A Fading Sun
Page 12
I dream of my children every night, Voada wanted to tell her. I’ve awakened you several times this moon screaming their names. What I see is a horror and not a blessing. But Ceiteag was already shuffling to her pallet; it seemed a very few breaths later that she heard Ceiteag start to snore.
“I want Orla. I want Hakan. I want to hold them again.” Voada spoke softly into the night air, looking at the statue of Elia on the altar stone at the center of the sun-paths. She could feel the cold brush of her anamacha as it moved closer to her. “Can you give me that, Mother Goddess? Is that within your power to grant me?”
“Then when?” she asked the anamacha.
Voada sighed. Standing, she went to her own pallet on the far side of the temple. Sleep, when it came, was troubled and confused, and she heard both Orla and Hakan wailing and crying for her. In her dream, she cried along with them.
The morning light slashed in through the east windows of the temple and across Voada’s face. She shielded her eyes from the light. She could hear Ceiteag, already up, singing softly to herself in a quavering voice. Voada lifted her head from the pallet to see the old woman packing clothing and supplies into a sack. In the shadows of the temple, she could see both Ceiteag’s anamacha and her own, watching.
“You’re leaving?” Voada asked sleepily.
“Soon. You should also.”
“You’ll die if you do that.” Voada remembered the menach’s comment from the night before, and it rekindled her anger at what was done to her family and her fear of what Orla and Hakan had experienced since. I’ve waited too long here. Orla and Hakan need me …
Voada tossed aside the blanket from her pallet. After her morning ablutions, she began rolling up her own few belongings: clothing gifted to her from the villagers, a spare pair of leather shoes, a wooden mug, a water skin, a fire stone. The silver oak leaf pendant Meir had given her was already around her neck, where it always stayed. She rolled the rest in a blanket and tied it with leather thongs, ready to carry. Ceiteag had finished packing and was watching her.
“Thank you again for all you’ve done, Menach,” Voada told her. “I will always be grateful, and may Elia reward you for your kindness.”
“You’re leaving to seek your revenge?”
“I seek my children first.” Involuntarily, Voada’s hand went to the oak leaf pendant. She clutched it, remembering how excited Orla had been when she’d been given her own silver oak leaf, remembering how she’d glimpsed that pendant around Orla’s neck as she’d been taken away …
Ceiteag nodded. “What does your anamacha tell you?”
“I do what my heart tells me, Menach, not the will of ghosts.” The silver warmed in her hand. Her fingers caressed the serrations of the leaf.
“Hearts are fickle muscles. They can lead you to be rash and too quick.” Ceiteag paused. She watched as Voada slung her pack over her shoulders. “I told you that I can’t teach you what you need to know. That’s true. But there are those who can. Come to Onglse. The draoi at Bàn Cill can show you how to fully use your anamacha, how to open it completely so you can wield its power. They can make you the draoi you’ll need to be to have any chance to rescuing your children.”
Voada shook her head, but without conviction. She looked at her anamacha:
“You’ve already lost them, my dear. Do you know where they are at this moment?” Voada had to shake her head, and Ceiteag continued. “As a draoi, you might find them again with your anamacha. And you might survive long enough to get the rest of what you want. The Mundoa—they hurt you because of what you are, Voada: because you’re Cateni, and the life of a Cateni is worth nothing to them. We’re chattel. To them, we’re no more than possessions and slaves. As Hand-wife, you were blind to that. But we’re also what they most fear. They’re afraid that if they don’t beat us down and keep us there, we’ll rise up against them and push them back into the sea from which they came. What happened to you and your children happened because you’re Cateni, because you forced them to face that fear and acknowledge it. Here in the north, we’ve never forgotten that. I’m telling you to embrace what you are. I’m telling you to be a bright sword, to be one of those Cateni who make them shiver in their fine boots and cower in their marble halls. But if you go back now, as weak as you are now, you’ll never be that. You’ve not been tempered in the fire. That fire waits for you on Onglse. You have to find the courage and the faith in Elia and your own people to go there. You have to become Cateni, not something that is neither Mundoan nor Cateni and therefore less than either. Then—possibly—you might be able to recover your children and have your revenge.”
