The Lord of the Mist Folk was amused by the boldness of the mortal. He blew in the Red King's nostrils so that he could survive in the airless wasteland of the upper reaches, and he sent him on his way.
The Red King did seek The Father of All Dragons, and found him. Attended by sixteen griffins, the Great Wyrm gave him audience in the Cavern of Temptations. He lay his bulk, the violet-grey of naked mountains, upon precious metals and gems and the priceless artifacts of a thousand times a thousand long-dead nations, and he asked the Red King what it was that he had come so far to seek.
"Peace," answered the Red King, and the Father of All Dragons uncoiled his endless body in irritation.
"I can give only you a gift, and not your people," said the dragon. "You may return with anything that I possess: jewels and gold, objects of magic, machines of fantastic invention, arcane books that have known the touch of no other hand but ours. All are here. What is it that you desire?"
"I have named it."
At this, the Great Wyrm was wroth. The fan of his wings was greater than a hurricane, lightning a mere spark to his eyes, and his voice was the voice of thunder.
"Foolish mortal! Only one can give you that, and She will not. Because you would not take what I offered, know as your punishment Her decree. Not until you have returned again, and either saved the land or destroyed it, will you have peace."
By the time the Red King asked for a griffin so he might search the heavens for Her, Lisha was asleep. But because a tale should have an ending, Caldan finished it for no one but himself, with the yawning blackness of the space between the stars and the sagacious reptilian smile of one who knew that She could never be the found, but was only, ever, the finder.
Caldan looked down at the tiny child in his lap. The way she slept, so soundly, with her lips slightly parted and sooty lashes on rounded cheeks, reminded him of his daughter when she was as young. Even asleep, she gripped his jacket fiercely. Unwillingly, he recalled Elzin at her return, gripping the Flute, clinging to life. He gently pried loose Lisha's fingers, and put his ear to her chest where he heard the faint susurration of her heart, that untrue sound which caused her to tire so quickly. Which could be passed on, and which must not be.
He gave himself a moment for preparation, locating the cool core of calm at his center, clearing his mind so that its commands would be carried out swiftly, directly, without hesitation. The moves were ancient, taught to every Kyr male by the fifth month of their mate's pregnancy, or before if need arose. Gently, so gently, he cradled Lisha’s chin and the back of her head. Muscle and nerve knew their pattern well, and when he unleashed them, they performed with unearthly speed. The sound was like the snap of a dry twig carelessly trod on, and she went instantly limp.
He wrapped her broken body in his cloak and with his fingers he pried rocks from the ground to begin a cairn. How many times, he wondered. How many times had he honored/been honored? Twenty? Thirty? More? He knew that he could count them, if he dared to think back and remember. They were there, in his memory. These things, one did not forget.
From the beginning his people had culled. Poor eyesight, impaired hearing, a mind which grasped too slowly; anything detrimental that might be passed to another generation demanded a cull. Parents conscientiously watched their children for signs of defects. If another spotted what they missed, elders would speak to the parents so that they might choose who would honor their child. Few ignored or evaded their obligation. For them, there were the nightwender.
At last, satisfied that normal scavengers would be thwarted until Lisha's parents could come for her body, Caldan rested. The morning birds called the hour before dawn, but, pensive, he waited beside the barrow until the first edge of the sun showed itself over the mountain.
o0o
When Caldan returned to the encampment, no life stirred as yet. This troubled him. Surely someone should be awake and cooking by now; the elite at the least changed their posts with the dawn, but as yet all was still. Only his own soft footfalls and those of his dark coursers broke the silence, and this, too, made him uneasy. The birds had fallen curiously mute. With a thought to Elzin's doves and to last Saire's strangeness, the Kyr turned his footsteps toward the Saire's tent.
He froze, unbelieving. Four guards stood stiff and solemn at the tent's four corners, another warded the door. Not one seemed troubled by the mist, a madly roiling river of silver vapor, which had thrust aside the tent flap to rush like a cataract across the grounds. The guards stared outward, keenly watchful but somehow oblivious as the miasma poured across their boots and boiled against their knees.
