Author: Kate Elliott
Category: Science
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She crouched, and drew. “Third comes the Cup of Boundless Waters.”
When she straightened, the flowers flowing out from either side of the trail had taken on a shimmering, unearthly cast, as though they bloomed with something other than material substance. Poppies flared with impossible scarlet richness. Lilacs lay a tender violet blush over swaying green stalks, shading into the complicated aftertones seen at sunset, although the sun still rode high above her.
She pressed forward four steps as a hazy glamour rose off the path like mist. Through this soft fog she reached, searching for the ground at her feet. It was hard now to see the path beneath her, but the dirt felt the same. Into the cool soil she traced the next pattern.
“Fourth lies the blacksmith’s Ring of Fire.”
Fog billowed up along the path, swirling around her knees as she took five steps forward. Ahead, through the hazy shimmer that now lay over the meadow, she saw the river. A figure stood on the far bank, caught in a moment of indecision among the rocks at the ford. Even from this distance, Liath recognized the stocky body and distinctive face of one of the Ashioi, but the woman was dressed so strangely, in human clothing, with human gear. She looked utterly out of place and yet entirely familiar as she gazed at the scene unfolding before her.
The fragrance of roses surrounded Liath, so dense it made her woozy.
Was it dizziness? Or was that Ashioi woman actually wearing Liath’s other tunic, the one she had folded away into the saddlebags thrown over Resuelto’s back just before she and Sanglant and the baby had tried to make their escape from Verna?
It was too late to stop now. She couldn’t pause to find out the answer. She had to go on.
She knelt, and drew. Rising, she spoke as she walked. “The Throne of Virtue follows fifth.”
The field of flowers expanded around her as though the clearing had breached the bounds holding it to the earth and had begun to spread up actually into the sky. Cornflowers burned with a pale blue-fire luminescence, blazing lanterns, each one like a shard of the burning stone cracked and shattered and strewn among the other flowers. Through this dizzying terrain she took six steps. It was both hard to keep to the path and yet somehow impossible to step off of it.
“Wisdom’s Scepter marks the sixth.”
She was almost to the river. Ahead, the flower trail melded and became one with the river itself, but the river no longer resembled an earthly river, bound by its rock bed. Like the River of Heaven, it streamed up into the sky, a deep current pouring upward, all blue and silver. Vaguely, beyond it, or below it, she saw the shadows of those things that still stood on the land: a pale figure more shade than substance, algae-covered rocks whose chaotic patterns nevertheless seemed to conceal unspoken secrets, withered trees so dark that they seemed lifeless.
She must not pause to look back. Her feet touched the water, yet it was not water that swirled around her calves as she took seven steps forward. She waded into a streaming river of aether that flowed upward to its natural home. When she thrust her hand into its depths, the currents pooled around her, swift and hot.
She traced the outlines of the final sigil, the crown of stars. Where her hand drew, the blue-silver effluence surged away with sparks of gold fire.
“At the highest rung seek the Crown of Stars, the song of power revealed.”
She climbed the River of Light.
The path opened before her, the great river spoken of by so many of the ancient writers. Was it the seam that bound together the two hemispheres of the celestial sphere, as Theophrastus wrote? Or was the theory of Posidonos the correct one, that by its journey through the heavens it brought heat to the cold reaches of the universe?
Or was it only the ladder linking the spheres? She toiled upward, the current pushing her on from behind. Beneath her feet the land dropped away into darkness. Above, stars shone and yet began to fade into a new luminescence, one with a steely white light like that of a great, shining wall, the boundary that marked the limit of the lowest sphere. Low, like the delicate thrumming of plucked harp strings, she heard an eerie music more pulse than melody.
Rivulets sprang away from the main stream, so that the river itself became a labyrinth winding upward. On the currents of aether, insubstantial figures shaped in a vaguely humanlike form but composed of no mortal element danced in the fields of air through which these rivulets ran. The daimones of the lower sphere, those that lived below the Moon. If they saw her, they gave no sign. Their dance enraptured them, caught in the music of the spheres.
