The Eye of Night

by Pauline J. Alama

“Surely that can wait a little while you speak to me,” she said, and I nodded: the weeds, unlike the cows, could wait, and I doubted my fellow-workers regarded me as much of a boon to their efforts. I followed tamely to her little round house, where she shared a breakfast of porridge with me and spoke her mind.

  “Jereth, you know how much it has meant to the Folc to have Hwyn among us,” she said, “but I wonder whether you know how good this place has been for Hwyn.”

  “I do know,” I said. “She glows like a torch when she speaks of the things she is learning. I knew as soon as you offered to teach her that this was the best thing anyone had ever offered her. I have not been with her long, but I know her life has been hard; the world outside this valley has been harsh with her. I know you have been kinder to her than she could ever have asked, if she dared ask for anything for herself.”

  “It is not kindness,” said Halred, much as I had. “Everyone who teaches must dream of having such a student. I love Day and Night dearly, and they are fine, quick-witted girls, but Hwyn—Hwyn is something else entirely. You know that she should be a priestess. It is a crime against the gods that no one ever taught her till now. She may be old to begin, but she is making up for missed time quickly.”

  “I know,” I said. “She is a marvel: no one need convince me of that. I think I knew it before anyone did.”

  “But even she cannot take in a lifetime's training in a fortnight,” Halred said. “On this bleak journey north, who will teach her? How will she become all she is capable of becoming?”

  “Good Mother,” I said, “I see all this, and feel it more deeply than I can say. But if you think Hwyn's plan to move north began with me, you are mistaken. Hwyn leads and I follow. I know what a marvel she is, and I follow as the tide follows the moon.”

  “And yet I know you have much influence with her,” Halred said.

  “Do you?” I laughed. “I know no such thing.”

  “I know you have not been happy here,” said Halred.

  “The Folc have been kind to me,” I said.

  “That is not the same thing,” she said, sensibly enough. “Your discontent weighs on her. But that can change. You will gradually feel more a part of the Folc. And you too have gifts you have never used. You were a priest once, in the Tarvon tradition, like Anlaf—but your vision is larger than his, perhaps too large to be confined in a single order. You might be sent to be the bridge between my ways and Anlaf's. You too could find a place for yourself here.”

  “Good Mother,” I said, “you mistake me if you think I could be so vain as to put my own goals before Hwyn's. If I thought I stood between her and her true path—dear gods, I think I would take poison. What is my life beside her promise?” I stopped, astonished at what I had just admitted, breathless, confused, naked.

  Halred touched my face gently, as she had during the Rite of Increase. “Jereth. I am sorry,” she said. “I have touched a sore.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Isn't that your professional duty?”

  The corner of her mouth twitched as if she would have laughed, but her face was sad. “Hwyn is not the only one who has known little kindness,” she mused.

  “In truth, we are many,” I said. “In my darker moods I think all the kindness in the world would hardly fill that bowl you measured blood in. I have found more of it here than in half a dozen great cities I once knew well. And yet you are right that I am ill at ease here; and yet it makes no difference at all. Hwyn has reasons beyond her happiness or mine for what she does. And my happiness is to follow her, wherever her mad vision leads us.”

  “I have misjudged you, then,” Halred said. “I only hope she chooses the right path. I am sorry to have wounded you; in my zeal for your companion, I have not known you rightly. Come with us some afternoon; our circle should not be closed to you.”

  “I may,” I said, though I doubted I would. “Thank you, Good Mother.”

  I stumbled to the grainfields half blind. I had looked forward to working beside Hwyn, to stealing a little time with her, but I found I could scarcely speak to her, crushed under the weight of what I had just admitted to Halred and to myself, filled to the mouth with all I could not tell her.

  That evening Ethwin came again to look for Trenara. I pulled him aside to speak to him a little apart from the crowd. “You lament that you have never left the Hills of Penmorrin, that you may never leave,” I said. “But what if there were reason to leave—a noble reason, a quest on which the life of the world may depend?”

