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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  Many of the cataclysms of history can be traced to the workings of the gods, of course: there are very old stories of the gods of Breasaíl leveling the strongholds of Their enemies, and some songs suggest the isle of Hy-Breasaíl itself may have perished in a war among Them. Even Lady Tella destroyed the once-great city of Esunertos; but that was because Esunertos was the seat and final bastion of Her enemies, the worshipers of the old god Esus, and Esus’s followers would not accept the true religion. I had traveled the road that skirts the site of Lady Tella’s final battle with the Esusdians; that destruction could not compare to what I saw around me. The idea of a goddess visiting this on Her Own people sent cold into my core.

  We traversed the fractured, poisoned plain for hours. Here and there we passed outcrops and buttes of strangely melted aspect; sprinkled at irregular intervals were bodies of water, but all of them venomous: green with floating patches of sulfur-yellow; the rust-red of a peat bog, surrounded by bituminous black ooze; waters chalky white and steaming amid brick-red mud-flats; ponds that might have seemed safe except that the water boiled. One spring exhibited the brilliant teal that men who sail deep into the southern ocean speak of; but the black rime covering the rocks at its perimeter was a clear warning. The knights passed the canteens back and forth until they were all empty; when the sun was high we halted on a rise tall enough to let us stand, temporarily, above the low-hanging bands of noxious fog. But there was no water for the horses, and the feed we carried was too dry to go down easily without it.

  Even here, the party spoke little. Several of them paced around the top of the rise, but they seemed to have stopped trying to absorb their surroundings. Letitia stood a little apart from the group, hugging her own arms and staring morosely northward; Iminor’s head was tilted back, his eyes on the sky. I examined the wasteland in which we stood in all directions, as much as was possible through the fog and smoke, trying to discern whether the Bard’s Wizard might be preparing another attack. I saw no signs of mounted parties besides our own—but visibility was too poor to be certain.

  From this vantage point, it seemed as if the earth itself had ignited, like a pan left too long on a fire; as if some lingering coals might lurk in the crevices, trailing smoke and waiting for their next opportunity to light up the sky. As if whatever happened here had almost, but not quite, run out of fuel rather than been brought to a definite end. I wondered whether I imagined the hatred I felt still lurking here, the smoldering embers of something that surpassed any rage that ever fueled the cruel, angry things I’d done. And were I not imagining it, whether that made me less terrible and dangerous a person than I thought.

  Probably not.

  As I made my slow circuit of the top of the rise, I came upon Amien staring west: face drawn with dismay, eyes fixed on the far distance.

  “What the hell is all this?” I said to him, sotto voce.

  He startled, glanced at me and shook his head. “The will of the goddess,” he muttered. “I don’t know. I can only assume it happened after my last visit here. You have any sense of it?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk about the things I’d felt. He would understand far too much, as always. “Anger. You?”

  Amien nodded, eyes still on the horizon. “Something that would reach all the way from the Abyss to kill us, if it could.”

  For a moment I felt as if that something stared at me across the realms: as if its animosity were personal and meant for me. The hair on the back of my neck rose.

  “Lords,” Nuad said, snapping me back to the present moment. “The mora is ready to ride.”

  I glanced around; Iminor held Letitia’s stirrup for her, and she swung tiredly into the saddle. I stored the information: the days were so long as to defy belief, this far north; but the party’s range must be measured by the extent of Letitia’s stamina rather than hours of daylight. I nodded and returned to my own horse.

  We rode down into the acrid vapors and resumed threading our way past this thing the Tanaan called the Deluge: this event that, I now saw, was also a place. Our shadows turned to stretch and lengthen behind us; I began to feel as if we had become the victims of some cruel joke, and we would ride northward until we all expired of thirst, surrounded by undrinkable waters. Clouds gathered, somewhere above the noxious fogs; the world plunged into grey shadows, and visibility shrank further. Eventually the terrain began to rise again, steadily gaining in elevation. Clusters of melted-looking buttes gathered to the left and right. Letitia began to sag in the saddle. Dirt gave way to grey ash and pockmarked basalt, garish ponds to pools of bitumen; we crested a steep rise, and the river came suddenly into view below us.

