Meir looked at Voada with his eyebrows raised. Behind the archiater’s back, Voada shrugged.
Boann grunted as she stepped away from Meir’s bed. As soon as the woman moved, Fermac jumped back on the bed, circled twice, and lay down next to Meir, who patted the dog’s head. “Well?” Meir and Voada asked, nearly simultaneously. Boann didn’t answer; instead, she rummaged through her leather bag, which she had placed on a nearby table.
“You have lack-breath, Hand Paorach,” she said finally, pulling several packets from the bag and sniffing at each of them.
“We knew that much,” Voada said. “Can you help him?”
Boann gathered together a handful of the packets. “Here,” she said. “Have your cook steep these herbs in hot water until the water turns brown and she can’t see the bottom of the pot. She should strain the liquid into a cup and bring it to the Hand. Hand Paorach, you must drink the potion while it’s still warm; once it’s cold, it will lose all effect.”
“Thank you, Archiater.” Meir sat up in his bed, pulling his day robe around himself and disturbing Fermac, who lifted a mournful head. “I appreciate your help, and tell the Voice that I’m grateful to him for sending you. Hand-wife Voada will give you your payment on the way out.”
Boann lifted her chin. “I don’t make Cateni pay me,” she said. “Especially when one of them is a draoi.” She stuffed the remaining packets back into her bag and placed the strap over her thin shoulder again.
“Consider the money a gift, then,” Voada told her. “I assume even the archiater has to eat.”
“As you wish.” Boann took her staff from where it was leaning against the foot of the bed. “You should rest for now until you take the potion, Hand. Walk with me, Hand-wife.”
“Certainly. Would you care for some refreshment, Archiater? I could have the cook prepare a supper for you before you go …”
“No.” The archiater hefted her pouch again and started for the bedroom door. Voada followed Boann from the bedroom and out into the atrium. One of the house servants hurried over to escort the old woman, but Voada waved her away. Boann said nothing more until they finally came to the outer courtyard, her staff tapping along the tiles. Then she stopped, abruptly, and turned to face Voada, looking up at her face. “Your husband doesn’t have lack-breath,” she said.
“You said—”
“I told him what he wanted to hear and what he wanted to believe. To you, I’ll speak the truth. His problem is here.” She tapped Voada’s chest with a forefinger. “His extremities are cold; his color is pale. His blood doesn’t warm him. Inside, his humors are broken, and they are becoming worse.”
“Will the herbs you gave him help?”
“They will help his breathing some for now.” She shook her head. “Beyond that, no. I can do nothing for him.”
“Is he going to …” Voada stopped, not wanting to say the final word.
“We all die,” Boann told her. “It’s only the timing of it that’s in the hands of the gods.” Her cataract-pale eyes regarded Voada. “In another age, you would have been a menach as well as a draoi. You’ve guided some of the Cateni dead along the way afterward, haven’t you?”
Voada quashed the denial that immediately rose in her throat, resisting the urge to look away from the woman’s face, wrinkled like an old apple. “Yes,” she said finally. “I have.”
That earned her only the barest nod. “Then you should enjoy your husband’s company while you can. A good evening to you, Hand-wife,” Boann said.
With that, she turned and made her way through the courtyard’s open doors, staff tapping on stone.
4
The Ghost’s Return
“IS FATHER GOING TO be all right?”
Orla’s voice interrupted Voada’s reverie as she sat on a stone bench in the atrium of the house, staring up to where the failing sun shrouded itself in rags of clouds. She’d had the cook prepare the potion as Boann had ordered, had watched Meir drink it, and had stayed with him until he fell asleep with Fermac alongside him. Now her supper cooled beside her on the bench, and her thoughts were dark, all of them involving Meir.
“Come here, Orla,” Voada said. She shoved aside the tray of food and patted the polished stone of the bench. “Sit with me.”
“That woman’s gone?” Orla asked as she sat.
“The archiater? Yes. She left a few stripes of the candle ago.”
