by Janet Morris
“No,” he whispered, agonized, finally realizing that there was no love of the Unseen in Dey-Ceilneeth, as there was in the forests.
“Of course it did not. You have been in His most sacred sanctuary. There is nothing else. You have seen the unseeable. And, I hope, seen through it. Some say the god is dead. Some say another is on the way. Some say the three for whom the Spirit Gate opened are that very thing: new gods for a godless age. What say you, who have seen them face to face?” And he took Deilcrit’s goblet, refilled it, handed it back.
“I asked them that,” he said in answer. “I, too, was concerned that they might be gods. But they said that they were not, though one said that if I need him ...” And he stopped, and thumped the full goblet down resoundingly on the stand, so that it slopped over and the red juice crawled along the cane and dropped to the stone.
He sat back, but very slowly, and tried to make his ears stop ringing so that he could decipher the ossasim’s words.
Some while later, when the black-furred one took his leave, it occurred to him that he did not recall exactly what had passed between them, though they parted on good terms.
Standing by the door of tied rushes, it came to him that the drink had been stronger than he anticipated, and that he should drink no more. But when he went to pour out the remaining juice, he found no signs of the pitcher, or the goblets either, though a red stain on the caning and a wetness on the floor proved that he had not imagined it.
He was on his hands and knees by the bench, his finery forgotten, when she entered from a curtained doorway he had thought to be simply curtains, and drew him wordlessly within.
V. Step-sister’s Embrace
We sat in the crotch of a gargantuan tree overlooking the maze surrounding Dey-Ceilneeth. The ancient titan was hoary with overgrowth but in places the crystal of her cathedrals still shone like jewels in the sun.
I shivered, and wriggled my back more firmly against the forest giant’s bark. Sereth sat on a limb wide as I am long, his feet swinging, Chayin between us. The cahndor’s arms were folded over his chest.
“You take nature’s whim as a personal affront,” he growled at Sereth, who had not spoken since we had seen the children in the forest the day before.
“What affronts me is my own concern.”
“So be it!”
“Stop this!”
Sereth tossed me an indecipherable glance, and came in from the branch, to lounge against its parent trunk. “How long do you propose to sit here?”
I looked at Chayin, who studied the memnis’ bark. I, wished it could be otherwise between us. Especially now when we entered what could easily be a dangerous situation. So my forereading showed it. Chayin and Sereth were each keeping their own counsel. There had been entirely too much of that from all of us, but not even I would be the first one to stop it. No, I would not do that. I looked at Sereth, and at Chayin, who had not yet replied.
“You know we are going in there,” I implored him. “You will go for Se’keroth. I will go for Deilcrit. He will go because he cannot stay away.”
“You are wrong, Estri,” said Chayin. “Sereth will go for Deilcrit. You go for him. And I in one sense for Wehrdom, and another for Mahrlys-iis-Vahais.” The veil was heavy on him. Sereth, enmity wiped from his frame like dust by the wind, crouched down, leaning forward, intent on Chayin’s face.
“When Deilcrit is no longer Deilcrit, and a blackened Se’keroth lies across the arms of a carnelian throne, we will depart this land. Not before; and failing that, not at all,” came the cahndor’s singsong from the far side of the abyss.
“Chayin,” I said softly, “please—”
“Estri, you do not talk to Sereth of Wehrdom. Why? Because he will no more accept its hegemony than that his own skills wield over his actions. Truth?”
“Yes,” I admitted, as much to keep him talking as anything else.
“Do not forget that. He is hase-enor, of all men: that, too, recollect.”
“Chayin,” said Sereth evenly. “See your way into the maze, and out safely. See the moment of entrance, and its perils.”
“Surely,” said the cahndor in that same bemused voice, and reeled off the turnings. After a time, his voice became more normal and his observations more tentative.
I studied Sereth covertly. He and Chayin were barely speaking, yet he had not wasted this opportunity to benefit us. Whether Chayin would deem what had just passed an invasion of his privacy, a use made of him while he was indisposed, I did not know. It seemed likely. They were more and more wary of each other, and as a consequence, more wary of me.
