Runestone of Eresu

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

  The vision vanished. She floated between icy banks, feeling the loss of that child like a wound.

  Whose child? Whose child had it been? And when, in what time?

  She swam back at last to the white hill. She could see now that the window through which she had come was partly hidden from the lake by a jutting snowbank. When she stepped from the water, the icy air made her tingle. She pulled on her robe and made her way absently through the snow, thinking of the child she had held.

  Once inside she returned to the large hall dressed in the long fur robe and fur slippers, deliciously soft against her clean skin. The low table had been set with wooden plates and with a loaf of warm new bread, a pot of ale, a garnish of some pale, long-leafed vegetable that she did not recognize, and the steaming stewpot set on a metal trivet. She settled herself on cushions opposite Canoldir and looked around the room with appreciation.

  Canoldir’s weapons hung beside the fireplace: a fine sword, knives, a beautiful bow, arrows with game tips. Canoldir watched her careful appraisal. “There is game on these snowy peaks, Skeelie. Stag and small deer and a great cow-like animal that wanders the snowbanks in search of moss. There are sheltered valleys where they can dig deep for fodder, and valleys where the burning heart of the mountain gives forth heat enough for the grass to grow thick. There is game in plenty, and I speak a prayer for them when I must kill them.”

  She saw then that across the mantel, beneath Canoldir’s weapons, were carven five faint lines of words. She rose, stood before the blazing fire to read them.

  Those who have torn away the seams of Time,

  through the repetition of their birth upon Ere itself,

  can move through the tapestry of Time

  and can weave new powers into the intricate fabric

  of the one power.

  When she turned, Canoldir was dishing up the stew. She watched him, caught up in the words. What was their meaning? So like the tree man’s words, One of the few born to weave a new pattern into the fabric of the world.

  She came to the table abstracted, seated herself on the low cushion with her feet tucked under her robe. The stew smelled wonderful, rich and brown. Canoldir cut bread for her, said quietly, “Why do those words worry you? Do you not understand them?”

  “I’m not sure. That—that most are born again in different lives, some in different worlds, some born twice upon Ere? But then . . .” She saw that Ram had read the words, and waited for him to speak.

  “Those born again on Ere have woven a new pattern into the warp of powers. You, me, Telien, Anchorstar have woven a new pattern that can reach through Time.” Ram looked to Canoldir for agreement.

  “But then the wraith . . .” Skeelie began. “The wraith makes a new pattern yet again. And, I would hope, not a lasting pattern, but one that will fray and fade.” Canoldir reached to refill their mugs with hot brew.

  “But why were we born a second time upon Ere?” Skeelie said. “And the Luff’Eresi are so born, too? I don’t—”

  “The Luff’Eresi are a different matter,” Canoldir said, watching her. “The Luff’Eresi are not, as were you and Ram, born a second time of the same race.” He saw her puzzlement. “Nothing made the repetition of your birth, Skeelie. Your birth is chance, only chance. The repetition is a new thread woven into the warp of an incomprehensible pattern. A pattern born of chance, but fitting and meaningful beyond anything we can imagine.”

  They ate in silence for some time, Ram and Skeelie puzzling over questions that interlocked even as the forces that touched them interlocked. At last Canoldir began to speak again, to speak of Time and of things both strange and familiar, then soon of things so remote that both Ram and Skeelie were caught with fascination in the rising web of his words. And as he spoke his moods were as changing as quicksilver, and with each mood, his face, his whole presence changed. He might have been a dozen men, some terrifying in their fury when he spoke of the dark Seers or of evils across Ere, some as innocent and filled with joy as a young colt. When there was joy, Canoldir’s dark eyes shone with clear light. When he spoke of evil upon Ere, his eyes were a killer’s eyes.