“You haven’t eaten anything.”
Voada glanced at the tray. “I found I wasn’t hungry.”
She could feel Orla’s gaze searching her face. “Is Father going to be all right?” she asked again.
Voada smiled at her daughter. She stretched out a hand and stroked her cheek and hair. “I hope so,” she told her. Orla trapped Voada’s hand between her head and shoulder, and the tentative return smile told her that Orla hadn’t heard the lie.
“Good,” Orla said. “Then tell me more about being draoi. Is it true what that old woman said—you’re one, and so am I?”
Voada lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know, dear. It’s more complicated than you might think. There are draoi—those who can create spells—but there are also menach, the priests who maintained the temples of Elia and conducted the services. They can see taibhse too, though they can’t do spells unless they’re also draoi. In another time, yes, you and I would have at least been menach and perhaps draoi, but now we’re not draoi. There aren’t draoi left south of the Meadham, and neither you nor I has the training a true draoi would have been given on the island Onglse in Albann Bràghad, in the north.” Her own words made her pause. In the north. The taibhse—it said we belonged there, in the north … Does it want me to go to Onglse?
The thought was interrupted by Orla. “Seanmhair Ina—your mother—was draoi, then?”
Voada shook her head. “No more than you or I, if that, but her mother, my seanmhair Ailis, always told me that she was supposed to have been sent to Onglse for draoi training when she was about your age. She might have become draoi; at least, that’s what Mother always said. But then the Mundoa came not long after Ailis’ first bleedings, and it simply wasn’t safe to teach someone to be draoi any longer. I think your seanmhair Ina saw the ghosts too, but she would never admit it to me, and if she knew more about the draoi, about their spells and such, she never told me any of it. She made certain that my seanmhair Ailis didn’t tell me either while she was still alive.” Orla’s head lifted, and Voada stroked her hair again, relishing the silky feel of it. “It’s best not to talk about such things where others can hear. Do you understand that, dear one?”
Orla nodded solemnly. “Is the taibhse still up there in the temple?”
Voada shrugged. “Possibly. I don’t know. The spirits of the dead have their own ways.”
Voada heard Orla’s intake of breath, as if she were about to say something, but she said nothing. She saw her daughter’s gaze travel to the central opening of the atrium, to where the temple could be seen on its crag in the distance. Voada remembered being Orla’s age, not long after she’d had her first moon-time bleeding, when she’d first begun to see the ghosts, and how she would sneak away from their house at night to go looking for them.
So many nights after one of the Cateni died in the village, I went up there to the temple to see if the spirit had come there, and sometimes it had, and sometimes it even spoke to me …
“We could go see,” she whispered to Orla, and Orla’s head whipped around eagerly, her eyes bright under her hair. “There’s still a stripe’s worth of sun left to the day and a full moon tonight for the walk back. But you can’t talk about this. If someone asks, we are going only to do some cleaning after the ceremony. So go get a bucket and cleaning cloths from the kitchen and bring them back here. I’m going to see how your father’s resting, then I’ll come back.”
Orla hurried away, grinning. Voada watched her go. Then she went to their bedroom, opening the door quietly. Meir was sleeping, long gold-green shafts of the late sun
falling over the sheets that covered him. She watched him, listening to his breathing. She thought that it seemed somewhat easier, but that might have been only her hope.
We all die. The old woman’s words lingered in the air, as if they were unable to be unsaid. Voada pressed her lips together. Going to the bed, she kissed Meir gently on the forehead. His eyes flickered open at the touch. “Sorry, my love,” she told him. “I was just looking in on you. Are you feeling better?”
He nodded. “Yes. I think the potion has helped.”
“Good.” She leaned down and kissed him again, this time on the lips. There was a sour taste to his breath. “Sleep, then, and let the potion work. I’ll come back in a bit. Orla and I are going to take a walk.”
Another nod. His eyes closed. She waited until she heard his breathing deepen again, then left the room.
