The Veil Of Years - Isle Beyond Time Part 20

How had it been for young Kraton, when his family finally achieved these sh.o.r.es? Had Aurinia set him to play with other children-children like Neheresta, perhaps, already ancient except in body-who had made of him their novelty, their toy? Or had he just become bored with the pa.s.sage of years, then centuries, during which his body remained impotent and manhood never arrived? Now she looked upon the travesty, the monstrosity, she had unwittingly created, and . . . her last meal-olives, an apple, and gruel she had made of steeped, uncooked grains-rose in her throat, and spewed over the grinning Kraton.

He continued to grin, wiped his face with an extended finger, and asked, "What is this? What new thing have you done?" Then, as he examined his finger, it began to change. First, it faded to the unhealthy hue of sour milk, then darkened through chestnut to ashy black. As Kraton stared, uncomprehending, his flesh turned to powder and crumbled away. A twig of black bone remained.

Pierrette saw-as he did not-that his nose and his cheekbones were also changing, darkening, and soon Kraton also realized that what he had seen happen to his finger was occurring everywhere that Pierrette's vomitus had come to rest. But he seemed to feel no pain-or else pain, like everything else, was so prosaic, so boring that it no longer moved him. He smiled, even as his ravaged face began to crumble. "When at first I cried that my little dogcart was no longer fun to ride in, Mother said 'Pray to the G.o.ddess, that someday you will again find pleasure in something new.' I have not prayed for a long time, and you were a long time coming . . ." His lips were now stiff and brittle, and Pierrette had to lean quite close, in order to hear his last words: " . . . but you heard me . . ." He crumbled to the gleaming pavement, that had never before been soiled.

"I am not the G.o.ddess," she whispered. "I am less than her fingernails, or the breath from her mouth, but I now know she heard you. Fare well in your new adventure, child. You have long lived in the beginning, and now find the end. Perhaps in the Otherworld you'll live out the middle, which I denied you."

Someone jarred her shoulder and pushed her aside. Another figure, blurred by her tears, came between her and the darkening heap on the shining tiles. In no time at all Pierrette was edged away as the occupants of Kraton's house crowded around his remains to witness, for the first time, something entirely new. She fled, retracing her route, and did not stop running until she topped the ridge. Then she wipedher eyes on her skirt, and watched the villa roof collapse inward in a cloud of black dust. A vagrant breeze plucked at the roiling ma.s.s, and scattered it eastward across the island's spine.

She heard no one approach her vantage, so when something soft, warm and velvety nudged the back of her neck, she leaped up. "Gustave!" she squealed. The donkey, cautiously a.s.suming her sudden move as rejection, skittered away, then turned his back on her as if insulted-but nonetheless rolled one large, brown eye in her direction, on principle. When she knelt and encircled his neck with her arms, kissed his forehead and scratched his ears, he relented slightly, and his nuzzling almost pushed her over.

"How did you find me?" she asked. Of course, he might not have told her, even if he had suddenly acquired the gift of speech. Donkeys had few advantages over people-else they would hold reins and ride, and people would bear donkeys' burdens for them-so those few tricks of their equine trade were best left unmentioned.

Even without halter or lead (Gustave had rid himself of those early on) she had no difficulty getting him to follow her to the boat, or to climb awkwardly aboard, where he stood expectantly by the sternmost thwart, beneath which were his bags of tender, sweet, and flavorful grain.

By the time Pierrette reached her boat-several hours after the terrible events of the day, or so it felt-a vast swath of ashy darkness lay across several hills and fields. By the time she had raised sail and pushed off, it seemed no larger. In truth it was not, for there had not been much evil in her even by King Minho's severe definition, except the blind pride she had exhibited when she instructed Bellagos to seek not a mythic death, but a long life, in the Fortunate Isles.

Part Four - A New Day

Pierette's Journal

Now I have most of the answers I need to decide, and to act. I cannot discover the others except through the consequences of my action. The clues were there all along. Minho pulled his kingdom out of the stream of time, but not (entirely) from the realm of causality, of consequence, and as long as the Isles remain accessible from and to the mundane realm, they cannot be entirely free of its constraints. Thus Minho's strict prohibitions against change, innovation, and above all, consumption, are not results of his spell-they are the spell, or are at least an essential axiom within it.

