Chains of Gold

by Nancy Springer

  “Dance,” the goddess said.

  The lights grew larger, yet softer, until they formed pale, human semblances, head and shoulders and a hint of trailing limbs. A vast crowd of them, a sea, a flood, spread into the reaches of that great hall, and they arranged themselves into serpentine lines such as the waves of the sea must be. At once, swaying, they started to move.

  “You will see that your babe is not here either,” the goddess told me.

  I became aware that there was music, a voiceless music coursing through me, my body, my heartbeat, my breathing. Such a silent dance, no scrape of feet, no talk, and yet all moved in perfect accord with that swelling rhythm, the rhythm of tides and days and seasons. The white lines rippled into spirals, flowed into interlocking circles that turned through each other, and after a while I dimly saw that the whole swirled in form of a great, circling wheel that slowly spun on darkness—the goddess, she the hub. The shifting vortex floated past me where I sat on the dais, and within the wheel the smaller circles ebbed and flowed, blooming like flowers, melting into each other, until I grew aware of a pattern I scarcely could grasp and knew that every luminous spirit of that whole vast throng had, for a moment at least, his place before me. And there were many whom I knew: my mother, my earthly mother, a white spiritous stranger; and Erta, and others who had gone beyond. And there were babies aplenty, but not my baby. And comely youths, but not Lonn. It must have been a long time that I sat there, but I think I went into a kindly trance, for I do not remember it so. I remember only the dance turning, turning, turning—

  “Be done,” said the goddess, and the lights dimmed away.

  “So you see,” she told me in tones of patience, “they are not here.”

  “Is there not another place—” I hesitated, but I had to ask her. “—even more pleasant than this, a sort of meadow …?”

  “Yes indeed. But Lonn is not there, I assure you.”

  I looked up at her, letting her see my perplexity. “But he was a hero.”

  “A hero without wisdom is only another sort of fool. Lonn was the usual sort of young ass, knowing only how to be loyal and brave. The shadow within self he could not deal with. The human way is not often the hero’s way.” She stood up, waving me off the dais with one hand, and I went down to stand before her again.

  “Go eat again, Rae,” she told me, “and sleep. I will consult the deep pools, to see what has become of your child.”

  I stood blinking up at her. I must have been more weary than I knew, for I spoke as a child myself. “So you do not hate me, Mother,” I blurted. I dared to call her that to her face.

  “Indeed, no!” She sounded shocked, amused, even tender—she who demanded twice yearly the sacrifice of youthful blood. “Where I have once given my favor, even on a whim, I will not lightly withdraw it, Rae. Your faithfulness is a mirror of my own.” She gestured softly, vaguely, in my direction. “Go, eat, sleep.”

  I gave an awkward bow by way of courtesy, turned, and went blindly. Soon I was flanked by the elementals again. They led me back to my sumptuous chamber, and I slept for many hours.

  I had one more audience with the goddess before I left that place. This time the hall glowed with the light of nine serpent suns, and the animals lay sleeping, even the serpent on her forehead. The goddess wore a full-skirted gown of a golden cloth that swirled about her hips; her bodice was studded with gems, and her breasts stood bare except for the nipples, which were gilded. I felt more uncomfortable in the presence of that finery than I had before her nakedness.

  “I have seen the babe floating in the basket down the Naga,” she told me, and instantly I forgot her deep-clefted breasts. “He was struggling,” she added.

  “Crying,” I murmured, aching with the old pang.

  “No, not so much crying in the manner of babes; struggling. The tiny ones do not struggle against death, for they do not understand. This was Lonn struggling against loss of the body he had taken for himself. And he found strength in it somehow to tip himself into the shallows, and he crawled ashore.”

  I listened with breathless hope. “Yes,” I said eagerly, “yes, he was growing very strong even before I—”

  “Abandoned him. Say it candidly. So he had to grow rapidly, and he has grown more rapidly since. He learned to walk that first day, the pool tells me, toddled away from the river until some few days later he found shelter in a homestead.”

  “Before—before the storm came down?”