The thin arch of a gateway manifested in the shining wall that marked the limit of the sky. With a shock like the sight of a beloved kinsman thought dead but standing alive before her, she recognized this place. She had known it all along. Da had trained her in its passages, in the spiraling path that led ever upward. Although the way seemed obscure and veiled before her, she had a feeling very like that of homecoming as she ascended to the first gate, the gate she knew so well from the city of memory in whose architecture Da had trained her.
Had he known that the city of memory reflected, like a hazy image in a pond, the true structure of the universe? Or had he merely taught her what others had taught him, and by this means passed on to her what had remained hidden to generations of magi before him?
No matter.
She knew where she was going now. Each gate was part of the crossroads that linked the worlds.
As though her thought itself had the power of making, an archway built of aether and light flowed into existence against the shining wall. Before it stood a guardian, a daimone formed out of the substance of air and armed with a glittering spear as pale as ice.
“To what place do you seek entrance?” Its voice was as soft as the flow of water through a grassy side channel.
“I mean to cross into the sphere of the Moon,” she replied, determined not to quail before this heavenly creature.
“Who are you, to demand entrance?”
She knew well the power of names. “I have been called Bright One.”
It stepped back from her, as though the words had struck it like a blow, but kept its spear fixed across the gateway. “Child of Flame,” it whispered, “you have too much mortal substance. You are too heavy to cross. What can you give me to lighten your load?”
Even as it spoke, she felt the truth of its words. Her belongings dragged on her and, in another instant, she would plunge back to earth—or into the Abyss, falling forever. She had no wings.
Swiftly, she tugged off her boots and unpinned her cloak. As they fell away, she rose. A breath of aether picked her up bodily, and the guardian faded until she saw it only as a spire of ice sparkling by the gateway.
The way lay open.
She did not look back as she stepped over the threshold.
PART TWO
QUEENS’ GRAVE
V
IN THE AFTERLIFE
1
PROBABLY he was dead.
But when the fish twisted and slipped out of his hands to escape back into the river, it acted like a living fish. The men who laughed uproariously around him sounded lively enough, and the stocky man who had yesterday threatened him with an ax had certainly looked alarmingly alive.
He knew what death felt like. Just yesterday he had held a newborn infant in his hands that was blue with death, but he’d learned the trick from Aunt Bel that sometimes newly reborn souls needed chafing to startle them into remembering life. Just yesternight he’d stumbled through a battlefield with his own life leaking from him in flowering streams of blood.
It was hard to believe that he was alive now, even standing up to his hips in the cold river as the tug of the current tried to drag him downstream. It was easier to believe that he was dead, even if the fish in the baskets up on the shore churned and slithered, bright sunlight flashing on their scales. His companion, Urtan, clapped him on the shoulder and spoke words, none of which meant anything but which sounded cheerful enough. Maybe death wouldn’t prove onerou
s as long as God granted him such good company.
The other men, Tosti and Kel, had started splashing each other as soon as the last weir had been hauled into the shallows and emptied of its bounty. Now Kel stoppered up the weir with a plug of sodden wood and flung it back into the river, and they swam a little, laughing and talking and with gestures making him welcome to join them.
He let the current jostle him off his feet as he lay back into its pull. Didn’t death claim its victims in exactly this manner? Perhaps he was only streaming upward on the River of Heaven, making his way toward the Chamber of Light through a series of way stations. But as the water closed over his face, he heard the hounds barking. Just as he heaved himself over and stood, Sorrow bounded out into the river, paddling madly, while Rage yipped anxiously from the shore.
“Nay, nay, friend,” he said, hauling Sorrow by his forelegs back to the shallows, “I’ll bide here in this place for a while yet, if God so will it.” His companions swam closer, unsure of his intent. They smiled cautiously as he shook out his wet hair, then laughed when Sorrow let fly a spray of mist as the hound shook himself off.
