by Carol Berg
Kol held his position for a long while, and when at last he stood, his posture bespoke a man completely drained. His head came up, expression vague and lost, his sculpted features sharpening only slowly when he caught sight of me. He heaved a sigh, kneaded his neck, and started up the gentle slope, following the path of the stream. A slight sweep of his right hand commanded me to follow.
I joined him, padding through wet grass while he strode on a game trail that bordered the stream. “How do you do it?” I said, when it became clear he had no plan to initiate conversation. “Draw the music from plants and beasts and dirt clods? Use your body…your movements…to join all the parts together? Is the Canon something like this?”
“I am not here to teach thee of the dance. I’ll not speak of the Canon. Nor will I guide thee through the remasti of regeneration. No use in developing skills…and hungers…thou canst neither use nor satisfy.” He swept his dripping hair back from his face, squeezed water from it, and tied it into a heavy knot at the back of his neck.
“Regeneration,” I repeated. Osriel had said the third remasti was the passage of regeneration, when Danae first experienced the hungers of fleshly love…when they became both capable and desirous of mating. “That’s what you did to this field. Your dance healed its sickness as a human physician heals a body, diagnosing its ills and applying the proper remedy. You called forth creatures to cleanse and nourish it, changed its makeup in subtle ways to leave it healthier. But the way you accomplished it was more like mating than healing. The dance this morning touched my spirit, but this…I was honored…humbled…to witness it, relagai.”
Kol cast me a sidewise glance. Suspicious. “Thy gards tell thee these things?”
I looked down at my mottled arms and legs, so pale and ill-defined beside the brilliant clarity of his dragons, reeds, and heron. My marks no longer flashed or swirled. I doubted a human eye would even notice them were I ten paces distant. Yet though the wind had picked up, and I felt its bitter edge, the cold no longer penetrated beyond my skin.
“No. Not the gards…” I stumbled a bit, as the truth of my change settled even deeper in my gut. “I saw, or well…rather, it’s something like seeing. When I touch the earth and use my magic…my Cartamandua bent…an image of the surrounding land forms in my mind, in my senses, so I see and hear and smell what’s there or has been there in the past—plants, beasts, humans, the paths they’ve left. And I can explore the image—look deeper, learn how it fits together, as I did with the tide pool. It’s difficult to describe.”
“Thy senses comprehend the particular changes I brought to this land?” Surprise and skepticism boiled out of him like seepage from a wound. “Without study or examination or practice?”
“The changes—the hunting birds you called forth, the water channels, the rest—yes. The paths of your movements that link them all together appear to me as threads of silver across the landscape. I can see the threads even as you draw them, and those of other Danae from earlier times.”
He halted in midstep and glared at me, his aspen-gold eyes like flame in the darkness. “Thou canst see the paths of the kiran—the patterns left behind from the dance?” His tone dared me to affirm it.
“I could walk them as you do this track under your feet.”
He clamped his mouth shut and stomped faster up the path. When a dead limb blocked his way, likely fallen from Picus’s fence making, he snatched it up and threw it farther than even my improved eyesight could make out in the middle of the night. Had it struck a fortification, even at such a distance, I would wager on the stick to penetrate the stone, so vicious was its launch. I’d thought he would approve my increased understanding. Perhaps I had trespassed some protocol by observing Danae mysteries or speaking of them. I trailed along behind him, my bare feet tormented with sticks and rocks, narrowly avoiding wrenching my ankle in some burrower’s entry hole, and near giving up on comprehending my uncle.
As the vale sloped upward, the land grew rockier, so my battered feet could attest. The path soon vanished, as did the stream, replaced, almost before I could imagine it, by rills and rivulets that trickled across the hillside from thick forest on either side of us. The soil beneath my feet thinned. At least the rain had slackened, holding somewhere between a drizzle and a mist. Kol’s gards flared brighter.
