Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil

by Rebecca Bradley

  "Beware, Child of Oballef," he whispered. He sketched in the air the old formal gesture of warning. "There are more foes in Gil than the accursed Sherank. The people of Gil have lived in bondage for seventy years and have forgotten the ways of our fathers. Trust no one—do you hear me, Scion? Until the Lady in Gil is found, even your countrymen are your deadly enemies." His grip tightened. I sighed.

  "And hark to this, too! There are more perils in the Gilgard than those foolish youngsters would have you believe." Marori waved with contempt in the direction of the other Flamens, who bristled their grey beards irritably but made no move to shut him up. "Hark to me, Tigrallef, son of Cirallef! Before Fathan rose and fell, before Vizzath and Myr, before ever the Gilgard caves were carved out by Oballef, there was a maze under the rock—and do you know what was in it, Scion?"

  "What, what?" I demanded. The tide was right, the ship was waiting. Since I was doomed to go anyway, I wanted to get it over with.

  "Things!" he hissed. "Things of legend, terrible creatures of the dark, things older than Fathan, older than Vizzath, older than everything on earth except the Lady in Gil herself! It was indeed the Lady who forced them deeper into the mantle of the world and held them there for nearly a thousand years. But mark my words! It has been seventy winters and more since last a Priest-King ruled in Gil. Who knows what crept back to the Gilgard caves when the Lady's will was broken? Who knows, Scion, who knows? And hark to this too, Scion—"

  But at this juncture the other Flamens moved in and had Marori carried off, still declaiming horrors and dark prognostications and other acutely uncomforting things. They assured me as I settled glumly into the boat that the old man was off his head, really, and was forever babbling gruesome nonsense about the ancient legends, when he wasn't boring them with the good old days in Gil. All right for them, I thought, as I watched their green-robed figures recede on the other side of a widening stretch of water; they'd be home safe in their beds while I stumbled about in those dark, sacred, unholy caverns—assuming I even got that far.

  * * *

  2

  I WISH I could say that I was stirred by my first sight of the Gilgard, but it would not be true. I was seasick at the time. I was slumped in the bow, wishing from the bottom of my heart that the smelly little boat would be obliging enough to sink, when the captain bent and shook my arm.

  "The Gilgard is on the horizon, my lord Tigrallef." I grunted, hoping he'd go away. He didn't. He seemed to be expecting some heroic and memorable saying, like those produced by previous Scions of Oballef on such occasions. I pushed my head briefly above the railing, blinked at the far-off misty outline of Gil, and retched. "Very nice," I mumbled. Thank the Lady, he left me alone after that.

  There remain few other memories of that last day of my voyage to Gil. I know we were challenged at least twice by Sherkin patrol ships, great ugly hulks bristling with spear-chuckers and flame-slings and large heads in snouty Sherkin helmets, looming over the foredeck where I lay. The spectacle might have been terrifying if I'd been fit to appreciate it. I even have a dim memory of the fishing boat being boarded for inspection, for I recall hearing harsh voices and opening one eye to see a shiny black boot with sharp metal teeth set into the toes.

  "One of your crew?" a deep voice growled above me.

  "An apprentice," said the captain's voice smoothly, "and still finding his sea-belly."

  The boot prodded my shoulder, then turned me over. "Great Raksh. Is he the best you can do? You'd be better to chop him into pieces and use him for bait." I listened dreamily as the boot-owner guffawed, kicked me light-heartedly in the ribs and disappeared. I was beyond caring.

  It was not only the seasickness. It was also a deadly mixture of inadequacy, hopelessness, honest fear and shame. Arko would never have been afraid; and even if seasick, he'd have bitten the Sherkin bastard on the ankle. I permitted myself a moment of rage with Arko for getting his stupid leg cut off. After all, he wanted to be here, I didn't. I wanted to be safe at home in the archives, preferably reading.

  And so, as the fishing boat lolloped its way towards the tall stone finger that marked a homeland I'd never seen, I thought neither of my mission nor of my heroic responsibility, but of cool, still air; of the musty smell of old books and flaking scrolls, the sour old-ink smell of the First Memorian, my friend and mentor, the whispering discourse between pens and pages; I dreamed of solid chairs on solid floors. The boat dipped, abandoning my belly in mid-air.

