Wheel of Stars

by Andre Norton

  The watch of the Star Hours, Lady Lyle had named it. However, since Gwennan had left the vicinity of the stones that morning the symbols became so dim they could only be seen in the strongest light. While the bar which had moved about the dial disappeared from sight entirely. To take it to the stones at Midwinter day—almost a month away still. Did she want to go—perhaps to plunge into another series of adventures which would separate her even farther from her own birth world?

  Yet to cup the watch as she did now between the palms of her hands and her own breast gave her such a feeling of security as she might have had if some friend stood beside her shoulder to shoulder. She closed her tired eyes upon the dark of the room.

  Cold—tight—

  Did she walk, run, or was she borne in some fashion above that long ribbon of light? There arose a wall of dark on either side, so thick, in a way so menacing, that she knew only with the light she followed was there safety. Now from that narrow path arose tendrils of mist—some pure white, some tinged with gold. Those close to her were only streamers—yet it seemed that those farther ahead formed tenuous figures and shapes—only to melt as she approached.

  There was a pyramid. She might have been viewing the huge structure from a far distance. From its sides streamed tongues of light as those ribbons had once curled from the fingers of the Voice when she wove her peace and harmony spells. Then, as Gwennan floated the nearer, the pyramid vanished. A wheel arose in turn, to stand before her as might a barrier refusing her passage. Within its rim glowed a five-pointed star and where each point touched the outer circle a ball of light gave new source to the floating ribbons of Power.

  The wheel faded, was gone. What waited ahead now was a symbol she knew well—part of those same half-effaced markings carved above the doorway of the house which she claimed as her own. This was the ankh—the key—and from loop above, arms below, always the light—

  No longer was she cold, for her body, if it was in body that she roamed so, was washed by warmth as well as by a feeling of peace—of power leashed and made servant to the light.

  She passed through the mist which had formed the ankh. Now—

  Here hung the sign of the pendant—a full orb of moon surmounted by the horns of its birth. From the tips of those horns the light trailed now—not uprising but outward to either side, between her and the wall of the dark. Nor did the moon orb disappear into its mist birth as she came to it. Rather the vast circle of its light formed a doorway through which that which carried her wafted her on.

  What was the rest of it? There came those to meet her. Some of them wore faces she knew well from other times and was glad in her heart to see. She had a vague memory of riding—not a horse of her own world—but a creature which carried its head proudly high with a single horn springing heavenward and that horn was purest white, spiraled with a thread of gold. She walked through a great place where gathered men who wore splendid mail under surcoats of the finest silks patterned with gems and threads of pearls, women whose gowns might have been woven of pure sunlight and seafoam.

  Only there was not all light. She ran, her body taut with fear, her heart pounding so in her breast that it would seem about to leap from its encasing of bone, down a street where all doors were closed against her, knowing that she sped so

  because she was hunted by a dire and terrible danger, from which she must expend her last breath to escape.

  She lay in dirty straw, her throat parched with thirst, while a molten hot sun beat in upon her through a ragged break in a tumbling wall. In her nostrils then was the smell of dissolution which she knew to be that of her own mortal body, rotting before the life was free from it, and she cried inwardly for death which was pitiless because it did not come.

  There was a wood where the trees were sometimes women and then bark and wood. Those jeered and mocked her as she tried to escape their flailing branch arms and strove to find a way between their trunks which swayed to cut off her path.

  Then she stumbled over the stones that a mighty sea had rolled landward—leaving no soft sand of beach—rather a maze of rocks among which it would be very easy to fall and break bones—and which were slimed green and brown. Over her head passed a shadow—something winged which was large enough to pluck her up did it wish. So she crouched among the rocks, her arms across her head with little hope of escaping its notice.

  There was sand underfoot now—but not water-washed—endless drifts of it—no marked road. Save here and there the wind had capriciously laid bare a skeleton—some of beasts, some of men in rusted steel—or smaller tumbles of bones in rotting cloth. She might be moving through the remains of some great company who had fled in-to this waste land to fall and die one by one. She stumbled across the edge of a shield standing near upright in that ever-traveling sand.

  No forest, even one formed of women trees, no sea and rocks, no desert now—this was a place of greyness in which grew what looked to be giant fungi, sickly yellow, with here and there a brilliant cap of red on a slender trunk—towering above her head. Here she did not stumble, walk, nor run, but went forward in hops, her body bent, transformed into something she did not want to look upon or imagine.

  So it went—as ever she passed from one place to another, always different—some bright and beautiful—some dire and of the Dark. In each, she came to understand, she had a place—had had a place—or would have a place. In each there were some duty or needful action which was hers alone, some choice she must make. Nor did she even learn what those duties or choices might be, for never did she linger long enough.

  Finally there was a last time of all, when she stood on a dark hillside. Above the night was clear and cloudless—the stars plain in their light and beauty—seeming closer than she had ever seen them—so that she marked many she believed she had never seen before. The stars were not fixed, rather they moved in a stately parade, across the sky, making a circlet of the heavens, changing their positions time and time again. Until, once more, they reached the same position they had held at her first looking upon them. The wheel had turned completely.