Of a sudden, I realized that we had traveled farther from Picus’s meadow than our steps could justify. Alert now, I began to feel a shifting when Kol invoked his magic—when the path took a sudden turning or broke dramatically uphill. When the scent of pine and spruce entirely supplanted the scent of oak and ash and hawthorn in the space of twenty paces. When the air grew sharply colder and very dry.
“Your gards carry power that enables you to move from one place to another,” I said, pushing my steps to keep up with the fast-moving Dané.
“Aye. After the second remasti, the stripling’s growing familiarity with the world becomes a part of the walking gards and can be called on as desired.” The brisk walk seemed to have restored his calm. “The particular slope of a grass-covered hillside recalls that of a mountain meadow. The sound of one stream echoes another that happens to feed a mighty river. Just here”—he pointed to a stand of evergreens—“the odd shape of that tallest tree’s crown recalls to me the outline of another tree against a different sky, thus forms a path from this place to the next. I can walk there if I will. It is all a matter of similarity and recollection, for all places are bound one to the other in ways a human—most humans—cannot perceive.”
“Sometimes we do,” I said. “We come to a new place, yet feel as if we’ve been there before. Or we meet a stranger and feel as if we know her already.”
“Perhaps.” A grudging admission.
By the time I wrenched my eyes from the fork-tipped fir, disappointed it had not belched fire or displayed some other obvious magic, we walked a slightly steeper path amid widely scattered trees. My breathing labored. Around another corner and we were traversing the shoulder of a conical peak outlined against a star-filled sky. Mist floated like a gray sea below us.
A half hour’s hard climb and we had left the last stunted trees behind. We came to a rocky prominence—a thick slab of pale stone, some twenty quercae in height, that poked up in gloomy isolation from the mountainside. Kol propped one foot on a broad flat shard, long split off from the standing rock and toppled to the grass.
“We begin thy teaching here,” he said. “Thy gards draw in the sights and sounds, tastes and smells from forest, vale, and shore, as well as the dust of Picus’s foolish babbling and the stink of his dwelling place. No doubt rememberings of thy usual days intrude upon thy perceptions, as well. Likely it is some confusion of these impressions with the observation of my kiran that caused this seeing thou hast reported.”
So he had not entirely dismissed his disturbance at my claim. “Yes, my eyes, nose, and ears are overwhelmed, but what I saw back there, the silver traces—”
“Thy task is not to think or speak,” he snapped. “I’ll give thee ample opportunity to question. ’Tis the deeps of the night here on Aesol Mount, the time when the world is quietest. Best for listening to voices that cannot be heard in the day. Best for learning control.”
I shut my mouth, suppressed my resentful urge to kick him, and bowed. I needed to learn.
As before, the politeness seemed to take him a bit off guard. “I should not have taken the time to shape a kiran for Picus’s plantings. Thou didst not linger within his walls as long as I thought a halfbreed might, thus my hurry opened the way for this misunderstanding. So, no matter.” He waved as if his willing could dismiss my beliefs. “A wanderkin’s task is learning of the world, thus the separation gards are the most sensitive and most subject to confusion. Thou must seek perfection in their use, as in all things. For now, I promised to teach thee closure and control. Sit before the rock”—he pointed to the featureless slab—“and listen. Stone speaks softly but with utmost authority. Seek its voice. Listen for it al
one, and it will root thee firmly. Once thou canst hear the speech of stones, thou shalt begin to understand closure.”
Were he anyone else, I might discount such instruction as lunacy. But the man who had made love to Picus’s garden, tending it, infusing it with life, must be granted trust despite our other disagreements. The effects of his work yet fired my blood. Feeling exceedingly awkward, I sat cross-legged on the damp ground facing the rock and reached out.
“Do not touch the rock!”
I snatched my hand away.
“Our purpose is to develop and exercise thy control of the gards. Human tricks have no place here. Heed the stone. Work at it.”
