“It is like her, I grant you,” said Girnhild, “and however strange it is, your story rings true. Such power to heal in a healer's hands is a great temptation. And yet—who were the two others, the ones who heard of the Raven's Egg but did not see it?”
“Paddon and Ethwin,” I said.
“Ah,” Girnhild mused, “Paddon would not want to touch the uncanny thing, and Ethwin is too open-handed to keep it to himself. I'm afraid we are left with Halred—and the Hall of the Dead.” She fixed Hwyn with a stern look. “What will happen when you take the Raven's Egg out of its hiding place—and out of this land? Will all we have gained be lost? Will the tomb of our ancestors crumble?”
“I wish I knew,” Hwyn said. “But I am as sure as I can be of anything that if I don't take it away, we will all suffer for it. For days the Raven's Egg had been crying to leave, till I dared not ignore it. Now it has been taken by force, perhaps imprisoned, spellbound. I first found it in a hall where it had been spellbound thirty years; when I took it away, the hall crumbled and its lord died in agony. If I take it soon enough, if it does not become cankered in the heart of the mountain, much suffering may be saved. Or it may not. I wish I knew,” she said again.
“I confess I don't like inviting an outlander to search our tomb,” Girnhild said. “Can no one else bring the Raven's Egg out of hiding?”
“If I fail, I hope someone else can do it,” said Hwyn. “But the attempt will be perilous. I at least have done something like this before, and Jereth has the Gift of Naming, so our chances are best—unless the one who hid it undoes her bindings willingly.”
Girnhild frowned for a moment. Then she said, “Go, then, and the gods go with you. Let Trenara stay with Godrun and the children; I will escort you at least to the mouth of the cave, lest any try to bar your entrance.”
“Thank you,” said Hwyn, “and may the gods reward you.”
“Gods grant I have chosen right,” said Girnhild. “Let's go, before I change my mind.”
We were not out the door before Trenara, who had been playing with a puppy in the midst of a knot of children, noticed that Hwyn was leaving her. Abandoning the dog, she rushed at Hwyn, weeping, and flung her arms around her: “Don't leave me!”
“Hush, Trenara,” Hwyn said, pushing her back. “You'll be safe here. You can't come with us; I couldn't protect you there. I'll be back soon. Stay here just a little while with these good people and the puppy. It won't be long.”
Godrun scooped up the puppy in one arm, despite the protests of the children, and brought it to Trenara, putting her other arm around Trenara's waist. It was a clever ploy, the sort of thing I would once have used to distract my little brother and sister, but it was not enough. In the end, it was only with some force that Hwyn detached herself to leave.
“I'm sorry, Trenara,” she said, almost in tears herself. “Forgive me. It will not be long.”
Girnhild took a moment to shake her finger at the puppy— chiding, “Who brought that filthy creature into my kitchen?”— before shepherding us out toward the Hall of the Dead. The rain continued weeping down on us, the mud squelching under our feet as we trudged silently to the cave.
Beyond the Assembly Stone, Girnhild stopped short with a cry of surprise: “Edwach! What are you doing away from your flock? And Drict, why are you standing here like a stone?”
“Mother Halred set us to guard the tomb,” Drict said.
“Guard it! When has it ever needed guarding?” said Girnhild. “And Edwach, when have you and Halred ever agreed on anything?”
“We agree that increase is better than blight; that is only common sense,” Edwach said. “She said the travelers had gone mad, that they would steal the holy things from the Hall of the Dead, breaking our hard-won prosperity.”
“The travelers brought that prosperity,” said Girnhild. “Don't meddle in things you don't understand. Halred is using you.”
“Would you let them plunder our ancestors' grave?” said Drict.
“I would let them take away what they brought,” said Girnhild. “You know they brought something; do you know what it is? And if you do not, don't be so quick to judge what they do with it. They say it will turn against us if we hold it too long, and I think they know it better than Mother Halred does, having traveled with it. Let them pass, by order of the Headman.”
“Ha! Guthlac is in the far pastures,” said Edwach.
