The Mountain of Kept Memory

by Rachel Neumeier

  “When the last of the gods died, their servants and slaves took what they could of their power. But they mishandled what they took. What in the hands of the gods had been useful became maleficent in the hands of mortal people,” said the Kieba, as he had known she would.

  “The plagues,” Gulien said.

  “Yes,” agreed the Kieba. “Those were difficult years. Manian Sinai strove to contain the plagues, but it was a long task. Very many people died during that time, all but a few of the gods’ servants, all but a scattered handful of men. A few survived in Gontai, a handful in what later became Tamarist. More here in this country, though it was not Carastind then. It had no name. But fewer plagues burned here in the drylands. That is why we set our mountain here. Some plagues could potentially endanger crystalline memory. Manian Sinai considered it best to establish the Kieba in a land where such plagues come seldom and lack virulence.”

  “You stopped the plagues. Or he did. The Kieba stopped them.”

  “The Kieba fought the plagues across all the world. Yes. Here as well. But the task was endless, and Manian Sinai was not immortal. He tried to make a woman from this country his heir, but that woman proved unable to master the kephalos. A man from Gontai failed as well. The woman who eventually succeeded was from the land that became Tamarist. And so one Kieba has passed the mastery of the kephalos to the next for three thousand years.”

  “Everybody thinks you—the Kieba—is immortal,” Gulien murmured. “They think you used to be a goddess. But you never were, and not even the gods were truly immortal. And now nobody remembers you need to pass your power on to an heir. Or people who do, don’t remember it properly. But Bherijda, at least, thinks he can take it.”

  The Kieba shrugged, a minimal movement. “The memories of men are short. I have been the Kieba for a long time, and so when men think of the Kieba, they think of me. But,” she added, “I am failing, Gulien. I—the woman I remember being—I, she, I lost five possible heirs to age or mischance or failure. So in order to win time, she made this body, and at first all seemed well. But now her body is dying and her—my—identity, without a living body to anchor it, will fade soon after. Your predisposition is strong. The kephalos entered your blood and your dreams long ago and believes you possess the qualities it seeks for a claimant.”

  “I understand,” Gulien said. He did. He was afraid, but he understood. He couldn’t even be angry. Or he could, but there was no point to his anger. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that he’d picked up that bit of crystal as a boy, or that his family had been primed with possession of powerful artifacts so that he’d been able to dream in response to its prompting, or that the kephalos thought he had the right qualities for a Kieba. He pressed a hand against his eyes for a long moment, but the darkness behind his closed eyelids was not darkness, but waiting memory. Lowering his hand, he said, not expecting it to matter against the terrible urgency of the Kieba’s need, “I don’t want this. Even if I wanted it, I’m not ready. You know that.”

  “No,” agreed the Kieba. “But you are my last chance to make an heir. I meant to give you a year. A year to establish your identity within the kephalos, a year to learn to encompass memory, a year to become accustomed to the idea of becoming the Kieba in my stead. But now there is no time.”

  Gulien shook his head, but he didn’t know how to argue. He knew it was all true. He remembered that it was all true.

  “To master the kephalos, you must establish your own identity within it. You must remember yourself amid the memories of three thousand years. The kephalos will try to take your memories and your identity and make you part of itself. It is crystallized memory, and so it will try to encompass your memory and your very self and hold it. That is what it does. It is a powerful tool, the heart of the Kieba’s power, yet you must master it and not allow yourself to be mastered. You must encompass it and not allow yourself to be encompassed.”

  Dread was running through Gulien now, like ice. “I don’t . . . I can’t do this. I haven’t agreed to any of this!”

  “But you will. You have no choice—or if you believe you have a choice, then after all, you do not have the qualities the kephalos values. Gulien Madalin, in this exigency, when no one else can do this, will you try?”

  Gulien shook his head. But he didn’t say no.

  “It is true you are not ready. But you must try. No one else can. So you will succeed.”