  He showed them Time in so far distant a past that humans had not yet come into Ere, a time when only the triebuck and the great cats, the snow tigers and white-horned beasts and animals with long slim necks and hides like saffron roamed Ere. And great dark beasts, neither bull nor bear, dwelt among the woods and fields of Ere; and then his eyes laughed with pleasure. He showed them a time when the first Cherban peoples came into Ere from across the sea, just as the old myths told, and sank their ships at the point of Sangur’s coast in solemn ritual and spoke no more of those ships or of the land from whence they had come. He showed them the Cherban making settlements along Ere’s coasts, and then showed the Cherban decimated by death and slavery as the first Herebian raiders came down out of the high desert lands. He showed them the young Cherban herder, Ynell, who was the first in whom the Seer’s powers rose, the first to speak with the gods; and then they saw how the Seeing grew among the Cherban peoples from that latent talent, suddenly catching fire among them at Ynell’s persecution and at the growing threat from the Herebian raiders. “But that,” Canoldir, said, “that was long ago.”

  Then he showed them, abruptly, a vision of Telien that made Ram catch his breath and draw away from them in painful silence.

  “Yes, Ramad, you search for Telien. You search for the wraith of the dead Yanno, who gave his soul to the drug MadogWerg in the caves of Kubal. Who would have destroyed Anchorstar and many more, except for the skill of a few young Seers—young Seers wielding the runestone that Telien brought with her out of Tala-charen.”

  Ram stared at him. “The runestone she . . . but then that runestone is found!” He watched Canoldir, perplexed. “She had—she did not remember.”

  “Telien did not—will not find it. And that time is yet to come, Ramad, in the way of your lives. I could tell you that that runestone is found in that future time; and yet all Time can change at the whim of forces that even I—who move outside of Time—cannot understand truly. Let us say that that stone is, in all likelihood, found.” He paused, watching them; then idly he began to brush the crumbs from the sliced bread into a little heap and spread them out with one deft movement of his palm, began to draw in the thin veil of crumbs, one thin line across, bisected by another. When he looked up at last, he had scribed the little circle of crumbs into nine sections, eight fanning out, and one in the center. Ram sat staring at the sketch. Skeelie was silent, following Ram’s thoughts. Just so had the shattered runestone of Eresu lain in Ram’s palm, in nine jagged pieces. “It had a center stone,” Ram said with amazement. “I remember now; but I did not remember. I remembered well that there were nine shards of jade, but not that one was a center stone. Gone. Gone from my mind. I see it clearly now, one long, oval stone. The center—the core of the runestone.” He raised his eyes to Canoldir. “A golden stone—amber . . .”

  “Yes, Ramad. The core of the runestone, just as Time has a core about which it weaves endlessly.”

  Ram drew from his tunic the leather pouch and spilled its contents onto the table. The two jade runestones. The three starfires. But suddenly the starfires were four. His hand paused in midair. He looked up at Canoldir again with cold shock. “Telien’s starfire? Telien’s . . . You brought it here! Is Telien . . .”

  “It is Anchorstar’s,” Canoldir said quietly. “Anchorstar has no need for such a stone now. Anchorstar moves in his own time, thirty years beyond the time in which you mourned and buried Hermeth of Zandour, Ramad. Perhaps Anchorstar may move in Time yet again, but only shallow slips through Time, I feel. I think that he will not need the power of the starfire in that time to which he truly belongs. That time in which he was bred by Cadach. For Cadach, too, born twice upon Ere, wandered Time, bred his children through Time, in different times by different women, before he turned his powers into an evil that was his undoing.

  “The starfire belongs with
you, Ramad. You have need for all the starfires together, in the semblance of the one stone. Perhaps that need in part is simply to signify that in some time yet to come, you will join the stone itself. Make it whole again.”

  “You seem very certain.”

  “I am not certain. But if your powers seek out sufficiently well, if your powers, your commitment, are strong enough, unswerving enough—then that very force can change and realign forces moving upon Ere, can well bring you, at some time not yet clear, into the realm of all the shards of the jade. And then, Ramad, all powers may align with you—the powers you can touch but do not fully comprehend. If you are strong enough, all powers may draw in as they did at the splitting of the jade, atop Tala-charen. But this time the jade might be fused again into one whole stone. I do not say this will happen. I say that it is possible. It will depend on you. There is something in your blood, in your breeding, that belongs to the stone and its joining.”

