“In the course of time the forces of the glycon gathered and made ready once more to assault the land, and Elidir and Eladu met them with the others on the strand. Their helmets were of bronze, and their shields also, and their swords and greaves and breastplates were of orichalc, the glowing bronze, and they were chained together with chains of precious metal, arm to arm and leg to leg. They shone gloriously upon the field of battle. Then, seeing scorn and challenge and defiance in their splendor and their chains, the fierce undersea folk bent all their malice upon felling them, and as Eladu was the worse off, his sword arm being chained to his brother’s shield brace, they focused their assault on him. In the long course of a bloody day, they succeeded in harrying him to his knees and then to the ground, and Elidir was staggering.
“Then Elidir felt the weight of his doomed brother dragging on him, his brother who was as good as dead, and he knew that chains were on him also to die in like wise. Chains were pulling him down to lie by his brother’s side. But he wanted to live.”
Ophid paused and merely glanced toward Arlen, who sat listening as if entranced.
“He cut the chains,” Arlen whispered, and Ophid nodded.
“He cut the chains with his sword. But Eladu saw him do it, and with the last of his strength he reached up and caught at the dangling ends with his hand and pulled his brother down, and the sea folk swarmed over them both.”
“Why?” Arlen breathed. There were tears in the word, and the ragged ends of dreams.
“Because the pattern tends always toward balance, and the wheel turns. Those who are born strangers to each other meet and cleave and become comrades or lovers; those who were born brothers must someday go their separate ways—or love turns to venom in them.”
“But they were heroes,” Arlen said.
Ophid pointed up at his great carved wheel, at the twenty-eight segments, the full moon and the dark. “Hero is all light,” he said. “Villain is all dark. The one strives to overtake the other, and death attends them. We who live, we are more in the balance of the pattern. We are fools and churls and lechers and misers and madams and sluts; I could name you twenty more. We are dames, clerics, merchants, farmers, soldiers, maids. Some few of us are oracles who sit aside and talk.” He grimaced, mocking himself. “We live. Are you a hero, Arlen?”
“No,” said Arlen promptly, though his voice was low.
“Long life to you, then. And may you find the large joys and the small in all the days of it.”
We lay down by the fire, but we did not sleep much that night, in spite of Ophid’s warm words. We had sensed the weight of doom in his story, and we knew that in the morning he would tell us more of it.
He did, after we had eaten. “I have been lying to you,” he admitted.
We stared at him, for of all things that was the last we would have thought of him, that he should mislead us.
“The signs have been plain,” he explained, “all along, not obscure. But I had to be quite sure.…”
We sat silent and gazed at him, waiting.
“It is also in the pattern, the ancient pattern,” Ophid said, “that the son of the winterking will wed his mother. And this is the pattern that seeks to conceive itself, the abomination against which the Gwyneda so carefully guard.”
He looked at us, but we would not speak, and reluctantly he went on.
“I have searched and searched for a name for your babe, the boy babe who is truly yours, Arlen and Rae. And I find none except the one you have already given him—that is to say, Lonn—and one other, which is: Arlen. And whichever of those two you give him, his doom remains the same: that he should love you in the way of a consort, Rae.”
FIFTEEN
I sat like so much wood; I could not speak, and I did not dare to think. It was Arlen who spoke at last, wetting dry lips. “What are we to do?” he whispered.
“Send the babe away,” said Ophid.
We looked at each other numbly, not willing to comprehend, and Ophid got up and walked back to some recess of his cave where the snakes lay. When he returned he was carrying a basket, and he laid it before us. It was a plain wicker basket, such as I had seen once before bumping against the shore of a certain crannog, and of a size and shape to accommodate a baby snugly. I looked at it with a chill, and in spite of myself I understood.
If the baby had been sleeping, the beloved little one, I think I could not have done it. But he was awake, Lonn was awake, peering at us with those unnatural violet eyes of his, and he saw the basket and yelled out loud. “You cannot!” he shouted. “Plotting to kill me, call it by no other name—”
That hated, husky voice. Arlen must have loathed it as I did. “What do you care?” he retorted, swiftly and savagely. “You are already dead.”