  “I will strive to prevent anyone from claiming the superior position save you or the current Kieba,” stated the kephalos. “I will try to assist you.”

  This time Gulien nodded. Because the Kieba was right. He had no choice, not now, and he knew it.

  The kephalos wasn’t a person. He knew that now. It wasn’t a person or a creature or, in a sense, real at all. It was in the crystal. It was the crystal. It was crystallized memory.

  But it was like a person, in some ways. It did not precisely have a self of its own, or its own desires or intentions. Not as a person did. But Gulien knew, part of him knew, that it had its own kind of identity even so. If he had to do this . . . if he had to, then he was glad to have it as an ally.

  It said, “I will present you with the clearest secondary identity possible. But you must take it and make it yours, while retaining throughout your own identity.”

  “You will learn to engage gently with memory that is not yours,” the Kieba told him. “You must not allow it to move you. You must accept memory and vision that is not your own. Fear is your enemy, unless it is your own fear. So with anger. So with love. All strong emotion will shake you and make it harder to keep your balance in the ocean of memory. Do you understand?”

  Gulien hadn’t understood. He did now, much more so. He had discovered very quickly, once he took his place in the Kieba’s chair, how one memory and vision dissolved into the next within the kephalos, and how each vision shattered when he lost that necessary indifference. He knew, too, without anyone precisely explaining it, that each breaking vision marked the point at which he would have failed to master the kephalos, if he’d actually been trying. The result was a horrifying exhibition of his own lack of ability.

  If he tried and failed to master the kephalos, it would master him. He would lose himself in its flood of cold thoughts and three thousand years of memories.

  He’d thought it difficult enough merely to be king of Carastind after his father. To deal with the fractious lords of Carastind and the acquisitive merchant-princes of Estenda and the aggressive Garamanaji princes. To marry an appropriate girl he’d hardly met and didn’t know, and hope she lived—the memory of his two brief engagements had trailed at his heel, the deep understanding that death could take anyone. Anyone.

  And now this. All his expectations turned awry, all the fears of his youth shown as paltry, and his own hand meant to be set between everyone he loved and the bitter death of the lingering plagues.

  The sudden shift in his fortunes seemed both profoundly disorienting and yet almost expected, almost familiar. He thought now that he might have dreamed this, too. This moment. Or one very like it, so like it ancient experience blended with his own living experience . . . It was a most peculiar feeling.

  A year. He had been meant to have a year to learn this. He had, if he had not lost track of real passing time, about one day.

  So now he sat in the heart of the Keiba’s mountain of crystallized memory, watched shards of present and past sleet through edged, shimmering darkness, and tried not to wish too fiercely for the past, for his own home, for everything to be back the way it was supposed to be, because whenever he did, the longing itself broke whatever vision he was trying to hold. Whenever this happened, the Kieba protected him. He knew she had somehow put herself between him and the kephalos; she was preventing it from taking his memory into itself. He could not prevent it, so she was doing it for him, while simultaneously working to contain the plague mist in Elaru. He could not have done that. He could not manage either to protect himself or to contain the plague,
even though he remembered how to do both.

  Except it wasn’t him, it wasn’t his memory, not quite. He couldn’t quite encompass it; it lacked the integrity of a living person, but it was older and stronger and far deeper than he was; if he tried to take it into himself, he would lose himself in it. He couldn’t do it. He was afraid to try.

  Another vision formed, so that he seemed to look down through the eyes of a broad-winged eagle that soared in wide circles over the harbor of Caras. The kephalos showed him this, reminding him of his own identity. The kephalos was not his enemy. He knew this, too. It wanted him to succeed. But the ships in the harbor flew black-and-green scorpion banners, and he saw fighting in the streets, and he was afraid for his people. And then, shattered by his fear, the half-grasped images of Caras fragmented and dissolved and left him with nothing.

  The kephalos did not understand fear, or desire, or love, or anything human. That was why the Kieba was necessary. But the woman who had been the Kieba was dead, and the golem into which she had put herself was almost but not quite what she had been. It—she—was losing her primary identity. He understood that. She herself now also barely remembered fear or desire or love or anything human. Those were all part of being human, and she was losing them all.