Chayin had spoken with me once of Benegua in genetic terms. It is a science of which I am not totally ignorant. What he had had to say disturbed me. But I had not mentioned it to Sereth. He would not like what Chayin’s theory portended.
As of this sun’s rising, we had been thrashing about in the forest for eighteen days. Eighteen days of their growling at each other, of shields snapped tight, eighteen days within the wall of Mnemaat. How long we lost in the obviation of space that spat us out at a cold campfire strewn with our carnage, I could not determine. Long enough for no Deilcrit, no Se’keroth, nor my blade either, to be lying there when we arrived.
We had expected nothing different, and so were not disappointed. We spent one uneasy night listening to the forest’s mutters. Chayin got very drunk on a miraculously spared skin of kifi-a, and said a number of things better left unsaid, and he and Sereth did not speak except in monosyllables for three days. Hence their pace was hard, and I, too, turned surly trying to keep it.
On the morning of the fourth day since the obviation, which we undertook directly after a day-night vigil for Chayin’s dead there by the sea, Sereth came to me as I wakened.
I had, since he overheard Chayin offer me asylum in Nemar, found it prudent to sleep with neither one of them. Prudent but difficult. Abstinence is for me a weighty yoke, and I was only too glad to slip into his arms when he extended them.
And I was heartened, lying in the grass with him as of old, that so easily might I chink the breach growing between us. It had been a couching full of promise and promises, one of new beginnings. So I started to speak to him of Chayin and the strains I knew lay upon them both, but he rolled over onto his belly and said:
“Watch.” And with a distant little smile on his face, he traced my name with his finger in the grass. As his nail moved along the blades they seemed to shrivel, then smoke, then the very ground beneath began to run together. Still with that faraway little grin, he laid his hand flat beside the letters of my name branded a finger’s-joint deep into the earth.
“As easily can I destroy him. And I will, if owkahen serves me up your loss.” Sereth always whispers death. “Is that clear?”
And I nodded, for he was watching me out of the corner of his eye.
“Good. Now, look.” And he waved his flat palm over the letters singed deep into the turf. His forehead furrowed, and grass reappeared where my name had been. Or rather, other grass appeared: it was of a lighter green, and more densely packed, than that around it.
“What did you do?” I queried, hushed.
His eyes flickered sidelong at me, he tucked his chin in and stared at the lighter-green ESTRI written in sod among the darker grasses.
“I borrowed it. The first sod, that I burned away, became smoke and ash. This is from a year hence. I took it from the same spot.”
“So my name is gouged in the ground a year from now, in this place?”
“Something like that. I thought the technique might help you with your time discrepancies. Do you want it?”
“Do I want it,” I echoed dumbly, sufficiently chastised.
“There is a condition,” he said, turning his narrowed eyes full upon me. “You will teach this to none else.”
I knew whom he meant, but I agreed. So began the taking of sides.
And the nursing of the tension that crackled around us in the tree’s crotch like owkahen’s
own lightning.
What can I say in excuse for myself? In retrospect one dredges up alternatives that seem more workable than those that have come to be. But only if I were other than myself, and they also some other folk, could it have gone differently. Chayin alone inherited from our progenitors that talent for existing always in the selection of consequences some call the sort. Sereth and I grit our teeth and wrestle with the moment, drawing (at the best times) a sufficiency of what we desire therefrom, so that with the aid of what we have already gained we can repeat the process. My forereading is a mass of tantalizing obscurity which like some diabolical instructor leads me into truth by way of error. From which I emerge, I hope the wiser, and with a wry understanding of what my visions earlier portended. The best I can say for myself is that I seldom make the same mistake twice. Seldom, but not never ....
The mistake I was then concerned with not making was of being the last so high above the ground in the crotch of the huge memnis, as I watched Sereth’s head disappear between the branches. He would not wait for Chayin’s indisposition to pass, but swung out and down like some sucker-footed tree-kepher, leaving me to talk Chayin back from the land of veils.
