by Kage Baker
He fell silent. Smith drank more wine, remembering.
“Have you ever been in love like that?” Willowspear inquired at last.
“Not really,” said Smith. “I never stayed anywhere long enough. My mother died when I was a baby, so… my aunt’s family took me in. And I had to work for my keep, so I was apprenticed out young. And one night I was coming back from delivering an order and … some thieves jumped me. I killed all three of ’em. Standing there with bodies all around, scared out of my wits at what I’d done. So I ran away to sea. And later I was in the army. And later still •… so, I was never any place to meet the kind of girl you settle down with. Lots of women, but, you know … you both just get down to business. It isn’t especially romantic.”
A silence fell. Finally, Smith said, “You could go home. I could go on and rescue the lady. I haven’t got as much to lose, and I’m better with weapons.”
“I don’t doubt that,” said Willowspear. “But what would my mother say, Smith?”
“You think Fenallise would miss me?” Smith blinked. It had never occurred to him.
“Of course she would,” Willowspear replied. “And I am still bound by honor. Lady Svnae’s Mother raised me, Smith. She guided me on the path that brought me to my own mother and my wife. If Her daughter is in danger, how can I walk away?”
“I guess you couldn’t,” Smith agreed.
“It may even be,” Willowspear said dreamily, “that this is a quest, and She means me to travel on. She knows the journey of each star in the heavens, and all the journeys of the little streams to the great sea; and each man’s path through life, She knows, Smith. Even yours. Even mine.”
A hollow voice spoke out of the darkness.
“You won’t leave off worshipping her, will you?” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Give me some of that wine.”
“Yes, my lord.” Willowspear propped him up. Smith tilted the bottle. Lord Ermenwyr drank, and settled back with a sigh.
“ ‘Yes, my lord,’ he says. Why should I be your lord? All my life, even when I was a snotty little thing in long clothes, there you were all big-eyed watching my family like we were kings and queens,” said Lord Ermenwyr hoarsely. “You and the servants. Yes, my lord, Yes, Master, Kneel to your Lady Mother! All her damn disciples climbing our mountain on their knees, expecting her to solve all their problems for them!”
“But She always did,” said Willowspear.
“That’s the worst part,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “She does. You know what it’s like, growing up with a mother who knows everything? You, you look in her eyes, and you see—everything you really are—”
He went into a coughing fit. Willowspear scrambled away, returning unsteadily through the darkness with his medicine kit and the box containing Lord Ermenwyr’s medication. He drew a sealed glass jar from the kit and gave it a vigorous shake. To Smith’s astonishment, it at once began to glow with a chilly green light.
“I thought you couldn’t do magic,” he said.
“I can’t,” Willowspear replied. He fitted a medicine cartridge into the hummingbird needle and gave Lord Ermenwyr an injection. “Have you ever seen a phosphorescent tide? It works on the same principle. Lie still now, my lord.”
The lordling subsided and lay breathing harshly, looking even more like a corpse in the unearthly light.
“Oh, put it out,” he demanded. “I want to sleep.”
“At once, my lord.” Tight-lipped, Willowspear set the jar in the box and closed the lid.
“And you can just get that look off your face.” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice floated out of the abrupt darkness. “You know I have insomnia. Did you know that, Smith? Chronic insomniac, ever since I was a baby.”
“Really.” Smith lay down again, drew up his blanket.
“Nothing helped but sleeping with Mother and Daddy. I hated the night nursery. Eyrdway came and took horrible shapes at the foot of my cot, until Svnae got up and hit him with her wooden dragon. I ran out the door, down the long dark halls, right between the legs of the guards. I scrambled into bed with Mother and Daddy.
“Daddy growled, but Mother was ever so gentle in that ruthless way of hers and explained I couldn’t stop in their bed, but she’d take me back and stay with me until I was asleep. The servants made her up a bed by my cot. She told me we were going to go to sleep. I closed my eyes tight, but I could hear my heart beating, and that always scared me, because what if it stopped?