  He stared at me as blankly as Trenara for some moments. “Is this a game, or are you really asking me?”

  “I am really asking you,” I said. “Would you have the foolhar-diness to leave everything you love behind?”

  “Everything?” he echoed. “Trenara?”

  “She is safer here,” I said. “So is Hwyn. Consider carefully: it is no small thing to leave your heart behind.” I thought I saw a resolution forming in his eyes, but I judged the time not ripe. “Speak of it tomorrow,” I said. “Now I am going to seek out Hwyn; if you want to look for Trenara, I will be glad of your company along the way.”

  And so the young hunter and I walked together, following Seeker up the path to the common paddock under a fast-swelling silver moon. But we did not speak, each lost in our own inner storm. When we reached the paddock, Hwyn and Trenara were with Halred and her acolytes, and we could not tease apart that skein to speak to either woman alone.

  The next morning in the fields, I seized a moment to ask Hwyn, “Can you meet me later to speak in private?”

  She straightened, wiping sweat out of her eyes. “There is but one private place in this valley,” she said softly. “Meet me outside it when you are done with the milking. I too long to speak with you alone.”

  Then we had much work to do under the high sun, and little breath to spare for talk. But now and again, Hwyn would raise her head and look around, straining her weak eyes to find me among the workers.

  At night, as I strode along the climbing path toward the Assembly Stone and the Hall of the Dead, Seeker came bounding up past me and I turned to greet Ethwin as he overtook me. “Well met, friend,” I said. “But I must speak with Hwyn alone tonight; you will not taken it amiss?”

  “Not at all,” he said, seeming to brighten.

  “Have you thought about your decision?”

  “I am almost resolved,” he said. “Can I have until tomorrow?”

  “Till the day after,” I said.

  The two women were waiting for us behind the Assembly Stone. Trenara ran out to greet us, disappearing once more after Seeker, with Ethwin following, leaving Hwyn and me free to slip into the cavern together.

  Again Hwyn gripped my hand as we went into the dark, and the familiar pressure of her fingers made my heart ache for what I had resolved to say. “Hwyn, do you still feel the Eye of Night crying to move on?”

  “Nothing is clear,” she said. “Nothing gives me firm ground to stand on and argue with Halred why I should leave here. And yet in my heart I know what I must do.”

  “There may be another way,” I said. “You have a purpose here, a place as priestess and healer, as I believe you should always have been. But I do nothing here but the chores the smallest child can scarcely spoil. Let me take the Eye of Night on its journey. If I lack your gift for understanding it, still I can at least follow the stars north. Perhaps before the end it will learn to speak to me. Ethwin may come with me, I think: he chafes under his father's rule, and longs for strange places and adventures. He will not be a bad companion. And you can stay here, loved and honored, knowing you have abandoned neither your task nor your calling.”

  I could see nothing in the lightless chamber, but as I spoke, I felt her fingers tighten around my hand, then release it.

  “Jereth,” she said, “why do you say this? Do you want to part company?”

  “I don't think what I want is the question,” I spoke her words back to her.

  She was silent a long while.<
br />
  “If the question still needs answering,” I said, “the answer is no.”

  “Nor do I,” she said. “We will leave, and it will be together. Tomorrow we will say our farewells, and the next day we will leave.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “If you do belong here, do not let me sway you from your true path. I swore to Halred that I would never do such a thing—”

  “To Halred?” Hwyn seized the phrase. “When did she draw this promise from you?”

  I said, “She spoke to me yesterday; she thought I had been pestering you to leave. She sees great promise in you, as I do; thank the gods someone sees it who can nurture it well. Let me give you this gift: let me give you yourself. It pains me to see you torn between your journey and your true name, your true soul.”

  But Hwyn said, “You have already given me myself, and I think you will again and again along the road we travel together. Halred has no right to say my true name is here. She does not know my name, and if I shouted it to her, she would not hear it over the name she wants to give me. And I, too unused to kindness, have let her drown out my name, and the call that is mine alone, with her teachings. How rightly she warned me when I first came here that the hand of a teacher might lie too heavily on me to let me hear my own call! How well she knew herself then, and how foolish I was not to heed her while she still saw clearly!

