Coll had already shown himself to be an unsatisfactory informant, confused, rambling and apt to misplace the point of one story until he was well into another, but this time the fault was in the subject matter. It seemed that, without being at all conscious of any inconsistencies, the Vassashin were able to believe: (1) that the fire-gods had told Valsoria what they intended to do about Sher; and/or (2) that Valsoria had told the fire-gods what they really must do about Sher; and/or (3) that Valsoria and the fire-gods, between them, had decided what they were going to do about Sher; also that the fire-gods had channelled their powers through Valsoria, and/or that Valsoria's own considerable powers, drawn from her connections with unspecified old ones, had been channelled through the fire-gods. Coll didn't put it that clearly.
In fact, the only clear and consistent conclusion I could draw from Coll's account was that Valsoria had not made her prediction public before the event. This, Coll said when I pressed him, was because she had not wanted the Sherank to hear of it accidentally and take warning—well and good, but the truth was that upwards of eight hundred Vassashin had drowned when the waves from Sher's passing deluged the islands. Surely, I thought, someone should have wondered why the Divinatrix didn't circulate a gentle hint among the populace beforehand, a discreet intimation that high ground would be healthier than low on that fateful morning. However, Valsoria's powers of prophecy were unquestioned.
In all Vassashinay, in fact, it was only the Sherkin garrison which had been displeased by the lack of advance warning. Soon after the wrack of Sher, Commandant Skran had sent thirty troopers to fetch Valsoria to the Pleasure of Vass—it had not yet dawned on him that Sher's downfall was also his own. None of that party returned alive to the barracks.
"They thought we had gone mad, Gilman. They rode through the crowds trying to herd us back with swords and horses, but we ran roughshod over them, and pulled them off their horses, and some of them we trampled to death, and some of them we killed with boathooks and mattocks, and oh Gilman! How surprised they looked!" Coll laughed so hard at the memory that he fell over into the grass.
"Ho ho," I said. "And the others? The ones left in the barracks?"
"We took them alive." Still chuckling, he sat up. "That was on Valsoria's orders—the rest of us would have killed them all on the spot, which would have been a great waste. It was so much better to kill them later." He broke off, beaming, and slit himself from throat to navel with an imaginary knife, hissing suggestively through his teeth.
I sighed and laid my pen down. "You didn't like the Sherank very much, did you?"
"Oh, we liked them very much. Never have we seen such deaths!"
"Never mind, I can imagine."
But he told me anyway, with an impressive amount of fiendish technical information. And the Vassashin had seemed like such nice, gentle people! I was inclined to be shocked until I remembered some of the imaginative deaths meted out to Sherkin survivors in Gil—and we had only seven decades of bloody occupation to avenge, whereas the Vassashin had suffered more like seven bloody occupations.
I tried to change the subject several times.
"The islands' chief agricultural exports? We have none. But I was telling you about the tapestry of eyeballs—do you know how much skill it takes to tan an eyeball—?"
I learned more than I wanted to about the pre- and postmortem preservation of bodily parts and in the end Coll succeeded where masollar had failed. He made me feel ill.
Far out on the Sherkin Sea on the night of that same day, two Vassashin fisherman, a father and son whose names I never learned, were drawing a fine catch up in their nets. Of all the known world's mariners, only the seamen of Vassashinay never feared the ocean that rolled over lost Iklankish; in fact the fishes that battened on the bones of Sher were held to be particularly plump and flavourful. The moon was high and the sea was calm enough to mirror the stars, even though a gentle breeze was blowing.
When the bottom of their boat was full and they were thinking of turning home, a sound came to their ears from somewhere close at hand. They looked up and saw a vision—a great white three-headed dragon, its three necks proudly curved and its six eyes glowing, bearing down on them across the placid water. The son whooped with terror and dropped the net he was holding; the father retrieved it with a boathook, and clouted his son about the earhole in a fatherly fashion.
