The Gods Return

by David Drake

  Tenoctris straightened. She’d placed only five pebbles, one between each pair of trees to mark the inner angles of a pentacle. The points were the trees themselves. “It’s the Grove of Biltis,” she said.

  “Who’s Biltis?” Garric said. He was fighting his instinct to lay his hand on the pommel of his sword. He knew—not because Tenoctris had told him, but because of the feeling of quiet sadness he felt in this grove—that it wasn’t a place for weapons. His disquiet—and King Carus’ universal response to anything unusual—kept drawing him to the blade, though.

  “A very long time ago . . . ,” Tenoctris said, taking items out of her satchel. Besides a codex and two scrolls, she began to unwrap what turned out to be the silver statuette of a wasp-slim woman. “Biltis was a God. Biltis was the God, in fact. Later she was revered as an oracle whose answers were given in the ripples of her sacred fountain. By the time this grove was planted—and that was before the dawn of the Old Kingdom—Biltis was a spirit of the night who eased childbirth. The cypress as a tree of the waters was thought to be a proper attribute for such a spirit.”

  Tenoctris let her fingertips drift over the curve of the figurine’s molded hair. She met Garric’s eyes again and smiled sadly. “It’s a place of power,” she said. “And it suited my sense of whimsy, if you will, to use a site created by ordinary women who had ordinary female concerns. Since both those things are utterly divorced from my own life.”

  Garric cleared his throat. “I had a pretty ordinary life myself before you arrived in Barca’s Hamlet, Tenoctris,” he said. “If you hadn’t changed that, I guess I’d be dead by now. Along with all the other pretty ordinary people in the world. I’m glad you came.”

  Tenoctris chuckled. “I might as well complain that I was born a wizard instead of being a mighty warrior, I suppose,” she said. “No doubt I’d have been far happier then.”

  “Maybe until she drowned,” Carus said. “Because she didn’t have a clever wizard and the other fellow did. No, I’m getting used to things being the way they are now.”

  Tenoctris looked at the books she’d taken out, then returned them unopened to her satchel. “They were crutches,” she said apologetically. She seemed to be speaking to the figurine, not to Garric. “I don’t need crutches anymore.”

  Without further preamble she chanted, “Basuma bassa . . . ”

  The statuette bobbed in her right hand, a dip to each syllable. A wisp of violet flame shimmered from the center of the hinted pentacle, as pale as moonlight. Garric thought the first flickers were reflections thrown from the silver, but it mounted as quickly as real fire in dried vines. It was silent and gave off no heat.

  “Ashara phouma naxarama . . . ,” Tenoctris said.

  “Can the troops see the light or only us?” said Carus. His expression was as bleak as a granite headland, concealing the discomfort he felt even as a ghost to be a part of wizardry.

  Garric shrugged. The tempo of the guards’ murmurs didn’t change, nor did the sprightly galliard a musician among them picked out on a three-string lyre. If they’d noticed the flame, there’d have been silence or perhaps shouting.

  Tenoctris was facing Garric across the fire. Her lips continued to move but he no longer heard the words of power.

  The grove vanished. Instead of a fire, Garric and Tenoctris stood a pool of violet light. The statuette in her hand rose and fell to the rhythm of the unheard syllables.

  The charged atmosphere shattered into planes. Garric felt a rush of vertigo: there was no up or down, but there were infinite numbers of universes from which he and Tenoctris stood apart.

  A speck in one of the planes swelled. Everything shifted again. A blur of darker violet coalesced into a boat—a perfectly ordinary vessel, different from the dories fishermen had used in Barca’s Hamlet but of similar size and utility. It had one mast, a tall triangular sail, and a single boatman in the stern.

  The boatman brought the tiller sharply over and at the same time loosed a halyard, dropping the sail as the bluff bow grazed to rest on the shore. The beach beneath Garric’s boots was sand, not the black volcanic shingle of Barca’s Hamlet and certainly not the expanse of roots, leaves and sedges of the grove they’d been standing in.

  The boatman stepped out, gripping the sides of his vessel to keep it from drifting away when his weight no longer held it onto the bottom. He was a slight man with thinning hair and ink-stained fingers; though he was obviously strong enough, he seemed incongruous in this job. He reminded Garric of his own father rather than the fishermen who drank in the inn of an evening.