  “If all depends on me, is Anchorstar’s mission of no concern then? Does he search for that one stone in vain?”

  “Anchorstar’s mission is urgent. All powers, all forces, must move as one, Ramad. You may be the last key in the final joining, or someone close to you may. But the powers and strengths of all who move in this battle are of urgency. Anchorstar’s mission is a part of the whole; the mission that consumes him now is to battle that which has gone awry. He moved with such intensity that he has all but forgotten that which has occurred before. Other times have become as a dream to him. His ruling passion, now, is to find that lost shard of the runestone and to aid those Children made captive by forces uglier than any that have yet touched the Children of Ynell.”

  Canoldir picked up the starfires, placed them on the table before him, and began to arrange one next the other in the way they had been cut. Fitting perfectly, they made a rough oval but with a hole where one stone was missing. “The starfire that Telien carries.” He then took up the two runestones. “Now tell the runestones for me, Ramad. Count them.”

  Ram pushed his bowl aside, gave Skeelie a long questioning look, then, unexpectedly, a comforting one. “The stone that I brought out of Tala-charen is lost in the sea, off the coast of Pelli.”

  “Yes.”

  “The stone that NilokEm brought out of Tala-charen and passed down to the dark twins is the stone in your left hand, given me by Hermeth.

  Canoldir nodded.

  “The stone in your right hand, the wraith dug out from beneath the mountain Tala-charen.”

  “Yes. You took it from the wraith at the moment that it possessed Telien.”

  Ram studied Canoldir. Did this man care that Telien had been taken by the wraith, that her very soul was captive? But why should he care? What was Telien to him?

  “Continue, Ramad. What I care about is not of moment here. I would not have brought you here had I not intended to help you pursue Telien. Though I care for more than that. I care for the fate of the stones. And I care for a coupling you do not dream of; and of which I will know a long sorrow.”

  Ram watched him, unable to make sense of his words. “What coupling? What do you speak of in such riddles?” Yet the sense Skeelie caught from Canoldir’s thoughts was so disturbing she upset her mug, occupied herself for some time mopping it up with her napkin.

  Canoldir said softly, “Continue, Ramad, with the naming of the stones.”

  “The—the stone that Telien brought from out Tala-charen when she was first flung into Time, that stone is lost somewhere in darkness and she could not remember where. ‘Lost in darkness. Found by the light of one candle, carried in a searching, and lost in terror,’“ Ram repeated.

  “That prediction, Ramad, is one of the wonders that moves through Time unchanged. Ever, ever changing are the winds of Time, ever nebulous and moving. And yet moments among those winds, words or predictions sometimes, the fate of a man sometimes, can move through those winds unchanging even as the swirling storms of Time change. ‘Found again in wonder,’ the prediction says. ‘Given twice, and accompanying a quest and a conquering.’ That is four stones, Ramad. What of the other five?”

  “The fifth is the starfires, of course.”

  “Yes. Though the starfires do not hold the same magic as do the other runestones. The starfires know only their own magic, they know only the work of the core, which they are; they know only the magic to plunge into the core of Time.” Canoldir lifted the ale pot from beside the hearth and poured out more of the spiced liquor into their empty mugs. “Five stones, then. Five you have accounted for. And what of the other four?”

  “I do not know. I know only that all the shards must be brought together, that Ere cannot know peace until the runestone is whole once more. Four missing shards. Four—”

  “No, Ramad. There are not four. There are only three.”

  “But I—”

  “You carry the sixth runestone close to you. Do you not know what you carry?”

  Ram stared at Canoldir. “I carry no other stone. I know no other stone. I carry no stone but these. What do you . . .?”

  “Reach into your tunic, Ramad, and put on the table what you carry there.”

  Ram drew out from the folds of his tunic the only other object he carried and placed it on the table before Canoldir. The bitch wolf grinned in the firelight, her long rearing body turned red-gold before the flame. Ram raised his eyes to Canoldir, unbelieving.

