by Tad Williams
But Jiriki, although visibly saddened, remained adamant.
Balked at every turn, Simon’s anxiousness began to turn to anger. The reserved Sithi came to seem smug and self-righteous beyond enduring. While Simon’s friends were fighting and dying, engaged in a dreadful losing battle with the Storm King as well as with Elias, these foolish creatures wandered through their sunlit forest singing and contemplating the trees. And who was the Storm King, anyway, but a Sithi!? No wonder that his fellows were keeping Simon prisoned while the world outside withered before Ineluki’s cold wrath.
So the days spun by, each more and more like its predecessor, each increasing Simon’s disaffection. He ceased taking his evening meal with Jiriki, preferring a more solitary appreciation of the songs of crickets and nightingales. Resentful of Aditu’s playfulness, he began to avoid her. He was sick of being teased and fondled. He meant no more to her, he knew, than the lapdog did to the queen. He would have no more. If he must be a prisoner, he would act like one.
Jiriki found him sitting in a copse of larch trees, sullen and prickly as a hedgehog. The bees were mumbling in the clover and the sun streamed down through the needles, crosshatching the ground with slivers of light. Simon was chewing on a piece of bark.
“Seoman,” the prince said, “may I speak to you?”
Simon frowned. He had learned that Sithi, unlike mortals, would actually go away if permission was not given. Jiriki’s folk had a deep respect for privacy.
“I suppose so,” Simon said at last.
“I would like you to come with me,” Jiriki said. “We will go to the Yásira.”
Simon felt a quickening of hope, but it was a painful thing. “Why?”
“I do not know. I only know that we are all asked to come, all who live in Jao é-Tinukai’i. Since you live here now, I think it fitting that you come. ”
Simon’s hopes sank. “They did not ask for me.” For a moment he had envisioned how it would be: Shima’onari and Likimeya apologizing for their mistake, sending him back to his own kind bearing presents, laden as well with the wisdom to help Josua and the others. Another mooncalf daydream—hadn’t he grown out of them yet? “I don’t want to go,” he said at last.
Jiriki squatted beside him, poised as gracefully as a hunting bird upon a branch. “I wish that you would, Seoman,” he said at last. “I cannot force you and I will not plead, but Amerasu will be there. It is rare indeed for her to ask to speak to our people, except when it is the Day of Year-Dancing. ”
Simon felt his interest quicken. Perhaps Amerasu was going to speak on his behalf, order them to let him go! But if that was the case, why hadn’t he been asked to come?
He feigned indifference. Whatever else occurred, he was steadily learning Sithi ways. “There you go about Year-Dancing again, Jiriki,” he said. “But you have never told me what it means. I saw the Year-Dancing grove, you know.”
Jiriki appeared to be suppressing a smile. “Not very closely, I think. But come, Seoman, you are playing a game. Some other time I will tell you what I can of the responsibilities of our family’s house, but now I must go. You, too, if you plan to accompany me.”
Simon tossed the piece of chewed-upon bark over his shoulder. “I’ll go if I can sit near the door. And if I don’t have to speak.”
“You can sit wherever you please, Snowlock. You are a prisoner, perhaps, but an honored one. My people are trying to make your time here endurable. As to the rest, I have no say over what you may be asked. Come, you are almost grown, manchild. Do not be afraid to stand for yourself.”
Simon frowned, considering. “Lead on, then,” he said.
They stopped before the doorway of the great living tent. The butterflies were agitated, fluttering their spangled wings so that shifting patterns colored shadow rippled across the face of the Y ásira like wind through a field of wheat. The papery rustle of their gentle commingling filled the whole glen. Suddenly unwilling to proceed through the door, Simon pulled back, shaking himself free of Jiriki’s companionable arm.
“I don’t want to hear anything bad,” he said. There was a cold heaviness in the pit of his stomach, the same as he had felt when he expected punishment from Rachel or the Master of Scullions. “I don’t want to be shouted at.”
Jiriki looked at him quizzically. “No one will shout, Seoman. That is not our way, we Zida’ya. This may be nothing to do with you at all.”
