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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  I stood for a long time looking south, across the darkening lands beyond the ruined wall: trying to catch some glimpse of the retreating Básghilae, trying to estimate the road we would ride tomorrow. The river Latis unwound lazily across the blasted plain, shallow waters reflecting gold in the setting sun. The road to the Muir Pass followed that river, I knew, but it was hard to pick out in this light. I saw no signs of anyone living within the tower’s horizons; it all looked disturbingly like the lands outside the fallen city at Arian.

  Eventually I walked the rest of the circuit, turning south, east, and finally north as the clouds blazed peach and crimson and some half-familiar zephyr of delight teased my edges. I felt I should recognize it; I couldn’t lay hands on it. But as I came around the curve of the parapet, the last sliver of the sun winked across the wall at me, casting Letitia in gold.

  Another man might have thought it a trick of the light: she should be a silhouette against the glowing sky, not readily visible. But a breeze skittered past her, stirring her unbound hair and carrying the delicate, unmistakable arcane aroma I kept smelling on her, and I recognized the flavor haunting the part of my awareness that mundane senses confuse with the throat: she was enmeshed in the same subtle magic I’d glimpsed on our first night out of Irisa, somehow absorbing the light of the sun. The scent of roses tickled my brain, though my nose knew there were no flowers nearby; a warmth like the memory of brandy filled my throat, spreading into a shiver of desire that tripped down the length of my body. I stood as if enchanted, drinking her in, afraid to move and startle her into mundanity. Amien’s wards hovered on the edge of visibility, a net of green that shimmered in the hues of the emeralds that come from Tellan’s deepest mines. She turned and looked at me, and I realized those emeralds were the same color as her eyes.

  On the other side of the mountains, in places where the sort of language that coaxes a woman into bed had long ago become a reflex, I would have made that observation aloud. Tonight such wooing felt false. I couldn’t remember the last time I had played those games with a woman: even that night with Macha at Irisa had been her idea, not mine. I wondered whether I had lost the knack.

  And then Letitia’s eyes met mine, and I forgot about everything else. There was no room for wooing here, only worship. If there are prayers one is expected to offer the avatar of the goddess Dana, I had no idea what they might be. I just stared, heart pounding in my throat.

  “The Danaan no longer practice sorcery?” I managed finally.

  And just that quickly the spell was broken, and a Tana wrongly clad in spidersilk mail stood before me, glancing away in embarrassment.

  “No sorcery,” she said softly. “Just a gift of the Holy Mora. It is of no practical use.”

  “The Touch of the goddess is its own justification,” I said, just as softly.

  She cast me a swift look of astonishment; then one corner of her mouth quirked into a humorless half-smile. “If anyone would understand that, I suppose it would be you.”

  She was thinking about the Tuaoh Stone, I realized. I shrugged and glanced away. There was no balm here but truth; to apply it was a strategic error.

  “That is a thing I learned long ago, on the other side of the mountains,” I said, embarrassed by my own foolishness, and turned to look out across the ruins.

  Half a second later Letitia leaned against the wall beside me, avoiding my gaze with a similar pretense of surveying the horizon. “And last night?”

  I shook my head, still unable to look at her. “If your goddess turned Her gaze on that mountaintop yesterday, I had no sense of Her presence.”

  In my peripheral vision I saw Letitia nod and glance back at the swiftly-disappearing sun—and dared to hope the matter had finally been laid to rest.

  “So this gift,” I said after a moment. At the eastern end of the sky, stars shimmered into visibility, pale diamonds against a cloak of deepening blue. Soon the Swan would be visible. “Is it a thing given to all the morae?”

  Letitia sighed. “I don’t know. There were so many things my mother never had the chance to teach me.”