  I was not the only one who exclaimed with relief. The party hurried down to the water and dismounted; knights bent to the water beside their horses. I scooped out a handful: it had a metallic tang, but it was swift-moving, and I judged that Easca at least would have known whether it was to be avoided this far north. After a deeper drink I refilled my canteen, then rose and looked around.

  Bare, scarred basalt stretched away in all directions, relieved only by occasional areas of broken ground in which moss and low grasses clung to life. Even the river supported only narrow fringes of bracken and a few stunted, gnarled trees. Across the river, similarly barren land rolled away beyond sight. I turned, scanning northward—and spotted a glint of wan sunlight on metal at the top of a hill. Worry seized at me; Letitia was far from the only person too tired to face another attack. But immediately I realized what I saw: one of the immense sculptures that grace the Twin Hills of Arian. The serene, beautiful city I had read about lay in ruins around it.

  “Sweet Lady Tella,” I said without thinking. Tanaan heads up and down the line snapped around in my direction; in my peripheral vision I saw them follow my gaze, then heard their collective gasp.

  “Mora,” I said. “That is Arian?”

  Letitia flushed; after a moment she gave a reluctant nod.

  “What happened?”

  “I—” She swallowed, then visibly gathered herself. “Ouirr, let us speak as we ride.”

  After days of informality, yet another outbreak of courtly language from her lips: I felt myself stiffen, forced myself to nod as if the change in tone were of no consequence. Nuad called the party to order; Iminor helped Letitia into the saddle again; we followed Easca across the windswept barren, towards a broken wall I guessed had once enclosed the great city of Arian. I nudged my horse into position beside Letitia and Iminor; she looked at me, then glanced away.

  “Mora?” I said quietly. “This is the Deluge. This was Arian. Now…?”

  Letitia sighed.

  “After the Transition, Dana’s People came to the Four Realms and settled around the Devadore,” she said to her horse’s ears. The bardic recitation was easy to hear in her voice: someone, probably Macha, had drilled her on this passage until she could recite it letter-perfect.

  “On the shores of the Devadore they built their capitals: Moria in Fáill, Senia in Muir, Uriah in Banbagor, and Arian in Fíana. In the summers the morae tended to their lands; the morae Ériu made their summer capital at Irisa, and while the summer ships sailed they remained in residence there. When the seasons turned, the morae of the Four Realms returned to their capitals, gathering around the warm, life-giving waters of the Devadore as if around the Lady’s Hearth, and the graceful city of Arian outshone them all. People came from all over the Four Realms to take the waters and the healing air; the brehon and the bards held their conclaves at Arian, and the city rang sweet with the learned discourse of the brehon and the songs and tales of the People’s great bards.”

  Letitia fell silent. No one spoke; for a time only the sounds of horses and the occasional pop and hiss of a steam vent competed with the moans of the dank wind.

  “But then?” I prompted.

  Letitia seemed to sink further into the saddle. Again her gaze fell on something in the vicinity of her horse’s ears.

  “The Holy Mora lost patience wi
th Her people, with their prideful sorcery and petty wars,” she continued, so quietly I had to strain to catch the words. “And so She sent the Deluge, as discipline and warning, that Her People must mend their ways, cease their grasping at powers not intended for mortals, stop their fruitless battling. Fire rained from the sky; the summer capitals fell and the Devadore died.”

  The wind moaned, grasped the tail of my hair and tugged it sideways. Letitia must have been the despair of her tutors.

  “And?” I said.

  “Enough!” Iminor barked. “Lord Ellion, I don’t know how it is in the Beallan lands, but among the People it is considered rude to humiliate one’s host!”

  I couldn’t help it: I stared at him, stunned. The Tanaan thought this obscene waste was somehow their fault? Why couldn’t they see that the blame lay with a goddess Who was anything but benevolent? Finally I shook my head.