He ran for the tent, shouting for Shagril. No one moved, no one but himself. He leaped inside.
The mist here curdled so thickly he ran into Elzin without seeing her. He tried to step back, but she captured his arms. Her nails pierced his flesh like a raptor's talons, her grip stronger than iron.
Through the bright and dark of the mist he recognized her face, though its fierce expression made his stomach clench. He wanted to flee, to escape the cloying, loathsome miasma more than he had ever wanted anything before, but she had bound him as with chains. He could not see his dogs, could not begin to guess if they, too, had been affected, or if they merely failed to recognize his need. The mist thickened, obscuring even Elzin's angry countenance until nothing remained but featureless grey. He was suspended without weight or pain. If he breathed, he could not feel it. If he blinked, he could not see it. He might have screamed, had he remembered how, but he had forgotten. He was forgetting. Consumed. Past. Present. Self.
o0o
A void is by definition empty.
Now, again, it was.
o0o
Cognizance was like the shaft of a spear plunged through his breast.
"That is what you sent her into, murderer!" her voice accused bitterly. "Could you think I would not know?"
Caldan collapsed to his knees. His coursers nuzzled him with concern. He gathered them closer, unable to speak.
He was no longer in Elzin’s tent, and alone but for his dogs. Below, far below, the camp surged with life. Children laughed as they played or performed early chores. Horses whinnied. Adults labored over their cookfires. Heratinn stepped from his tent, his elite a cocoon.
Then the flap of Elzin's tent rose, pushed open from the inside. The breath snagged in Caldan's lungs, though this time the guards were alert to their duty. They watched as the opening widened, and a stout, dark-haired handmaid passed through. Kezwann, on her way to the cookfires, bent on a meal to awaken her lady.
There was no mist, no silence, no void. Nothing had changed.
And nothing must.
o0o
They were likable, these Tarskans. They smiled at his approach, listened attentively to his questions, courteously offered directions to another who might provide better answers for Your Highness Prince Heratinn.
"Your camp is so clean, my guess is you haven't been here that long. Do you move your camps often, perhaps to avoid depleting the game?"
"Oh, Diskahni could answer that better than I. You can find her down by the horses--or perhaps at the river's edge. She likes fish for breakfast, Diskahni. Do you know her, Your Highness Prince Heratinn? You may mark her long plaits and dark eyes, and her buckskins are lighter than mine--just a little. Yes, the edge of the river, I think, or perhaps by Okadar's cookfire. Good hunting!"
Yes, good hunting, indeed, if one liked the pursuit of wild geese. So far all he'd gotten was his exercise and an excellent idea of the many ways highlanders, both male and female, did up their long hair.
"Come eat with us, Your Highness Prince Heratinn," his hosts urged him. They made him comfortable. A plate was pressed into his hands.
"What's this I'm eating?"
"A quail. See, it has been stuffed with squirrel meat, ground acorns, mint and wild garlic and arrowroot."
"Are you sure?"
"What is it you mean?"
"Well, shouldn't I ask Hatki instead?"
"Oh, no," the grave answer, "this I am sure of."
"So about food you will not be so reticent."
"Reticent?"
"You're so quiet whenever I'm present."
"We are?"
"Yes. I've been thinking, perhaps an exchange of stories might serve to make us more comfortable with one another."
"Stories?"
"Surely you have stories."
"Oh, Vitask--"
"Or Chatsai--"
"Or maybe Koiyath--"
The prince put his head in his hands. "Never mind…"
"He wears a thin headband--"
"--two braids at the temple--"
"--gathered in back with a clasp made of bone--"
"I said I give up."
They all fell silent to smile at him benignly. "Won't you have some herbed deer meat, Your Highness Prince Heratinn?"
