Crown Of Stars - Child Of Flame Part 39

"Let me see," said Adica, more insistently now. He held out his arm. Where her fingers probed gingerly, pain flared. He looked away, unwilling to see the angry swelling turn ^hite where she pressed on it, as if it were already dead and rottir '.

Sorrow and Rage took off running down the ^each, stretching their legs at last. Many tunnels studded the cliff face that backed the strand. A ship lay beached on the sand, drawn up out of tide's reach: sleek curves and pale, gleaming wood.

Seeing him stare, Adica spoke as she continued to probe. In a way, her matter-of-fact voice took his mind off the pain and off the fear of what the snake's poison might be working in him." Only the Cursed Ones build such beautiful ships, as fair as the stars and strong enough to sail out of sight of land. In such ships, the Cursed Ones crossed the world ocean. They came from the west many generations ago, in the time of the ancient queens. Here in human lands they crafted a new empire built out of human bone and human blood."

* "Ai, G.o.d, look." He choked, wincing as Adica's touch reached the painful bite.

The phoenix had gotten here before them. The ship hadn't burned, but its sails had. The planks had scorched but remained intact. Dead littered the beach like flotsam.

Not even an enemy deserved a death like this one, rent to pieces, burned, and mangled.

"I'll make a poultice," said Adica, letting go of his hand.

"Where has the phoenix gone?" asked Laoina nervously, but she headed down along the sh.o.r.e to collect weapons off the dead.

Was that movement, out on the sand? He hurried forward to kneel beside a body, one among two dozen, a formidable raiding party with their bronze swords and spears, and wooden shields overlaid with a sheet of bronze embossed with cunning scenes of war.

Formidable, except that they were all dead now.

The man moaned, gurgling. His crested helmet had been half torn off his head, his wolf's mask ripped clean off, but the death wound had come when claws had punctured his lungs.

"Poor suffering soul," murmured Alain, kneeling beside him. His proud face reminded Alain bitterly of Prince Sanglant: the same bronze complexion, high, broad cheekbones, and deep-set eyes, although this man's eyes, like a deer's, were a depthless brown. Despite his wounds, he hissed a curse through b.l.o.o.d.y lips when he saw Alain looming over him, and in an odd way, Alain felt he could understand him, a dutiful soldier defiant to the last: "Although you defeat me, you'll never defeat my people, beast's child."

"Hush, now," said Alain." I hope you find peace, Brother- Laoina stepped up beside him and drove her spear through the man's throat." Sa'anit! So dies another one!" She spat on the Cursed One's face.

Alain rose." What need to treat him cruelly when he already dies?"

"How is a quick death a cruel one? That is better than the death his kind give to their human slaves!"

"So may they do, but that doesn't mean we must become as they are! If we let them make us savages, then we have lost more than one battle. If we lose mercy, then we may as well become like the beasts of the wild." With his good hand, he gestured toward the carnage left by the phoenix. Blood stained the sand and leaked in rivulets out into the sea, soon lost among the surging waves.

Laoina stabbed her spear into the sand to clean the blood off of it. When she looked up, she met his gaze, warily respectful." Maybe there is truth in what you say. But they still must die." Then she flushed, looking at his wounded arm.

"I won't die," he promised her. But he thought, suddenly and vividly, of Lavastine and of the way Bloodheart's curse had, so slowly, turned the count into stone. Yet when Alain touched his swollen, hot fingers they hurt terribly, and he could still feel bone, flesh, and skin. Even to turn his wrist caused enough pain to make him dizzy. But he wasn't turning to stone.

The sea hissed as waves sighed up onto the beach and slid away I again, leaving foam behind.

"Hei!" By the cliff, Two Fingers pulled a bush away to reveal a cave's mouth.

Alain stayed on watch while the others dragged out a slender boat, deep-hulled, with clinker-built sides, a steering oar, four oar ports on each side, and a single mast, and shoved it down over the sand and into the water before fastening down all their gear and looted weapons as ballast. Alain whistled, and the hounds came galloping back, eager and fresh, to pile in with them.