I sat and fumed and choked back curses, and then, asudden very conscious of the winds that blew around the tree and shook its fronds so that they whispered, turned to the task at hand.
It had been long since Chayin spoke from beyond the abyss, long since the veils held him entrapped. Once he had been sorely afflicted by this manifestation, called by some forereader’s disease, and I had used my skills to ease him out from its grasp. It was a measure of owkahen’s tumultuousness I saw there in his inward-staring eyes, in his boneless form melted against the memnis’ trunk.
I inched toward him, uncertain of my footing though it was more than ample, and made the error of peering out into space, where Sereth scrambled ever downward, far below.
Then I put concerted effort into returning the cahndor’s attention to what we call the present.
It took some extensive laying-on of hands, there on the swaying branch.
“Dey-Ceilneeth awaits,” I murmured, when his membranes snapped back and forth tentatively and he uncrossed his arms and at my urging slid inward to the safety of the memnis’ cleft.
He looked, for a moment, all of his father’s son, staring at me from across the abyss. Then he shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his palms, and said: “Now?”
“No time better,” I affirmed.
“That is not strictly true, but”—and he yawned and stretched, and gathered his legs under him—“I am anxious to retrieve Se’keroth from that jungle boy of yours .... Where is ... ?” And he himself peered between the memnis’ uplifted arms to spy Sereth, descending.
“Se’keroth?” I wondered. “Then you do not recollect what you said?”
“No.”
So I told him what he had said to us, and at the retelling’s end, with a wail I could not suppress, sought the shelter of his arms. “How has it come to this, that we use each other so ill?”
“Ssh, little one. Things are not as they appear. It is Wehrdom whose distrust we feel. It is the very air which divided us, the echoes of their converse which make us like strangers in our own minds.”
I shivered, my face pressed to his leathers.
“It is as it was with the children: He thinks I obstruct him. But it is not me.”
I nodded. I well recalled the children we had seen in the forest, strewn about like discarded rag dolls, their stuffing spilling out onto the ground. And the live ones, all huddled in a group that wandered helpless in the wilderness.
They had crossed the road, headed eastward. We had been thrice sickened by dead ones we had passed, and we followed. But no attempts to get near the children availed us. When we showed ourselves they screamed and the little group of thirteen flew apart and disappeared. Sereth had been determined to catch one, if only to offer aid. This he did above Chayin’s mysterious and seemingly arbitrary protestations.
The child we cut from the herd and pursued was fleet. We chased it, circling, closing in on the little girl from three sides. When at last the tiny thing cringed with its back to a large boulder, weeping, its capture sure, we heard a snapping among the trees and something dark and winged swooped straight down. There came a moment of shadowed wings and whooshing air, and the child was gone, snatched into the air, only to reappear, hurtling groundward. Even as I lunged forward, it struck earth with a sickening crash.
We stood over that crushed and broken body, peering up into branches that seemed to seek eternity somewhere above our heads.
“I told you,” Chayin growled, prodding the child’s corpse with his foot. Indeed, he had told us that only death could come from our mixing in these affairs.
“If you had not obstructed me,” spat Sereth, “the child would be alive.”
The cahndor had thrown himself upon Sereth, dragging him to the ground, when the wehr’s shadow first darkened the earth.
Chayin, breathing hard, grass in his black mane, rubbed a fresh bruise on the side of his temple.
“Sereth, I will not tell you again. We have entered the wehrs’ domain. Our rules do not obtain here. A strong territoriality does. We have twice withstood wehr-rages; it is because of this that they no longer attack us. By their own ritual, we have won the right to walk these woods. But we stay not still, and this makes the wehr-folk uneasy. By the rules of their society, if we rage—if we start another bloodletting—they will fight us until either all of us or all of them lie dying. And there are very many of them. We have acted outside their conventions. The wehr-mind stretches to accommodate men who are more than men, wehrs who are less than wehrs, creatures who carry their territoriality with them.”