I only require to discover just what those constraints are. What are the bonds Minho has been afraid to break, that keep his kingdom from drifting entirely away, but also threaten to pull it back to its point of origin, and its destruction-at the very moment it was saved. This much I now understand: every change, as when I ate the baker's bread or defecated beneath a bush, has weakened Minho's spell. How has he dared allow me the freedom of his kingdom? Surely he has felt the ripples and snags I have caused in the fabric of his creation. There can be only one conclusion: that while I have been dawdling about, temporizing, unable to decide, he has been working to make final and complete the separation of his kingdom-while I am still in it.

Once entirely outside the frame of reality that encompa.s.ses both worlds I know and have experienced, Minho's spell will be unrestrained by consequences: consumption and change, defecation and innovation, will not affect it. Minho's power will be absolute, and mine, based in an Otherworld no longer accessible to me, will be gone. I will be bride or slave, at his wish, but the consequence to me will be as nothing when weighed against the suffering the world has endured, and will forever endure.

The terrible initial spell that caused the Black Time did not truly break the Wheel. It weakened it, and made the route from past to future along its rim impa.s.sible, but the Wheel of Time is not broken. It has stretched. Just as the universe expands to fill the ken of questing eyes and hearts, so time stretches backward and forward to the limits of speculation, for the circle unbroken is not, as the ancients had it, infinitely recursive, a constraint upon time, but is infinite.

I surmised that the event that caused the Black Time would not be found within its devastation, but I underestimated the stretching of the wheel. No primitive shaman of the hunter Aam's era uttered that spell, for Aam's remote past did not yet exist. The originator of that cold and final h.e.l.l is here, in these so-called Fortunate Isles, and his name is . . . Minho.

Chapter 32 - The Fall of the.

Kingdom Pierrette carefully wrapped her journal in oiled cloth and returned it to her small watertight chest. She was a day short of her exile's end, but there was nothing left for her to see. The central island lay ahead, and she was approaching it opposite her original landing place. Was there somewhere she could go ash.o.r.e unseen?

She could not dismiss that last sight of Kraton's island, that vision of black despair. Horrified, she realized that she had seen it before, repeatedly, beginning the first time she had eaten a red amanita mushroom and a pinch of nightshade beside the sacred pool. It was the Black Time, the end of the world and the beginning, which she had long foreseen. Like the universe in Minho's water-sphere, it was a microcosm, a miniature, but not a false beginning or end. Viewing it, she at last understood the full enormity of Minho's crime.

He was the sorcerer whose spell had warped and distorted the ever-turning Wheel of Time. He was the usurper who had taken goodness from the world and h.o.a.rded it, upsetting the balance and giving rise to the Eater of G.o.ds-whose advantage was ever so slight, but which made him unstoppable. Minho's magic, his overweening pride and self-importance, had caused the distortion of all magics, had destroyed the pristine beauty of the sacred groves, the elusive beauty of nymphs and dryads, the wisdom of centaurs and small sylvan G.o.dlets. His twin was not the only greedy one. Just as Minos had sucked the material wealth of his kingdom, so Minho had done with the awe and wonder, the mysteries, the elusive joy of discovery. Love him? Pierrette was surprised, upon reflection, to realize that her feeling for him fell short of outright hatred. Now the puzzle was solved. She knew what she must do, to obey the G.o.ddessMa , and she felt no qualms about doing it. No qualms at all.

Once again wearing her rough-and-simple boy's clothing, Pierrette steered her boat close along the sh.o.r.e of the palace island. There had to be a sea entrance to Minho's archives, because in the bard's tale the king had rested the miniature simulacrum of his land in a tidal pool. There were many niches in the rock, with overhangs that blocked the bright moonlight. The darknesses looked like the entrances of caves, but on close inspection, all turned out to be only shadows.