Two Fingers unwound eight heavy ropes % ened to hooks at the stem of the ship and flung them over the^ jide. He stationed himself at the stem. While the boat rocked on incoming waves, he drew a bone flute out of his pouch and began to play.

They came, first, like ripples in the water. Two creatures reared up from the waves, their bodies glistening as foam spilled around them. They wore faces that had a vaguely human shape, with the sharp teeth of a predator. The skin of their faces and their shoulders and torsos had a sheeny, slick texture, as pale as maggots. The first dove, swiftly, and slapped the surface of the water with a muscular tail.

Alain stared." He's summoned the merfolk! I never thought " He reeled as the boat rocked under his feet. How long had it been since he had dreamed of Stronghand?

But he was dead, wasn't he? The dead did not dream, and he had not dreamed of Stronghand since the centaur shaman had brought him to Adica's side. In a way, staring at the sea, it was like dreaming of Stronghand all over again.

If he was already dead, then he could not die again, even from a poisoned snake bite. He laughed, grasped Adica's shoulder, and turned her so that he could kiss her on the cheek.

"Maybe the poison makes you lose your wits," muttered Laoina.

Adica's frowning apprehension was as strong as the salt smell of the sea, yet she was too practical to weep and moan. She crouched in the boat and began to rummage through her pack while, as Two Fingers played the flute, the merfolk circled in reluctantly.

A second pair arrived, and a third, and suddenly the boat lurched under Alain, and he sat down hard onto the floorboards, clutching at the side with his good hand. His staff clattered against the stern-post. He caught it just before it tumbled into the water. The hounds settled down, whining softly. Laoina spoke soft words, as though she were praying, and stared in wonder and horror as the merfolk caught the ropes in their clawed hands and, to the tune of Two Fingers' flute, pulled the boat onto the sea.

A fourth pair arrived, then a fifth and a sixth, until there were always some circling and some towing, their bodies a slick curve against the dark waters. The strand and the cliff receded until even the gleam of the crippled ship left stranded on the beach vanished from sight.

Alain's arm throbbed steadily, all the way up to the armband. His ears rang slightly, and he felt feverish, or maybe he was only shivering because of the wind and the cold sea spray.

"Drink this." Adica set the rim of a leather cup to his lips, and he swallowed obediently. Afterward, she pressed a cool mash against the swollen bite and wrapped it tightly under a bit of wool cloth.

Night fell. Alain could not see the merfolk at all, yet the salt spray stung his lips and eyes and the boat heaved and danced under him as they pressed onward. His hair, his clothing, his skin: all were sticky with salt. Adica had fallen asleep under her fur cloak.

He dozed, and woke, cold, damp, and miserable with his head pillowed on Sorrow's ma.s.sive back. Two Fingers stood tall and straight by the stempost, playing. Alain knew a spell when he heard one. Should Two Fingers falter, they might well be abandoned here in the middle of the sea, left to drift and, finally, die of thirst despite the wealth of water. Alain found a waterskin but drank sparingly, even though he had gotten very thirsty.

For a long while he sat in silence, in the darkness, his hand and arm hurting too much to let him sleep, as the boat split the waters and raced onward. The merfolk made clicking sounds so muted that at first he thought it was the hounds' nails ticking on wood. But the pitch and distance of these clicks changed and shifted: in this way the merfolk communicated each to the others, punctuated by sudden wild hoots and spits of water arcing skyward.

He swam in and out of waking as he shivered, dreaming that he could understand their talk: "Turn them out of their sh.e.l.l and into the world so we can eat them. Nay, the queen bids us. We cannot refuse her song."

Sometimes when they changed direction, swells. .h.i.t them sideways and water spilled over the side. Every time cold seawater sluiced around his feet, he bailed while the hounds whimpered. Here, out on the sea, the two hounds scarcely resembled the fearsome creatures they were on land. To the merfolk, whose element this was, the dogs would no doubt be nothing more/ijn a tidy morsel gulped down. Nor could the human pa.s.sengers^ xpect any mercy. He didn't like to think of what would happen to one who fell over the side.