Simon shook his head, embarrassed. “Sorry. Of course.” He took a deep breath and shrugged nervously, then waited until Jiriki gently took his arm once more and steered him toward the Y ásira’s rose-entwined doorway. A thousand thousand butterfly wings hissed like a dry wind as Simon and his companion stepped through into the vast bowl of multihued light.
Likimeya and Shima’onari, as before, were seated at the center of the room on low couches near the jutting finger-stone. Amerasu sat between them on a higher couch, the hood of her pale gray robe thrown back. Her snowy white hair, unbound, spread in a soft cloud upon her shoulders. She wore a sash of bright blue around her slender waist, but no other ornamentation or jewelry.
As Simon stared, her eyes passed briefly across his. If he hoped for a helpful smile or a reassuring nod, he was disappointed: her gaze slid by as though he were just one unexceptional tree in a great forest. His heart sank. If any ideas remained about Amerasu’s being concerned with mooncalf Simon’s fate, he decided, it was time to put them away.
Beside Amerasu, on a pedestal of dull gray rock, stood a curious object: a disk of some pale icy substance, mounted on a broad stand of dark and shiny witchwood wrought with twining Sithi carvings. Simon thought it a table-mirror-he had heard that some great ladies possessed them—but, oddly, it did not seem to reflect. The disk’s edges were sharp as knives, like a sugar-sweet that had been sucked to near-transparency. Its color was the frosty near-white of a winter moon, but other, deeper hues seemed to move sleepily within it. A wide, shallow bowl of the same translucent substance lay before the stone disk, nestled in the carved stand.
Simon could not stare at the thing too long. The changing colors disturbed him: in some strange manner, the shifting stone reminded him of the gray sword Sorrow, and that was a memory he did not wish reawakened. He turned his head away and looked slowly around the great chamber.
As Jiriki had suggested, all the residents of Jao é-Tinukai’i seemed to have come to the Y ásira this afternoon. Dressed in their emphatically colorful manner, plumed like rare birds, still the golden-eyed Sithi seemed unusually reserved, even by the standards of a retiring folk. Many eyes had turned toward Simon and Jiriki upon their entrance, but no one gaze had lingered long: the attention of all assembled seemed fixed on the three figures at the center of the vast tree-chamber. Glad of the anonymity, Simon chose a place on the outskirts of the silent crowd for Jiriki and himself to sit. He did not see Aditu anywhere, but he knew she would be hard to pick out in the midst of such an array.
For a long time there was no movement or speech, although it seemed to Simon that there were hidden currents moving just beneath his own understanding, subtle communications shared by everyone in the room but him. Still, he was not so insensitive that he failed to perceive the tension of the quiet Sithi, the clear sense of uneasy anticipation. There was a sharpness to the air, as before a lightning storm.
He had begun to wonder if they would go on this way all afternoon, like a group of cat-rivals gathered on a wall, silently staring each other down, when at last Shima‘onari rose and began to speak. This time, the master of Jao é-Tinukai’i did not bother with Simon’s own Westerling tongue, but used the musical Sithi speech. He spoke for some while, accompanying his soliloquy with graceful hand gestures, the sleeves of his pale yellow robe fluttering as he emphasized his words. To Simon, it was only confusion piled atop incomprehensibility.
“My father speaks of Amerasu and asks us to listen to her,” Jiriki whispered, translating. Simon was dubious. Shima’onari seemed to have spoken a very long time just to say tha
t. He glanced around the Y ásira at the somber, cat-eyed faces. Whatever Jiriki’s father was saying, he had the undivided and almost frighteningly complete attention of his people.
When Shima‘onari concluded, Likimeya rose, and all eyes then turned to her. She, too, spoke for a long time in the language of the Zida’ya.
“She says Amerasu is very wise,” explained Jiriki. Simon frowned.
When Likimeya finished a great, gentle sigh arose, as though all assembled had released their breath at once. Simon let out his own quiet sigh, one of relief: as the incomprehensible babble of Sithi-tongue went on and on, he had been finding it harder and harder to concentrate. Even the butterflies were moving restlessly above, the colorful sun-patterns made by their wings swimming back and forth across the great chamber.