"It's got masts, you snivelling git, it's a ship," he explained, not unkindly. (The story, complete with dialogue and all its homely detail, spread throughout Vassashinay over the next few days.) He hallooed to warn the ship of their presence—it would run them down on its present course—and when no reply came, he made some comments about the captains of large ships and instructed his son to row them out of danger.
It was already almost on top of them, the water sliding noiselessly around its bows and smooth sides: a mid-sized windgalley, two-masted, well-conditioned, with the three dragons' heads rising from the figurehead and catching the moon in their blue-glass eyes; a Calloonic trader from the description, like those that used to bring cloth and carpets to the harbour of Gil. A ship that size should have carried a crew of at least thirty to forty including the oarsmen, but the fishermen saw nobody on deck, and the sails were drooping on the ropes as if set for quite a different wind. The father shouted again and then, the ship drifting very close to them, he snagged the tailrope with his boathook and pulled his craft alongside the other.
The silence was broken only by the creaking of the sails on their slack ropes as the fisherman hauled himself up to the rail and surveyed the deserted deck. It was remarkably tidy for a derelict, with the spare ropes still neatly coiled and the deck-freight lashed down; all that seemed out of place was an open strongbox lying on its side at the foot of the foremast, spilling golden palots almost as far as the scuppers—enough gold, it seemed to that simple fisherman, to buy all of Vassashinay and have enough left over to pay for lunch. He advanced on the treasure with such wonder that he failed to notice the body in the shadows until he tripped over it.
The son was not far behind his father; they looked at each other wonderingly across the contorted corpse. The silence seemed heavier, the stars remoter and less friendly, and the breeze was not quite fresh enough to disperse a whiff of corruption that hung over the ship. Without speaking, they pulled the body into the moonlight and stared for a long moment at its face. Another very short moment after that and they were already casting themselves over the side of the doomed windgalley into their own boat, and pulling for Vassashinay as if all the demons of a Lucian hell were panting after them.
Having seen the dead man's face, they wisely counted the gold well lost; if others had done the same, the lives of many people, including my own, would have taken very different courses. However, there were some thoughtful frowns at daylight on the beach at Vass, where the two fishermen first told their story—and a few days later, many small pieces of gold began to circulate in the market, some of them in the form of shapeless chunks still warm from the crucible. And a few days after that, a fish broker rose pensively from his stool in the central market of Vass and began to dance on a carpet of dried fish.
* * *
25
THE CORALFIELD BETWEEN Vass and the volcano was crossed by a narrow low-tide road that meandered along the exposed spines of atolls and around deepwater pools filled with seablooms and bizarre bright fishes. The road, a crazy pavement of rough blackstone slabs, was obviously a Vassashin construction, nothing to do with the master masons of my vision. We laboured along it under the blinding afternoon sun, slipping frequently on the scummy paves, choking on the stench that steamed from the hillocks of stranded seaweed.
Not Rinn, though. She had flatly refused to walk. Her voice issued fretfully from behind the draperies of a closed litter, complaining of the jolts, the heat and especially the smell, although I knew she was holding a towel soaked in powerful perfume under her nose. The four stolid Vassashin carrying the litter paid no attention to her com
plaints.
We were finally on our way to see the Divinatrix Valsoria. Not counting the bearers, there were seventeen of us in the party: Rinn and myself, Coll the interpreter, Shree and Chasco, two of Rinn's serving-women, four lightly mailed but heavily armed Miisheli guards and a half-dozen Vassashin notables who were also going to consult the Oracle. I had hoped that the Bequiin Ardin would be allowed to come, but the Frath Major decided the old man was too frail for the journey. We had been given no more chances to speak with each other.
As we reached the midway mark of the coralfield, I squinted up through the glare at the volcano glowering above us: velvety green on its lower slopes, a dull dark-grey cone from treeline to smoking peak, the harsh surface fissured with black shadows. The only sign of habitation was a straggle of white buildings along the treeline, just coming into view. When I was sure this was not a trick of the sunlight, I caught up with Coll and asked him about it.
He glanced up at the mountain without breaking stride. "Yes, Gilman, we can see the Sacellum from here. Not long now, and we will be there."
