Cygnet

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Corleu.”

  Tiel stood beside the tumble of lilies. He stared at her; she looked like something the morning had just fashioned out of shadow and light and the mysterious, silvery green leaves. “Corleu,” she said again, softly, when he didn’t speak. “They’re all angry with you. Jagger says you’ve gone moon mad.”

  “There’s no moon,” he said. But there was, he realized; she had brought it with her: moon and stars, the memory of the green-scented summer nights.

  “Everyone is looking for you. Jagger says you should go back to Withy Hold, the Delta mists are driving you loony.”

  He shook his head. “This road goes one way only, and where, none of us knows yet.” He barely heard himself; he wanted only to sit and look at her, in the bewitched morning, while the world turned circles around them.

  “Delta,” she reminded him, but there was the shadow of a question in her voice.

  “No.”

  She paused, perplexed. Their eyes held in the silence. She swallowed. “Corleu,” she said, and, surprised, he felt as if no one had ever spoken his true name before. “What—what’s to be done, then? If this is not true Delta, then where do we find it?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t just go on blind; there must be something to point, someone to say why all this, why this place that never changes, why…” But under her gaze he was forgetting why he cared, why they should not circle forever in that changeless, sultry, scented air. Her body had pulled back from him a little, disturbed at his words. But her eyes clung. Within them he watched doors open, one after another, revealing things he had never seen in her before. Her voice sank, barely more than a whisper.

  “Maybe if you—if you come back with me and try to explain—Maybe, Corleu, maybe if—” She faltered into silence. They stared at one another, lost, he felt, in a dream within a dream.

  He wanted to put his cheek against her long eyelashes to feel them brush his skin. He wanted to gather all her long, heavy hair into his hands until they overflowed with darkness. He wanted to circle her bare ankles with his fingers, her bare neck with his hands. He wanted to fall into her eyes with all the opening chambers in them, and keep falling and keep falling… He whispered, “Tiel.” And then she fell toward him, seemingly from a long distance, and as she fell, he felt himself yearn toward her as if a wind had pushed him.

  The block of night across the small pool finally caught his eye. It had been dragging at him for some time: a square of black between his hand and her breast, a flick of dark over her closed eyelids, hidden within the braid his busy fingers had unwoven. He raised his head, one of her bodice laces between his teeth, blinking at strands of her hair that clung to his eyelashes. There it was, fallen out of nowhere: the tiny house. Four black walls, the gold roof, the lintel of gold. Standing without sound or movement in a riffle of mist.

  He was still, so still that Tiel, fingers tangled in his hair, finally opened her eyes. She turned her head. Her lips moved silently, as if they were remembering a song. Then she sat up in horror, tugging at her bodice as if the lintel were an eye. “What is it?” she breathed.

  Four stars its walls, one star its roof, one star its lintel, and the blue star its latch, so he had heard the lord’s daughter describe it, in formal language, as she lay beside him, her ringed hand pointing out stars in a warm night tumbling with wind. The Hold Sign of Hunter Hold: seven stars that trapped the golden warrior’s face of the sun.

  The little dark house that falls from the sky…

  He shuddered, feeling the cold tighten his skin, the bone-bare chill of recognition.

  “Corleu!”

  He dropped his face, kissed her numbly. “My mother saw it. Something falling. And she saw our path in her petals circling, circling…”

  “But it wasn’t here when we came!”

  “It was always here. It’s the dream we’re in.” Still holding her tightly, he eased to her side, his eyes intent on the house. He breathed, “And there’s the door.”

  “What door?”

  “The door out of the dream.”

  She stared at him. “How do you know? How can you say that’s the way out, just looking at it?”

  “It’s a door. It’s the only door we’ve come across anywhere for weeks. You come in a door, you go out.”

  “No.” She pushed against him suddenly, her face in his neck, hands gripping his shirt. “No. Wayfolk don’t cross under doorways.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “No! I’m not listening!”