The rhythm of the waves chopping at the underside of the boat lulled him into a doze even as his blood pulsed hotly in his hand. He slept fitfully, dreaming of a great chasm opening in the heavens as the earth split beneath his feet and plunged him into an abyss with no bottom into which he fell and fell and fell. ... He had sworn to protect her, just as he had sworn to protect Lavastine, and now he had failed.

"Alain."

He started awake, almost crying out in relief to find that it was Adica, alive and well, shaking him gently. Her face was a shadow against the sky, like a ghost, nothing more than eyes, nose, and mouth.

"I feared for you, beloved." She touched his lips, brushed her CHILD or FLAME fingers lightly over his forehead, and checked his pulse at his throat.

"I am well enough." He tested his hand but still could not flex it. It felt stiff as a board and twice as large as normal. But he could bend his elbow, very slowly.

Up by the stem, Laoina crouched behind Two Fingers, staring into the sea.

"You must see." Adica's voice had an odd hitch in it.

The waters sang around them, an eerie lilt, like the sea wind streaming through a hundred whistles. Light gleamed from the watery depths. He crawled over the nets splayed over the ballast and, clinging to the side, looked out over the waters.

There was a city under the sea.

A whorl of light, like a vast sh.e.l.l, spread across the seabed below them. It seemed to go on and on and on in a tangle of curving walls, accretions of alabaster or palest living sh.e.l.l coated with phosphorus that pulsed in time to the waves above, or some respiration of the sea unknown and unknowable to him and to all creatures who live in the world of air.

A crowd of merfolk rose to the brink of sea and sky to swarm around the ship. They, too, seemed trapped by Two Finger's flute. Their dance, as they swam in tight circles and spirals, winding in and out around the ship as it streamed through the waters, seemed born as much out of resentment as enchantment. Magic binds. They were powerless against the spell he wove.

At times, a pair of merfolk streaked in, taking over the ropes; the tired pair melted away, lost as they sank into the darkness. Their clicking and singing serenaded their voyage, yet it was no restful lullaby. 'What lies beyond the Quickening? How can magic out of the thin world bind us? We could eat them if it weren't for that sh.e.l.l. Do they breathe in the Slow, too?'

He was so tired that his drifting mind wove those noises into intelligible language. Were the merfolk simply beasts? Stronghand had not thought so. Stronghand had negotiated with them, trading blood for blood, the currency he knew best. They had shown signs of intelligence, and here lay greater evidence before Alain's eyes: a vast city.

How was it possible to know what was truth and what was falsely seen, the outer seeming that concealed the inner heart?

How could one person ever pull aside all the veils that shrouded his sight and m.u.f.fled his hearing?

At last the whorled city pa.s.sed away and the swarming seafolk dropped behind, diving back to their home, all but the ones who towed their craft. At intervals a new pair surfaced abruptly to take the turn of ones exhausted. In this manner, as night pa.s.sed, they went on, and at last Alain slept.

DAWN bled light over the waters and, as the sun rose, Adica saw birds, the harbinger of land. Driftwood bobbed thoughtfully along the swells. Whips of kelp slithered along the hull before being left behind. A trio of porpoises surfaced, blowing, and vanished.

Adica turned away from this appealing vista to examine Alain's hand and arm. Although the skin was still swollen to a bitter, nasty red, it looked no worse than it had yestere**J Surely, if it meant to kill him, he would be suffering more by n*w.

"There!" cried Laoina.

White flashed along the horizon. Was it land?

"It is a ship," said Alain.

"They will kill us if they catch us." Laoina hooked her elbow around the mast. She shinnied up the bar, trying to get a better look, and swore vigorously." It is ship of the Cursed Ones."

Two Fingers did not falter, although he looked exhausted. The merfolk swam on, plunging through the waves with the ropes taut behind them. The ship creaked and moaned as it hit choppier waters.