  She paused, brooding. “I feel traditions dying around me every day, and I don’t even know what they were. I’ve lost count of the skills I lack. I suspect I haven’t the faintest idea of the things that occupied my mother’s mind, or her mother’s.” She looked at me. “How do I find out about these things? Who can I ask these questions, now that my mother is gone? I found her journal recently, at Irisa—” She glanced away again, as if this fact were somehow damning. “And I’ve been reading, and trying to learn…” She shook her head.

  “But what one writes in a journal is not what one would pass to a successor, given the time,” I finished.

  Letitia nodded.

  “Have you spoken with your bards?” I said. “The preservation of such things is their greatest responsibility.”

  Letitia sighed again. “Macha makes me… dream of slitting my own throat.”

  I surprised myself by laughing. Letitia didn’t step away, but she shifted, and it was a motion of withdrawal. I forced myself to quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have memories of my own tutors that are just as fond. But surely Macha is not the only living bard in Fíana?”

  “I’m sure others will find me just as lacking,” Letitia said glumly.

  “No,” I said. “They won’t. They will know you first as the mora, and any lack they perceive in your education they will pin on Macha, not you.” I stood still for a moment, watching night spread across the sky. “People who knew us as children always seem unable to forget the children we were. It is no coincidence that every righ, without fail, eventually releases every one of his father’s retainers.”

  Letitia nodded thoughtfully. A question fluttered in her face, then died. Abruptly I realized how many questions she chose not to ask, how keenly she saw the gulf between the things I thought and felt and the things I could allow myself to speak. A hundred secrets piled up in my throat, tripping over one another in their rush to be the first out into the open. I swallowed them all down.

  “Do you want another strategy lesson?” I said. “I’m afraid there’s too little light for sword-work tonight.”

  “Yes,” she said, and glanced up at the moons. Telliyn stood directly overhead, half her face showing. Arliyn trailed behind, already full. The next few nights would be increasingly bright: better for in-camp training, but also better for nighttime attacks. And once Telliyn reached her completion, her waning would mark the rush of days to Bealtan. Bealtan Eve was little more than a twelvenight away, I realized. Strange to think how far away it had seemed, even as recently as Irisa.

  “Thirteen days to Aballo,” Letitia murmured, evidently to herself.

  And six days to Goibniu, where we might meet reinforcements. Where Amien might hire Letitia a ship, all but guaranteeing her safe arrival at Aballo and relieving me, if that was the phrase for it, of the obligation to continue with the party. Where I might find it necessary to part company with them anyway, if today’s total lack of self-control in the presence of the arcane didn’t cease.

  Six days. An eternity of ambushes stood between us and the relative safety of Goibniu. And yet the time seemed suddenly too short.

  Letitia shook her head, eyes still on the sky.

  “What?” I said, reflexively.

  She shook her head again, glancing away. “I can’t remember how I imagined that I might still manage to be invested at Bealtan.”

  I sighed. “I think there is a part of the mind whose sole job it is to imagine ways that things might return to normal, after our lives are taken from us.”

  Letitia glanced at me and visibly decided against asking a question. But I knew what she wondered, and the impulse to give her things she would not ask for overwhelmed me.

  “As far as I know, that part of the mind never stops, no matter how many times the rest of you calls it a fool.”

  She sighed. And though I knew, assuming any of us sur
vived, where Letitia would spend Bealtan, I couldn’t imagine where I would be. I could not go to Aballo, not and refrain from giving myself over to arcane impulses that would only end in destruction. Whatever I might desire and dream, Iminor would have no competition from me that night. Amien would want me to accompany him to the Bealtan Moot; my heart shrank in me at the idea. I had to tolerate Coran being elected to the throne that should have been mine, but I wasn’t sure I could bear watching it happen. And yet there would be no getting around the fact that I had received Amien’s summons. Perhaps I should be hoping for relief at Goibniu: at least parting company at Goibniu would give me a chance to lose myself before the Moot. But that idea held no pleasure, either.

  Gods, I was a fool.

  “So, a lesson?” I said finally.

  “Please,” Letitia said, eyes on the sky again. “You choose the topic. One way or another, our time together is short.”

