Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ancestors of Avalon (32 page)

But she controlled her reaction and looked at the queen with a sigh. “My lord still mourns his wife, who was lost in the escape,” the acolyte said solemnly. “I do not think he is ready to think of such things.”

But I am,
she could not help thinking,
and not with Lanath!
She cast another swift glance at Cleta and realized that she, too, was watching Micail as he finally disappeared in a crowd of Ai-Zir. It was strange. Elara had always thought of Micail as the husband of the high priestess. It was strange to view him suddenly as . . . a man, and an available one, at that.

“Well, there is no urgency yet,” the queen said comfortably, as she set her spindle turning, “but the alliance between our peoples would be strengthened by a marriage.”

Elara had been in Azan-Ylir long enough to understand that according to tradition, almost all matings were arranged by the matriarchs of the clan. She eyed the queen again, uncertainly. In the warm sunlight she had taken off her royal cape of finely tanned doeskin painted with the symbols of her rank and tribe. The elbow-length sleeves and hem of her upper garment of pale grey-green wool was edged in a patterned braid sewn with discs of bone, straining a little over an ample bosom on which lay necklaces of amber and jet. A voluminous skirt with interwoven woolen stripes of different colors fell in folds about her feet. Khayan-e-Durr’s brown hair, bundled into a net of twisted cord, was threaded with grey, but the queen had a majesty about her that did not depend on fine attire.

Over the preceding months it had become clear that the Women’s Side held a very real, if different, kind of power. According to custom, the queen was not Khattar’s wife, but his elder sister, and at times seemed to view him as hardly grown. It was her son Khensu, not his, who would be Khattar’s heir; moreover, she and the clan mothers had the right of final decision to go to war.

They recorded the matings of the beasts as well as men, and before the men could make war, the women must agree they had the resources to do so. In the priestly caste of Atlantis, certain powers were inherited by the men or the women, but nevertheless, in Temple or palace, gender was no barrier to leadership. The soul, after all, changed sex from one lifetime to another. But one did not expect to find that knowledge among unschooled primitives.

“The king has a daughter called Anet,” Khayan was saying now. “She is ripe for the marriage bed. She has been at the sanctuary of the Goddess at Carn Ava with her mother, but she will return before winter. We will see how she likes him. Yes . . . that mating might well serve . . .”

Cleta bent her head to whisper, “But will Micail like
her
? And what will Tjalan say?”

Khayan was clearly concerned with the welfare of her people, but did she support the king’s dream of making his tribe supreme? During the past months she had made something of a pet of Elara, and Tj alan, on his most recent visit to Azan, had urged her to gain the queen’s confidence . . . yet Elara felt she was no closer than ever to learning Khayan’s true mind.

“And you young ones,” the queen said suddenly, “you too must think of your husbands to be.”

“Oh, Cleta has a betrothed who is still in Belsairath. And I am betrothed to Lanath,” Elara said, a trifle bitterly.

“You said that you were not married.”

Elara shrugged. “There is—much to do first. We must complete our studies—”

“Huh!” The queen grinned. “Maidens think to be young forever. But it is true, the priestess-born are different.” There was a brief pause, but before anyone else could speak, Khayan resumed. “Your Lady Timul is far away, but you are here. Maybe I should send you to Ayo.”

Cleta frowned, trying to understand. “Ayo? The king’s wife?”

“But also the Sacred Sister, who dwells at the Sanctuary,” Khayan nodded, smiling. “The women of the tribes share information that sometimes the men do not know. One has come to us from your village by the shore. She says that the Blue Robe priestesses who build the Mother’s Temple there know something of our Mysteries. And this—this is no business for the shamans. Yes, I think the sisterhood will wish to speak with you.”

I must tell Ardral—
Elara stared at the queen, her mind whirling.
Or should I?
Khayan was only an Ai-Zir, maybe, but she was right. These were women’s mysteries, not to be shared with any man. Somehow she would have to get a message to Timul . . .

She found her voice at last. “I would be most interested in meeting them.”

 

Micail took a long, deep breath of the fair wind that caressed the plain. He had walked out to the site where the henge of stones would be built early that morning, when the rising sun had just begun to promise a blazing day. Now, at its closing, the scent of ripe grass was like incense—an incense of the earth, flavored with the warmer odors of the cattle who ate the grass. In the middle distance one of the small herds kept on the plain for milking in summer was following the lead cow homeward, their brown hides glowing like copper in the slanting twilight.

Slowly he was coming to understand their importance to the people here. An ordinary Atlantean meal had consisted of fruit, vegetables, and boiled grains, with perhaps a few small fish for flavoring.

In Azan, cattle were the life of the nation, their health and numbers the gauge of a tribe’s power, their leather and their bones worn as clothing and decoration, or used for myriad other purposes. Grains were eaten as porridge or flatbread, and wild greens in season, but at every season of the year, the people fed by preference upon the meat and milk of their cows.

At first, most of the Atlanteans had found it difficult to digest the high-protein diet, and even when they grew accustomed, found it even harder to metabolize efficiently.
All of us,
he thought ruefully as he patted his middle,
have become more substantial . . . except for Ardral.
The old guardian appeared to survive on air and native beer, though he continually pronounced the latter a poor substitute for proper liquors. Still, whatever Ardral was or wasn’t eating, it gave him plenty of energy. He never seemed to cease moving from one part of the work site to another, observing, ordering, correcting, his robes flapping around him like the wings of one of the great cranes that stalked the river and the ruins.