“How do you know all this?” Sereth demanded, his fingers toying with knife sheathed at his hip.
“I have spoken with them. As might you, if you chose.”
And he would say no more.
So we followed the children in their ragged band, and saw a thing even more strange: they came to a widening trail, at the end of which a mud-brick wall encircled a score of bent-branch huts on the Isanisa’s bank.
It was getting on to day’s end, and the light grew uncertain. We circled around the youngsters and concealed ourselves near the wall, within its very shadow in a clump of the silver-berried bushes.
Just when we had done this, two men slipped through a low door in the wall and scuttled to obscure themselves in the trees that lined the path.
Sereth laid hand on my shoulder, but I needed no warning. I held my breath and stayed very still.
I cannot recall what I expected to see, but—it surely was not what passed before my eyes:
The group of children had broken ranks. Two came, almost together, pell-mell along the trail, out of sight of the others. One had hair as red as the sun.
The men in the bushes waited until the children were almost parallel to them. Then, as one man, they leaped upon the fleet little forms.The redhead, by some few feet the straggler, let out a strangled cry and wheeled to run back the way she had come. She could not elude her pursuer.
The men secreted the children’s bodies in a pit I must assume they had dug there for that purpose, and took up once more their vigilance in the trees.
Sereth hissed articulately, and Chayin warned him, very low, that any overt attempt to interfere would bring weighty consequences, that Beneguan ways were not Silistran ways, nor his to adjudge.
For a moment I thought they would tear each other to pieces among the silver berries. Obviously they did not, but they did sit unspeaking while the rest of the children, still bunched together, passed unmolested by the two concealed men; sat there until the moon rose and the men, with grumbled laughter, forsook their concealment and pounded upon the gate that had opened to admit the balance of the children’s band, and were themselves admitted.
It seemed that within the mud-bricked wall a celebration was under way, for the silence was eat
en up by laughter and the thrumming of drums and the piping of eerie pipes.
On our way back to the great road we had quit to witness this odd and terrible scene, we stumbled over two more slain children.
“It is as it was with children,” had said Chayin. “The very time divides us.” I could feel in myself the detached patience I had felt then, that cool heedlessness that had saved me from some pointless attempt to intervene in what was none of my affair. But this time, my mind told me dryly, everything was very much my affair.
“Do not withhold your aid from him. For my sake,” I dared to beg. And then he did not answer but only pushed me gently away. “Then, if not for me, for whatever you hold sacred.”
“How cometh your obviation of space?” he queried bitterly, letting me know that he was aware of what Sereth had given me, and the price I had paid. I lowered my head. “What I will do is for his sake, not yours. I will get him through the maze and pick him up if he falls. But I will not let him die for his ignorance.”
And with that, he made motion that I should descend the tree before him.
Which took most of my concentration. I am no tree-dweller, not like Sereth, who spent his youth in forests. My youth was spent upon silken covers, learning my womanhood and those joys it can give to a man. I begrudged the loss of those days, and the joyous ignorance I then possessed.
It seemed to me that as far as Sereth remained “ignorant,” to that extent was he blessed; that we were both in that respect unlike Chayin, who sought knowledge for its own sake. And I caught my first glimpse of what Sereth had dubbed the “lack of compassion” in us Shapers’ spawn, as I climbed slowly and painstakingly down the towering memnis and Chayin followed behind.
Another thing that occurred to me as I scratched and scraped and slid my way groundward was one which caused me to reach out under my shield, testing as a warrior might reach out beyond his shield arm’s defense. I sought Wehrdom. I sought the touch that had brushed my sensing and withdrawn when we entered by the Spirit Gate; that had nearly drawn me down into its whirling tunnel when I destroyed the wehr-master. I had devalued that at the time. I had not wanted to think that Wehrdom might be a worthy foe, or even an intelligence whose wishes need be considered. A certain smugness comes with successes, such as ours, and in that smugness is the most insidious of perils.