Darkfall

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘One must bend beneath the onslaught of a great storm, and sometimes even then it is not enough,’ Wind had said, explaining the value of the yielding kata movements.

  All at once, Glynn understood why she had allowed herself to remember Wind after all this time. It was not just that Solen reminded her of him. It was that she was no longer frightened. Wind had said they were the same and then he had killed himself, and deep down she had been terrified the same impulse would take her. But I am not like you, she thought sadly. Wind had seemed so strong, but he had been unable to bear the greyness of the world; what he had called its indifference. So he had fled from it in the only way he could.

  Glynn had seen the greyness and it had eaten a hole in her, but she would not run from it. She did not know how to fight it – maybe it could not be fought – but she would face it and know it for what it was. She would be a witness if she could be nothing else.

  Long-suppressed tears filled her eyes as she allowed herself to remember Wind, and grieve for him at last.

  Oh, Wind, she thought, you said those who tread strange paths have gifts from the gods to help them. I hope you’re right.

  segue …

  The watcher was startled to find itself drawn back to the world of the Unraveller. For once it did not seek to control its weaving, but gave itself to the propelling unexpectedness of the pull which led it to a man and a woman in a room …

  ‘Why don’t you go back home?’ the woman was saying, flat and chilly as a butter knife.

  The man was still with his head in his hands and she was thinking how old he looked slumped over in that way. Like a drunk she had seen on a bench in the park last week; an old man too close to dying, who had looked up suddenly and asked if she had heard about the comet.

  The woman wondered how she had imagined the man’s careworn face was beautiful. Only a year ago she had called his wife old, but they must be about the same age; both old while she was, if not young any more, not old, anyway.

  He made a groaning noise and she saw that he was crying. She felt a dull, scratchy anger at his weakness. There were veins on the backs of his hands. If he had got up and hit her, that would have meant he had some sap in him, but how could you expect passion of a man with veins like that?

  Yet how he had scared her in the beginning with his ferocity, squeezing her breasts until she had gasped at being so finely and savagely balanced between pleasure and pain. One day he had bent her over the back of a chair in a taut arc. Holding her like that and running his hand over her, he told her he was leaving his wife. Later he had bitten her wrist hard enough to leave an even imprint of his teeth.

  They had shifted away from the city, wanting a fresh place to match their newness. They had found a small town by the sea, cradled in the elbow of a river, and set up house. They had afforded a king-sized bed and a stereo and fridge, and had admired the pure austerity of their home.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said now. ‘What’s happened to us?’

  Distantly, the woman watched the man rock back and forwards. The pale early morning fell in luminous stripes on him, sawing back and forwards like knives of light as he moved. Her mind flew to that first morning in Quarry, when she had wakened too early. Unable to lie still beside him when her whole spirit thrilled, she had gone for an early run.

  With stunning clarity it came to her: the decline in her love for the man had begun in that run. She had stumbled over a bundle of clothes and an envelope on the side of the bridge spanning the river. In the envelope there had been a poem written on a scrap of paper in a tiny meticulous script and, underneath the words, a roughly drawn arrow describing an arc that first rose and then fell to a trembling horizon line. She had read the words and had traced the path of the arrow with her finger, before going to the nearest phone to call the police.

  Running home after the police dismissed her, she had thought not of the suicide, but of how her feet sounded pounding the pavement in their own lone rhythm. She had thought how his slow, heavy tread had gradually imposed itself on her with the seriousness of a funeral dirge or an anthem over a child’s drum or a little dog yapping at its master’s feet.

  It was not until some days later that she learned that the man who had killed himself was the Chinese man who ran the town’s martial-arts gym. She had actually met him once briefly. Her impression had been of deep reserve. Impossible to think of such a man committing the chaotic act of suicide. Yet he had done it. No one knew why. He was not verging on bankruptcy, though at first they had interpreted the falling arrow to indicate this. The poem had finally been taken as evidence of mental disturbance.

  On impulse she had gone to the sparsely attended funeral, but had been unable to transcend a flabby depression to mourn for a man she had not known. She had found herself watching a tall, intensely tearless blonde girl. Someone whispered that the girl was the favoured pupil of the dead man.

  Wind, that had been his name, the woman remembered. He had written the poem and he had drawn the arrow, and then he had fallen in his own descending arc. She understood suddenly that the poem was so simply the reason why he had killed himself that no one but a person in that state of mind could comprehend it. He had been saying that an arrow flew driven by the longing for its target, but when there was no target it could only fall.

  It struck the woman bleakly that they were falling now, and the dead man’s poem had been a suicide letter not just for them, but for the whole world.

  She turned her face away from her lover.

  She had intended to reveal that she was pregnant, but there was no reason for her to do that. Let the arrow fall. She made up her mind to go to the city to visit her mother and, there, get an abortion.

  I fall to the Void. I drown, she mouthed the words and they were bitter on her lips …

  ... though soulless, the watcher was capable of wonder, and it marvelled to find those words in this world, for were they not words it had uttered in another time and another world? It felt the bleak power of the poem into which they had been woven, and the deadly contagion of its despair, and wondered how these words had come here, and why.

