Crown Of Stars - Child Of Flame Part 12

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 rang 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sages, 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 gra.s.sy 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.

JENS' GRAVE.

IN THE AFTERLIFE.

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 sh.o.r.e churned and slithered, bright sunlight flas.h.i.+ng 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 J wouldn't prove onerous as long as G.o.d granted him such good company.

The other men, Tosti and Kel, had started splas.h.i.+ng 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 sh.o.r.e.

"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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sured 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 G.o.d 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 wh.o.r.e.

"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 G.o.d.

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 ch.o.r.es 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 G.o.d 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. 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 Strong-hand, he would have heard each least crease of loam crushed under Beor's weight as the other man s.h.i.+fted, 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 defiant 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, ma.s.sive 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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, fas.h.i.+oned 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 G.o.d had chosen to shape humankind a little differently.

Unlike his kinsman Kel, Urtan had the gift of patience, and he fell back to walk beside Alain to teach him new words: the names of trees, the parts of the body, the different tools and the type of stone they were made of. Beor strode at the front with various companions walking beside him. Now and again he shot an irate glance back toward Alain. But unlike an arrow, a glance could not p.r.i.c.k unless you let it. Beor might hurt and even kill in a fit of jealous rage, but he could never do any other harm because he hadn't any subtlety.

The village feasted that evening on fish, venison, and a potage of barley mush flavored with herbs and leaves from the forest, sweetened by berries. Urtan ate with his family, his wife Abidi and his children Urta and a toddler who didn't seem to have an intelligible name, leaving Alain to eat with the unmarried men, all of them except Beor little more than youths. Adica ate by herself, off to one side, without companions.h.i.+p, but when Alain made to get up to go over to her, Kel grabbed him and jerked him back, gesturing that it wasn't permitted. Adica had been watching him, and now she smiled slightly and looked away. The burn scar along her cheek looked rather like a congealed spider's web, running from her right ear down around the curve of the jawline to fade almost at her throat. The tip of her right ear was missing, so cleanly healed that it merely looked misshapen.

Beor rose abruptly and began declaiming as twilight fell. Like a man telling a war story, he went on at length. Was he boasting? Kel and Tosti started to yawn, and Adica rose suddenly in the middle of the story and walked right out, away into the village. Alain wanted to follow her, but he wasn't sure if such a thing was permitted. At last, Beor finished his tale. It was time for bed. Alain's friends had given him a place to sleep beside them but at the opposite end of the men's house from Beor. He was tired enough to welcome sleep, but when he rolled himself up in the furs allotted him, stones pressed into his side. He groped and found the offending pebbles, but they weren't stones at all but some kind of necklace. It hadn't been there earlier.

At dawn, when he woke, he hurried outside to get enough light to see: someone had given him a necklace of amber. Kel, stumbling out sleepily behind him, whistled in admiration for the handsome gift, and called out to the others, and they teased Alain cheerfully, all but Beor, who stalked off.

Down by the village gates, Adica was'already up, performing the ritual she made every day at the gateway, perhaps a charm of protection. As if she heard their laughter, she glanced up. He couldn't see her face clearly, but her stance spoke to him, the way she straightened her back self-consciously, the curve of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s under her bodice, the swaying of her string skirt as she walked from the gates over the plank bridge. It was difficult not to be distracted by the movement of her hips under the revealing skirt.

Kel and Tosti laughed outright and clapped him on the shoulder. He could imagine what their words meant: gifts and women and longing looks. Some things didn't change, even in the afterlife.

i o He had come a long way. He no longer wore the ring that marked him as heir to the Count of Lavas. He no longer had to honor the vows pledged between him and Tallia. He no longer served the Lady of Battles. With a smile, he put on the amber necklace, although the gesture made his friends whoop and laugh.

That day they hoisted the poles they'd cut the day before into place in the new palisade. Once, Beor neglected to brace while Alain was filling in dirt around a newly upright pole, and the resultant tumble caused two poles to come down. Luckily no one was hurt, but Beor got a scolding from one of the older men.

Alain went down with Kel and Tosti to the river afterward to wash." Come!" shouted Kel just before he dove under the water." Good!" he added, when he came up for air." Good water. Water is good."

Alain was distracted by the sight of the tumulus. Here, upstream from the village, the river cut so close below the earthworks that the ramparts rose right out of the water except for a thin strand of pebbly beach from which the men swam. He couldn't see the stone circle from this angle, but something glinted from the height above nevertheless, a wink like gold. The twisting angle of the earthworks reminded him of the battle where he had fallen. He heard Thiadbold's cries as if a ghost whispered in his ear. The past haunted him. Did the bones of their enemies lie up there? Two days ago, he had wandered off the height in a daze, following Adica. He hadn't really looked.

Stung by curiosity and foreboding, he began to climb. His companions shouted after him, good-humoredly at first, then disapprovingly and, finally, as he got over the first earthwork and headed for the next, with real apprehension. But no one followed him. At the top a wind was rising and he heard the hoot of an owl, although the sun hadn't yet set. Where it sank in the west, clouds gathered, diffusing its light. The stones gleamed. He ran, with the hounds beside him, sure he would see his comrades, the Lions, fallen beside their Quman enemies, whose wings would be scattered and molting, melting away under wind and sun.

