Harpist In The Wind trm-3

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Asleep at Caerweddin. She’ll follow me when she wakes.”

  “Across Wind Plain? Alone? You aren’t easy on one another.” He prodded the fire until it groped for the low boughs of the oak.

  Morgon asked, pulling the cloak tight, “Was Yrth with you? Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. I thought he came out for a cup of hot wine. This is no season for old men. Why? There are two great wizards here, both at your service.” He did not wait for an answer; he cast a quizzical eye at Aloil. “You are linked to him. Where is he?”

  Aloil, staring down at the fuming oak logs, shook his head. “Napping, perhaps. His mind is silent. He made a swift journey across Ymris.”

  “So did Morgon, by the look of it,” Talies commented. “Why didn’t Yrth travel with you?”

  Morgon, caught without an answer, ran one hand through his hair vaguely. He saw a sudden glitter in the crow’s eyes. “No doubt,” Mathom said, “Yrth had his reasons. A man with no eyes sees marvels. You stopped at Caerweddin? Are Astrin and his war-lords still at odds?”

  “Possibly. But Astrin is bringing the entire army to Wind Plain.”

  “When?” Aloil demanded. “He said nothing of that to me, and I was with him three nights ago.”

  “Now.” He added, “I asked him to.”

  There was a silence, during which one of the sentries, wearing nothing more than his bones under gold armor, rode soundlessly past the fire. Mathom’s eyes followed the wraith’s passage. “So. What does a man with one eye see?” He answered himself, with a blank shock of recognition in his voice, “Death.”

  “This is hardly a time,” Aloil said restlessly, “for riddles. If the way is clear between Umber and Thor, it will take him four days to reach the plain. If it is not… you had better be prepared to march north to aid him. He could lose the entire strength of Ymris. Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked Morgon. “You have gained awesome powers. But are you ready to use them alone?”

  Talies dropped a hand on his shoulder. “You have the brain of an Ymris warrior,” he said, “full of muscle and poetry. I’m no riddler, either, but living for centuries in the Three Portions taught me a little subtlety. Can you listen to what the Star-Bearer is saying? He is drawing the force of the realm to Wind Plain, and he is not intending to battle alone. Wind Plain. Astrin saw it. Yrth saw it. The final battleground…”

  Aloil gazed silently at him. Something like a frail, reluctant hope struggled into his face. “The High One.” He swung his gaze again to Morgon. “You think he is on Wind Plain?”

  “I think,” Morgon said softly, “that wherever he is, if I don’t find him very soon, we are all dead. I have answered one riddle too many.” He shook his head as both wizards began to speak. “Come to Wind Plain. I’ll give you whatever answers I have there. That’s where I should have gone in the first place, but I thought perhaps—” He broke off. Mathom finished his sentence.

  “You thought Yrth was here. The Harpist of Lungold.” He made a harsh, dry sound, like a crow’s laugh. But he was staring into the fire as if he were watching it weave a dream to its ending. He turned away from it abruptly, but not before Morgon saw his eyes, black and expressionless as the eyes of his dead, who had been eaten to the bone by truth.

  Morgon stood in the trees at the edge of Wind Plain at twilight, waiting as the night slowly drew the empty city and the long, whispering grasses into itself once again. He had been there for hours, motionless, waiting, so still he might have rooted himself to earth like a bare, twisted oak without realizing it. The sky spilled a starless black over the world, until even with his night-vision, the jewellike colors of the tower stones seemed permeated with the dark. He moved then, aware of his body again. As he took one final step toward the tower, clouds parted unexpectedly. A single star drifted through the unfathomable blackness above it.

  He stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up at them as he had when he first saw them one wet autumn day two years before. Then, he remembered, he had turned away, uncurious, uncompelled. The stairs were gold, and according to all legend they wound away from the earth forever.

