Lady of the Trillium

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  It displayed the alphabet again, and said, “Student Mikayla.” Mikayla didn’t get the sequence perfectly right the first time, for she hadn’t been paying attention quite as closely as Fiolon had, but she got it on the second try, and the mirror said, “Lesson One completed for student Mikayla.” Then it added, “Power level low. Hiatus for recharge.” The mirror went blank, and Mikayla and Fiolon quietly left the room, closing the door carefully behind them.

  As they went back down the tunnel Mikayla was surprised to find that her feet hurt. “How long were we standing there, anyway?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Fiolon replied, looking at the lamp he was carrying. “But it was long enough to burn a lot of lamp oil.”

  They stopped by the kitchen to return the lamp, and Enya said, with obvious relief, “There you are! Where did you two disappear to? You’re three hours late for dinner, and Master Uzun has been fretting about you.”

  “Does this mean you’re not going to feed us?” Fiolon asked anxiously. “We didn’t mean to be late; we were exploring and lost track of time.”

  Enya shook her head. “Boys!” She sighed. “No matter what the race, they’re all the same. Yes, of course I’ll feed you. You two go up to the study and assure Master Uzun that you’re alive and well, and I’ll bring your dinner up there.”

  “Thank you, Enya,” Mikayla said. “We’ll try not to be late for meals again.”

  Uzun was inclined to be querulous about their having been gone for so long.

  “I’m sorry, Uzun,” Mikayla said. “But I’ve got good news. I think we’ve located some people who can help make you a new body.”

  “Really?” Uzun said in astonishment. “So soon? Where? And who?”

  “There’s a place on Mount Gidris called the Temple of Meret,” Mikayla said.

  “That’s right,” Fiolon said, frowning, “it was on Mount Gidris. I’m not sure you should go there, Mika.”

  “I know you said it was unstable on this side,” Mikayla began.

  “Very unstable,” Uzun interjected.

  “But the Temple is on the other side, and it didn’t look at all unstable. That wasn’t an ice cave; that was a regular cave, carved out of solid rock. And if it were unstable, they wouldn’t be working there.”

  “It is true,” Uzun said slowly, “that Princess Haramis’s Talisman was in an ice cave on this side of Mount Gidris. But the cave collapsed when she removed the Talisman, and only her faithful lammergeier Hiluru saved her from dying there, with her work unfinished.”

  “Since the only way I’m likely to be able to reach the Temple of Meret at all is by lammergeier,” Mikayla pointed out, “I can fly out at the first sign that the north side of the peak is unstable.”

  “That’s true,” Fiolon said. “But I still have a bad feeling about this.”

  Mikayla fingered the green ribbon around her neck. “I’ll bespeak you every night,” she said. “I promise. That way you’ll know how I’m doing, and you can tell Master Uzun.”

  Fiolon looked at her in surprise. “You expect me to stay here without you?” he asked. “What if the Lady Haramis comes back?”

  “If she comes back, then you can leave,” Mikayla said.

  “Since she’ll undoubtedly throw me out,” Fiolon pointed out, “I’ll have to.”

  “But it doesn’t look as though she’s coming back anytime soon,” Mikayla said, adding, “and you can check every day in the ice mirror. That way you’ll have some warning of her return, and you can tell me so that I can get back before she does.

  “But the main reason I want you to stay here is so that Master Uzun won’t be alone,” she continued. “He can’t go down to the ice mirror and see how the Lady Haramis is doing; if you aren’t here, all he can do is sit here in the study and brood. And that wouldn’t be fair to him at all!”

  Fiolon nodded. “You’re right, Mika. I should have thought of that.”

  Uzun said formally, “You are welcome to remain here as my guest, Lord Fiolon. I would welcome the opportunity to share my music with you—and I believe you mentioned some music boxes from the ruins of the Vanished Ones?”

  Fiolon’s face lit up. “I’d be delighted to learn anything you could teach me about music, Master Uzun. And I’ll be happy to share the music boxes with you.”

