by Clayton, Jo;
It was quick, lasted a few seconds only, and was as precise as a healwoman’s knife. She began to appreciate Hern’s eye and that part in her shaped by him saw more clearly how he’d evaluated their possibilities from the meager evidence of the Mirror.
The Southgate swung open and a band of meien rode through, came across the scree toward them, familiar faces, all of them; she sighed, deeply pleased to see them all again. “Kindayh,” she said.
“Serroi,” Kindayh smiled, lifted her hand in a quiet, warm greeting, then turned to Hern. “Dom,” she said. “Yael-mri got word of your coming and sent a message flyer telling us to be ready for you.” She looked beyond him at the mob he’d brought through with him. “Though we aren’t quite prepared for all that. Have to stretch, but we can manage, I think.”
Hern glanced at the lowering sun, then faced Kindayh. “That’s good to hear.” A swift arc of his hand sketched the wall and the gate. “A cold night out here; should get them settled by sundown.”
“Right. Follow us.” She swept her arm in a wide arc, brought her macai around and started toward the open gate.
3
Ombele’s voice came a third time, oddly diminished even in the taut silence that was broken only by the steady lapping of the ocean close behind them. “Going in,” he boomed. “Ahead slow.”
Julia eased up on the brake as the jeep just ahead of her with Braddock and the rest of the council in it began to roll forward. Around her the walking families started after it, moving faster than the pickup’s creep. She could feel their excitement, their eagerness to get their first sight of what they’d be fighting for, then living with. She felt much of that herself. How many months … no, years. Yes, years since she’d felt that bright glow of anticipation. It wasn’t just growing older that had diminished her, but the dusty gray everyday despair that spread over the whole country, darkening and thickening as the years passed. It was different here; she breathed that difference in with the clean bracing air and was exhilarated by it. She couldn’t isolate reasons for this; there was no more hope here, no less violence, but there was a new smell to the place as if the world itself were somehow younger, as if the possibilities they’d exhausted on their homeworld were open here and multiplied. She drove past the gates and nosed into the dark hole that turned in a shallow curve putting the opening at the far end out of sight. The wall was thick, far thicker than she’d guessed, more than six times the length of the pickup. She twitched the lights on and breathed a bit more easily, then she was out and the walkers around her were letting out whoops of their own, especially the children, whoops that bounced back and forth between the ragged cliffs that towered over them, crumbling chalk with a toupee of scrub and scraggly grass. She squinted into the jumping side mirror and tried to estimate the size of the exit hole, wondering if the biggest truck was going to fit through it. Close thing, if it did. They might have to unpack the truck and haul the load through. Too bad to lose that transport. Too bad to lose anything here, no way of replacing it.
Liz leaned over, slapped the lights off. “Don’t waste the juice. No rechargers here.”
Julia glanced at Liz, was startled to see in the small dark woman no sign of the excitement bubbling in the folk outside or in her own blood. Liz was the same as she’d always been, wired in the face of danger, even a danger that seemed so remote and undefined as the one ahead of them. Julia wanted to say something, to ask Liz what she was thinking, but there was no invitation in the woman’s face, so she only said, “Right.” And started forward, creeping along a rutted excuse for a road toward the vee of brilliant cloudless blue ahead of them.
At the mouth of the deep ravine a stone keep loomed like a continuation of the cliffs, forcing the road, such as it was, too swing wide around its walls. The women stopped them on a rocky barren plain dotted with tufts of yellowed grass and scattered stones. The keep’s outer gate was an opening just broad enough to let two of those lizardish beasts walk side by side and just high enough to clear their riders’ heads. With Ombele and Braddock directing traffic they got the trucks lined up and parked, noses facing the road. The wind sweeping along the plain was like an ice bath and the little heat the sun provided seemed more illusion than reality. Some of the younger children were crying and Julia was shuddering so hard she almost couldn’t walk by the time she followed Liz through the double-gated entrance tunnel into the court beyond.