  Tenoctris curtsied. “Thank you for coming so promptly,” she said.

  The boatman smiled faintly. “You have the right to command me, Your Ladyship,” he said in a quiet, cultured voice. “Where is it you wish me to take you?”

  “To the Gate of Ivory,” she said. “Can you do this?”

  “I can take you to the edge of the lake,” said the boatman. “But no farther. Is that sufficient?”

  Tenoctris sighed and lifted her chin in assent. “I feared as much,” she said. “But yes, if that’s the reality, it has to be sufficient. We’ll find our own way across, then. Are we free to board?”

  “Yes, Your Ladyship,” said the boatman, offering the wizard a hand over the gunwale. She seated herself primly on a forward thwart.

  “Ah,” said Garric. “Sir, would you like help shoving off? I’ve done that, well, often enough.”

  “That’s won’t be necessary, Your Highness,” said the boatman. Neither Tenoctris nor Garric himself had told the man who his passengers were, but he clearly knew. “Though if you’ll sit on the thwart just ahead of me, the boat will ride better. Whatever you please, of course.”

  Garric stepped aboard, placing his foot on the keelson so as not to rock the vessel any more than necessary. The hull settled slightly into the sand. He sat, facing the stern and the tiller rather than the mast.

  The boatman strode forward, leaning into the vessel and bringing the bow around. Even on sand, that required great strength as well as skill.

  Garric felt the hull bob free. The boatman took two more strides and clambered in over the transom. Keeping the tiller between his left arm and his body, he raised the sail of linen, tarred to hold the wind better. It filled with the breeze and drove the vessel into the seeming twilight.

  Garric looked to port, then to starboard. The beach was vanishing into the horizon; he hadn’t seen anything above the strip of sand.

  The sea lifted with the slow, powerful motions of a brood sow shifting in her sty. The water was gray with a hint of green where foam bubbled in the vessel’s wake, but when Garric bent to look straight down over the side he thought he saw twinkles of the violet flame which Tenoctris had kindled.

  “I always liked the sea,” Carus said. “Of course, that didn’t keep it from killing me in the end.”

  He chuckled. “If it hadn’t been the sea,” he added, “it might well have been a woman. And I liked them too, lad.”

  The boatman eyed the sail, then let out the sheet he’d snubbed to a starboard stanchion. Garric couldn’t imagine how the fellow navigated; the sky was the featureless gray of a high overcast.

  “Sir?” he said. They faced one another, so closely that Garric could have touched the boatman’s knees just by stretching out his hand. “I’m Garric or-Reise. May I ask your name, please?”

  “ ‘The boatman’ will do,” the man said, smiling again. “I don’t have a name anymore, only a task.”

  Garric cleared his throat in embarrassment, though the fellow hadn’t been deliberately insulting. Mainly to break eye contact, he looked to starboard as they crested a swell.

  Midway to the horizon, an enormous back humped out of the water. It continued for over a minute to drive forward in a shimmer of droplets, like the paddles of a millwheel. Neither the head nor the tail broke the surface before the whole dripping mass sank into the depths again.

  “Sir?” Garric said. “What was that?”<
br />
  The boatman adjusted the sail again, this time taking it in slightly. “What you see,” he said, “isn’t the reality, Your Highness. It’s the shape your eyes—your mind, really—gives reality.”

  “Sir?” said Garric. “Are you what you seem to be?” The boatman laughed without reservation. Sobering, he said, “Nothing is what it seems, Your Highness. Much as you or I might regret the fact.”

  As the boatman spoke, he fitted a pair of looped ropes around the tiller to lock it centered. His hands freed, he worked the lid from the enameled tin box beside him and took from it a scroll made of split reeds. The fore-edge was vermilion, and the winding sticks had gilt knobs. Garric couldn’t have been more surprised if the fellow had pulled out a hissing viper.

  “Why!” he said. “That is, ah; you’re a reader, sir?”

