The creature shrieked. The sound was repeated, over and over, echoing down the rocky galleries. It thrashed from side to side, but Danica held grimly to her blade and could not be dislodged. She realized, with some small part of her mind that a man’s voice was calling her name, urgently, desperately, even as her own voice prayed aloud. Power, enough power … She spared one glance, and saw Bellasteros’s face flushed in a frenzied rage.
He raised his sword, brought it down in a swift two-handed thrust. Its point drove deep into a crevice in the rock, pinioning the basilisk by its tail.
The creature was coiling backward on itself, the head questing for its prey, the great blind eyes oozing scarlet tears. Bellasteros, unarmed now, threw himself full-length onto its back and grasped a fold of Danica’s cloak. The basilisk reared upward, Danica’s sword at last lost hold, and she and Bellasteros tumbled together down the expanse of shining obsidian scales onto the ledge.
The plumed head crashed like a battering ram against the wall above them; the tail jerked convulsively, and Bellasteros’s sword snapped in two. The huge body of the basilisk fell toward them, its crushing weight driving a gust of hot air before it.
In one concerted movement Danica and Bellasteros rolled away from each other. The creature’s body struck where they had lain, and the rock of the mountain trembled. As it writhed upward again Danica heard her own voice screaming the paean. Her shield ignited, the emblazoned star burning with a clear light. Her strength twisted within her, her body coiled —she struck, her sword glancing into the creature’s throat.
Again it shrieked, but the scream was strangled in blood. The huge body heaved, knocking Danica to the side; her sword slipped from her grasp and went spinning across the wet, blood-slick rock, under the creature’s belly and directly into Bellasteros’s hand. He plucked it up. He shouted the incoherent name of some god, lunged forward, struck with a berserk strength. The basilisk’s head, sliced cleanly from its body, bounced across the rock and over the brink into the crevasse. A gout of fire leaped upward, hissing.
The heat drained from Danica’s face. Suddenly nauseated, she turned her back on the final jerks and thrashings of the creature’s body. She staggered around the buttress of rock to hide herself in the rose-tinted gloom of the passageway. She rested the shield against her knees and bent over it, stilling the trembling of her limbs; the child stretched against the suddenly slack muscles of her abdomen, and she tucked her cloak around it.
The tide of power she had summoned ebbed from her. Mother, how could I let myself be taken by surprise? Do I think myself invincible?
A scraping noise from the edge of the crevasse, and the sickening thuds and bumps of a falling body. The fire snapped. Bellasteros’s slow steps came around the corner and his shadow fell lightly across the shield. She looked up.
He offered her sword hilt first. “It is just as well,” he said, “that I will soon have a new one.”
She took the weapon, noting that he had cleaned it well. “My thanks yet again,” she said. She was hoarse, but she could barely remember shouting.
“No. I thank you.” He settled down beside her, removed his helmet, leaned his crisp dark hair against the rock, and closed his eyes. Beads of sweat stood like drops of pale blood on his brow. “I would,” he said plaintively, “much rather face the army of Bogazkar under the sun I know …”
His voice shook and he stopped it in his throat. She touched his arm. “We shall soon be there.”
His eyes rested on her face, her hand on his arm. The walls of rock flickered with firelight, with the light shared by their eyes, with the words unspoken that hummed in their throats.
At last Danica returned to herself. She gathered up the shield, and her strength, and rose to her feet. Beside her Bellasteros replaced his helmet, smoothed the plume, stood. “We seem to have destroyed our bridge,” he said.
“Then we shall spin a new one.” She laughed, briefly, and drew a smooth breath. The murk of the passageway thickened. She inhaled again, and the darkness gathered on the face of the shield. She drew it from the tunnel and across to the edge of the chasm, a rope of shadow reflecting the dancing crimson light of the fire. Well, this power does have its pleasures …
Bellasteros followed, his head cocked to the side, disbelieving.
The rope grew dense. Carefully Danica stepped onto it; the darkness bore her weight. She guided the shield over the crevasse, spinning the rope around and behind her. She stood in midair, supported by shadow and flame, and glanced back over her shoulder. “Are you coming?”
