Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “Yes. I mean, no. I mean—not exactly—”

  “Goat crap! Now look here, idiot little brother—” Zadain grabbed Ain by the front of his shirt and shook him. “I’ll show you what sort of girl she is. I’ll go up in those hills this very night, and if she’s still there I’ll bring her back over my shoulder, like any other piece of loot—”

  “No! You can’t!”

  “I think I can.” Zadain shoved him to the ground. The lyre fell out of Ain’s bag and rattled over some stones. “Listen, little boy, when and if you ever grow up, you’ll find out what that thing between your legs is good for. You don’t play music on it!”

  Helplessly, Ain watched his brother stalk off in the direction of the hills. And he watched the sun set behind those hills. The stars came out. He stayed in the field, allowing the goats to wander where they would. When he was sure that the new glow in the hills was not moonlight, he ran in that direction, stumbling over the rough terrain and falling painfully, but always pressing on. His father’s anger didn’t frighten him now. Nothing else mattered.

  At last he reached a spot where, through a trick of echoes, he heard a dim strain of music. He was certain. And there was another sound. It was the lady. He was certain of that too. Was she angry, frightened, startled? No, she was laughing.

  The light went out.

  * * * *

  Ain returned to the farm, again without most of the goats, just as the sun rose, but before his parents could reach for the switches, Zadain arrived. The elder brother was not visibly harmed, but he seemed diminished, emptied of all but a rudimentary awareness. He walked like a corpse rooted out of its grave. His face was blank. He only spoke when spoken to, and then without any feeling.

  The younger brother looked on with knowing dread, but at the same time he was sure this was Zadain’s punishment for his blasphemy. He would not end up like this.…

  Then Thain exchanged glances with Patek his wife, and they grabbed Ain by either arm, dragged him out of Zadain’s hearing, and demanded of him what he knew. The tale was recounted, and afterward the father spoke in a low, grim voice.

  “And what do you think your lady will make of you now? After this?” He pointed to his elder son.

  “Father, I don’t imagine. I can’t imagine. But I’ve heard old stories, about people who loved ladies like that, and I am sure that if she is pleased with my music, she’ll come to me again.”

  Thain struck him in the face.

  “You blind fool! Can’t you see that your brother is bewitched? I think you are too. I think your brain has melted away. Know this: I’ve heard of creatures like this lady before, and I haven’t been listening to idle stories or poetry. I know what she, or it, really is. She is one of the Bright Powers. The Bright Powers move about with the changing of the seasons, like clouds, like wind or the sun. They have no minds. Their outward forms are illusions. They are fragments of the Goddess, shards, splinters, motes of glittering dust. When a great image falls, it breaks into a million tiny pieces. These are the Bright Powers. They are remnants of the fair aspect of the Goddess. She had a dark side too, from which come the Dark Powers. People say that the Dark ones are more dangerous, but as you can see, this Bright one didn’t do your brother any good.”

  “Father, I am sure you’re wrong. She is a lovely lady.”

  Thain struck him again.

  “Listen! I am not wrong! Foolish boy, know this from more years of experience than you’re ever likely to see! This is my judgment: I forbid you to make music, or to sing when you are in the fields, or otherwise to summon this Bright Power. If you do—” he looked back to where Zadain stood, still as a statue, then into his wife’s face, then back to Ain. His voice broke. He seemed about to weep. “If you do…If you do, then I have no more sons. You shall be turned out from this house, driven from all Randelcainé, as is the law. Understand?”

  “Yes, Father. I do.”

  Then Thain took the lyre and hung it on a peg inside the house. “There it stays,” he said, “until you’re over this madness.”

  A little while later the thing that had been Zadain rose, took up shield and spear, and departed for the wars.

  * * * *

  The boy tended the flock for another two days, and he remained silent all the while, in obedience to his father. But then he knew that the time had come for him to go to the Bright Lady. This could not be blasphemy, he told himself. It could be no violation of the law. He would not summon her, as any village conjurer summons a spirit out of a tainted well. No, he would go where he had seen her last, and wait. Perhaps he would perish in the waiting, but he would wait all the same, so strong was the compulsion within him.

