Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ancestors of Avalon (34 page)

M
ama! Pretty! See?” Domara danced forward, pointing at the blackbirds that dotted the grass, their sleek feathers iridescent in the sun. The night before it had rained heav ily and the birds were feasting on earthworms flooded out of the ground. Tiriki tried to grab the child, and failing, straightened with a smile. Domara had celebrated her third birthday last spring and was constantly moving, her bright hair flickering about the Tor like a tiny flame.

Forolin’s daughter, Kestil, walked with the dignity due her seven years. “Why do you chase them? They only fly away.”

Domara glanced back over her shoulder. “Pretty!” she said again, flapping sturdy arms. Laughing, Tiriki scooped her up and held her high.

“Fly, little bird!” she sang. “But never so high you forget the nest . . . Your friends Mudlark and Turtle and Linnet are waiting to play with you, you know.” She settled the child on her hip and started along the plank walkway that led to the old summer village which, for more than a year now, the marsh folk had been rebuilding into a permanent home. She felt again a small thrill of pride, as she thought about their first year in this land, when it had been so clear that the natives thought the Atlanteans were mad to attempt to live in the marshes year round . . .

Yet at the same time she knew that if they honored her, they revered Chedan, who had personally nursed so many of them through the plague. When he walked through the village, they brought their children for his blessing, and they had been collecting the feathers of hawks to make him a cloak of ceremony. It was for him, not for Tiriki, that they had agreed to live here through the winter, and also to dig out and drag into place the rocks that the mage was using to build the community’s first stone hall.

Tiriki sighed and decided that she was not jealous, but simply a little—conservative. The concept of a male healer was disturbing to her, as strange to her as the idea of a woman, even herself, leading the formal ceremonies. And yet in the Ancient Land, her own father had been a healer whose writings on the subject might even be considered by the Lords of Karma a sufficient atonement for his sins.

“New customs for new lands,”
her old teacher Rajasta the Wise used to say. Tiriki let her thoughts wander.
Maybe if I’d paid more attention to his prophecies, I would find it easier to make adjustments. But perhaps it is not supposed to be easy.

Overhead, the sun was burning through the clouds and the marsh mists, leaving only the merest veil of vapor across the sky. She and Domara walked in a circle of clarity whose edges blurred into uncertainty. From a distance the village seemed to shimmer in and out of vision, yet when they neared, they saw women grinding seeds, snapping beans, or cutting up tubers outside their doors, and men mending nets or fletching arrows.

Many villagers lifted a hand in greeting, and Domara chattered back at them happily. Tiriki often left her to play with the village children, and as a result, Domara echoed the guttural local dialect as often as she did the lilting subtle grammar of the Sea Kings.

“Mor-gan, you late. Glad you are good,” said Heron’s wife, a cheerful woman with the incongruous name of Nettle.

The natives had made much better progress in learning foreign tongues than Tiriki, but she could usually puzzle out the meaning of most of the Lake folk names.
Morgan,
she repeated silently. Chedan had told her the word described a sea spirit in several very old Lerandian legends, but then he had laughed and said no more about it.

Now what is it they call
him
?
She tried to remember.
Sky-Crier? Light-Wing?

“Sun Hawk!” she exclaimed. “Have you seen Sun Hawk today?”

“He go to new spirit house.” Nettle snapped another handful of longbeans. “They argue about
stones.
Men.” She shrugged.

Tiriki nodded agreeably, but was distracted by the same little stir of excitement she always felt whenever she thought of the new Temple—at once a restoration of traditional splendor and a commitment to the new land. Forolin had proved especially helpful, for he came from a family that had produced more builders than merchants. His practical experience complemented Chedan’s grasp of theory so well that Tiriki was beginning to believe that the project might actually succeed.

And why not?
she asked herself.
We have accomplished a great deal else.
In the four years since their arrival, the first rude huts had been replaced by solid log structures, caulked and plastered against the weather. Beyond the thatched roofs of the village, Tiriki could see sheep grazing in the water meadows, and on higher ground, fields of emmer wheat and barley rippling green and silver beneath the breeze.

She supposed that not only the buildings but the people themselves had changed, though the transformation had been gradual. A few of the glorious and shining robes of Atlantis still remained, but they were rarely worn anymore; and as their ordinary linen garb fell to rags, many of the refugees had begun to go about in simple garments of deerskin, like the people of the marsh.

But that may not last,
she told herself, catching sight of one of the village women clumsily carding wool. Now that the priest Dannetrasa’s maps had allowed Reidel’s sailors to find more sheep to import, spun cloth was beginning to gain in popularity, and Liala and the saji women had begun to process the local wild flax, dyeing it with a native herb that made a lovely blue.

And if we’re not very careful, men will end up wearing blue, too,
she thought with an involuntary shudder of revulsion. To her, blue would always be Caratra’s color, sacred to her priestesses.

As they neared the end of the village, a flock of children came pelting out of one of the houses, their sweet voices piping like birds. Domara answered in the same language, and Tiriki released her daughter to join them. A slender dark woman followed, and Tiriki saluted her.

“Day’s blessing on you, Redfern. May I leave Domara with you again? I will be teaching on the little island today, but at sunset I will return.”

Redfern nodded, smiling. “We watch. Kestil,” she added, turning to Forolin’s daughter, “you help? Keep Domara from water, she don’t fall in?”

“Yes!” Kestil piped happily in the marsh folk language, before she went back to chasing after Nettle’s children, Mudlark and Linnet.