  “My true name brought me to this journey,” she said. “Though I may look back with longing on Folcsted, I do not really want anyone to take up my quest in my place—the quest that called me by name, by my true name, from the waters of the sacred pool. I am my journey: you call me back to myself. If I am sorry to leave here, it is only because I cannot live two lives at once: one here, as Hwyn the Priestess, and one on the road north, as—as myself.”

  “Are you certain?” I said, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Never more so,” she said. “Come, let us tell Halred we must go.”

  She led me out of the stone chamber. I felt the presence of the dead and fancied I heard voices—not words, but small sighs only. When we reached the open air and the rising moon, we found Seeker standing guard outside the cave, but Ethwin and Trenara were nowhere to be seen.

  “Where can they be?” Hwyn said, peering behind the Assembly Stone.

  I had my suspicions, but did not speak of them. Nor did I need to: as we stood pondering, Trenara and Ethwin emerged from the same gateway we had just passed through, a suspiciously musky scent lingering about them both. Her face was unreadable as ever, his full of wonder. Poor boy, I thought, whether he stays here or comes with us, he will break his heart on Trenara like a hull on the insensible rocks. Seeker leapt up at the sight of them, and Trenara, laughing, bounded off with the black dog, Ethwin following as best he could, as Hwyn and I trudged behind.

  “How did they enter the cave without our hearing them?” I said.

  But Hwyn did not answer, troubled in a different way. “He is not the innocent I thought,” she said. “I should never have left them alone together.”

  “Why?” I said. “He loves her, and if her feelings are less clear, she at least enjoys his attention. What's the harm in it?”

  Hwyn looked at me curiously. “For someone who almost vowed celibacy, you take a remarkably benign view of others' yielding to temptation.”

  “I'm not such a hypocrite as to judge Trenara,” I said. “I was never half so beset with that sort of temptation as she is. Besides, when I looked forward to a life of celibacy, I promised myself all sorts of intellectual pleasures to make up for the physical ones I'd miss. Trenara can't have those, and I can't find it in my heart to frown on one of the few pleasures she has.”

  “But this pleasure can harm her,” Hwyn said, and at my blank look added, “Oh, you're a man—you don't think of these things! Listen: Trenara miscarried a child last year on a rough stretch of road. At first, I didn't even know what was happening. She bled oceans, till I thought she'd die. It scared me to death. I hadn't the least idea what to do about it; no one ever taught me those woman's things. I hadn't even noticed that she was with child. I suppose the hard road must have shaken it out of her somehow, and the gods know we have some very hard roads ahead. Ethwin means well, I know, but his loving could kill her. Unless—do you think he would actually marry her and keep her here?”

  “I think he would in a heartbeat,” I said. “Do you think she would stay?”

  “I don't know,” Hwyn said. “She seems happy here. And yet there's a restlessness in her.”

  “And she loves you,” I said.

  “I suppose so,” Hwyn conceded. “Sometimes I wish she did not.”

  When we reached the common paddock, we found Halred haranguing a shamefaced Ethwin for taking advantage of a simpleton. The simpleton in question sat bewildered in the grass, her arms around Seeker. Night and Day tactfully kept their distance.

  “But I will marry her,” Ethwin was protesting as we arrived.

  “Oh, Ethwin, do you think she even knows what you mean when you say that? How can you exchange promises with her, or expect her to keep a promise? You saw how she fared with the oath at the Assembly.” Halred looked up from her tirade to see us awkwardly standing by, awaiting our chance to speak. “Ah! There you are at last. Night is passing: already the moon is far above the horizon.”

  “And the moon is waxing,” Hwyn said. “Tomorrow it will be full, and the next morning,” she said slowly, “we must go. I am sorry.”

  “Ethwin,” Halred said, “go home now; I must speak to them in peace.” With many glances over his shoulder, Ethwin left us, Seeker bounding behind him. When he was too far off to overhear, Halred asked Hwyn, “What is it? Have any new signs come to you?”

