Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Aunt Morrig,” Perdita exclaimed as she recognized the darkly clad figure beside the pool, her aged face a pale blur in the dimness.

  “My fault,” Morrig said. “I didn’t light the candle. I come in here sometimes to remember my dead. They become more numerous when you’re as old as I am. And they seem to have much more to say.”

  The heart of the sanctum held only one broad bowl of a pool, lined with river stones. Water flowed silently out of a blue-green marble globe in the center of the pool. Above the water, the ancient face of the goddess, carved in moon-white marble, gazed from the domed ceiling down at its own reflection. The pool was ringed with candles. Marble benches alternating the colors of the goddess were scattered around the water. It was a place for stillness and solitude, built for those who mourned.

  It was also, when the door was closed and the candle lit, the most private place in the palace.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Lady Seabrook,” Holly said tightly. “We came here to talk.”

  “Then you might as well join us,” Morrig said, waving a hand at the shadows. “They won’t mind. They like company. And they’re incredibly discreet. They won’t say a word outside this room.”

  The mystes shook her head, unable to speak. Abruptly, she walked out of her shoes, pulled up her robe, and stepped into the water. She shifted candles, sat down on the edge of the pool, the flickering reflections of light around her ankles rippling across the gentle fall of water from the endlessly weeping globe. She held the book out to Perdita.

  “Will you read this, Princess? Where I have marked it. I’m too upset.”

  Wondering, Perdita opened the pages. The queen settled herself on a bench beside the mystes; the princess sat under a tall branch of candles and began to read.

  “‘The god Severen lay dying. His mighty rush from mountain to sea slowed. His shores became barren as waters ebbed. Fish died in great numbers, all down the long path he made to the sea. The great herds that drank from him fought and thinned and dwindled for the lack of him. No cloud hid the burning sun from dawn through night and again dawn. No rain fell. The god lay dying. Frogs and salamanders died; mosses grew dry and died; the great birds that fed on the creatures of the river died for the lack of them. Daily, the water grew shallow, grew inward, far from its shores; the river bottom grew hard and dry as stone. And the great mouth of the river dried as it opened to the sea; no water came down to give life to those that spawned in sweet and followed the salt to the sea.

  “‘In his weakness, in his dire distress, the river god took his human aspect and prayed for water as it left his veins.

  “‘She came then, in answer to his call. Though he had overwhelmed her, carried her to the sea over and over without thought or shame, she came to him. She raised his head up from the dead mosses and reeds and held her healing vessel to his lips. He drank. He drank.

  “‘His veins filled. His waters quickened. He drank. He opened his eyes and saw her face between his face and the sun, shading him like a cloud.

  “‘The sky remembered how to fashion cloud; cloud covered the sun everywhere across the land, and everywhere from dawn to night and again to dawn the hard, sweet rains began to fall.’”

  “You see?” Mystes Halliwell said in bitter triumph to the princess and the queen. “Calluna and her cup. Her power. Not Severen’s. She saved his life.”

  “Surely Lord Skelton knows the tale,” the queen said.

  “He does, my lady. He says that since the only written version of that tale is less than four centuries old, and he has never seen an older reference to the tale, it is too recent to be of interest.”

  “Is that where you got the book? From Sylvester?” Morrig asked.

  “No, of course not. He wouldn’t lend me the time of day. The book belongs to us. I found it in the sanctum library. I’ve been searching the archives for anything that pertains to this tale. Anything that Lord Skelton didn’t find first, that is. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a few things hidden on his shelves that could point toward the truth of the matter.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” the queen said quickly. “He is too much a scholar.”

  “And another thing,” Holly said, with great indignation. “Dame Cecily Thorpe, who was one of my acolytes before she decided to train for knighthood, told me that some of the knights, who are speculating wildly over nothing but rumor at this point, are planning to search Calluna’s cave for the mysterious object of power. They can’t just go barging through the sacred shrine, wading down the water, and shining headlamps on everything. The idea is outrageous. First they bury the cave and forget it completely; now they want to excavate it.” She kicked at the water angrily, sent it splashing, dowsing candles in its wake. She blinked as the queen wiped her face. “I beg your pardon, Your Majesty. I’m frothing, and it’s all Sylvester Skelton’s fault.”