“Do you think he will gainsay me when he comes down?” said Girnhild coolly.
Neither man said he would, but neither showed any sign of moving from the entrance, till suddenly the mountain shook itself like a wet dog and an inhuman moaning came from inside the cave.
“Gods preserve us,” Hwyn said, “it's begun.”
“Come on, then,” I cried. Drict and Edwach had stumbled away from the entrance; before they could regain their balance, I took Hwyn's hand and leapt into the darkness.
The heart of the mountain was beating hard, a deep drumming that I almost felt rather than heard, stirring the stone floor of the cave. I took a few shuddering steps forward, then did not have time to cry a warning when I found myself plummeting through empty space, deep into the mountain, Hwyn's hand still clutched in mine.
The shock of finding the ground missing beneath us was nothing beside the wonder of landing on my feet, breathless but unhurt. I looked all around me, but could see nothing; the light of the cave mouth was gone. “Are you all right?” I panted.
“I think so,” Hwyn said. “Unless, of course, that sudden fall was death, and we're now two of the ghosts of the cave.”
“I can reassure you on that point,” I said. “Your very corporeal fingernails are digging into my hand.”
“Sorry!” Hwyn said, and began to unclench her grip.
“Don't take your hand away,” I said, “or I'll be lost in the dark. What happened to us?”
“Tremors in the earth,” said Hwyn. “One of the signs of the Troubles. I hope Halred felt it.”
“That was no earthquake,” I said. “I've never been known to fall like a cat with my feet firmly under me.”
“What do you mean?” said Hwyn.
“I don't think we've fallen at all. At least, not in the normal sense of the word.”
“So it wasn't the stone that gave way,” Hwyn said, “but reality itself.”
“Fortunately for us,” I said. “If we'd lost the light in a rock-slide, we'd be waiting to suffocate or die of thirst.”
“If this were a rockslide,” Hwyn countered, “I'd be afraid for our lives—but not for the world.”
There was not much to be said to that. “Which way shall we go?”
“Forward?” she said.
“Why not?”
But a mere step forward brought us to a solid wall where no wall had been. If we'd had any lingering belief in a rockslide, the wall would have been enough to obliterate it. The stone surface beneath my hands could not have come about by accident: it was too regular, too unbroken to have been formed by falling rocks. The rough surface under my hands was covered with curving grooves and clusters of bumps and dents that seemed to form some pattern. “The walls are carved, I think.”
“Yes,” Hwyn said, running her hands across them. “Grapevines, like the wall of a vintner's shop. See?” she put my hand on one of the clusters. “Grapes.”
“If you say so,” I said.
“If only I had the Eye of Night to light our way!” she said.
“If you had the Eye of Night,” I said, “there'd be no need to be here at all. But shall we go onward?”
“All right,” she said, tugging my hand. “This way.”
We inched along for what seemed hours, the curving grooves under our hands offering no clear landmark to track our progress. At last a grayness grew to my left, beyond Hwyn; we shuffled toward it a little more rapidly. As the light grew, something in the air disturbed me.
“Do you smell something?” I said. “Something in the air smells wrong.”
�
��It doesn't smell like outside,” Hwyn said. “No flowers, no hay. Probably a shaft in the stone, far from the open air, or a chamber with a lamp.”
When we reached the mouth of the tunnel, the light blinded us for a moment. We stood blinking and rubbing our eyes before we opened them to find ourselves standing out on the hillside, the Assembly Stone before us. Blood ran down the stone, lurid in the light of a huge red sun. But this sight was not what most disturbed me.
“Do you see?” I asked Hwyn, afraid to put into words what I saw, lest I make it real.
“Why is the land black?” she said.
“It looks scorched, burned to the roots,” I said. “There's no grass, no crops, no living trees as far as the eye can see. Could fire have consumed the land so utterly in the little time since we were last here?”
“You have not been here before,” said a voice behind me.
We turned as one, glad to take our eyes from the charred land even for the sight of a gaunt, rangy ghost with the startlingly light eyes of the Folc, a river of blood streaming from his slashed throat.