Outside the line of sticks that had been stuck in the ground to mark the circle, men were shaping two great sarsen blocks with round mauls of the same hard stone. The song of the singers had succeeded in cracking the great slabs free from larger pieces of rock that lay scattered everywhere across the plain, but the fine shaping had to be done by human hands. The pounding of the mauls made a dull music in the cooling air.

“Come here, will you?” Ardral’s call roused Micail from his abstraction. “Bring Lanath. I need a second check on this alignment.”

Micail looked around and saw his acolyte standing next to one of the holes left by an uprooted bluestone, gazing across the plain toward the slow fading of the light.

“Lanath, we’re wanted,” he said softly. “Come, lad, there’s nothing out there to see.”

“Only the Heralding Stars,” Lanath responded dully. “But anything could be creeping unseen in the darkness. This whole countryside is ghost-ridden—” and he motioned toward the rounded humps of barrows on the plain. “When night falls it all belongs to them. Maybe that’s what Kanar’s telling me.”

“Kanar!” exclaimed Micail. “Your former master? Is this another of your dreams?”

“He talks to me,” Lanath replied in that same strange small voice.

“Ghosts are notoriously untrustworthy messengers, especially when you don’t know the right questions to ask,” Micail replied more roughly than he intended. “Let’s have no more about it now; the shamans’ tales have made the men nervous enough without adding to their fancies! We need their labor, lad—we cannot do all the work with song!” He grasped Lanath’s shoulder and hauled him back to the center of the circle, where Ardral was gazing at the wooden poles that were set to mark the rising and setting of the midsummer sun.

“Look there—” he commanded, pointing westward. “There is the light!”

Clouds were blowing in from the distant sea, touched now to flame by the descending sun. As he watched, a long beam flared across the sky, tracing a path of gold across the darkling plain. Ardral muttered some words and swiftly incised a string of hieroglyphs onto his wax tablet.

Micail closed his eyes against the glare and felt as if the sunlight was becoming a current of energy—as if he stood in a flowing stream, or at the crux of many streams. There was one that flowed from the west, where the sun set at equinox, and another whose origin was farther south. The new ring of stones would center on a northeast to southwest alignment, so as to catch the midsummer sunrise, amplifying the flow of energy.

“You have not been out here at end of day before, have you?” he heard Ardral say to him. “When the sun is rising or setting you can feel the currents quite strongly. It is why the sensitives directed us here. If we angle the stones correctly, this place will be an enormous focus of power.”

Micail opened his eyes and realized that the masons had fallen silent.

“If the Omphalos Stone had been saved, Tjalan would have installed it here,” Ardral added. “Perhaps it is just as well that—” Whatever else he might have been about to say was lost as someone cried out in terror.

Lanath stood staring at the barrows again. The workmen were watching him.

“Look, something
has
come out of the barrow!” Their mutterings became louder. “The young priest sees it! The old priest is angered because we moved the stones! Droshrad was right! We should not be here!”

Micail squinted into the shadowy middle distance, and seeing a large horned head, began to laugh. “Are you children, to let an old cow frighten you?” There ensued a moment of tense silence, broken by a mournful moo.

“She could take the shape of a cow,” someone whispered, but then everyone was laughing.

“And if there
were
a demon here—” Ardral’s voice commanded their attention. “Do you think I could not protect you?” In the dimming light, all could see the shimmer of radiance that swirled about him.

It was only a magician’s trick, Micail knew, and the kind of display that the initiates and adepts who had taught him had considered beneath them . . . but not beyond them. Taking a deep breath, Micail allowed his own awareness to shift, transferring energy to his aura until he also glowed.

Can Droshrad do that?
he wondered, with a flare of pride which as swiftly turned to shame as the workmen backed away, making protective signs. The prophecy had said that by his efforts he would found the new Temple, but was this structure they were building a place to serve the powers of Light, or for some more earthly ambition?

Winter was when the Atlanteans longed most deeply for their lost home. After almost three years, Micail’s bones still ached when the north winds brought snow.
God of Winter,
he would often swear,
in this cold, Four-Faced Banur Himself would put more logs on the fire!
But for the moment, the roaring fire in the center of the royal roundhouse and the sheer body heat of the people gathered in it for the midwinter feast had made the temperature rise high enough so that Micail was almost willing to remove his sheepskin cape.

To Khattar’s left sat Droshrad and the shamans of the other tribes, and to his right the Atlantean priests, in an uneasy symmetry. On the other side of the fire, the chieftains of the five tribes had shed their capes and round hats long ago and lounged on their benches in tunics of patterned wool. Droshrad was still swathed in his deerhide vestments, painted and sewn with many clattering bits of bone.

Micail wondered if he should have sent Jiritaren and Naranshada and the acolytes back to Belsairath for the winter along with Ardral and the others, but the social life of Tjalan’s new capital seemed to him a harder exile than this life among savages. Last fall, staying here had proved wise enough. He and Lanath had been able to fine-tune the calibrations used in placing the stones. But this year, Droshrad seemed to be eyeing them with more than his usual disturbing disdain.

“Not much like the formal celebration of the Passing of the Stewardship of Nar-Inabi—is it?” Jiritaren asked, in the language of the Temple of Light. The formal words sounded oddly incongruous as Jiri cracked open a roasted rack of rib bones. Among the tribes, acorn-fattened pig was the favored food for feasts held in winter; the fatty meat staved off the chill. So did the beer. Micail lifted his beaker and took another swallow.

Naranshada frowned and, scratching his beard, said in a less refined form of the temple language, “I must admit I am not charmed. I look forward to the day when this work will be done and we no longer have to live here. But I have just heard that we will not have a labor force for the other stones until after sowing is done in the spring.”