“So I opened my eyes at last. Mummy was asleep.
“And I thought: Mummy knows everything, even Daddy’s servants say so, and she is all the Good in the world. And she’s asleep. What happens to the world when Good sleeps?
“I’ll bet you never wondered about that, did you, Willowspear?”
“No, my lord, I never did.” Willowspear sounded exhausted.
“Well, I did. I’ve been scared to sleep ever since.”
“My lord,” said Smith. “We’ve got hard work to do tomorrow.”
A sullen silence fell, and remained.
Once or twice there were screams in the forest, brief ones. Smith told himself it was animals, and went back to sleep.
He was cautious when he crawled out in the dawn, all the same.
“Child of the Sun.”
Smith met the gaze of six pairs of red eyes, at the level of his own before he swung himself over the rail and dropped to the ground. He nearly landed on a motionless body, and staggered back; but it was only a wood deer, or had been, for its head had been torn off and it had been clumsily, if thoroughly gutted.
“We hunted,” said Cutt. “Now our master can have broth.”
“That was a good idea,” said Smith, looking up at Cutt. He gaped as he saw the single green dart that protruded from between Cutt’s eyes. “Hold still.”
Very carefully indeed, he reached up and pulled the dart out. Cutt made a strange noise. It was something like a deep note played on a bowstring, and something like the distant boom of ice breaking in polar seas.
“We hunted,” he repeated, in a satisfied kind of way.
By the time the sun had risen above the trees, it looked down on the Kingfisher’s Nest inching its way up the portage trail on the massive shoulders of Cutt, Crish, Clubb, Stabb, Strangel, and Smosh, preceded by Smith and Willowspear hacking madly away at the nearer edge of the forest canopy to make them room. Smith had only the kindling hatchet and Willowspear the largest of the carving knives from the galley, so the work was not going as quickly as it might have done.
Nevertheless, before the sun stood at midday they had arrived at the top of the bluff, sweating and triumphant, and by afternoon the Kingfisher’s Nest was clanking away upriver at last. Her owner, who had made the whole remarkable journey in his bunk, fastened in with sheets like a dead chieftain in a particularly splendid tomb, was sound asleep and hence unconscious of his good fortune.
But he was sitting up in bed and smoking by the time Smith moored that evening and went below.
“Well done, Smith,” he called cheerily. “I must remember to buy you a nice big shiny machete of your very own when this is all over. One for Willowspear, too.”
“So you didn’t die again, eh?” Smith leaned against the bulkhead. His arms felt as though he had been hammering steel all day. “Great.”
“Must be all this damned fresh air,” Lord Ermenwyr said, and blew a smoke ring. “Our humble servant Willowspear actually handled meat to prepare me a cup of broth, can you believe it? And he grilled the ribs of whatever-it-was for you. They’re in the kitchen.”
“Galley,” said Smith automatically.
“In the covered blue dish,” Willowspear called.
With a grateful heart Smith hurried in and found that Willowspear had indeed inherited his mother’s ability to cook. He carried a plate back to the lordling’s stateroom.
“How much farther is this monastery?” he inquired, slicing off a portion with his knife. “I went aloft three times today, and I couldn’t spot a building anywhere.”
“Oh, well, it’s not what you or I would think of as a building,” said Lord Ermenwyr dismissively. Willowspear looked indignant.
“The brothers live in bowers, open to the air,” he said. “They need no more than that, because they own nothing the air can hurt.”
“Except for writings,” said Lord Ermenwyr.
“They have a library,” Willowspear conceded.
“So they do have one building?” Smith inquired through a full mouth.
“No; the library is housed in a deep cave,” Willowspear explained. “All the Lady’s epistles are archived there.”
“So … will I have any way of knowing when we’re close?”
“Oh, you can’t miss, it,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “There’s this whacking great rock spire, and the river goes behind it through a gorge. There’s even a landing.”
“Great,” said Smith. “The sooner we can get this over with, the better.”
He told them about the dart he had found on Cutt. Lord Ermenwyr scowled.