  “It must have been. At any rate he was fed, and the folk there think they were visited by a god, for within a few weeks he had grown to the size and skill of a boy of seven years, and within a few months he had grown to the likeness of a stripling of the age of passage, and a churlish one at that. And by the time the whitethorn bloomed he had attained the strength of a youth. And at the time of the ceremonial of the summerking he left them.”

  “Bound where?” I cried.

  “He did not say. But I think you know where.”

  I did indeed know, and I fervently hoped I would return to Arlen before Lonn did. I took a few hasty steps before I recalled my manners. “Good my Mother,” I requested, “may I leave you now?”

  “Certainly. The clothes you wear are yours to keep. And you know you need no gold for the boatman. Go with all blessing.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” I told her, bowing, and I turned and ran, my red cloak flying behind me.

  “And may yours be the victory,” she added, and though her words were quiet I heard them. But I gave no sign, for I was in haste.

  Back under golden archways. Back past jade gardens, over marble floors; back past black pools where white swans floated amid waterlilies, past the singing serpent. It did not occur to me that I should ever muse on those things or remember them with wonder. I thought only of reaching the passage and Bucca. Should he still be there in his glade, should he not have strayed too far—

  He was standing just at the rim of the rock, close by the passage entry, already saddled and bridled and awaiting me, and on him were loaded blankets and bags full of provision; I noticed the aroma of meats and freshly baked bread. And laid across his saddle was a single gold chain. I slipped it around my neck, hid it under my gown of green.

  “Thank you, Mother,” I shouted to the forest, the rocks, the Adder’s Head far below, glinting in the sunlight. Then I sprang onto Bucca and started with all speed back toward home.

  NINETEEN

  The season had advanced since I had ventured into the Afterworld. The early trees were starting to yellow. All my thoughts turned to hurry, the more so when I thought of Arlen; I tried not to do so. I hurt with yearning for him.

  Down, down, we went, along the Naga as far as the Blackwater, for a rocky wilderness barred any other way, forcing me southward. And then, at last, moorland, and I turned sharply northward and eastward. The goddess had provisioned me well, and Bucca was well rested; we went relentlessly, the horse and I, dawn and day and twilight. I let Bucca gulp the tall grasses on the move. And although the Naga and the moorlands seemed to crawl snailishly away behind us, I am sure we traveled swiftly, more swiftly than heroes in legends of old. If Lonn went afoot, I reasoned, we might yet reach Arlen before him, or even overtake him.

  I skirted Briony’s soddy, passed it a day’s journey away, for I wanted no sight of it or of him. At the last homesteads before the Forever Forest I stopped, trading links of gold for food, and the folk spoke of a strange shining youth who had passed that way some few days before, spoke of him with awe though they could scarcely describe him. I pressed on all the more quickly. When I reached the forest, the great trees loomed ablaze in red and orange leaf, bright as flame.

  Passion’s flame, I said to myself, and my heart ached for Arlen.

  Thinking of flame and passion, I knew what to do about Lonn. I wanted to confront him—for reasons of my own, without hope of gain—and I felt that he should be nearby, but how to find him amidst the thickets and vines of the wilderness? The ancient, crowding tr
ees closed off all sight within a furlong of the seeker. But that way lay home, so I sent Bucca into the shadows under those huge boles, the ivy twining them as red as blood above the green of moss. And when I camped that night, I gathered a great mound of wood and made a fire, and not just to ward off the autumn chill or the oak elves, either. I built it far larger than I customarily would have, and I sat beside it late into the night.

  Lonn did not come to me that night, or the next, or the next. I traveled a week more without a sign of him, and I had long since decided I was mistaken. I built my fires each night out of habit and to cook the meat that the wolves, the bears, the goddess gave me. But on a night when I estimated I must soon reach the northern limit of the forest and come out again within sight of the mountains, my home, on a night when the moon shone full and golden, I heard a small stirring as of golden leaves and looked up, and there beyond the fire he stood.

