by Janet Morris
Upon the way there I learned that Sereth, through Leir, had come to be held high among them. And that hulions, also, had taken a knowing part in Khys’s destruction. They had willingly absented themselves from the Lake of Horns. It had been between them and Sereth decided: if thus-and-thus occurs, such will be done.
From Santh I could coax nothing of reason or motive during those two days. Nor would Sereth enlighten me, except to say that only selected hulions ever frequented the Lake of Horns. His implication was that the hulions gathered such intelligence as concerned them, while seeming to serve the dharen. There is no way any of us will ever be sure.
“I care little for their reasons. I took the chance. It proved lucky. They aided me, or I aided them. Or it was a coincident serving,” Sereth had said, as I pressed him in the firelight that evening. But he had not been angry. Little would have angered him then. Before his fire, he lounged upon the chill ground as loose as the hulions stretched with their bellies to the fire’s warmth. Above us the full moon danced, impaled upon an audacious peak. The fire showed me the easy inward smile upon him. The laughter rekindled in his dark eyes that night, as if the flame cleansed his spirit. I recollected that look, from when I had first known him in Well Arlet. And I began then to fan within me the banked coals of my own faith. If he might find contentment upon such a night, how much less could I show myself to be?
He had sought owkahen, and found it pregnant and new. What he chose, he might now do, with the crux time clearing away. And he found no shadowing upon it that troubled him, although I had found my ardor much damped by what I myself had seen.
The storms grow upon owkahen. We saw them then. We feel them now. But still, there is time. The ship rocks under me. The waves make a wine-sot of my not-ever-precise handwriting. The sea’s pitching has this past set taken a different rhythm. Chayin says we will soon sight land.
There are various observations that I would like to make upon what has come to be. But there remain certain outcomes, if such they may be called. The cahndor maintains that little of life may be neatly tied up, and even less of those particular events with which I have here concerned myself.
None will know, Chayin is sure, what disposition the fathers made of Khys. And yet I saw him, when we sat with the hulions in their cavernous temple. Luminous veins riddled the rock with greenish trails that seemed to pulse. The only other light was that of their eyes—pair upon pair of glowing pools, all shades from palest yellow to brooding red. Their rumbling, magnified and returned to us by the subterranean vault, might have been that sound a sphere makes, turning. I was visited, while kneeling among them therein, by a number of truths. Among them was a sense of Khys’s presence. Since that time, I have doubted his demise. Though for his sake I hope that he achieved it, that passing he so concertedly sought, that inalienable freedom to which we are all entitled. Those teachings he so venerated, those masters whose works he emulated, bespoke it far better than I ever might: all come to the abyss, there to partake of the definition of life, the catalyst death, that beginning toward which all life labors.
Still, in my mind, he lives. Upon all of Silistra he thrives, through the metamorphosis he has brought about. Where men erect yristera boards and throw, is Khys. Where the children are conceived, does his spirit rejoice. Upon the chalder’s anvil are his blessings ever forged. In the Day-Keepers’ schools and the Slayers’ hostels and about the waists of wellwomen and pan-breeders and weaponsmiths and pelters one may see him. Sereth weighed him, and found him mad. It may be so. A relic from a long-dead age he was, in truth. Those teachings that he gave unto us were not those that he had learned. In a way, he was never of us, but only with us, he who was a Stoth priest even before the holocaust. Perhaps, as said Sereth, he never truly partook of that morality he taught. I have presented him, to the best of my ability, as he presented himself to me. I make no judgment upon him. In accordance with that Stothric tradition into which he was born, he lived. And in a Stoth manner, he sought his death, not in flight, but as a fitting resolution to his life.