  He was the only one here who knew what it was to be human, and he was not the Kieba, except in scattered, fragmentary memories. When the kephalos showed him his father riding at the forefront of a long column of soldiers, Carastindin and Tamaristan both, with Bherijda Garamanaj beside him . . . he cared too much. The vision broke into pieces in Gulien’s mind and he could not hold it. The vision fractured again into a dozen other pathways, and he lost track of everything.

  Terror shivered through him, and exhaustion. He was tired—tired of trying to keep his mind as open and calm as the kephalos demanded, bitterly tired of failing. He let the vision go, let everything go, and tried to scrape together some fundamental belief in his own identity. And suddenly he glimpsed Oressa, on a racing chestnut horse. She was somewhere on the road—he couldn’t tell where—not in Caras but somewhere on the open road. She was leaning far forward, her eyes wide with excitement or fear. The horse flung itself through the morning sunlight, and Gulien, wrenched out of scattering memory, shouted, and the vision shattered, first Oressa and then the whole scene falling away in a shower of sharp-edged shards, glittering, opaque, and ungraspable.

  Gulien jerked up sharply, his own eyes opening, the vision cascading around him. He jerked his hands away from the arms of the chair and lurched to his feet, ignoring the pain and the blood where the kephalos had withdrawn the needles not quite fast enough to accommodate his furious movement. His head pounded, and his vision—his own vision, he thought, but was not sure even of that—wavered and spun. He felt dizzy and sick. That last might just have been fear. He hardly understood what he’d seen, but he understood that Oressa was in trouble. And his father was getting closer, with that bastard Bherijda. And there was fighting in Caras, between the remaining scorpion soldiers and his own people.

  He pressed both his hands over his eyes, trying to drive back the exhaustion and collect himself through a sheer effort of will. Gajdosik and Paulin between them could handle Caras. They would have to. He said, “Kieba—”

  “There is time. There will be time,” she told him.

  She might have meant to sound reassuring. But he could hear, now that he knew to listen for it, the flat indifference behind her tone. He was afraid for her—afraid for them both. Afraid for them all. He said exhaustedly, “I can’t . . . I can’t not care.”

  “Yes,” she said dispassionately. “That is part of your primary identity, and part of your principal aspect. But you must learn to set all that aside in order to allow the kephalos to support you. You will need the memories of ages past. You must learn to hold them beside your own memories so that they blend only along the . . . edges.”

  She paused, studying him, and Gulien wondered whether she remembered exhaustion and fear. Whether she remembered being not only human, but young and new to the crystallized memory of the kephalos. He suspected she had forgotten. He said, “I can’t do this.”

  “You can. But there is time. Nothing will happen today. Perhaps not tomorrow.” Turning, the Kieba put her hand out and opened a door that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The stairway curled down through the reaches of the mountain—not Ysiddre’s white stairway, but rough, red stone steps that twisted around and vanished into the welcoming sunlight of an ordinary morning.

  “Go,” said the Kieba. “Rest. Eat something. You are human; some of your distress comes from hunger. The kephalos will provide food. I will fortify this mountain and see what may yet be done to salvage something of Elaru. You, go. Eat and rest and think of nothing, remember nothing—fear nothing.”

  Gulien thought her advice to think of nothing would be impossible to follow. But he stumbled down the rough stairway and found himself in what seemed for all the world like an ordinary bedchamber, a room of comfortable dimensions, with walls of whitewashed plaster rather than glittering black glass, plain furniture of wood rather than stone or soapy gray crystal. A couch wide enough to serve as a bed rested below a wide window. Sunlight came in through a wide window, along with a warm breeze carrying the scents of hot stone and dust, dry grass and pine. The view through that window was of nothing but the slopes of the mountain and, beyond, the level drylands running out as far as the eye could see. Twenty feet away, sparrows, their breasts streaked with taupe and their wings barred with rust and brown, hopped and fluttered below a twisted pine. On a table beside the bed, a round loaf of bread rested on a cloth, beside it, a crock of honey and a bowl of stew redolent with beef and onions and turnips.

