Wintermoon

by Mercedes Lackey

  The door of the house too was open.

  Clirando entered, sword in hand, and reached the threshold of a graciously furnished room now rather spoilt. A chair had gone over. Broken pitchers lay on the floor. Two men were there also, one of them stumbling, shouting. It was this awful voice she had heard before. Then, in the moment before the shouting stumbler fell, the other man caught him back. “Yazon, listen to me. This would have been your twenty-ninth day without drunkenness. Think what you had achieved.”

  “And lost,” the other grated. “I have ruined it. Besides, what do I care? Give it me back, the wine—” But Yazon’s voice dropped away into sobs. He sank down on a couch. And Zemetrios seated himself beside him. “No, my friend. No wine. You’ll have to kill me first.”

  Zemetrios. His face was weary as that of a man who had been entirely sleepless for months, yet also hard and resolute. Yazon—he could be no one else—was speaking now of horrible secrets of drunkenness. But his eyes at last were growing sane and sad.

  As if some god had told her—Sattu, perhaps, the little god of domestic things—Clirando seemed to know it all.

  This naturally was not what had taken place in the world, at Rhoia. Instead, the house of Zemetrios’s father had been magically rebuilt here on the slopes of the moon, by some spirit or spell. And now, in this new reality, Zemetrios—having given up his post in the king’s legions and sent all his servants, women and men both, away to safety—cared for Yazon, striving to cure him, to make him whole.

  That then must have been in Zemetrios’s hidden mind. Not that he had killed Yazon in rage—but that he had not devoted his life, however briefly or lengthily, to helping Yazon. Not with money or shelter, but with the comradeship and dedication they had each shown the other in war. Now Zemetrios wished to atone.

  It was very plain that Zemetrios believed utterly this situation truly existed.

  Clirando did not know if she could, or should, have any part in such a scenario. But the previous bliss of her own liberation now filled her with the desire to assist in whatever way was possible. To assist, that was, Zemetrios.

  She spoke his name. Could he hear her?

  Yes. He looked across at her instantly. His face, which had seemed older than its twenty-four years, was suddenly as she recalled. A smile lit his mouth and eyes.

  “And here is my beautiful wife, Clirando.”

  The other man—ghost—illusion—whatever he might be—also looked up at her. And he too gave her a smile. It was not corrupt, only distant. Some half-forgotten good-manners from an earlier time when he had been himself. And she wondered then if perhaps really this was Yazon, come back from death to undo this knot of pain and anger, as needful for his phantasmal life as it was for Zemetrios’s mortal one.

  “And I warn you, Yazon,” said Zemetrios, with amused lightness, “try nothing stupid with her. She’ll kill you and have your skin sewn up as a sunshade.”

  His wife.

  In his fantasy, this dream of righting wrongs and making all good, I am his wife…

  Zemetrios got up, came to her and kissed her gently on the lips. “Things will be better now you’re here.”

  Only Clirando marked accurately the passing of the last three nights of full moon. Though perhaps she did not do it as accurately as she meant to, because she had to get her bearings from the rise and fall of the blue-green earth-world above.

  In the house, apparently, months went by.

  She herself was not conscious of these. Her time frame functioned very differently, and the scenes that were enacted, and in which she sometimes took a small part, were fragments of some vaster drama, played clearly for Zemetrios alone.

  She went along with everything, knowing he did what he must. His penance and self-examination were longer than hers, deeper and darker though less savage.

  In the segments of events that Clirando witnessed, Zemetrios hauled Yazon back to sober health. Zemetrios was by turns dominant and consoling, as appropriate. He never gave up, and gradually the physical ghost-image of Yazon responded. Then Clirando would find the two of them at friendly, noisy practice with swords or bows, or wrestling, eating, talking. They played Lybirican chess. They would discuss the army days, and reminisced away the nights that somehow came and went inside the outer time which she alone observed. They would look up at the blue orb in the sky, and call it the moon.