  He bowed his head as if he were walking into a hard wind and began to climb. The walls around him were of the lustrous burning black between stars. The gold stairs ringed around the core of the tower, slanting gently upward. As he rounded it once and began the second spiral, the black gave way to a rich crimson. The winds, he realized, were no longer the thin, angry winds of the day; their voices were forceful, sinewy. The stairs beneath his feet seemed carved of ivory.

  He heard the voices of the winds change again at the third spiral. They held tones he had harped to in the northern wastes, and his hands yearned to match their singing. But harping would be deadly, so he kept his hands still. At the fourth level the walls seemed of solid gold and the stairs carved out of star fire. They wound endlessly upward; the plain, the broken city grew farther and farther away from him. The winds grew colder as he climbed. At the ninth level he wondered if he were climbing a mountain. The winds, the stairs, and the walls around him were clear as melted snow. The spirals were getting smaller, and he thought he must be near the top. But the next level plunged him into an eerie darkness, as if the stairs were carved out of night wind. It seemed interminable, but when he came out of it again, the moon was exactly where he had seen it last. He continued upward. The walls turned a beautiful dawn-grey; the stairs were pale rose. The winds had a cutting edge, merciless and deadly. They were prodding him out of his own shape. He kept walking, half-man, half-wind, and the colors around him changed again and again, until he realized, as others had realized before him, that he could spiral through their changing forever.

  He stopped. The city was so far beneath him he could no longer see it in the dark. Looking up, he could see the elusive top of the tower very near him. But it had been that near him, it seemed, for hours. He wondered if he were walking through a piece of a dream that had stood among the abandoned stones for thousands of years. Then he realized it was not a dream, but an illusion, an ancient riddle bound to someone’s mind, and he had carried the answer to it with him all the way.

  He said softly, “Death.”

  15

  The walls rose around him, circled him. Twelve windows opened through midnight blue stone to the restless, murmuring winds. He felt a touch and turned, startled back into his body.

  The High One stood before him. He had the wizard’s scarred hands, and the harpist’s fine, worn face. But his eyes were neither the harpist’s nor the wizard’s. They were the falcon’s eyes, fierce, vulnerable, frighteningly powerful. They held Morgon motionless, half-regretting that he had spoken the name that had turned in his mind after all that time to show its dark side. For the first time in his life he had no courage for questions; his mouth was too dry for speaking.

  He whispered into the void of the High One’s silence, “I had to find you… I have to understand.”

  “You still don’t.” His voice sounded shadowy with winds. Then he bound the awesomeness of his power somewhere within him and became the harpist, quiet, familiar, whom Morgon could question. The moment’s transition bound Morgon’s voice again, for it loosed a conflict of emotion. He tried to control them. But as the High One touched the stars at his side and his back, bringing them irrevocably into shape, his own hands rose, caught the harpist’s arms and stilled him.

  “Why?”

  The falcon’s eyes held him again; he could not look away. He saw, as if he were reading memories within the dark eyes, the silent, age-old game the High One had played; now with Earth-Masters, now with Ghisteslwchlohm, now with Morgon himself, a ceaseless tapestry of riddles with some threads as old as time and others spun at a step across the threshold into a wizard’s chamber, at a change of expression on the Star-Bearer’s face. His fingers tightened, feeling bone. An Earth-Master moved alone out of the shadows of some great, unfinished war… hid for thousands of years, now a leaf on a rich, matted forest floor of dead lea
ves, now the brush of sunlight down the flank of a pine. Then, for a thousand years, he took a wizard’s face, and for another thousand, a harpist’s still, secret face, gazing back at the twisted shape of power out of its own expressionless eyes. “Why?” he whispered again, and saw himself in Hed, sitting at the dock end, picking at a harp he could not play, with the shadow of the High One’s harpist flung across him. The sea wind or the High One’s hand bared the stars at his hairline. The harpist saw them, a promise out of a past so old it had buried his name. He could not speak; he spun his silence into riddles…

  “But why?” Tears or sweat were burning in his eyes. He brushed at them; his hands locked once more on the High One’s arms, as if to keep his shape. “You could have killed Ghisteslwchlohm with a thought. Instead you served him. You. You gave me to him. Were you his harpist so long you had forgotten your own name?”

