Ancient Light

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Ancient Light Page 65

by Mary Gentle

Light filled the room. Starlight shone in through the roof-slot, and an iron candlestand dripped under the weight of becamil-wax candles; that familiar sweet scent. Apart from that the room was bare. Yellow light, and moving shadows. No tables or couch-chairs and I thought, Cory may not know or care what this place is, but why has the Wellkeeper let her use it to keep a prisoner in? The Goddess’s Well defiled by a Harantish Witchbreed in the inner sanctuary – and then I saw her and I knew …

  ‘Kethrial-shamaz shan’taj,’ said the Harantish Orthean woman, as she walked across the uneven brick floor. She carried a metal jug in one hand, and was chewing; and as I looked up she swallowed and wiped her mouth, and put the jug down on the rim of the Well beside me.

  Small, no more than five feet high; and thin – her pale grained skin caught lamp and starlight, almost luminous; and her mane was a white fire drifting round that narrow face; and I sat gazing up at her for a long minute, silent, and realized that this woman was barefoot, and wearing a meshabi-robe yellow and brown with dirt; girdled with a verdigris-copper chain; and that she was ash-stained and bleeding from one foot, and none of it mattered – she is Golden; is Santhendor’lin-sandru’s heir, who was Phoenix Emperor and Last Emperor – and I reached for my stick to try and stand up: pain jabbed hip and thigh as I tried to rise; and it cleared my head.

  She is only one Orthean woman; a woman of the city Kel Harantish. And that’s all she is, I thought; sinking back down, and reaching forward to shift my leg and try to ease it:

  ‘Kethrial-shamaz shan’tai Calil.’

  Never underestimate charismatic insanity – but she’s a prisoner now. And more than that: the Tower has put memories in my mind – when she lies, I’ll know, I thought; and I’ll know when, and if, she tells the truth.

  The young Orthean woman put a dirty, high-arched foot on the rim surrounding the Well. Starlight shone down into the Wellmouth, gleaming on black water that lay only a few inches down from the rim. There is never a smell of stagnant water in Wellhouses; I don’t know why. She looked down at the glittering blackness, and her profile was sharp and unhuman. White mane rooted down her spine, fell forward over high cheek-bones; and she turned her head to gaze at me, nictitating membrane sliding back from sunny yellow eyes.

  Why her and not you –?

  ‘So you’re living still,’ the Orthean woman remarked cheerfully. As if she were perfectly at home, she sat down on the rim of the Wellmouth, rested her foot on the stone, and cupped Well water in her hand to bathe blood from her cuts; adding,’ I want to talk to you. These s’aranthi here are fools.’

  Disgust filled me. I could rehearse what she’s done, these past few months; but what use. I said, ‘You’re not important, Calil. Can you grasp that? You’re not important; I’ve a few minutes here; if you’ve got anything to say, then say it. But you haven’t, have you?’

  Becamil-wax candles hissed in the silence, and burned tall and smoky. The pale plaster roof above them was becoming soot-blackened. The young Harantish woman leaned forward, resting her arms on her raised knee; so close to me that I could smell the musk of her skin. She smiled.

  ‘No, I’m not important, shan’tai Christie. I always told you that. You would have it that no one in my city wanted this except myself – well, no matter; my Harantish bloodlines are still out there’ – a thin, six-fingered hand gestured to the door; and the land beyond – ‘in the hills, or on jath and jath-rai … I tell you truthfully, whatever I would do if I were there now, there are a hundred Harantish who will do the same. And so no, I don’t matter at all.’

  Listening to her, I almost believe that she wants to be here. That the Peace Force guards just beyond the arch are unnecessary. That this is, as it was in that chiruzeth hall in Kel Harantish, an audience with the Empress-in-Exile … What a farce, I thought, half-amused, half-disgusted.

  These are the people who would have occupied Tathcaer. And then this Calil bel-Rioch would have threatened the use of a weapon she doesn’t have; would have threatened to make the Hundred Thousand into what the Elansiir and the Glittering Plain already are: sterile crystalline devastation …

  ‘What do you want to say?’