  So he drove the goats home on the evening of the second day, and sat with his parents on the doorstep after supper, in the cool breeze. At first the talk was slow and faltering, as all were reluctant to mention Zadain, but then words came quickly and easily. Ain and his parents spoke of everyday things. Thain and Patek were pleased to see their son behaving sensibly once more. Ain was tense, but he dared not reveal it. He was about to go away, as Zadain had gone, but much farther, and perhaps he too would never return. He wished his brother could be with him.

  It was nearly midnight when they retired. He lay above his parents in a loft which seemed vast and empty, now that Zadain was gone. But for all the unhappiness it might bring, he knew what he had to do. He put his ear to the boards beneath him and listened to his mother’s gentle breathing and his father’s snoring for a long time. Then he sat up, tied on his shoes, wrapped a cloak around himself, and climbed carefully down out of the loft. He paused in the darkness over his sleeping parents. He wanted to lean over and kiss his mother goodbye, but dared not, so he merely slipped away, into the kitchen, where he gathered some bread and cheese and dried meat into a bag, and slung a water skin over his shoulder. With tense, breathless stealth, he lifted his lyre down from the peg. Then he was gone. The night received him.

  In darkness he walked toward the hills. The moon was just up and the sky very clear, so he could see the slopes before him, but the light did not reach into the lowlands yet. Each tree and boulder stood in black outline like some silent sentry in the land of the dead. But he knew the way intimately, having wandered over this ground since he was old enough to walk. Before long he came to the bank of the Endless River. This he followed until he came to where the land sloped upward. He followed the path he had taken on that first night.

  He looked up at the cave mouth and saw a light. Fear shot through him. Bandits? Then he saw how foolish his fear had been. The light was a steady glow, not the flickering of firelight, and in it, lesser lights drifted up and down. As he neared it, he could make out upright figures moving. Some of them he recognized.

  The Bright Lady was waiting for him. He stood before her, all terrors forgotten.

  “I am pleased that you have come again,” she said. “When the other came…it was not you.”

  This was the first time that he had heard her voice. She spoke the words in human fashion, but there was something else, like an after-echo, just beyond the range of hearing, a quality of sound not of Earth at all.

  He did not ask if she wanted him to play again. He merely did, and at once the four-armed musicians joined him on the tambang, the zootibar, the kabukkuk, and others for which the languages of men have no names. Once more the Lady danced, whirling the auroras around her, and a great force came over Ain, something as elemental as any which moves the Earth or causes the seasons to change. He could not comprehend the vastness of it, but he felt it in his music, and played on.

  The Lady began to move away. The white-robed man with the staff approached Ain, becoming like a cloud, drifting over and around him. Then the boy felt himself rise up. He was caught in the spell of the music, and even that part of his mind which was still conscious knew better than to hesitate for even the tiniest instant; but still he perceived that he was being borne aloft on a litter by some of the winged musicians, who held long, c
urling horns in their free hands. The knights with the flower-tipped lances were his honor guard. The Lady circled him like a bright planet in its course. For a time he seemed to be high in the air. The Moon was very close, but then the horizons whirled. The stars spun like beads in a top. The ocean rose up to meet him, but there was no coldness, no splash. He had been translated into some other form of being, not wholly material. Still he played his song, as the company passed down through the earth.

  At last he came to a place few men have seen even in visions, where all solid things, all soil and stone melted away and only light remained, not blinding, but bright beyond seeing, bright on a whole new scale of perception. Brilliant against brilliance, there were shapes and forms, and gradually Ain discerned an overall pattern as he approached the center of the realm of light: a huge, burning rose unfolded before him, swallowed him up, filled the core of the world. This was the home of the Bright Powers.

  * * * *

  It seemed that he sang forever, without stopping, and that he had stopped, as if he were separated into two Ain Harads. There was no sense of time. He could dimly make out the Powers as they gathered around him, as he drifted suspended in light. Sometimes a shape would flash intensely blue or red or green, then fade away, like an afterimage in his eyes.

