by Jo Clayton
She was lanky and tall, thin for her height with long narrow hands and feet that looked too big for her. She had fine curly flyaway hair the color of dead leaves, a pale gray-brown with shines of an equally pale gold when the sun touched it at the proper angle. Her eyes were a light gray-green like shadowed water; her skin was thin and pale with a spray of small freckles across a longish nose and high broad cheekbones; every ebb and flow of blood showed through, to her frequent embarrassment.
She wore old canvas trousers frayed and soft as velvet from many washings, trousers inherited from a student long gone, and a sleeveless pullover with a high neck, several badly botched patches, assorted pulls and snags. Over this she’d pulled on a knee-length canvas coat with huge pockets and wide cuffs; it was slightly newer than the trousers, but even a ragman would turn up his nose at it. On her feet she wore a pair of heavy-soled sandals, fairly new but as scuffed and scarred as her ankles. She was carrying an old leather rucksack, not heavily loaded, with a thick blanket rolled into a tight cylinder and tied below it.
She climbed the Old Man’s Mountain, walking along an unobtrusive but well maintained path. Much of the time she was moving through lowslope woods, maple, beech, aspen, oak, the morning light glowing through leaves like translucent slices of jade, dark and light, gold and green, the leaf shadows moving mottles on the red earth of the path. A hundred kinds of songbirds flittered and swooped over her, hidden by the leaves, singing extravagant solos, or blending in pleasant cacophonies. Now and then the path moved out of the trees across an area of open slope or along a cliff edge where she had a clear view out over the bay.
Halfway to the Old Man’s Meadow, she stopped walking and turned to gaze at Silili; she could see the gilded roofs of the school buildings peeping through the dark yews, oaks and willows planted along the walkways and in the water-gardens. She was startled by how much of the south slope of Utar’s Temple Mountain the school took in. There were no vistas inside the walls, just gardens like green gems for teaching and meditation, so it was impossible to judge the size of the place when one was in it. She’d known the school was important from the way that merchants treated her when they saw the patch sewn on her shirt, but this was the first time she’d had any real idea how important it had to be. Only the Temple grounds were larger. You did me well, Maks my friend. I suppose I’ll have to thank you for it. She sighed again and trudged on. Hmm. I expected to see you before this. Well, busy busy, I suppose, setting the world right. She’d gotten very fond of the man and was a little hurt because he hadn’t come.
Watersong filtered through the trees; she went over a hump on the mountain’s flank and looked down into an ancient cut at a stream leaping along a series of steps, swirling about black and mossy boulders. The path continued along the rim of the ravine, crossed over it on an elegant wooden bridge, each timber handhewn and hand-polished and fitted together with wooden pegs and lashings of thin tough rope. On the far side the path curved through a stand of ancient oaks that almost immediately opened onto the Old Man’s Meadow.
His small neat but was across the meadow, half-hidden by the droopy limbs of a monster oak; like the bridge the but was built of ax-smoothed planks with a roof of cedar shakes. Korimenei pulled off the rucksack, rummaged inside and took out the gift she’d brought for the Old Man, a half pound of the most expensive tea found in Silili Market; it was wrapped in a swatch of raw silk and tucked into a carved ebony box.
The Old Man was kneeling between rows of onion sets, pulling gently at grass and tiny weeds growing around them. Ghost children ran in silent games among the dying vines on the beanpoles, ghost grandmothers so ragged they were little more than sketches watched over them, ghost grandfathers squatted beside the Old Man, chatting with him, pointing out weeds for him. A strangled man ghost hovered close to the trees, watching Korimenei with frightening intensity. A headless woman, her battered head clutched under one arm, came rushing at Korimenei, veered off, trailing behind her an anguished wail more felt than heard. Korimenei ignored all of them, stopped at the end of a row and waited politely for the Old Man to reach her Her first sight of the ghosts of Silili had startled her, Owlyn ghosts stayed decently among the treetops until they dissipated, but habit and time had made her accustomed to the sometimes vocal and always present dead.