  The High One moved; Morgon’s own arms were caught in an inflexible grip. “Think. You’re the riddler.”

  “I played the game you challenged me to. But I don’t know why—”

  “Think. I found you in Hed, innocent, ignorant, oblivious of your own destiny. You couldn’t even harp. Who in this realm was there to wake you to power?”

  “The wizards,” he said between his teeth. “You could have stopped the destruction of Lungold. You were there. The wizards could have survived in freedom, trained me for whatever protection you need—”

  “No. If I had used power to stop that battle, I would have battled Earth-Masters long before I was ready. They would have destroyed me. Think of their faces. Remember them. The faces of the Earth-Masters you saw in Erlenstar Mountain. I am of them. The children they once loved were buried beneath Isig Mountain. How could you, with all your innocence, have understood them? Their longing and their lawlessness? In all the realm, who was there to teach you that? You wanted a choice. I gave it to you. You could have taken the shape of power you learned from Ghisteslwchlohm: lawless, destructive, loveless. Or you could have swallowed darkness until you shaped it, understood it, and still cried out for something more. When you broke free of Ghisteslwchlohm’s power, why was it me you hunted, instead of him? He took the power of land-law from you. I took your trust, your love. You pursued what you valued most…”

  Morgon’s hands opened, closed again. His breath was beginning to rack through him. He caught it, stilled it long enough to shape one final question. “What is it you want of me?”

  “Morgon, think.” The even, familiar voice was suddenly gentle, almost inaudible. “You can shape the wild heart of Osterland, you can shape wind. You saw my son, dead and buried in Isig Mountain. You took the stars of your own destiny from him. And in all your power and anger, you found your way here, to name me. You are my land-heir.”

  Morgon was silent. He was gripping the High One as if the tower floor had suddenly vanished under him. He heard his own voice, oddly toneless, from a distance. “Your heir.”

  “You are the Star-Bearer, the heir foreseen by the dead of Isig, for whom I have been waiting for centuries beyond hope. Where did you think the power you have over land-law sprang from?”

  “I didn’t — I wasn’t thinking.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. He thought of Hed, then. “You are giving me — you are giving Hed back to me.”

  “I am giving you the entire realm when I die. You seem to love it, even all its wraiths and thick-skulled farmers and deadly winds—” He stopped, as a sound broke out of Morgon. His face was scored with tears, as riddles wove their pattern strand by gleaming strand around the heart of the tower. His hands loosened; he slid to the High One’s feet and crouched there, his head bowed, his scarred hands closed, held against his heart He could not speak; he did not know what language of light and darkness the falcon who had so ruthlessly fashioned his life would hear. He thought numbly of Hed; it seemed to lay where his heart lay, under his hands. Then the High One knelt in front of him, lifted Morgon’s face between his hands. His eyes were the harpist’s, night-dark, and no longer silent but full of pain.

  “Morgon,” he whispered, “I wish you had not been someone I loved so.”

  He put his arms around Morgon, held him as fiercely as the falcon had held him. He circled Morgon with his silence, until Morgon felt that his heart and the tower walls and the starred night sky beyond were built not of blood and stone and air, but of the harpist’s stillness. He was still crying noiselessly, afraid to touch the harpist, as if he might somehow change shape again. Something hard and angled, like grief, was pushing into his chest, into his throat, but it was not grief. He said, above its pain, feeling the High One’s pain as one thing he could comprehend, “What happened to your son?”

  “He was destroyed in the war. The power was stripped from him. He could no longer live… He gave you the starred sword.”

  “And you… you have been alone since then. Without an heir. With only a promise.”

  “Yes. I have lived in secret for thousands of years with nothing to hope in but a promise. A dead child’s dream. And then you came. Morgon, I did anything I had to do to keep you alive. Anything. You were all my hope.”