I scanned the apparently unbroken greenery below the Sacellum. "How will we get there?"
"There is a road up from Villim. You will see it soon enough."
I decided any road would have to be a viciously steep one, and wondered if Rinn would have to get out and climb it on her own soft-skinned feet. I rather hoped so; it would be educational for her. Looking back, I saw the line of porters stretching behind us across the coralfield as far as the shore of Vass, about a third of them burdened with offerings for the Oracle, and fully half of them with Rinn's luggage. We were to stay at the Sacellum for five days and nights as the honoured guests of the Divinatrix; Rinn had thought it necessary to bring sixteen complete changes of costume. I was getting very tired of Rinn.
She took three days to recover from the effects of the masollar and another three to declare herself satisfied with the arrangements for our expedition. At first she demanded the use of the Tasiil's smallboats, but the Frath refused to be cut off from the Tasiil for even a few hours. Lillifer then offered his own boat, but this was rejected by Rinn on the grounds that it stank, which was true but tactless. For a while it looked as though the expedition might founder; but at last the ever-helpful Lillifer unearthed a Sherkin lady-litter from the crypts of his great house and it required only a bit of regilding to be a suitable vehicle for a Miisheli princess. There were enough spikes and curlicues and useless ornamentations on it to satisfy even my lovely Rinn.
And so, I thought, there we were at last—headed for my tryst with Valsoria and whatever secrets the Lady said she held. Frankly, it surprised me that the Lady took this so-called Divinatrix seriously. Nothing in Coll's breathless stories suggested she was more than a skilled survivor, a manipulator of the people's superstitions, a very shrewd entrepreneuse. I had met her ilk a score of times among the little cults in Gil.
Take care, Scion. Valsoria is both more and less than she seems.
I jerked and slipped. Growling, I picked myself up off the slimy stones. Chasco leapt to help me, but I waved him away.
Couldn't you warn me before you speak, madam? Clear your throat, scrape your feet, something?
I cannot. I have neither throat nor feet. I say again, beware of Valsoria.
This was too much.
By all the gods, Lady, coming here was your idea. What do you mean, beware of Valsoria? Couldn't you at least be consistent?
Silence; but also a prickling up my backbone, so poignant and surprising that I stopped short and whirled around, startling Chasco, who was walking behind me. Suddenly uneasy, I peered up at the white jumble of the Sacellum; the central building, horned with two towers, reared up forbiddingly against the sinister grey of the mountain slope. There were eyes up there, I thought, watching our procession as we neared the shore; perhaps searching for the toiling ant that was myself.
Villim differed from the town of Vass mainly in the precipitous slope of its ground. That is to say, Vass was a roughly horizontal maze, whereas Villim was a roughly vertical one, its ramshackle dwellings stepping up the mountainside on narrow terraces hacked out of the fertile volcanic soil and smothered in lush vegetation. A network of trails and precarious stairways wove these dwellings together, many of them branching off a slightly less narrow trail which Coll, with a straight face, referred to as the road.
This was the path we climbed, often with a foundation on one hand and a rooftop on the other; in some places, the roadway was cut across by stinking open drains, or overhung by cantilevered extensions that had to be stronger than they looked, since they didn't collapse on us when the mountain performed one of its frequent snake-dances. We collected the usual audience of children, but in Villim they did not trail us around as they did in Vass; they gawked at us from the undergrowth while we passed, then swarmed directly up the mountainside, to be waiting for us as we laboured up the next switchback of the road. They seemed to be especially entertained by Rinn's squawks and curses as the litter bounced from side to side. (I believe the bearers were doing it on purpose. Coll had translated some of Rinn's running commentary into Vassashin for their benefit.)
What I did not see was any trace of the ancient master-builders, but this was to be expected. When the great stone parabolas of Vass were raised, this mountain did not even exist. The Sherank, though, had left a monument: another caged corpse in the centre of the tiny plateau that served upper Villim as a marketplace. The Vassashin dutifully chucked some pebbles at it as we went by.