  Lonn. Lord of all lords, but he was magnificent! The glow could not have been only moonlight or firelight—all the glory of his last living day lay on him yet, glory given by the goddess, serpent power. His hair moved and shone like the flames, as if he were crowned with fire. And the splendor of his broad glistening brow, his broad bare shoulders—for bare they were, as if he were a slave or a felon, but I did not think of it so at the time, but saw only how they rippled and shone, how the light played upon him, golden hair of his bare chest, even his breathing visible and full of a mystic energy—and his eyes, holding me with their shadowed gaze, dark and full of meaning. I could have fallen in love with him for the mere gaze of those eyes. Everything I had in mind to say to him left me, vanished, and I sat wordless and openmouthed, staring at him in hunger for his beauty … and then I hated myself. For all that Arlen might be but a memory—

  “Rae,” Lonn murmured, the word vibrant with meaning, and he came around the fire to me. He sat by me and reached toward me to touch me, and I drew back, still shamed by my own weakness, that I should have been for a moment so ensnared by his glamour. Battle, victory, they were to be with self, it seemed, as much as anything. And still I found nothing to say to him.

  “You have wanted me to come to you,” he declared. “I know you have. Why else these great fires …?”

  Eyes the color of wood violets, of some nameless gem bluer than amethyst, darker than sapphire, eyes fixed on me ardently, nearly glowing—duskier now than violets, in firelight, the color of purple oak leaves in autumn.

  “But you are lovely,” he said softly, “so lovely, in your cloak of red with the black hair all in a torrent down your back, a cataract—”

  “All in a tangle,” I said sourly, the first words I had spoken to him.

  “A falling flow, like the black water. And your face, your hands, brown as earth but fairer than rosewood against that white silk. And gown of green—you look like a queen of the earth maidens sitting there so darkly. Nay, more: like spirit of summer night, fecund. Like the goddess herself.”

  “Speak more kindly of the goddess,” I said sharply.

  “She has done nothing for me.” He shrugged, the movement setting his glorious hair a-shimmer. “But you might.…”

  I saw that there was going to be no sleep for me that night.

  “Love me, Rae,” he whispered.

  “I love Arlen,” I told him, nearly as softly.

  “But Arlen is not here; I am here! Rae, lady, I want your love, I long for it, and I know you have felt that pang; love me too.”

  “And never again look on my beloved without guilt? Thank you, but no.”

  “You need never look at him again,” said Lonn eagerly, far too eagerly. “Come away with me. We shall travel together; I will show you places you have scarcely dreamed of. The strand where the blue glain lies, and the burning sea where the sun goes down, and the white castles of ice beyond the snow mountains—”

  I thought of my own small home with sudden fierce longing, my humble stone house in the mountains. “No,” I said.

  “Love me,” he begged.

  He went on in this way for some time, declaring to me his eternal devotion, asking me to cleave to him, or at the very least to lie with him that night. Oddly, the longer he pleaded the less his entreaties moved me. That he desired me I could not doubt, but that he loved me—I wondered. That passion in him, that energy; not love, forsooth. Love would not so urge me toward a tearing injury, a sundering of self.

  I sat stolidly. “No,” I told him for the hundredth time.

  “Rae,” he said, a darker tone to his voice, a hint of threat, “I will have you.”

  So. It was a matter of possession, then. Passion for possession. I was a prize to him, a trophy, little more, as I had once been but a possession to a man called Rahv.

  “Yield to me. I can take you, you know, perforce and forthwith. Immense power is in me.”

  “I do not doubt it,” I flared at him, feeling the hot rush of an old anger, very old. “But do not call me Rae then, if you think to force me. A good, gentle man gave me that name.”

  The allusion to Arlen infuriated him. “Proud piece,” he breathed. I heard rage in his voice to answer my own, and I looked at him, intending to stare him down—and he had no eyes.

  Horrible, empty sockets with the blood oozing—startled beyond screaming, I gave a dry gasp and scrambled up from where I had been sitting.

  “So,” he said grimly, “at last I have moved you.” And he stood up as well, to face me. “You would not have me fair,” he said, “so you shall have me foul.”

