There. Movement flickered up on the side of the mountain and Dvan fired without aiming, without time to aim, paused a moment and then fired again. The sun had nearly vanished now, leaving nothing but the last gleams of twilight to light Dvan's way to vengeance. He squeezed off a fourth shot, shifted his aim slightly and sent another bolt up the mountainside in the general direction of the movement he had seen. He considered the laser, slung across his back, and discounted it; if the kitjan, with its wider field of effect, had not taken the Dancer, then the laser was no better.
He tied the kitjan down over his thigh, and resumed his pursuit.
The mountain grew steep now, so steep that Dvan had to use both hands to help himself move up the icy cold rock, up the side of the mountain in near darkness. The sky itself was near as dark as the rock around him, and Dvan was forced to go more slowly, and more slowly yet, and he felt his heart pounding away inside him; he was losing the Dancer, losing ground he would never recover--
He glanced upward, up the mountainside.
The god had been kind.
The Dancer's figure stood straight, like a Shield on duty, and Dvan knew from the way the Dancer held himself he had been touched by the kitjan; the Dancer stood outlined against the starlit sky, as visible as though in daylight, no more than a hundred meters ahead of Dvan. Dvan clawed for the kitjan, got it free and saw that the figure had vanished again. He did not tie the kitjan down again, but rose and leapt up the rock in great bounds, no longer climbing, accepting the chance of a misstep and mortal fall. A long dark ravine led upward and Dvan went into it, and then out of it, and found himself on a small ledge that led off to the east and west alike, heard the sound of the Dancer shuffling across the stone off to his right, and sprinted the last distance, not tired, filled with a joy so profound he had never known its like, fulfilling the service the god had requested of him, and he rounded an outjut of rock and found an open place leading inward to a cave, and there, in the middle of the cave, groping cautiously for something, his back turned to Dvan, was the Dancer.
For a moment so short and so long it could have no meaning, Dvan stood perfectly motionless, frozen in the awareness of success. Hollowness filled him, made him an empty vessel for the touch of the god, and the god used him for the tool he had always been; he watched the god bring up the kitjan, heard the god say softly, "Good-bye, Sedon," and felt his index finger depressing the stud, watched the bolt strike the Dancer full on, heard the Dancer's death scream--
A slowtime bubble appeared from nowhere.
The god released him.
Dvan almost fell, took a stumbling step forward, unbelieving, cold and alone, the kitjan a great weight in his hand.
The bubble glowed at him, hard and real and solid, a dim and gentle silver beneath the light of distant stars.
Dvan let the kitjan drop to his side, took half a dozen achingly slow steps forward, and let himself sink down at the side of the cave, with the slowtime field to his back.
And waited for morning to arrive.
He had never been so tired before in all his immensely long life.
In the morning he looked around, fixing the place in memory, the relationships of the peaks to one another. It took some time, imprinting the image into deep memory, but at length he was satisfied; though eons might pass between visits, he would know this place again.
After a while he got up and stretched to relieve his stiffness, and headed back down the mountain.
* * *
39.
He spent most of the winter trying to follow Indo's trail, without success. Eventually he gave up and went looking for Marah.
He found him, easily enough, shortly after nightfall. A day's march on past the point where he and Marah had separated, Lorien had made a stand of it, on a long bluff overlooking a wide river. There was not enough left of the site where the conflict had taken place for Dvan to reconstruct much of the battle; perhaps the Dancer had not realized that Marah was carrying the grenade launcher. Most of the bluff was gone, and the river's course had been altered. Splatters of molten stone coated most of the immediate area. At least three grenades had been detonated, possibly four.
An ambush; Marah's corpse showed it clearly enough. Marah lay, with the grenade launcher and kitjan, at the edge of the devastation. Arrows filled him like the quills of one of the small pricklies the Shield had sometime dined on. Though Dvan could never find the smallest trace of the Dancer, Dvan had no doubt that Marah had killed Lorien; the Sentinel had died smiling, and had frozen with the rictus still upon his features.