  He kissed her hair, her jaw, found her lips again. “Listen,” he whispered, and she stopped him speaking, plundering his words until he fell back, inarticulate. A stone, intruding between soft ground and his head, made him remember how to talk. “Listen to me,” he said, blinking, hoisting to his elbow. “Listen. We’re all spellbound in this dream country. Nowhere is where we’re going. There’s a door out. It’s here, to be opened now—now, or we may be left here on our own in a world where nothing lives as easily as in one where nothing dies.”

  “Find Venn’s mam, she knows things—”

  “No. What if it goes? What if it’s our only way and it disappears? My da was right. Not even the Cygnet can see through this mist. The only one can see in it and around it and beyond it is trapped in that little ancient house…”

  “What are you saying? Whose house is it? Who is trapped?”

  “And he trapped us…”

  “Who?”

  He had made the first movements away from her without realizing it: pulling up, beginning to rise. She grasped at him in horror, and he felt the blood lurch out of his face, at where his next steps would take him.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, pulling her to her feet as he rose.

  “No! Corleu, no!”

  “I will.” He pulled her against him, hard, and even then he felt the cold slide shadowlike between them. “Wait for me.”

  “How can you leave me?” she cried, as he loosed her, and, stepping away, he felt his whole body pull toward her. He caught his breath, dazed, her face and the house and all the colors of that enchanted world blurring together in his eyes.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I love you, I love you.”

  “Corleu!”

  “I’ll bring you back the stars…”

  He was running, half-blind, along the edge of the pool, when he heard her scream at him again.

  “Corleu! It’s the house! It’s the black house with the roof of gold that falls from the sky! Don’t go into it! Don’t! It’s the house you’ll never leave!”

  He ran faster. In another country, he heard oars in an oarlock, water stroked and lifted, words. He left all his thoughts behind, ran under the gold lintel, into the dark.

  He stood with his eyes shut, waiting.

  Three

  THERE was a smell of fish cooking.

  Startled, he opened his eyes. He was instantly sorry. Inside, the small house stretched endlessly; the dark around him shimmered with vague colors, forms that he almost recognized until he stared straight at them, and then they dissolved, washed away by some invisible, lightless tide. He made the mistake of looking down.

  All the stars in the night sky hung beneath his feet, as if he had stepped through the Ring to stand outside of time. He closed his eyes again, felt his whole body cry out, though his voice was frozen and made no sound. He began to fall back into the black, shining waters of time. Stars flowed past him like the bubbles of his final breath.

  He smelled grass. He opened his eyes, lifted his head groggily. Sunlight he had not seen in weeks struck his face, Through the misty gold he saw Tiel again. He stretched his hand to her, tears of relief filling his eyes that he had fallen through all the worlds there were to find himself with her again.

  Darkness fell between them before he could touch her. The filigreed dome of night rose over him, with its vast humans and prowling animals. The Dark House hung above the Cygnet’s outstretched wing: the four stars marking its
walls, one star its peaked roof, one star its lintel, the seventh the door latch that Corleu had opened. Within the dark house…

  Within the dark house…

  Within the dark house he opened his eyes and saw the shrunken, dusty floorboards. Beyond the door he had flung open, perfect lilies tumbled from the tree-bough, down toward the pool.

  There was the smell of fish cooking.

  Within the Dark House he opened his eyes and saw beyond the open door the black, black night and the huge, northernmost star of the Cygnet’s outstretched wing.

  Someone was singing. It was a smallfolk rhyme, about a dark house falling, falling out of the sky, and how you must never enter it, for having entered, you will never leave… He lay listening, his skin prickling with horror, because the door was open, he could have touched the dusty sill with his hand, but he could not move; he had leaped beyond the world into a child’s song, into the story behind the song.

  There was the smell of fish cooking.

  He opened his eyes. He no longer saw the black walls, but he knew the Dark House rose all around him, beyond the mists, its four walls the night, its shining lintel the star that was the world’s lintel.

  There was the smell of fish cooking.