Balls of Karus, the man is difficult! The task seemed impossible with him standing not two paces behind me, with the riot of smells, sounds, and tastes from my senses swelling my skull to bursting. The traveling had, at least, reduced the uncomfortable involvement of my privy parts, but had presented its own myriad questions. And somehow in this clean and pungent air, my charge to Saverian kept repeating itself in my mind…
I needed to understand Llio’s curse, which condemned halfbreeds to crippling. My sudden conviction that my own existence was intimately entwined with the fate of Navronne had surprised even myself. But surely my life had taken no random course—not from the day I was conceived, not from the day I happened upon the book of maps, not from the day three months past when I lay bleeding in a ditch, only to stagger, blind and ignorant, straight to my mother’s sianou, where a Karish abbot had built his lighthouse. Clyste, a dancer so powerful that the earth itself had chosen her for a guardian, had laid the preservation of the lighthouse…of Navronne…at her son’s feet. My feet. Of a sudden that seemed so obvious. And terrifying.
Listen for the stone. A hand clamped my bare shoulder as a dog’s jaws grip a bone, infusing my body with my vayar’s will. I had to learn before I could act. And so I shoved aside fear and looming destiny for the moment and set to work.
How would one recognize the voice of stone? First concentrate on hearing in preference to the other senses. Dismiss colors, images, tastes, and tactile sensations. Soft, Kol had described it, and so I dismissed the noisy, loud, and brightest sounds, the florid trumps and horns, the bawling of donkeys, the screams of prisoners, and cackles of madmen. With utmost authority, he’d said, and so I dismissed the quiet nattering of birds and insects, the trivial speech of gossips, and the soft mouthings of lovers, the pale colorings of everyday living. As if the entirety of my perceptions were bedcoverings, I peeled away layers, hunting a voice of solidity, of weight, of dense, slow changes…
Saints and angels, this is impossible! As if slogging through desert dunes hunting for one particular grain of sand, I would push one thought aside only to feel five thousand more cascade into its place. But in the end, when all else was stripped away, a soft word rumbled through my spirit like distant thunder, like the shudder of an avalanche halfway across the world. A burden settled on my shoulders…ponderous…immense. Hold. And some interminable time later came another. Forever.
This was no dialect a mouth could imitate. Truly I heard no speech at all—no sentient mind produced such words. Rather I experienced an expression of unyielding heaviness and stalwart density, stiffening my back and chest, forcing thigh and shoulder taut. Unmoving. Unshakable. Just as I was about to release my concentration and declare victory, for of a certain no entity but a mountain itself could speak with such weight, another word boomed from a wholly different direction. Crush. I held breathless, as if the massive boulder and its fellows were grinding me to powder. Pound. Squeeze. This voice drummed cold and harsh. Then came another voice—smaller, lost. Deep. Tumbling. Diminished. Dizzy, I imagined smooth rounded stones washed endlessly in a mountain river, their substance ground inevitably away.
Fascinated, I sorted through the slow-moving litany, seeking the voice of the particular rock before me, for the words came one and then the other with great gaps in between. Was this a conversation? I decided not. A foolish notion, and yet what would I have said a few days previous to anyone who told me I would hear words in the voices of stone?
Shattered. Waves of blazing heat rolled over me, and more of wet and brittle cold, an uneasy pressure culminating in explosive power and breaking—this rock, whose fractured shoulder lay prostrate beside it, whose enduring memory spoke destruction and ending.
I’m sorry, I answered. Not that I believed the slab could think or understand, only that its overwhelming desolation required some response.
Satisfied and weary, I released the sensory textures of the world to intrude once again. How small and weak they seemed. Not trivial. Not unimportant. But eminently controllable. This must be what Kol wished me to understand. Closure.
Excited, I nudged and poked at the clutter, recalling the depths to which I’d gone to hear the stone. The act cleared a small space where I could have a thought without intrusive clamor. Of course, my newfound order quickly collapsed into confusion again. This would take practice. I gave up and opened my eyes.
Mist had crept up the mountain and enfolded me, soft and damp. The bulging moon hung in the sky, thinly veiled like a pureblood bride. A rush of air overhead marked a hunting eagle’s quiet passage.