“Nine Hells. I’d have thought the Steadfast Orphans were all at Hlinjerith for the big race war by now. Well, perhaps the boys got them all.”
“We have to go past Hlinjerith on our way back!” said Smith.
“Don’t get excited! I’ll be downstairs here, well out of sight. If you just sail past, they shouldn’t bother you,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “Other than shooting at you a little.”
“They would do no such thing,” said Willowspear severely. “They’re surely going there to protect a sacred place and for no other purpose.”
“But if you time it right with the, er, tide and all that nautical business, they’ll be past before you know it,” Lord Ermenwyr assured him.
Mounting aloft the next day, as a hot wind filled the sails with the scent of forest and plain, no least hint of sea, Smith beheld Rethkast.
It looked like a fist of rock standing in the land, an improbable mountain upthrust alone, towering and strangely streaked with colors. Smith could see no sign of habitation at first, though as he stared he thought he could make out a certain regularity of green along the valley floor below the rock, in long lines. He watched it until a range of hills rose to obscure everything but the rock, and told Willowspear about it when he came down.
“That would be the orchards, and the garden,” said Willowspear, looking pleased.
“What do they grow there?” Smith inquired.
“Healing herbs,” Willowspear replied. “The Lady sends them seeds and cuttings with Her letters, cultivars of Her own creation, whose purpose it has not yet pleased Her to reveal to us. They have kept this garden for thirty years in Her name, in this open land where the air is mild and warm.”
“Thirty years?” Smith was astonished. “We can’t grow anything longer than two years, before the land goes dead.”
“What do you mean, goes dead?”
“Well, you know. The first year your cabbages come up fine, then the second year they’re not so big, and the next year all this chalky stuff comes up out of the ground, and the cabbages are tiny and yellow,” said Smith. “Nothing for it then but to move on. The only place that doesn’t happen is in the grainlands around Troon, because the barley grows itself. We don’t do anything but harvest it.”
“You’ve never heard of crop rotation?”
“What’s crop rotation?”
Willowspear turned and stared at him, saying nothing for a moment. At last he said, “Merciful Mother of All Things, no wonder your people go through the world like locusts!”
“What the hell’s crop rotation? Does it have anything to do with irrigation? Because we know how to do that; our aqueducts will take water anywhere,” said Smith defensively. “We’ve made deserts bloom, you know. Just not for more than two years.”
“But you can’t—” began Willowspear.
He turned and staggered away from the helm, and Smith jumped into place at the wheel. “We know how to steer, too,” he snapped.
Willowspear collapsed on a barrel, holding his head in his hands. “All this time, I thought—”
“That you’re better than us,” said Smith. “I know.”
“No! I’ve been trying to teach your people the Way of the Unwearied Mother. I’ve been teaching them meditation and prayer. What I should have been teaching them all along was simply how to garden,” said Willowspear.
Smith shrugged. “I never thought it was as easy as just saying the Green Saint’s name over and over again, whatever you told me.”
“If you only took the filth you dump into the sea and put it on your fields instead—” Willowspear rose and paced to and fro on the deck in his agitation.
“So I guess interracial orgies aren’t the answer, either?”
“You don’t—there must he love. There must be tolerance, and faith. But—there must be much more, or none of it will do any good! It’s complicated.”
“Well, nothing is simple, son,” Smith told him. “Not one damned thing in this world is simple.”
Willowspear did not reply, staring ahead at the spire of Rethkast.
“It’s just as well you figured this out now, since you’re going to be a father soon,” Smith added. “By the way … was that sorcery the other night, that cold light in the jar?”
“No,” said Willowspear. “It was the powdered bodies of certain insects in a solution of certain salts. Mix them, and the mixture glows. When the powder precipitates out, the glow fades and dies. The Lady’s invention.” He looked oddly at Smith. “But She must purchase the jars from your people. The Yendri have never learned how to make glass.”
