I groped for it and missed. Tigrallef was farther away than my senses told me. "What are we doing?"
"We're yielding up the Harashil."
"What?"
"We're giving them back the powers!"
"Are you insane?"
"We can save him, Vero. Hurry—"
Born of the Harashil. Yes, Katla would know. I had Tig's right hand by then, burning hot but unresisting, and Katla was reaching for the left. Arkolef stood between us, his noble brow lightly furrowed with perplexity, which I shared. I watched Katla's hand complete the circle—
—and I was on a great sliding slope of time, where all directions were up and stars hung like black spiders against a blinding white wall, or perhaps the other way around; and also in a room like half a globe, where seven bright shadows stood in a semicircle and an incandescent river flowed from a spring beside me, a pulsing stream of red flame like blood pumping from a fire-dragon's heart. Too bright, too searing. I turned my eyes through solid rock to the skin of the planet, found it swarming with uncleanness—not-Naar, none of our kind, a firm voice told me, filthy squalling rabble of world-lice, not important, crush them all—and when I realized it was my own voice, I retreated in terror to the extremes of vision, the curve of time and the curved room, where now the river of red fire was slowing to a trickle and now to nothing. I had hands again, and other hands were holding them, one burning, one cool. The stars flamed more darkly and then not at all.
I opened my eyes. My headache was fit to be stuffed and mounted and exhibited to a wondering public. From the feel of my limbs, my muscles had dissolved clean away. At least the wind had died, so the chamber was a little quieter. I groaned and raised myself on bruised elbows; collapsed again. Lifting my head on a neck that felt splintered, I saw Kat sprawled nearby, her hand still clasped in our father's hand, both of them apparently dead. Beside me, the Priest-King lay peacefully on his back staring at the domed ceiling. I thought he was dead too, until he sat up and looked around with an air of benign curiosity. A half-moment later, Katla stirred.
"Vero," she gasped, "the Will of Banishment. It's time now."
"What?"
"Find it. Read it. Do it fast."
"What? Oh, yes." I was beyond thinking, but I could still take orders. I groped around on the floor close to me, then saw the golden plate near the bier, many feet away, just beyond the Priest-King. I began to crawl in that direction; collapsed yet again. When I made the next effort to raise my head, I noticed the shrunken corpse on the bier was somehow sitting up. It was already less shrunken.
I saw Katla was also making a pathetic effort to crawl towards the pectoral. "Faster, Vero," she said thickly, "there's no more covenant. They can hurt us now." She sank down again, her head on her outstretched arm and her eyes shut.
They? They? Pivoting my head the other way, I saw what she meant—the looming death of all our hopes. Those crude mud figures were not so crude now, and they were touched with colour; they had eyes as well, glittering at us hungrily. Still rigid, carved out of fine marble by master craftsmen, hand-painted by dedicated artists, every scale of the snake-thing and the dragon, every hair of the cat-thing and the wolf—
"Vero . . . hurry . . ."
Kat's eyes were open again. Tigrallef was blinking feebly beside her. I managed to crawl another few inches, every movement pushing another hot spike through my temples and thousands of tiny needles into every joint, but the weakness sickened me more than the pain.
From the direction of the bier, I heard someone take a shuddering breath. The Naar-thing, it must have been, drawing the first air in five thousand years into its lungs.
The golden plate looked so close, so close—I reached out to grasp it. It taunted me by being at least two feet past the full stretch of my arm, while being teasingly close to my useless uncle's right hand. I looked up at him in despair, found he was watching the transformation of the Old Ones with an idiotic smile on his face; might as well ask a newborn baby for help. But he did seem less physically shattered than the rest of us; he was sitting up, and he had considerately pulled his leg out of my way.
"Arkolef," I croaked, "Arkolef, Son of Cirallef!" With all the strength I could pull together, I reached out and tugged at the hem of his robe. "Arkolef, please! If you can hear me—please hear me—that golden square by your hand—"
He looked down at me and smiled pleasantly.
