by sun sword
"But bring the lamp," she added. "We don't get a lot of tallow, and we don't waste what we have."
"Even so."
He stayed the evening, whiling it away as if he were a chisel, and time a rock or a piece of wood. But he asked her for nothing. Instead, he asked about this place, this one-room dwelling. She demurred, saying little; she did not know this man enough to want to share the few precious memories she did have. He did not seem displeased, and turned his discourse to the question of wood, of the type of wood that could be found in the Averdan valleys, and of the finishes applied to this tiny home. She listened politely, thinking that morning was going to be hard; she was not a young woman anymore, to speak and while away the Lady's hours without suffering during the Lord's.
As if hearing her, he rose, lifting his lamp and his light and his regard, as if each were somehow a cloud. "Ashaf kep'Valente," he said softly, bowing. "The stars are out; the night is not a dark one. I thank you for your company this eve."
She began to kneel before him, as if he were the Tor, and stopped; then she said, "And I thank you for yours. It is not… what I expected."
"Oh? And do you, Ashaf kep'Valente, know what it is, exactly, that you did expect?" And the darkness was in his eyes, and along the glittering edge of the teeth in his sensuous half-smile.
She could not speak then. Words would have marred his menace, and she greatly desired to use them, but she felt his power again, and it made her feel young, and in youth, she had known the value of silence, of remaining hidden. The Lady's smile was dark this eve.
He stared at her a long while. Then he said, "Might I return to visit you again?"
"Could I stop you?"
"With a word." He lifted the lamp; its light lengthened his face and darkened the shadows around it.
But she nodded. "As you will." And turned, feeling old, knowing that the menace and the strangeness, the sense of hidden power and danger, did not change the fact that he had not hurt her, although he had every opportunity to do so.
When, she thought, did I become such a lonely old woman ?
The earth that lay beneath the silvered moon was silent, and the silence was all the answer that she had never wanted.
* * *
As a concubine in the court of the Tor's father—a man who returned to her in nightmares for years after she had been "discarded" —she had been envied by the other serafs in the village; they knew that she would be taken from their toil and hardship, and given a wife's name, and a wife's place, at the side of a man of power; that she would live in luxury, and never again have to face the heat of the Lord's face, the chill of the wind. And she had thought so herself, as she was taken and cleaned and clothed and oiled. One night, two, and the illusion was gone, although appearances had to be maintained. She learned her manners, her diction, the nicety of movement and the tricks by which the Tor might be pleased. She learned to sing and play the samisen. To dance. She would not dance now.
In the harem, she had never slept well. There was always, beneath the surface of sleep, a certain knowledge that, at any time, the Tor—or the cerdan he thought to reward—might come upon her unawares. She bore the old scars, some visible, most hidden; time under the Lady's skies, with a gentle man whom the Tor's son—upon taking the clan's title—had seen fit to grant her permission to marry, had slowly masked and eased the viscerality of those memories. There had been little love lost between the new Tor and the old.
But that husband had passed, like the pain, and under this night sky, her sleep was as harsh a thing as it had once been during those years.
Ashaf dreamed, and her dreams had never been kind.
The sound of the chimes woke her, or she thought it was chimes; a hint of music lingered in the air. There was no light in the room; she lay on her side on the worn, wide roll that had served her for too many years. And she heard the voice.
But where Isladar's voice held the menace or danger of the not-quite-known, this voice held something familiar. And besides, it was night, and it was a woman's voice, and after all, night was the Lady's time.
"Ashaf."
She was disoriented by the nearness of the word; thought, for a moment, that the harem enclosed her again, and a wife had jostled her to give her a few minutes of warning, granting her time to prepare, if such preparation were possible. Kesli had done it, often, before her untimely death. Kesli. She sat up quickly, stiffly, pulling the sleeping silks up to cover her shoulders and breasts.
Except that there were no silks; there was a blanket of rough cotton twill. She was home. Home.
"Ashaf."
"Who—who is it? Who's there?" She hated the sound of her voice, when it came; it wobbled so much she knew she was making a child's display of fear.
"Not a friend," the voice replied. "Do you mind if I bring a little light into this place?"
"Not the Lord's light," Ashaf said, quartering herself with the sign of the Lady's moon.
"Not the Lord's light, no." And light came, and it was the Lady's light, a soft, silver glow that did not destroy the privacy of night colors, but did allow a woman to see by.
Two women.
Not a friend, Ashaf thought, repeating the stranger's phrase to herself as she stared at the pale contours of this other woman's face. She wore blue, a dark midnight blue that made her seem one with the Lady's intent; the hood framed her face, hid her arms. There were shadows about her and within her; Ashaf recognized them at once, for they bowed her as well: old pain. Old fear.
"Who are you?"
"I am Evayne a'Nolan."
"a'Nolan? You are a Northerner, then."
"I have no home," the woman replied gravely, "But if names are important, then, yes, I was named in the North."
"Names are important." Ashaf rose. "It seems this is a night for visitors."
"It is night," the other woman said softly, "and in the South, night is the time of possibility."
"Possibility." She paused. "You told me that you are not a friend, yet I do not feel you to be an enemy."