“This rock misliked its breaking, vayar,” I said, grinning as I straightened my back and twisted my neck, stretching out muscles too long still. Had someone told me I’d sat before the confounded rock three nights in tandem, I could have believed it. I needed a piss so badly, I felt like to burst.
No one answered. And I felt no presence behind me. I peered first over my shoulder and then around the rock.
Kol stood slightly higher on the slope, conversing with another male of his kind, this one shorter and wider in the shoulder, though yet lean and tautly muscled. The moonlight illumined moon-white hair, bound into a long tail tied every knuckle’s length with scarlet. The gard on his broad back—a twisted pine as you might see on a mountain crag—gleamed a sharp and vibrant cerulean. The two of them were arguing and did not glance my way.
I shifted my position slightly, so that I could observe the two less obviously. Clearing away the clutter inside my head, I picked out Kol’s voice.
“…told the tale of my kiran as if he had himself designed it. He touches the earth to know these things. He saw my changes, Stian. He claims to see the kiran patterns themselves.” Kol’s voice rang tight. Anxious.
Stian…my Danae grandfather. The eldest of my family. Wonder held me speechless.
“And this is the same sorcerer who brought death to Aniiele’s meadow? Who violated Clyste’s sianou so that now thy sister, too, lies poisoned by the Scourge? How canst thou look upon a human without loathing? How canst thou ask me to approve a halfbreed as my charge?” The elder crouched beside a cracked slab of rock and picked at a tangle of vegetation, tossing aside dead leaves and stems. “The Cartamandua…healthy for them both thou didst hide this history from me. Humans are a breed of vipers.”
I held my place behind the rock, excitement quenched. Fortunate that experience had given me no expectations of warm family welcomes.
Kol stood his ground above the older man. “Indeed, this Valen broached Clyste’s sianou, but only his companion sullied the water that day. And I’ve told thee repeatedly that he saved Aniiele, though I did not understand how so at the time. The hands of the Scourge had struck down the victim and left him to bleed. But this sorcerer gave back the victim’s choice as to the manner of his passing, and so, at the last, the victim’s blood was freely given. Aniiele lives, Stian sagai, by virtue of this man’s deeds.”
Great Iero’s heart…Kol had watched me murder Boreas! That terrible night had etched a vivid horror on my soul: the black, blood-smeared lips of Sila Diaglou and her henchmen; my old friend captive of agony and despair; the sweet meadow that had felt as a part of heaven stained in so vile a fashion by his blood and torment. Blood freely given…Aniiele lives… Though naught could cleanse the blood from my hands, Kol’s words brought
a measure of comfort I had never expected.
“I have tried to dismiss him,” said Kol. “But he sticks to me like thorn. I have named him as insolent as his sire, yet he sounds the streams of earth with reverence and respect, using skills unknown to our kind. He hungers for learning and does not hold back. He led me to the poisoned Well, and I danced beside it. Had my kiran not been flawed with anger and grieving, I might even have reclaimed the Well. And Clyste…Thy daughter was no birdwit child, Stian, tricked into mating with a pithless fool. The Well chose her as its guardian, and she chose the Cartamandua as her child’s sire. She never explained her choice even to me, but just this day I’ve wondered—Feel the waning season, sagai. The true lands are dying. Just this morning I’ve had to reclaim yon garden vale yet again. The Well and the Plain are lost, and my heart speaks what my mind cannot grasp—that the Canon is diminished by far more than we can remember. If this halfbreed’s claim is true, if he can see the patterns, might he be—?”
The elder burst to his feet and shook his finger at his son. “Thou art our answer, Kol, not a halfbreed Cartamandua. Each season brings thee closer to perfection. All recognize it. Thou shouldst dance the Center this season. But thy petulant exile sours the archon and the circles, and as a storm wind among roses hath thine errant rescue of the halfbreed pricked Tuari’s wrath. He would see thee bound and buried for the shame thou hast brought on our kind before Eodward’s son. Only thy irreplaceable ability keeps thee free. Break the halfbreed. Give him over.”