  Perdita got up to relight the candles, tipping flames to smoking wicks along the pool. “We have to find an earlier version of Calluna’s tale,” she said. “Lord Skelton may be obsessed by his version, but he’s not at all devious. If we could prove the cup belongs to Calluna, he could be persuaded out of his certainty.”

  “Or we could just find the cup,” the queen said.

  Perdita, lighting a final wick, found the queen’s eyes on her above the flame. She was looking, her daughter realized, for a reason.

  “We,” she echoed. “You mean me.”

  “Why not? Nothing in the stars says that only knights should go on this quest. People are used to seeing you in Calluna’s cave. Nobody would question your presence there. You could look for the artifact anytime you want. Tomorrow morning. Before the cave opens to the public.”

  Mystes Halliwell lifted her feet, splashed again with excitement. “Yes. That’s the perfect idea, Your Majesty.”

  “I’ve been trained to give tours of the cave,” Perdita reminded them. “I’ve seen all the images, and I know what the scholars say about them.”

  “Scholars,” Morrig said, stirring the water with her fingertips. “Always getting us into trouble, putting up walls, naming things. You must look beyond those walls, Perdita. Beyond the designated path. Trespass into the past.”

  Perdita sat down again. She contemplated the reflection of the goddess in the water, and the wild, wide-eyed face in the pool seemed to come alive, her expressions changing at every flare of candle fire, every riffle of water.

  “If the artifact is Calluna’s, it wouldn’t be metal,” she mused. “There would not be a jewel on it. A river stone, maybe, hollowed to hold water. A wooden bowl. A clay cup. She might have carried the water in a leaf.” She paused, thinking again, while the walls of the cave formed in her mind, images covering them, symbols, the silent language of tales telling and retelling themselves. “I’ve never looked at the images in the context of that story. That gesture of the goddess. What would she have used to carry water to a dying god?” She looked up, aware of but hardly seeing the watching faces of women, flickering with light and shadow, like the goddess’s reflection. “If anyone asks, I’ll say that I’m studying the cave as a form of worship. If I don’t find anything, I’ll try Sylvester’s library again.”

  “Be careful around Sylvester,” the mystes warned. “He reads minds.”

  “He won’t pay any attention,” the queen said dryly, “if it’s only about Calluna.”

  —

  Perdita drove to Calluna’s cave early the next morning. She brought a set of keys to the outer and inner doors, and a pair of bodyguards, who stationed themselves at the cave entrance, one watching the stairs, the other the steamy, murmuring pool. Nobody else was there at that hour. The constant darkness edging the frail lights around the pool made true time vanish; it might have been any hour of any lost century Perdita stepped into as she followed the water flowing away from the pool. She had turned on every light; most illumined the visitors’ path alon
g the narrow river and the images carved and painted on the walls. Those—handprints, trees, and flowers dedicated to the goddess, toads, dragonflies, deer, strange, huge-eyed faces—she knew well; they were in every souvenir guidebook.

  What she did not know so well lay in the dark beyond the path, beyond the reach of light.

  The bodyguards had given her an assortment of lights, tools, flares, even a weapon. She carried them to the little bridge across the river that marked the boundary of familiar tourist territory. She left everything on the bridge but the candles and matches she carried in her pockets. The oldest images had been made under the earliest form of light; they would speak, she guessed, more clearly in the flickering uncertainty of fire than in the glare of a flashlight.