But Lonn spoke only to me. “Lady, if you do this thing you will bear my curse,” he cried, babbling in his haste to save himself. “Your breasts will sag forever full of milk, and they will pain you. Serpent dreams will harrow your sleep. Your face—”
I picked him up, leaving the blankets behind, and put him in the basket, and did not let my hands linger on him.
“Lines of sorrow will come on your face!” he shouted. “Your lovemaking will give you no joy—”
I picked up the basket, not touching the babe, and what more Lonn said I do not remember, for I shut my ears and my mind to it, though I know he shouted all the way down to the shore. I carried him to the water myself, and Arlen and Ophid came with me, and with my own hands I placed the basket in the Naga. It spun and eddied in the backwater by the island’s shore. I remember that spinning, the turning and turning of Lonn’s hard, hateful eyes in the baby’s furious face, but I remember no sound. I think Arlen said something, and he went into the water and pushed the basket out so that the current took it, went into the water up to his knees. Then Lonn was gone, was only a speck floating down the Naga, into the mist and gone forever.
We walked back to Ophid’s cave, and Arlen brought Bucca out of the hazel coppice and began to saddle him at once. We could not soon enough be gone from that place.
“Stay a minute,” Ophid offered. “Sit by the fire, dry yourself.”
Arlen wordlessly shook his head.
“Very well, if you must go.… Have you provision?”
“We have wherewithal,” Arlen muttered. I brought our blankets, a few other possessions, and he tied and loaded them on Bucca.
“Be watchful,” Ophid told us. “The lords will yet be riding homeward from the Sacred Isle.”
We had forgotten. We stopped our preparations and looked at Ophid for a moment. His face had gone bleak, and we reached out of one accord and touched his shoulders, as if to say, It is not your fault. Then we mounted Bucca and departed as quickly as we could, sending him springing into the Naga and swimming across in the freezing cold.
We did not speak to each other. Ophid’s warning concerning the lords gave us excuse enough to be silent. But in fact we met no one to fear. Arrow-straight and nearly as swift, we left the region of the Naga. We slept that night in an outlander’s warm cottage, with no taint about us but not much cheer either, and we shivered beneath down comforters, not touching each other, and told ourselves the night was chill.
The first of Lonn’s imprecations did not come to pass. My milk dried up within two days, and my breasts ceased to ache after three. On the fourth day a snowstorm whistled down from the north, a fierce winter storm as deadly as the one that had driven us to a cenotaph a year before. We took shelter with a homesteader this time, and I tried not to think of the baby out there, pelted by ice, somewhere on the Naga. He should have been dead before then even of the milder winter chill. I hoped he had not cried too much, my Spriggan. For my own part, I could not weep, could not grieve for the one I myself had cast away. I thought of him as floating, floating, forever floating, down the Long Lake and through the Wondermere and past the Isle of Promises and all the way down the Lake of the Lost City and out on to the great vastness of the sea, a speck, s
till floating. I myself felt as if I were floating, adrift in my world, lost, and I would not think of him in any other way, as aground in death, drowned, disintegrating, returning to earth; such thoughts hurt me. In my mind I kept him my pink-petal babe, forever rocked on the waves of the sea.
It took us a month and more to return home, in the snow, and in all that time we scarcely spoke to each other, Arlen and I, and the worst of it was, I did not care.
We reached our mountain haven on a gray day of deepest winter, and all stood so silent, so still, so cold, that we sat on Bucca staring, reluctant to dismount and begin again. But there was nowhere else to journey to. Finally I slipped down, and Arlen went off to the village to fetch our chickens and our cow, and I began in a drifting way to lay a fire on the hearth.