  It delved inside the woman and tasted the throbbing golden pulse of life in her belly, before segueing wearily back to camla, the calm within the eye of Chaos. Incapable of pity or of guilt, the watcher nevertheless pondered its visioning. It knew there were random forces which ensured that, no matter how humans schemed and plotted, life would not be tamed to their purposes. But the vision suggested that there were not simply random events and consequences flowing out from them as inevitably and purposelessly as ripples from a thrown stone, but that some events repeated and mirrored themselves so perfectly that they surely created their own meaning which had nothing to do with anything else, and within which humans were irrelevant.

  This might mean that its own long watchfulness and occasional dangerous attempts at meddling were irrelevant also. But it went on watching, knowing that when it could not help itself, it would act despite the risk and the prohibitions.

  It, too, had its compulsions.

  It segued …

  6

  Of the seven planets, Keltor alone was chosen to nurture life

  for it was sung of the essence of all the rest.

  Its fiery lakes were gifted from Aenid the flame, closest to Kalinda;

  its red sand winds echoed the barren wastes of Dar;

  its waters shone with the phosphorescent humours of glittering Zorik;

  its mountains were mantled by Lori’s ice;

  its earth was studded with rare power stones from Gard’s meteorite,

  Gardion;

  its night was subtle with Draakar’s shadow …

  LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN

  Life was a liquid darkness and she who floated in it was no longer sure if she was in the water, or dreaming she was in the water.

  A memory drifted into the darkness of her mind. Someone was relating the story of a man who dreamed so vividly of being a butterfly, that he
was unable to decide if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

  Maybe I am a drowned butterfly, she thought.

  Exhausted, she allowed herself to drift steadily downward. It would be so easy to give herself to the motion. But something made her kick her way up to air and life. There was something she had to do, though for the moment she had forgotten what it was.

  The fleeting anxiety dissolved and she relaxed again.

  She seemed to have been floating for hours, alternately treading water and drifting; odd disconnected thoughts and strains of music bobbing and surging around her as a flotsam of disjointed and meaningless memories. She had wakened, new-born, to this life of watery darkness, her mind as featureless and bare as an old eggshell.

  She remembered entering the water fully clothed. There had been a compelling reason for that. Something that had driven her from the shore. Her dress had wrapped around her legs and she had kicked to free them but strength was running out of her like sand from a bottle. She had known, without looking back, that if she went any further she would be out too far to swim back without help, and yet she had continued, straining her eye against the radiance of a silvered moonpath.

  To see what?

  She did not know. There was a memory of water like ice, but now she did not even feel the cold except as a distant ache. There was no land in sight. She must have been swept out to sea while she was unconscious. The water was very calm and, empty as she was of memory, it was no wonder she floated. But the darkness was leaking into her, filling her up.

  Soon I will drown, she thought, and the possibility of death seemed curiously uninteresting. Maybe without a name or a life to remember, there was not much to lose. Only a little lightless time of cold. Who could regret the loss of such a small thing?

  You are so negative … A girl’s voice floated through her mind.

  She was too exhausted to even begin trying to figure out whose voice it was. What did it matter anyway when she was so near to the end, and utterly alone?

  Something shifted sluggishly in her mind at the thought of being alone, as if it lay alongside some opposing though unknown matter.

  She saw herself again, swimming towards the moon. A snatch of song drifted through her memory, consumingly sweet and riven with sadness. Her whole soul seemed to struggle to be free of her waterlogged flesh and follow the music. But the music faded, and she wondered at the desolation it left in its wake. Was it because, in this little dark life, the snatch of music had been as bright as a comet?

  The thought was swallowed up in a violent fit of shivering. She could not feel her hands or feet, but the cold seemed to have worked its way through flesh to hard bone, and was freezing the marrow.

  She blinked because her tired mind had obligingly conjured up for her the humped shape of land ahead. It took some time for her to understand that this was no exhausted hallucination. There really was land ahead!

  It might as well have been a mirage for all the use it was. Paralysed with cold and resting so low in the water now that only her mouth and part of her face were in the air, she was going to drown within easy reach of shore. Music and irony, and then death. It had not been an uneventful life, for all its brevity.

  With a surge of relief, she gave herself up to the seductive undertow tugging gently at her feet, and the sea drew her into its silent mouth.

  There is no music here, the thought came to her strangely.

  Then she heard a horse whinny.

  Which proved that it was a dream. You could not hear a horse under water. Another fleeting memory rose in the darkness of her mind; someone talking about a horse that had gone into the sea. Was that why she had gone in the water? To look for it?

  The whinny sounded again and spiralled rapidly into a neighing, bubbling scream. Instinctively she would have struggled to the surface to escape the dreadful, tormented sound, but her body would not respond. The screams of drowning, dying horses seemed to fill the water, as if there was not one but a thousand horses, screaming and drowning all around her; all of the horses in the world.

  She opened her mouth to suck the sea in, but a hand closed with brutal force over her lips. She felt herself being dragged up to the surface, and manoeuvred roughly onto her back. Gasping and gagging for air, she felt an arm hook under her chin as her rescuer struck out for shore.