They judge me recovered from what he did to me. I wonder if any of us might ever recover. That which one experiences is not other than oneself from that moment ongoing. I no longer cringe when a hand is raised unexpectedly within striking distance. I have made some progress in excising from my behavior the fear and timidity he taught. But I yet bear his sign upon my flesh, and in my heart also. If it were within my power, I would change his ending, if it be death or confinement or the anguish I sensed when I knelt amid the convened hulions of Silistra. Why they deserted his service and turned their absence to Sereth’s aid, I know not. Nor why they held service in his honor and sat vigil for his spirit, do I know. Suffice it to be that such was the case—that it was done, and I was present, and Sereth and Chayin were also there. And we each gave up, in that cavern with the deep-throated hulion hymns vibrating the stone upon which we knelt and the bones of our bodies, what recollection we had of him, into a pool of communal reliving. And when that pool had no bottom and no surface, when all ever known of him had been entered therein, the hulions walked one at a time, with measured stride and solemn demeanor, through the harvest of his years. When my turn came to enter that darkened depression in the circled mid-cave, it seemed to me that I stepped into cold, fast running water. Down the unsteep incline I proceeded, at each step the tingling chill of immersion rising higher up my body. As I had seen the hulions do, I stepped onto the down-spiraling ledge and followed its ever-tightening course until I stood at the pit’s center. But I saw it not. Rather did I see Silistra, her copses and groves, her precipices and seas. I saw her burned and steaming, oozing foul putrefaction upon the land. And I saw all those years of her tending, that she might once more raise bountiful eyes to the sun.
And he came to me there. First it seemed he bestrode a lake sheeted with ice. Across it, toward me, he came. The sun lit the ice tawny. Where he lifted foot, deep tracks appeared, as if the fire of him melted the surface beneath his flesh. And he held out his hands to me, his face becalmed and peaceful, as the ice began to rumble and creak. With sounds like bones snapping, in an air turned dark and awful with crackling chuckles, the surface of the lake broke asunder. As if some great sea beast desired exit and beat against the ice sheet from below, the cracks spread and heaved, whole chunks the length of a man rearing up into the air and crashing down to smash what ice remained. He danced, scrambling for purchase. With more than man’s effort, he leaped and scrambled. I saw him fall once, feet first, into the ice. Hands, clawing, seized the chunks afloat. He struggled upon one and lay there, his face turned away. Beneath him, it crumbled. And I saw him swimming, first desperately, then sluggishly, then a mere flailing of hands. And he met my eyes once with his. And then he was no more. There was only the lake and the tiny crystals of slush that floated gray upon the surface. That, and only that, was revealed to me, as I sat with the hulions, of the fate of Khys, once dharen of Silistra.
Of my son, all that remains is a name: Jehsrae.
We went, upon the first first of Decra, by hulion out from that place. It was a set later we stood upon the plain of Astria, Sereth and I, unscathed, as I had so long ago hested. And indeed, I could not excise the crawling, mewling wounded from my sight of that place, nor the corpses over which they crawled. All around us I met the shades of our dead. We did not stay long there among the helsars. The hulions had refused even to enter that place, but waited past the stand of trees in which Sereth had secreted his archers to await the closing of battle in Amarsa, ’695.
Chayin was first to speak it, but we were all, by then, apprised of the need to be gone from the plain. As we had been of the need to come, to offer our silence to those who had perished in our service, a thing we had not been able to do that day.
We avoided, by my will, Well Astria. Let Vedrast’s daughter reign there. It matters not to me. “Guard Astria, or you will lose it,” had written the Well-Foundress Astria in her warning. One should not go about groping for the
joys of youth to which maturity has made one unsuited.
Sereth, surely sensing my melancholy, led me gently from the field. My eyes, upon my feet and his, saw here and there, among the browned grass, helsars, awaiting those who would sometime claim them. It was said to me once by the dharen that helsars have been provided for all ever meant to take them; that a helsar knows no sequentiality, no waiting. To them, every man who will come to claim them, every woman who will pilgrimage here, stand all together upon the plain in one moment encompassing all of time. There must be many still to come. Upon the plain of Astria are enough helsars to bestar lavishly a virgin sky. Enough, perhaps, to make a necklace for a universe mother, should such a she ever care to appear bedecked before the creator spirit to whom she is in service.
I wondered briefly if Dellin and M’tras had come and gone, or if it still remained for them to lessen the field of helsars by two. And of what they would become, attendant to the helsar’s teachings, did I take thought.
The hulions left us upon the outskirts of Port Astrin. I made a blurry-eyed farewell to Santh, and wished his mate Tjeila a fruitful birthing.