Gradually, as we climbed, the scatter of structures and terraces thinned and the jungle took over. The crowds of children began to melt away, although we were well above Villim by the time the last one abandoned us, and the air was already appreciably cooler. The road wound upwards between silent tangles of large-fronded trees, like ferns enormously swollen, many of them sprouting parasitically from the fallen trunks of their forebears, rooted in decay. It was all rather metaphorical, and I mused sadly on the cycles of history as we climbed—the fall of empires, the rise of new empires out of the rot of the old, and also the fact that running up and down the stairs in the Temple Palace had not prepared me for climbing a full-scale volcano. The higher we went, the less I thought about history and the more about the muscles in my calves.
At last the trees gave way to a continuous thicket of low aromatic bushes, and I could see the Sacellum was not far above us. The roadway at that point was hacked into the face of a narrow black escarpment like a vertical slash through the greenery, affording us our first unhampered view down the mountainside. I stopped with Shree, Coll and Chasco to gaze at the black shingle beach far below us, scalloped at the waterline with crescents of dazzling white sand. Perhaps a dozen fishing boats were pulled up on the shingle, surrounded by arrays of fish laid out to dry in the sun, looking from this height like a pavement of silver tiles. To the right, the beach was cut off from a small deserted cove by a broad black finger of rock that stretched far out into the water in line with the rockface we were standing on, possibly the relic of a rare lava flow that, not too many decades ago, had managed to reach the sea. Villim itself was invisible under the treetops.
At that moment there was a stir above us on the roadway. A small procession was coming downwards from the Sacellum. When they reached us, we stood aside to let them pass: three women swathed head to foot in flame-coloured silk robes, a tall youth in a white gold-belted gown, and a child of perhaps four or five wearing a white hooded cloak. They trailed past us without a glance, but the Vassashin in our party reacted dramatically to them. The bearers dropped the litter with a thump and everybody from the notables down to the lowest porter knelt on the roadway making reverent gestures with their hands.
Once they were past, Coll leaned to me and said in an awed whisper, "Gilman, that was the Kalkissann, the Great Saviour."
I gazed at the youth's white-robed figure as he disappeared around a bend in the road. "Really? He's no more than a boy. He looks too young to sa
ve anything."
Coll was shocked. "Oh, his time has not come. But the Divinatrix says someday he will save Vassashinay from a terrible peril; that is why he is called the Kalkissann."
Poor lad, I thought. I knew what it felt like, being expected to save a nation, but if Valsoria's prophetic powers were on the level I suspected, he had very little to worry about.
The bearers resumed their burdens—the quality of the silence inside the litter suggested that Rinn was too furious for speech—and we climbed the last few switchbacks of road to the scrubby open ground in front of the Sacellum. All my thoughts were on what was about to happen, none of them on the trivial encounter that had just taken place.
Later, I realized the Lady was playing a little game with me. In this instance, her joke consisted of keeping silent when there was a great deal she might have said.
The closed gates and twin towers of the Sacellum loomed over us. Lesser buildings straggled off to each side—a goat-byre with wide-open doors, a foundry, a long weather-beaten shed with laundry flapping on its roof, an open-fronted shelter stacked to the ceiling with racks of wide-bellied pots from the potter's yard beside it. Other buildings might have been factories or warehouses and one, higher than the rest, looked like a barracks. The place could have passed for the industrial quarter of a small town, not the outbuildings of a remote sacred retreat halfway up the side of a volcano. Only the Sacellum itself looked the part.
It was not very large—it could have been held comfortably inside the Gilgard's Hall of Harps, except for the twin towers that soared a good five hundred feet above us. The rest was a long plain rectangle running back into the mountainside, the free-standing portion being perhaps two storeys high; it was hard to judge because the few heavily grilled windows were staggered in level. The white plaster facing was fresher than on any of the outbuildings and shone a luminous blue-violet in the failing afternoon light. At sunrise, I thought, the Sacellum would be blinding. At the midpoint of the stark façade, three broad stone stairs led up to the solid wooden doors.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 19