Moongather

by Clayton, Jo;

  “The light be blessed.”

  “Blessed be the light.” There was a greedy pleasure in the Followers’ response, a stench of malice.

  Tuli searched the faces of some she knew, seeing in them hunger and spite, greed and hate. Chark—three healthy older brothers who stood between him and any chance at his own land, a father who despised him, a sickly stooped body; his eyes glistened with spite as he chanted. Nilis—a cursed woman, her single suitor a stuttering second son courting her only because no one else would have him and even so only lukewarm in his pursuit while her sister Sanani, two years younger, was promised already and happy in it. Kumper—only son of Digger Havin, a good old man; Tesc endured Kumper’s whines and complaints and slovenly work for his father’s sake, but two seasons ago, when he found him tormenting a macai, he threw him off the Tar, telling him not to come back ever.

  “The Taromate has named Tesc Gradin spokesman. He leaves tomorrow early for Oras to protest the tithe.”

  “Cursed be those who deny the light.”

  “Be they cursed.”

  “I live because I have to among the followers of the dark hag. I am tainted with their evil. Purge me, Soäreh. Be Father and family to me.”

  “Fire burns clean, the Light cleanses all.”

  “Blessed be the light.”

  “Father, mother, sisters, brothers, all refuse the light. I sin because of them. I give in to anger. I doubt the right. They are the roots of my sin. I renounce them, Soäreh, my Father. I renounce them.” Her glowing eyes were fixed on the arc of flame above her head.

  “Blessed be the light that burns away the darkness.”

  “Blessed be the light.”

  “Let my soul be a transparent glory, let the light shine in me.” With this final outburst, Nilis lowered her hands and thrust her arms back in the fire, crying out after a moment, a wild hoarse wail of a pleasure too much for her slight body to hold.

  As Nilis swayed back to her place and another of the Followers stumbled to the fire, Tuli slapped at her brother’s leg, then wriggled away from the window. Without waiting for him, she clawed her way up the wall and dropped to the ground outside.

  Teras thudded down beside her. “How could she do that?” There was anguish in his voice. His usual control stripped away, he slammed a hand against the mud bricks. “Traitor!”

  Fighting with her own anger, Tuli caught his hand in hers, held it tight, his need the one thing that could cool her heat. “What are we going to do?”

  He tugged his hand free, rubbed it hard across his face. “Tell Da first, that’s one thing.” His voice was hoarse. “We have to, he has to know what she did.” He kicked at the wall, stared away from her, blinking tears he was ashamed of from his eyes. “I can’t believe she did it, Tuli. Why’d she do it? Why?”

  “She’s Nilis, I s’pose that’s all.” Tuli touched his arm. “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know.” He struck the wall with the flat of his hand, then raced along it toward the street.

  Tuli ran after him, caught hold of his arm, stopping him. “The watcher,” she breathed.

  He pressed his back against the crumbling brick. Eyes closed, head back, he stood, breathing raggedly. In the light of Nijilic TheDom, directly overhead now, clear for that moment of clouds, he looked far older than his fourteen years. Tuli shivered, chilled by a sense of loss—then he opened his eyes, grinned at her and the world was right again. She grinned back, pointed down the street, started loping through the shadows of the overhanging storefronts, moving with the stealth of a prowling fayar. Several shops down she cut across the street then circled around behind the Maiden Shrine toward patient Labby slumping half-asleep against the post.

  They rode in silence, Tuli’s arms around her brother’s waist, her cheek pressed against his back. Neither spoke until the barns of Gradin-Tar loomed ahead and the great black bulk of the watchtower, then Teras brought Labby to a halt. He twisted around, his face grave. “You better get back up the wall ’fore I go in. Da ’ud skin you alive if he knew you were out.”

  “Yah.” She relaxed her hold, shifted back until she was sitting on the macai’s rump. “Think he’ll believe you?” With a small grunt, she swung a leg up and over, slid off and stood looking up at him.

  “Why shouldn’t he?” He clucked to Labby, started him walking again in a slow amble. “If he doesn’t, I’ll have to tell him you were with me and heard the same things.”

