“Lady,” I said, “I want nothing except what you have not offered: to return my love to life. But if I cannot have her back, at least tell me what I can do to finish her work, so the hope she served will not die as well. She said that if the task ever fell to me, I would know what to do. But I am as lost as I ever was.”
“Not so lost as you believe,” she said. “You were right in one thing: you will offer yourself at the world's end; that is your part in this breaking of the age. Build a new boat for yourself and me, and we will sail together to the rim of the world.”
“How should I build it?”
She shrugged. “You are the shipbuilder, not I.”
“I am a two years' apprentice, and a decade out of practice.”
“You will know how to build it, and you will know the way to sail,” she said. “Only you could make this journey, Jereth son of Garmund. Whoever would sail to the world's rim must set all life behind him and make for the emptiness beyond the world. Who else could set his back to the world so well as you?”
For a while I only stared at her cold impassive face. “You— you wanted me broken,” I said. “You needed me in despair. You needed Hwyn dead and me bereft. How can I follow you? How can I trust you?”
“That is your riddle to resolve,” she said. “You must find a way. You will need to trust me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you can only trust me and hope, or distrust me and despair. You will never find the certainty you seek,” the goddess answered.
I shook my head. “Never mind. Trusting or not, I will do as you say. I have nothing to lose, nothing I value: life or name, home or goods, heart or body.” I rose from my knees, weary, aching, but certain that only Harga's potions could make me sleep. “I can't trust you. But I can build your boat and try to sail it. And if it drowns us—” I shrugged, turning away, “I warned you I was incompetent.”
I worked for what should have been days, but was still the same unchanging night. When I grew so bone-tired that my hands fumbled and fouled the work, I let Harga drug me to sleep, and endured the fresh grief of waking from dreams of Hwyn to the remembrance of loss. I needed the rest to restore me, for the work was hard. The craft did not come easily to me, nor did the seasoned boatmen among the Holdouts venture any correction of my methods. Everyone assured me that I knew best. It maddened me. I was working on half-remembered teachings of twelve years ago, filling the gaps with pure, uninspired guesswork. I was not at all certain I did right. My only comfort was that I didn't care if I drowned in my bad handiwork—except that the Holdouts were counting on me to make this journey, whatever it was for. I couldn't fail them. But how could I succeed?
Til worked silently beside me, lending a hand wherever I needed it, docilely following my instructions—though I would have been more thankful for his criticism—and treating me with the sort of pained reverence usually reserved for the dying. When we'd finished tarring the bottom, I said, “Well, it's done, for good or ill.”
“It's done,” Til said more positively. “All it needs is the sail— and a lantern, for this journey.”
I was not so sure; I wondered whether the yard were too long to manage, whether the rake of the stempost were wrong. Something looked odd about it; either that, or I had been staring at the thing too long to see it straight. But I sighed, “Let's get them, then, and test this tub to see if it sinks or swims.”
“It'll swim,” Til said. “There's nothing wrong with this boat. What are you afraid of?” Then he caught himself. “Gods! Listen to me: what do I think this is, a ferry-trip across the salt ponds?” He put a hand on my shoulder, and spoke quietly: “Jereth, I couldn't do what you're doing, sailing out into that endless darkness without a sight of land or a star in the sky to guide me. I couldn't face it.”
“Just as well,” I said. “You heard why this journey is mine: because I'm so lost to life that I can set it all behind me and steer for the cold of the unliving as though it were my guiding star. You shouldn't be able to face it. No one should.”
“All the same,” Til said, “If I had any courage, I'd join you. I ought to. You're sailing for all of us; it doesn't seem fair that you should go alone.”
“The Hidden Goddess will be with me,” I reminded him.
“And isn't that alone?”
We went looking for Grim's wife, Mara, who had offered to fix a sail for me, in the great hall. People clustered there and in the adjoining kitchen for warmth and light, saving firewood and tallow by banding together instead of kindling separate fires in their separate chambers.