The ghost stirred in the shadows as Voada and Orla entered the temple, which still reeked of incense and sweat from the ceremony the day before. The bust of Pashtuk glowered in the last rays of the sun, still visible here at the highest point of Pencraig Bluff. The taibhse, moving around the room’s perimeter as before, stepped into daylight and vanished, appearing again once it was in shadow. Voada could see its mouth moving, as if calling out to them, and it flung its arm out, its index finger pointing northward. The gesture was strong and almost violent, as if the specter were becoming increasingly agitated.
The temple was silent, though, except for the rustling wings of doves settling into their evening roosts among the timbers holding up the temple’s roof. Through the roof’s central opening over Pashtuk’s head, Voada could see the sky already darkening toward night.
“Why does it look so angry? Why does it seem to have so many faces?” Orla asked as she set their bucket down on the tiles with a scrape that seemed impossibly loud in the hush.
“I don’t know,” Voada told her. “Sometimes the taibhsean are upset because they know they need to follow the sun-path, but they can’t seem to find it. When I’ve shown them, they’ve understood and become calm. They walk the path and go away. This one …” Voada sighed. “I’ve tried to show it the sun-path, but it doesn’t seem to want that. And none of the others ever looked like this one. They always had only the face of a single dead person.”
“How did you talk to the other ghosts?” Orla asked. “The ones you helped.”
Voada took a slow breath. “I could hear them in my head. And I spoke to them the same way. It … well, the way to talk to them just came to me, as I’m sure it will to you as well.”
The ghost was moving toward them, and Orla took a step to meet it. Suddenly uneasy, Voada caught her shoulder. “No,” she said. “Don’t let this one get too close. Remember what happened to Voice Kadir. You can try to touch it with your hand if you want, just to feel how cold it is, but don’t let it come closer.”
Orla nodded. As the ghost approached, she put her hand out toward it, and Voada kept her own hand on Orla’s shoulder to pull her back if need be. Voada felt Orla shiver as her hand passed through the apparition. She saw the ghost’s multiple, shifting faces look from her to Orla, and there was something eager and hungry in its look that made Voada uneasy. She quickly pulled her daughter backward into her arms. The ghost continued to walk forward, following them. Voada continued to retreat, holding tight to Orla. The ghost pointed its finger to Voada, then to the north, the import impossible to miss.
“No,” Voada told it loudly, shaking her head. “No.”
The taibhse seemed to shrug. It pointed then at Orla and started toward her. “No!” Voada shouted again. “You stay away from her! Stay away!”
The taibhse glared at them both and slowly moved past, still speaking silently and pointing northward as it continued its restless pacing.
“When I touched it, it was freezing,” Orla said in wonder as they watched its movements. “How can it bear that, Mother?”
“The taibhsean don’t feel the cold where they are,” Voada told her. “I can remember Seanmhair Ailis telling me once, when she thought my mother wasn’t listening, that the dead exist in another world, and the cold we feel around them is the wall between us and them. I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any.” Voada turned to watch the ghost circle behind the bust of Pashtuk once more, and she kept Orla tucked tightly in her arms. Something about the taibhse and the way it had stared at Orla when Voada had refused it frightened her. Into the shadows, out of them … “Your seanmhair Ina was listening, though—that’s when she told my seanmhair Ailis that she couldn’t speak to me anymore about the draoi and the old beliefs. I remember being so frightened of how angry they were with each other and how loud the argument became that I went and hid in the cow barn and didn’t come out until they both came looking for me that night.”
The ghost had made most of a circuit of the altar and was coming around toward them again. “Whose ghost is this?” Orla asked.
“I don’t know,” Voada admitted. “As I said, it’s not like any of the others. The ones that have come here, that I’ve seen … well, I knew them. They were those who had died in Pencraig—those who still had some belief in the old ways rather than that of the Mundoa. And I could hear those souls; the whisper of their voices came through, and they could hear me when I told them to follow the sun-path so they could join with the goddess Elia. This one …” Voada stared at the ghost as it drifted through the growing darkness of the temple. She shivered as if she had touched it again. “This one is something different. I’m not sure what kind of portent it might be, and I’m not sure it’s safe. Seanmhair Ailis might have understood. I don’t.”