We went through the motions of our days. Arlen tended to his animals, his friends. I cooked food, swept dirt, sat idle the rest of the time. I could have gone down to the village for companionship; there was no taint on me any more, no death dog. But I did not. Arlen tried harder than I did to find a way back to the contentment we had known before. He took up his calling as a healer again, went to the village every day, smiled at the folk he met. Sometimes he touched me on the shoulder or caressed my hair. I seldom responded. One day, as I sat by an empty cradle, he knelt beside me and placed gentle hands on mine, which lay twisting in my lap.
“We—could have another,” he suggested, very softly, very diffidently. “Perhaps it might be a girl.…”
“And if it were not?” I snapped, as if the whole horror were somehow his fault. “What must I do with another boy? Drown it in the cistern?” So he got up and left me alone, as being alone was what I seemingly wanted.
What a quaint pattern life makes. When Lonn had been too much with us we had struggled, stolen moments to make love at times and in places safe from the spying of his angry eyes. And now that he was gone, now that we had all the world and time to spare, we scarcely looked at each other. We had not kissed since that last night beside Ophid’s fire. Nor did I see how we ever could again.
“It will get better,” Arlen said to me one evening during my long silence, helplessly. “Things will get better as time goes on. You must believe that, Rae.”
I did not believe it, not in any measurable way. But time did go on. Signs of early spring appeared, the purple buds swelling, the tree frogs creaking in the night. Some sort of stirring took place in me also, within my numb endurance, and I began to think again. The small added pain of thinking did not matter to me any more. Snow melted, and something hard and frozen began to melt in me and pool, though I could not yet weep.
“I have been blaming you,” I said quietly to Arlen one evening, in the midst of the silence, as he would sometimes speak to me. “And I have been blaming Ophid, and the goddess, and the world, and the Naga for being the way they are, anything to blame away my pain.”
He looked at me with a sunrise of hope in his face, though he tried hard to suppress it, and he set down the pegs he was carving and came over to me.
“But now I see it is no use blaming anyone but myself,” I told him. “What I did was wrong, deathly wrong, and all sense should have told me that.”
Sunrise faded. “We had no choice, Rae,” he said softly.
“I am not speaking of you. I am the mother, and I speak of me. I held a baby in my arms, and I cast it away. I was frightened, worn down by fear, but now I have suffered too much to be any longer afraid and I see that I was wrong. No mother can give up her child in such a way and be blameless. All nature is against it.”
“Rae, give it over, let it go, turn away! Have you not grieved enough?” He had grasped me by the arms in his fervor, nearly shaking me, but I sat impassively in his hands. “Do not blame yourself,” he begged. “It is just—something that happened. We have the authority of the oracle—”
“And I believed the oracle. And I still cannot think badly of Ophid; nor can I think badly, any longer, of you. But I have seen things in a new way, and I know now that what I did was wrong.” I stood up, and he stood beside me, and suddenly he was angry at me.
“Very well,” he flared. “You are a heartless, wicked woman. What are you going to do about it?” For he thought there was nothing to be done.
And I surprised him by smiling at him. I think it was an unnerving smile. “But I have not said that I was wicked,” I told him softly. “Only that what I did was wrong.” And I went to bed and lay in the dark, half triumphant, for I had a plan. I had not, indeed, given up my child. And as for what had gone wrong, I hoped somehow to set it right.
I grew more cheerful over the next several days, and talked readily with Arlen about commonplace things, and he noticed it. This was all part of my plan, to comfort and reassure him. What I had not expected was that I felt my love for him again blooming in my heart. I would have to leave soon, or I would not be able to bear it.
For leave I must, to find the babe. And, as I felt certain that Arlen would not knowingly let me go, I would have to slip away in secret. In some other plight, perhaps, with nothing wrong between us, he might have let me go off on my own—but I felt sure he would hold desperately to me now, for he would be too afraid of losing me forever, too afraid that I would not come back. He would try to keep me by him, or, failing that, he would come with me. And I felt beyond all reason that this was a journey I had to make on my own. Only, how to leave him hopeful, comforted …?