The night was half gone. Pierrette had no time to waste. She had hoped to find another entrance, because she had no idea what kind of reception she would get at the palace, a day early. With a sigh of resignation, she tugged on the steering oar and, shortly, felt her boat's prow grind against rock beneath an overhang that would conceal it from sight except from the sea. "Stay aboard and wait for me," she commanded Gustave. Then she began the long climb to the palace. There was no obvious trail, so she tramped over the lovely blossoms that turned their tiny white faces toward the moon. It was a long climb.

She was out of breath when she reached the top.

Edging around to the portico and the entrance, she pushed on the great door, which swung wide on silent hinges. Only then did she hear the clipping of hard hooves on the tiles. Gustave had not obeyed.

She sighed. "Very well then, you may come with me, but if you leave t.u.r.ds on the carpets or eat the lace from the draperies, blame only yourself if someone beats you." No one was about. She made her way toward Minho's chambers; the secret stairway to his archives would not be anywhere distant or inconvenient for him. She listened at the door. There was no sound-but then, she hadn't expected there to be: surely, fastidious Minho's great spell precluded such prosaic and annoying trivia as snores. She couldn't imagine him snoring as her father did, or ibn Saul.

That door also opened easily. A single lamp glowed warmly upon the wall. Minho's great bed, with a coverlet of white fur, was empty. Truly, the task he had set himself must be an arduous one, if he found no time to sleep at night. She examined the walls for any hint of a crack or a protrusion that might hide a secret latch, but she found nothing. She pulled back a rug, hoping to find a trapdoor in the floor, but saw only smooth, unbroken tiles.

At the far end of the chamber was another door. Heavy bronze brackets were mounted to its casing, and a thick oaken bar stood next to it, but it, too, opened easily at her touch. She gasped, amazed. This was no man's room; the white marble walls were streaked with palest rose, like a hint of sunrise on a clear morning. The translucent floor was shot with glimmering gold. Pierrette suspected it was not marble, but hard, fine quartzite-and that the gold was real.

Looking for a second exit from the room, Pierrette found another chamber, hung with women's clothing in the Cretan style-skirts and dresses designed to leave the b.r.e.a.s.t.s bare, and sheer capes that would neither warm nor conceal. Pierrette, in her leather trousers, felt like an invader in that place.

The bed, centerpiece of the frilly chamber, was large enough for several people to sleep comfortably-or for two to frolic in. Curtains of sheerest diaphane were drawn back from a window . . . but no, it was not a window at all! It was hard, flat, and painted with a scene of sheep grazing on a hillside of impossible pink flowers. Though this room was not at all to her taste (which was simple), she knew that it was intended for her. It was more than a bedroom; with its false window, it was a prison. She was sure that the clothing in the small room-nothing she would dream of wearing-would all fit her to perfection.

She heard a noise from beyond the door. The skin on her arms and back tightened, and gooseb.u.mpsformed. Now that she understood what the room was, she was afraid that she might be caught in it.

Someone could shut the door and place the bar in its cradles. Her fear of discovery was drowned in her terror of being trapped. She exited into Minho's own room.

The noisemaker was Hatiphas. "You again! You aren't supposed to return until dawn. What are you doing here? Snooping? What are you looking for?" Thankfully, Gustave was not within his line of vision.

"Where is Minho? Where is his secret door?"

"If I knew, would I tell you? The king is engaged upon a vital task. Why would I allow you to disturb him? You, of all people?"

"Why not me? Is it because his task concerns me? Is it because I've given him sixteen days to prepare himself to confront me? Let Minho decide for himself. Where?"

Hatiphas laughed snidely. "Look all you wish. You cannot get there from here. You will not find him until he is ready to be found-until he is ready to put you in your proper place, which is . . . there." He nodded toward the pink-and-white prison, then departed.

Pierrette looked around herself. The entrance to Minho's secret place had to be here, in the palace, in Minho's own suite. The fibrous, linty dust on his kilt, that day on the balcony, would not still have clung to him if he had traveled any great distance outside where there had been a breeze. Dust. Lint-laden dust.

Pierrette threw back the coverlet on Minho's great bed. Had the sc.r.a.ping sound she had heard, blindfolded, been the noise of the bed being pulled aside? On her knees and elbows, she peered underneath. Was there a faint shadow on the tiles, there? There was plenty of dust.

