Faery Worlds - Six Complete Novels
Page 16
The twenty-one Zavaedies and Tavaedies dressed in swift silence. The utter blackness of pre-dawn matched their spirits. Though the healing rain had soothed the physical wounds inflicted on them, nothing could heal the ache of what they had lost. They danced open the faery door to the underhill knowing they would find corpses.
At least they died innocent, Brena told herself. Better than to emerge into this world of torture and war and hate, where even good deeds were rewarded with betrayal.
The hole into the earth appeared at the center of the clearing. Normally, the magic of the exit would have allowed each Initiate to emerge from the ground one at a time, as the ceremony required.
Abiono descended into the hole. He leaped back out almost immediately, his whole face transformed.
“They live! They live!”
“But how is that possible?”
“The magic of the tor itself? It was built by fae…”
“Who cares? They live…”
Dizzy babble finally found focus in the agreement to carry on the ceremony as though the abomination had never interrupted it. The Tavaedies took their places around the circle, one before each of the stones, not bound this time, but bathed in halos of magic light.
Hadi
Hadi woke up with a biting headache. He’d had the strangest dream, of a beautiful woman dancing…
No light. No food. No water. No air. No wonder he felt like gunk under toenails. But a draft of air had revived him somewhat. He didn’t see anyone around him…
…because it’s dark, you idiot, he reminded himself.
But he couldn’t hear anyone around him either. Rejecting the possibility that he had gone deaf, and the even more unlikely scenario that the other Initiates around him had stopped whining, he crawled toward the fresh air.
He saw the faint outline of moonlight. He scrambled to his feet and raced outside.
Ugh, he was in the center of the creepy megalith circles they called the Stone Hedge.
“Follow the brightest light you see,” instructed a voice.
The Tavaedies, all dressed up in their finery, stood in a circle around him, in line with the stones of the inner circle of megaliths.
Hadi didn’t hesitate. The brightest light? Only one Tavaedi held a torch. The rest stood in the shadows. He walked toward the torchlight. How easy was that? Some Test.
The Tavaedi said, when he approached, “Present your totem.”
“Uhm, here.” Hadi fumbled with the corn doll he had on a string around his neck. He lay this at the feet of the Tavaedi.
“Congratulations, Hadi, son of the Lost Swan clan of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe,” said the Tavaedi, handing him an ornate obsidian pestle. “You are now a man.”
Gwenika
Gwenika awakened to a golden light. The wisps of a beautiful dream, a dancing maiden more brilliant than the sun, tingled at the edges of her mind.
She was still in the cave, but she appeared to be alone except for a glowing ball of yellow light that hovered in front of her.
Come with me.
Gwenika couldn’t stand in the cave, so she crawled after the puff of light through the catacombs. At last, the unhewn rocks in the floor tilted up an incline. Gwenika crawled faster. Soon she realized the ceiling was tall enough that she could stand, so she did. The glow puff didn’t wait. She hurried after it.
Pale as it was, the moonlight stabbed her eyes when she first emerged from the cave. She recognized where she stood—the center of the Stone Hedge.
Tavaedies dressed in elaborate costumes stood in between the large monoliths. Most of them stood in shadow, except for one, who held a torch.
He called aloud to her in a sepulchral voice, “Follow the brightest light you see.”
The golden puff twinkled at Gwenika. It bobbed toward the shadows on the opposite side of the circle from the man with the torch. While Gwenika looked on, wide eyed, the golden ball of light grew into a blinding sun.
“It’s so bright,” Gwenika murmured, hiding her head with her arms.
Dance with me.
The miniature sun turned into a Vision of glowing men and women dancing. Nothing felt more natural than to copy their movements and join them.
That’s when she saw the yeech, flying toward her on the backs of leathery-winged bats. She wanted to duck and run, but she remembered what Dindi had told her, and indeed, when she forced herself to look up at the horrid things, she realized she was pulling them toward her on strings of light. Let go! Let go! she begged. The dance was becoming hopelessly tangled.
“Let. Me. Go!” she shouted. She slashed at the strings, not really expecting it would help, but to her surprise they were as frail as cobwebs and floated away. The yeech on their bats veered away into the night sky.
All that remained was the grace and golden light of the dance of the Ladder to the Sun, the oldest and most powerful tama of Yellow Bear.
At the end of the tama, the golden sun faded to a tiny puff of light cupped in the hand of a Tavaedi in a Yellow costume.
“Do you see any other lights?” asked the Yellow Tavaedi. “Look around the circle carefully. The torch is not important—look for other spheres like the golden one that led you here.”
Gwenika scanned the circle of Tavaedies and stones, but all she saw were men and women standing in the dark. She shook her head.
“You’ve done well,” the Yellow Tavaedi reassured her. “Present your totem.”