  * * * *

  Once he drifted through a long, wide place lined with many pillars. Fountains spewed gold. He sang. The Bright Lady sat on a throne before him, flanked by her knights. The musicians hovered above, high among the pillars like bright moths.

  An image came to him: a tiny fish in a glass bowl, being passed from hand to hand among the splendidly garbed lords and ladies of the court. They talked and laughed and made intrigues, and the fish in the bowl, only faintly aware of them, understood nothing. He was that fish.

  * * * *

  Beautiful? he said to himself. There were no words, no sounds, no sights, no memories, but something beyond all senses, which could not be encompassed by eye or ear or mind.

  * * * *

  He sat by the Lady’s side in a small boat, motionless on a mirrored lake, his lyre in his hand, the strings strangely solid to his touch, more substantial than anything else. He ran his fingers over them gently, then paused. Of their own accord, they made music.

  The Lady wore something around her neck. She leaned forward, holding it up for him to see. It was a sphere of blue glass. Inside, a tiny boat lay on a mirrored lake. A boy sat beside a lady, playing softly on the lyre. He could hear the music, coming out of the glass sphere. The lady sitting inside it, beside the other boy, held up something, and within that yet another lady and boy sat, and the lady held up a gleaming sphere, and the scene was repeated endlessly, as if in a procession of mirrors; and somehow his eyes were made able to see all that tiny detail, into infinity, and his ears could hear the vast harmony of the music made by endless fingers.

  * * * *

  Once he awoke and was astonished to feel the chill night air and a lumpy mattress beneath him, and to hear straw rustle as he sat up in the loft in his parents’ house. Eagerly he opened the trapdoor. More than anything else he wanted to behold his parents sleeping down there, to know that they were real and solid and not some kind of dream—

  He set foot on the top rung of the ladder—

  —and the light—

  —the burning rose, slowly unfolding—

  —he awoke into the light, and the Lady spoke inside his mind:

  “Ain Harad of Randelcainé, son of Thain, surely you have known since you arrived here that all your ideas about this place are…to use an example from your world…like the efforts of a worm to describe the running deer. You are someone special. Your music alone, of all the productions of your race, has attracted the notice of the Bright Kind. Do not ask how this has come to be. It is from within you. You may never be able to comprehend the source, but the miracle and the mystery are within you. You thought to move me and win my love. That cannot be, but nevertheless I am pleased, in a simple way. Now your song is part of the great dance which is our world. For this I am grateful.

  “No, no, do not ask anything more. No questions. No wishes, no granting of boons. It is not like that. Do not presume to raise yourself any higher than you are, for it cannot be done. We are of the substance of the Goddess, whose nature and death even we cannot understand. Your words have no meaning. They cannot encompass such thoughts as would be meaningful to us.

  “I wish you no ill, Ain Harad. In a small way, you have pleased me. But now, think of something else from your own world. Think of a lady who holds a beautiful songbird in a cage. After a time, she has heard its song and grows tired of it, but she does not hate it. Therefore she sets it free. Think now, focus your mind, on the world from which you came, to which you must return. The door to the cage is open.”

  * * * *

  —and flying on wings of light, the two of them soared or descended or moved in some direction which Ain Harad’s mind could not grasp, through the center of the great, burning rose. He felt the Lady’s hand on his. There was an illusion of solidity and warmth, though in some abstract way he knew it was an illusion even as he experienced it.

  He thought of stony hillsides and grass-filled plains, of rivers and forests, of men and their noisy cities, of marching armies, ships under sail, of gulls drifting on columns of air; of the winter when a dog snatched his slippers and he had to run after it, out into the darkness in his bare feet. As he recalled that particular sharp, clear sensation of cold, the familiar world became more substantial to him, more tangible. He smelled the smoke of a hearth fire. He reached out with his mind, grasping the place of his birth, his home, his parents’ house, with all his, drawing himself toward it, like a moth toward a distant light.