  “Nothing like a stroke of thunder, nor even like the voice in the cave,” Hwyn said, “but I know in my heart of hearts, as I knew where to seek the Eye of Night, that I must not delay its journey much longer.”

  Halred turned toward me with a stung look. “If after all you told me, you have prevailed on Hwyn to leave—”

  “No,” Hwyn said, “far from it. He urged me to stay with you and complete the training we began, but his urging only made me hear more clearly the voice calling me onward. I always knew this was not my destination.”

  “I will not believe it. I studied the signs carefully,” Halred said. “You belong among us. I know this land, these people, and I have seen many strangers come and go in my life, and none, not even Paddon, became so easily part of the Folc as you. I cannot believe you came here by chance, a mere diversion from your journey.”

  “Perhaps it was no accident. Perhaps the gods sent us here, one of their unexplained acts of mercy,” Hwyn said. “Nonetheless, it does not follow that they meant us to stay forever.”

  “Forever is a long time. But your work here is scarcely begun,” Halred said. “You may not understand all you have sown here. It is not only the land's bounty that has increased, but our own open-handedness. While you lie among the flocks to bless them, they are kept in the common paddock as one flock; had you not begun working in the fields, they too would be partitioned. You have helped revive the generous old ways. If only you stay till harvest, the Folc will have time to become used to these ways, and the old customs will take root again. No one will go hungry while another has food to spare. But if you leave so soon, all this will be forgotten.”

  “I have gone hungry in sight of plenty, and I know how much you stand to lose,” said Hwyn. “But you, as priestess, can best see that this season of wonders is not forgotten. I dare not stay to remind them. The Rite of Increase itself has hastened the day of hatching; I must go now and find the place.”

  “Don't you see? This is the place!” Halred cried. “You said yourself that the Eye of Night had never increased the yield of the land in any other place. The Eye of Night belongs here; this is where it will come to birth.”

  “You don't know what you're calling down on your land,” said Hwyn. “Not for nothing is the Raven's Egg feared. The
land of its birth must suffer the pains of birth.”

  “We are strong enough for it,” Halred said. “Who has borne greater suffering than we have?”

  Hwyn shook her head. “The well of suffering is bottomless; do not be too quick to claim you have drained it. I know this is not the place.”

  Halred's mouth tightened a moment. Then she sighed, “If there is nothing I can say to persuade you, I may as well let you sleep. You will have a hard journey the day after tomorrow; you will need all your strength to cross the mountains. I will meditate into the night, and pray that we all see clearer in the morning.”

  I went home to the house of the Red Oak Clan, dark and silent under moonlight, and was startled by a movement under the eaves: Guthlac pacing uneasily back and forth across the doorway like a dog across the sheepfold gate. “You're up late, cousin,” he said.

  “And you, my Lord of the Red Oak,” I said.

  “There's something restless in the land tonight,” he said. “You may laugh, but I feel it in the soles of my feet. I felt it when the first of the lean years began, and again when you and your friends appeared at our Assembly. And I feel it now.”

  “We must leave,” I said, “the morning after tomorrow.”

  “Ah, of course,” he said, “This—this time of wonders could not last long. Well, my mystery is solved, and I will try to sleep now. So should you, traveler.” I followed him into the dark hall. “We will miss you,” he added softly.

  “We will never forget your welcome,” I said, and then was silent, lest I wake the sleepers all around.

  10

  THE ENTRAILS OF THE MOUNTAIN

  The next day passed quickly in work and in farewells as word spread among the Folc that we would leave the following morning. Even those we scarcely knew paused in the day's work to lament our parting or wish us well on the road ahead. A farewell celebration was hastily thrown together for the evening, with hymns of thanks, spiced ale from the Linden Clan's stores, and song and dance. It was to begin at the lakeside, drift to each clan's house in turn, and end in a grand procession to the common paddock where we would spend a last night with the flock.