As they drew nearer, yet they were driven back; for now the river narrowed between high hills, and the current had greater force. Yet the Kingfisher’s Nest put on all her canvas, and with a fair wind and the steam oars going at full speed they made way at last, and moored in a backwater where a landing pier did indeed welcome them.
“So where’s this back door?” Smith inquired, staring upward at the sheer rock wall.
“We have to climb up and knock,” said Lord Ermenwyr, setting his hat at a rakish angle. “How’s this look? Suitably adventurous? An appropriate ensemble for sweeping a lady off her feet?”
“I guess so. How do we get up there?”
“There’s stairs, concealed with fiendish cleverness,” the lordling replied.
“Here,” said Willowspear, pointing, and after Smith had looked for a moment, he spotted them: rough steps cut out of the rock, angled in such a way as to be nearly invisible in the crazy-swirled colors in the strata. They moved up at a steep angle. There were no handholds, nor any rail that Smith could see.
“Boys, you’ll wait here,” Lord Ermenwyr told his bodyguard. They nodded gloomily and stood to attention on the deck.
“What about this threat we’re rescuing your sister from?” Smith inquired. “Wouldn’t they be useful if we have to fight somebody?”
Lord Ermenwyr checked his reflection in a pocket mirror. “I have to admit, Smith, I may have exaggerated just the tiniest bit about the amount of danger Svnae is in,” he said. “It’s actually more sort of an awfully embarrassing fix, to be honest.”
“I see,” said Willowspear, in tones of ice.
“No, you don’t, and don’t go all peevish on me like that!” said Lord Ermenwyr. “All will be revealed in good time. For now let’s just mind our own little businesses and obey our liege lord, shall we?”
He started up the stairs. After looking at each other a moment, Smith and Willowspear sighed and followed him.
They climbed steadily for several minutes, as the stairs zigzagged first left and then right, but Smith was unable to spot anything resembling a doorway or even a cave mouth.
“Can’t imagine who carved out all these fiendishly concealed stairs,” he grumbled, “unless it was one of us poor benighted Children of the Sun. We’re so clever with little engineering feats like this.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Lord Ermenwyr, gasping for breath
. He leaned on the wall at a slightly wide place and motioned them past him. “Go on, damn you. But you’ll wait at the top until I get there! I get to knock on the door.”
“I have had an epiphany, Smith,” said Willowspear, as they ascended.
“Really?” Smith panted.
“There is a parable the Lady tells. I will translate it for you. The trevani Luvendashyll is traveling through the forest, he comes to a village, he sees a woman lamenting. ‘How can I help you?’ he asks her, ‘What is wrong?’ and she says, he thinks she says, ‘Oh, kind sir, I need wisdom!’
“He says, ‘My child, you must travel a long road to find wisdom, for it is not easy to get. You must struggle, and suffer, and speak to all you meet and study their ways, learn what is in their hearts; and even then you will only have begun to find wisdom,’ and the woman says back, ‘No, no, that can’t be right! Can’t you give me wisdom?’
“And Luvendashyll says, ‘I have a little wisdom, my child, but it cannot be given so easily. You would have to become my disciple, and give all you owned to those who are less fortunate than you are, and travel with me to the ends of the earth, and hear me disputing with other trevanion; and perhaps in twenty years I could give you a little wisdom. Or it may be that the wisdom of other trevanion would seem better, and you might leave me and apprentice yourself to them for a score of years, in order that they might give you wisdom.’
“And the woman is angry, she says, ‘That’s ridiculous! Why should I have to do all that to get a little wisdom?’ So Luvendashyll is offended, and he says, ‘Impatient woman! You do not know what I had to go through for the wisdom I possess. I studied with my master from my earliest childhood, for his wisdom. I spent many days lying in a dark place listening to the Seven Stories of Jish, repeating them for my master until I knew them by heart, to obtain his wisdom. I fasted and prayed and stood on one leg in the bitter cold of winter, that I might be worthy of his wisdom. I walked on cinders and scored my back with a knotted thong, and yet in the end I was granted a little wisdom only, for my master did not like to part with his great wisdom.’