  He sat up so abruptly that stars flecked his vision; he blinked fire into shape, water, a face.

  A shaggy-haired man cooked over a fire beside the pool; from his battered pan came the smell of fish. Corleu’s eyes flickered across the pool. The lilies cascaded endlessly; the petals he had shredded still circled slowly in the water. He could not see Tiel. He turned quickly, looking for the house, in a desperate hope that he had only leaped into a dream and knocked his head against truth so hard he saw stars… A tinker’s wagon stood where the house had been. The black horse that drew it was stone-still in harness, not even blinking; its hooves and mane were shaggy as the tinker’s hair. Corleu could not take his eyes off the wagon. It was a tiny, rolling house, shadow-dark, with a peaked yellow roof and a yellow lintel; black stairs ran up into the open door. Painted in weathered yellow on the door was an ancient Hold Sign: the Gold King, with his furious, sun-round face and fiery petals of hair, imprisoned by the seven stars that formed the Dark House.

  Corleu dragged his eyes from it finally to the face beside the fire.

  It was a lean, swarthy face, with astonishing eyes of such light hazel they looked yellow. They smiled a little at Corleu; for a moment the smile was unfathomable. Then, in a shift of light, it was simply friendly. The tinker stirred the fish in the pan, cocked a dark brow at Corleu.

  “Fish?” He ticked his fork against the side of the pan as Corleu stared at him. “Have a bite. Fish improves the mind. They say.”

  “Fish.” His voice barely sounded.

  “They say. Though,” he added, “those swamp fish are ghostly things. Sweet, mind you, but pallid, as if they’ve been down in that pool for several hundred years. They might do for the brain, but they do nothing to improve the eye.”

  Corleu said nothing. He felt as ancient and pallid as the fish in the pool, something washed out of time’s backwaters, without much brain to speak of, for he had been caught, it seemed, on a tinker’s hook. Or had he? He cast a glance at the tiny, wheeled house; the Gold King glared fiercely at him, dusty and peeling. He swallowed drily. The tinker was filling his patched plate. His clothes were patched as well, with motley at neck and knee and elbow. He wore gold in one ear; a thin gold chain around his neck disappeared into his shirt. Words tossed crazily in Corleu’s head. Tinker or King? King or tinker? He said finally, since the tinker had handed him a fish to deal with:

  “Mist might do that to them.”

  “Mist?”

  “Make them pale. For lack of sun. There is no sun under these mists. Except that on your wagon.”

  The tinker’s mouth went up a fraction. “Likely you’ve hit upon the problem.”

  “Could cut these mists with a knife.”

  “To be sure. But,” he added, raising the knife he cooked and ate with, “knife is not what’s needed here.”

  “No?”

  “No. Besides, you haven’t got one. I noticed, as you slept. Not a knife or horse nor pot to your name.”

  “Not here. Wherever here is.”

  “A damp, muggy, empty place it is. Pretty, though. Smells nice.”

  “It wasn’t empty—” His hands had closed; he kept his voice calm with an effort. “It wasn’t empty. It had all my Wayfolk company in it.”

  “Ah. Wayfolk, are you? You wandered off the road a bit.”

  “Far off. So far off I don’t know anymore where I am.”

  “You’re between earth and sky like the rest of us, walking from morning until the fall of night like all folk.” He worked a fishbone out of his mouth. “Going from here to there, in one door, out the other, one place to—”

  “Door.” His voice shook as it seized the word. “In one door. What other door?”

  The tinker crooked a brow. “It’s a saying. An expression, so to speak. Are you sure you won’t have a—”

  “No. In one door, out the other, you said. A way in, a way out. That’s what you said.”

  The yellow eyes, catching light, seemed to smile again. “You’re a quick one, taking words up as fast as they fall. But, glancing around, I don’t much see there’s an in or an out here, unless maybe to the world itself.”

  “There’s one,” Corleu said. He was as tense as if he were poised to run for his life: A flower hitting the pool in the silence that followed his words would have sprung him piecemeal all over the ground.