Adica fumbled in her pouch, her hands cold and stiff and sticky with salt. She blew on her fingers to warm them before struggling to open the strings of the pouch, now swollen with brine. Inside, she found her tiny bundle of precious Queen's Broom and a braid of dried thistle. She twined the Queen's Broom into herbodice so that it wouldn't fall, and with some effort struck flame, with her flint, and set the braid of thistle alight. As it burned, she sang a spell: "Flee now, thistle, The lesser from the greater, The greater from the lesser. Let there be no meeting And no bloodshed."

Fighting the rocking ship, she lurched toward the stern. The ship plunged down a high swell and she fell hard against the sternpost. Alain caught her with his good hand before she fell overboard. Hanging there, she watched the distant ship heave to and change direction. Had they spotted them?

Quickly, she fastened the Queen's Broom to the sternpost and, with the sting of the burning thistle still in her nostrils, sang the spell again.

As they watched, it became apparent that the other ship had not seen them. It came no closer and in time vanished over the horizon.

Sh.o.r.eline rose in the distance, more green than brown. They hit the first line of surf just as the ropes went slack and the merfolk rolled away, letting the swells carry them toward sh.o.r.e. The sea creatures lolled in the waves, watching. One bold merchild swam so close that Adica saw the tiny mouths snapping at the ends of its hair, like eels. Beady eyes studied the ship with greedy antic.i.p.ation just before the merchild dove under the boat. Its back jostled the hull, rocking them enough that Two Fingers had to grab at the stempost to keep from being thrown over the side. Abruptly, the merfolk swarmed menacingly around the boat, only to retreat as the waves dissolved into breakers.

With the breaking waves throwing spray over them, Alain made to jump out of the ship and guide them in, but Two Fingers grabbed his good arm.

"Stay!" Laoina was quick to translate." Beware the water. The merfolk have shs./p teeth and do not wish us any kindness."

"True enough."

The merfolk stayed beyond the breakers, but one coursed in, in their wake, rolled, and spun away again, letting the outgoing waves drag it off the sh.o.r.e. When the ship finally sc.r.a.ped bottom, Alain leaped off, followed by the rest, and they dragged the boat up onto the sh.o.r.e, out of reach of the tide. The dogs yelped and bounded around, chasing their own tails, barking and racing.

Two Fingers waded out to his knees in the waves, facing the sea. The waters hissed and ebbed around his legs. He raised both hands." Thank you, sisters and brothers. You, also, have done your share, if unwillingly. I return to you this bone that once belonged to your queen."

He flung the bone flute high and long. It disappeared into the waters. A swarm of bodies churned the sea where it had fallen. As suddenly, all trace of the merfolk vanished. The sea sighed in along the beach, and the morning sun drenched the sand with gold. The only sound was the water and the bubbling song of a curlew.

Far out, movement flickered. A single gray tail flicked into sight, slapped down. Then, nothing. The merfolk had gone.

"So." Laoina turned to take in the view. The beach itself, more pebbles than sand, stretched eastward out of sight, bounded on the west by a low headland evergreen with scrub and trees grown distorted under the constant pressure of wind. Hills rose up behind them, pockmarked with shallow caves." Let's find shelter and something fresh to eat."

Two Fingers waded back to sh.o.r.e. They dragged the boat up the beach and sheltered it in a cave, blocking the entrance with driftwood, and stowing a cache of weapons, too many for them to carry. A trail led past sh.e.l.lfish beds, populated by a flock of annoyed oyster catchers, who protested, kleeping, a& e four humans raided the rich tidal pools. Out of the wind, they^%md a hollow that showed signs of previous habitation: a fire pit, a lean-to woven out of branches, a pile of discarded flint shavings and broken tools. Sh.e.l.l mounds rose at intervals along the path. After collecting driftwood, Adica struck a fire.

They rested here, rinsing the salt out of their clothing and hair in a nearby stream.

Adica pulled Alain aside into the shelter of a copse of low trees. She was greedy for him. It was a curse to want someone so badly that you would make demands on him even when he was injured, but his sweetness was a healing nectar. He kissed her eagerly-he always did, like someone who has been denied water for too long.

It was a little awkward, with him favoring his one arm, but wasn't it true that lovemaking was exactly the thing to take one's mind off pain and anxiety? So it had proved for her.