  She carried several tapers together, enough to illumine the shallow water, to draw an image on the stone walls out of the dark, then let it melt back into black. Most repeated the patterns of the early ones in the sacred cave. But as she wandered farther from the pool, now and then something would surprise her: the goddess’s face, with its stark, powerful gaze, its wreath of hair, attached to a human body, or that same face with light, or water, or power streaming from its eyes. The Calluna itself quickened under that gaze; the water’s voice changed, became stronger, cleaner, as its waters gained depth on its journey to the sea.

  The paintings came to an end where all the books Perdita had seen on the subject ended: the goddess’s face on one side of the river’s wall, on the other a pair of hands, cupped, angled down, spilling drops of water shaped like tadpoles or tears. Beyond them, two massive wedges of stone leaned against one another across the river. The water pushed through the narrow opening between them, carving more deeply into its bed, its voice grown assured, imperative, echoing against the walls as it ran on, clamoring for the world and light.

  The dark beyond the huge stones, Perdita knew, was caused by the human hands that had shaped the tunnel above the Calluna River to support the busy street named for the goddess. In an earlier century, the river had unearthed itself, glittered with sunlight, expanded in the luxury of meadows and fields for a brief, innocent moment of freedom before it met the Severen and was swept into the embrace of the god.

  There, at that point of collision, a god dying of thirst, a mighty river drying up, might well have drunk gratefully and ceaselessly from the stream of water whose birthplace was buried underground, its source untouched by the light that had burned with such ruthless destruction across the whole of the land from the wyvern-riddled mountains to the sea.

  Here, where the princess stood, was the goddess’s face on one wall. There, on the opposite side, were her hands, water flowing out of them. In this form of the early tale, the sacred, powerful, life-carrying vessel took the simplest shape of all: the open hand.

  Perdita, gazing perplexedly at the goddess’s face, at her hands, wondered if they had ever truly taken any other shape.

  Then she thought: The story isn’t finished. Where is the god in distress?

  On impulse she stooped, held her bouquet of flames above the dark water rushing between the slabs of stone. She tried to see beneath the surface to the river stones and what they might reveal if, perhaps, they had once been part of the ceiling or the walls. They might have spoken, continued the story long before the monstrous machines of a later era had shaken them down into the water.

  A face formed in her light.

  Her own reflection, she thought at first, seeing only the suggestion of a human in the coiling, rippling flow. Slowly it took on color, dimension. Her lips parted. She sucked air, felt the quickening, terrifying touch of the goddess on the nape of her neck. She knew that face like she knew her own. She stretched her hand toward it, her mouth opening soundlessly; her fingertips touched the water, and the face, the reflection in the goddess’s eye, misted away.

  Daimon.

  11

  Pierce drove through a cleft in a dry, golden hill and found himself on a six-lane span across the astonishing breadth of Severluna Bay. The city sprawled at the end of the bridge, a tidal wave of civilization spilling so completely over land bordered on three sides by water that the land itself had vanished under it.

  Pierce’s hands grew damp, locked on the steering wheel. He was surrounded by more vehicles than he had seen in a lifetime; it took every nerve he possessed not to stop the Metro in the middle of the bridge so that he could get out and slink back into the hills. The Metro kept moving; the city grew. Streets appeared, going everywhere at once. Signs gave him choices, all unfamiliar. Since he would probably die, chewed up by the monsters snorting on all sides of him before he got safely off the bridge, choices seemed moot. He was slowed, at the end of the bridge where waves roiled and broke far under him, by traffic bottlenecking toward a tollbooth. The bill he proffered in trembling fingers was snatched away by the wind. The toll-taker eyed him implacably as he rummaged through his wallet. Finally, he did something right; a light turned green; the man waved him on, nodding, even smiling a little, while sounds of Severluna—horns, wind, engine growls, gulls, tide—poured through the open window like some kind of maniacal welcome.

  He drove. Signs queried him constantly. Me? they asked him. Do you want me? He was frozen again, unable to say yes or no, right or left; he could only stop when everyone stopped and move forward when everyone else did.

  He had no idea where to go.