  Canoldir did not speak. The room began to fade, fog to come around them, then the space to warp and remake itself, so Ram and Skeelie stood in a small stone chamber lit with torches round the walls. A young man dressed in a deep blue robe knelt there in some private ritual; then suddenly a brilliant white light shattered around them and they were in Tala-charen, Ram a child again holding the shattered runestone in his hand while all around him came figures out of Time to receive those shards in one flashing instant, and among them the man in the blue robe. Ram recognized his face from having seen it in a vision long before; it was NiMarn, a younger NiMarn than Ram had seen, who had fashioned the bell of bronze. NiMarn, founder of the cult of the wolf. Time warped again, a dark-clad forgeman labored by NiMarn’s side. The blaze of the forge flared and died and flared. He poured his molten metal, and NiMarn, in a strange, quick ceremony, placed the jade shard within. They saw the casting harden, they saw NiMarn raise the bronze bitch wolf aloft, smiling cruelly.

  Long after the vision faded, Ram sat staring at Canoldir. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible. “How can it be? The wolf bell was already made when—when the runestone shattered. How . . . ? It cannot be. The bell . . .”

  “The turning in on itself of Time can be, Ramad. Not often does it happen, not even with the strongest powers. But the power that night on Tala-charen was power gone wild, power warping into new patterns, into new paths. Such a thing might never happen again, in all of Time. It was, it is. The jade is there inside the wolf bell and will remain so now until you yourself release it. Or until one close to you does. The sixth runestone of Eresu, hidden there inside the belly of the bitch wolf.

  Ram touched the bronze wolf reverently. No wonder the bell had such power. And now—he lifted his eyes to Canoldir. “Three stones unaccounted for, then. Three stones to search out . . .” His voice caught with wonder.

  “Three. But remember, Ramad, the wraith covets all of this,” Canoldir said, sweeping up the two jade stones and the starfires into the leather pouch and tossing it to Ram.

  *

  Once, late in the night, Skeelie woke to hear the wolves howling on the mountain. She turned over, hardly aware of them, her thoughts all of Canoldir. Fawdref’s voice raised in a wild, gleeful song, wailing, cleaving the night with furious joy. The others, the bitch and dog wolves, cleaved their voices to his in octaves like wild bugles ringing, crying out across the night against all that would fetter them.

  Did another voice, a human voice, rise with their song, deep and abiding? Later, Skeelie could not be sure. She slept smiling, strangely unsettled.

/>   TEN

  Skeelie woke at dawn. Somewhere, Canoldir was singing in a deep, wild voice that stirred a memory she could not bring clear; as if she had slept all night hearing his song, as if she had dreamed of him. Puzzling, she rose and began to dress; then she remembered suddenly, stopped half dressed to stare into space, seeing the hall last night, seeing Canoldir’s face shadowed by firelight, hearing again his words.

  Ram had left the hall, yawning. She had turned to leave when Canoldir stopped her with a look, and she had stood, her back to the dying fire, watching him.

  “I cannot tell you what will happen, Skeelie, when you and Ramad follow the wraith. I can only tell you that I will put you where the wraith wanders. After that, there is nothing I can do. But I will tell you this. If you succeed in bringing Telien back with you, if you and Ramad succeed in rescuing her from the wraith and do not—are not destroyed yourselves, then—then, Skeelie of Carriol, I would speak with you.” He had turned then, paced the length of the hall, turned again in shadow to pause, a bear of a man, his force filling the room. Then he returned to stand looking down at her. “If Ramad brings Telien away from the wraith, they will be—you will be wanting to be away from them.”

  Skeelie had stared into his eyes and nodded, her misery catching at her throat.

  “If you will come to this place, Skeelie of Carriol, I would . . .” His dark eyes had looked so deep into hers she shivered. “I would court you!” he cried with a great shout. “I would court you! That is what I would do!” He had swung her around in a great dancing step like a bear, leaned to kiss her fiercely on the forehead, then had grown quiet, had led her down the corridor to her chamber, left her there with reluctance; she had felt his emotion like a tide, long after he had gone.

  She stood clutching the door, filled with consternation. What was she to say to Canoldir this morning? That she would return if . . .? That she would not return? Yet she knew no answer was needed. No word need be spoken to Canoldir this morning—or ever, if she chose.