  The boatman looked at him with an expression of disdain. “Yes, I’m a reader, Your Highness,” he said. “At the moment I’m reading Timarion, if the name means anything to you. Perhaps Her Ladyship can inform you of who Timarion was, since like her he was of the Old Kingdom.”

  Tenoctris had been staring over the bow when Garric last checked. She twisted to look around the mast to the men, caroling a laugh.

  “I assure you both,” she said, “that unless he happened to be wizard or write about wizardry, I wouldn’t know anything about this Timarion. He could be the greatest poet of my day, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me.”

  “I know who Timarion is, sir,” Garric said formally.

  “Though I’ve read him only as excerpted by Poleinis.”

  He cleared his throat and added, “Even in Lady Tenoctris’ day, there can’t have been many copies of Timarion’s work. It was written nearly a thousand years before.”

  Garric knew he shouldn’t have been so surprised that the fellow owned a book of such high quality. It was nothing you’d expect of an ordinary boatman, but there was nothing ordinary about this vessel. Still—neither was Garric an illiterate peasant who’d stumbled into kingship.

  The boatman laughed again. “I was raised to believe that the sort of work I’m doing now was beneath a gentleman, Your Highness,” he said in mild apology. “There are obviously compensations, but I am a menial when those who have authority require the services of this vessel. I’m afraid I sometimes allow myself to resent the assumptions that arise from my duties, however.”

  “I apologize, sir,” Garric said. “You had the right of it.”

  After a pause he went on, “Poleinis judges Timarion harshly, as I recall?”

  “Yes,” said the boatman with a wry smile. “He would, wouldn’t he? Since otherwise someone might notice that almost all his geographical information about the eastern portion of the Isles and the lands to the northeast of the archipelago was drawn directly from Timarion. What I’ve been doing for the . . .”

  His voice trailed off; his expression became briefly melancholy, then returned to its normal quiet resignation. “Time isn’t important anymore, is it?” he said. He faced Garric, but he was apparently speaking to himself. “The problem is—”

  Now his gaze did meet Garric’s.

  “—that when I think that way, I’m apt to think that nothing is important anymore, not even the knowledge which I accepted these duties to gain. That leads into troubled waters, Your Highness. Even for a philosopher like myself.”

  “Sir,” said Garric, “I know some philosophers deny there’s any difference between good and evil, but I don’t agree with them. I don’t think anyone who really lives in the world could. By helping Lady Tenoctris, you’re helping good against evil. Which is purpose enough for me.”

  The boatman smiled. “I was never a man of action,” he said, “but I’ll bathe in your purity of purpose for the time being. Thank you.”

  He handed Garric the scroll. “What I’m doing now,” he said, “is annotating obscure portions of Timarion. For example, he speaks of permanent settlements far to the north, where fishermen not only winter over and salt their catches but also plant barley and onions.”

  Garric adjusted the winding sticks to open the full width of a page. The writing was in an oddly narrow form of the Old Script, making it hard for a moment to determine which were loops and which were vertical strokes.

  “These capes are far to the north of the islands of the Ostimioi,” he read aloud, “but nevertheless they have been settled by men from Wexisame who first followed the currents hither. The Wexisamians do not allow men of other tribes to fish in these waters, though they meet them on rocky islets midway and trade there.”

  Garric looked up. “Surely that’s the Ice Capes?” he said, handing back the book with the reverence it deserved.

  “I have never visited the Ice Capes when the glaciers didn’t cover them down to the shore,” the boatman said. “If you’re right, Your Highness, then Timarion was using sources from a very long time before even his own age.”

  He chuckled. “Or of course Timarion may have made the settlements up, as Poleinis predictably claims,” he said. “With no evidence whatever. I will continue to search for a solution.”

  “And then?” said Garric.

  “There are other cruxes, Your Highness,” the boatman said. He closed the scroll and placed it back in its protective container. “I’m sure a scholar like me will never exhaust the possibilities of increasing his knowledge.”

  He fitted the tin lid, then leaned out to look beyond the bow. Straightening, he unlashed the rudder.

  “We’re approaching your destination, Your Highness,” the boatman said. “I wish you and Her Ladyship good fortune in your activities there. I hope to return you to the waking world in good health.”