  Gulien felt tension unknotting from his shoulders and back. Though he had not been aware of hunger, the smell of the stew and the bread woke his appetite, and he longed to eat and then stretch out on that couch and close his eyes and not dream. But he did not move at once toward the table. He said out loud, “Kephalos, where is Oressa? Is she safe?”

  There was a slight pause. Then the kephalos answered. “Oressa Madalin rides north from Caras. She appears well.”

  “You have a falcon watching her? You’ve had one watching her all the time?” Gulien took a step toward the table and gripped the back of the ordinary chair drawn up to it. “Kephalos?”

  “I am watching her now,” the kephalos said. “I will protect her now. You are the preferred claimant, and I understand Oressa Madalin is important to you. Do not allow your mind or attention to be distracted from your own necessities.”

  Gulien subsided slowly into the chair and rested his hands on the table. His hands and wrists stung, though not badly. His skin was stippled with tiny dots and smears of blood. He had achieved that much: He could tear himself free of the kephalos’s control fast enough to do himself an injury. Progress, of a sort. He opened and closed his hands slowly, aware of the flex of muscles and tendons beneath the skin. He was alive, and human, and himself. Still himself. He said, “You’ll continue to protect her. To protect all my people. Gajdosik—gods.” It was impossible. He was silent.

  “For as long as practicable,” said the kephalos. “Eat. Rest. When the Kieba sends for you, I will wake you. It is important that you return to the heart of the mountain of your own will.”

  “I know,” Gulien said wearily. He did know that. Or something in him knew it. He picked up the loaf of bread and broke it in half in his hands. They were still his hands. He dipped a piece of the bread in the stew and ate it, shut his eyes, and thought about nothing.

  The kephalos said, “Gulien. Gulien.” It said his name a third time, no louder or more emphatically. “Gulien.”

  He did not so much wake as dream he was awake, dream he stood up and followed that summons. He walked through directionless light and warmth and into a haze that dimmed and then cleared to light again. Then he blinked, and he was awake. Or else the dream became more vivid; he was not entirely certain.
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  It was suddenly as though he were standing high on the slopes of the Kieba’s mountain, with the high, bright sky above and, far below, the road running through tawny fields of wheat and pastures with goats and mules. But a thousand men were spilling out to either side of the road, and there were men among the farmhouse and the outbuildings. Men with torches and swords. The barn nearest the main house wasn’t yet on fire, but a lot of the other outbuildings were, and one of the smaller houses and the closest fields. The flames were almost too pale to see in the brilliant light, but black smoke poured upward into the clear sky, and the scorpion banners whipped out to their full length in the fiery wind.

  For a moment Gulien held perfectly still, too shocked to move. Then he knew he was awake, and he turned, shouting, “Kieba!”

  He was not outside at all. He was in the heart of the mountain, surrounded by crystal, but all around him the crystal held the same vision of fire and violence. The Kieba was lying on the dais. She looked, as before, still as death. This time he knew she was not dead. He thought he knew that. He moved cautiously forward. “Kieba?”

  “The Kieba’s enemies wish to force her to show herself to them,” stated the kephalos. “She cannot do so safely. Her primary identity cannot withstand challenge. Thus I am limiting her awareness to Gontai. I will not allow her to manifest herself here.”

  “You’ve trapped her in Gontai? In another golem body in Gontai? Kephalos, how am I supposed to do this without her? There was supposed to be time! I was supposed to have time!”

  “She cannot assist you. Given the brevity of time available, I projected that further experience would be less useful than rest. You must be ready.”

  “I—you—can’t you stop them, slow them down at least, give me more time to—to learn how to do this?” He turned helplessly back toward the chair, gestured toward it, a sharp wave of his hand. “To do that?”