“Mara,” Til called as we entered the room, “is the sail ready? We'll be needing it.”
“Here it is,” Mara said.
Near her, Trenara sprang to her feet. “Is the boat finished?”
“It's done,” I said. “It's time now to test its seaworthiness.”
“It will be seaworthy,” the goddess said, implacable. “We must go now.”
“You haven't even looked at it!” I protested.
“Never mind that. It will carry us. No time for tests: we must leave at once.”
“Are you mad?”
Her silvery laugh rang through the great hall; it chilled me to the heart. “Maybe! You have known me longest—have you ever known me otherwise? But we have no time to lose. The hour of birth is near, and what I hold in my womb must not be born in these lands. It comes from your world, but your world cannot bear it. Come!” she said, gesturing about her to the Holdouts gathered around, “bring lanterns and gear for the journey, and see us off.”
So they brought lanterns and oil, ropes and gear, and everything we might need, and followed Til and me as we brought the boat down to the sea. For this launching there was no ceremony, but the people who had saved my life, first from the cold and then from myself, came in as great a throng as for funeral or festival. They paid final homage to Trenara, their queen and goddess, and begged her to remember them. “You are my children, my beloved,” she said. “How could I ever forget you?” Some kissed her hands; other, bolder souls embraced her. And many came to bid me farewell with a warmth that surprised and touched me. I remember Syrc clasping me fiercely, as though she never meant to let me sail; Hart half crushing me; Rand shyly offering a good-luck token, one of the gilt stars they'd hung up for the festival; Ash bringing food. Harga, her face lined in worry, told me, “Take care of yourself, for a change.” Over her shoulder I could see that Syrc's eyes glittered with tears. I almost felt I was present at my own funeral. As we said our farewells, we all heard the crashing of waves gone wild in this ending time, felt the cold spray, saw the water lapping too high, almost topping the pier. But none of us spoke of it, as though our words alone would make the danger of the journey real.
Just as I was about to embark, Til caught me in a tight embrace. “Forgive me,” he muttered, “for not sailing with you.”
“Don't be absurd, Til,” I said. “You saved my life once; that's enough. Just don't forget me.”
“I'll keep the lantern lit for you on the point,” he said. With that we pushed off the boat, and the Hidden Goddess and I sailed away into the darkness. The torches glimmered a while behind us, calling forth an answering glow from the waves, but I could not spare a look of farewell on that last sight of human habitation. One hand on the tiller and the other on the sheet, I turned away from this last vestige of comfort and took on the dire invisible waves. For a time it seemed that if we capsized, I would scarcely know it, for I could see neither sky nor sea and, dizzied by the waves' tossing, scarcely knew up from down. After a time my sense of balance adjusted and I snatched a glance behind me, but the Holdouts and their torches had vanished into mist; in all the world, the lantern hanging from the mast and the ghostly glow of Trenara's face were the only lights. With no stars to steer by, all I had to guide me was the vague sense of life and warmth receding behind me. Ahead was the cold emptiness I had been sailing toward, without knowing it, for years, maybe for all my life, losing piec
es of myself all along the way. Suppressing a shiver, I lashed the tiller in place, lest my resolve might fail me in this last stage of a thirty-year journey into darkness.
The wind rose, and our little craft bucked and leapt on the waves. I struggled desperately with the sheet, and was surprised to meet Trenara's hands on the rope, working with me.
When we'd fastened the sheet to the belaying pin and had time for a breath, I said, “I didn't know you were a sailor.”
“You know me little,” Trenara said.
“Can you blame me?” I said. “After all the time you played the fool, leaving Hwyn and me to guess and wonder and try to keep you out of trouble—”
“That was no play-acting,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, but was interrupted by a wave slopping over the gunwale into the boat. I bailed frantically, then adjusted the sheet again, for the wind had changed somewhat. When I felt more confident of staying above the water's surface I asked again, “What do you mean, it wasn't play-acting?”