Dvan disassembled the grenade launcher, removed the two remaining grenades, and set their time fuses.
He walked away without hurry. Half an hour after leaving Marah's corpse, the world behind him lit with the sudden glare of the midday sun. Dvan's shadow, moving ahead of him, grew huge and wavered like the shadow of a giant. Eventually the brilliant light faded, and the hot wind, when it came, merely warmed the back of Dvan's neck.
He camped for a while at the floats.
He did not know how long he stayed there. After a while, he noticed that the summers were growing longer, and warmer, and that the winters were not so fierce. One summer a tribe of the savages wandered through, and stopped to camp at the edge of the long flats upon which the floats were beached, and watched Dvan, from a distance, for day after day after day.
Toward the end of the summer they picked up and left. The morning after they were gone, Dvan awoke and realized that the floats, which had once been some two hundred meters back from the edge of the water, were getting wet with every high tide. Plants had grown up to cover the thrusters, and drifts of sand had moved up into the cabins of the floats, covering the floors so completely they could not be seen. The doors still shut, after a fashion; Dvan sat in the pilot's seat, and looked out through the still flawlessly clean windows at the vast blue ocean. After a bit he unstrapped the kitjan that had lain against his thigh so long he had run through over two thousand of the restraining thongs, and left the kitjan on the seat once used by the weapons operator.
He left the doors to both floats open to the elements, and set off down the coast, following the savages.
Over thirty thousand years passed.
* * *
40.
The shop sat in the very shadow of the great Library at Alexandria. In the mornings it got sunlight; in the afternoon the Library blocked it.
"Hello, Indo."
The shopkeeper, an elderly man of no more than average size, turned about slowly, peering up at the giant who had brushed through the hanging beads that filled his doorway. The shopkeeper spoke pure, accentless Greek. "Forgive me? Did you speak to me?"
"You recognize me."
The old man bowed quickly, apparently somewhat nervous. "Forgive me, sir. I do not understand your tongue; I speak Greek and Hebrew only. Are you interested in cloth? We weave the finest in all--"
The giant, dressed in the tunic and leggings of a Greek businessman of some wealth, did not hurry; he unsheathed a sword to match his own awesome size, swung its tip around to rest against the shopkeeper's windpipe. "For the last time, Indo. Speak shiata, or die."
The shopkeeper peered up at the giant; then, calmly, straightened himself up out of his hunch, and abruptly gained a good ten centimeters' height. His features smoothed, the tremor in his throat and hands disappeared, and suddenly he seemed not so much old, as simply care-worn and reserved. In shiata as accentless as Dvan's own, he said simply, "I've no lon; may I offer you a glass of wine?"
Dvan sheathed his sword, inclined his head slightly, and said in Greek every bit as good as Indo's, "It would be my very great pleasure."
They sat together in the back room, a small place of white stone walls, with a single window that looked out toward the walls of the Library. Only a kilometer distant, the Mediterranean gleamed blue in the noonday sun. Indo poured wine from a stoppered clay jug; Dvan was not surprised to find the wine of a quality that did not match the humb
leness of Indo's surroundings.
Dvan sipped at his wine.
Indo smiled at him, a gentle and guileless thing, teeth hidden as though they were two servants of the Flame, on the World that had abandoned them eons since. "Have you come to kill me?"
"I don't know, Indo. I had not thought of you in--" Dvan searched back. "I cannot even say how long."
"You thought me dead."
"I did. It had not occurred to me...that any others could have survived...so long. So very long." Dvan said suddenly, "Do any others survive? Any of the exiles?"
Indo merely shook his head. "If they did I would not tell you."
"My trip here," said Dvan, "fourteen years ago; I saw an exhibition of swordplay here, and I knew--"
Indo nodded. "The students of the students of my students."
"They spoke shiata among themselves--not well, not as those born to it; but the language was unmistakable." The words burst from Dvan. "What are they?"