"If a man is driving a wagon, and the weather is poor, and he does not see the child that runs out into the road, the child is still dead. That man, if you are the mother of the child, is no friend, although he intended you no ill. An accident."
Ashaf felt the cold, then, but this Evayne did not stop speaking; she merely paused a moment.
"And if a man is at the till of a ship, be it Northern or Southern, and it is being pursued by pirates or vessels of war, and a child falls overboard, and he sees this clearly, but raises no cry because to stop is to lose the lives of the rest of his passengers—although there is no guarantee that the ship will escape, regardless—that man is less your friend. And that accident becomes a choice.
"And that choice…" The woman in midnight blue lowered her face a moment. "I have made that choice. And I have come to you to ask you to make a choice as well."
"What choice?"
"I will not tell you, Ashaf; you will know it soon enough."
The older woman snorted. "Speak plainly."
"Very well. I would come to you in dream, but your dreams are so distant and so troubled that the path has brought me here, instead, where words are harder and much more solid.
"Ashaf kep'Valente, if you choose to leave your home, you will journey to a place that defines darkness, and you will see, in the time remaining to you, things that will make the days of your youth seem easy by comparison."
Ashaf waited in silence, knowing that such an obvious choice was not that: obvious. How could it be, and be called a choice at all? She was patient now.
"And if you choose to leave your home, you will be a warrior, but you will be unsung, and the war that you fight will have no reward for you. Make no mistake; you will die before the battle is fully joined. You will never see its end, and you will never know whether or not your life and your effort made any difference at all. No one will find your body; no one will say the rites by which the Lady's blessing is conferred. Y
our story ends here, in this village; there will be no one to tell it, to carry it on, to bring it to light."
It was the stranger who paled as she spoke, her eyes darkening, her gaze falling; Ashaf kep'Valente thought that this Evayne would feel more at ease speaking of her own death. She waited, still, feeling detached.
"But if," the stranger said, and Ashaf thought, ah, now it comes, "you choose this task—and it must be willingly chosen—then you will begin the battle, and you will define some of the rules by which it is fought. You will step into a war that started before the birth of man—before the birth of the Firstborn—and your presence will count for much. With or without you, the battle is coming, and with it, the darkness that clan Leonne fought so long and so hard against."
The clan Leonne. The clan that, by right of battle and bloodshed, now ruled the Dominion of Annagar from beside the waters of the Tor Leonne. Clan wars were clan wars, and they happened; Ashaf had seen two in her life. The lot of a seraf changed little, except when the raiding and reprisals were fierce—in which case, the serafs died. When the war was over, they had either the old master, or a new one, and they toiled, as ever.
But Leonne was made by no petty clan infighting. Ashaf knew the old stories, although she was simple seraf. That the founder, Leonne, had been given the Sun Sword by the Lord himself; that he had fought to preserve the Lady's domain, in the name of the Lord. And that, of course, he faced the priests of the so-called Lord of Night to do so. Children's stories. True stories. So often, they were the same, if you know how to understand what lay beneath the words. "I don't understand."
"Don't you?"
"You're telling me if I choose to go on Lady knows what journey, that I will be forgotten and unmourned."
"No, Ashaf—you will never be forgotten and unmourned."
"And I'm to do this to save the—the world?" The old woman laughed. "I am not a warrior, Evayne a'Nolan. Even in my youth, I could not wield a clansman's sword. You ask me to fight? Then the darkness of the night had befuddled you."
"Has it? There are territories over which battles are fought in this world in which no sword is raised."
Ah, yes. How could she have forgotten, who had fought—and lost—so many? And why was it that to win was to prepare for another battle, but to lose was to lose all? Oh, she was tired, was Ashaf kep'Valente. It was only when she was weary that the dead were so strong.
"You wish me to make this journey."
"I wish you to know and understand that the price of it will be, in the end, your death." There was no softness at all in the words.
"And if I don't?"
"I do not know. Perhaps another woman will be asked to make the choice that I ask of you." The stranger was silent a long time. And then her face softened; she lifted a hand a moment, as if to touch the older woman's face. She stopped, lowering the hand, letting the gesture linger only in her expression. "I can promise you this: You will never have to bury her."
And then, before Ashaf's eyes could sting at the words and the memories they invoked, the stranger took a step into the room's shadows—and silver light, pale and luminescent, swallowed her, returning her, perhaps, to the Lady's Moon.
She missed the dawn, but met the day when the shadows cast were still long and slender. The fields were full of moving bodies; women toiled with their scythes in their personal plots in the common before being called to serve upon the Lord's lands at the sides of their husbands. This Tor'agar granted them that much. His father had not. Small children gathered tied stalks; older children knotted and bundled them. During this month, this, the only time of year when the Lady's hand was felt during the daylight hours, there were no idle hands.
Not even, she thought ruefully, her own. Her back was strong, her arms stronger; she would be missed. And she did not care to offer excuses, either of the two that she had, for her absence. She scurried with haste to the edge of the Lord's field, knowing her own part of the common serafs' plot would be tended by the younger women in the village. Age granted her that unspoken right, but she hated to take advantage of it now when in her dotage she might truly require it. Unself-conscious in her movements, she rolled up her sleeves, inviting the sun's touch as she ran.