With a grimace Bellasteros stepped up beside her. She walked on across the crevasse and he followed, taking great care to set his feet only where her feet had been. Their footsteps were small whorls of smoke.
Then they were across. Danica tugged at the shield, and the shadow rope broke, springing back into the darkness of the tunnel from whence it had come. A small gray cloud lingered around the shield; Danica blew it away. She turned to Bellasteros with the smile of a conjuror whose trick is well done.
He bowed. “I am impressed. Do you enjoy being a demigod, my lady?”
“It is not at all what I would have thought,” she told him. “The power is too much, it seems, or not enough. A beguiling confidence that could well be misplaced.”
“I know, Danica. My power is, after all, only illusion.”
“Is it?” she asked. “Are you sure?” But he had no answer.
Side by side they turned down the passageway; in just a moment a point of light, of blessed daylight, appeared far ahead. Bellasteros hurried forward.
He was frightened, suddenly and uncontrollably frightened. Danica’s heart leaped into her throat. A faint odor of hatred filled the passage—not from him, but around him … She sprinted to catch up, but the floor here crawled with the living slime of a bat cave, lichens, droppings, half-digested prey, tiny scuttling creatures. For a moment her feet could find no purchase and she slipped back, sliding into a nightmare. His nightmare, she realized with a pang of horror, his evil dream come upon him at last.
Bellasteros was at the clear, dry rock before the doorway, reaching out for the sunlight, when the demon seized him.
It was a wan shape, a pale suggestion of a man, but it was twisted and malevolent still. Gerlac. Danica remembered only too well the hatred that had possessed Lyris. She swallowed her heart and lunged forward, shouting imprecations.
Bellasteros turned, paled, went down with one brief cry of dismay. The demon’s hands tightened on his throat, and the stench of unguents and decay filled the tunnel.
Danica pelted up, raised her sword, struck. The weapon passed cleanly through the wraith. It was only a wisp of form and motion, wasted and feeble. “It is but a sour, spiteful memory,” she called. “It has no more power …” But even as she spoke she realized that over Bellasteros it had great and deadly power. Her nostrils flared at the smell of it.
Bellasteros was choking, his face mottled red. The tunnel echoed to distant, howling laughter, channeled from hell. The demon’s face shifted, gaining substance, decaying to a skull with a gaping jaw which bent forward as if to consume the living man …
“Gerlac, no! You will not have him!” Danica shouted. She threw herself down beside Bellasteros, clasped him to her, laid her shield over them both. And the shield began to glow, not with the nearby daylight, but with the light of moon and stars. The light leaped upward, shaping itself into the form of a woman with arms outstretched.
Bellasteros looked up, and his glazed eyes filled with the light. “Mother,” he croaked, “Ashtar, Viridis, help me …”
A breeze chimed down the tunnel. The laughter stopped suddenly and invisible wings beat the air, fading, gone. Bellasteros threw the wormlike fingers from his throat. “No!” he cried, to the empty eyes, the hollow mouth. “You have no claim on me; I have none of your blood and I deny you!”
The demon moaned, growing transparent; the gleaming female form lowered her arms and the last of Gerlac’s hatre
d shredded like smoke into nothingness and was dissipated by the wind.
Bellasteros collapsed in Danica’s arms. “Mother”—he sighed—“save me from myself.” But she, too, was gone. The shield faded, humming gently, and grew inert.
Bellasteros rested, ordering his breath, and for a time Danica rested at his side. At last, the demon defeated at last … But soon she thought, enough of this … comfort, and she commented, “Foolish, to rush ahead of your guide.”
He gave her an exasperated look, cleared his throat, and sat up, pulling his brisk and confident manner like a cloak around him. His eyes, though, were haunted, dark with the shadow of hate. “How did you know who that was?” he asked, too casually.
“Adrastes sent him in the body of your wife’s serving-woman to kill me in Sabazel.” And in a few clipped words she told the tale.