It was the longest speech Voada had ever heard the woman make, and her fervor pulled at Voada, making her recall every time Voice Kadir and Voice-wife Dilara had made some disparaging comment about the Cateni or treated Voada and Meir like they were errant children or pets to be scolded and chastised. She remembered her early youth, before she met Meir, and how her parents had bowed whenever a Mundoan had approached them, how their voices changed whenever a Mundoan talked to them, going lower and softer and never daring to contradict what they were being told, how the elders had mused at night about the great exploits of old Cateni warriors and draoi and spoke of legends that had been told to them in their youth but were now only ghosts and whispers. She remember the statue of Elia that her family had buried in order to save it from being destroyed, of the statue of Emperor Pashtuk that stood in Her place in Her temple.
They stole our past from us—at least in the south.
Voada’s anamacha had glided close to her as Ceiteag was speaking. Now it slid partially into her, the cold presences inside seeping into Voada’s blood.
“Can you promise me that I’ll be able to find my children, at least?”
Now it was Ceiteag who shook her head. “I promise you only that possibility. Nothing more, because nothing in the future is certain. The future is in Elia’s hands and your own.”
Voada was still cradling the silver oak leaf. She saw Ceiteag looking at her hand. She released the pendant and tugged her pack higher on her back. Voada glanced at the altar, at the statue of Elia caught in sunlight.
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“Good,” Ceiteag said. “I have something for you.” She reached into her own roll and pulled something out: a bronze torc, the metal gleaming. On the face of one of the knobs, Voada could see the incised mark for “oak”—a vertical line with two short horizontal lines meeting it on the left side. “This is for you. You’re draoi, and you should be marked as such.”
“I can’t …” Voada protested.
“You will. I won’t have someone I taught going to Onglse without it. Lower your head, woman.”
Voada did. Ceiteag pulled the torc open enough to slip the knobbed end around her neck, then pushed it closed so that the metal was cool against her skin. “There,” she said, sounding satisfied. “Now everyone will know you’re a draoi.”
Everyone but me, Voada thought, but she said nothing. Instead, she managed to smile at Ceiteag as her fingers caressed the polished torc.
12
On the Path
ONGLSE, SHE’D BEEN TOLD, was the long gray smudge on the horizon past a few darker lumps of closer islands, all set on a gray sea that flailed at the rocks of the shore on which Voada stood and crashed with cold, white fury against the low cliffs. Behind her, in a makeshift village of tents and crude shelters, were those they’d gathered up in their walk to the shore of the aptly named Storm Sea, a journey of two
hands and four days. They’d gone well north of the closest approach to Onglse, warned that there were several Mundoan cohorts there guarding the shore as well as Mundoan ships patrolling the channel between. Worse, the news had come to them that the main force of the Mundoan army was already on Onglse, though there was no immediate danger to Bàn Cill.
Voada wondered how they would reach Onglse if it was so well guarded, but Ceiteag seemed unconcerned.
The wind off the Storm Sea was cold and wet with salt spray, and Voada pulled her woolen cloak, beaded now with water, tighter around her shoulders. She couldn’t see her anamacha in the broken light of the day, but she could sense its presence near her, colder than the wind. She turned away from the vista before her and began walking back to the village through a stand of wind-twisted aspens, birches, and wych elms. The wind swirling through the branches carried a wisp of speech to her.
“… you’ve all felt the anamacha who has claimed her.” Voada recognized the voice: Ceiteag. A male voice, one she couldn’t readily identify, answered. A chill touched Voada.
“Aye, we’ve felt it. We thought that one lost and dead forever.” Another male voice, with a tone of disbelief woven through it. That voice Voada remembered: Conn, a draoi from another tribe they’d met on the journey.