As soon as he crossed into the stone circle, mist boiled up, drowning him, and he floundered forward. Was that the ring of battle in the distance? If he walked far enough, would he stumble back to the place he'd come from?

Did he want to?

He struck full against the altar stone, banging his thighs, and held himself up against the cold stone. The ringing had a gentle voice, not weapons at all but the click of leaves on the bronze cauldron.

"Why come you to the gateway?" said a voice he recognized from his dream.

He looked up but could see only a shape moving in the mist and the spark of blue fire, quickly extinguished.

"Why am I here? Where am I?"

"You have not traveled far as humankind measures each stride of the foot," she answered." I brought you off the path that leads to the Other Side. Has it not been told to you that you are to be the new husband of the Hallowed One of this tribe?"

He touched the amber necklace at his neck, remembering the way Adica had invited him to sleep beside her. He had been angry, then, because he felt his desire was shameful." None here speak in a language I understand, nor can they understand me. How is it that we can speak together, you and I, while I speak as a foreigner would with the others? You aren't even human."

"By my nature I am bound to what was, what is, and what will be, and so my understanding is alive in the time to come as well as the time that is and the time that was." Abruptly her tone changed, as though she were speaking to someone else." Listen!" Her voice became faint. He heard the soft percussion of her hooves on the ground, moving away." I am called. Adica comes looking." Fainter still: "Beware. Guard the looms. The Cursed Ones walk!"

"Can't you give me the gift of speech?" he called, but she was already gone.

"Alain!"

The mist receded as suddenly as it had come. Adica hurried to meet him as twilight settled over the stones. He sat down, worn out by labor and by strangeness.

Adica stopped before him and looked him over, both alarmed and concerned and, maybe, just a little irritated. She was handsome rather than pretty, with a wickedly sharp gaze and a firm mouth. This close, he had the leisure to study her body: she had the pleasing curves of a woman who usually gets enough to eat, but she had a second quality about her, an intangible strength like the glow off a hidden fire. In a funny way, she reminded him of Liath, as if magic threw a cloak over its wielders, seen as a nimbus of power.

Her next words reproved him, although he couldn't be sure for what. Abruptly, she saw the line of the amber necklace where it lay concealed under his linen tunic.

Reproof vanished. She brushed a finger along the ridge the string of amber made under the soft fabric, then flushed.

"You gave this to me, didn't you?" he asked, lifting it on his fingers to display it.

She smiled and replied in a tone half caressing and half flirtatious.

"Ai, G.o.d, I wish I could understand you," he exclaimed, frustrated." Is it true I'm to be your husband? Are we to come to the marriage knowing so little of each other? Yet I knew nothing of Tallia on the day we were taken to the wedding bed. Ai, Lady, so little did I know of her!" He could still feel the nail in his hand, proof of her willingness to deceive.

Mistaking his cry, or responding to it, Adica took hold of his hand and pulled him to his feet. For an instant, he thought she would kiss him, but she did not. In silence, she led him back to the village. The clasp of her hand made his thoughts swim dizzyingly until they drifted up at last to the centaur shaman's last words. Who were the Cursed Ones? What were the looms? And how could he tell Adica, when they had no language in common?

dCXME, up, to morning sun!" Kel prodded Alain awake." To work!" He made an expansive gesture that included himself, Tosti, and Alain." We go to work."

Three more days had pa.s.sed in the village. It was a prosperous place, twelve houses and perhaps a hundred people in all. They had about a fourth of the outer palisade raised and today headed back to the forest to fell trees. Work made the day pa.s.s swiftly.

During one leisurely break, Kel finished carving a stout staff out of oak, ornamenting each end with the face of a snarling dog. When next Beor hoisted his ax near Alain with a surly and threatening grimace, Kel made a great show of presenting the newly carved staff to Alain and even got Tosti to stand in for a demonstration of how the snarling dogs could "nip" at a man's most delicate parts.

The men's laughter came at the expense of Beor this time, and he grunted and bore it, since to stalk off into the forest would have made him look even more ridiculous. Grudgingly, he let Alain work in peace as the afternoon wore on.

But that evening they returned home to a somber scene. During the day, a child had died. By the stoic look on the faces of the dead child's relative, they'd known it was coming. Alain watched as women wrapped the tiny body in a roughly-woven blanket, then handed the limp corpse to the father. He laid it in a log split in half and gouged out to make a coffin. After the mother placed a few trinkets, beads, feathers, and a carved wooden spoon beside its tattooed wrist, other adults sealed the lid. Together, they chanted a singsong verse that sounded like prayer.

A strange half-human creature emerged from Adica's house, clothed in power, with gold antlers and a gleaming torso. It took him two breaths to recognize Adica, dressed in the garments of power she had been wearing when he had first arrived.