  For just an instant he had a vision of something else, of a realm equal and opposite to that of the Bright Powers, where a dark rose gleamed at the world’s heart, facing into the night, but the Powers dwelling there were no more as his father had described them than the running deer or the stars of the midnight sky can be described by the worm that crawls in the mud.

  The Lady led him inward, his beacon on the dark way, until at last he seemed to be rising from the depths of a murky sea. There were pinpricks of light above.

  Imperceptibly, his motion stopped. There was solid ground beneath him, and his body seemed solid once more. He held his lyre in his hands, and stood, rather unsteadily, in the middle of a flat, grassy meadow under a clear midnight sky.

  Light flickered behind him and he turned, and beheld for the briefest instant the image of the Bright Lady, like a candle flame snuffed out. He was sure—he forced himself to believe—that she was smiling. Then he was alone and blind in the darkness. It was a long time before his eyes adjusted and he could again see the pale stars overhead.

  * * * *

  Ain Harad walked out of that field, into a town where a strange tongue was spoken. The people there saw by his manner, by the look in his eye, that he had been touched by something beyond nature. They provided him with food and drink, did him reverence, and hurried him on his way. He passed thus through many lands, unmolested but never encouraged to linger, seeking his home.

  For a long time he delighted in the simplest things, the feel of the dusty road beneath his feet, the good green woods, the chatter of birds as they heralded the day’s dawning. Sometimes he would sit for hours by a stream listening to the rushing waters, or watching tiny fish in a pool. He had words of cheer for all he met, but most folk avoided him, taking him for a holy pilgrim deep in thought, or else a Power clothed fleetingly in material form, or else merely a lunatic.

  More than anything else, in those days, he wanted to see his parents again. This drove him on. He thought of his brother Zadain, off in the wars. He even thought of herding goats with more a sense of regret than not.

  As long as he focused his mind on such things, he continued on his way. But one evening, after a long climb up a steep mountain road, he paused at the summit to watch the s
unset, and the fading light reminded him of the Bright Lady and her kingdom.

  It was as if he had awakened from a stupor. The memories came flooding back, overwhelming him. With them came a flash of pride. He would be the greatest of all singers when he told of the Lady in song. He would be, indeed, her equal. She had said otherwise, but she was wrong about that, he was certain.

  The memories filled his mind. He went deeper into his trance than ever before. That last, detached part of his consciousness was also filled, like a final housetop submerged in a flood. He thought of his parents and his homeland no more.

  He came down the mountain singing. The music was far stronger than any human music. It sustained him. He knew no need of food, drink, or rest. Wild beasts bowed down before him, and, yes, the stones wept.

  The people of towns and cities left their homes to follow him, scarcely aware of what they were doing. The strange procession trampled fields of crops and interrupted battles, yet no voice was raised in protest. He crossed stilled seas, walking on the water, and the great masses followed in ships, on rafts, anything they could contrive. Islands were depopulated as they passed.

  When at last he came into his own country, the folk of Randelcainé saw before them the largest army ever assembled. The dust from these countless feet filled the sky. This throng joined with another, streaming out of the holy city of Ai Hanlo, as all were drawn to the boy’s music and to his singing.

  Beneath Ai Hanlo Mountain, the bones of the Goddess stirred.

  Then the Guardian of the Bones, lord of the city, called together what few of his counselors who had not already joined the listeners, and said:

  “In the days of our forefathers, the body of the Holy Goddess plummeted from heaven, trailing light across the sky like a comet, crashing deep into Ai Hanlo Mountain. Out of the chasm made by that fall, the newly formed Bright Powers, fragments of the Goddess, swarmed like bright bees, filling the nights with glory. Out of it too came the Dark Powers, enshadowing the days. Men died in ecstasy and terror, their minds and their hearts overwhelmed. It seemed all mankind would perish. It was only when the Powers had fled away, and the first of the Guardians had contained the bones in a vault and closed up the chasm by desperate magic that the survivors could return. Each guardian tells this to his successor, but now the danger is so great that I tell you.”