  “Good,” Mikayla said. “That’s settled then.” She added to Fiolon, “And when you check on Haramis in the mirror, you can continue your reading lessons.”

  “Reading lessons?” Uzun asked. “Don’t you already know how to read?”

  “Not the language of the Vanished Ones,” Fiolon said. “The mirror seems to have some sort of teaching program, in addition to its ability to let you watch a person or people and to show you where they are. Come to think of it, Mika, I’ll probably be able to see you in the mirror. It should know who you are from the language lesson.”

  “And even if it doesn’t,” Mikayla pointed out, “it knows where the Temple of Meret is.” She tried to figure out how the mirror’s ability to locate people might work. If it could view only people it knew … “How did the mirror know who I meant the first time I asked to view Haramis?” she wondered aloud.

  It was Uzun who answered that. “It had been asked to view her before,” he explained. “Orogastus used the mirror to keep track of Haramis and her sisters. She told me about it.”

  “I wonder how he first identified them to it,” Mikayla mused.

  The harp was silent.

  The next morning Mikayla went down to the mirror with Fiolon. Haramis was awake, but still seemed to be trapped back in her past. She was still asking where Immu and Uzun were, and what was going on, and was the army of Labornok close by, and why wasn’t anyone telling her anything.

  “She sounds really cross,” Mikayla said. “Even though her speech is still rather slurred, you can tell.” She sighed. “I know it’s selfish of me, but I’m glad she’s not here. At least at the Citadel there are a lot of people who can take turns taking care of her.”

  “That’s true,” Fiolon said, thinking it over. “There aren’t many servants here, and they all seem to have plenty of work just keeping this place running. It would be awkward to have her be sick like that here.”

  “Very,” Mikayla agreed. “I bet everyone would expect me to take care of her—and I’m not a good nurse. Besides, Haramis doesn’t even like me!”

  Fiolon looked back at the screen. “At the moment I’d say she still doesn’t remember you. Maybe when she recovers, you’ll get the chance to make a new start with her.”

  “Maybe,” Mikayla agreed glumly. “But I don’t think it will help. I don’t think I could ever be the kind of person she would like.”

  Fiolon silently patted her on the shoulder, and then had the mirror start Lesson Two of the reading program.

  At lunchtime, Mikayla said good-bye to Uzun, surprised at how reluctant she was to leave him. I guess it’s mostly because he’s the only one here who has been willing to accept me as I am, without pressuring me to change into a copy of Haramis. “You and Fiolon take care of each other,” she said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I’ll be back as soon as I can with your new body.”

  “Fare well, Princess,” Uzun said. “And be careful.”

  “I shall,” Mikayla said, “but I really don’t think that side of the peak is unstable.”

  “The peak may not be,” Fiolon muttered, “but the Lords of the Air alone know about the people.”

  15

  The lammergeier dropped her off on the path, just out of sight of the Temple, and Mikayla followed the path to the Temple’s main entrance. The land felt different on this side of the mountain, almost wild, as if it had no Archimage and never had. But surely Haramis is Archimage of Labornok as well as Ruwenda, Mikayla thought.

  The Temple was easy to find; it seemed to radiate energy, although it was energy of a type Mikayla had never encountered before. It didn’t draw power from either the land or the air, and the energy t
hat she sensed did not seem to act upon the land. It floated in the air, like the fog had at the Tower when she had been working weather magic. Yes, she realized, that was what it reminded her of; it seemed to be some sort of excess, something unheeded, shaken loose from whatever the primary magic being worked was.

  Casting a glamour to make herself unremarkable, as Uzun had taught her, she went inside quietly and followed the sound of voices. The outermost portion of the Temple was an enormous room. The ceiling was so high that Mikayla could barely see it, and while the room was full of pillars, fashioned in many different forms, the pillars were far enough apart that a full-grown lammergeier could fly between them with its wings fully extended.