"Why, certainly," he said, "here you go. Tell me something, young man, what play is this? Those costumes are awfully good."
There was no time to marvel. I fumbled with the pectoral he handed me (the arms of the Many-Handed trembled into life) and saw that the writing on the pectoral now made sense (the snake-thing falteringly lowered its great flat head) but my eyes would not work and the glyphs danced maddeningly in and out of focus. I tried closing first one eye, then the other. The dragon's tail twitched.
"You know, you don't look at all well. Shall I?"
The pectoral was removed from my hand. Something thudded on the floor not far from my nose—I squinted at it, saw a bare foot, well-formed and rather dusty, attached to an ankle, attached to (I twisted my neck to see upwards) the towering naked figure of our forefather Naar, who was looking down at me with not a trace of family feeling in his strikingly handsome face. Elsewhere claws clicked, scales scratched, robes whispered across the flagstones—I closed my eyes. It seemed we were now going to find out how literally the text about consuming the innocent, the brave and the angry was meant to be taken.
The Priest-King cleared his throat and began to read.
First came the screams: fury rather than fear or pain. I opened my eyes in time to see Naar's foot abruptly leave my field of vision as he staggered backwards and cannoned off the bier to join the Old Ones. The light was already gathering around them, a cold light, strong and white, streaked with the deep blues and purples of the ice-cliffs of Myr. Where the seven graceless idols had stood a few minutes before, there were now eight figures, all of them shimmering with a beauty that the world will never see again, with any luck: dragon, serpent, wolf, cat, and four in the shape of men. The light whirled and tightened around them. Shrieking, they drew together.
Apparently elocution is one of the heroic arts. My uncle read the Banishment beautifully, in a fine deep voice, though I noticed he kept his place by following along with a fingertip. Thus I could see when he had only one quatrain left, then three lines, then two. There was silence just before the end, as if the Old Ones themselves stopped screaming so as to appreciate Arkolef's dramatic final flourish. Then the cold cone of light around them shrank to a streak like a short segment of lightning, which compressed in turn to an unendurable point of light; which in turn compressed to nothing at all.
"My, it's gone dark," said my uncle.
There was a small gourd of water attached to my belt, and a candle and flint in Kat's belt pouch. The Priest-King chattered affably while he got a candle going and poured a little water down each of our throats. He was still under the impression we'd been involved in an ingenious performance of some new play; he especially liked the concept of audience participation. When he recognized Tig, he was delighted—"Mother always said you'd come back"—but he wept a little on reflecting that his nephew and niece would never know their cousins.
While Kat began the arduous task of explaining to him where we'd been for twenty years and why no marriage had been arranged for her yet, I crept closer to Tig. Though a headache was still pounding inside my temples, the water had helped and my muscles seemed to be properly connected again. Tig looked far better in the candlelight than I felt, though he had hardly moved. He sat up and frowned at me as I dropped down beside him.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
"Empty."
"That's to be expected after no breakfast."
"Not that kind of empty, Verolef. Empty."
"I was trying to make a joke."
"Sorry," he said crossly, "it's just—I never thought I'd miss the old sow
like this. I hardly feel like myself."
"You'll get over it. What now?"
He brightened a little. "Well—I was thinking we might take up your mother's suggestion."
"I meant, what will happen to the world now that we've saved it?"
"Saved it?" That made him laugh out loud. "Never mind, Vero, the answer's not important."
"I'm starting to hate those two words."
"I always did. All right, I'll tell you what I think. Nothing very different will happen. The nations will never even know they've been reprieved. They'll go on much as before, but none of their disasters will be part of some demented divine plan."
"Will that be an improvement?"
