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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  “Like a sacred spring,” Letitia observed in an undertone to Iminor. I had a sudden flash of her as a priestess in this place, making offerings, bathing in the pool. Did they celebrate Bealtan itself here?

  “You’re not going in?” Iminor answered, a wary edge to his voice.

  A vision of a wholly unorthodox Bealtan, with Laverna as the Bealtan goddess and a Tanaan priestess as Her avatar, began to unfold itself in my mind. Instead of trees, a pillar circle; instead of the soft grass of a sacred grove, the welcoming waters of a sacred pool.

  Letitia shook her head, stepping through the circle of melted stones. “But I’m going to make an offering.”

  The Ruillin is unpredictable and frequently harsh, but Laverna had never brought an entire people to its knees. Surely She was more deserving of Letitia’s devotion than their goddess Dana. With Letitia as Laverna’s priestess, who could resist the urge to worship here?

  “Ti—” Iminor said urgently, voice little more than a whisper.

  She paused, looking back at him.

  He shook his head, distress written in his face. “We should go. It’s getting late; the tide will turn soon.”

  She shook her head.

  “What if you fall in—?”

  She cast him an impatient glance, already unfastening the pin from her cloak. “I’m not going to fall in.”

  Letitia crossed the little perimeter between the stones and the pool, stood at the pool’s edge with the pin in her hands. It winked in the light of the setting sun as she held it, face alien and beautiful in the stillness of her devotions. Even the priestess administering the bathing of the worshipers seemed unable to look away from Letitia; but then someone in the crowd at the other side of the circle shrieked, and everyone looked west. Galloping across the flats, sending water splashing in every direction, came a contingent of Básghilae.

  “Avengers!” somebody shouted; suddenly everyone seemed to be running in a different direction. The human stampede surged through the circle of stones. Letitia’s voice rang briefly above the throng, and she fell into the pool with a resounding splash. Iminor shouted—at me, I felt certain—but all I caught was undead and water. I knew what he meant, though: The undead cannot cross water? The hell they can’t! But then the Básghilae took their first victims, and the splashing of those energies against my skin made me lose track of everything else.

  It was only a second, I knew; but in that second I was completely lost. Rapture blasted through me, holding me fast; for that instant the source of the delight was completely irrelevant. But I had been trained to work through whatever energies might flow from a working, and that training took over: immediately every arcane sense I possessed was open wide, and the stray life-energies of a dozen people flowed through me and away.

  I hadn’t drawn power. I hadn’t. But the hunger roared in me now, and as I raced into the circle with the Tanaan, claiming a place at the pool’s western edge and the forefront of the onslaught, I saw the full truth of each of the ghouls that came at us. The first man I faced had been Essuvian; he was a cocktail of despair, the life-energies of a woman of Goibniu, and a surprising shot of the power of the Well at my back—and beneath that, beneath everything, the presence that was becoming all too familiar, the man called the Bard’s Wizard. I didn’t draw on those energies, though it felt as if I had arrived at a banquet hungry and then refused to eat; but I saw, behind the dead man’s eyes, the clear and fearless awareness that drove everything he did. It would have been easy to open a direct arcane connection with the wizard. Instead I applied myself to destroying his masterfully-created tool. That is warfare, in the end: the deliberate destruction of things that men of talent have crafted with all their skill. I wrecked that effort and turned my attention to the next.

  At some point during my next engagement—another Essuvian, flavored more with impotent rage than despair, who tasted of the recent lives of both a woman and a man—I realized that the Tanaan who stood with me around the Well had been replaced by horses; I spared a glance to my right and discovered Iminor mounted beside me, blade sliding and sparking against a dead man’s as he fought for control. And then, suddenly, as I wrecked another painstakingly-crafted Básghil, my horse appeared at my left hand; and Manannan was offering me the reins.