“Where are we?” said Hwyn. “Isn't this Folcsted?”
“Did you blunder in here without having heard of the Entrails of the Mountain, the Paths of Mystery?” laughed the ghost. He looked a little like Guthlac, a big rugged man in a red tunic. A hammered-gold oak leaf, stained with blood, hung from a leather thong about his neck.
“Dirnlac of the Red Oak,” I said, “we are strangers in this land. Answer us clearer than that: by your name I charge you to speak.”
“Find your own true name, half-Tarvon. How did you ever come into that order?” grumbled Dirnlac. Nonetheless, he answered as he was bound: “The Entrails of the Mountain wind through the dreams of the dead and the living, the deep night-thoughts that catch hold of us and will not release us. The initiates of the Hidden Goddess can open these paths at will. To others, in the normal order of things, they are closed. But on the darkest day of the year, others may enter these paths. Some stumble in like fools and are protected in their simplicity. And others, neither quite fools nor quite wise, may wander confused, trapped in their own imaginings.”
“Are we not still in Folcsted on St. Arin's Lake?” I said.
“You are and are not. You are in its dreams,” Dirnlac said.
“Why are you here?” I asked, curious after all I had heard. “You died three hundred years ago, before the Red Oak Clan lived in this valley. This was not your home.”
“True, this was not my valley,” said the ghost, and pointed past us to the gateway in the mountain and the Assembly Stone beyond it. “But I died on that stone.
“Times were hard among my people then, and some of our young men were caught raiding livestock from the Valley of the Linden. The Headman of the Linden sent a message to me, as Headman of the Red Oak, that unless we gave him two goats for every one the boys had tried to lead away, he would cut their throats like beasts for the slaughter.
“If we had given him what he demanded, we would not have had even a breeding pair left, and my people would have starved. So I brought my message back: a Headman's life is worth a herd of goats.
“It was not a true sacrifice: the Rite of Increase requires a willing victim sprung from the land, not a prisoner from over the mountain. And yet it was true sacrifice, for I handed myself over in exchange for my people. My blood marked the Assembly Stone for years, and the Folc of the Linden feared to gather here. Their land did not increase, and the one who ate my heart sickened on it, but my people survived and grew strong in their hardship. And I remain here in the Entrails of the Mountain, in this image of the valley where I died, unable to leave, pinioned between hatred and love.”
“Will you ever break that deadlock?” I said.
“I await some deliverance that is scarcely a shadow of a dream in this place of dreams. But my plight is not what you came to learn.”
“No,” I said softly, “but your story moves me. May the gods send you your deliverance! But first tell me: is the Eye of Night here?”
The ghost's eyes widened. “Who are you that ask of the Eye of Night?”
“You haven't answered my question. Do you know where it is? Much depends on our finding it.”
“Much indeed,” said the ghost. “It is not in my private labyrinth of hate and love, linden and oak. But the other paths in the Entrails of the Mountain are locked to me.”
“How can we find those paths?” I said.
“How can I tell you?” said Dirnlac. “I am caged. But you may find the way in time. None are trapped here but me and my enemy.”
Just then a rushing down the passage announced the coming of another ghost, a powerfully built man in sheepskins, brandishing a gleaming sword. “Who despoils my tomb? Dirnlac, what rats have you brought into this sanctuary?”
“If you would fight, Feoward, fight with me, not with these children,” said Dirnlac, his own sword bright in his hand.
“Dog of the Red Oak, how many times must I kill you?” shouted the second ghost. Their swords rang together, and the clash seemed to split the mountain around them.
We fell through solid stone, and when we regained the ground beneath our feet, neither the battling ghosts nor the mouth of the cave were anywhere to be seen. Blackness surrounded us again.
“Pity they're gone,” Hwyn said, “or rather, pity we're gone so soon. He seemed to know something about the Eye of Night; I would have liked to ask him what he knew.”
“I know,” I said. “I should have gone straight to the point instead of asking him about himself. But I was curious.”