  It was pitch dark, dense cloud blotting out the moon, so she could not see who had hold of her, but it was a man’s arm, thick with corded muscle. He must have had long nails because she felt them dig into her shoulder. He towed her tirelessly towards land, until her feet dragged on the bottom, then he pulled her above the waterline up on to the wet sand. It was too dark to see more than an outline of his broad shoulders and long sleek hair sticking up in tufts at the top where the water had dishevelled it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked in a queer growling voice that hurt her head.

  She tried to speak, but her lips were numb. Then the clouds parted, perversely choosing to reveal what they had before hidden.

  She would have screamed if she had been able, for her soft-voiced rescuer was not human. Wet black hair falling down over naked human shoulders flowed back from a sharply defined widow’s peak, parting to reveal neat, dark-furred ears. Body, lips, nose and jaw were human, too, but the creature’s eyes were slanted up sharply at the outer edges, and slashed with golden feline irises. Sharp predator’s teeth glinted between full lips. The creature looked like a cross between a man and some sort of wild cat.

  Only then did she register its eyes, riveted to her face.

  ‘How can this be?’ it rumbled, sounding stunned. Again the voice seemed to claw its way into her head.

  Dreaming, she told herself.

  ‘We are both of us dreams, lady,’ the beast said very softly.

  Its lips had not moved, and she knew it must be communicating telepathically. That must be why her head felt so peculiar whenever it spoke.

  Then he, for the creature seemed to her masculine whatever else it was, leaned over her and pressed his lips to her mouth. She felt sharp teeth beyond the softness of the lips, and tasted blood. She did not know if it was the beast’s blood or her own. Her lips were tingling and the warmth was spreading gradually back from her mouth and down her throat, as though she had drunk something warm and sweetly potent.

  ‘You will be able to speak now,’ he said in her mind, and again the words were accompanied by a slight twisting pain. But with the pain came the memory of the horse.

  ‘You have saved me. Will you leave him out there?’ she croaked. The words seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her and she was aware, even as she said them, that they made no sense.

  Yet the creature recoiled – strange golden eyes ablaze with anguish. He lifted his head and gave an ululating howl that hammered into her mind with agonising force. The sound shuddered her bones with its strangeness.

  ‘My dearest lady, I have sworn to …’

  She screamed, the force of the words spearing behind her eyes.

  The pain ceased instantly and the manbeast stared down at her, panting, his mouth agape. He swallowed visibly and his voice came into her mind again but softly, with only the slightest ache.

  ‘Forgive me, lady, but for a moment I thought …’ He frowned in a very human way as if collecting his wits, then said softly, ‘Each thing woven has its song to sing.’

  He stiffened suddenly, and looked out into the dark night with flaring cat’s eyes.

  Then he was gone back into the waves and she was alone, wavelets lapping at her heels. She gazed up at the twin crescents of moonlight and wondered why she could not seem to waken from this dream. Or maybe she was dead and this was what came after.

  Waves lapped at the back of her knees. The tide was coming in swiftly. In a short time water would cover her face. If she was not dreaming, she would drown.

  The darkness in her mind mocked at her.

  She heard the sound of running feet
in the distance and, from the corner of her eye, saw two circles of light bob unevenly in the dark, drawing steadily nearer.

  ‘There!’

  The lights converged, then resolved into two unusual circular lanterns carried by two muscular women with strong, handsome faces and long hair bound into complicated tiny plaits and dreadlocks; the elder was blonde, the younger, brunette, and they wore identical short tunics and sandals.

  ‘Song save us, Alene was right!’ said the darker amazon, sounding stunned.

  ‘Of course. But why did she scream?’ the other said. Both were panting hard.

  ‘Thank the Song we were in time,’ came a melodious voice out of the darkness behind them.

  A slight woman with straight dark hair falling in a curtain around her narrow cheeks came forward into the light, also breathing hard. She had a crescent-shaped tattoo of dots on her forehead, and the pupils of both eyes appeared to be completely covered by cataracts that looked silvery in the moonlight. Twitching her long shift aside, the woman dropped to her knees in the sand. Her hands reached out unerringly to a face blue and disfigured with cold. She hesitated and broke off the motion.

  ‘Not here. It is too cold. Bring her,’ she commanded, rising and turning away.

  ‘I will take her, Tar,’ the blonde amazon said, handing her lamp to the other. ‘I doubt if she will weigh as much as a new-born aspi and it will be less awkward than trying to carry her between us.’

  She, who had been swallowed by the sea and kissed by a manbeast, found herself being carried like a baby across a broad, flat beach. The three women bore her wordlessly along a narrow path leading away from the shore and through a thick grove of trees that gave off the scent of crushed lemon leaves. The path brought them to a lake whose surface was so still it mirrored perfectly their passing; the flickering lanterns they carried, the sparse stars above. The path hugged the edge of the lake, until the farthest rim, then it swerved sharply away into a small clearing screened by a thick clump of trees. A tiny cabin had been constructed there. A kitchen garden and a water barrel at the side of the hut were visible in the moonlight that showed intermittently through tattered clouds moving swiftly across the sky.