She dozed a little, after. Walking the looms made her so tired. Fighting the constant urge to worry and be afraid and angry at fate made her so tired. Live now, each moment, each kiss.

She woke to Laoina's call. The dogs swarmed over them, licking Alain's face, sniffing at his swollen hand. He laughed and shoved them away. For the first time, he could close his bitten hand halfway, and that made him kiss her so pa.s.sionately that finally Laoina had to come and, with a laugh and a gentle prod of her spear, remind them that it was time to move on.

Their clothes had dried, stretched along a fallen log to catch the sunlight. It was a hot day, quickly felt as they walked.

They hiked a trail obviously used for part of the year, grown over but distinct, a pleasant path with heights and falls. The landscape of oak wood and pine opened frequently into bright clearings. Ivy twined up the oaks and the shrub layer grew in some places as tall as she was. The dogs often ran off to lose themselves in the leaves. She would hear them barking and rattling branches, never losing track of Alain but often out of his sight. Madder grew across the path, and butcher's broom spread in dense shrubs. It was very different than the forest she was most familiar with.

That night they sheltered in another campsite, made pleasant by the addition of several lean-tos, branches bowed and covered with thatch to provide shelter. The clouds had blown off, and the night was unusually warm and balmy, not one for hiding in a shelter.

"This is a winter camp," explained Two Fingers as he and Adica made note of the position of the stars. The Hare leaped higher here in the south.

"Look at the Sisters and the Bull," she said, as Laoina translated." Can it be true that summer is here? We left my village at the spring equinox."

Yet what could she do? That was the curse of the looms, that they ate one's life like a hungry wolf eating you up in bites. All she could do was live in the day given her. It would have to be enough.

In the morning Laoina skinned and roasted three rabbits that had been trapped overnight in srares while Adica spread a poultice of bramble leaves and comfrey on Alain's hand to draw out the swelling. When they had done, they set the campsite in order, buried their leavings, and set out. Laoina hung the sc.r.a.ped rabbit skins over her back so that she seemed to be wearing withered wings as she walked. She knew these lands well enough to comment on familiar landmarks. She had sojourned here for many seasons when she had come to learn the language of Horn's people, and she knew the names and uses of many of the plants, and recognized birdsong. Not even Two Fingers had her knowledge of the land. He had, so he said, lived with Horn's people when he was a boy, to study with her-Horn had been a woman already when he was a boy-but he had been so taken up with the arts of the ancient ones and the caverns in which the secrets of her ancestors lay concealed that he had often gone for days without seeing the light of the sun.

"To the place of caves I will take you now, to see if there is truth to the words of the Walking One from whom you heard this grievous news."

The path grew steeper, clambering up goatlike along the side of a ravine, and brought them to a plateau where oak wood gave way to brush. Three goats fled into the forest at the approach of the dogs. Two Fingers moved forward cautiously into range of a watch post, somewhat the worse for weathering: its plank roof had fallen in. A cistern lay beside it. He sipped at its waters, declared them good, and they refilled their waterskins while Alain clambered up to the topmost part of the wall, finding that he could, with care, use his injured hand to grip. When he found a safe vantage place and beckoned, they climbed up beside him.

Stumps of trees littered the hillside, giving way downslope to an extensive grove of olive trees and, farther down, irrigated fields woven together with an elaborate pattern of ca.n.a.ls. The town itself lay on a rise. Ma.s.sively fortified with earth walls and^ wooden palisade, it looked impregnable to Adica's eyes, yet the *ures that walked its ramparts wore the crested helmets and anifhal masks that marked the soldiers of the Cursed Ones. Some of the houses in the village lay in ruins, burned or torn down, and a few human figures labored at the tannery and in the fields, stooped with misery and despair. Fresh scars marked the earth just outside the rampart. Adica shuddered: she knew that the Cursed Ones had a habit of throwing the dead bodies of their slain enemies in pits, like offal, thus condemning their souls to haunt the living for eternity since the souls of the dead could not pa.s.s on to the Other Side without the proper ceremonies and preparation. She caught sight of a flock of hummocks, like sheep, to the north. There, almost out of sight, lay the tombs common to the tribe. They, at least, did not look disturbed. But in their midst she saw the uprights of a stone loom, and tiny figures standing guard. The Cursed Ones held the path in and out of Horn's country.