Indo shook his head. "I know the answer to that no better than you. They call themselves the Face of Night. Shivata. Before we came to this world I turned away from the god, spurned his service; abrogated to myself, by right of the fact that I could take them, the gifts the god had given me. The god no longer speaks to me." Indo paused. "But he speaks to them."
"They are not Dancers."
"No. The Dance, Dvan, is a celebration of life. It is not a tool of death, and even we heretics could not make it one."
"They have done it."
Indo's voice was gentle, dreamy, distant. "No. The Dance of the Flame cannot be used so. But they have made a transition, Dvan, that I think was inevitable; once the Flame was mastered, and master it we did, Sedon and I, the next step was inevitable. We Dancers, trained so well in the Dance of the Flame, could not take that step.
"Our children have."
Gi'Tbad'Eovad'Dvan said simply, "I do not understand."
"If life is art, Dvan, so must be death. All power arises from transformation, the movement from one state of existence to another. The power to bring life, to take the Flame down into the world; it is the same thing as the power to mold life, and to take it." Silence for a while, and then Indo whispered, "In his right hand he holds a black Flame."
They sat together in silence, as darkness descended around them.
"Art," said Indo finally, "at each step. I would not have believed it had I not seen it; but there is beauty in the Kill." He looked up at Dvan. "You have made your decision."
"Will you fight me?"
"No." Indo shook his head. "What the god brought me to do, I have done."
"Then stand up."
Indo did, lifted his chin. Dvan loosed the sword, and simply did it, quickly, with no attempt at art. He was out the door, into the darkened street outside, before Indo's head had ceased rolling cross the floor.
North. He would go north, away from Indo's students; he had no desire to fight them.
With Indo dead, released at last from the vow that had held him nearly all his unnaturally long life, he had no desires at all.
* * *
41.
From the Flame came nightways.
In the beginning was the Flame, and the Flame was life. Those who came after saw the Flame, and rejoiced, and Danced in its beauty.
For a long time this was so.
Then we came, the broken ones. We learned the Dance, and mastered the Dance, and then dared attempt to master the Flame itself.
And did.
From shia came shiabrè.
From life, came death.
From the Flame came nightways.
--Excerpted from Shiva Curiachen's An Oral History of Nightways, pub. 2332, Alternities Press, CU:18.995 Zaradin.
* * *
42.
On a cold morning early in the year 527 a.d., Dvan waited with his troops for the coming battle.
They camped on the hills overlooking the Camel, overlooking the fields where battle would take place.
It was a grim chill day, gray with clouds and damp with mist, and Dvan felt it in his bones, felt the wetness of the air in his beard. It made him wonder, not for the first or even ten thousandth time, if this might be what age felt like; the loss of vitality, of warmth. Impending battle had always affected him this way, and doubtless always would. It seemed to him at times that he had spent his entire immense, unending life on this barbarian Earth either preparing for a battle, cleaning up after a battle, or seeking bleakly to evade one.
He and his men, a band of better than two thousand horsemen if Dvan's scribe Nicco was to be believed, were gathered in the trees overlooking the clearing on the west side of the Camel. The balance of Dvan's forces he had left at home. He lacked horses for them, and constrained to the speed of men afoot he could not have reached the Camel in any reasonable time.
Dvan did not for a moment believe old Nicco's count of two thousand; he reckoned, estimating by eye, that they were at least two hundred shy of their second thousand. But no need to embarrass the old man. Nicco's eyesight was fading, and his memory going with each day. If he wished to call the count at two thousand and fourteen, why then, two thousand and fourteen it would be.
The only certainty in the world was that it would be far fewer by day's end.
The King's troops assembled throughout the long morning, horsemen and foot soldiers arriving together, taking up position in the eastern fields, with the Camel separating them from the bastard Medraut's troops, and the Saxons with whom Medraut had allied himself. Dvan did not know why Medraut had not taken Camelot, and held it against Arthur's return--he'd have done so himself--but it hardly mattered.