  Instead of answering, she put her arms down from her knee, and lowered the leg to the floor, and began to wipe at the mudstains on her meshabi-robe. The tiny hook-nails on her fingers were bitten ragged, and they caught in the cloth; and the skin of her six-fingered hands had in it a gold-dust sheen. She raised her head quickly, as if a sound startled her.

  Why, yes – and I couldn’t, for a moment, breathe; the realization choked me. That pale hawk-face is younger than hers, but similarities go deeper than the eyes: that high-boned face is so like … Ruric, didn’t you say to me once, My Desert Coast mother may have come from Kel Harantish? And so she may, I thought. Is it coincidence, or some distant kinship of a bloodline?

  Ah, but it doesn’t matter to you now.

  Calil bel-Rioch said, ‘What have you done with my Pathrey Shanataru, shan’tai?’

  ‘Done with –’ I bit back amusement, thought, What have we done with him? Ah, that’s a question. He could be halfway to Kasabaarde and the Tower now – and at that, cut off all thought; I can’t stand to remember yet what we said and did, Ruric and I, before this day.

  ‘The shan’tai Pathrey was very useful in bringing us some information.’ And let her remember that, I thought; and repeated, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was not mistaken,’ the Orthean woman said.

  She rose lightly to her feet. My head swam when I looked up: the room lurched. Exhaustion – I don’t have time to waste here, I thought. The shuttle …

  Candles burned steadily, and then dipped; a night wind blowing in through the roof-slot, where the clustered stars blaze. Her elongated shadow danced on the pale, curving wall. She stood with her cut foot resting on claw-nailed toes; poised, as if she could run. Her robe was torn, and the smell of ash and soot hung in it. And as she turned to look down at where I sat, there was a line of head and shoulder and leg that was all grace, all strength; and the light shone on her floating white mane.

  She said, ‘I was not mistaken. You have the look of the Tower about you … Shan’tai Christie … have you travelled there, and learned, and learned well? I thought once that I would have to come to Kasabaarde. What I know, I do not know from them. Shan’tai Christie, have you learned well, and learned of what the Elansiir is?’ Those lips curved; the nictitating membrane blinked down to veil her eyes.

  ‘I’ve learned from the offworlders who were in Maherwa and the canals,’ I said bluntly. I got both hands to the metal strut and levered myself upright, resting no weight on my right hip.

  As the pain abated, I said, ‘I don’t know what it is you do. I don’t care how close your people think you are to being Golden-blooded; I’m not even sure of what that means. You’re threatening with something you don’t have, your people don’t have, no one has had on this world for thousands of years – and it’s immaterial now. If I get one thing out of this, I’ll get Cory to make certain you suffer for Molly’s death. That girl …’

  I see her in my mind’s eye. Not the woman in PanOceanian uniform, but something I found in her Company record when I made the report on her death – an early image-cube. Against hot sunlight, an aborigine girl standing barefoot and in an old cotton dress; somewhere in her Pacifican homeland. That is Molly Rachel; that’s all that’s left.

  ‘Her? That was not I; that was my Pathrey. He is something of a liar,’ the young Harantish woman said; but her gaze shifted away from mine.

  I want to hurt you – if exhaustion and pain weren’t confusing me, I thought, I would know what to say; I would damage you so that you care. That it’s a pinprick, compared to what is happening now on this world, I know and I don’t care; and that there are others doing what you’ve done … Rage faded with the realization that quite probably any of the Harantish would have acted as she did.

  Calil bel-Rioch turned, walking away from me. She carried one
foot lame. When she stopped, it was on the far side of the Wellmouth. Candles gleamed on the black water. Her reflection shone – mirror-perfect: pale mane, gold-dust skin, and that hawk-face with the unveiled yellow eyes …

  ‘They make their religion of this,’ she said thoughtfully, staring down at the Well water. ‘We gave them this, too. When we bred them from animals, bred memory into their bone … Shan’tai Christie, what did you learn in the Tower?’

  To look down into that dark water is to sense the aeons of time past, the millennia that are gone; my eyes dazzled with the darkness. I have forgotten (or chosen to forget) that the past is not dead in me. That memory lives. I shivered, hands gripping tight on my stick; drugs and fever making me light-headed. I looked round at the Wellhouse walls, the pale plaster, and rough brick floor.

  ‘I learned that what is made just for expediency’s sake can become genuine.’