“Aye,” yet another voice agreed, this one female. “That’s what I was told as well by the ceanndraoi himself. Greum Red-Hand always claimed that the anamacha of Leagsaidh Moonshadow died when the last image of Elia was taken from the temples of the south.”
Voada moved slowly and quietly through the trees and blackthorn brush toward the voices. She stopped when she could see the speakers just inside the tree line with the encampment a hundred strides beyond them: Ceiteag and four others—two men, two women—huddled together. She’d been introduced to them by Ceiteag over the last several days; all of them were draoi who had responded to Greum Red-Hand’s summons to come to Onglse.
“Then it seems the ceanndraoi was mistaken.” That was Ceiteag again, but the others seemed unconvinced.
“Greum Red-Hand, mistaken? That’s not something I’d care to tell him to his face,” Conn answered with a laugh. “We can’t be certain she has the Moonshadow’s anamacha. Maybe we’re the ones who are mistaken.”
Ceiteag’s laugh was dry and unamused. “You know that’s not the case, all of you, or you wouldn’t be troubled by the possibility.”
Leagsaidh Moonshadow. Voada knew the name; all Cateni did. She was a draoi of legend, one of the Eldest, her accomplishments more myth than reality. In the tales Voada had been told as a child, when the sun failed to rise for a full summer, it was Leagsaidh Moonshadow who called down the moon from its place in the sky to replace the sun so that the crops could grow in its light and heat, causing the sun to grow jealous and return. It was Leagsaidh Moonshadow who had pulled Onglse up from the Storm Sea to become the haven for all draoi. It was Leagsaidh Moonshadow …
“Does she know?” asked one of the women: Marta, if Voada recalled their brief introduction correctly.
“Why not ask her?” she heard Ceiteag respond.
The woman’s gray head turned, and her gaze found Voada’s. “Well, Voada?” she asked.
The others had followed her glance. They were all staring at Voada through the intervening branches. She walked toward them, her fingers scissoring the oak leaf on its chain. “I didn’t intend to overhear you, Menach Ceiteag. I was only out walking, and—”
“I know,” Ceiteag said, waving her hand impatiently. “I wasn’t accusing you of spying. Answer the question we’ve asked. Is the Moonshadow part of your anamacha?”
“I don’t …” Voada started to answer, but her anamacha slid partially into her, unasked, at the same moment.
“Much. Or nothing at all.”
“Still talking to your students in riddles, Ceiteag?” Conn laughed. “You did that with me as well. Let’s be more plain with our words. Voada, many of the anamacha have vanished since the Mundoa came, and without the anamacha, there are no draoi. Yet one of the oldest known anamacha thought lost with all the others evidently remains, and somehow it has found you. Greum Red-Hand has to know about this. If the anamacha that holds the Moonshadow still exists, then so may all the others, which means there may be more draoi in the south who—like you—aren’t aware of their full capabilities.”
“Worse would be if the Mundoan sihirki subvert them,” Marta added. “What if those draoi of the lost anamacha are turned against us?”
“That’s why we must go to Greum Red-Hand as soon as possible,” Ceiteag said. “The answers to all questions will be at Bàn Cill. Tomorrow. We’ve been promised that tomorrow the ships will be here and we can sail.”
The others nodded in agreement, but their smiles were too broad and too forced. Voada had the sense that they hadn’t told her everything they knew, nor had they explained why her anamacha had alarmed them so. There were gaps and omissions in the information she’d been given.
But that could wait. As Ceiteag had said, the answers were at Bàn Cill. At least Voada hoped so.
So Voada attempted a smile and walked back to the village with the other draoi.
The ships did come the next morning: several four-oared, single-masted vessels of sturdy oak with leather sails, emerging from the morning fog and anchoring just off the rocky shingle below the cliffs. The ships were from Cateni coastal villages to the north, and they smelled heavily of fish and brine, with nets of twisted linen draped over the rails.