  I met his gaze, seeing all the honor of a warrior who has dedicated his life to the defense of people who need him, the knowledge of his life trickling away hour by hour, his determination to use his remaining days to serve the same ideals he had pursued all along—and his horrifying gratitude that whatever happened in the next few days, he wasn’t going to end up like those ghouls. Sudden, soul-deep self-loathing swept over me. These dire ghouls I secretly admired, these energies that lit up every power center I possessed: they were the profoundest wrongs anyone had ever seen, and I didn’t know the difference between good and evil anymore. I wasn’t sure I ever had.

  But in a sudden, blinding flash, I saw it now: this man who just wanted to use his remaining hours defending the woman who needed him; the innocent woman who required all our defense; the warriors who had committed themselves to the task despite dangers beyond anything they had ever imagined; the simple people who just tried to live right lives every day, to honor the gods as they understood them—those were the things to which I should commit my heart and blade. These black energies and dire workings were not only threats to the people I had mistakenly allowed myself to love: they were things that must be eradicated from my self.

  I scrambled into the saddle; by the time I looked back to meet Manannan’s gaze again he was gone. And the next Básghil was on me. I saw him just as clearly now, but now it was all different: the horror and despair of the man’s entrapment tore at my throat; the waste of the simple lives he’d been forced to take in order to continue his unending nightmare raised a twisting revulsion in my chest. The awareness behind his eyes was colder, crueler than I had imagined a man might be. Loathing and ire welled up in me, drove my blade, made me burn with the need to use arcane means against him as well. The ghoul was down; the man I wanted to destroy was once again out of reach; I glanced around to locate Letitia and my next opponent—and spotted a newly-exposed path across the rapidly emptying flats, which led in the direction of Goibniu. I wanted desperately to engage my enemy again, but finally I was able to recognize that my first priority must be Letitia. She was in the saddle, like the rest of them, soaked to the bone but sword at the ready; I shouted, and they broke from their engagements and followed me across the flats, Básghilae on their heels.

  Gradually our lighter, faster horses pulled away from our pursuers. But before long we came upon a group of people fleeing along the same path. I knew what would happen if we overtook them and raced for safety: a moment later, the Básghilae would overtake them too, and they would fall victim to the enemy. There was no choice; a swift glance exchanged with Letitia settled the matter, and I reined. We formed up, right there on the flats, as Letitia shouted for the people behind us to run. The Básghilae crashed into us, and the engagement began again.

  The power they carried blasted through me, setting me alight even while the eyes of the first opponent met mine and my gut twisted with the horror of what I saw. He was trapped by evil; it wasn’t his fault; but the pity I reached for was subsumed by hatred, and I wanted nothing more than to hack him to bloodless bits. I destroyed him, and the one who followed, and if I did either of them any service it was only by accident. I knew what they were, knew the manner of their making and the atrocity of their existence, and I could not rest until even their memories had ceased to exist.

  Yet their memories would linger, and their energies would haunt my dreams, and my opponent knew it too. I suspected I was already as doomed as Manannan.

  Finally the people we protected had run beyond sight; we broke away and fled again. Over and again we fought that rear-guard action, while the walls of Goibniu and the long, steep ascent to its gate hove into view—and the tide began to flow in the wrong directio
n. The waters rose steadily around us; each time we had to delay a little longer as the fleeing people behind us fought the flow, as energies I knew were evil but couldn’t help craving knocked against my awareness and sought out the chinks in my nonexistent armor. My head whirled with desire; my throat knotted with horror; I gave up trying to reconcile the two and let the imperatives of the engagement take me.

  Automatically my mind tallied fallen ghouls and Amien’s increasing arcane success against them, the rising of the waters and the growing proximity of defensible walls; a sector of my awareness observed and approved the consistency with which the Tanaan bested their opponents, the way they protected each other’s flanks, the unity with which the contingent moved. Finally the noncombatants behind us were racing up the ascent to the gate—and straight into market-day traffic on its way back home. The Básghilae seemed to spot the tangle and the potential victims at the same moment we did; ghouls we had not yet engaged stopped swarming around the edges of the fray and broke towards the people on the Goibniu gate road.