  "Not long now, my lord," said the captain. This news was not good, though not entirely bad. In my view, the advantage to being on shipboard was that I wasn't yet on Gil; but just then the Sherank seemed the lesser of the evils as long as they were on dry land.

  I hardly remember the approach to Gil harbour, only the sudden chill as we moved into the shadow of the Gilgard, shouts of greeting from nearby boats as we moored, the black prow of a massive Sherkin warship gliding past overhead; oh, and the smell. Dead fish and seasalt, as in any harbour in the known world, but borne on a shorewind of shit and decay, mouldering offal, sweat, dung-smoke and despair. My first whiff of Gil. The captain, seeing what was about to happen, draped me across the rail so that my head hung over the side.

  "Forgive me, my lord Scion," he said, "but we've just swabbed the deck."

  I was too busy to thank him. When I had finished losing whatever was left to lose (who knows where it came from; I hadn't eaten in four days) I rested my chin on the rail and focused blearily on the shore.

  Rubble and smoke. No rosy stone villas, no spires, no fountains, no arcade of green trees sweeping the curve of the harbour. Rubble and smoke, that was all. It looked like the city had been sacked just that morning instead of seven decades before, and was still smouldering—in other words, like a typical subject city in the Sherkin empire. It was even uglier than I'd expected. I gulped and moved my eyes upwards, above the bleak urban jumble, to the mountain and the heights of Gilgard Castle.

  Even sick as I was, that sight made me catch my breath. Gilgard Castle—the masterwork of Oballef, the seat of my ancestors, the sacred house of the Lady in Gil; also, more pertinently, the local Sherkin stronghold. Its turrets sprang from the living rock of the Gilgard, as if sprouted rather than built; its ramparts and buttresses, the tiers of the three palaces, the airy colonnades of the upper galleries, flowed easily up the mountainside like an ocean wave frozen in mid-break. It was impossible to see where the castle ended and the mountain began, so seamless was the construction. My ancestor had built well; his handiwork had defied even the Sherkin genius for vandalism, at least from a distance. It hung over the suppurating city like a dream of the shining past.

  Oh, very nice, said the gloom-merchant in the back of my head. Poetic, even. But what about the caves? What if they've found the secret ways into the mountain, where the Lady lies hidden? What about that?

  "What about it?" I mumbled out loud. I hung my head over the rail again, searching my stomach for something else to throw up. An object like a log bumped gently against the hull at the waterline—except that logs do not generally have shoulders for shreds of rotten cloth to cling to, nor faces like lumps of leavened dough. It had hands, too—one of them waved at me as it bobbed about in the ship's wash. Welcome to Gil, lord Scion.

  "Thank you," I said.

  The right eye seemed to wink as a small crab climbed up through the socket. Come to find the Lady, have we?

  "Yes."

  The head submerged for a moment, as if thrown back with laughter. To free us? To rid us of the Sherank?

  "If I can."

  You? You must be joking. What were the Flamens thinking of when they sent you? That was the lipless mouth-hole, grinning around a tongue that emerged waggishly—and emerged, and emerged, and emerged, until the eel pulled itself free and slid lazily into the murk below. The conversation was becoming unpleasant. I turned my face away.

  "Captain," I said, "there's a body in the water."

  He bent indifferently over the taffrail.
"So? Don't let it bother you. You're in Gil now."

  "Oh, I'm not bothered by the body," I whispered, "I'm bothered by the fact that I was talking to it."

  But the captain had already walked away. I closed my eyes. Why should I fret over the opinions of a bloated corpse? The deck was level for the first time in four days; I stretched out and let the world grow fuzzy around the edges. The captain told me later that I looked like a corpse myself—certainly I slept like one, and had no dreams that I can recall. He threw a blanket over me and kindly left me to sleep.

  Thus it was not until the dark early hours of the next morning that I was wakened, dumped respectfully into a row-boat and smuggled ashore. I remember curling up miserably between the thwarts and half-dreaming about my ancestor Oballef, who also came to Gil in a rowboat, and did rather well for himself. In my daze, the rowboat was decisive in his success.