Yet, Heratinn could not bring himself to be angry with the Tarskans, no matter how much Petril muttered against the dangers of insolent primitives. The more he watched, the more he realized that here he must set aside all his conceptions of respect, honor and politics. He might have demanded answers this morning--had he met with such transparent resistance from common folk elsewhere, he would have been forced to. That, or risk being perceived as both weak and a coward. Instead, he swallowed his pride and annoyance, not to mention the worry that his patience would be misinterpreted for the blunt persistence of a dullard, and pursued each intentionally vague lead. And it seemed to work, too. Last night he had been pointedly ignored; this morning he had been sought out to sit by their fire. Surely that must be considered progress. Mustn't it?
After the meal he went with them as they gathered. They reminded him of deer approaching a field at twilight--a graceful, wary folk with long legs and longer memories. They no longer seemed so identical, now that he made himself note features beyond clothes and hair. A few even had grey eyes, like Castandra's, instead of the prevalent black, though the color occurred most in the women. Or so he thought. It might just be he spent more time looking at only the faces of the women, for he found it embarrassing to look--or worse still, to be caught looking--at the slender, shapely female legs garbed in what he considered men's clothing. He found the effect disconcertingly provocative, and had no difficulty sympathizing with two coltish adolescent boys who gamely endeavored not to let their eyes stray to the Saire's enormous bosom. By highland standards, her proportions must be quite astounding. Actually, anyone's standards would find them impressive, he decided, then blushed to realize that it was he who now stared.
"Caldan!" A Tarskan in ash-colored buckskins gestured an invitation to the councilor and his daughter to share a choice spot near the front. The man's deeply seamed face gave the impression of great age, though his swept-back hair paradoxically poured down his back, long and thick and darker than pitch.
Caldan. Since their arrival he'd not heard the councilor called anything else. Not the smallest child used his proper title, or acted as if he might not be approached. 'Next grant me dominion of the wind,' he had said. But it was not a contemptuous familiarity, rather an intimate respect that seemed to have swelled since that first, uneasy confrontation that he'd come to think of as the horse test.
A hush fell over the encampment. The Saire stepped forward, Flute in hand. The instrument was still blackened and scarred, yet she raised it to her lips without hesitation and gave it sound.
Impossible sound. Impossible that an instrument so small and one frail mortal body could create a sound so huge and all encompassing. One note, even and unending, played so low it was more a vibration than a tone, so deep he felt, rather than heard it. Like raw power given voice, it resonated in his chest and lungs and reverberated along his bones until his entire body sang with it, fine crystal coaxed by the throat of a master singer.
Unmarred by swell or fade, enduring as the stars, the tone continued… perfect… unchanging… infinitely sustained… He became a part of it, and it a part of him, a presence more intimate than his heartbeat and more sure. Its embrace protected him, enabled him. He need fear nothing so long as he was held.
And then he noticed other voices, small ones intertwined within the deep vibration of the unchanged first. Their notes wove tiny rhythms about the great tone, intricate and alien, each voice different, yet harmonious, held together somehow by the grand, immutable bass.
It became his world, that profound vibration, as constant as the ground on which he stood. Like the world, it had always been. Like the world, it would always endure.
But it did not. Impossibly, it faltered. His body swayed with the shock of it, an almost physical blow. Around him, Tarskan and Lhantian alike adjusted their balance as if the earth tilted beneath their feet.
And then, that earth was gone.
They all stood blinking, stupefied, spell broken. The sun had crossed from east to west, but it might well have been the evidence of centuries as of hours. Time had lost all meaning within that cradle of sound.
Heratinn's feet were blocks of unfeeling lead against the winter-hardened ground, but it was not the cold that made him shudder. It was… everything. This place, this isle, his life, and all that had been ordinary in it. The reality he had always known seemed suddenly strange, even hostile, and he felt vulnerable before it. He was unfettered and yet, somehow, confined. Why? How?