The village lay just beyond the river. Towering behind sod-and-timber houses rose the huge tumulus with its freshly raised earthworks and the gaunt circle of giant stones at the flat summit. In many ways, the tumulus reminded him of the battlefield where he had fallen, but the river had run on a different course there, and the forest hadn’t grown as thickly to the north and west, and the tumulus itself had been so very ancient. Nor had there been a village lying in its shadow. This couldn’t be the same place where he had died.
“But it’s a good place,” he assured Sorrow, who regarded him reprovingly. Rage padded over for a pat and a scratch. “Yet doesn’t it seem strange to you that there should be no iron in the afterlife? They carry daggers of flint, and their ploughs are nothing but the stout fork of a tree shaped so that one length of it can turn the soil. It seems strange to me that God would punish common folk by making their day-to-day work harder in the other world.”
So Aunt Bel would have said. But of course, she wasn’t his aunt any longer; he had no family, orphaned child of a dead whore.
“Alain.” Urtan gestured toward the baskets, which needed two men each to hoist.
Perhaps he had no family, but in this land they needed him, even if only for as humble a task as carrying a basket of fish up to the village. Hadn’t he given everything else to the centaur woman? Maybe at this way station of the journey toward the Chamber of Light, he had to learn to forget the life he had once lived.
They hauled the baskets up the slope. Children shrieked and exclaimed over the fish, and after much good-natured jesting he realized that it wasn’t so hard after all to learn a few words: “fish,” “basket,” “knife,” and a word that meant “child,” applied equally to boys and girls.
It was a good idea to learn as much as he could, since he didn’t know how long he would bide here, or where he would end up next.
By the gates he saw Adica. Without the gold antlers and spiral waistband that had made her presence awe-inspiring up among the stones, she looked like any young woman, except for the lurid burn scar on her cheek. She watched them as they hauled the baskets through the gate, and he smiled, unaccountably pleased to see her, but the spark of pleasure reminded him of last night, when she had gestured toward the bed in her house. Her movement as she smiled in response made her corded skirt sway, revealing the length of her bare thighs.
He flushed and looked away. He had made vows to Tallia, hadn’t he? If he must abjure them, if he must admit that he and Tallia were no longer husband and wife, then hadn’t he long before that been promised to the church? He ought not to be admiring any woman.
Yet as they came to the big house that stood at the center of the village, he glanced back toward the gates, lying below them. Adica still stood there beside the elderly headwoman, called Orla. Hadn’t he given up all the vows and the promises, the lies and the secrets? Hadn’t the centaur woman taken his old life and left him as naked as a newborn child in a new world?
Perhaps, like the infant yesterday, he needed to learn how to breathe again. Perhaps that was the secret of the journey, that each way station taught you a new lesson before you were swept again downstream toward the obliterating light of God.
At the big house, children of varying ages swarmed up and, by some pattern he couldn’t quite discern, Urtan doled out the fish until a small portion was left for Tosti and Kel.
“Come, come,” said Kel, who had evidently been stung at birth by the bee of impatience. He and Tosti were close in age, very alike except in temperament. They led Alain through the village to the only other big house. It had a stone foundation, wood pillars and beams, a thatched roof, and pungent stables attached at one end, now empty except for the lingering aroma of cattle. Inside, Kel showed him a variety of furs and sleeping mats woven of reeds rolled up on wooden platforms ranged under the sloping walls. The young man showed him a place, mimed sleeping, and made Alain repeat five times the word which perhaps meant “sleep” or else “bed.” Satisfied, he led Alain outside. Setting the guts aside for the stew pot, they lay the cleaned fish out to dry on a platform plaited out of willow branches. It took Alain a few tries to get the hang of using a flint knife, but he persevered, and Tosti, at least, was patient enough to leave him alone to get the hang of it.
There were other chores to be done. As Aunt Bel used to say, “work never ceases, only our brief lives do.” Work helped him forget. He set to willingly, whether it was gutting fish or, as today, felling trees for a palisade. He learned to use a stone ax, which didn’t cut nearly as well as the iron he was used to and, after a number of false starts, got the hang of using a flint adze.
Could it be that God wished humankind to recall that war had no place in the Chamber of Light? War sprang from iron, out of which weapons were made. After all, it was with an iron sword that the Lady of Battles had dealt the killing blow.