  “Your pardon, Mora,” I said quietly, acutely aware of Iminor’s cold stare. “Clearly your people are much holier than mine. If our gods rained fire as punishment for warfare and magic, the Beallan realms would be a slag-heap on which the flames never died.” I reined and let the escort pull ahead of me, and took up a position at the rear.

  The opening in the ruined wall through which Easca led us had probably not been one of Arian’s main gates: it was situated on a northwest bearing, flanked by two simple pillar-stones. Or it had been: the one on the right had fallen and lay blackened as if by lightning, encrusted in lichens of pale grey-green. Nevertheless the road had once been broad and solid even at this minor gate, and it still showed a clear path up the hill.

  We followed the broken paving-stone through a landscape of tumbledown buildings that even now showed ripples and sprinklings of quartz and other luminous minerals. Gnarled trees sprang up every so often, in many cases from the rubble of the buildings themselves; like everything else here, they bore streaks and swaths of lichens in hues I had never imagined possible. Here and there a building or an enclave still stood; but all were vacant and blasted.

  As the road twisted this way and that, the immense sculptures on the two neighboring hills slipped in and out of view behind buildings and trees: the scales that marked the place that had been the central enclave of the Tanaan brehon, and the harp that stood where the College of Bards had made its home. The sight of that harp increased the heaviness of the grief in my chest every time I saw it. So much music and knowledge lost. Would humans ever find the truth that stretches beyond our oldest histories, find some way to separate the facts of Hy-Breasaíl from the fictions and maybe even discover where the isle lies? The College of Bards in Arian had been the last remaining place I could think to inquire.

  No one spoke; the sounds of our horses’ hooves echoed mournfully against the ruined stone. At the top of the hill, the avenue we had traveled opened into an immense square. Here, oddly, many of the buildings still stood; but the western side of the square lay covered in an immense heap of multicolored rubble that could only have been Fíana’s summer palace. Tragedy gathered in my throat again; I reined without really thinking about it, slid from the saddle, stood staring across the square. The sounds of the party continued across the square, presumably down the hill; but I stood as improbably fixed as a tree whose roots had tangled in a building.

  After a moment Easca stood beside me, looking out across the tumble of stone.

  “That was Atzila, the summer palace,” she said quietly. “It was built of seven colors of stone: white and green marble, goldstone, bluestone from Fáill, pink, red and grey granites—and red-streak basalt from Muir. They say the gleam of the orichalus roof could be seen from Ilunmore.”

  I nodded.

  “At the center of this square arose the Ithaldach spring, famous for the rainbows of the fountains built here and the healing properties of the water. It’s probably still there, under the rubble; but no one can find it now. No one knows where the water has gone.”

  I nodded again; for a moment we stood silently looking across the terrible waste. From this point the lonely harp sculpture was easy to see.

  “On that hill there,” I said, “where the harp stands. That was the College of Bards.”

  Easca looked at me, surprise in her face. Wind blew a strand of red-blonde hair across her face, but her gaze never left mine.

  “Yes, Lord,” she said. “The sculpture was wrought of findargat—gods-metal. It’s indestructible. Even the argentel crystal that makes the strings gleam like that is still in place.” She sighed. “It’s the only thing that still stands, over there. The College of Brehon is a little better, but not much.”

  I glanced around the square again, taking in the rest of the buildings. The one nearest me stood, and it looked reasonably sound; I stepped closer, to the steps leading down from the square to the shadowed entry. I peered through the gaping doorway, but it was dark inside. Stepping down to the entryway, I laid a hand on the smoothly-worked doorpost—and magic tumbled through me: the subtle power of the music in a bard’s hands. But this wasn’t one bard: hundreds, maybe thousands had passed through here, each carrying musical energies that raced up my arm and sprinkled themselves across the small quiet spaces of my mind. Almost without conscious decision I stepped inside; and even after all this time and all the malevolent intent outside, the energies of this place welcomed me in: I stood in a tavern, and countless seasons of stories and songs, the magical strains I knew and others I had hoped to learn flowed through and around me: beauty and the sort of hunger that can only be expressed in music, far more than one bard’s best work. But after that brief swell, the energies of the place went quiet, and the tragedy of its emptiness caught up with me again.