  Tuli grimaced, touched a buttock. “My backside will heal faster than what Nilis is doing to us. Teras.…”

  “Huh?”

  “Make sure Da knows that if he still is going to go, he should leave right now, not wait for morning. And he should be careful, real careful.”

  “Hah! You think I didn’t think of that?” He leaned forward, squinted at the moonlit area in front of the house; the macain tied there earlier were gone. “The meeting must be over.”

  Tuli sniffed. “Course it is, you heard Nilis.”

  “Hunh!” He slid off the macai’s back. “Get up that wall, you, before Da wears out your bottom.” He led Labby toward the corral. “Girls.”

  CHAPTER II:

  THE QUEST

  Her Noris stands high on the mountain, black boots ankle deep in cold stone, his narrow elegant form a darkness half obscured by swirls of snow and mist—cold, cold, so cold. Pale hands reach for her, sad eyes plead with her. He touches her, catches her hands in his—cold, so cold.

  “Help me, Serroi,” he whispers and the words are splinters of ice tearing into her flesh—cold, cold, so cold.

  “Come to me, dearest one,” he cries to her. Stone creeps around his knees while below, far below, the valley stretches out in golden splendor, golden warmth. “Help me,” he pleads. Gray and relentless, the stone rises past his waist—cold, so cold. His hands reach to her again. She feels feather touches on her face—cold, cold, so cold.

  “Come to me, daughter, come to me, my child.” The stone closes around his neck; the yearning in his eyes touches the long-denied yearning frozen deep within her—oh cold, so cold.

  “Let me be, father, let me be, teacher,” she whispers and sees before the stone closes over his head the agony in his eyes, an agony without measure as the pain in her is without measure—cold, so terribly cold.

  Moonlight slanted silver through the window, painting an oblong of broken silver on Serroi’s body. She turned and turned in her troubled sleep, side and back and stomach, caught in dreams she could neither banish nor wake from.

  Her Noris reclines on black velvet before a crackling fire. She is a small girl, comfortable and happy beside his divan, half-sitting, half-lying on piled-up pillows, silken pillows glowing silver, crimson, amber, azure, violet, emerald, midnight blue. His hand drops, strokes her hair, begins pulling soft curls through his fingers. The fire is no warmer than the quiet happiness between them.

  “No!” Serroi jerked up from her sweat-sodden pillow, leaped from her bed and reached the door before she woke sufficiently to remember she was home, home and safe, safe in the Valley where Ser Noris could not come. Once, long ago, he’d tried using her as a key to unlock the Biserica defenses for him. She pressed her face against the door’s polished wood, squeezing back tears she refused to shed. Now I’m no key, I’m a lever and you’re using me to force an opening for you. It won’t work, won’t, can’t work. I would have done anything for you once, but not now. “Not now,” she whispered.

  Still trembling, she tumbled back to the bed and sat wearily on its edge, dropping her head into her hands. “Maiden bless, I’m tired. Let me sleep, will you? Please. Please, let me be.” Her eyes burned. She rubbed them then lifted her head to gaze out the window toward the shadowy granite cliff across the valley. “You’re up there now, aren’t you? Wanting all this not for what it is, wanting it because you can’t have it, wanting it though it would turn to dust and ashes at your touch.” She shivered in spite of the night’s warmth at the thought of that touch, feeling a painful mi
xture of revulsion and desire. Her lips curved tiredly up then fell to a bitter line. “If only you knew, my Noris, you betray yourself with every dream you send to torment me. You show your own weakness, not mine … ah, Maiden bless, that’s a lie. My weakness too, too much mine.” She turned her eyes from the cliff but found no ease for her spirit, not when the only other thing she had to look at was the empty bed across the cell. Even in the cloud-mottled moonlight she could see the precision of the blanket folds, the crispness of the white pillow. Tayyan had never in her life left a bed like that, not without a lump here, a sag there, a wrinkle or two that her greatest effort couldn’t eliminate. A knocking at the door broke her from her brooding. She lifted her legs onto her bed, crossed her ankles and tugged her sleeping smock over her knees. “Come.”

  Yael-mri pulled the door open and stood in the dark rectangle, the candle she held stiffly before her painting inky shadow into the hollows and lines of her strong face. “The Silent Ones sent to tell me you were dreaming again.”

