The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods)

by Barbara Friend Ish

*Red and black?* Rishan broadcast. *That doesn’t sound like Banbagor… Who else could—No.*

  *What?* Letitia broadcast.

  *No Fíana clan would stage an attack on you—certainly not so close to the investiture. Not even Be Chuille would use sorcery. Surely there would have been a chal-lenge…*

  *We lost people from every clan,* Letitia broadcast. *Who would sacrifice their own—*

  Rishan broadcast a word I didn’t understand, but which I suspected was a Tanaan profanity. I hoped I would remember it later.

  *Where are you now?* he broadcast.

  *On the barge again, headed downriver. Mabon says we should reach Irisa morning after tomorrow night.*

  Rishan nodded, somewhere in his house at Tyra. *How many of your guard remain?*

  *Four, not including Iminor or the harpist.*

  Irrational resentment flared in me. Yes, I’d introduced myself as ard-harpist, but then I’d saved her life. And yet she reduced me to the inconsequential thing.

  *The harpist?* This time Rishan’s broadcast crackled with distaste, which I knew was meant for me. *The zhamin with the—*

  Zhamin is a Tanaan word for which I’d never heard adequate translation, though I knew it meant human—and not in a complimentary sense. But Rishan’s venomous broadcast shifted abruptly into an image of a golden-feathered eagle clutching a redsnake in its talons. A moment of arcane consciousness raced through me.

  Rishan was a seer, the stories said. Had I just become entangled in a vision?

  *Damn it, I’m sorry,* Rishan broadcast. *I had hoped you might avoid him.*

  *Papa, he saved my life. For the first few minutes he was the only one who understood what was going on.*

  Another eagle-image blasted through my mind: this one was as black as moon-dark. Rishan swore again.

  *I’m dressing,* he broadcast. *We ride within the hour. I will be in Irisa within fourteen hours of you, Daughter. Secure the gates the minute you ride through, stay on the barge until you get there, secure Ériu House as well. And by all the goddess—by Endeáril’s name DON’T assume you know what that harpist intends. I swear demons follow him.*

  I sighed. No man was ever enhanced by eavesdropping.

  *I promise, Papa,* Letitia broadcast. *Be careful. I’ll see you in two days.*

  *Be safe.*

  Letitia opened her eyes. I was snared in her gaze before I could look away, still too strange with that little hit of arcane consciousness to guard against the wonder of her eyes. A door inside me that had long stood closed creaked open, just a bit.

  “Mora,” I heard myself say. “You weren’t sleeping.” I should have given it a question-inflection, but the opportunity was past by the time I realized my mistake.

  “Talking to Papa,” she replied. “To Mor Rishan.”

  “You’re a telepath,” I said, with grand mastery of the obvious.

  She nodded solemnly. “It didn’t seem to be of any practical use, before tonight.” She looked around the barge, at the guards patiently plying their poles. “A lot of things didn’t.”

  I tried and failed to imagine a world in which guards didn’t seem as necessary as water to a royal. I wondered where the wizard who should have been watching over her was tonight. But a royal house’s security arrangements are its own business, not topics of polite conversation with outsiders. My curiosity didn’t matter. Instead I reached for the thing that would keep her talking, driven by a wish for a connection I didn’t understand.

  “Sometimes it’s impossible to recognize what’s real.”

  “Until afterward,” she agreed.

  I nodded.

  She curled up in the middle of a pool of torchlit silk, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Mindtalk works better at home—when we’re together.”

  “Really?” I said. “Why?”

  “Why shouldn’t it? We’re farther apart.”

  “Yes, but it’s not as if you’re using your ears,” I pointed out. “Maybe it’s only harder because you expect it to be.”

  Aether knows no distance, after all. But she frowned at me, as if I had overstepped my bounds again. Finally she looked away, and I sighed. The legends do not paint the Tanaan as quite so touchy.

  But the flickering torchlight fell softly on her, making her hair glow and her dress gleam, and I remembered that she had been in mortal danger and seen dozens of her people, doubtless many of them friends, die tonight. And those are not things to which women are accustomed.