Gwenika unfastened her corn doll totem from the gold bead necklace about her neck, and deposited it with a bow to the Tavaedi.
The Tavaedi regarded her gravely. “You are invited to join the Yellow Dancers secret society, to learn its dances, its magics and its hidden Patterns. Do you accept the invitation and pledge to impart knowledge of the secrets to no one outside the society, upon pain of death?”
A Tavaedi? Me? Gwenika’s heart began to pound very fast. My sister, yes, we all knew she would be invited. But me?
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I pledge my word.”
“Congratulations, Gwenika, daughter of the Sycamore Stands clan of the Yellow Bear tribe,” he said, handing her a windwheel with painted yellow petals. “You are now a Tavaedi of the Golden Maize Society.”
Dindi
Dindi woke up alone, bathed in light.
All around her on the cave walls, she saw luminous glyphs. The symbols looked the same as the abstract designs painted upon houses or woven in to clothing. Chevrons, half moons, zigzags, arrows, squiggles. Things that looked like claw marks, and things that looked like bird wings. All glowing in every primordial color of the rainbow.
She traced the sigils with her fingers. Where did the light come from? She couldn’t tell. She followed the glowing glyphs up a slope, until she reached the exit from the subterranean vault.
Wind whipped her hair once she stepped into the cold night air. All around her, she saw huge stones inscribed with more glyphs. The symbols shone like brilliant flame against the basalt rock of the megaliths and the black night sky.
“The Tor of the Stone Hedge,” she whispered, spinning in a circle. She remembered the Vision clearly. Where were the other Initiates? Had they also seen the Corn Maiden’s breathtaking dance before her enemies upon this very tor?
Dimly, she could see the silhouettes of people, Tavaedies in costume, standing at the base of the megaliths with faint balls of light cupped in their hands, but it was impossible to see their faces because they were backlit by the overwhelming waterfalls of light streaming from every stone.
“Follow the brightest light you see,” a woman commanded her.
Is it a riddle? she wondered. Among lights all equally bright, can any be brightest?
She turned around again, in a slower circle this time, searching to see if any particular megalith glowed more strongly than the others.
“If you can follow the light, do it now,” said the woman. “The brightest light you see.”
“But all the stones are lit!”
“Don’t spin f
ancies to impress us. The stones are not lit. Dance, if you can see the tama to follow. Otherwise, walk to the torch.”
Which of you should I follow? Dindi asked the stones of light silently. Which of you can sing me the Unfinished Song?
As if in response to her thoughts, the three concentric circles of shining stones pulsed more brightly still. It was like trying to stare into the sun. The light stabbed her eyes. Music washed over her like a river that would drown her.
Luminous figures jumped out of the stones and swirled all around her, cavorting madly. It was the tama of the Unfinished Song, and it was as breathtaking as when the Corn Maiden had performed it. But she saw now that it was not simple at all. The dancers flipped and leaped and twirled in the air. They flew through the moves, they swayed, they swam, they fought, they flung themselves around the circle in steps so convoluted she couldn’t even catch the movement clearly, never mind copy it. The faster they twirled and whirled, the more cacophonous the song and the brighter the lights until she couldn’t see anything any more. The radiance from all sides battered her like a rain of fire. She screamed and hid her head.
“Go away, go away, I can’t take it!”
Darkness felt like a cool cloak when it settled back around her. She collapsed onto the grass. It felt cold and wet and prickly.
“Fool girl,” a woman who sounded suspiciously like Gwenika’s mother, Zavaedi Brena, called to her impatiently, “Stop spinning in circles like an idiot, and just go to the woman holding the torch!”
Still woozy, Dindi struggled to her feet. She staggered to the woman holding a torch.
“Present your totem,” said the woman. It was Zavaedi Brena.
Dindi braced herself for another Vision. To her surprise, nothing happened when she released the corncob doll from its ribbon to present to the Zavaedi Brena, except that Brena handed Dindi an obsidian mortar.
“Congratulations, Dindi, daughter of the Lost Swan clan of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe. You are now a woman.”
Dindi stared at the grinding bowl blankly. A bowl in which to mush corn and crush spices. The companion piece to the pestle some young man—Yodigo, perhaps—had been given this night. How practical for a new wife and mother. But utterly useless for a Tavaedi. Where was her windwheel? What had happened to the invitation she’d dreamed of hearing for so many years?
I failed.
Her stomach collapsed on itself in a fierce cramp, her jaw worked up and down of its own accord. Her head felt like someone was hitting her with rocks.
I failed. I failed. It was all she could think. I haven’t enough magic. I can never be a Tavaedi. I can never dance again.
Continue reading Dindi’s story in the sequel: The Unfinished Song: Taboo.
Author's Note
Every story starts from a seed, the tiniest grain of an idea. The seed that began this story planted itself in my mind ten years ago. It was simple: I wanted to tell a fairy-tale. With the fairies left in, as they so often aren’t in the retellings.