She tried to push the huge bed aside. It would not budge. Disheartened, she looked toward the door.

Hatiphasknew where the secret entrance was. Would anyone else know? A servant? The dust under the bed was not so thick that it had never been swept. But who would have swept it? Not Minho himself.

The image of a delicate, youthful face arose before her eyes: Neheresta would know. With all her years, she would know everyone in the palace and, likely, whose ch.o.r.e it was to tidy the king's chamber.

Where would she be? Pierrette reviewed what she knew of the palace. She did not think there was an understory beneath her feet. Where would servants live?

The levels of the palace were successively lower, following the slope. Surely the kitchens were adjacent to the large hall, and the cooks' rooms not much further away. The quarters for domestics would also be close to their work. She looked both ways down the hall outside Minho's door. One led past the room where she had slept, and the hallway seemed to continue for a long distance. The corridor to her right was shorter, turning a corner only a few doors past where she stood. That way: ordinary residents could expect to wait for a servant to trudge the long hall, bringing an extra pillow, but it would not do for Minho to have to wait for anything. The domestics quarters would be close at hand.

Just around the corner, dozens of small, unimpressive wooden doors lined the hallway. She had no time to examine each room. She shrugged. What did she care whom she disturbed? "Neheresta!" she cried out. "Neheresta!" From several doorways she heard grumbles and the tossing of bedclothes. Some distance down the hall, she saw the ancient girl emerge.

"What is it? Why are you calling me?" Neheresta, Pierrette observed, did not look well. Her hair was tangled, her hands trembled, and . . . were those the marks of a whip, on her shoulders? She offered no explanation, so Pierrette did not pursue that. "Neheresta, you must help me. I must find Minho. Who here knows the way to his hidden archives?"

"Who would dare tell you? Who would risk being banished to a salt mine or a desolate orchard on the slopes of an outermost island?"

"You do know, don't you? Please, tell me."

"Hatiphas will punish me."

"How can you speak of punishment? Isn't your every day punishment enough? How long can you endure your own life, such as it is?" Then Pierrette had an idea. There was a word in the Minoan tongue for what the Celts and Romans calledanima . Soul. Where a word existed in a language, a concept did also. "Do you have a soul, Neheresta? Do you believe that you do?"

"Of course I do. Doesn't everyone? What does that have to do with anything?"

"Thatis your only escape from the endless torment of your pointless life. It is the only way you will ever grow up, to know the joys of adulthood."

"Do I understand what you are saying? That the only way I will ever be free is to die? To be reborn, somewhere else, some other time, and not remember who I am? How will I know I might be better off?"

"You can't. In the real world, no one ever can. But if you don't help me, Minho's kingdom will endure exactly as it is, forever. Never again will you see a new face like mine-he will break the last ties that hold these islands in this world. Never again will you know a visitor from the outside, and your last chance for freedom will be gone."

What was Neheresta thinking? Was she remembering the terrible indignities Hatiphas had inflicted upon her, and contemplating a thousand additional lifetimes of such insults to her body, her dignity, her very . . . soul? Was she considering the risk not of risking all for a matter of philosophy, but of failing to do so?

Pierrette stood silent, almost seeing the thoughts that rushed through Neheresta's mind. At last, the girl spoke. "You can't get there from here," she said.

"That's what Hatiphas said. What does it mean?"

"I don't know. That is what the king says also."

"Minho said that? Now I think I understand. . . ." Pierrette turned back the way she had come. Now she knew why she had felt a chill the last time she had entered Minho's sanctum. Now she also knew what his muttered words on that occasion had been.

"Let me come with you," said Neheresta.

Pierrette slowly shook her head. "I'm sorry. Minho was right.You can't get there from here. But I can get there from . . . there." Not from this palace, but through . . . the Otherworld. "Thank you. You have told me what I need to know. There isn't much time, but I might yet prevail."

Softly, Pierrette murmured the words of the great, ancient spell. "Mondradd in Mon . . ." Then shelooked around herself; nothing seemed to change. It was the same plain, unadorned hallway as before.