“When I chose to come into this world,” the goddess said, “no one earthly body could contain all of me, so two bodies were prepared: the one you know as Trenara of Larioneth, and the Eye of Night. Both parts were bound together, inseparable in health or harm. Now the Eye of Night, as you know, was harmed: imprisoned, bewitched, pent up like a caged bird in a magic circle that kept it from growing, from fully living. So was my mind: imprisoned, moonstruck, stunted, confined. One could not be whole when the other was harmed. Thus I became a fool.”
“But—but you are a goddess!”
“Yes,” she said, “as I was all along, even when I could not dress myself. Think of that! You wondered why you did not know me at once, why the Gift of Naming failed you. It did not. You knew me: the moment you looked in my eyes you knew all I was. And you refused to know it.”
“I—I refused?”
“Of course. Who could blame you? Who could bear to know that the world lay in the hands of an idiot?” She laughed, but there was sorrow even in her laughter. “For so it was, then. And it would have driven you mad to acknowledge it.”
“That it would,” I said. “But how—how could you be so marred? You, a goddess? Who could have power to harm you?”
“Mortals, at times,” she said, “have more power than they believe, and we gods, less.” The wind shifted, and we had our hands full a while, too absorbed in our task to speak. But when we'd steadied our course she spoke on. “You think of us as invincible, untouchable: four puppeteers pulling the strings of the world, pulling you here and there, now and then cutting the strings of one you loved for some cruel caprice of our own. But we are no such thing.”
The wind toyed with us another while, and it took some difficult tacking to keep our prow headed north, the distant memory of life astern. But I did not forget, the whole time, what we'd been speaking of, and when she knew I had an ear free for anything but the wind, the goddess continued. “Four potters spun the earth on a wheel, and only later found the flaws in the vessel we had shaped. By then, in our eagerness for life, we had filled it with oceans and lands, with living things growing on the lands and swimming the seas. It was too late, then, to spill the work and start afresh, planning a flawless vessel in calmer moments. We had acted hastily, but it was done: we would not destroy what we had created. And yet the flaws were grave, and the whole would crack if nothing were done and the Wheel kept up its turning. So from time to time one of us enters the Wheel to work from within, perfecting what we began, saving it from dissolution. Each in turn, throughout the ages of the world, must be born into our own creation to give what we have to give, each according to our nature. The Rising God would bring some new knowledge to light, or establish justice through law; the Bright Goddess would build something; the Upside-Down God would give his life. I give birth.”
“To whom—or what?”
“It is not in my nature to know,” she said. “I do what I can.” Waves crashed around us, but her fine musical voice somehow stood out amid the din; I can still hear it. “And if in the confusion of storm and darkness, one woman, most precious to you and to my own heart, slipped through my fingers, I grieve for the loss.”
Tears blurred my eyes, but it hardly mattered, for there was little to be seen. By the Hidden Goddess's voice I knew that she also wept. “I have misjudged you,” I said. “I'm sorry.”
“Everyone does,” she replied.
“But I berated you openly, in front of those who loved you, in the harshest terms I could devise!”
“And do you think I could hate you for that?” said the goddess. “You still have much to learn, my child. My ways are not human ways, nor do I judge by human measure. I know you taunted me to rouse my wrath against you, to make me strike you dead for your insolence. Is that not true?”
“You see through me,” I said. “You know too, I suppose, that you punish my presumption more truly by keeping me alive.”
“But my aim is not to punish you,” said the goddess. “Indeed, I love you more even than those that bowed to me. You were kind to me when I was weak; you did not flatter me when I became powerful. You loved my saint with all her beauty invisible, hidden. No more than I, do you judge as others judge or love as others love. You turn other men's measures upside-down. The wonder, Jereth, is that you were ever a priest of the Rising God, when you have lived most of your life as a disciple of the Upside-Down God. You have been falling toward me all your life. You even tried to trick me into taking your life: his own most desperate stratagem.”
“The Upside-Down God—” I mused, “I never understood him.”