This is just the beginning of the story, of course. I hope you wouldn’t think I’d end a fairy-tale in failure. Even the Littlest Mermaid, in the original Hans Christian Anderson story, though she perished because her lover was untrue, gained a soul. Besides, the older, true “folk” fairytales almost always have happy endings. A gruesome sort of happy, in some Grimm versions, but happy.
This story has a happy ending too, and it’s already written, in case you were worried I was one of those authors who might depart to another plane of existence before finishing my story. I am the morbid sort who worries about that a lot, so I wrote the ending first.
That wasn’t hard to do, because the whole thing is based on a myth. I shan’t tell you which myth, because then you would know the end, but chances are, you haven’t heard of it anyway. It’s Polynesian, and I’ve only found one reference to it.
Some stories are omnivorous. They overlap and interweave, they transform and transmute like the lycanthropes and pumpkins they describe. Therefore, although The Unfinished Song began as a simple retelling of an obscure Polynesian legend, it quickly gobbled up other fairytales, legends and myths, churning and turning them into something a little bit old, a little bit new.
The first fairytale I learned as a child was Cinderella. Not surprisingly, there is a bit of Cinderella in this story. (We’ll get to that bit in a later novel in the series. There’s a pretty dress involved, but no glass slippers, since they haven’t invented glass yet.) A bit of Beauty and the Beast. (Oh, just wait til we meet the man in black! What? Of course there has to be a man in black. Come now, really.)
But many of the fairytales that found their way in were stranger ones. If you’ve read the novella Tomorrow We Dance, or the Author’s Note about it in the anthology Conmergence, you may know that it draws on The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes.
The very idea of the Tavaedies, and their secret societies, and their power dances, comes from Native American and African sources. The fae of Faerarth are not Celtic, despite the familiar name.
Originally, I wrote the first three chapters of Dindi’s story set in a quasi-medieval landscape of castles and peasants, knights and princesses. Familiar ground for fantasy readers, and a reasonable setting for fairytales.
Yet wrong.
Something about it didn’t satisfy me. Maybe it was just that the medieval period is overdone in the genre, and I wanted to stretch further than that. In addition, though, I wanted to set the story in a primordial time when all the fairytales of the world were first being written, an age when the population of the world was limited to the first seven tribes. I called it Faearth because it is a time when fae still openly roam the earth. There are seven tribes of peoples in Faearth, seven and no more.
So the technology and social structure of Faearth is neolithic. Neolithic means “new stone age,” which means they have all the major inventions to make them more civilized than cave dwellers: weaving, sewing, clay thatched houses, beaten gold. But they have no bronze, and definitely no iron. They have bows but not swords. I did decide to allow them horses, but horse-riding is new to them, and in many clans, they still think it more fit to eat than ride a horse.
The astute reader will also notice that I have mixed European fauna with North American flora. They grow corn, but they have wild horses, and so on. Other customs are shamelessly stolen from real cultures too. There was a culture in India that used to raise slaves as their own children, until some need arose for a human sacrifice. Then the mariah (their term, which I borrowed) would be ritually killed. This struck me as a particularly heartwrenching form of human sacrifice. It’s one thing to kill your prisoners of war. This is more like killing your foster children.
Another suspect combination is the sequoia forests of Yellow Bear, roughly based on my own native California, and the hakurl, beloved rotten shark dish of Blue Waters. Hakurl is a real dish, but not served anywhere near California. You can buy it in Reykjavik, Iceland (officially as far from California as you can get without leaving the planet). In case you thought such a food could exist only in fiction, or that I exaggerated its charms, Michael M. described hakurl in an article on, “The Worst Meals on This Earth”: “So what does hakarl taste like then? It tastes like crying. It tastes like broken promises. It tastes like the Lord God Almighty ripping the Bible out of your hands and saying, “Sorry, this doesn’t apply for you. I think you want ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’” It tastes like the Predator wading into a Care Bears movie and opening fire.” Exactly what you would expect Vikings to eat, in other words.
This eclectic mix is not due to botanical or anthropological ignorance on my part. It was a deliberate decision, to show a primeval earth yet undivided into continents. Not that I want to insist Faerarth is our earth separated only by time. If it is our earth at all—I am agnostic on this point—it is separated from us by a great deal more than time, and by a great deal less. I cannot explain more clearly, as faeries are involved, and their sense of time and space i
s notoriously suspect.
Continue reading Dindi’s story in the sequel: The Unfinished Song: Taboo.
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Also by Tara Maya:
The Unfinished Song Series
Initiate
Taboo
Sacrifice
Root
Wing
Blood
Mask – Coming soon!
A Vampire Carol and Other Christmas Tales
30 Daily Tips for NaNoWriMo: No Fail Formulas to Finish Your Novel
Conmergence
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