  Of course, Zemetrios never separately sought her. It seemed she was tucked away somewhere in his illusory life in the house. Mainly, she was peripheral to his task. Sometimes he did not even see or hear her as she entered a room only a few paces from him. He only ever fully saw Yazon, the one in fact who probably was not there.

  She began to think Yazon was not a ghost, working out the dilemma of its life. No, he was solely a conjuring of Zemetrios’s mind. And of Moon Isle.

  She came to believe all this would end at the finish of the moon’s Seventh Night. Till then she could do nothing but be present, offering her slight participation—a touch, a cup filled from the well in the courtyard. Every illusory thing seemed real, as in the village. Therefore, how would this saga be resolved?

  She pondered too with the winter snow in her heart, if Zemetrios would have been driven mad by the finish of it.

  The ultimate problem was their return to the world, which still she had not solved. Maybe they must stay here, despite all expiation. And maybe too they would be segregated here from each other.

  Do I love him?

  Even in that extremity and strangeness, this question was paramount, and unanswered.

  Sometimes she sat alone in the winter yard of the simulated Rhoian house, gazing up at the multicolored stars. Indoors the men talked rationally, remembering old campaigns.

  The food and drink she had found in the kitchens had nourished her, and them. Even the rug bed she had made herself was comfortable. She could sleep now. Anywhere therefore would have been comfortable.

  Perhaps madness has taken all of us.

  But the lion lashed its tail in her spirit, and she herself quieted it. Be patient.

  When next the blue orb rose, that would be the Seventh Night, as far as she knew. She could do nothing but wait.

  In sleep, she heard Zemetrios speaking to her very softly. “It’s done, Cliro. He has gone.”

  Instantly she was fully awake.

  “Where?”

  “Away. Away where he must.”

  He spoke of Yazon. Who, it seemed, had gone back to the lands beyond death.

  Zemetrios said, “This has been a dream.” She thought, Thank all gods, he knows. “But it was a dream I needed to be dreaming. Oh, Clirando, I should have given him that, no matter how he was. I should have tried so much harder to save him, in the true world, while he lived. Not dragged him into my house and shunned and treated him like a sinful baby, despised and left him always to himself, busy with my own affairs. I should not either have gone out, and left my servants at his mercy—afraid of him, afraid to offend me. I’ve done what I should have done, but here. It’s—freed me. But I shall never cease to be sorry.” He leaned close to her, resting his forehead on hers. “How long has all this gone on? It seemed a year—But he was my friend, my brother—oh, Cliro—if only I’d done this then, as I should.”

  She held him. They lay wrapped among the rugs, like two children in the dark. “Hush, my love,” she said. “If only any of us had done what we should. We see it clearly when it has passed by. Yet we must try to see, and try to do. That’s all the gods ask. That we try.”

  And she thought, And is he my love, then?

  And she thought, Yes, he is my love.

  They curled together. Beyond the narrow window the blue disk gemmed the sky.

  He had survived the test, and was not deranged. Each of them had paid their debt to themselves. They slept exhausted in each other’s arms.

  The next time they woke, it was together, and they lay on the bare plains of the moon. The house with all its lamps and groves, its rooms and well
and yard, was gone. Only those mountains like spines scratched along the horizon.

  The earth hung above, and all the stars.

  “There was a way that led us here, beyond the rocks,” he said. “But how do we find it?”

  Clirando stared into her mind. There were visions there still, things which came from the magic not only of this place, but from the sorcery of the Isle.

  Slowly she said, “There’s home,” nodding at the disk above.

  “But the way to it?”

  Clirando’s brain showed her the magicians in the square who had called the stars.

  Instinctively she raised her arms.

  Up in the inky black, the exquisite jewelry shivered. One by one, stars—stars—detached from their moorings. They began to float down, not a swarm now, a snowfall—

  If it was a dream, you might do anything. And if not, still you might attempt it.

  The stars wove around one another in slow, sparkling tidal surges. She thought of the old woman weaving on the headland, the old man who made snakes at the forest’s end, and of the stilt-walker lighting torches.