  Serroi’s hand trembled on her knee. “Yes.”

  The flame wavered as Yael-mri sighed, licked at a raised edge sending a liquid slide down one side of the candle. The smell of hot wax was suddenly strong in the small room. Absently Yael-mri straightened her arm, holding the candle farther from her. “The Shawar are troubled by these sendings. Their meditations are disturbed, and what’s worse, several makings have collapsed.”

  Serroi licked dry lips. When she met Yael-mri’s compassionate gaze, she stopped breathing, then tried to smile, but the twisting of her mouth felt more like a grimace so she let the smile die. “I’ll have to leave the Valley.”

  “I’m afraid so. Come to the prieti-varou when the bell sounds treilea. We’ll talk. I have some suggestions I want to make about your destination once you set out.”

  “I hear.” Serroi drew shaking fingers across her eyespot, trying to counter its painful throbbing. She grimaced. “At least I’ll be doing something, not just sitting around watching the rocks grow.”

  “You do a great deal more than that.”

  Serroi shrugged. “Other people’s work.”

  Yael-mri watched her a moment, frowning thoughtfully. “Do you want someone to stay with you the rest of the night? Or should I send one of the healwomen?”

  “No.” As Yael-mri still hesitated in the doorway, Serroi lifted her head, stared coldly at her. “Don’t worry, I won’t sleep again. There won’t be any dreams.”

  The door clicked shut, footfalls moved crisply away, fading as the thick walls cut off the sound. Serroi pulled the quilt off her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. She touched her eyespot again, traced its outline, a long oval with its major axis parallel to the line of her brows, a dark green oval almost black against the bright olive of her skin, remembering other fingers that had touched her there, slim white fingers of surpassing beauty when she was a child and, later, the love touches of tan fingers rough with calluses from swordhilts and macai halters, thin and a little bony and very dear. Tayyan, lover and swordmate. Tayyan, abandoned on a street in Oras to bleed to death, her body tossed outside the walls for demons to eat. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, then let her hands fall into her lap. The days had dribbled like quicksilver through her fingers, days unnumbered, one much like the other. Time. Too much time. Her grief was blunted, her guilt lost in fear as her Noris fought to reclaim her. She leaned against the wall, her eyes on the window as she watched the shifting clouds, the shadows dappling the mountainside. Find me something hard to do, Yael-mri, hunt out an impossible quest and I’ll hug it to me like it was my only child. Her lips twitched. Foolishness. Still—anything would be better than this wretched drifting.

  She spent the morning cleaning out one of the stables and washing down trailworn macain brought in by meien who came home dismissed from their wards, some of them running ahead of hostile mobs. The mindless labor brought quiet to her spirit until she was calm and ready to face whatever Yael-mri had in mind for her.

  When she heard the dalea bell, she swiped at the dusty sweat on her face and carried her tools to their shed. The stable-pria looked up from a macai’s slashed leg as Serroi came from the stable; she was an old meie, mountain bred, better with animals than people though time had taught her to read her fellows nearly as accurately as she did her beasts. She was Yael-mri’s closest friend and unofficial adviser, wise beyond her years, wiser perhaps even than the most venerable of the Shawar because she’d suffered more. She came to the fence. With wordless sympathy she held out a lean, callused hand. Serroi smiled as the rough fingers closed around hers. “It’s nothing so bad, pria Melit.”

  Melit nodded. “Not life or death, it will pass. Later, after the talk is done, come see me.”

  Serroi nodded, warming to the warmth offered her. “I will.”

  By the time she’d washed away the grime of the stable and pulled on clean leathers, the bell was ringing treilea. She stood still a moment, fingers opening and closing, then walked quietly out with no backward glance at the room that had been hers for half her life.

  Before the aste-varou, the ascetic waiting room—more like a stunted corridor—outside Yael-mri’s office, Serroi hesitated, brushed nervously at her sorrel curls, straightened her shoulders, then pushed the door open.

  Dom Hern glanced at her as she stepped inside. He stood at one of the windows that marched along the north wall of the narrow room. His eyebrows rising, he left the window and crossed to settle himself on the hard wooden bench backed against the south wall. “You too?”