  “You are giving me even the wastelands. I loved them. I loved them. And the mists of Herun, the vesta, the backlands… I was afraid, when I realized how much I loved them. I was drawn to every shape, and I couldn’t stop myself from wanting—” The pain broke through his chest like a blade. He drew a harsh, terrible breath. “All I wanted from you was truth. I didn’t know… I didn’t know you would give me everything I have ever loved.”

  He could not speak any more. Sobbing wrenched him until he did not know if he could endure his own shape. But the High One held him to it, soothing him with his hands and his voice until Morgon quieted. He still could not speak; he listened to the winds whispering through the tower, to the occasional patter of rain on the stones. His face was bowed against the High One’s shoulder. He was silent, resting in the High One’s silence, until his voice came again, hoarse, weary, calmer.

  “I never guessed. You never let me see that far beyond my anger.”

  “I didn’t dare let you see too much. Your life was in such danger, and you were so precious to me. I kept you alive any way I could, using myself, using your ignorance, even your hatred. I did not know if you would ever forgive me, but all the hope of the realm lay in you, and I needed you powerful, confused, always searching for me, yet never finding me, though I was always near you…”

  “I told… I told Raederle if I came back out of the wastes to play a riddle-game with you that I would lose.”

  “No. You startled the truth out of me in Herun. I lost to you, there. I could endure everything from you but your gentleness.” His hand smoothed Morgon’s hair, then dropped to hold him tightly again. “You and the Morgol kept my heart from turning into stone. I was forced to turn everything I had ever said to her into a lie. And you turned it back into truth. You were that generous with someone you hated.”

  “All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles… When I thought Ghisteslwchlohm had killed you, I grieved without knowing why. When I was in the northern wastes, harping to the winds, too tired even to think, it was you who drew me out… You gave me a reason for living.” His hands had opened slowly. He raised one, almost tentatively, to the High One’s shoulder and shifted back a little. Something of his own weariness showed in his eyes, and the endless, terrible patience that had kept him alive so long, alone and unnamed, hunted by his own kind in the world of men. Morgon’s head bowed again after a moment.

  “Even I tried to kill you.”

  The harpist’s fingers touched his cheekbone, drew the hair back from his eyes. “You kept my enemies from suspecting me very effectively, but Morgon, if you had not stopped yourself that day in Anuin, I don’t know what I would have done. If I had used power to stop you, neither of us would have lived too long afterward. If I had let you kill me, out of despair, because we had br
ought one another to such an impasse, the power passing into you would have destroyed you. So I gave you a riddle, hoping you would consider that instead.”

  “You knew me that well,” he whispered.

  “No. You constantly surprised me… from the very first I am as old as the stones on this plain. The great cities the Earth-Masters built were shattered by a war that no man could have survived. It was born out of a kind of innocence. We held so much power, and yet we did not understand the implications of power. That’s why, even if you hated me for it, I wanted you to understand Ghisteslwchlohm and how he destroyed himself. We lived so peacefully once, in these great cities. They were open to every change of wind. Our faces changed with every season; we took knowledge from all things: from the silence of the backlands to the burning ice sweeping across the northern wastes. We did not realize, until it was too late, that the power inherent in every stone, every movement of water, holds both existence and destruction.” He paused, no longer seeing Morgon, tasting a bitter word. “The woman you know as Eriel was the first of us to begin to gather power. And I was the first to see the implications of power… that paradox that tempers wizardry and compelled the study of riddlery. So, I made a choice, and began binding all earth-shapes to me by their own laws, permitting nothing to disturb that law. But I had to fight to keep the land-law, and we learned what war is then. The realm as you know it would not have lasted two days in the force of those battles. We razed our own cities. We destroyed one another. We destroyed our children, drew the power even out of them. I had already learned to master the winds, which was the only thing that saved me. I was able to bind the power of the last of the Earth-Masters so they could use little beyond the power they were born to. I swept them into the sea while the earth slowly healed itself. I buried our children, then. The Earth-Masters broke out of the sea eventually, but they could not break free of my hold over them. And they could never find me, because the winds hid me, always…