  High in air, a bridge began to form in a wide, swooping arc. It was laid with coruscating stella stones—emeralds, rubies, amethysts—it curved down toward the surface where they stood, making a hill-road for them to climb. While the rest of the arc soared away like the curve of a bow. Infinities up in the air, the earth disk had received the far point of this incredible bridge, without the tiniest ripple.

  They neither debated nor held back. Both he and she ran at the bridge of stars, this extraordinary path that led toward the ordinary, and the mortal.

  Simultaneously they leaped, landed. Clirando felt the faceted paving under her feet. Ethereal colors washed them like high waters, now copper, now bronzy, now golden.

  Not to sleep so long—it had been worth it, to know a dream like this one.

  Both of them laughed. Children laughed like that, innocent, and prepared to credit that dreams came true.

  As so often on the Isle, shoulder to shoulder, Clirando and Zemetrios broke into their companionable, well-trained, mile-eating lope. Over the night, over the heavens, running home through the spatial outer dark which, for them, was full of a rich sweet air, mild breezes, summery scents, branches of static stars, rainbows and light, wild music, half-seen winged beings.

  Clirando knew no fear, no doubt, and no reticence. She thought idly, as she bounded earthward, This is the truth.

  But somewhere, something—oh, it was like a vagrant cloud, feathery and adrift. It bloomed out from nowhere. It poured around her. Zemetrios was concealed. She half turned, missing him, and then a delicate nothingness enveloped her. That too brought no alarm. It was also too good, too true.

  And after only a second anyway it was done.

  And then—

  “Clirando!”

  This known female face bending to hers, someone well liked, familiar—

  “Tuyamel?”

  Clirando’s eyes were clearing. She stared into six faces now, all known, all in their way loved. Her girls, the women of her band.

  “Lie still, Cliro,” said Tuy firmly. “You’ve flown such a great way off, and had such a long journey back.”

  They were sworn to secrecy, they assured her, all of them. No one who came here must ever afterward speak of the secrets of Moon Isle. Besides, they knew very little.

  “Certain persons—they go to certain places. The priests—and the gods—direct them. Some even go—so we heard—to the moon itself. And you went somewhere, Cliro. That’s what they said.”

  Her band told her how, the morning after they had beached their boat on the strand of the Isle, they had found her unconscious, and had not been able to rouse her. Though she breathed, she seemed all but dead. And so they picked her up on a litter improvised from cloaks, and bore her inland.

  An ancient priestess by a beacon on the cliff top declared Clirando had suffered no awful harm. “She has not slept a while,” the priestess said. “Now she must.”

  So Clirando’s loyal girls carried her, with much care and attention, to one of the seven inland villages of the island.

  “Every night of the full moon you lay here,” lamented Seleti.

  “We tried to wake you—the moon was full for seven nights!”—Draisis—“But you never stirred.”

  “And the old priest, the one with the pet snakes he names after jewels—he said we must let you slumber. You were so young, he said,” affrontedly added Erma, “you would certainly see in your lifetime several more such seasons of seven moons.”

  “You missed all the festivities,” elaborated Oani.

  “Jugglers—magicians—” Vlis.

  “One of them made a bridge over the sky, all like precious stones—green, red, mauve, yellow—” Tuyamel. “Though I knew it was all a trick.”

  Clirando lay on the narrow pallet, in the cell of the temple in Seventh Village.

  Her heart beat leadenly.

  It had been—all of it—a dream?

  And yet, she had been enabled to throw away the negative and hateful things. Only proper grief and regret remained. Except…Zemetrios.

  If all this had been a dream—including even, as it had, transcripts of actual external things—what had Zemetrios been? His thoughts, his personality—his mouth, his arms?