“So was I,” Hwyn admitted. “The Folc are a strange people. How did they come to be one after such wars, such cruelty?”
“In three hundred years, even great hatreds may die,” I said. “But if I go on asking all these old ghosts for their stories, we will wander lost in these paths of dreams, neither wise enough nor foolish enough to find our way, as Dirnlac warned. Whose dream have we fallen into now, I wonder?”
“It's a narrow pass,” said Hwyn. “I can reach both walls at once. There are no more carvings.”
“It seems to widen a little in this direction,” I said, feeling around me. “Do you mind if we go this way?”
“Let's go,” said Hwyn, catching hold of my tunic as we began our creeping progress through the darkness.
We came to a vast, cold chamber lit from a crevice above our heads through which the wind moaned like a thing in pain. Curving paths spiraled down to the central pit of the chamber, where a tall clay urn stood, marked all over with a pattern like leaves or spearheads.
“A funeral urn,” I said. “Should we look closer?”
“I'm afraid so,” she said, starting down the path. “I don't relish the thought of being up to the elbows in someone's ashes— still less in the grim sort of spells you might bind with them—but with my senses confused, I can't be sure it's not buried there.”
“Wait for me,” I said, following her.
“Of course,” she said. “How could I open it without you?” The urn was taller than she was.
“We're not going to open the urn at all, if I can help it,” I said, overtaking her. “I'm going to speak to the ghost.”
“You can do that? You don't have to wait for them to show themselves?” Hwyn said.
I was not at all sure I could, but by the time she said this, I was too deep in it to answer her. I knelt before the urn, arms open in prayer. “Rising God, protect us against the pull of death, the hand of the grave, the weight of old anger, and the burden of old sin,” I called aloud. Then I rested my palms and forehead against it, searching for a name amidst the ashes. For a long while, it eluded my grasp; some distant part of my mind was grateful that Hwyn was wise enough to keep silent while I sent my mind deeper into the shadows of this burial place. The bones of many were mingled here, their names tangled together in my mind. At last one name rang clear in my mind, and I spoke it aloud, sealing the bond: “Nidrad of the Linden, hear my call
, answer my question.”
“I am here,” said a voice behind us. “What would you ask?”
I turned and saw a tall warrior, sword at his belt, face painted pollen-gold. The wound in his chest was small, a mere discolored slit in his simple tunic of green wool, but it was directly over his heart. Suppressing the urge to ask when the Folc had been warriors, what battle he carried the sword for, and who had made that precise little wound, I asked instead, “Where is the Eye of Night?”
But the ghost laughed. “Ask me a question I can answer, Tarvon Priest. Your Gift of Naming can't draw water from a dry well.”
“Do you know what I mean by the Eye of Night?”
“The Sky-Raven's Egg,” said Nidrad. “Some say its coming will be a sign that our time of waiting nears its end; what will follow, I do not know. Nor do I know where it is, save that it is not here.”
“Ask whether Halred has been here,” said Hwyn; but before I could ask or the ghost could speak again, we were falling through the dark to another cave, another version of the Hall of the Dead.
This time we did not land in utter darkness. A soft green light filtered through leaves into the mouth of the cave. “What's this?” Hwyn said, turning irresistibly toward the splash of green.
We pushed aside branches to clear a path to the world beyond, and it seemed we would never be done pushing them aside. “I swear new branches are growing while we push away the old ones,” I grumbled.
“They are,” said a voice behind me.
I was growing used to this. “Arvath of the Linden,” I said without turning my eyes from the strangely fecund greenery, “where is the Eye of Night?”
With a lean arm, he swept the branches aside to show us a valley soaked in green, sated with green, vines across every house, corn tall as trees in the fields, pond-weed floating on the surface of St. Arin's Lake. “Why should I tell you?” Arvath said. “I have all I need now. Even in the waking world you have left behind, they are beginning to have all they need. But you come to take this thing from our mountain. Why should I help you?”
The Eye of Night Page 28