  Finally, catching sight of a quiet street, he reeled onto it, scarcely seeing the great stone houses along it as he drove, just relieved to be able to slow a little. He had a city map somewhere in the car but not a clue anywhere why he should go one direction instead of another. He drove aimlessly a bit, peering at street signs, smelling an oddly pungent scent of leaves from a park running along one side of the street. A broad road, lined with trees and very quiet, veered unexpectedly into the park. Pierce followed it eagerly, wanting only to find a place to park the car in the sudden peace and sit until he stopped trembling. Then he would look for his map and pretend he knew what he was doing.

  He had followed the road’s long curves deeper into the park, looking for a place to pull over, when he passed a little hut with heraldic devices painted on all four sides of it. Someone without a face popped instantly into his rearview mirror. A line of metal teeth rose out of the tarmac, pointed, with lethal intent, at the Metro’s tires. He shouted wildly, shaking again, and braked hard; the car slewed to a stop inches from the teeth.

  A loud metallic voice said, “Step out of the vehicle.” He managed to find the latch, tried to get out; his seat belt pulled him back. He cursed, heard the eerie voice again, and finally fumbled himself loose. He pushed himself upright, wondering wearily what he had done wrong, what ruthless laws he had broken just trying to find a place to sit among the huge old trees.

  Two humanoids in black leather and full-facial visors that made them resemble giant, eyeless ants walked briskly to either side of the Metro. They each held something that lit up a strand of air between them and hummed. They passed the line of light fore and aft over the car, let it hover for a moment across the pack in the backseat. They reached the front bumper; the light vanished. Dark head consulted head, soundlessly to Pierce’s ears. Then one walked back toward the little hut, and the other raised his visor, revealing a young, tanned, expressionless face.

  “You have a knife in your baggage.”

  “I do?” Pierce said, and then remembered. “Oh. I do. The kitchen knife.”

  The guard murmured something into his chin, listened a moment. Behind him, the malevolent teeth slowly sank into the tarmac. The young man looked at Pierce again.

  “You need to continue on, take the next right, then the immediate left. You took the wrong entrance.”

  “Oh.”

  “After you go left, the entrance will be on your right.”

  “Ah—”

  The guard held up a hand, listened. “They’re expecting you.
”

  “Could I—like—just turn around?” Pierce pleaded.

  “No. This really is the shortest way from here. You can drive on now.”

  Wordless, Pierce slid into the driver’s seat, started the engine. “Right, then left, then right again,” the guard reminded him as he crawled over the hidden teeth. Pierce saw him watching, visor down again, from the middle of the road. He swallowed, his mouth dust dry, and gave up any thought of peace in that demented city.

  He followed directions carefully to avoid another yawning gape of vicious road teeth. An entrance of some sort into something loomed beyond another tiny guardhouse. As he took the second right turn, he saw the guard watching him, commenting to someone invisible about Pierce’s passing. The end of that brief drive was a parking lot filled with vehicles of every kind. Pierce pulled in among them, not knowing what else to do. He wondered what would happen if he just took his pack and snuck into the trees surrounding the parking lot. Then he saw the vast stone wall running endlessly behind the trees.

  There was a thump on the Metro roof; he started, expecting the insect-men to reappear. A girl in a black tunic and trousers, her hair bundled into a net, peered at him. She gave him a crooked, cheerful smile as he rolled down the window.

  “At least I’m not the only one who’s late. Walk in with me?” She added, as he stepped mutely out of the car, “Don’t forget your stuff.”

  “Ah,” he said tentatively. “I’m not sure— Is this the right—?”

  “The royal kitchens, back entrance. They needed so many extras for the king’s Assembly that you’ll probably meet everyone you know here. Come on.”

  Dumbfounded, he grabbed his pack and hurried after her.

  He caught up with her as she pulled open a door into what looked like an enormous cave filled with dimly moving figures. A cloud of steam smelling of bread, chocolate, onions, roasting meat blew around them and out.