“Is it just going to stay here forever?”
“I don’t know, Orla.” She hugged the girl as they both watched the specter gliding along the edge of the temple. The moon was already high in the sky, bright now that the sun had slipped below the horizon, and in the lunar glow, the ghost seemed to shimmer as if lit from within by frozen flame. “Maybe. I wish I had the answer to that, because I don’t like it here. After what happened with Voice Kadir, I’m worried that it will affect more people the same way because they can’t see it or move away from it as we can.” She tightened her arm around her daughter. “I think we should both stay away from here for now and pray to Elia that She’ll take the ghost away from us. I especially want you to stay away from it. Do you promise me that?”
Orla nodded solemnly. The taibhse was coming nearer to them again, its pale face staring directly at the two of them. Its mouth opened again as it tried to speak, and its hands pointed to both of them in turn, then again gestured northward. Toward Albann Bràghad. Under her arm, Voada felt Orla tremble as they backed away from the approaching vision. It followed them this time, arms open as if to embrace them, but its movement was slow.
“We should leave,” Voada told Orla. “Go on, grab the bucket and we’ll go home.”
Orla offered no protest at all. Giving the ghost a final glance, Orla half ran to the bucket in front of the bust of Pashtuk and grabbed it, going quickly to the temple door. “Mother?”
Voada was still watching the ghost. Why are you here? she asked silently, mouthing the words as if that would help the apparition hear her thoughts. Why have you come? What is keeping you captive?
There was no answer. The ghost’s face was turned toward her and its mouth was moving, but Voada could hear nothing. A dozen different faces seemed to flicker over the ghost’s features.
“Mother?” Orla said again, and this time Voada shook her head.
“I’m coming,” she said. “Let’s go home and see how your father’s doing.”
Meir was still asleep when Voada and Orla returned to the house, though Fermac padded over to greet them. Voada checked on Hakan, who was playing in the courtyard with Una and resisting her attempts to get him to go to his bedroom. After helping Una bundle Hakan into bed and tucking Orla into her own, she returned to her and Meir’s bedroom, Fermac following her. She watched her husband sleep for several minutes
while stroking Fermac’s head, then finally undressed and got into the bed alongside him. Fermac lay near their feet.
Sleep came only after a long struggle. The taibhse haunted her dreams, its cold hand reaching for her. Reaching for Orla.
The next morning, waking early, Voada supervised the kitchen staff preparing another of Boann’s potions and took it back to the bedroom herself. She found Meir awake, dressed, and grinning at her as she entered; Fermac was still nested in the blankets. “You slept a long time,” she said. “How are you feeling, my love?”
“Much better,” he told her. He thumped his chest. “My breathing is easier. Boann’s herbs did wonders, even if the potion tastes like ashes and dirt.”
Voada had to agree; the odor wafting from the cup on her tray was worse than an uncleaned midden. She sat on the lid of the chest at the foot of their bed. “Well, here’s your morning serving,” she told him, then shook her head at his budding protest. “No, you’re drinking it, since you’ve just told me how much it helped, and Boann said you have to drink it while it’s hot, if you remember. Here.” She lifted the cup to him.
Meir made a face. “You’re worse than Una with the children,” he said, but he took the cup from her. He sniffed it, his nose wrinkling above the silver rim.
“Drink it,” Voada said sternly. “Pinch your nose if you must, but get it down. All of it. Now.”
Meir scowled at her, but he tipped the cup and swallowed what was there. “By Elia, that’s awful,” he complained as he set the cup down.
“Too bad. The archiater left four more packets for you and told me to come get more when they’re finished, so you’d better get used to the taste,” Voada said unsympathetically, but she smiled.
A Fading Sun Page 4