"Ashaf!"
"Na'Carre," she said, smiling broadly at a slender, too tall youth.
He blushed, almost ducking under the hand that ran through the sun-bleached tuft of his curly hair. He was a young man now, and no child, to be so called. When had he grown so? Last year, and he had blushed and smiled, joining her a moment to brag about his new exploits, his ability to trap small game in the forests outside of the Lord's fields and the serafs' common. He brought her an almost recognizable pelt, a gift of sorts, proof of the truth of his words.
She stopped a moment to look at him, and his mother, Valla kep'Valente, thwacked him soundly on the shoulder for being what he was: a youth yearning impatiently for the imagined grace of manhood.
She had been just such a youth except, of course, she had desired to be woman and wife.
"Ashaf," Valla said, falling into step beside the older woman. "Are you well? It's not like you to sleep so late."
Not, Ashaf thought, during harvest. "I slept poorly," she told the younger woman, wondering if she had ever walked with such unself-conscious, easy grace. "Yesterday was the start of the harvest season; I rose too early."
"Ah," Valla said, her own face taking the shadows a moment. Every seraf had her dead, be they mother or sister or child. Or father. Or brother. Or husband. "We said our rites. My youngest—Tia—she wouldn't mind me. Crawled all over the graves as if they were hillocks made for child's play."
"The Lady," Ashaf said wryly and sadly both, "is the mother. She understands; the joy of children is no disrespect to either her or those who now rest in her keeping. Believe that, Valla."
The younger woman smiled and nodded, just as Ashaf knew she would. Ashaf, having lost so much, had done what she could to fill her life; she was old enough now to be considered wise—at least by the women. They came to her, when they could not or would not go to their own mothers, and she let them come, taking a pain and a pleasure from their youthful company. The what-ifs of her own family.
Her arms ached, but the smile across her lips, habit and more, was pleasant and warm enough. "Now come. We've no time for talk; as it is, we'll be under the headman's eyes. Look at the sun."
She loved the harvest season, and as she watched it unfold, she wondered what the cooler weather would bring. Rain; probably too much of it. Averda was the Lady's land; there was no doubt about it. And those who called the Lady the weaker of the two were fools who deserved to live in the harsh, wind-blasted desert plains. If the sand made men, she thought, it scoured them so clean only their swords and their will remained. And swords and will were a poor home and a poor haven for life.
Here, with green and gold and red all about, she thought she could be happy. No, she did not think it; she felt it, a deep and even peace that came from working with life, for it. There were drummers on the fields' edge, and a man who played the pipes as if the pipes were a sweet, youthful voice. She did not recognize him, and that was odd; she recognized all of the village serafs on sight.
"He's pretty, isn't he?" Valla said, catching the black strands of hair that had worked free of her confining knot and tying them up again.
"Do you know him?"
"1? No." The younger woman laughed. "But I would if Arrego weren't so jealous!"
"Valla!"
"He's Voyani," she replied, as if that explained anything. Or everything.
It explained much.
In the Dominion, there were the clansmen, and there were the serafs. The clansmen were free, and where they had power and the will to protect their holdings, they gathered serafs, branding and naming them. If they were powerful enough, they chose to merely name; the name was enough. Ashaf kep'Valente bore no scar, no brand. She understood that she was owned by a powerful clan, and perhaps she was even blessed by the owne
rship; today, under this sky, with the smell of the earth in her nostrils, the soil beneath her nails, the harvest beside her bent back, she felt so. And she knew it as the Lord's will, and the Lady's. Some served. Some ruled.
But the Voyani were as old as the land. They traveled, many upon the horses of the open plains, and many not; they moved in groups, and they defended each other as fiercely as blood-born clansmen. But they took no serafs. They owned no land. They carried no war with them.
It was said that they were not averse to robbing the clansmen they found who were poor and unable to defend themselves properly, and Ashaf knew it for truth. Yet they were suffered to survive, and survive they did, trading and bartering and carrying information from one Terrean to the next. They even moved out of the Dominion from time to time, seeking the merchants in the Northern Empire. It was said that some, one or two, settled there, like so many of the poor, free clansmen who could make no mark for themselves in the Dominion. The North took the weak ones, and accepted them; the Lord let them go. The Lord had no use for weakness.
It was also said, although she did not know if it were true, that serafs who escaped their clan could travel with the Voyani and find both home and freedom in Essalieyan. She and her husband had spoken of it in whispers when their first child was born. Perhaps the Lady had heard them. Perhaps the Lady had been angered by it. Perhaps the Lady had chosen to keep the children within her reach.
Too much darkness. During the Sun's dance. She shook herself. "Why are the Voyani here?"
Valla shrugged.
"Which family?"
"Hers. Yollana's."
Ashaf felt a little chill in the sun's heat. She raised a hand, adjusted her hat, feeling the edge of the wide brim as if its presence were a comfort. "Has she come to trade?"
"I think it's too early for that. We're just starting our harvest."