  She lay a few days in the little Temple of the Maiden. Then, when she had recovered enough, Clirando roamed through its courts, admiring columns and the flowering vines on its walls—for summer had continued uninterrupted in the world. Here and there, meeting others, she mentioned a particular name. “Zemetrios?” they asked, the mild priestesses. “Warrior,” they said to her, not unkindly, “no one may be told anything more than the minimum of any other here. This is Moon Isle. For those like yourself, or the man you mention, what each does and experiences is a private matter. Only they and the gods can know.”

  So they would tell her nothing. And was there anything to learn?

  Everything else had been her dream, so why not this golden man? She had wanted a lover. Tranced or asleep she had had one.

  And now she knew for sure she loved him? Well then. She loved a figment of her dreams. She would not be the first or last.

  Two days following the celebration of the Seven Nights, which all of them repeatedly reminded her she had missed, Clirando walked around the village.

  It was not at all like the one she had seen when asleep. The buildings were clean and garishly painted. The three or four temples were garlanded, and that of the Maiden had walls of deep red patterned with silver crescents.

  Just as she had heard, priests and priestesses thronged the Isle, and lingering warrior bands were there too traders and performers, but now the processions and shows were over. A great packing up was going on. A great leave-taking.

  And neither was it any use to question these people, let alone the villagers, who seemed educated in coy evasions. There seemed too a polite, unspoken wish that visitors should go. It began to make her band uneasy, and soon enough Clirando, as well.

  I threw off my guilt. I must throw off this also.

  She slept always soundly at night. She did not dream, she thought, at all, as if she had used all her dreaming up. Would she ever see the ghost of Araitha again? Or him—would she ever see Zemetrios again? No. Never.

  On the fourth day they set off along the forest track. It was rather as Clirando had visualized it, but then her girls had carried her this way. Now animals and birds abounded. A statue marked either end of the road, island gods, nicely carved. Clirando thrust her introspection from her. She acted out being her ordinary self, calling it back to her. It came.

  Meanwhile her girls were so attentive and careful of her that Clirando eventually lost her temper. “Leave off treating me like some fragile shard of ancient pottery! What will you do on the boat? Wrap a shawl over my legs and pat me on the head?”

  There under the sun-sparkling pines, she wrestled Tuyamel and Vlis, and threw them
both, and hugged them all. They danced about there, laughing, embracing, loud and boisterous as eleven-year-olds.

  Next day they reached the shore and rowed out to the galley. By sunfall they were on the way to Amnos, and life as they remembered it.

  Epilogue

  Paper

  The windblown sky was full of birds that morning.

  Summer had stayed late in Amnos, giving way at last to a harsh, bleached winter.

  Now spring tides freshened the coast, and men and beasts were casting the torpor of the cold months.

  Clirando had been with Eshti, her old servant woman, to the fish market, and coming back Eshti bolted straight to the kitchen with her prizes. Clirando climbed up to the roof of her house. She was watching the antics of the house doves circling over the courtyard trees.

  And out of her inner eyes, from nowhere, Araitha came, and stood silent in her mind. Clirando recalled how she had stood in the yard too laying her curse, then turning away from shadow to light to shadow—or had it been light to shadow to light….

  Unlike her companion, her dream lover, Clirando had had no dialogue with her dead friend to set anything right between them.

  Araitha therefore might always haunt her. No longer injurious, only bitter. It could not be helped. At least her curse was spent.

  All winter Clirando had carried on her life as she had in the past. If her mood was sometimes uneven, she hid it. Mourning the loss of a dead comrade was one thing, but to mourn the loss of someone who had not been real was wretched and bewildering. Sometimes she even mocked herself. But now—now it was spring.

  Clirando turned. Eshti had come up on the roof, puffing from the steps, wiping fish scales off on her apron.

  “What now?” Clirando inquired. “Has dinner swum away?”

  “No, lady. The priestesses of Parna have sent for you.”

  Clirando’s thoughts scattered apart and back together in concern. She sprang downstairs to fetch her cloak.

  In the shrine by the main temple hall, one of the two priestesses who received Clirando was the middle-aged woman who had dispatched her to the Isle.