He understood, and his reply was an epithet. Mouth tight, jaw stern, he struggled to his feet and offered Danica his hand. She took it. Together they walked into the light of another world.
Chapter Nine
The valley was a verdant bowl lidded by a shining blue sky. Sheer precipices closed the horizon in three directions; in the fourth was the craggy mountain slope and the dim mouth of the tunnel where Danica and Bellasteros stood.
He looked about him. “Would it be useless to point out,” he said, “that this is not the same hill or peak or mountain that we entered?”
“Quite useless,” returned Danica. She turned her face toward the sun and cleansed her nostrils with the warm scented breeze. “This is the garden of the gods.”
“And we are permitted to trespass?”
“I certainly hope so.”
Shimmering groves of olive, orange, and almond dotted the floor of the valley, and spring and fall flowers intermingled were strewn in bright patches, red, yellow, purple, across the grass. Doves murmured in the shade and the bees were busy, humming in drunken ecstasy from bloom to bloom.
On a prominence in the midst of the valley was one great tree, gnarled with age and yet laden heavily with golden fruit. “There,” breathed Bellasteros, “there….” He started off, then stopped and glanced around for Danica. “Are you still my guide?”
She shrugged. “I am not sure. But I will walk with you, gladly.”
They moved through the shade of the groves as through an airy liquid, sunlight and shadow shifting and whispering around them, dancing to the music of the wind. Danica realized she was smiling, enspelled. She did not even start when some small furry animal, alarmed by their footsteps, dashed away in an upheaval of iris blossoms. Was this, then, what it was to be a god? Peace, and beauty, and the senses soothed … But even the gods had duties in the world of men.
The tree was above them, the blue vault of the sky winking through its lacy green canopy. The smooth brown branches twined downward, offering lush handfuls of golden fruit. They had only to walk up a rough stairway of granite boulders half-buried in the swelling grass. Bellasteros took the first steps with a bound, and sparks flew from his boot.
Someone waited. A hooded figure waited in the fluid shadow of the tree. It had not been there a moment before. Bellasteros stopped abruptly between two rocks and braced himself. His hand fell to his side, groping futilely for the hilt of a sword that was not there.
Danica leaped up beside him and placed a restraining hand on his arm. The figure was that of an old woman, bent and wrinkled with age, leaning on a staff; her eyes, as clear and blue as the sky, were piercing, looking through the warriors who stood before her as if their armor, their flesh, were no more substantial than the sunlight. As if even sunlight were a substance to be molded by her glance into whatever flesh she chose.
Danica knelt, raising her palms. A laugh escaped her throat, the pleasure of a lost child found again. “Mother,” she began, but she was interrupted.
A fluttering in the sky, a hoarse cry, and a falcon spiraled between the branches of the tree to land trustingly on the woman’s outstretched arm. It settled its wings, preening itself, and turned its gaze on the warriors. Its eyes, too, were the clear blue of the sky.
Bellasteros gasped and fell to his knees at Danica’s side. His mouth dropped open, his eyes glinted, shocked, awestruck, even pleased …
Perhaps the woman spoke; perhaps it was only the wind and the rustling of the leaves. Danica felt the sound like a note of music in her mind, a strand of melody filling her senses and straining at her consciousness as if she were a ripe piece of fruit, ready to burst. The baby leaped within her, and at her side Bellasteros caught his breath in a sob.
Then the moment of harmony was gone, leaving only a humming aftertone in her thoughts. No—it was her shield that was humming. She glanced at it, at the glowing star, at Bellasteros beyond. His eyes were closed, his face drawn and pale. Did you think it would be easy, she thought, to be one with the gods?
The woman and the falcon were gone. Only the staff was left, driven upright into the thick grass between the roots of the tree. A serpent coiled around it, swaying gently, its hood spread and casting an iridescent shadow down the steps.
“Ah,” said Danica, understanding. “The staff, Marcos, take the staff …”
The color returned to his face. He rose. He stepped forward, into the shadow cast by the serpent, and the snake withered away, leaving only the gleaming scales of its shed skin wrapped about the staff.