Arthur himself arrived toward mid-morning. Even from where he had encamped Dvan recognized some few in the King's party; Arthur himself, his son Llacheau, the immense bulk of the monster Gawain, the first man Dvan had met in some hundreds of years who surpassed his own great size.
Dvan kept his men encamped; no use in moving until the course of the battle, if there was one, came clear.
The morning wore down into the afternoon, and in the afternoon, Medraut and Arthur went forth to parley.
Dvan had his men ready themselves; when combat came--and Dvan knew there was no real chance of peace out of this parley--it would come quick.
He sat still, breathing slowed down to practically nothing, calm as the ocean before the storm. He knew it a thing of pride to his men, his lack of concern before a battle. His sword, so large no normal man could have wielded it, lay across his thighs, waiting for blood.
Dvan sat up high on the ridge of Camel Hill, watching the forces below. Medraut and Arthur spoke together for hours, spoke so long that Dvan began to wonder if the battle everyone had seen coming for the last two years might actually be averted. At one point the two men sent their aides away, and stood together, with no one else within range of their voices, for most of half an hour.
Whatever it was they discussed would never be known; Arthur nodded abruptly, turned away, and with his party made his way back across the Camel.
When they were halfway across the Camel, in an act of blatant treachery, the Saxons at Medraut's back surged forward, across the open field, and engaged Arthur's party while it was still mired in the open water of the Camel.
Impatience was not one among Dvan's failings; he gave it fully half an hour before he joined in, long enough that the Saxons had nearly forgotten him, long enough that Arthur's folk doubtless thought themselves betrayed.
Long enough that all those whom Dvan's men were likely to face had grown tired.
They swept down off the hill in a great thundering wave of horseflesh, came upon the south flank of the Saxon forces with a suddenness that buckled that flank. Dvan held back slightly, let a few dozen of his men make first contact with the Saxons, and then rode in after them and settled down to work.
And the day stretched on.
Twice fighting took Dvan to within hailing distance of Arthur, once so close to Medraut that Dvan hurried in killing th
e Briton who fought against him, and urged his mount toward Medraut. Too late; Medraut left his mount behind, between himself and Dvan, flowed off the horse with all the grace of a Dancer and went to the ground with his sword, landed lightly and walked away from Dvan, walked through the field of battle as though certain of his own immortality. Dvan took an ax cut to his arm from a Saxon he had ignored, and then had to turn back to business, his sword hand now wet with his own blood. He switched hands without thinking about it, turned away from Medraut's retreating form and cut the Saxon's head off. When he had time to glance again the surging sea of men and horses had hidden Medraut from him.
No time to look for him, either; behind the first Saxon came a second, and Dvan slew him, and then a huge creature slammed into the Irishman to Dvan's right, dragged the man and his horse to the ground. Dvan swung around to face him, found himself staring down at a blond giant. With a one-handed chop of his ax the Saxon cleanly decapitated Dvan's horse, and Dvan had to leap from the animal's back as it fell. He rolled to his feet, sword in hand, and turned to face the approaching Saxon. The man was a giant by modern standards, near Gawain's size, surely every bit of Dvan's own unnatural height. Blood flowed crimson across the hugely muscled shoulders, down the Saxon's arm and over his ax. He was upon Dvan in the moment that Dvan regained his feet, ax up over his head, whistling down toward Dvan. Dvan got his sword up, lunged forward, and saw the tip of his sword go into the Saxon's chest, felt the resistance and leaned into it as the man's ax came down and bit through the leather of Dvan's head guard, through hair, flesh, bone, and into the pink of brain.
By the time it had breached bone most of the impact had been absorbed.
The two men stood staring at one another as the battle swirled around them; they fell together, and the Saxon died in the moment of that fall.
Dvan never knew it.
Indeed, for a long, long time, Gi'Tbad'Eovad'Dvan knew nothing.
The Last Dancer Page 39