  17. Blood-Price

  For five days we fought our way through northernmost Banbagor: following the remains of the river road through areas of devastation like those outside Arian until we reached the deserted fortress at Helike, then striking west-by-southwest across league upon league of rolling, nearly featureless plains in which life gradually resumed. Three times we spotted Tanaan settlements; each time, Letitia bade us pass them by. The geas of receiving travelers who need shelter is as strong as it ever was, on that side of the mountains; but so is the one that forbids a man—or woman—under a death-vendetta to accept another’s hospitality. We could not ask anyone for shelter, Letitia decided. Not after what had happened at Arian.

  But after Helike there was no other shelter to speak of, and on north Banbagor’s rolling plains visibility is measured in miles. The Bard’s Wizard switched tactics to accommodate the terrain, as any sensible commander would: with little hope of surprising us, he harried us. Time after time, Básghilae dashed in swift as a flock of vultures, only the sound of their hooves giving any sense that they were of this world. They galloped in from behind and overtook us; they appeared suddenly over the crest of a hillock to our left; in the evening, when the sun was low and blinding, they came at us out of the glare. Not once did they dig in for a complete engagement: the attacks were swift hit-and-run affairs that gave Letitia’s knights no time to form up, Amien no time to attempt the working of wards, me no time to give in to the temptation to meet their eyes. Each successive engagement made me more grateful for Letitia’s personal wards. And, oddly, each engagement became a new lesson for Letitia. I was surprised by how quickly she learned, by the constant leaps in the sophistication of the questions she asked.

  Our tactics shifted, too. There no longer seemed any point in denying the Bard’s Wizard knew where we were going and by what route, or that our attempts at evasion were merely wasted miles. We rode straight across the plain, only adjusting our course when sun- or star-sightings told us we had strayed from our bearing. After Letitia stunned both Amien and me by asking whether the Bard’s Wizard might actually use the signatures of Amien’s arcane workings to locate us, he stopped working wards around our campsites at night—and we stopped suffering attacks the moment the wards came down. I wondered privately how long it would be before our enemy chose to exploit that; but in the mean time, Amien was as well rested as any of us, and I began to believe he would make it to Aballo without burning himself from the inside out.

  I talked myself dry as we rode those empty grasslands, teaching Letitia as much and as fast as she was able to absorb. Before long I realized Iminor was listening, too, and included him in the discussion now and then. In the evenings, under the waxing moons, I began developing blade skills with her—and quickly realized that my predecessor in her training, whoever he had been, had committed the same mental error that very nearly ensnared me. She had only ever been taught defensive tactics. I growled at the injustice; she stopped, blade resting lightly against mine, and said quietly, “I’m not sure you’re blaming the right person. I had never seen the point of mastering the sword. After all, blade handling in a mora is really only for show.”

  I had not known her capable of irony: it is not a thing at which the Tanaan excel. The surprise of it made me laugh until half the knights were staring at us, and then I completely failed to recreate the humor for them. Afterward, however, I began teaching her the knack of making one’s defense count for offense, of finding an opponent’s weaknesses and tells and using them against him.

  And at that, she was a surprisingly adept student: particularly when it came to personalities. As the grasslands gave way to varied terrain and the beginnings of forest, and the party grew accustomed to her preoccupation with learning strategy and tactics, their interest in our proceedings faded; and she began sharing a variety of surprising insights with me, during quiet moments on the road and in camp. Through her eyes I saw how Amien picked fights with me when he felt he was falling short of expectations; how harshly Iminor judged himself when he failed to outperform her knights; how Easca hung on my words but gave Letitia herself no more than her due—and I saw how troubled Letitia was by her sense that she had failed to earn the Arian woman’s respect. Gradually I realized how clearly she saw all her knights, how she yearned to be worthy of their service. It made me feel naked before her, wondering what she saw in me but chose not to share.