The Old Man settled onto his haunches, his dirt-crusted hands dropping onto his thighs. Morning light cool as water and filled with dancing motes picked up every wrinkle, wart, and hair on his still face. He blinked, mild ancient eyes opening and closing with slow deliberation; with his shaggy brown robe, the tufts of white hair over his ears, his round face, he looked like a large horned owl. He also looked harmless and not too bright, but there were many stories about him and certain brash intruders who thought they could force his secrets from him. “Saцri?” His voice was the dry rustle of dead leaves.
Korimenei bowed and held out the chest. “This unworthy student will be much honored if the Satir considers accepting this handful of miserable tea.”
He took the chest, tucked it into a pocket of his robe. “Leave the mountain as you found it,” he said.
“This one hears and swears it will be so, SaOr.”
He grunted,.swung round still squatting and began pulling grass from around a set.
Korimenei flared her narrow nostrils, but swallowed the laughter bubbling in her throat; the Old Man could be touchy about his dignity at the most unexpected times. She resettled the rucksack and began walking again, following the path.
3
The tiny meadow was stony and dry in its upper reaches. An ancient conifer had fallen to a storm a decade or so past and now lay denuded of bark, slowly rotting into the earth it had grown from. Thinner now and noisier, the Old Man’s Stream curved around the stubby root-shield and squeezed past boulders at the bottom of the roughly circular meadow and disappeared into shadows under the shivering gold leaves of a grove of aspen saplings. Korimenei shrugged out of the rucksack, set it on the dead trunk. She wriggled her body, reached high, stretching all over as she did so, stayed on her toes for a long long moment, then exploded out a sigh and dropped on her heels.
She pulled loose the thongs binding her dream-blanket to the rucksack, shook it out and spread it on the grass. Toward the end of her first year at the school, she’d bought wool in Silili Market. She dyed it and wove it into a dreampattem blanket which she kept wrapped in silk for the day she’d need it, for now. She sat on the trunk and smiled at the sharp-angled patterns and the brilliant colors. I did good, she thought, pleased with herself. She unbuckled her sandals, closed her eyes and flexed her toes; the earth was cool and silky against her soles and she had a curious sense that she was momentarily cut off from the flow of time, that she was a part of the Mountain. Her mind drifted into phrasemaking, ephemerally eternal, eternally ephemeral. The Mountain and the life parasited on it changed, died, was continually reborn. She sighed and yanked herself back to her own purposes. Settling herself on the blanket, she folded her legs and dropped her hands onto her knees. Her mind drifted to yesterday…
##
Shahntien Shere sat behind her desk and frowned at Korimenei. She was a tall woman, thin, her abundant gray hair dressed in a soft knot at the nape of a long neck. She wore a simple white dress with close fitting sleeves and a high soft collar, over that an unadorned sleeveless robe of heavy black silk. It was her customary dress, effectively elegant, underlining her authority without making too oppressive a point of it. Abruptly, unexpectedly, she smiled, her dark eyes narrowing into inverted echoes of her mouth. “The ten years are up,” she said. “Of course you know that. You’ve done well, better than I expected. Maksim is most pleased with you, though he seems rather shy about telling you himself” She paused, rubbed the tips of her fingers together. “I don’t know what his plans are, Kori; I expect he’ll show up when he’s ready. I’ve taught you all I can,” the ends of her thin mouth tucked deeper into their brackets, turned into a mirror image of her earlier smile,
“All anyone can, I think. The rest is up to you.”
Korimenei laced her fingers together and stared down at them. She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she said nothing.
“Yes,” the Shahntien said, “and that is essentially what this is about.” She sighed. “To it, then. I have consulted yarrow and water and tortoiseshell and considered your family lines. Your people are… urn… remarkably untouched by Talent, always excepting that imposed by the Chained God on his priests; however, that has nothing to do with you since the priests are always male and as far as I can determine chosen by the God himself without much concern about any inborn Gifts. Your Talent has come to you from your Ancestress Harra Hazhani, the Rukka Nagh; there were, no doubt, other women before you with much the same abilities, but things being the way they are among your people, the Gifts were denied and they withered without being used.” She tapped her nails on the desk top, a tiny clatter like a flurry of wheatsized hail against a window. “An obscenity…” She spread her hands flat on the desk, frowned at them… “Which is a digression… I’m explaining too much. It’s not needed. More than that, it’s probably counterproductive. You are to go to the Old Man’s Mountain across the bay. You are to find a sufficiently quiet and secluded place. You are to fast and meditate for three days. Do nothing. Accept what comes to you. Forget nothing. You won’t understand most of it now, you don’t know enough about the world or yourself. Accept for the moment what I tell you, it comes from my own experience, Kori Heart-in-Waiting; you will return again and again to this time, finding new richness, new meaning in it.” She straightened her back, looking past Korimenei. “Again I explain too much. You seem to have that effect on me, young Kori. Go and do.”