At last Amerasu stood. She seemed much less frail than she had in her house. Simon had thought her then like a martyred saint, but now he saw in her a touch of the angelic, a power that smoldered low but which could burst out into pure white light. Her long hair moved in a breeze that might have come from the careful movement of a million wings.
“I see that the mortal child is here,” she said, “so I will speak in a way that he can understand, as much of what I say came from him. He has a right to hear.”
Several Sithi turned their heads to gaze impassively at Simon. Caught by surprise, he dropped his chin and looked down at his chest until they had turned away once more.
“In fact,” Amerasu continued, “strange as this may sound, it is possible that some of the things I must say are better suited to the languages of the Sudhoda‘ya. The mortals have always lived beneath one kind of darkness or another. That is among the reasons we named them ‘sunset-children’ when they first came to Osten Ard.” She paused. “The manchildren, the mortals, have many ideas of what happens after they die, and wrangle about who is right and who is wrong. These disagreements often come to bloodshed, as if they wished to dispatch messengers who could discover the answer to their dispute. Such messengers, as far as I know of mortal philosophy, never return to give their brethren the taste of truth they yearn for.
“But among the mortal peoples there are stories that say that some do return as bodiless spirits, although they bring no answers with them. These spirits, these ghosts, are mute reminders of that shadow of death. Those who encounter such unhomed spirits call themselves ‘haunted.’ ” Amerasu took a breath; her immense composure seemed to slip. It was a moment before she resumed. “That is a word we Zida’ya do not have, but perhaps we should.”
The silence, but for the murmur of delicate wings, was absolute.
“We fled out of the Uttermost East, thinking to escape that Unbeing that overwhelmed our Garden-land. That story is known to all but the mortal boy—even those of our children born after the Flight from Asu’a take it in with their mother’s milk—and so it will not be told again here.
“When we reached this new land, we thought we had escaped that shadow. But a piece of it came with us. That stain, that shadow, is part of us—just as the mortal men and women of Osten Ard cannot escape the shadow of their own dying.
“We are an old people. We do not fight the unfightable. That is why we fled Venyha Do’sae, rather than be unmade in a fruitless struggle. But the curse of our race is not that we refuse to throw down our lives in purposeless defiance of the great shadow, but that we instead clasp the shadow to ourselves and hug it tightly, gleefully, nursing it as we would a child.
“We brought the shadow with us. Perhaps no living, reasoning thing can be without such shadow, but we Zida’ya—despite our lives, beside which the spans of mortals are like fireflies—still we cannot ignore that shadow that is death. We cannot ignore the knowledge of Unbeing. Instead, we carry it with us like a brooding secret.
“The mortals must die, and they are frightened by that. We who were once of the Garden must also die, although our span is vastly greater, but we each embrace our death from the moment we first open our eyes, making it an insoluble part of us. We yearn for its complete embrace, even as the centuries roll by, while around us the death-fearing mortals breed and drop like mice. We make our death the core of our being, our private and innermost friend, letting life spin past as we enjoy Unbeing’s grave company.
“We would not give Ruyan Ve’s children the secret of our near-immortality, though they were stock of the same tree. We denied eternal life to Ruyan’s folk, the Tinukeda’ya, even as we clasped Death tighter and tighter to our own bosoms. We are haunted, my children. The mortal word is the only correct one. We are haunted.”
He did not understand most of what First Grandmother said, but Amerasu’s voice worked on Simon like the scolding of a loving parent. He felt small and unimportant, but reassured that the voice was there and that it spoke to him. The Sithi around him maintained their careful impassivity.
“Then the ship-men came,” Amerasu said, her voice deepening, “and were not content to live and die within the walls of Osten Ard as the mortal mice before them had been. They were not satisfied with the morsels we tossed to them. We Zida‘ya could have stopped their depredations before they became great, but instead we grieved over the loss of beauty while secretly rejoicing. Our death was coming!—a glorious and final ending that would make the shadows real. My husband Iyu’unigato was one such. His gentle, poetic heart loved death more than it ever loved his wife or the sons of his loins.”
For the first time a quiet whisper began to travel through the assembly, an uneasy murmur scarcely louder than the rustle of the butterflies overhead. Amerasu smiled sadly.