  And suddenly Manannan broke away as well, overtaking them all, racing up the steep road to the place where sodden people had run up against local farmers and their wares. Even as we hacked our ways out of the fray to join him, he cut through the people on the ascending road like a herdsman among cattle, driving them all gradually up the rise. We outpaced the ghouls we had been fighting, but the ones who had broken away before us reached the Goibniu gate road first, and all of us dragged increasingly tired mounts through rising water.

  On the gate road, Manannan had somehow managed to single-handedly turn the tide of people, and they were scrambling towards the gate with the first wave of Básghilae in pursuit. Water surged steadily up the road, faster and faster as is the Ruillin’s way. The low wall separating the steep lane from an abrupt drop into the water disappeared beneath the racing tide; there was nothing to do but guess where it had been and press on, attacking the Básghilae from below as Manannan tried hopelessly to fight them off from above. Behind him, people cut donkeys and cart-horses loose from their burdens and hurried them through the gate, leaving an obstacle course of half-laden wagons behind. Manannan planted himself between two wagons, blocking the Básghilae’s path, blade humming among three opponents simultaneously and apparently oblivious to the wounds they inflicted. We had very nearly won through to the spot he occupied when one of the ghouls separated his head from his shoulders and his body toppled into the rising surf.

  A roar tore from my throat; I turned fury and some flavor of loss for which grief was too small a word on the opponents that remained between us—but by the time we had defeated them, the rest of the Básghilae were attacking from below. Nuad and I shouted the same instructions simultaneously; the knights re-formed with Letitia at the rear, covering her retreat through the racing tide. By the time she was within reach of the gate I realized I couldn’t see Manannan’s body anywhere, and the water was less than a dozen feet below the entrance. It was too late; it had been too late four days ago; I shouted at the knights until they were all inside, and as I rode through behind them, somebody slammed down the portcullis so fast I felt the wind of its passing on my neck. Seconds later a wooden gate crashed closed as well.

  Letitia’s skin achieved a heretofore-undiscovered shade of white; her eyelids fluttered, and she fell unconscious across her horse’s dripping neck. Her sword slipped from her fingers and clattered on the stone at her horse’s feet. Easca looked intensely thoughtful for a moment, then burst into tears.

  “Well done,” I croaked, looking around at the party. “Dear gods, well done. I need far more than one drink.”

  “Pra-nu,” Amien said.

  19. A Night for Strong Drink

  I had never visited Goibniu before tonight: its reputation as a rough, unappealing mining town had dissuaded me from ever making the trip. The place lived up to the reports: the streets we traveled seemed populated exclusively by gambling and drinking establishments; street vendors hawking food with smells that elicited wildly conflicting messages from my stomach; smithies and a jeweler or two, with shops already shut tight for the evening; and, perennial as wildflowers on the Ruillin and as numerous, women of the profession that is politely called night butterflies. But nothing I’d heard had prepared me for the energies humming in the air of this place: Goibniu vibrated with the power of the old gods, infiltrating my tattered boundaries until I ached with need.

  Goibniu looks to the old smith-god for Whom it is named, the god of the forge and the underground ways that yield secret treasures; I felt the power rumbling beneath the earth of this place, wafting up from the smithies, swirling in the smoke of the smelters. And from the east, proximate and in a surprisingly-easy peace with the palpable presence of the energies underfoot, the raw power of the river swirled around the edges of my mind. None of these energies should move a man devoted to the true gods, but I couldn’t shut them from my awareness or stop the thrills they raised along my flesh. I strove to pin my mind to the present moment, to hear the speech of my companions and see the mundane faces of things the people around me saw. I was not entirely successful.