"Horn and her people will have taken refuge in the caves of her ancestors." Two Fingers made no other comment on the devastation.

They negotiated the broken walls of the watch post and fell back to the safety of the oak wood. Both Two Fingers and Laoina knew this trail well, although it was cunningly hidden and disguised by a series of dead ends, deadfalls, switchbacks, and false turnings. They came finally to a limestone outcropping where a cave mouth gaped, but Two Fingers led them past this inviting opening and down over the rocky slope, until with his spear he swept aside the heavily weighted branches of a flowering clematis. A small opening cleft the hillside, barely large enough for an adult. Two Fingers got down on hands and knees and clambered in without hesitation. Laoina waited, indicating that the others should go first. After commanding the dogs to wait, Alain followed the old man into the hill, more confident now that he had regained some feeling in his hand.

Adica crawled after them. The rock closed over her head, and, very quickly, darkness blinded her. It was slow going because of her hesitancy, but she heard the movements of the two men ahead of her and Laoina behind and in general the going was fairly smooth. The tunnel forked to the right, and suddenly she heard whistling and moaning: narrow shafts thrust skyward, a pipe for the wind. The tunnel dipped, hit an incline, and at the base opened out. By now it was pitch-black. She groped, found Alain's body, and held on to him as Laoina came up behind her. Night had never bothered her, nor her visits into the tomb of the ancient queens under the tumulus, but this place, narrow and clammy, had a presence that weighed uncomfortably, as though the earth itself had consciousness.

"Come," said Two Fingers, as Laoina translated." Hold one onto the next, and follow me. There is a trap we must work around."

"You don't think they've laid in others since the attack?" asked Laoina.

"It may be. But I have certain charms upon me that will warn me."

So it proved. Three times he stopped them. Once, she heard a hissed conversation, words exchanged, and they were allowed to pa.s.s through a bottleneck so narrow that she had to squeeze sideways to get through. A hand brushed her head, checking for the telltale topknot worn by the Cursed Ones, and let her by without further molesting her. It was a good place for an ambush. She was blind as a mole; she could not even see her own hands in front of her face. How the others moved with any sense of confidence she couldn't imagine, and yet wasn't all their work as the Hallowed Ones, learning the secrets of the great weaving, itself like groping forward in darkness?

None among humankind knew the extent of the Cursed Ones' magic. They could call fire from stone and earth from water; they could cause wind to arise from flame and water to leach out of the air. They knew the power of transformation, and they could coax elementals from their hiding places among the ordinary places of the Earth. For this power they paid a price, and they paid it not just with their own blood but with the blood of their enemies.

So humankind had perforce learned other magic, those manipu-lable by the hands: smithing and pottery; plaiting and weaving; words and melody and dance. In such forms, human magic flourished, and in this way the ancient mothers and fathers had observed the turning wheel of the heavens and the way in which the shuttles, known as the wandering stars, moved an invisible weft through those stars which never changed position in reference to each other. Adica had listened at the knee of her teacher for years and been initiated into the greater mysteries, and into the secrets of the great working: That the stars in the heavens aH^ve were woven as though in a vast loom, and the power of trios*Threads could be drawn down to Earth and woven into power made manifest here, on Earth.

All this had gone into the building of the stone looms that now waited in readiness across the land, set such great distances apart that she knew if she tried to travel between them on foot she could probably never reach them all in her own lifetime. But each loom, when woven with the living threads of the stars, made a gateway that linked it to all of the other looms, a gateway that might lead east and south on one night, depending on the configuration of the stars, and north and west another.

Yet the Holy One said there was a greater hand that worked the loom of the heavens, one that made changes unseeable by human eyes, since the span of any individual human life on earth was brief. This was the greatest mystery of all.