  What was needed here was a new topic: something neutral.

  “You began telling me, earlier, about the book you were reading,” I said. “It belonged to the mora Carina?”

  She looked at me again, and in her alien eyes I saw regret. “Let me see—here.”

  She reached for the book, opened it to a page someplace in the middle. “’Each moment holds the opportunity to step back onto the path of the gods, to choose the gifts with which the gods created us,’” she read. “’Redemption may lie in great acts, but the possibility of harmony with the gods is inherent in each breath.’”

  Wonder shivered through me; my throat closed up. It had been so long since I’d felt the Hand of the goddess on me—but this passage, from Letitia’s lips, felt like an invitation to return to Her. Holy Lady, was it possible I had actually stumbled onto my proper path—here, in the wilds of Fíana?

  “You’ve read it?” Letitia said.

  I was half enmeshed in arcane consciousness already; as far as I could tell, she and I were the only people still on the barge, and the river we traversed might or might not occupy the mundane world.

  I shook my head, altogether snared in her gaze. “Beautiful ideas. Who wrote it?”

  “A man named Cullinn.”

  Disappointment crashed down on me: I knew that name. The Cullinns ruled Ilesia before the arrival of the true gods—before Ilesia was called Ilesia. Little has been heard of them since. The conclusion was unavoidable: this work predated the true religion; this call was not for me. A chilly night on an unfamiliar river resumed existence around us.

  And yet I couldn’t shake a sense that my path lay here, with Letitia. Why?

  “You know his work, then,” Letitia said, as if I’d guessed a surprise she’d planned, disappointingly ahead of schedule.

  “I… No. I’ve heard the name. But his philosophy—” Abruptly I bumped up against the edges of my Tanaan vocabulary and had to search. “Is… earlier than the arrival of our gods.”

  Letitia frowned pensively. “So Bealla don’t read his work anymore?”

  I offered her a regretful smile. “Modern sages teach that who a man is… is in the hands of the gods. His stars ordain his fate.”

  Her pensive frown shifted to an expression of annoyance. “So everything we’re ever going to do—is already known? That can’t be!”

  “Of course it can. Why do you think seers dream true?”

  “Why do you bother to get out of bed in the morning?” Letitia retorted.

  “What?” I blurted.

  “If you can predict what is going to happen to you, for the rest of your life, why bother going through the motions? If I had known how this trip was going to turn out, sure as the Lord breathes I would have stayed home!”

  And there it was. Why was this harder to face than a contingent of undead warriors on battle-trained destriers? Abruptly I was like the canopy of an airship when the fuel runs out; I found it necessary to sit down on the deck.

  Why bother going through the motions? If my stars, which seemingly marked me for ard-righ but had instead concealed a lifetime of infamy and shame, were correctly understood from the outset, would everyone around me have built me up so high, then turned away when the inevitable fall came? Why didn’t knowing I was shot through with evil, somehow cursed by too-portentous stars, make it easier to bear? Would I have done anything of importance differently, if I’d understood—or was I doomed to carry out this string of damnable, ignominious failures, no matter what the contents of my mind?


  “Why do you bother, if that is what you believe?” Letitia said, softly this time.

  My throat clenched. I manufactured a laugh.

  “Damned if I know,” I said in Ilesian, and stared out at the north shore again.

  “Letitia?” Iminor said from the front of the barge. He laid down his pole and threaded his way to the rear, fathomless eyes flicking from her to me and back. “Is everything all right?”

  Letitia nodded. “We were just… discussing philosophy.”

  Iminor nodded solemnly, but his face darkened into distrust. And suddenly it was just like so many conversations in so many ballrooms in Ilnemedon, only without the pleasure of having the woman. I rose, brushing dust from my hands.

  “Sian, if I may, I’d be pleased to take a turn with the pole,” I said.

  The Tan bowed, but his suspicious eyes didn’t change. “Indeed, ouirr, I thank you.”