  One night as Letitia and I crossed blades in the evening’s training, Básghilae invaded the camp on foot, fading soundlessly into the circle of firelight. I pinned Letitia between myself and the fire, praying that the ghouls would no more brave fire than water, and we fought them off again—but Manannan took a minor hit shielding her from my off side. And as the Básghilae withdrew in yet another silent rush, and Manannan stood staring at the little cut on his hand, Letitia gave voice to a tiny moan and staggered away from the makeshift hearth. When next I glanced at her the sword was still in her fist, but her stance was strange; and she had the look a man gets when he’s deciding how best to end his life on his own blade.

  I covered the distance between us in two huge strides, clamped my hand around the hilt and wrested it from her, hissing, “Don’t you dare. His honor means more than that.”

  She recoiled as if doused with cold water, eyes glittering as she met my gaze. Then she nodded and sank to the ground.

  What must it be to know you are dead, and yet walk? My imagination failed to wrap itself around the problem. Manannan stared at his hand, stared at the fire, walked out past the circle of firelight on some errand I couldn’t imagine. Ogma, who despite or because of the fact that they occupied the two extremes of the age span of the contingent, had formed a strangely close bond with Manannan, followed him to the place where light faded into darkness and stopped. I couldn’t decide whether Amien should work wards around the camp or we should spare his strength and just admit the horse had left the barn. I felt as if time had frozen and trapped me on the spot.

  “He’s not losing forces with these tactics,” Amien observed. With difficulty I quelled the startle. “There’s absolutely no reason they can’t come back in an hour.”

  I met his eyes, sighed, and sent Ogma out to bring the Tan back to base.

  “Three nights to Goibniu,” Amien said abstractedly, in an evident attempt to cheer himself. But I remembered how he had looked after three nights of trying to ward campsites on the way to Dianann; and I wondered who I would be protecting if I refused to help this time.

  Naturally the Básghilae were there waiting when Amien’s binding came down in the morning. I was not the only one who waded into the engagement with renewed passion. This morning the Tanaan displayed a fierce synchronization that seemed like something out of a song, shouting at each ghoul that fell. Manannan tore into the Básghilae with fey abandon, oblivious to the damage their blades could still do him; but neither Nuad nor I called him to task. I found myself seeking the awareness behind the dead eyes of each ghoul I engaged, though what I would do once I found it remained a question not only open but unexamined—and then,
in the third opponent I engaged, he was finally looking back at me, and I knew: I dispensed with style, left myself open for half a second, and swept off the ghoul’s head.

  But the itch of revenge not yet won remained someplace deep in my chest. When the Básghilae disengaged and rode off, it took everything I had to refrain from chasing them. The quickness of my breathing had less to do with exertion than with the need to track the Bard’s Wizard to his base, to seek out and destroy whatever well he was using to create these ghouls, to engage the man himself. Swords would be only the beginning; and for those moments during which the fight still surged in my veins, I burned to throw aside any concerns about the methods and energies I might call upon in besting him. How could there be harm in using even the blackest of resources against a man who worked this much evil this casually? But even as I formed the thoughts, I knew they were the doorway to evil as great as what I wanted to defeat. I spent the first couple miles after we set out grinding my teeth.

  A short time later, we were back on the trail that had once been the Muir Pass Road. The terrain climbed steadily as we approached the mountains; the forest closed in around us, until the sky disappeared behind layer upon layer of evergreen boughs. It put me in mind of Tellan—and the duel. For the first time in days I remembered my suspicion that Letitia’s enemy might be Deaclan. I knew better, now. I would have recognized his mind as he stared at me from behind Básghilae eyes.

  The road passed out of the woods again. Across a small sunlit plain, the road carved a visible path up the flank of a mountain. Here the hard riding began, I knew; but once we gained the pass, everything would grow easier: the terrain, the weather, the defensible structures of civilization. Once we reached the shores of the Black, the very waters would act in our defense. It was too early to even think about relaxing, but the presence of the mountains made me feel we might win through, after all.