Around the inside of the high thick walls, slate-roofed three-story buildings were backed against the stone. The lower floors were stables, open face forges. storage rooms, or housed other, less obvious functions. The second and third floors were living space if she remembered her history correctly. She saw two of the women leading the riding beasts inside the stable nearest the gate and a third showing Angel where he could put his horses. The folk around her were beginning to relax now that they were out of the wind. Though it wasn’t warm in the court, the air no longer seemed to slice the meat off her bones. She stood by the well in the center of the paved court, feeling a little lost, wondering what to do, then Ombele came out of the square tower, Samuel Braddock beside him. He bent and listened a moment to Braddock’s murmur, then straightened and used his foghorn voice to get the attention of the thronging mob, sending Georgia to set up a guard rota for the trucks, a clutch of girls to fetch spare blankets and food, a string of boys to haul water for cooking, then broke the rest into groups, took one himself and sent the rest of the council to get the others moving.
Julia leaned on the railing of the gallery and gazed down into the Great Hall of the tower. It was a peaceful and comfortable scene, the fires in the four enormous fireplaces beginning to die down, the floor everywhere except near the hearths and the narrow walkways covered with a thick layer of straw, the younger children fed and tucked away in blanket cocoons, already asleep, warm and safe. Adults and older children were sitting in groups about tubs of coffee and tea, comfortable themselves, some of them beginning to stir about, getting ready to take themselves to bed, others talking quietly, tiredly, countentedly about the extraordinary events of the day. Angel and his bunch were out with their horses; they ate there, planned to spend the night there. Near one of the hearths Dom Hern sat with the council, talking quietly. Braddock, Ombele, Lou, Evalina Hanks and Samsyra. Julia looked for the healer but couldn’t find her. Several of the women fighters were there also, the—what was it?—meien. Meie singular, meien plural. One aspect of the magic in this place is definitely a blessing, she thought. When we passed through the membrane we seem to have acquired the local language. And what’s better, we got it without losing our own; there’s so much you just can’t say in mijlocker. I suspect the children will grow up mixing both languages. Well, English is a mongrel tongue anyway and the stronger for it. Forty-six, that’s not old, got a good thirty years left, thanks to the little healer. Serroi. I know her name, why do I have trouble calling her by that name? Afraid of her? Distancing her? Stop it, Julia. Serroi.
As if the silent repetition of her name had conjured her out of shadows Serroi came toward her and stood beside her looking down at the crowded, peaceful scene. “Plotting and planning.” She smiled at the council and Dom Hern. “Catching up on everything that’s happened since we left.”
“How bad is it going to be?” Julia felt impelled to ask though she didn’t really want to know, she didn’t want to spoil the mellow mood and the spring scent of hope that hovered about her.
“I don’t know. Bad enough, I suppose.”
“Shouldn’t you be down there with them?”
“No. I don’t belong there. Not now.”
“The land is the same,” Julia said. She drew her hand along the polished stone of the railing. “Granite is granite, it seems, wherever you find it.”
“People, too—they seem much the same everywhere, if you disregard custom.” Serroi spoke absently, frowning down at the eroding groups below—more and more of the refugees were heading for their blankets though they’d lost the greater part of t
he day by their jump—but Julia didn’t think she really saw them. “How long did you know?” Serroi said after a moment’s silence.
“That I would die?”
“Yes.”