  He loosed the half-hitches holding the sheet but held the sail in place with his hand. Looking at Garric again, he said, “I don’t feel a lack of company, Prince Garric. Nonetheless your presence has not been a burden on me.”

  He threw the tiller to starboard and released several feet of sheet, though he didn’t let the yard swing into Tenoctris. “I have brought you to your destination, Your Ladyship,” he said; and as he spoke, the hull grounded on what this time appeared to be a muddy riverbank.

  CASHEL SPUN HIS quarterstaff before him at a leisurely pace as he walked toward the blob of light. The vivid blue sparks crackling from his ferrules would’ve drawn the eyes of almost anybody, but the two little demons stared at the red blur between them instead.

  They didn’t move, though the demons at even a short distance were clopping away as quick as their little hooves could move. They ran stiffly, bouncing like their legs didn’t have any knees.

  The goats, the only other things in this landscape, didn’t pay much attention. One blatted a nasal warning when another, smaller, goat moved toward the bush it was methodically stripping the small gray leaves from.

  A monster stood where the blotch of light had been, just as sudden as the flash when a mirror shifts to catch the sun. It was taller than Cashel, twice as broad as he was, and looked like a toad on two legs.

  Really like a toad. It had a broad mouth, goggling eyes, and a nobbly hide colored like bricks that had weathered to a pale, scabby red. Cashel kept walking toward it.

  The toad didn’t move for a moment. The demons standing on either side of it tried to stay frozen, but the one on the right started trembling. The toad turned its head slightly; it didn’t have a real neck. That demon shrieked, “The Lord!” and sprang away in a tremendous leap.

  The toad’s black tongue shot out like a javelin. The barbed tip spiked the demon two double paces away. The tongue didn’t look any thicker than a night crawler, but to drill into the demon’s bony chest like that it must be hard as steel.

  The demon’s arms shot up into the air and its legs splayed like they’d been stuck on by a child who wanted his dolly to stand up. It was as stiff as a dried starfish. The demon on the other side took off running—well, bouncing—as soon as it saw that the toad was busy with its friend.

  “That’s over
now,” Cashel said. It wasn’t exactly a challenge, but he thought there ought to be something beyond him just smashing the toad’s skull. That’s what he’d do to an animal, but he didn’t think this “Lord” was an animal even if it acted like one.

  The toad drew its tongue back, hauling the demon with it. The spitted body was starting to deflate: the slender legs drew together and the torso slumped slowly down over the abdomen; the arms hung slackly.

  Cashel stepped off on his right foot, bringing the staff around in a horizontal stroke aimed at the toad’s head. The toad vanished. The demon flopped on the ground, empty as a split bladder. The hole at the base of the torso where the tongue had gone in oozed what looked like thin red jelly.

  Cashel stepped forward to recover from the blow. His foot brushed the demon’s corpse; it rustled. The skin had gone pale gray with a yellow underlayer.

  “Behind you!” Rasile shouted.

  He spun, leading with his right hand this time and punching the staff out like a battering ram. There was nothing when he started the blow save the wizard at a distance with Liane beside her, but the toad appeared a fraction of a second later—and vanished untouched by the driving iron butt cap as before. This time it gave a “Whuff!” of startled anger.

  “Your right!” said Rasile.

  Cashel turned, pivoting on the ball of his right foot. He swept the staff around with his left hand leading, stepping into the blow. The toad was not/was/was not standing before him, goggle eyes sparking with hate. Iron-shod hickory swished through where its head had been.

  “Your right!”

  That was awkward, but you couldn’t expect the other guy in a fight to do the things that made it easy for you. Cashel punched the staff again, not a clean blow but he’d learned by now that the toad wouldn’t be sticking around long enough to take advantage of him being off-balance. The creature was dodging the quarterstaff, but he didn’t have time to think about it. As soon as his eyes caught movement, he vanished.

  Like this time. The toad’s size had been, well, a consideration—Cashel didn’t worry exactly in a fight—at the start, but it wasn’t willing to use its bulk and likely strength. Its blotched mass swelled out of nothing and then disappeared in a flicker, making it seem more like a cloud than an enemy. That was a dangerous way to think, so Cashel made sure he carried through on every stroke.