  Serroi hitched her weapon belt up and dropped onto the bench. “Too?”

  “Summoned.” His light grey eyes mocked her.

  “Yes.” Her curt monosyllable seemed to amuse him even more than her presence here. She swung around and ran cool eyes over his pudgy body. She hadn’t seen him since he’d moved into the gatehouse, though she’d certainly heard enough about him. She grinned at him, willing, for no reason she could think of, to share his amusement. “We’re being kicked out, Dom.”

  “Thought so.” He rubbed at his nose, then bounced to his feet, his mood changing suddenly from amusement to an irritated frustration. He stared out the window at the drying flowers and listless vegetation, tilted his head back to gaze at the mountains rising to the north. She remembered then the other things that occupied his time (besides riding, play with sword and staff and endless loveplay), the hours in the Biserica library pouring over maps and searching through reports, the time he spent with meien new come from the mijloc, probing into Floarin’s words and deeds, into the words and deeds of the Followers and their Aglim. She watched the strong square hands clasped behind his back. He wouldn’t have stayed here much longer anyway. But why did she send for him now?

  When Yael-mri opened the door to her varou, Hern swung around, Serroi rose to her feet. Yael-mri smiled at Serroi. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long, but I had a visitor I didn’t expect.” Her lips compressed to a thin line, her face stern and disapproving, she turned to Hern. “Dom.”

  “Prieti-meien.” He bowed, graceful in spite of his bulky body, but when he took a step toward the door, Yael-mri stiffened; anger flashed in her light brown eyes. To depress his presumption, she stopped him with a chopping gesture and beckoned to Serroi. “Come, meie.” She stepped aside and let Serroi move past her into the varou. As soon as she saw her seated, she waved Hern in.

  Ignoring his affronted scowl, she walked calmly to a wide table and arranged herself in the high-backed chair behind it. “If you will sit, Dom Hern, I wish to discuss something with the two of you.” She leaned back, her hands resting palm down on the age-smoothed arms of her chair, brown eyes shifting from Hern to Serroi and back, the flecks of gold in the brown catching the light, lending the commonplace color an odd unstable quality. Between the two of you, life in the Valley is becoming impossible.” She tapped long thumbs against the chairarms. “You, Dom Hern, are getting to be more than a nuisance. Two knife dances yesterd
ay alone and a hair-pulling brawl.” She snorted. “You needn’t look smug, Dom. It’s no compliment to say you have the sexual habits of a yepa in heat. What my meien do off-duty is no business of mine. Keeping the peace most certainly is. I won’t have this nonsense disrupting our defenses, not when we’re threatened as we’ve never been before.” She scowled, leaned forward, slapping her hand on the table, looking—in spite of this vigorous action—drawn and weary. “I think it will be no surprise to either of you that I require your absence.” She twisted around, reached a long arm to a taboret beside the table, took a small silver box from it, straightened, turned the box over in her hands then set it on the table and slid it toward Serroi. “You’ll remember this.”

  Serroi lifted the box, drew her thumbnail along the smooth metal. “The tajicho?”

  “Yes. Don’t open the box here.” She leaned forward to fix disapproving eyes on Hern. “What are your intentions toward the mijloc?”

  Serroi bent slowly, slipped the box into the top of her boot. As she tucked it away, some of her anxiety flowed out of her. Slumping back in the chair, eyes unfocused, smiling a little, she drifted away from Yael-mri’s inquisition of Dom Hern into memory of that stormy night when she turned aside from her return to Oras (duty and penance) to defend the small furry creasta-shurin from the hideous great worm that was eating them into extinction. When the Nyok’chui fell to her arrows, she remembered old tales from the books in the tower of the Noris, cut the third eye from the Nyok’s skull and called down lightning to form the crystal that could deflect the farsight of sorcerers and seers, that could turn spells back on the spieler. Once it was out of the shielding silver and touching her, hers again, no one could take it from her. It turned aside men’s eyes like a shuri’s fur turned water. And the Noris would have to let her be, stay out of her dreams if she couldn’t force him from her memory.