##
Korimenei settled into her fast-vigil. She sought to re-find that sense of connectedness with air and earth, with plant and beast that she’d gotten as a gift for those few moments when she sat on the trunk and dabbled her feet in the dust.
The sun rose higher, dust motes danced in the rays that slid through openings in the needle canopy above and behind her. She was all sensory data, perception without self-awareness. Then lost it. Then had it again. Then lost it. And lost it. And sank into self-doubt and sourness. Shadow shrank about her, hot yellow sunlight crept toward the blanket, came over it, touched her knees, her fingers. She rubbed at her eyes, looked up. The sun was almost directly overhead. “Three days,” she said aloud. “Three days.”
She rocked on her buttocks, straightened her legs, flexed and loosened the muscles in them until the stiffness was gone. She stood, stretched, shivered all over. Two hours only and already the exercise seemed futile, a fanatic’s flagellation of body and spirit. She let her arms drop. There you go again, you silly maid, aping Settsimaksimin, roaring phrases in your alleged mind. Her fast had begun this morning with a breakfast of juice and a hardroll. She was hungry, her stomach was grumbling and she had that all-over sense of debilitation she got when she went too long without eating. Three days, she thought again and just managed to stifle an obscenity, one of the many she’d picked up when she was a rebel child wandering Silagamatys’ waterfront when she was supposed to be in bed.
She fished a tin cup from the rucksack, filled it at the stream and sat on a flat rock with her feet in the water. The stream went down a long shallow slide here, with a steady brushing hum punctuated occasionally by the pop of bubbles or a troutling breaking surface. She sipped from her cup and watched the clear cold stream smooth as glass slip over her bare toes. The sun was hot on her head and shoulders; behind her she could hear the buzz and mumble of insects. Her stomach cramped. She closed her eyes and willed the nausea to go away. It was mostly imagination, she knew that well enough, but knowing didn’t seem to help. Three days. I’ll be a rag. Why am I doing this?
She rinsed the cup, filled it again and took it back to the blanket. She lowered herself onto the dreampattem, set the cup beside her and folded her long legs into the proper configuration. Ten years she’d spent learning control of her Talent. That’s all it is, this school, Maksim told her once, control. And maybe expanded possibility. Maybe. She could testify to the truth of that now. Control and the limits of control. She told herself she knew her limits, she told herself she had earned a degree of confidence in her skill and in her strength. She’d survived each trial so far, but every new step was a new threat. She didn’t believe there could be more for her to learn; the last two years she’d spent consolidating what she’d dredged up out of herself during the first eight years of her schooling. She didn’t want to believe there was more power out there waiting for her to tap into it; she was afraid of touching any hotter, wilder sources. There were times during the past ten years when she was working hot that the power she was shaping threatened to consume her. She managed to hang on, but each time was worse than the last, each time she came closer to losing it, a lesson she took to heart. She had an edgy uncertainty working in her now, a fear that the next time she touched heat, she wouldn’t be strong enough, that she’d die, or worse than death, find herself controlled.
“Trago.” she said aloud. “Come talk to me.” She waited, hands on her thighs, opening; closing, short ragged nails scratching erratically at the canvas of her trousers. He didn’t come. She never knew if he heard her when she called him; sometimes he showed up, sometimes he didn’t. This looked like one of the latter. “Damn.” If it weren’t for Trago locked dreaming in crystal, she’d run and trust her reflexes to keep her loose. But he was the hook that bound her to the Shahntien’s whim and she had to play out this farce.
