall, slowly filling the ring-shaped lake inside. They wanted a castle at the center, of course, but the new island’s easy gradient hardly matched the jutting rock crag to be found dominating the heart of old Edinburgh. A fleet of civil engineering bots got to work carving as the surrounding waters rose. Over the following years, three rock-blade pinnacles were hacked out from the solitary mound, sharp and rugged enough to fit into any Alpine range. A Bavarian-style castle was grafted onto the apex of the tallest peak, reached by a solitary road that spiraled up around the sheer rock cliffs.
Beneath the castle, and occupying the rest of the harsh mount, monolithic granite buildings sprang up, separated by broad cobbled roads and twisting alleyways. There were no parks and no trees, for there was no soil where living things could grow, only the naked rock exposed by the cutting tools of the bots. As the construction work progressed, the entire overfinanced mechanism of government moved in; from the doughty parliament building itself to the elaborate palace of the supreme court, bloated office-hive ministries to the Romanesque planetary bank. With the world’s rulers came the usual circus of subsidiaries: the expensive restaurants, hotels, clubs, the office service companies, theaters, corporate headquarters, concert halls, lobbying firms, legal partnerships, and media companies. Swarming through the somber official buildings were the army of elected representatives, their aides, researchers, interns, spouses, civil servants, and pimps. Only the top echelon actually lived on the Castle Mount; everyone else commuted from the city that grew up on the other side of the rim. Suburbs and boroughs sprawled for kilometer after kilometer down the incline of the crater’s outer walls, home to four and a half million people.
Leithpool was one of Adam Elvin’s favorite cities. Its layout was a welcome exception to the neat grids found on most worlds. Here the streets wound down the outside of the rim in random curves, intersecting and branching chaotically. Light industry and housing all had their separate zones, but they were squashed together in true jigsaw layout with admirable disregard for logic. Broad terrace parks formed pretty green swaths through the stone and composite structures. A good underground metro network and street-level trams kept the private traffic to a minimum. Elevated rail lines knitted together the main boroughs, meandering their way down to the bottom of the northeastern slope, where the CST station squatted on the outskirts.
Today, Adam was walking along the western quadrant of Prince’s Circle, the road that ran around the top of the crater rim. It was the main retail district, renown on many planets. A rampart of tall department stores and
brand-flagship shops formed the outer side of the broad road, while the inner side curved down sharply to the quiet waters of the ring lake twenty meters below the pavement. When the city was built, the rim had been leveled off, with the exception of the High Forth inlet, which was roofed by a twin arch bridge; and the similar outlet gully on the opposite side that sent the water foaming down a long artificial cascade through the most exclusive residential districts.
He spent a quiet twenty minutes walking among the crowds that boiled along the shopfronts. Every building sported a white and scarlet Celtic Crown national flag. Without exception they were at half mast. Two days earlier, Lothian’s team had been knocked out of the Cup. That had knocked the new Scottish nation hard, it was as if the planet had gone into mourning. Eventually he found the café he was looking for, a door at the side of a big electrical retailer, opening onto stairs that took him up to the first floor. The large room was some kind of converted gallery, with high ceilings and huge curving windows that looked down on Prince’s Circle. He found a slightly tatty sofa in front of one window, and ordered a hot chocolate with two choc-chip and hazelnut shortcakes from the teenage waitress. The view he had out toward Castle Mount was peerless. A few hundred meters to the south, one of the monorail tracks stretched out across the calm dark water; a single silver carriage streaked along it, shuttling late office workers over to their desks.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” a voice said at his shoulder.
Adam glanced up to see Bradley Johansson standing behind him, holding a large mug of tea. As always, the tall man gave the impression of being slightly disconnected from the world around him. There was something about his thin, elegant face that made him appear far more aristocratic than any Grand Family member.
“I enjoy it,” Adam said evenly.
“Of course, it looks even better at Mardi Gras,” Bradley said, sitting down on the sofa beside Adam. “They light up the castle with huge hologram projectors for the whole week, and during the closing ceremony they let off real fireworks overhead.”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 29