  Then she was enveloped by dark—yet it did not frighten her—rather it enwrapped her warm and welcoming. In it she neither dreamed nor envisioned.

  Gwennan awoke, the window near her bed was near frosted over, still that did not shut out the daylight. She looked at her clock—eight! She had overslept and there followed a scramble to dress, eat, get ready for her work. The snow had drifted, but she already heard the clank of the plow. Red Anderson, who kept that in his barn just outside of town, was headed in for duty. She would have a path free for walking.

  Her phone rang—the Newtons wanting to know if all was well and she reassured them quickly. Ralph promised to bring in some more wood for her later that day. Gwennan was so quickly caught up in the round of winter living that she half forgot the dreams of the night—in fact many of them faded already, as dreams so often do. She ate breakfast with one hand while she listed those items it would better be added to her emergency store.

  The sunlight was very weak and thin as she fought her way through two drifts to the road, her ski pants gathering knots of crusted snow. There were new clouds gathering. If it began to snow again she might be wise to close early and head for home.

  A snowmobile swooped in the distance with the laughter of the passengers carrying through the crisp air. Gwennan wondered as she tramped along the cleared road at that touch of another, simpler world. What lay in her mind, what was about her—there was a growing gulf between the here and now, and herself—could that be true? She shook her head. No more midnight work on strange concerns. She did not dare. This morning she had had flashes during which the familiar kitchen, all in the house, appeared alien—not hers. It was dangerous—what was happening to her. No! This might be the end. She must keep her feet firmly on the real ground.

  Reality was this crunch of snow underfoot, the sting of cold against the very small exposed portion of her face between high tied scarf and pulled down,
knitted cap. She was Gwennan Daggert, and it was only Gwennan Daggert that she wanted to be. The rest—

  This was a sharp reaction, one of fear—a fear which grew the stronger as her thoughts suggested what might happen should she allow her obsession to become visible to others. Most townspeople already thought of her as odd—she was well aware of this. And there was a very thin line of safety between being “odd” and being considered mentally disturbed. She must concentrate on life as it had been before she had been drawn into this wild series of dreams and speculations.

  When Gwennan reached the library, she had made her decision. Quickly she caught at the chain of the pendant, pulled that from around her head with a sharp jerk, feeling that if she did not free herself from it swiftly she might never do so again.

  It was warm—no, hot, in her hand, almost as if it were heating up with anger or in warning. She picked up an envelope from her desk, slid the disc and its chain into that, sealed it. The envelope in turn she pushed to the very back of a drawer. She would gather up all the books, see that they were returned to the institutions from which she had borrowed them. The notes—she would light the fire with those notes—as soon as she went home today. She was through—she had to be for the sake of her own sane outlook on the world.

  There were not many patrons today but Jim Pyron dropped in as she was using slack time to straighten shelves and replace books.

  “Weather news is none too good.” He stamped most of the snow from his thick boots, but he tidily sat down on the chair by the door to rid himself of them, leaving them standing while he crossed the floor in his thick double pairs of sock. “They say there is a regular blaster on the way. You stocked up?”

  “I’ll get some more today,” Gwennan promised. “Brought a list in. Paul Newton is going to pick me up at the store and see about my wood.”

  “I’m going to take a couple of the Crowder ledgers if you’ll trust me with them. Might not be opening up on Monday, and, if I were you, I’d close right about now.”

  He went with the ledgers and Gwennan did dress once more in her heavy clothing, was heading to lock up, when she paused by her desk. If she were wise she would certainly leave the pendant exactly where it was—it would be safe in the library—and she would probably be safer than she might be with it around as a temptation. Only she discovered that, certainly not by either her will or volition, her hand pulled open the drawer and that envelope was transferred into the front of her ski jacket before she zipped it up.

  However, to counter the attraction of that artifact, she also caught up a book bag she had deliberately filled for herself volume by volume during the morning. No more esoteric reading—she had crammed in three newish mysteries, two biographies suitably dull enough to send anyone into dreamless slumber, and a travel book, beside three of the lightest and most frivolous historical romances one could pick for the lighting of the brain’s occupation. These were going to be her home reading! She was Gwennan Daggert, town librarian, and a very ordinary and sane person—

  She held firmly to her inner impression of that ordinary and sane person as she visited the store and gave in her order. There was no supermarket in Whitebridge and the homey smells, the comfortable in-townness, of the old building set another barrier of reality about her.

  Then Paul came in with his own list, and they tramped back and forth from the pick-up with their cartons of emergency supplies. Snow was beginning to fall again. The sunlight had disappeared and the clouds massed. There was a rising wind which could cut like a knife or take one’s breath away. It was clear that the promised bad weather was well on its way, and Gwennan was very glad to be home again. Paul came in to fill, first the wood box in the kitchen, and then make sure that there was a future stack as high as he could cram it in the shed where she could reach by the inner kitchen door.