  The tinker glanced at the door, surprised. “So there is. But that’s only my wagon with the one door in and out.”

  “It’s a door. It’s here.”

  “You’re welcome to it. I’ll be here waiting,” he added, as Corleu got to his feet, “when you come back out.”

  Corleu paused. The dark house stood, weathered and tantalizing, a dream within a dream. He had yet to enter it, he had already entered it. It rose all around him, invisibly. Beyond it, there was Tiel, inside…another dark house, with perhaps inside it another dark house…

  And another… He was shivering in the warm air, as if the icy stare of the Cygnet’s eye had rimed his bones as he fell past. He slid his hands over his face, murmuring, uncertain that Tiel would be anywhere in any of those houses, no matter how many he entered. He dropped his hands. The door was still there, beyond the tinker, who was still picking at his fish. He walked toward it. The tinker smiled; creases ran down his brown, stubbled cheeks, imprisoning his smile.

  “Where are you going, Master Corleu?”

  He felt his heart pound at the sound of his name. He did not dare look back. “To undo what I just did.”

  “Ah. Doing and undoing.” Something in the tinker’s voice caught Corleu mid-step, as if he had reached out long, clever fingers and gripped him. “You can’t do and undo through the same door.” Corleu turned slowly, the cold sweat gathering at his hairline. “You know that. Under that hair.”

  Corleu was silent, staring at the tinker behind the flames, with the gold in his ear and the flecks of gold in his eyes. Smoke billowed at Corleu; he blinked away tears, trying to see clearly through the harsh mist. He felt words push out of him, the last thing he wanted to say, the only thing he had left to say.

  “That house,” he whispered.

  “My wagon?”

  “Your dark house with the yellow lintel and the yellow roof.”

  “It’s my house.”

  “It’s the house of the Gold King.”

  “It’s my house.”

  His heart beat raggedly; the colors of leaf and lily were suddenly too vivid. “Then you are the Gold King.”

  The tinker’s smile did not change. He spat out a fishbone and said, “The dark house is a child’s song. One of those songs Wayfolk brats are endlessly singing. If I were King would I live in such a tiny, dark, windowless house?”

  “Not if you could find a door out.�
�

  “The Gold King is a moldy old shepherd’s tale, one of those silly stories that get passed around the world like air, only if they were dreams and smoke they wouldn’t be keeping such as the Gold King alive, would they, listening to his spoken name? Yes or no, Master Corleu?”

  “Yes.” Sweat, mingling with tears from the smoke, ran down his face. “No.”

  “If I were the Gold King, if I just happened to be him, eating fish in your company, how would I free myself?” He chewed a bite, regarding Corleu, knife pointed at him to invite answer. “How would I, do you think?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know—”

  “Think.”

  He licked dry lips. “You would likely find a door.”

  “I have a door.”

  “Then you would—you would—” He closed his eyes, finished in the dark. “You would likely find a moonbrained fool muckerheaded enough to enter your house, and get him to do what you can’t.”

  “Ah. A muckerheaded fool who thinks, is it? Good, Corleu. And think this over: What, likely, would I ask you to do?”

  If he closed his eyes tightly enough, to shut out every splinter of light, he could see Tiel again, under a tumble of green leaves and lilies, her hair unbraided, her bodice loosened over her soft, nut-brown breasts. If he closed his eyes still tighter, he could see her eyes smiling, he could see his smiling reflection in her eyes. If he shut out all light, maybe he could slip through the dark, back into memory. There he could linger forever as he had been, in some distant, former life, too stupid to do. There in that private green memory, he could bury himself instead of asking the question that was forcing itself like breath out of his mouth.

  He opened his eyes; they were burning; his throat burned. “I don’t know. What would you ask me to do?”

  The tinker, finished with his fish, gazed at his reflection in the round tin plate. “Most likely just a small thing. Very small. Maybe I would… Yes. Maybe I would ask you to find something for me.”