  That first rowboat came ashore about a thousand years ago, when the unlamented Empire of Fathan had been dead for less than a century, the nations were in their infancy and the world was a hostile and unruly place. Who Oballef was and where he came from were not recorded, not even in legend. He arrived on Gil to find the island an armpit of a place, infertile, unattractive, short of water, and torn by constant petty squabbling among the factions of its tiny population. The only impressive feature was the Gilgard itself, a great flat-topped plug of volcanic rock some two thousand feet high, dominating the dusty flatlands at the north end of the island: on the seaward side, a sheer uncreviced cliff, too steep to be scaled, too smooth even to provide nesting for birds; on the landward side, almost as steep, but climbable in theory. In practice, nobody wanted to climb it. In the pre-Oballef mythos of Gil, the Gilgard was both sacred and unhealthy.

  Nevertheless, carrying a small bundle over his shoulder and ignoring the natives, Oballef immediately set off to scale the Gilgard. The aboriginal Gilmen were confused by this behaviour, but interested. They were also interested in the contents of his bundle. Eventually, smothering their fears, a small group banded together to follow him up the rocky landward slope.

  They never exactly caught up with him. My ancestor climbed steadily, easily, never faltering, never looking back; the Gilmen scrambled unhappily a few score feet in the rear, not quite able to close the gap. Thus, when Oballef reached the flat summit of the Gilgard, his followers had an eagle's view of the extraordinary events that ensued.

  According to eye-witness accounts passed down to us, my ancestor stood on the edge of the summit and took from his bundle a glowing object about the size and shape of his forearm. He held it over his head with both hands and commenced to chant in a tongue strange to the observers. As they watched, a golden mist emanated from the object, enveloping but not obscuring Oballef, and then expanded to roll down the cliffside towards them, a cloud spangled with motes of fire. It was past them before they could even think of being afraid—they turned to watch as it billowed to the foot of the Gilgard and across the sere lowlands, sweeping the entire long crescent of the island before dissipating at the far southern tip. The whole traverse, it was said, took no more than three minutes.

  This cloud was spectacular enough in itself to ensure Oballef's reputation forever—and yet, it was only the beginning. As the astounded Gilmen watched from their vantage point high on the mountain, the island began a wonderful transformation. The tough yellow earth darkened to black, then to the tender green of sprouting shoots. Springs of clear water bubbled to the surface all over the island and began to cut meandering channels to the sea. Even the air seemed to warm and soften. Gil blossomed like a water-lily unfolding in the middle of a pond.

  The Gilmen were impressed—so impressed that they failed to mark Oballef's descent until he was already among them, the bundle tucked securely under his arm. He paused, apparently noticing them for the first time. "Well—let's find something to eat," he is supposed to have said, before leading them down the mountain into the burgeoning new Gil. Those words, much analysed in later times, were to take on a huge burden of mythic significance; I believe that my ancestor was simply hungry.

  However it was, this was the first recorded manifestation of the Lady in Gil. The object in Oballef's bundle was said to be a figurine, the image of a woman, carved from a radiant amber-coloured stone veined richly with sapphire. Or, according to alternative versions, it was gold inlaid with lapis, or possibly with jade; in fact, its precise nature and how Oballef came by it in the first place were secrets long hidden in the fogbanks of time. From that first manifestation to the day of catastrophe, the Lady was never seen by any but the Priest-King and the most senior of the Flamens, who remained professionally secretive; the public statues, the little glazed figurines made for tourists, even the Flamens' insignia, were all based on popular fancy, and very beautiful they were. The actual records, however, proved only that the Lady was the focus of a power, flexible in its applications, mysterious in its workings—and only to be wielded with safety by Oballef and, in due course, his descendants, the Scions of Oballef.

  Within weeks of Gil's transformation, the Lady had a large and devout following, which unanimously installed Oballef as Hereditary King of Gil and High Priest of the Cult of the Lady in Gil, a title that passed down intact through forty-odd generations of my forebears. In return, with liberal aid from the Lady, the people of Gil set about becoming the most cultured, peaceable and artistically brilliant race the world had known since the days of Fathan's innocence, and very likely the richest too.