  Mikayla examined the pillars she passed on her way through the hall. The ones nearest the entrance were an icy blue white and were shaped like stalactites and stalagmites meeting in the center. The only light in this hall was the daylight spilling in from outside, so it got darker as she went farther into the cave. But there was still enough light to see that the design of the pillars changed as one moved away from the entrance. The ones farther in were many different colors and were in the form of various types of plants—mostly trees, although Mikayla did recognize a few flowers among them. And a good many of them were things she didn’t recognize. She wished she were looking at them through the mirror and could ask it to identify them.

  The next room in had a higher floor and lower ceiling and was lit by a pair of oil lamps hanging from the ceiling at the front of the room. There was a dais below the lamps, hidden on one side by a curtain; the rest of the room had wooden benches decorated with elaborately carved designs set on both sides of a center aisle. The benches were nearly all filled, but Mikayla found a seat in a back corner. No one seemed to notice her; people were talking to their neighbors and presumably waiting for something to happen.

  Then two people in long black robes with golden masks covering their faces entered and took their places on the dais. One of them said something brief that Mikayla didn’t catch, and the people in the room all sat down and grew quickly silent.

  Then they started chanting, and everyone else joined in. After a few minutes Mikayla found herself singing along with everyone else—even though she had never heard either the words or the tune before in her life. This was not even a style of worship she had ever encountered before. It was as if the chant was in the room, and if you were in the room—even if you were wrapped in a dark cloak, hidden in an unlit corner, out of everyone’s sight—you were part of the chant. Or maybe it was part of you.

  “Meret, Thou Lady of the Southern Peak, have mercy upon us.”

  “Meret, Thou who makest the Noku, the River of Life, to rise from the Underworld to give life to the Land, have mercy upon us.”

  “Meret, Thou who savest us from the venom of the Worm, have mercy upon us.”

  “Meret, Thou who …”

  The chanting was simple and repetitious; anyone—however simpleminded, unmusical, or unfamiliar with the entire idiom—could pick it up in a few minutes. Mikayla wondered vaguely if it had been designed that way on purpose.

  In any event, it was making Mikayla feel very strange. She felt as though she were falling asleep, but she couldn’t be, because she was still singing. Still her eyes kept closing despite her best efforts to keep them open, and her head dropped forward until her chin touched her chest. This is magic, she realized suddenly. It’s not a type I’m familiar with, but this is definitely magic. She concentrated long enough to get a basic personal shield around herself and her thoughts, and then, feeling safe enough for the moment, relaxed back into the chant.

  After about half an hour, the chanting stopped, and one of the figures in the golden masks, a man by his voice, began speaking. Some of what he said was familiar to Mikayla; she remembered reading bits of it in several of the books in Haramis’s library. But as the man went on speaking she realized that his account differed from the ones she had read. At one point, she found herself opening her mouth and saying aloud, “That’s not true!” Fortunately she didn’t say it loudly, and her voice was lost in the chorus of folk loudly agreeing with their leader. At least now Mikayla was awake, free of whatever spell the chant held.

  He was a convincing speaker, she had to admit that. He seemed completely sincere, and quite possibly was. But the doctrines he was advocating, such as the need for sacrifice, and the efficacy of blood (he was a bit vague about whose blood) to wash away the troubles that beset the people, were centuries out-of-date. The one thing of which Mikayla was perfectly sure was that the books she had read about this sort of religion were old, very, very old. And Haramis had told her that blood sacrifice had been stopped in Ruwenda long before even the Archimage Binah was born. So why was anyone advocating it now?

  Well, this is Labornok, not Ruwenda, Mikayla thought. But Labornok and Ruwenda were united almost two hundreds ago, when Prince Antar married Princess Anigel. And Prince Antar was the only surviving member of the Labornoki royal family. I think.

  Granted, as the youngest princess, I never really studied history or government, but surely Labornok is ruled from the Citadel. How has this religion survived here?

  Still, if this is what it takes to get Uzun a proper body, I guess I should be glad it survived, however it did. And if Haramis used her own blood to put Uzun into the harp, then blood magic can’t be totally forbidden or wrong.