“Look, Arlen,” I cried rather crazily one day, “the swallows.”
The birds were coming back to their nests in the rocks. Back from the far reaches, as they did every spring.
“The swallows,” I told him earnestly, “they are like us, Arlen, their fidelity. They return. They always return.”
He peered at me strangely and merely nodded. Perhaps he thought I spoke of our returning to our home from the Naga. But I knew my eyes were wide, my color high, and I hoped he would remember afterward, and understand.
It was not difficult for me to make my way to one of our scattered hoards and take some gold for myself without being seen. Provision was more troublesome. I could not prepare anything of a quantity to see me through the wilderness without Arlen’s noting it and wanting to know why. Nor, for that matter, could I prepare much for Arlen, either, to sustain him for a few days while I was gone. In the end I made a meat pie for each of us and put them aside, and that was all. And I kissed Arlen that evening before we went to sleep, and my heart ached for him, because I knew what happiness that made him hope for, and in the morning when he awoke I would be gone.
I waited until he was well asleep, and then I slipped out of our bed and took just a spare blanket and a few viands and a change of clothing, that was all, in haste, and I went to saddle Bucca. There was no question of my not taking Bucca, for unless I did so Arlen would himself ride and overtake me. On Bucca I could leave him well behind before morning. Arlen would have to borrow a horse to do the spring plowing.… When Bucca was standing at the ready, I went softly back inside the cottage for a moment and took a charred stick and drew the outline of a swallow on the flat, dressed stone of the hearth. I made it distinct, dark enough so that I could see it in the moonlight from the window. I wanted to kiss Arlen again, but I was afraid that I would wake him. I put his dinner on the table, and so I left him and rode toward the south and west, over the lip of the mountain.
We had found a way to ride down the terraces by then, a hard way but not impossible, and Bucca knew it as well as I did. Still, I must have been desperate or crazy to try that trail by moonlight, and half a dozen times I believe we nearly broke our necks, Bucca and I. And he wanted so badly to go back to his warm stall—I had to force him onward, kicking him and lashing him with a stick, weeping all the while because I longed for home as fervidly as he did.
When light of dawn began to show, I found the going easier, and by the time Arlen might have been stirring in our bed, I was well down past where we had found our hoard of treasure. For what treasure was wort
h.
I rode hard all day, and I rode late, and I ate little. No one pursued me or disturbed me, for no one lived in these parts except logans and the beasts of the wilderness. And the next day and the days that followed I rode early and late and as swiftly as I was able. My food was soon gone, and it was mushrooms and wild asparagus again to eat. I did not care, for I was not very hungry, as I had not been for months. I wanted only to get through the Forever Forest to the wild moorlands where the eskers were, and to a certain esker, and a soddy. I was on my way to see Briony. Mandrake that he was, speaker with spirits, he might be able to tell me a way to find my baby.
SIXTEEN
The trees were fully in leaf when I reached the familiar soddy and stopped Bucca outside the door. I dismounted, but before I could knock, Briony opened it and came out to me.
“Rae,” he said in a low voice, staring. “But—you are thin, your face is drawn down by sorrow. What has happened?”
His eyes were still as black as beads of onyx, his face expressionless. I found his blankness oddly comforting. We went in and sat facing each other, and I told him everything, told him things I would not have been able to tell anyone who would have cried out in shock or wept in pity. He had lit the lamp before I was done, and when I was finished he wordlessly prepared us some supper while I tended to Bucca. There was no question but that I would spend the night under his roof, nor did I think amiss of so doing.
We ate supper and cleaned away the leavings in a silence that troubled neither of us. After we were done, Briony spoke to my plaint as if I had only just voiced it.
“Wrong it may have been, as you feel it was wrong,” he said. “But if wrong it was, then Ophid has erred gravely, and that would be unlike him, for he is a highly competent oracle.”
“I was much impressed by Ophid,” I said. “I do not think badly of him in any way. Nevertheless, and against all reason, I feel that I was terribly wrong to cast away the babe.”
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