“A little more than a year.” Julia paused to consider. “I knew about the cancer before that. Several months before that. But I wasn’t thinking about dying then. Mostly, I was angry at fate or whatever landed this on me. And I was furious at the circumstances that blocked me from a cure. And at the same time I was still sure I could get around or over those blocks. Ever see anyone with boils? That was me, a walking boil.” She chuckled, went silent as she remembered the night when Georgia and Anoike tracked her through the brush and brought her back to the few left alive out of all those packed into the body of the truck. Remembered her rage and despair when she discovered that the border was shut tight, would be for the next six months until the Dommers got the fence built. Once that was done, they’d relax a little and it would be possible to get across if you knew the mountains well enough. Six months. Too long for her. A little crazy from anger and frustration and fear, she left the band and joined a group that called themselves the Mad Bombers. “When I lost all hope of living,” she said, “all I wanted to do was strike out at those who’d done it to me, stolen my hope, I mean.” She’d exaggerated her age and fragility, was their respectable front. No one ever connected the quietly dressed, middle-aged lady with the bombs that blew night after night. Bridges, airports, banks, police stations, introg centers when they could locate them, corporate headquarters, fuel storage tanks, a refinery, a thousand other targets, doing their best to avoid taking lives—until the time came that made her sick when she remembered it, the bomb that didn’t go off when it should, in the middle of the night when the warehouse was deserted, but twelve hours later. Noon. She was staying with an ex-client, a prostitute specializing in dominance who picked up quite a lot of information and passed it on without asking questions. The two women spent the afternoon watching the bodies being hauled away and the firemen exhausting themselves to contain the fire, even listened to the speeches of community leaders rounded up by the Dommers, all of them frothing with outrage. The only time Amalie showed the slightest animation was when she recognized one of her clients and in a detached voice listed some of his odder preferences. “Time came,” Julia said, “when I got sick of the bangs and the blood. Anoike took me up to the settlement in the mountains and I went on supply raids with them for a while, long as I was strong enough, then I worked with Dort and Jenny, writing pamphlets, running the offset, coaxing paper and ink out of Georgia and Braddock. When you can keep busy, you don’t think about much except what you’re doing. The nights were bad sometimes, but Georgia and Anoike got me morphine, so I did sleep. When I couldn’t get around anymore, well, that was a hard time, until I went back to writing, not on paper but in my head. I used to put off the shots as long as I could so I could keep the words clear. I spun essays out of air, wrote a novel in my head paragraph by paragraph, saying the words over and over until they were engraved in my mind. It never seemed important that I might not finish the book; as a matter of fact, I was determined to live until I did, sort of a measuring out of the hours, nor was it important that nobody was going to read it but me. Can you understand that? Never mind. It was my way of telling myself that my life had meaning and purpose even though my death was without either of those. What happened to me was only a throw of fate, useless, without meaning even to me. If I’d died in a fight or a raid.…” She shook her head. “And even the book was spoiled when that chopper came over spitting fire at my mountain. The day you showed up, I was trying to convince myself it would be better to ask Lou to give me an overdose.” She sighed, looked down at her hands. “Good thing you did come. He’d have hated that.”
“If there was a purpose to your dying, it would have been easier?”
“I think so.” She smiled at Serroi. “Likely I’ll get a chance to test that theory in the days ahead.” She rubbed at her nose, tapped restlessly at the polished stone. “Grace under pressure,” she said. “That was a fad of writers and leeches a couple hundred years ago—watch a hunter kill, and evaluate the heart of the beast by how long he struggled and how well he died, that kind of thing, I suppose you’ve escaped that here so far. No? You’re right, then, Custom aside, the beast that walks on two feet is much the same everywhere. Are you a seer as well as a healer?”
“No. Why?”
“I get the feeling it’s your death as well as mine we’re discussing.”
“Not death. Just something that terrifies me, yet I have to do it. I think I have to do it. I don’t know.” She hesitated, lifted eyes that shone like molten copper in the dim light, searched Julia’s face, then turned away and gazed at the group sitting beside the fire, deeply involved in what looked like complicated negotiations. After a while, she turned once again to Julia. “Are you too tired to stay up a while longer?”
“You know I’m not.”
“It’s a long story.”
“We’ve got a whole night.” Julia touched the healer’s hand, drew her own back, excitement and eagerness blooming within her. She throttled them down, spoke as calmly as she could, “If I can help.…”
“If you don’t mind listening to the story of my life.”
“Mind?” Julia chuckled. “Serroi, you don’t know what you’re saying. If I were two years dead, I’d crawl out of my grave to listen.”