  Gwennan swept the table bare of the book piles, stacking them swiftly into one of the grocery cartons, and pushing that into the frosty cold of the parlor where they could freeze, she decided, as far as she was concerned. But she did not light the fire with her notes. Just as she had been unable to abandon the pendant, so she could not destroy the work of the past few weeks. However, she did push all out of sight into another carton, toss the envelope with the pendant on top, and place that in the parlor also, shutting the door very firmly upon all of it.

  12

  Gwennan had half expected to be beset by more dreams of visions, put under compulsion to return to her studies, thus she prepared to fight any such subborning of her will. But such an assault did not come. Her sleep was dreamless, as if she had emerged from some illness, free of the shadow on her mind. The promised storm hit hard and for three days she had been prisoner in her home, keeping close to the fire, making only quick raids now and then upon the stacked wood.

  She drowsed away hours, curiously tired, thus willing to laze out time. Miss Nessa’s training, which had been always a spur to accomplish, to keep busy, had released its hold on her, so that Gwennan was lazy as she had never been in her life, napping, rousing to languidly spoon up a bowl of hot soup—or if ambition were a little stronger, make a stew to bubble on the stove, its pot to be dipped into for more than one meal.

  The Newtons phoned twice, checking on her. Then the phone was silent, so when she tried to check with Pyron in town as to the state of the library, she discovered the line was dead. In the past such times of isolation had never been so wasted. Miss Nessa’s hands had never been idle, nor had she allowed Gwennan to escape such duties as the darning of thick winter stockings, the careful turning of already well-worn sheets, the cutting and sewing of rags for another rug, even though already balls of such raw material long awaited the braiding.

  On the second afternoon when it was growing dark enough in the kitchen for Gwennan to reluctantly bestir herself to flick on the battery-run storm lamp—for the electricity had also failed, ice-burdened lines down in the wilderness of snow—she felt more alert, restless. Those hours of half-sleep had apparently renewed her into wanting action.

  While Miss Nessa had always scorned any needlework which was not practical, and she herself had disliked what she did because of her rigid sense of duty, there were at the bottom of an old chest some lengths of cloth, long folded away—fine and unusual pieces of silk and brocade. Some, judging by their shape, must once have been rich garments laboriously picked apart for purposes which had never been afterward accomplished. As a very great favor when Gwennan had been quite young, Miss Nessa had allowed her to take these out—smooth and examine them, marvel at ancient sprays of embroidery so perfect and delicate that they might have been woven into the surfaces which formed their backgrounds. There had been the glint of metallic-threads — time dulled — in those sprays — and some of the flowers had been centered by pearls or crystal beads.

  Gwennan had no idea why she remembered these now—but she went to that sewing chest, rummaging through the dull scraps and pieces kept for dish cloths, dusting squares, and the like, pulled up the layers of brittle yellow papers which had been always kept to protect the treasures below. Where had these come from? Miss Nessa had always answered firmly that they were old things—belonging to some one far back in family history. She had eyed them with scorn—certainly the Daggerts who had for generations been farmers, had no use for such fripperies. Did some one of those sturdy, unimaginative farmers once marry a woman of another background, bringing her into what had been a bleak outpost?

  If so—what then had been her life? Who had unpicked the dresses? There were parts of at least three such, as well as several uncut lengths which were yellowed, ready to tear at the folds from which they had never been shaken forth for any seamstress to lay pattern on. Gwennan gathered up the armload of ancient silks and fraying satins, time-rubbed velvets, to lay them out upon the table.

  Here were parts of a bodice. She deduced its shape from the remaining portions, of a sea green brocade. It bore metallic embroidery around a neckline which had been cut quite immodestly
low by what must have been the village standards of that day. Silver those threads could have been—they were black now, with dull pearls caught in their webbing. Just the remains of a bodice—no skirt.

  There was a rich yellow—perhaps the dye of that laid away had not faded over much—underskirt—or two breadths of it—the whole pain-staking embroidered at measured intervals with knots of pansies, strikingly lifelike with their purple and white faces. Then some velvet which Gwennan deduced had been part of a cloak. It had been a cinnamon brown, and to one strip of it still adhered fluttering tatters of lining—as yellow as the skirt.

  Last of all were the uncut pieces. One was purple, very dark—a rich shade which made one think of a queen attired for her crowning, a brocade so heavy that a gown made of it might have been fatiguing to wear. Below that was silk which tore, even under the careful handling Gwennan gave it—too old, too frail to even keep its substance when folded.

  At the bottom of that pile was a third piece and this Gwennan frowned at. She remembered all the rest. Had she not handled them before? But somehow she had forgotten this. It had none of the tarnish and worn magnificance of the rest. Instead it seemed almost to belong—be better among household discards and scraps which had been piled above it.

  The texture was coarse to the touch especially after fingering those silks and satins. In color—Gwennan spread it out closer to the storm lamp—it was dark green. But, oddly enough, as the cloth moved under her careful handling there appeared caught up in it threads of another color, causing a simulation of rippling across the surface.