"In practice, it will look very similar." He laughed again, but this time the bitterness was more apparent. "The same old cycles will continue. Kingdoms and empires will continue to rise and fall. The difference is, we've cut the puppet strings and left the nations to make up their own dance steps. It was Oballef's foolishness, you know, to think his good intentions justified keeping the strings in place. Well, we learned from his mistake. Now the nations have a chance of learning from theirs."
"And will they?"
"How would I know? Prophecy just became a lost art."
"You must have an opinion."
He hesitated. "In my opinion, the Second Gillish Empire has already made an interesting start. You may take that however you like. Up we get, Vero."
He stood up and gave me his arm. I staggered a bit but managed to stay on my feet. "And what about us?" I asked.
"I foresee a long climb," he said darkly, staring at the jagged hole of the stairway.
My memories of the departure from Gil are irritatingly patchy. Kat and I were drained by those moments of full-flood exposure to the Harashil; by the time we reached the top of Tigrallef's impromptu staircase, Tig was carrying Katla slung over his shoulder, and I was stumbling along drunkenly with Arkolef taking most of my weight, and his constant sunny chatter in my ear. I suppose he was making up for twenty years of silence. There was a bloody chaos in the Hall of Harps, which died away at the sight of the Divine Scion and the Priest-King; it's hard to keep a good battle going when all parties to it are grovelling on the floor. We walked right through the thick of them.
I do not remember getting from the Hall of Harps to the foyer, nor the foyer to the forecourt; the next memory I have is a blurred vision of the streets of Gil jouncing past, buildings burning and flame-bolts flying overhead, me slumped half in Kesi's lap and half in Mallinna's, her sweaty arms wrapped around me and keeping my neck from breaking when the carriage shuddered over obstacles in the street. I remember Tig saying, "Look, Calla, I'm bleeding," in delighted tones. Then the harbour: being dumped out of the carriage and hauled on to the deck of the Fifth between Mallinna and my uncle; recovering enough to watch Jonno carry Katla aboard and lay her tenderly down; then a blank spot, and then opening my eyes again to see Jonno and Chasco looking up at us from the quay as the windcatcher pulled into the channel.
"Look after Grandda! Tell Katla we have to find—" They were hidden by a rolling black cloud of smoke before Jonno could finish; when it thinned, they were gone. My memory blanks out for a while after that. The next thing I knew, the Fifth was well out in the open sea and Tig was at the taffrail wearing a bloodstained white bandage around his arm with the air of a man sporting a prized trophy. Calla was beside him, and he was in the act of throwing something into the sea. I pulled myself up and leaned over the taffrail to watch it sink. Square, golden, glittering. The pectoral of Naar. It planed down into the green shadows, dimmed and diminished, until darkness closed over it and it was gone.
* * *
Epilogue
OUR HOUSE WOULD win no awards from the Lucian Clerisy's Directorate of Harmonious Design: from one side, a pastiche of an Amballan pirate cruiser, one of the most graceful shipforms ever to terrify an honest seaman; from the other side, a large two-tiered box with a tower of sorts stuck on the front. We have not been able to decide what the privy used to be—Shree swears it's the deckhouse of a Ronchar Sea pearler, whereas my father holds out for the mast-top lookout from a Kerassoc windcatcher. To me, it looks very like a privy.
Across from the house is our cornfield, where my mother puts each of us to work on a rotating basis. Our second harvest is not far off. On the far side of the field, with a sweeping view of the icepack, is the first rough embodiment of the College of the Second Coming, the name of which began as my mother's idea of a joke. As she put it, the Myrenes had the refreshing distinction of predicting Tig would never return, all those years ago when they waved us off gloomily in the long-lost Second. Furthermore, the fact that we were the first crew ever known to we survived, or even attempted, a second passage through the icepack demanded some sort of commemoration. The name took hold.