At Ceiteag’s order, the draoi were placed on separate vessels—“If the Mundoan warships are out there waiting, we don’t want one lucky ram to sink us all”—though Voada remained with Ceiteag. They approached Onglse from the north and east, coming in from the Storm Sea side. They remained unchallenged, the ocean empty of any other vessels, and pulled into a small harbor to be met by grim-faced warriors and a single draoi, who had come from the hill-fort above the harbor. “Menach Ceiteag,” the draoi said. “Well met. It’s good to see you once again and to see so many with you. Who have you brought with you?”
“Well met yourself, Daibhidh. It’s been too long. We have five full draoi, one acolyte, and two hundred and more clan warriors.”
Daibhidh nodded. “They’re all needed. The warriors I’ll leave to the fort commanders to distribute. The draoi should follow me. We go to Bàn Cill.”
It took most of three days walking the steep hills of Onglse, but eventually Voada looked down into the central valley of the island and Bàn Cill. The sacred home of the draoi was surrounded by steep-walled green slopes with a ring of hill-forts along the ridgeline. In the valley stood another circle: a narrow band that was a forest of tall, imposing oaks. The sight of them made Voada touch the pendant at her neck. Surrounded by the oaks loomed a ring of dark standing stones capped with granite slabs, with taller openings at the solstice points and flagged paths marking them as well. Where the paths intersected at the center of the stones, a large temple stood, its walls the height of three tall people, crafted from polished stone that caught the sun’s light and threw it back, dazzling Voada’s eyes. The door stood open, and the windows of the sun-path weren’t simply openings cut into the stone like in the temples on Pencraig Bluff and in Ceiteag’s village. Instead, they were filled with panes of translucent white crystal.
Rings within rings within rings.
In all of Cateni history, Bàn Cill had never known the touch of an invader’s boot. “As long as there remains a draoi in Bàn Cill, it will never fall,” Voada heard Ceiteag
say, as if she were having the same thoughts as Voada. Led by Daibhidh, they followed a road through the gates of a stone wall that connected the towers of the forts, then wound down through the brush and bracken to the oaks. As they approached the oaks, Voada saw a cloaked form move from the shade of the trees onto the path they followed. The man was tall with a warrior’s build, long black hair braided down his back, and a thick oiled beard also heavily speckled with gray. His face showed years of exposure to sun and weather, the skin tanned and chiseled. Under thick eyebrows, eyes as dark as his hair regarded them. The bronze torc of a draoi, this one wrapped with silver wire, collared his neck.
Daibhidh stopped a few paces from the man and bowed low. “Ceanndraoi Greum,” he said, “more draoi have answered your summons.”
Greum inclined his head to the group, holding out his hand in greeting. The Red-Hand: Greum’s right hand was mottled past the wrist with a rash or perhaps the scars of an old burn, the blotches a bright red-orange. “I thank you all for arriving so quickly,” he said. His voice was a rich, deep baritone—much like Altan Savas’ voice, Voada thought. “I know most of you, and it’s good to see you all again. We’ve need of your skills.” Voada felt his gaze move to her; she held it with her chin lifted. His eyes slid just to her right, as if he saw her anamacha standing alongside her. His eyes narrowed slightly, his lips pressing together under his beard as his regard came back to Voada, slipping down to the torc around her neck so obviously that Voada had to resist the impulse to put her hand there. “I don’t know you,” he said. Voada wasn’t sure whether he was referring to her or her anamacha. She noticed that he pointedly didn’t use the word “draoi” to refer to her.
“I’m Voada Paorach,” she told him. “Menach Ceiteag told me that I should come here to learn from you.”
“You’re southern. Your accent is Albann Deas. Almost Mundoan.”
“And your accent is northern. We can’t help where we’re from, Ceanndraoi. I’m not a spy, if that’s your worry. I’ve as much a reason to hate the Mundoa as you. Perhaps more.”