  ‘Can it so?’ She smiled, shook her head; and then reached down to dip her hand in the Well water, and straightened up again, and put her fingers in her mouth. And it was that simple movement that brought memory back in a rush: the Golden Empire and the dead who are gone, and this half-blooded Harantish woman wears the face that is Santhendor’lin-sandru’s.

  All I could say was ‘Why?’ Blood doesn’t compel; the past is not the present, surely?

  She stood quite still. There were smears of black ash on her hands. Her robe was dirty. She stood: that whitefire mane taking the colours of candle-flame and starlight. Her eyes met mine, and I saw her exhaustion, her fear; and only then wondered how she had been hunted, captured, this young Orthean woman who now looks at me as if it is me she sees – not the Representative, not the S’aranth, but me.

  ‘It’s true that I wanted the Hundred Thousand for my people,’ she said, ‘and that certain things – to be Empress – I have wanted very badly. But that wanting, that desire, wouldn’t be assuaged now by the having of it. Wanting things like that somehow awakens the real desire, the real longing, of which that is only a shadow or a memory.’

  The water of the Well is ruffled, and the night wind is cold. Her soft voice continues:

  ‘I want … something I had, or saw, or heard of, long ago. And if you ask what it is that I desire, I don’t know. I have sensed it sometimes in the way light and haze and shadow fall – they remind me, I do not know how, that somehow and long ago I was disinherited; we … were disinherited, robbed, sent into exile; and we will always desire something to put in place of what we lost, and there is nothing to match that desire.’

  Do the candles flicker, does the starlight fail? Between pain and fever and blindness; I want to call out, there are guards just outside this room. But the dome is thick with shadow. You have cause to be afraid. We have all cause to be afraid!

  Tower-memories are mine, and at my control. Now, as she walks towards me, reaches up to brush my cheek with her long-fingered hand, I feel how it is to have memory imposed upon the mind: recall how eight years ago in the Tower I felt this pain that, if it lasted longer than an instant, would be intolerable agony; but this is not the Tower –

  high walls thick with shadow

  – Calil bel-Rioch’s yellow eyes; and vision:

  The Golden have lit fires upon which they cast bone and bread, in the secret places of the city; and speak over them words that should not be spoken; and go willing where – soon or late – the dawn of that ancient brilliance will take them. The thin tang of smoke and the charnel-house stench of the butchery in the lower city comes on the cool air to me now …

  ‘Hear the word of Santhendor’lin-sandru! Hear the word of the Golden Empire. In the heart and centre of this city, in Archonys of the Six Lakes, this is Night’s Festival!’

  The half-blood who is the Emperor’s Voice stands beside the Emperor’s throne. And his words are hidden now in a great roar of sound, a multitude of voices; for this is the city ‘s last festival, and this is the Empire’s last festival, and this is the last that earth will know of us and we of earth.

  ‘Hear the word of Santhendor’lin-sandru of the Golden! He has created in darkness a light that does not die. He has set in the flesh of this world a plague and a canker and a disease of all that is mortal. Now is the last ritual!’

  On the vast chiruzeth floor, we raise our voices. Our robes are coloured grey and ash and black; and I stand, moving with my brethren of the Golden – they walk on high-arched feet, whitefire manes electric in the dark air. Our faces are this night hidden behind fantastic masks, painted blue and gold and silver; masks and robes reflecting in the mirror-black chiruzeth floor.

  Now music sounds: the only music we will have, and that is our voices, raised in high paean: now one voice and now another, joining, changing, harsh, atonal – the echoes ring back from cyclopean galleries. We sing together, who are the Golden of Archonys.

  Here on this timeless night, I have no name. I move alone.

  And night comes.

  Our hands lift, to scatter handfuls of light-dust upon the night air. Dust that swirls and drifts and glows the colour of frozen lightning. Arms sweep up, long-fingered hands open: light is cast upon the air, reflects in golden eyes, on sharp high cheekbones, drifts to catch in tangling manes …

  One leads us, in a robe that is black and silver, and he cradles in the crook of one slender arm a globe and ragged staff. He comes to where we are, taking in his cold hand another’s hand, leading us out to dance – no choice now but to join the dance – and he takes another’s hand, and the chain begins to form. Led away, each of us: Golden and slave, great lords of the Witchbreed made equal now with the beast-born race; all equal in the Dance that ends all pride, levels all ambition –

  I hear our voices soar up frail into the dark. Chiruzeth is cold under my feet: time breathes from its substance, darkening the air with the chill of aeons. A slender hand reaches out: I take it and move to the ritual measure.