"What strange words are those?"

The unfamiliar voice sounded harsh and old. She spun around. There stood an ancient hag with thin, bedraggled hair and yellowed eyes. Her wrinkled b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung like empty sacks upon her bony chest.

But that dress she wore was . . . Neheresta's. And what was that thin, hazy line, like a jellyfish's tendril, that stretched from her brow and away into the murk of the hallway? Where had she seen something like that before?

Then Pierrette remembered: when first she had used the spellMondradd in Mon , such a tendril had linked her wandering soul to the inert body that rested beside the spring in the sacred grove. Later, more experienced with magic, she had learned how to voyage in the Otherworld without leaving her body behind, but never without a certain anxiety that should she be trapped there, her stiff, cold corpse would be found where she had left it, on the cold, foggy hillside of Sainte Baume, or on a marble floor in the ancient Roman baths of Aquae s.e.xtiae.

The tendril linked Neheresta-for indeed, the hag was none other-to her own origins in the remote past, to the devastating eruption of Thera that had put an end to the great age of the Minoan Sea Kings.

What would occur if Minho succeeded in tearing his land entirely away from the world of Time? Without the link to her faraway origins, would Neheresta be no longer an ancient girl, but . . . an immortal hag, forever locked into the ancient, hideous body that Pierrette saw, there in the Otherworld?

Suddenly, Pierrette was sure of it. In the Otherworld, things were as they were, not as they might seem.

No deception was possible, and the inhabitants of Minho's realm would forever, day and night, be forced to endure themselves not as his spell had made them seem, but as they really were: warped, wizened, corrupted ancients bearing all the scars and ugliness that were part and parcel of their unnatural estate.

What choice, given one, would they make? Would they choose as Neheresta had done, to take their chances, as all mortals did, that indeed what lay beyond this life was at least no worse than what they faced here? But they would have no choice. They had had none when Minho had brought them to this pa.s.s, and they would have none now. Either she would stop Minho, or he would defeat her. The rest would suffer one fate or the other, and there was no help for it.

"Wait here. Don't try to follow me," she said, looking away, afraid that Neheresta would see the revulsion in her eyes. She turned back the way she had come.

Busy Hatiphas pattered down the hallway toward her. Pierrette stepped into the shadow of an ornate doorway, and the vizier rushed by, trailing a milky, elusive tendril. The brief glimpse Pierrette had of his face showed that he too was raddled, wrinkled, and ancient-far more so than before. Then, to her horror, she saw his thread snap. The broken ends recoiled, one toward Hatiphas, and the other away, twisting and coiling, returning to its origin. Hatiphas turned the corner, and Pierrette was not able to ascertain more.

In Minho's bedchamber, she looked around. Where was the entrance? It had to be here, in this room.

She had a brief vision of herself, a small child, crawling out of the dark s.p.a.ce between the planks of the floor and the bedrock underlying her father's house, where he had stored her mother's powders and potions-and where she went to play, and secretly to experiment with them. She imagined herself emerging with dust clinging to her clothing, linty dust just like that which had clung to Minho-dust that had sifted between the boards of the floor, or between the similar boards that supported Minho's thick, soft mattress . . . She rushed to the bed, and began to push. Minho had broken Hatiphas from his past, his roots and origin. That was how he intended to accomplish his end: he would break all his people away, every thread and tendril, and there would be nothing left to hold them here. Desperately, she shoved at the heavy bed. Neheresta's link had been intact. Minho must be choosing first those people closest to him.

Did that mean she still had time to stop him?

"Gustave, come here!" She tied two corners of a silky coverlet together, and dropped the circlet over a bedpost. She lowered the remaining bight around Gustave's neck, and held it against his chest. "Now pull!" she commanded. The cloth tautened across the donkey's breast, and his sharp hooves sc.r.a.ped and scrabbled on the floor tiles.

Pierrette leaned against the other bedpost and pushed again. The bed moved. Once moving, it slid across the slick marble floor, revealing the darkness of a rough stone staircase that had not been apparent before, when Pierrette had peered at the dust beneath the bed. She stepped down the first riser and then the next . . .