  Besides, there was magic in the room; Mikayla could clearly feel the power being raised, and there was no blood being shed here now. She was no stranger to power; even as a child she had used it sometimes for simple things such as mind-speaking to Fiolon, although she had never realized that what she was doing was magic until Haramis started training her.

  But the power with which she was familiar was a solitary power, raised by one person, even though that person might be drawing on things outside herself, such as boosting the power by sitting in direct sunlight, for example, and using the sun’s warmth. And since Haramis had started her on the cram course in “How to Be an Archimage in Many Difficult Lessons,” Mikayla had learned much more about how to use other power sources for magic.

  But what she had learned from Haramis was still basically a solitary magic, linked with the land, but not with other people. Here was a group of people being molded into a single source of power—even Mikayla, despite her training and her shields, could feel herself being sucked in. Who controlled this power, and what was being done with it?

  The man stopped talking, and the chanting started again. This time, although the congregation was chanting the same words as before, as was the man who had been speaking, the other person at the front of the room—and several other women, judging by their voices—were singing something in counterpoint in a different language. Mikayla couldn’t see any other woman there, but there was the curtain on one side of the dais. Perhaps the singers were hidden behind it. The overall effect was exotic and mysterious, perhaps, Mikayla thought, even spooky.

  Despite her unease, the chant took hold of Mikayla again. It soon seemed to her that it had always been with her and would go on forever; she could hardly remember a life that had not been spent in this room, chanting along with everyone else. Mikayla did not notice when she fell asleep.

  “Well, what have we here? A gift from the Goddess?”

  Mikayla sat up, blinking, and focused on the young man standing over her. It took her a moment to orient herself, to remember that she was in the Temple of Meret and to realize that she had fallen asleep on the bench where she had been sitting. The man, apparently about three or four years older than she was, still held a broom carelessly in one hand. He must have been sweeping the room, Mikayla thought. I guess my glamour wore off while I was asleep, so he found me when he reached this corner.

  “Looking for someplace warm to sleep?” the young man asked, leering unpleasantly at her. “You can sleep with me, girl—I’ll bet we will become good friends.” He dropped the broom against the bench, leaned over and pinned
Mikayla against the wall, and kissed her. At first, shock held her motionless, but when he tried to force his tongue between her lips, she was overcome by outrage. Making a fist, she slugged him in the stomach as hard as she could. He released her and doubled over, trying to get his breath back.

  “How dare you?” she exclaimed, breaking free of him and retreating toward the center of the room so that he couldn’t pin her in the corner again. “Have you gone mad? You can’t treat me like that!”

  “By the Worm, what’s the matter with you, girl?” he snarled, getting his breath back and approaching her again, albeit more warily than before. “You’re carrying on as if you were a royal virgin!”

  “I am!” Mikayla snarled back.

  “Of course you are,” he snapped sarcastically, “and I’m the Husband of the Goddess Meret!”

  “Really?” a dry voice interrupted from the front of the room. “Strange; I thought I held that office.” From his voice, Mikayla was pretty sure that this was the man who had led the chanting. He was dressed in a long black robe, but he no longer wore the gold mask over his face.

  Mikayla decided that she liked his face. He had gray hair and regular features, and the lines on his face hinted at a sense of humor. “What seems to be the problem, Timon?”

  “She”—Timon indicated Mikayla scornfully—“says she’s a royal virgin.”

  The Husband of the Goddess regarded her thoughtfully. Then he made a sudden gesture with his hands, his fingers twisting in a pattern Mikayla could not follow. A blue light surrounded her, and she gasped.

  “You have nothing to fear, child,” the Husband said, “as long as you tell the truth. Are you a virgin?”

  “Yes,” Mikayla replied. The blue glow remained steady.

  “As you can see, Timon,” the Husband said, “she is a virgin. And virgins are scarce enough here that we don’t want to lose one.” He looked sternly at the young man. “So forget whatever you were thinking about her. And leave her alone in the future.” Timon glowered, but bowed his head in apparent acquiescence.