Yet if these people didn’t know war, then why were they fortifying their village?
Kel got impatient with the speed at which Alain trimmed bark from the fallen tree, and by gestures showed him that he should go back to felling trees while Kel did the trimming. Tosti scolded Kel, but Alain good-naturedly exchanged adze for ax. He and Urtan examined a goodly stand of young beech and marked four particularly strong, straight trees for felling.
Alain measured falling distance and angle, and started chopping. His first swing got off wrong, and he merely nicked the tree and had to skip back to avoid hitting his own legs. A man appeared suddenly from behind and with a curse gave a hard strike to the tree. Chips flew and the ax sank deep.
Startled, Alain hesitated. The man turned, looking him over with an expression of disgust and challenge. It was the man who had threatened him yesterday, who went by the name Beor. He was as tall as Alain and half again as broad, with the kind of hands that looked able to crush rocks.
The men around grew quiet; two more, whose faces he recognized, had appeared from out of the forest. Everyone waited and watched. No one moved to interfere. Once, with senses sharpened by his blood link to Fifth Son, who had taken the name Stronghand, he would have heard each least crease of loam crushed under Beor’s weight as the other man shifted, readying to strike, and he would have tasted Beor’s anger and envy as though it were an actual flavor. But now he could not feel Stronghand’s presence woven into his thoughts; the lack of it made his heart feel strangely empty, distended, and limp. Had he given that blood link to the centaur sorcerer, too, or had he only lost the link to Stronghand because blood could not in fact transcend death?
Yet envy and anger are easy enough to read in a man’s stance and in his expression. Rage padded forward to sit beside Alain. She growled softly.
Alain stepped forward and jerked the ax out of the tree. He offered it to Beor who, after a moment’s hesitation, took it roughly out of his hands. “You’ve great skill with that ax,” Alain said with d
efiant congeniality, “and I’ve little enough with a tool I’m unaccustomed to, but I mean to fell this tree, so I will do so and thank you to stand aside.”
He deliberately turned his back on the man. The weight of the other workers’ stares made his first strokes clumsy, but he stubbornly kept on even when Beor began to make what were obviously insulting comments about his lack of skill with the ax. Why did Beor hate him?
Behind him, the other men moved away to their own tasks. Beor’s presence remained, massive and hostile. With one blow, he could strike Alain down from behind, smash his head in, or cripple him with a well-placed chop to the back.
It didn’t matter. Alain just kept on, fell into the pattern of it finally as the wedge widened and the tree, at last, creaked, groaned, and fell. Beor had been so intent on glowering that he had to leap back, and Urtan made a tart comment, but no one laughed. They were either too afraid or too respectful of Beor to laugh at him.
It was well to know the measure of one’s opponents. That was why he had lost Lavas county to Geoffrey: he hadn’t understood the depth of Geoffrey’s envy and hatred. Could he have kept the county and won over Tallia if he had acted differently?
Yet what use in rubbing the wound raw instead of giving it a chance to heal? Lavas county belonged to Geoffrey’s daughter now. Tallia had left him of her own free will. He had to let it go.
Kel began trimming the newly fallen beech, and Alain started in on the next tree. Eventually, Beor faded back to work elsewhere, although at intervals Alain felt his glance like a poisoned arrow glancing off his back. But he never dignified Beor’s jealousy with an answer. He just kept working.
In the late afternoon, they hitched up oxen to drag the trimmed and finished poles back toward the village. Sweat dried on his back as he walked. The other men wore simple breechclouts, fashioned of cloth or leather. The tunic Adica had given him looked nothing like their clothing. It had a finer weave and a shaped form that was easy to work and move in, even when he dropped it off his shoulders and tied it at his hips with a belt of bast rope. The men of the village had stocky bodies, well muscled and quite hairy. They had keen, bright faces and were quick to laughter, mostly, but they didn’t really resemble any of the people he knew or had ever seen, as if here in the afterlife God had chosen to shape humankind a little differently.