  Whip weals sprang up across the flesh of his shoulders, raw red lines with trickles of blood starting down. More of them came upon more of them by the moment, until all I saw was cruel red of blood, and I winced and looked away. Lonn brought his hands up to his waist, loosened the ties of his trousers.

  “Yield to me,” he said, “or you will see what you could not bear to watch the first time.”

  Run from him, I thought. If he is blind, he will be hard put to pursue me. But something stubborn in me would not run from him, wanted only to face him down.

  “It was your pain I could not bear to watch!” I cried at him. “But there’s no pain in you any longer, only anger.”

  Indeed, his face was so contorted in anger that even his eyeless stare did not look very much amiss in it. He pulled off his breeches with a jerk, tearing them, and the wound beneath—a horrible wound, a ragged, empty place, bereft. I felt faint at the sight of it. But the wound was not as ugly as the look of his face.

  “Yield,” he warned.

  “Stay that way, and you’ll take small pleasure in forcing me,” I retorted. My voice shook, and tears were running down my face. I was glad he could not see them.

  “Yield to me, or there will be more than weeping.”

  The sorcerer, he could see me well enough! His wounds were all illusion, no agony; I could have choked with anger. But just as suddenly anger faded. It did not matter. I knew what his pain had been the first time, the true time that had bought my happiness. Better truth lay beyond anger.

  “I pity you,” I told him, weeping aloud; let him hear and see. “You have suffered, and suffering has bested you, and I pity you terribly.”

  Pity was not what he wanted of me. Terror would have been more to his liking. With a wordless roar he strode toward me, and he was all red, entirely horrible, the flayed man. I gasped, and for the first time I hid my face.

  “Yield!” he shouted at me.

  “No.” I did not shout; I am not even sure he heard me. “Take your head off,” I mumbled, “take your bones apart, turn yourself into meat and stew it. I don’t care.”

  He grasped my wrists and shook my hands loose of my face, and I opened my eyes to look at him, there, so close to me, knowing that my nightmares would all be bested. But he was himself again in his fairest form, winterking come to bed his bride, sheen of glamour on him.

  “You are still ugly,” I told him.

  It was true. That golden glow shone red as blood to me, baleful, ha
ir a living fire that would hurt me, eyes no better than knives—

  He hit me, hard, on the side of my face.

  There was truly no use in fighting him. That alone would not have stopped me—I had fought Eachan at the esker when all hope was gone. But Lonn was not Eachan, not my enemy; he had been a friend, the friend beyond friendship, giver of a supreme gift.…

  He struck me again, with his fist. For a moment I could not see. But I stood as firmly as I was able, not resisting him, not yielding to him either, and I met the fury in his eyes with love in my own—a friend’s love, not the sort he wanted.

  “You will be mine!” he cried.

  “Never,” I told him, softly, warmly. “Never, not really, do to my body what you will.”

  He hit me a third time, knocking me sideways; I would have fallen if it were not that he still grasped my wrists. He will push me down now, I thought. But he pulled me upright and stood glaring wildly at me, and I stood gazing back at him, not afraid, not hoping, no longer angry, meeting his stare with no hatred in my own, thinking, I have changed, I will never be afraid again. No shrewdness, no bravado, only truth—and his eyes closed in anguish and he gave a terrible cry, a cry of agony such as his torture and death had never wrung from him, and he released me and flung himself away from me, flung himself face down on the earth by the embers of the fire.

  I did not move, could not move. I only stood looking at him by moonlight and faint firelight, looked at his shoulders, taut and shuddering with the spasms of pain that had hold of him, and when he turned to face me I was sure. It was Lonn who lay there, no winterking but, beyond all expectation, the true Lonn, he the hero and supreme friend, he of the brown hair, the gentle rugged face, the gentle eyes. Misery in them. He winced, facing me, reached for the huddled mound that was his trousers.

  “Rae—” He stopped, his voice breaking. “Cerilla, my lady, I will never trouble you again.” Sobs shook him. “I—give you—my most solemn promise.…”

  And with scrambling quickness he was gone, off at the run into the shadows of the forest. Numb as I was, I had not even spoken to stop him.