Bellasteros set his hand on the staff. Light flared around his fingers, so that his flesh seemed to burn; light flashed in his hand, so bright that the staff, the tree, the rocky knoll itself disappeared.
Danica blinked, shook her head to clear it, and looked up. Bellasteros held in his hand the gold filigreed hilt of a sword, protruding from a smooth serpent-skin scabbard. It was Solifrax, the sword of Daimion. It might have been made for Bellasteros, so well did it fit his grasp.
He drew it, raised its gleaming arc above his head; steel so highly polished that it seemed like carved crystal. “Danica,” he cried, “look, it came to my hand.” His voice vibrated with a fierce joy. The blade caught the sunlight, snapping lightning from its tip, and the light sparkled in rippling refractions from Danica’s shield. Sunlight, not moonlight …
His eyes, midnight dark, sought the green radiance of hers, opening to it, reflecting a fleeting viridescent glimmer. He lowered the sword in salute. And, suddenly, he grinned, his teeth flashing in his bronze face. The plume on his helmet rippled in a whispering wind.
Danica raised the shield in return, laughing with him, at one with his pleasure and with the beauty of Solifrax.
Even above the enchanted valley the sun slipped implacably into the west.
*
They made their camp in a sheltered dell beneath the roots of the tree. The sun set, and velvet shadows welled from ground and sky to fill the valley. It was a living darkness, molding itself into shapes that gestured soothingly in the corner of the eye and then vanished. It was, Danica thought, like the blurred softness that surrounds an infant, the gentle movements blended of its own awareness and that of its mother, the peace that cradles it before its senses awaken to desire and pain.
Bellasteros struck a spark from the flint and watched bemusedly as the tinder caught. A tiny red flame licked upward, throwing the planes and angles of his face into sharp relief. There was no answering flame in the darkness of his eyes.
They set aside their armor to wash—separately—and they shared their ration of dried meat and bread. They plucked the rich golden fruit from the tree, feeding it in small morsels each to the other. The juice ran down their chins and they laughed like children. The stream that welled from the roots of the tree leapt and danced among the rocks at the edge of the campsite, droplets glinting like quicksilver in the light of the fire. The water was cold, slightly effervescent. “A fountain of youth?” Bellasteros hazarded.
“Perhaps,” replied Danica. “Perhaps not.”
He glanced at her with a wry sideways crumple of his mouth. “You would not even humor my fancy
?”
“Why?” she asked, brows tilted teasingly.
“Indeed,” he responded with an exaggerated sigh, “why?” He wrapped himself in his cloak and stretched out on the grass, turning his face to the sky.
Above them the tree murmured to itself in the night breeze, and its leaves summoned the stars to hang like tiny lamps among its branches. The sword in its snakeskin sheath rested beside the star-shield, both laid against a great granite boulder that sparked in quick glints of light that were not reflections of the fire. But the weapons themselves were silent.
Danica knew, with that instinct that she had so quickly learned not to question, that there was no need to post a guard. The dangers of the quest were over, and the dangers of the morrow could not penetrate to this place. Here, beyond the end of the world, she lay beside Bellasteros and for a time floated thoughtless on the slow swells of eternity.
“The stars,” he said after a time. “The stars are not quite … right. The constellations are altered somehow, the husbandman reaping instead of sowing and the hunter turning to face the boar.”
She pulled her mind back into her body, testing the boundaries of her own life. Its simplicity was gone, but still she would ask for no other. She glanced over at him. He lay with one arm flung back, cradling his head; the other rested on his chest. His fingers, long, strong, powerful fingers that held the destiny of the world, were as lightly curled as the hand of an infant clasped against its mother’s breast.
She smiled. Strange how her thoughts kept turning to infants. “And the moon is waning, somewhere,” she said. “Here there is no moon, I think. Ashtar’s eye closed in sleep— closed in worship …” If Ashtar holds Harus lovingly on her arm, she thought, they must be deities of equal power. They must be … one. And yet men fight in their names … Again the concept slipped through her mind like water through her fingers, and again she lost it. She remembered only that piercingly sweet note of harmony.
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