  Gil's next nine hundred and twenty-seven years could be described as happy, rewarding and blessedly uneventful, the Bright Ages, an extended golden summer in which the seeds planted by Oballef blossomed and bore fruit. The crops never failed, the fishing boats never landed empty, the Gillish argosies never sank. War was unknown. Combat was ritualized into a kind of athletic competition governed by strict rules of etiquette; under the matronage of the Lady, violence seemed irrelevant, even quaint. Gil became the wonder of the world, and the Gilmen a race apart. It lasted a long time—but no good thing, it seems, can last forever.

  * * *

  3

  THE WATER MADE oily sucking noises around the nose of the boat. We seemed, strangely, to be gliding in the dark down the centre of a garden arcade, one of those long, dim, vine-ceilinged passages between two rows of columns that are such a feature of the grand Satheli villas; curious place, I thought, to put a garden. Then heavy footsteps thundered overhead, the columns turned abruptly into wooden pilings, the trailing vines into rank streamers of sea-growth, and I realized we were under a jetty in the harbour of Gil City.

  The oars were muffled and slipped soundlessly in and out of the water. My belly calmed with the stillness. I sat up in time to feel the keel grate on to pebbly sand, with a noise that seemed shockingly loud. After a few moments, while I held my breath and waited fearfully for more footsteps above us, one of the oarsmen shook me by the shoulder and helped me over the side. We crept out from under the jetty on to an open beach, littered with crates, stinking of sewage and dead fish and bordered by a high sea-wall silhouetted spikily against the first lightening of the dawn.

  The fisherman motioned for me to follow. Keeping to the cover of the crates as far as possible, we worked our way a fair distance up the beach, bypassing the first three flights of stairs set into the sea-wall. At the fourth, my companion patted me pityingly on the back and waved me upwards; a second later, like a spirit, he had vanished into the shadows. I was alone.

  I stood for a moment, tamping down a fierce desire to follow the man back to the rowboat; or, failing that, to walk into the sea and start swimming. Then, sighing, I scrambled up the stairs and found myself for the first time on the streets of the city of Gil, former pearl of the world. Fortunately, there was no one there to meet me.

  I hovered shivering by the sea-wall, completely at a loss. The gaunt buildings looked down at me with wide, dark eyes—except they should not have been there at all. I should have been facing a broad strip of gar
den running along the corniche for the whole arc of the harbour. To my right, where the harbour-master's villa should have been, was a small market; to my left, where the grand avenue leading to the Gilgard Gate should have met the corniche under a soaring arch of white stone, was a massive brick-and-rubble wall at least thirty feet high. And yes—the limp sacks dangling from hooks at the top of the wall were indeed human, or had been; there was little left of them by then.

  The instructions given by the Flamens-in-Exile were extraordinarily vague when it came to practicalities. Go to Gil, find the Lady and destroy the accursed Sherank; that was clear enough. They were not very helpful, however, when it came to the middle bits.

  Certainly they equipped us well enough in some ways. I had a little pouch of lead tokens, sufficient for a few days' food and lodging; I had a sword in a scabbard, disguised as a walking stick; I had a knife concealed in a sheath sewn into one of my boots; and I had a dart-tube and ten little darts, although these were not actually part of my official kit—the Flamens didn't think such a sneaky weapon was really in the spirit of the Heroic Code, so I had packed it myself on the sly. And I had one other weapon unblessed by the Flamens, in fact scorned by them as unworthy of any civilized person: my fair fluency in Sheranik, the language of Sher, acquired along with a few other so-called lower tongues in my dear dead days as a scholar. I think their idea was that I should defeat the Sherank without ever deigning to speak to them; or, at most, that I should set them cringing with a choice few words in Ceremonial Old High Gillish. Such was my trust in that theory that I spent my last night in Exile reviewing Sheranik plurals.

  But there was no guarantee that I'd ever come to use any of this equipment, sanctioned or not, since what the Flamens had never armed us with was knowledge—detailed practical knowledge of the conditions, customs and physical set-up of the new Gil. Yes, I had memorized the maps of Gil as it was before the catastrophe, and pored over the paintings that Ma-rori and others had made while Gil was still fresh in their minds. Dropped in the middle of my great-greatgrandfather's city, I'd have known exactly what to do, precisely where to go. But by the Lady, the old place had certainly changed.