The rough stone walls on either side were irregular. This was a native cleft in the rock, not a carved pa.s.sageway. This, she realized, was the entrance to a sanctum already ancient long before the first rude shrine had risen on the site of Minho's palace. She reached the bottom of the stairs. She felt Gustave's warm breath against her hand. She feared she was leading him into danger unnecessarily-but what security was there for him anywhere in this unnatural land? Would he choose to be the only immortal donkey in a world where even the nicest treats tasted like sand? He was just as well off with her as elsewhere.

Three pa.s.sages loomed darkly ahead of her, in the failing light from above. Wasn't there less dust on the stony floor to the left? She turned into the darkness, feeling her way ahead with her toes. The floor was gritty, as it had been before. As she progressed, the darkness remained incomplete; ahead was a sickly light . . . and ahead was Minho. He hunched over a globe that glowed like fungi in a cave or the phosph.o.r.escence of a ship's wake at night. It was the crystalline microcosm that contained the sorcerer-king's realm. Along one rough-hewn wall were the sagging shelves lined with scrolls. Before them stood a heavy table, old and battered, with green mold staining the lower portions of its legs, with more scrolls scattered across its surface. On a wall above the table, no longer obscured by darkness, hung a ma.s.sive, double-bladed bronze axe-thelabrys , emblem of the Minoan kings, stolen from the even more ancient rulers of the land, who had first occupied these subterranean chambers and worshipped here-and who were women. Women. And did they worship a G.o.d? Of course not. This had been a G.o.ddess's sanctuary.

Without a sound, she crept forward. Between her and the king was a rough stone construction, the low wall of the ancient well. Somewhere deep within her was a small child, crying, not wanting to give up her dreams. She wanted Minho to say something, do something, to relieve her from making a choice. Again she crept forward. Minho, concentrating on his task, seemed unaware of her approach. Almost leaning over his shoulder, Pierrette observed what he was doing. His hands were within the glowing sphere.

Through some trick, some crystalline distortion of perspectives, his forearms seemed to diminish in girth, to stretch and elongate until the tiny hands at the ends of them seemed miles and miles away, reaching downward into his miniature kingdom.

What was he doing? She crept closer. Absorbed in his task, he remained unaware of her presence. As she peered over his shoulder, into the microcosm, she felt a wave of giddy nausea, a disorientation, as her perspectives shifted from without to within the tiny scene. She now saw where she "was." Her vantage was a gull's, or a magpie's, hovering unseen over the city where she had met the Hermit. And there he was: he was not speaking with a few women at the fountain. He stood atop a two-story buildingthat fronted on a broad public square, and the crowd he addressed surely numbered in the thousands.

Pierrette could not hear his words, but the mult.i.tude surely did. Every eye in the plaza was upon him as he spoke-and as he raised a gleaming object high over his head.

It was a cross, a golden cross, like the one she had given him, but much larger, as tall as a seven-year-old boy. Was it the same cross, expanded by a trick of distorted perspective, or a replica in wood, leaved in thin gold? Who could say? As the Hermit raised it, she heard an angry grunt. Minho also had seen what she saw. What was to her a m.u.f.fled sound must have resonated like the rumble of thunder within the microcosm, because the rapt faces of the crowd-and the Hermit's own eyes-lifted upward, to what was, from their low vantage, still a clear blue, cloudless sky.

Minho's hand clenched into a fist, a fist raised as if to crush an insect. What did the crowd below see?

They saw something: many fell to their knees, their faces tight masks of terror; others covered their eyes, or looked to the Hermit to save them. The Hermit also saw. He raised the cross again, holding it up over his head. His defiant eyes seemed to look right at her-or at Minho.

"No!" She reached within the tiny scene. Her hand seemed to attenuate as if with distance, and she grasped Minho's wrist. "Stop!"

He gasped, and turned. He saw her. "What are you . . . how did you . . ." His hand and hers both lifted from the water-sphere, and became ordinary, though she still grasped his wrist.

"You were going to kill him," she spat. "You would have crushed them all!"