  4. Who Treads Here

  No mortal eye has seen them, but the poet’s soul, it knows:

  Fáilias and Murias, Finias and Gorias

  Earth’s treasure, Sea’s delight, City of Wind and Soul of Fire

  Who treads here will return transformed

  Or mad, or not at all.

  The song had been in my head all day. As the barge approached the city of Irisa, I discovered I was humming. I’d been through here on my way out to Tyra; and of all people, I should know better than to believe old songs. There was no reason for this place to cast some sort of glamour over me, as if I were a farmer on his first trip to Ilnemedon.

  But if a twelvenight of traveling up and then back down the river had lent Fíana a certain familiarity, something about the city and its environs ensnared me in untoward wonder: some aura, perhaps, of centuries upon centuries of people descended from gods; people whose names graced songs that I had studied and performed. Maybe it was nothing more than the soft magic of watching the sun rise over these storied lands. Whatever the reason, today my whole being echoed with the wonder of the place in which I traveled. I peered around each bend of the river as we approached Irisa, naïvely open to all of it, even while some cynical portion of my mind strove to hold itself apart.

  Every so often for the past hour, the barge had floated past derelict towns and unused harbors. Canted stone turrets and crumbling houses peered from gorse riotous with yellow blossoms; decaying piers shrugged into still waters amid fleets of cranes. I seemed to be the only one surprised by the decay.

  Broad smudges of smoke on the western horizon captured everyone’s attention, however. I would have thought the smoke portended nothing more serious than early-season brush fires, a regular phenomenon on the plains of the human lands; but the taut faces on the barge suggested nothing normally burned here. If the song had a basis in reality, then, it must be Gorias, not Finias, that the composer styled “Soul of Fire”. For a pleasant change, the descriptives in the descending half of the verse were correctly paired with their referents. It almost compensated for the fact that at least one of the names was wrong.

  More and more of the land we passed had the appearance of cultivated fields. Once-elegant houses crumbled amidst expanses of rice and pastures occupied by the storied red cattle of Finias: creatures of no evident magic, roan-coated rather than sporting the scarlet pelt of some dandy human nobleman’s dyed-coat mount. I should have seen the cattle as further evidence that the place I traveled was a mundane land populated by people with no concept of security or evidence of commerce. Instead I found myself thinking about the songs of the great Siege of the Brown Bull, that song-cycle so old no human scholar can accurately fix its age, and wondering whether any of the cattle I saw descended from that illustrious bull’s line.

  Up ahead, in the center of the water, a river light stood: a white marble confection nearly as tall as the immense light towers that guard Ilesia at Donruil. I’d seen this on my previous visit, too: but from the shore, not from the water at its very foot. From this angle it seemed the work of a god, too airy and fragile to sustain its own weight without divine aid. I craned my neck for a better look as the barge passed by—and then the river opened into Irisa’s broad harbor, an expanse of mirror-calm water scattered with islands. To the north, ancient town-houses delicate as seafoam stretched away beyond sight, interspersed with windmills so tall and attenuated they could only have been conceived by Tanaan minds. Rather than sails the windmills had long, slender blades, which gleamed silver as they spun slowly through late-afternoon light. Their smooth tapered columns pointed like long white fingers towards the sky.

  Out in the harbor itself, westering sunlight dazzled on quiet waters. In the distance a businesslike fortress perched on an island that was little more than a huge rock. Other islands rode lower, invisible except as smudges atop the water.

  “Welcome to the City of the Winds, sian,” Letitia said.

  My head snapped around of its own accord. The Tana stood within arm’s reach, her mass of gold-silk hair radiant in the waterglow. She smiled and met my gaze, the mystery of her bottomless emerald eyes magnified by Fíana’s sunlight-saturated atmosphere; but tension around her high brows and in the tendons of her slender neck belied the ease of the greeting. If her gaze never wavered towards the smoke in the west, her deliberate inattention to the problem made me want to steal a glance in its direction. Nevertheless this oddly quiet place was her home, and she had made the effort to welcome me as her guest: the first such reception I’d received in Fíana. Honor demanded that I play my part; and something more complex than desire drove me to give that performance all the charm I could muster.