Most of the college, built of timber culled from the beach, is taken up by a suite of workrooms and a temporary home for the archives. Shree and Angel have been cataloguing the materials gathered on our twenty-year search for the Banishment—the rubbings and drawings, texts and maps, the language lists, records of oral tradition and observations of natural history. Mallinna and Kat are gradually sorting out the crates of books and scrolls from the archives in Gil, packed for the Benthonic Expedition. Just outside their workroom is the heap of stones we have been gradually compiling, against the time we can lay the foundations of a grander and more lasting structure.
Inland from the rock pile is the new realm of the former Priest-King of the Second Empire of Gil. He's growing vegetables, and tending the piglets we bought in Vassashinay before turning south, which have become pigs of respectable size. The former First Flamen helps him with the gardening, does odd jobs in the archives or sits in the watery sun. I suspect he is courting my grandmother, the former Dowager Empress, though she is very busy these days expanding her woollens business. She is not the descendant of hard-headed Satheli merchant-princes for nothing.
We keep busy. Yesterday I carried a few rocks up from the quarry, weeded in the cornfield with Chasolef slung on my back, contributed two hours of labour to the township and worked with Angel in the College. Today is my day to keep watch across the icepack, and I believe what we've been waiting for has finally come.
Tig had brought me my lunch and was still sitting with me when I sighted the ship, about an hour ago. He could not see it himself for quite a while—he's getting increasingly short-sighted—but at last we were able to agree that it was a small Gillish trawler, and the intelligent setting of the sails indicated somebody must be alive on board. Then we saw it was tacking, using the wind to fight the current for a better approach to the icepack, and Tig said, "I'd know that hand on the wheel anywhere. Take your baby back, Vero, I'll tell the others."
I took Chasolef from him, and he loped off towards the College of the Second Coming. Seconds after he disappeared inside, Katla tore out of the doorway and raced for the road that winds down the side of the cliff. Kesi was not far behind her, moving remarkably quickly for a man of his years. I will follow them in a few minutes—all of us will except Arkolef, who finds the road difficult with his wooden leg, and Angel, who hates open spaces.
Meantime the trawler has begun her dance with the ice-islands. She is naturally in some danger, but I think Chasco will bring her through intact, just as I did the Fifth; more of her will come to shore, anyway, than a few shattered boards and the good-looking golden-haired corpses of Jonno and his sisters.
Chasco himself will no doubt bring news of the Second Empire of Gil. It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, triumphed in the civil war—the Primate, the Captain, the Truant, someone else entirely. It will be interesting to see what the current victors are doing with the malleable stuff of history. It will be interesting to see whether the cult of the Divine Scion survived Tig's rather off-handed fulfillment of its central prophecy. Interesting, but not important.
I had a nightmare a few nights ago. Many ages had passed; mountains h
ad been levelled to plains, plains uplifted to mountains, deserts had sunk beneath seas, seabeds had risen and dried to deserts. I saw a man turn over an ancient slab of shellstone and be caught by a gleam of gold; he pried at the stone, flake by flake, until a square shape emerged from its nest of antique coral, untarnishable metal figured with strange glyphs. Frowning, he began to read them aloud—sweating, I woke up and shook Mallinna out of her own dreams. "Realistically speaking," she said when I told her what I'd seen, "if all that time had passed, he wouldn't be able to read the glyphs anyway. All this would be long forgotten, and so would we. But since you're awake, you can see to the baby."
The important things these days are all small: the archives; the cornfield; the white hair Tigrallef found on his head last week, and his not-completely-mad idea of a peace mission to the Eyesuckers; Chasolef, who is a very small thing indeed; our lives. The eventual crumbling of the College of the Second Coming is no reason not to gather the stones.
Katla is already a tiny figure on the beach, having broken all speed records getting down there. The trawler has woven its way to the clear water inside the line of the icepack; my wife and parents, Shree and my grandmother, are on the road waving at me to join them. I'll sling Chasolef on my back and we'll all go down together, four generations, for a reunion that is important at least to us. For the moment, history and the future can look after themselves.
* * *
REBECCA BRADLEY, a native of
Vancouver, has studied at the University of
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 34