“Does a fish understand the sea?” said the goddess. “He comprehends you, nonetheless.”
“He is your consort?” I asked, drawing on one of the many traditions.
“My lover? My brother? My father? My son? You have no words for what he is to me, what we all are to each other, we four that encircle the earth. But deep beneath words, you have known something of that love.”
“Yes,” I said, “I think I have known that love. Do I not presume greatly in saying so?” She rested a hand gently on mine where I held the tiller, and gave no other answer.
I asked, “Since you know my love and my grief, tell me, Goddess, how long must I live?”
“Long enough to complete the work your beloved began,” she answered.
“That is what she asked of me,” I said, “to complete her work, or correct it. She wasn't sure in the end if she had done right. After all she'd given—her life, her name—she feared she'd done wrong.”
“She followed her quest with absolute fidelity,” said Trenara. “She held nothing back.”
“And in the end, she could not even be satisfied with her own work, for all it cost her,” I said. “It was doubt that crushed her spirit in the end; the doubt seemed harder than the dying. It seemed so cruel, so unjust.” The goddess showed no sign of anger, but neither did she answer me, or justify herself. I pressed on. “Why was she chosen for this quest, this sacrifice—she who had suffered so much already?”
“She herself chose this quest,” said the goddess. “Nothing less would satisfy her. She sought me, though she did not know me when she found me. She was looking for the Eye of Night when she found me, not knowing we were one and the same. And when she defended me from the man who used and sold me, she chose again, though she knew not what she chose,” the goddess continued. “She chose not to try to use my powers, but to give my own back to me, to set me free—all for the sake of common compassion, the same compassion she would have offered to any other suffering creature, or to the world, had she known it was in her power to heal it. She chose; and though in some ways she chose in ignorance, it was nonetheless a true choice, the same she would have made if she had known everything.”
I nodded mutely; this was the Hwyn I knew. However greatly I loved her, I could no longer cling to the fantasy that I or anyone else could have saved her from the fate she had embraced—not without breaking he
r will; not without destroying her name, her soul.
“And yes,” added the goddess, “I chose her as well. Bound and bewildered as my mind was, I still recognized in her what I needed: the kindness of her heart and the power hidden in her name. For that I followed her.”
“The power of her name,” I echoed. “You knew her name, didn't you? Why don't you ever speak it?”
“I don't answer riddles,” the goddess said, “I create them. And beyond that: do you imagine that you would be happier if I told you her name? Do you think it would give you peace?”
“It might,” I said.
“Tarvon Priest,” she said, “what peace can the name bring you unless you learn it for yourself?”
I was not sure what she meant by this question, but I had no leisure to puzzle it over. Wind and waves together rose against us; I thought the boat would be turned bottom up, and we travelers spilled out like the sodden dregs of herbs at the bottom of one of Harga's brews. There seemed to be as much water in the boat as beneath it. I fumbled with the sheet and wrestled with the tiller, wondering desperately whether it made any sense to pray when one of the Four Great Ones was in my boat with me, bailing. After what seemed an eternity, there was enough calm to let me ease my cramped hands for a moment, chafing them together for some shred of warmth. I turned to my companion to find her holding back the waters with her hands. She seemed larger than before, more luminous, less human than I had ever seen her.
“We are near the Rim of the World,” she said, “and I am returning to myself. Soon I will leave this boat and send you back alone.”
“Where will you go?” I said, but her answer was snatched away by the wind. Overhead, I seemed to see the sky torn and hanging loose like the edges of a damaged tent; from the rent in the sky, wind rocked us, driving us back from our goal. I let out the sail, tacked, and was amazed and grateful to see how close to the wind my haphazardly constructed little boat would sail. We neared the rim again, neared the tear in the sky, and met its resistance again. The sky looked strangely close, and it seemed petty and foolish to fuss with the sail when the sky itself was too torn to hold back the wind. On impulse I leapt up and, to my own amazement, caught the torn edges of sky at the end of the world.
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