  Letitia was still pale and shaken, though she sat erect in the saddle and spoke in carefully firm tones; but it was the things running beneath her surface, the soft sparkle of a power whose name I didn’t know, that commanded my attention. She’d lost her personal wards again: doubtless they had been knocked out by the power of Laverna’s Well. The glow about her was all her own. Amien glimmered against the mundane people and things around us: his energies were familiar, as deeply lodged in my subconscious as the scent of home. Iminor cast a shadow that was more complex than the simple absence of light, though its flavor didn’t compel me. I kept fantasizing about wrapping my mouth around Letitia, and the reasons for that were not entirely sexual.

  The city fathers of Goibniu had never bothered with street lighting; we charted a path by the lamps outside the taverns and gambling halls, the light spilling through doors that opened as men came and went, the last fading streaks of scarlet and orange above the mountains to the west, the brilliant glow of two full moons. At the edges of the pools of light, night butterflies gathered like moths, the vibrant colors of their hair sparking under the lamps and the huge dark pools of their eyes seeming to swallow the night. The men we passed on the street stared frankly at the Tana, and a few of the more inebriated assayed tired come-ons; but the Tans in the party couldn’t help ogling the night butterflies.

  “Endeáril, look at that one!” Fiacha said to Ogma, grey eyes sparkling.

  “No, her!” Tuiri added.

  “Sweet Lord, where do they get those hair colors?” Tru said.

  “They’re dyes,” I said. “Like for clothing? But these are made for hair.”

  “Unbelievable,” Tru said, as we passed a pair of provocatively-dressed women sporting hair in vibrant shades of scarlet and blue and the floating silk scarves that are the signature of the profession.

  “Hello,” Mattiaci said to them, masterfully demonstrating his entire Ilesian vocabulary. Tru walloped him on the back of the head, without real malice.

  “I could make a fortune selling belladonna in this place,” Amien groused.

  I surprised myself by laughing; but Letitia roused herself to say, “Belladonna? Isn’t that…?”

  “A drug,” I said. “Yes. It’s good for fever, but it’ll give a woman who isn’t ill fever-dreams. And eyes that look like that.”

  “Her pupils are huge,” Letitia said.

  “They all are,” Iminor added.

  I nodded.

  “And that’s… beautiful?” Letitia said, puzzled.

  I laughed again, but this time with embarrassment for my race. The Tanaan all watched me, waiting for an answer; suddenly I was glad we were speaking a language the people around us couldn’t understand.

  “The idea…” I began, then glanced at Amien. “You want to take this one?”

  He laughed. “Not a chance. You walked i
nto it.”

  I sighed. “The idea is that belladonna eyes… look like Danaan eyes.”

  Now the glances I received ranged from puzzlement to astonishment.

  “I… wasn’t going to bring this up, but you might as well know: Beallan men everywhere, of every station, have—certain ideas about Danaan women.”

  Letitia raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to continue.

  I wasn’t going to explain it all. I couldn’t. How can a man be expected to tell people he respects that his kind objectifies their kind, sees them as objects of fantasy and possible sources of enchantment? It was simply not possible to explain that a human man who looks at a Tana sees, beyond the natural beauty of their race, a person whose mind is occupied with little but sex, who has either such great need or so little discernment that the meanest and ugliest among men is likely to find his wildest fantasies satisfied; that a Tana who meets a man otherwise immune to her charms (that mythical creature) is likely to enchant him so he succumbs to her desires. We breathe these ideas like air in the Beallan realms; they seem reasonable until one has met the purported wanton enchantresses in the flesh and realized that they are all as different as human women are. But it was too humiliating to admit, too difficult to explain—especially with Bealtan growing so near, and the light of the lamps around us making it so easy to imagine Letitia in the glow of a Bealtan fire. Her eyes would be as deep with night-vision, as full of the gleam of emeralds, as they were now. Her gentle intoxicating power would fill every corner of my being.

  I tried to clear my throat, but it didn’t help. I should come at the problem from a different angle.

  “Beallan women… aspire to the beauty of Danaan women,” I said. I relaxed a little: I could get through this version. “I suspect the Danaan do not realize how very beautiful a race they are. How could you, when you see that beauty all the time?”