“It is hard to hear such things,” she said, “but this is a time when truth must be spoken. Of all the Zida’ya, only one truly did not yearn for quiet oblivion. He was my son Ineluki, and he burned. I do not mean the manner of his dying—that may be seen as a cruel irony, or as a fated inevitability. No, Ineluki burned with life, and his light dispelled the shadows—at least some of them.
“All know what happened. All know that Ineluki slew his gentle father, that he was then unmade at the last, bringing Asu’a to destruction as he struggled to save himself and all his folk from oblivion. But his fires were so fierce that he could not go peacefully into the shadows beyond life. I curse him for what he did to my husband and his people and himself, but my mother’s heart is still proud. By the Ships that brought us, he burned then and he burns still! Ineluki will not die!”
Amerasu lifted a hand as a fresh spatter of whispering rolled through the Y ásira. “Peace, children, peace!” she cried, “First Grandmother has not herself embraced that shadow. I do not praise him for what he is now, only for the fierce spirit that no other showed, when such a spirit was the only thing that could save us from ourselves. And he did save us, for his resistance and even his madness gave others the will to flee here, to the house of our exile.” She lowered her hand. “No, my son embraced hatred. It kept him from dying a true death, but it was a flame even hotter than his own, and it has consumed him. There is nothing left of the bright blaze that was my son.” Her eyes were hooded. “Almost nothing.”
When she did not speak for a while, Shima’onari rose as if to go to her, saying something quietly in the Sithi tongue. Amerasu shook her head. “No, grandson, let me speak.” A touch of anger entered her voice. “This is all I have left, but if I am not heard, a darkness will descend that will be unlike the loving death which we sing to in our dreams. It will be worse than the Unbeing that drove us out of our Garden beyond the sea.”
Shima’onari, looking curiously shaken, sat down beside stone-eyed Likimeya.
“Ineluki has changed,” Amerasu resumed. “He has become something the world has not seen before, a smoldering ember of despair and hatred, surviving only to redress those things which long ago were injustices and mistakes and tragic underestimations, but now are simply facts. Like ourselves, Ineluki dwells in the realm of what was. But unlike his living kin, Ineluki is not content to wallow in memories of the past. He lives, or exists—h
ere is a place the mortal language is too inexact—to see the present state of the world obliterated and the injustices made right, but his only window is anger. His justice will be cruel, his methods even more horrible. ”
She moved to stand beside the object on the stone pedestal, letting her slim fingers rest gently on the disk’s rim. Simon feared that she would cut herself, and felt an abnormal horror at the idea of seeing blood on Amerasu’s thin, golden skin.
“I have long known that Ineluki had returned, as have all of you. Unlike some, though, I have not pushed it from my mind, or rolled it over and over in my thoughts only to enjoy the pain of it, as one prods a bruise or sore spot. I have wondered, I have thought, and I have spoken with those few who could help me, trying to understand what might be growing in the shadows of my son’s mind. The last of those who brought me knowledge was the mortal boy Seoman—although he did not realize, and still does not, half of what I gleaned from him.”
Simon again felt eyes upon him, but his own were helplessly fixed to Amerasu’s luminous face, framed in the great white cloud of her hair.
“That is just as well,” she said. “The manchild has been fate-battered and chance-led in many curious ways, but he is no spell-wielder or great hero. He has fulfilled his responsibilities admirably, but needs no more heaped upon his young shoulders. But what I learned from him has, I think, taught me the true shape of Ineluki’s plan.” She took a deep breath, summoning strength. “It is terrible. I could tell you, but words may not suffice. I am the eldest of this tribe; I am Amerasu the Ship-Born. Still there would be some who would secretly doubt, and others who would continue to turn their faces away. Many of you would prefer to live with the beauty of imagined shadows instead of the ugly blackness at the core of this shadow—of the shadow that my son spreads over us all.
“So I will show you what I have seen, then you will see, too. If we can still turn our heads away, my children, at least we cannot continue to pretend. We may keep out the winter for a while, but at last it will engulf us, too.” Her voice suddenly rose, plaintive but powerful. “If we are running joyfully into the arms of death, let us at least admit that is what we do! Let us for this once see ourselves plainly, even at the ending of things. ”