##
I put him, Maksim said, where his god can’t reach him. If I kill him, child, there’ll only be another taking his place, another and another, no end to it. He’ll sleep and sleep and sleep… Maksim turned his head and smiled at her… until you and only you, young Kori, until you come and touch him awake. He is in the Cave of Chains. If you can get yourself there, Kori, all you have to do is touch the crystal enclosing him. It will melt and the boy will wake. No one else can do this. No one, god or man. Only you.
##
She scratched at her nose. All over the place, she thought. I did better concentration my first year. “Tit,” she said, “give us a look, will you?”
Nothing. Obviously he was busy with other things, things more important than a long gone sister. She moved her body impatiently. He’d been looking over her shoulder for years, studying what she studied, maybe even nudging her when he wanted something she wasn’t dealing with at the moment. She’d been driven, those first years. She’d thought it was because she wanted to get away as soon as she could and free her brother. She had to learn, to grow accustomed to working hot and fast, she had to find a way to outwit the Shahntien so she could escape her claws. To outwit Maksim who made a habit of sending his eidolon to chat with her. Maybe it was more than that, maybe it was Trago pushing her. One thing she did know, he was watching and studying a long time before he started talking to her. She worked her mouth. It hurt, thinking that way, but the most important thing she’d learned (besides control, of course) was never lie to yourself. No matter what extravagances you practice on other people, it’s fatal to lie to yourself. She had the Shahntien to show her the truth of that, she had Maksim. Odd, the way he treated her. She could swear he never lied to her, never even shaded the truth. It was hard to take at times, but in the end she was grateful to his habit, in the end she saw this as the starkest compliment he ever paid her. In the end it was why Shahntien Shere stopped hating her. And life at the school got to be a lot easier.
The sun slid down its western arc; shadow crossed the stream and crept around her, cold and silent. Depressing. She was tired and hungry and she hadn’t managed more than a moment or two of real meditation the whole futile day. Her stomach cramped repeatedly through that interminable afternoon, at times she could think of nothing but food. She dreamed of roast chicken with brown-gold gravy pooling round it. She thought of shrimp fried in a batter so light it might have
floated off at a breath of wind, succulent pink shrimp. Peaches, peeled and golden, dripping with a rich fragrant nectar. Strawberries. plump tartsweet, floating in whipped cream. She wrenched her mind away and contemplated a blade of grass she pulled from a clump beside the blanket. She considered the greenness of it, greenness as an abstract idea, greenness as it was expressed in this particular physical object, mottled with lines of darker color, with pinpoints and patches of black and tan; she considered the edge where the blade left off and the air began, the finely toothed edge that was not so much green as an extraction from the colors combined into green, a pale anemic yellow fading to white, to no-color.
The sky put out its sunset flags and the wind rose, chill enough to knife through Korimenei’s coat and pullover, stir the hairs on her arms and along her spine. Gentle Geidranay came walking along the mountain peaks. He squatted among them with his head against the sun, his fingers grubbing among the pines, absurdly like the shadow of the Old Man in his garden, grotesquely enlarged and cast against the drop of the darkening sky. The Groomer of Mountains came closer, his fingers swept across the small meadow, brushed against Korimenei and passed out without noticing her. The fingers were like semisolid light, translucent, melting through the air without agitating it, dreamlike and disturbing, a beautiful nightmare, if such could exist. Korimenei shivered and shut her eyes.
A dozen heartbeats later she cracked a lid; the god was gone. She sighed and broke posture. Her head was swimming, but the diriiness faded when she had moved about some more. She went to the stream, refilled her cup and stood watching the water darken to black glass as the last color faded from the sky. She carried the cup to the dead trunk, sat down beside her rucksack and took sip after slow sip until the cup was empty. The largest bulge in the sack was a heavy, knitted laprobe. She thought a moment, then with some reluctance took the laprobe out and dropped it on the blanket; dying of pneumonia was not a desirable outcome of this minor ordeal. She plucked a handful of dry grass and went deeper into the trees to void her bladder; when she was finished she washed her hands at the stream, using sand for soap.