Sereth arranged with Leir a meeting for mid-Macara of the new year after next.
Chayin sent his regards to Frinhar, watcher of the clouds, whose eldest son had borne him hither.
We watched them in silence until they were only specks in the greening sky. When a hulion departs, the world seems shrunken and muted. Their perceptions, withdrawn, leave a flat and longing emptiness. They have the oneness, the wisdom of creation, within them. They see it in the leaves, they rejoice at its outcry in the thunderbolt as it carves its smoking likeness upon the rock. They are not as we, and there is much we might learn, should owkahen allow it, from Santh and Leir and their brethren.
I looked at Chayin, just turning away toward the twisting anarchy of Port Astrin’s jumbled streets. He stared with narrowed eyes at the city, then at his booted feet. Stooping down, he plucked a blade of withered grass and sucked upon it. His marks of godhood were covered by the loose sleeves of winter leathers. All in brown was dressed the cahndor, unassuming, with just southern short sword and gol-knife at his waist. But I knew what weapons nestled in the lining of his brown cloak, and even in the tops of his high boots, for I bore the like about my own person.
“Here,” said Sereth, holding out something in his hand. It was a chald. Upon it were strands to which I was entitled. I took it, circling it around my waist. When I had fitted the key in its housing, I saw Chayin’s snap-membraned stare.
Sereth bore at his waist an arrar’s chald. But it was not truly his, any more than that about my own waist was mine. And he might have borne another chald, that of Silistra’s dharen.
Chayin spat upon the ground and rose up. “I will never understand you,” he spoke to Sereth. “You take up and put down chaldra the way other men take up and put down women.”
The cahndor’s first act upon addressing his triumphant troops had been to rip from his waist the northern chald Khys had forced upon him, and replace it with his own, feathered and trophied. As he donned his southern chald, he bade each of his men do likewise. And he bade them also rip as quickly from their hearts all amendments of their custom that had been forced upon them. I had not been there, but I had heard tell of the cahndor’s impassioned speech to the jiasks and tiasks of his realm.
“Chaldra,” said Sereth, grinning, “is carried about the spirit, not about the waist. And besides, would you have me cut down for chaldless by the first Slayer we meet in the city?”
Chayin snorted. “Just the same, I like it not.”
And I liked it no better.
“While Carth remains alive,” said Sereth soberly, “I have a right to this.” He ran his hand along the supple chald nestled gleaming above his weapons belt. “And Estri has surely earned the chald of messenger. You would see us in southern chalds, I suppose.”
“It would please me,” the cahndor admitted.
“If your ship and your sailors are half as skilled as you claim, we may live to collect some.” He shaded his eyes with his hand, looking out past the city, where the gray-green sky met the gray-green sea. The harbor, from this vantage, was abristle with sharp-masted craft. “Let us get upon the trail. I would be there and at a meal by dark.”
Down the yellow-brown hills that sloped to the city and the shore we went, cross-cutting to take the wide and well-kept thoroughfare that led to the Well-Keepress’ gate, so called because it offers northerly exit toward Well Astria. The road, though there were some carts and one caravan (from Galesh, surely; gaen-hauled wagons, tasseled and belled and enclosed in colored silks, humped archeon packed to twice a man’s height with woven baskets, their bottoms sagging with produce; the fruit smell wafting back to us, sweet and sharp), was sparsely traveled, for such an enth.
And within the gate, at which we were not checked, but only noted upon a wax tally by a portly guard who judged us unworthy of even a two-eyed scrutiny, I saw more clearly what the loss of the star trade might come to mean. Shops were boarded up. Men hawked off-world goods at ruinous prices in the sandblown streets. Where M’ksakkan or Itabic or Torth legends showed upon hostels and inns, those signs had been defaced. Perhaps a third of the businesses were closed altogether. Port Astrin, more than any other place upon Silistra, had made off-worlders at home. She, of all Silistra, would most lament their departure.
“There seem an inordinate number of beggars,” Sereth remarked, silencing one mendicant in whining approach with a scowl that sent him stumbling over his own rags into a doorway.