  Easca stepped inside, her amber eyes intent on mine. For a moment we stared at one another in silence.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time walking these ruins, Lord,” she said finally. “Trying to understand. Trying to see how a reasonably-good people could so anger a good goddess that She would do such a thing to Her Own people.”

  Pain gathered in my throat.

  “And you know what, Lord? I don’t understand. If there’s evil in this place, I can’t find it.”

  “I know,” I said softly.

  “Is it—?” She hesitated, glancing away. The blonde tail of her hair gleamed in the subdued light.

  “I am of the clan house,” she said finally. “I won’t be a member of the Mora’s Guard forever. Eventually I will be the leader of Clan Arian, this clan no one else likes to admit still exists—as if pretending Clan Arian is just a sept of Clan Dianann can erase all this.” Her gesture encompassed the tragedy around us.

  “In thirty years, or fifty maybe, I will come home,” Easca continued. “To lead my people, to stand with them in defense against whatever comes across these wastes. That’s my responsibility, to stand for my people. And so I wonder—”

  She stopped again, swallowing. I waited, watching her. She’d already said more than she had since Irisa.

  “If a goddess does evil,” she said finally, voice hardly more than a whisper. Her eyes were still on something behind me. “If a goddess does evil—is it still incumbent on Her people to worship Her?”

  Her unvoiced thought hung on the air, as easy to hear as if she had said it aloud: Or should they stand against Her? Finally she glanced at me again, watching me while somehow managing to avoid meeting my eyes.

  Cold gathered inside me; for a moment I couldn’t find my voice. Easca waited as if I were some high-ranking brehon and my judgment might settle the matter.

  “Well,” I said. “In The Siege of the Brown Bull, when Conor betrayed Fergus, it was meet for Fergus to take his men and leave Ulaid, to stand against the righ who had betrayed him so.”

  Outside, the wind keened.

  “But you could argue,” I said, “that the vows of service the men of Ulaid gave the mora Maev, which ultimately required them to fight against their own countrymen, were the source of much of the evil that arose in that war.”

  I
sought her gaze; now, finally, her eyes met mine. Had their goddess’s wrath fallen differently, might Easca have been mora of Fíana, while Irisa lay in ruins?

  “I don’t know,” I said quietly. “There are questions for which none of the songs or sages has an answer, on either side of the mountains.”

  Easca nodded, silent, and followed me as I stepped back into the bitter air.

  13. Crossing Over

  Easca and I caught up to the rest of the party at the river-crossing to the village they now called Arian. Heads turned as we rode up; every face I saw wore the certainty that Easca and I had been dallying, and reactions to that imagined fact ranged from amused speculation to outrage. Letitia wasn’t looking at us: rather across the river. But the glance Iminor turned on me was toxic.

  So be it. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before, of course; people leapt to conclusions about what I’d been doing to whom several times a twelvenight. In Ilnemedon it was tiresome; here, unexpectedly, it stung. But I refused to acknowledge any of it. Instead I looked past the group to the river we must cross.

  The river ran even swifter here than where we first came out of the sunken waste, tumbling and frothing over the remains of a structure that must once have been a bridge of astonishing form. The span had been built in sections, punctuated by tall bastions and massive, improbable ropes of still-gleaming steel. Where the first section should have stood, only metal ropes trailed and twisted into the water. Farther out, one of the slender bastions had broken like a felled tree, carrying another section of the span with it. Other sections lurked, barely visible, a few feet below the tumbling water. The setting sun made the submerged sections wink in and out of visibility and cast long shadows from the bastions and the bluffs on the opposite shore: rendering the demands of the span’s center and the conditions at the other end impossible to estimate. What I did know was the crossing would require us to navigate slick, steep banks, swim the horses to the edge of the remaining span, and then alternately ride, ford across submerged sections, and swim again across the missing areas: a treacherous operation even under reliable light. Meanwhile, even if most of the women in the party still sat strong in the saddle, I didn’t need to ask whether any of them was tired; and Letitia’s form had grown distinctly soggy.