  ‘– Stop!’

  Beyond the pillars I see out into the night, into the city. The walls go up into an infinite dark, that shrouds cornice and pinnacle and balcony and terrace. And in avenues like canyons between palaces and mausoleums, they are holding masquerade and festival –

  ‘Cease!’

  Dancers halt: a frieze of shock, Santhendor’lin-sandru on his high throne looks down and sees a slight figure, one of the slave race. It is one of our failures, a child that has remained child although adult: the beast race call it ashirenin. There are a number of them every year, their lives are short.

  Ke raises kir head, gazing with membraned eyes at the Emperor Santhendor’lin-sandru on his throne. Kir skin is a rich, burnt-earth brown, and kir mane is gold, flowing down the spine, braided round kir sharp face.

  ‘O did I not say –’

  Kir rich, sexless voice; halfway between speech and song.

  ‘– say, your time would come to you, as it came to the Eldest Empire before you –’

  Slowly, we gather round. Ke is barefoot on the black chiruzeth floor, and ke stands and gazes, ignoring watchers; kir eyes only on Santhendor’lin-sandru.

  ‘– that your time would come, and you would pass away from the earth!’

  Ke laughs. There are small flowers braided in kir mane, and ke puts that mane back from kir lined face, with hands calloused by long years of labour. Somewhere far up in the galleries a flute is being played, up in the tenebrous arches.

  Santhendor’lin-sandru stands. His white metalmesh robe trails after him, its collar frames his hawk-face: that face that is all angles; cruel mouth and sun-gold eyes. Behind him are swathes of crepuscular light.

  Wearily, he says, ‘Take that and kill it.’

  ‘No, you who were called Emperor!’

  And he says, ‘Why not? You are Ours, We created you, bred you up from the night-hunter beasts of the fens to be Our servants –’

  ‘As you were bred by others.’ Ke smiles, head high, alone. ‘Emperor of the Golden, we were all created, and what is that to you or me?’

&nbs
p; There are knives in the hands of us who crowd close to kir, but ke ignores them. Seems small and dirty beside the pale grandeur of Santhendor’lin-sandru, that white and gold.

  And in softest voice Santhendor’lin-sandru asks, ‘What comfort have you for Us, who now pass from this earth?’

  The ashirenin says, ‘None.’

  Silence in these halls, so deep that one feels the pressure of it: a sea-bed silence.

  The ashirenin looks at him with clear eyes.

  ‘I have no comfort for you, Last Emperor. You have cut yourself off from all comfort. What consolation there is, is ours. Is that of the beast-made, the slave races, the followers in dark cities of a light that does not die – of a light that returns dawn by dawn, and fails sunset by sunset, only to return again.

  ‘We have the comfort of Her face, that brings life from the earth, and quickens death to life again. We have the comfort of that turn and return of the solid world; for we shall come again and walk upon the earth, for we have our knowledge of Her – we meet, and part, and meet again, and do not forget.’

  And, sardonic and amused, the Emperor says, ‘You have Our permission to believe that. When We made you, We bred that memory into your bone, into the motes of your flesh, so that you recall your mother’s lives, and your mother’s mother’s; but do not ever take it for more than that. We allow you your delusion, little animal, but We mock that belief, for We know whence it came.’

  Black chiruzeth reflects them, white and gold shadows in the depths of night; they are dwarfed by the pillars, and by the catafalque-throne, but all our eyes are on them, those two bright figures.

  The ashirenin stands, a scatter of light-dust about kir feet, sphere-lights above kir in the tenebrous air:

  ‘This will be remembered, and forgotten, and remembered again, in the ages that are to come – hear me, Santhendor’lin-sandru! We may come to joy by way of an evil act. We may come to truth by way of a lie. Could She not use you, as you have used us? If you made us as we are, still, She made all as it is.

  ‘O hear me, you in the city, you in the darkness! Hear me!’

 

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