PRIESTESS
Nilis tried to sleep, but the bed poked her and pushed at her; there was no position that felt comfortable. After an hour of that tossing she got up and went into the kitchen to heat some milk, hoping that would ease the tension. She sat at the kitchen table, sipping at the milk, staring at the flame of the guttering candle end, wondering what this was about, afraid she knew.
She wandered through the cold dark rooms of the shrine, feeling lost and alienated from them all, though she knew every inch of the stone in the walls and the floor, had scraped her hands raw cleaning them. After a while she drifted back to the kitchen, lit a new candle from the end of the old, and went reluctantly into the Maiden Chamber. She set the candlelamp on the floor and stepped back. “I know what you want,” she said. She drew a hand across her eyes, furious at herself for wanting to cry. “You promised me I’d have the time I needed. You promise me a life here and give me a passage. I won’t.…” Her voice broke and the tears she was trying to restrain gushed out. She dropped to the floor and knelt, hugging herself, sobbing out the pain of her years.
She spent an hour there, alternately hitting out at the Face, refusing to listen to what She was saying, and grieving for all the possibilities she’d lose if she let herself hear the call. When the candle was half gone, she sighed—grief, anger, denial all exhausted. Wearily she carried the candle into the kitchen and began packing the satchel with towels and food and other things she thought she might need.
For a few minutes she watched Mardian bringing order into the motley group assembled in the Court of Columns, then she walked from shadow and stopped beside him, satchel on one shoulder, quilt-roll on the other, her fur cloak swaying about cold bare ankles. She heard the mutter of comment from the Cymbankers and tar-folk, but ignored it, stopped his protest with a quickly raised hand. “She gives and She takes away.” Mardian looked at her a moment, looked past her at the empty shrine, then nodded and went back to what he was doing.
They walked south and west across the Cimpia Plain, gathering more new Keepers, villagers and tar-folk as they went. All day they walked, silent except when they were chanting the praises of the Maiden, their voices drowned in the great rumble of the folk following them. Hallam joined them at Sadnaji, along with all his folk who found the courage to cast aside Follower Blacks and cast with it their fear. They climbed the steep slopes to the Biserica Pass and led their rag-tag band chanting Maiden Praises through the great Gates of the Northwall two days before Floarin’s army reached the Pass.
MAGIC CHILD
Tuli scratched at her nose, grinned at the place where her hand should be but wasn’t. Ildas had spun a net of light-wire that sucked eyes around her and left her unseen. She was stretched out in dead grass beside Coperic, peering at the sleeping Minarks through some weeds and a hump of dead brush, there only because Ildas wouldn’t work on anyone but her. On his far side two of his people lay in another patch of shadow, Bella and Biel, Sankoise, younger versions of old Hars, with thick, sleek caps of dark gold hair, tilted, blue-purple eyes, the pallor of those who seldom walk in daylight, clad in matte black tunics and trousers that melted into shadow like a part of the night. They were cousins, tough, clever, skilled and impenetrable to most everyone but Coperic, content to follow wherever he led them. They’d accepted her into the band without argument or overt hostility but with no warmth, tolerating her because Ildas made it easier for them to attack and kill norits. They hated the Nor with a cold relentless passion that made Tuli shiver whenever she saw evidence of it.
There was a disturbance on the far side of the army, some shouting, a flutter of traxim, fireballs from the norits; she trembled when she saw those, the memory too recent to be easy to bear. More bodies left lying. She swallowed, seeing before her the bodies of tar-folk and villagers and Stenda boys left behind as the army moved on, clustered about the campgrounds like the piles of garbage and ordure. Teras might have been there at any of the camps, one of the dead, but she’d never know it, not being foolish enough to leave hiding and go poking about among the corpses. She moved restlessly, willing the raiders to go away and let things settle into quiet again; she didn’t dare move until then. She could hear curses from the Minarks, froze as a norit rode past, started breathing again as Ildas cooed to her and the norit moved on, having noticed nothing.