“Things will right themselves here,” I said. Chayin put an arm protectively about me as three raw-faced seafarers came by us.
We found an inn of Sereth’s acquaintance that was not closed. In the old section of the city, high over the harbor it rose, hulking blocks of taernite so thick that not even the shifting coastline had been able to dislodge them.
Over a meal that displayed the sea’s bounty upon our table, they spoke of ships and courses, of tides and straits and what might lie in the uncharted waters between the Astrian coast and that shore of which none were empowered to speak.
“We cannot keep calling it that,” Sereth decided, slid down low upon the padded bench, a pipe of good danne, courtesy of the innman’s girl, glowing red in his hand. “We are speaking about it all the time.”
“Let us name it when we set foot there,” proposed Chayin, flashing his white teeth expectantly. “That is the way such things are done.”
“The Keening Rock has a name. The shore upon which it sits has a name. Might we not be presumptuous, planning to name a continent?” I said it softly, my finger drawing the Keening Rock’s likeness in the wet rings the kifra goblets had left upon the striped ragony of the round table.
The innman’s girl took bellows to the fire against the encroaching salt chill. By my shoulder, the cold panes sweated. The calk-and-beam ceiling had depending from it brass oil lamps upon chains. She turned to their trimming, from the fire burning renewed upon the hearth. Its dance caught me. Within dance is ever story; within flame, glyphs of life. I saw Khys there, his glowing eyes heavy-lidded, as he had been above that blaze he had made upon the planet of his entrapment. And Sereth I saw, and the trail to Santha. And all that had occurred since then: upon Mi’ysten; in the Parset Lands; Hael dark beneath Raet’s likeness, underlit by chalder’s fire; the flames of the helsar gate; the fiery agony of childbirth; and my trial at the dharen’s hands. Then I saw hulion and uritheria. Father, give us respite. And Gherein roasting in his sire’s flame. Free us from this blind striving in thy name. And Kystrai, standing in a greater conflagration as if he stood beneath a beneficent waterfall. Khys, my grief is never-ending. Accomplice inconsolable, I stand bereft of even tears. Long had they lain in wait for you. I was born to destroy you. Golden lashes, so long his eyes seemed oblong. You would have fallen, then, without my betrayal, But I am the vessel of their chastisement. The herb that will be ground and sold for pois
on of an old weak man for his holdings—can the plant be adjudged guilty of the crime? If only you had gone to them ...
“Estri?”
“No, Sereth. No more kifra.” His arm goes around me, silent comfort. He knows, but he will not speak of it. He is free from fear. I draw peace from my head leaned upon him.
“And yet, I might speak of it,” he said. “Or repeat it, at least. Before the battle of Astria, you spoke it: we are it. Se’keroth, I thought for the thousandth time, and put the thought away.”
Chayin pushed the kifra aside, leaning his elbows upon the table. “‘Thrice denied and thrice delivered / Lost and bound and found and tempered ...’”
“‘Sword of severance’,” I repeated, as Chayin broke it off, that oldest of prophecies whose refrain was all too familiar. I pressed my nose against Sereth’s leathers. My eyes searched the fire. Khys and the anguish of my life no longer burned therein.
“Did you know I was born in Nin Sihaen?” offered Sereth gravely. Nin Sihaen, across the Karir-Thoss, is the most western city of known Silistra. “‘One from the east, born of ease and destined / One from north of Lost and bound and found and tempered …’”
“‘The third from out the west, astride a tide of death,’” quoted Chayin. He was not smiling. It is a long epic. All has been foreseen. We all know that tale’s end.
“A man thinks,” said Sereth softly, “that it cannot be him, as his life first bends to fit itself to some metaphysician’s metaphor. It cannot be me, I thought, at first with amusement and later with great fear. I admit it. Those old forereadings—they are detailed. The legend’s blade, it was said, would be forged of substance from the Sihaen-Istet hills. It is told to children in those lands. It was told to me, for I was raised there. And when I set off to test for a Slayer’s chain, the town boys laughed and called me ‘seeker after severance.’” I craned my neck to see him. His gaze rested in Chayin’s. I had known his birthplace. I had never heard him speak of his youth.