He forced his eyes to focus, and discovered that alone among them all, Elzin was unmoved. Still deep within the Flute's enchantment the Saire played on. Yes, he heard them now, the little voices: disparate now, unchanneled, their weird harmonies gone frenetic.
How desperately diminished they were, those tiny voices cast adrift without the strong, sustaining bass. As if sensing his own observation, they began to converge--too swiftly, he thought, too soon. The music gained strength, but the joining was graceless and brutal, contrived, even to his untutored ears.
Sound coalesced to song, stronger now, a song like a gale, like a hurricane. He stood outside it, but still it buffeted him--a great unfocused yearning. It wanted. It wanted with an awful passion the scope of which he could not encompass, or even conceive. It hungered, and the pain of its desire beat against him until he thought that he must be destroyed. But what it wanted was beyond him. What it needed, even it did not know.
He went into the black, not knowing. Only the scream of the lioness saved him.
The lioness walked among them. Beautiful and dread, its sheer mass crying out for disbelief, it picked its careful way between the knots of the assembled. Highland children clung to the legs of their parents, and without exception their parents looked to Caldan. But the councilor did nothing as the snow lion mounted the air and, tail lashing, rose higher than Elzin as the last notes of the song--a breeze now, a zephyr--dwindled, then died.
The beast screamed again. Untroubled, Elzin reached up to the snow lion's neck, where a silver medallion depended from a silver chain. She touched it and blazed with light. His confusion and otherness fell away before it.
Her voice was power too, but a power that he understood: cognizant and self-willed. "Know you then that the goddess can be generous. Let us mark our union with a feast."
The snow lion sprang from thin air to earth. As it left the earth again in another great leap, an oaken table sprouted from the ground. From it whole lambs and boars were raised spitted on racks, below which roasts of venison, beef and mutton steamed on giant wooden platters. The lioness leaped again, and another table appeared. Broiled or baked, stuffed or not, fried, sautéed or even raw, if it had flown in the air or swam in the depths, the second table's spread accounted for it. Another leap, and another table, this one spread with the bounty of orchard and garden. Though long out of season, fruits and vegetables blushed ripe and whole in bowls bigger around than the wheels of a drayman's wagon, or swam in rich sauces or cauldrons of butter and herbs.
Again, again, again, again--seven times for seven tables. The fourth was piled high with wheels of cheese and logs of co
ld summer sausage. A squirrel's treasure of nuts spilled over all from a circle of bright-woven baskets, and small vats promised pickles of every variety.
Heavy crocks held sway on the next table, in them soups and savory stews simmered while warm, thick puddings steamed. Heaped between all were breads for sopping, jars of butter and jams set among them like bright gems.
One table groaned beneath its burden of kegs and barrels, filled with fine wine and ale enough for a king's wedding feast. Halved fruits swam in vats of sweet juices, and gouts of fragrant steam billowed from two score kettles of tea.
The final spread would have given even the Queen's bakers pause. Pastries and pies and rich confections lay piled in heaps or stacked on racks. One cake, each layer different, rose in tiers to the height of a grown man's head.
The snow lion bounded once more, and disappeared.
Elzin's hands dropped as if the Flute had become suddenly too heavy for her. She rubbed her eyes, one at a time, then shook her head at the tables as if in disbelief.
"Goddess! That's what I call a feast," she exclaimed.
Highland children clapped hands over their ears; the adults winced, most already shielding their eyes.
"Oh, shells." The Saire's mild curse rocked the tree branches as her questing fingers dipped between her breasts. "I swear this thing--" She fished forth a silver medallion and dropped it to the outside of her robe. The clearing was flung from brightness into the twilight of deep shadows cast by the setting sun. "--has a mind of its own."
o0o
Even as his pupils dilated in response to the sudden dusk, hunger drove its fist into Caldan dead center. Already he could see that many of the children wore the pale and apathetic look that marked the onset of starvation. With twilight coming on and no food in their bellies since the morning, it was no wonder.
The Night Holds the Moon Page 21