  I bowed. “I can’t tell you how many songs tried to capture this. It’s easy to see why they failed.”

  Letitia waved dismissively, but this time her smile was genuine. “Ouirr, it’s only the harbor. Save your superlatives for my home.”

  “Are those windmills?” I asked. “I’ve never seen their like.”

  Letitia nodded. “They were built by the first mora of Fíana. They still supply all the water for the eleven islands and half the coastal towns.”

  “Amazing,” I said. “How do they work?”

  Letitia’s smile faded. “I’m not sure. No one is. Iminor’s been working with a group that’s studying them, trying to learn enough to go beyond maintenance.”

  “Any luck?”

  Letitia smiled ruefully. “Here and there. Iminor could give you a more complete answer. The part I understand is that we’ve got to regain not only building techniques but forging knowledge as well.”

  “Lost knowledge is a painful thing.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  Letitia shot me a penetrating look. Had I crossed another unmarked Tanaan boundary? If I couldn’t keep my foot out of my mouth, I might find myself evicted from the Tanaan lands long before Bealtan.

  The barge approached the fortress. Neighboring islands climbed out of the water, the depths between them spanned by bridges that looked too insubstantial to sustain a man’s weight—much less the horse-drawn wagons their width suggested. Clearly this place should be viewed from the water, not from horseback at the harbor’s edge. Finally I could see that the windmills I’d thought situated on the harbor’s southern bank actually stood on the islands, among more of the delicately-wrought town-houses. Some of these exhibited the subtle decay of buildings long vacant.

  “Kykia, here on your left,” Letitia said quietly.

  “What’s here?”

  “Merchants’ homes, mostly. At one time other royal clans maintained feasting halls there…” Letitia shrugged. Questions piled up in my throat, but this time I sensed the unmarked boundary: I kept my mouth shut.

  We passed through a narrow channel between the island and the fortress. Across the water, a tall island crowned with larger buildings climbed skyward on the right, while two more river lights jutted out of the water on the left.

  “Now we’re in the central harbor,” Letitia said.


  “Lovely,” I said, mostly because it seemed expected. The place was beautiful, but it was uncomfortably quiet. I wondered what it had been like before decay set in—and why the place had faltered at all. This was definitely in the class of questions that would get me hastened towards the door.

  “Euros on the left—originally the domain of traders who dealt in silk, spices, cedar, and precious metals from the Beallan lands. Irisa was the termination point for seafaring ships; from here goods went upriver to the Devadore, whence they traveled to Fáill, Muir, and Banbagor.”

  A better harpist would have memorized all those names and facts; I just let most of it wash past me, looking around. Nevertheless the words Fáill, Muir, and Banbagor snared my meager attention: these must be the Tanaan names for the nations of Fáilias, Murias, and Gorias, just as Finias had turned out to be Fíana. The song—and all the maps I’d seen—were wrong four times over.

  “And now?” I asked. This couldn’t be a rude question: she’d opened the discussion. But the tension around Letitia’s mouth deepened.

  “Now the growers on Apilio meet the demands of Fíana’s silk trade. And it’s been centuries since anybody built a ship big enough to take to the sea, so the need for cedar just isn’t there. Skira on the right, with Ériu just visible behind it.”

  I squinted more closely at the right-hand island. Now I could see that what I had taken for one island was actually two, and the height I’d spied was part of the farther isle. What must it be to rule a place whose greatest days lie in the past? A human righ is charged with leaving his nation better than he inherited it; from what would the ruler of a place so obviously diminished take her pride? When she dreamed of restoring her nation to its legendary glory, what form did those dreams take? I gazed around at the stillness of the once-bustling harbor, trying to imagine where I would begin; a surprising surge of melancholy washed through me. I realized I’d stopped listening to Letitia’s narrative.