At least,
thought Tiriki in resignation,
Domara knows how to swim.

 

The rocky hillock at the far end of the trackway was surrounded by water so frequently that it was more often called an island. Tiriki had come to realize that in this unknown wilderness, land and air and water did not have the same clear identities she had known on Ahtarrath. In the mists, they all tended to blur together, just as the caste distinctions between priest and sailor and native had begun to fade.

The acolytes and others who were her students were waiting in the clearing that they had carved out of the tangled ferns and alders in the midst of the isle. The energy in this spot had a certain youthful quality that made it appropriate for teaching the young. Not that her students were that youthful. In the interests of evening the ratio of priests to priestesses, they had adopted Reidel into the ranks of the junior priesthood and, after long debate, the sailor Cadis, as well.

Tiriki did not doubt that they had been right to adopt Reidel. The sea had taught him how to anticipate the currents of power, and any captain must learn to command himself before he can command men. Already his steady support was proving its value in the rituals. Reidel’s own reasons for agreeing to the training were less clear, though Tiriki suspected that Damisa was one of them. She nodded a greeting, and seeing a smile soften his strong features, observed that Reidel was really a very handsome man.

“Today, our topic is the Otherworld,” she began. “Our traditions teach that there are many planes of existence, of which the physical plane is only the most obvious. Adepts have ventured into the worlds of the spirit and mapped them, but are those maps always the same?”

She let her gaze travel around the circle. For once, wiry Selast, who seemed to quiver with energy even when she was still, was sitting next to her betrothed, Kalaran. Since he had begun to work regularly with Chedan, the scowl that had once marred his fine-boned features had eased, but she suspected that he probably found it harder to accept Cadis and Reidel because he still missed his old companions, the male acolytes who had been lost . . . Beside him, Elis was meditatively running her fingers through the dark soil. But neither Damisa nor Iriel was there.

 

Damisa’s absence was not intentional. Really, it was all Iriel’s fault. If Liala had not asked Damisa to take Iriel a message, Damisa would have gone straight to class and never needed to bother with the younger girl at all. But when Damisa finally reached the bower that Iriel had made for herself among the willows, the girl gave her no more than a quick glance before returning her gaze to the tangle of blackberry bushes that she had been staring at before.

“Liala says that Alyssa is still feeling ill,” Damisa said briskly, “so she wishes you to fetch her some more of the dried yarrow blossoms the next time you come up the hill.”

Iriel neither spoke nor stirred.

“You can take it to her after class, which is where you should be, by the way . . . What
are
you doing? It’s not the season for berries—”

“Hush.” However softly voiced, it was a command, and Damisa found herself obeying before she had time to question it. Instinctively she sank to her knees beside the younger girl. A moment passed . . . and another. There was no sound but the wind that whispered in the willows and the gurgling of the stream trickling past. She could see nothing to explain Iriel’s transfixed stare.

“You’re spending entirely too much time with Taret—you’re seeing things!” Damisa muttered, “Now look. It’s lovely here, but we have to—”

“Hush.”
This time there was a clear hint of fear in the word, and catching it, Damisa’s tongue stilled again. Shaken, she started to withdraw from Iriel, more than half expecting that the other girl would suddenly grab her and laugh.

“Please!” insisted Iriel. “Don’t move!” There was no sound in the words, only the movement of the girl’s lips, and all the while Iriel never blinked, never glanced away from whatever she had been so fixedly staring at—a deeper darkness in the underbrush that Damisa had not yet noticed.

And then there was a noise, a wet kind of ripping, and a rustling in the brambles. Unexpectedly, Iriel relaxed.

“What is it?” Damisa could not keep from saying.

“A spirit of the forest,” Iriel whispered with an odd smile, “but it has stopped listening now. If you move very softly and very slowly, you can see it too.”

Damisa unfroze a little, but before she could so much as twitch her shoulder, Iriel hissed again, “Slowly, I said! It’s almost finished. When it
does
finish it will go. Then
we
can go.”

Her neck hair prickling, Damisa shifted by inches until she could focus on the shadow in the brambles. At first it looked exactly like a hundred other places in the marshy woods, but as the wind shifted she could smell blood, and something else: a rank, wild smell.

Either we’ve both gone competely crazy,
Damisa decided,
or something
is
out there.

She scanned the quiet scene again, focusing fiercely on every mushroom, every patch of grass, until she noticed a thick brown branch at the edge of the darkness—a furry branch that ended in a black, shiny, cloven hoof. She had skinned enough deer by now to recognize that is what it was, but why was it lying there like that?

The dead deer’s leg twitched spasmodically, and she heard again the odd tearing, crunching sound.

Perhaps in her shock she made some noise, for the brambles shifted and suddenly she saw clearly a massive, heavy-jawed head, muzzle dripping with blood, and the glow of dark amber eyes. The brambles heaved again as the creature lurched to its feet, jaws still clamped around the deer’s haunch, and began to drag it away.

For a moment Damisa saw the animal in its entirety, a dark silhouette against the daylight, its shape like that of a man clad in thick dark brown fur. A strong instinct that owed nothing to her temple training held her utterly still, in awe of a power more ancient than Atlantis itself.

“A she-bear!” Iriel exclaimed, as the crackle of breaking branches faded. “Did you see her swollen dugs? She must have cubs hidden nearby!”

“A bear . . .” That seemed a small word to contain such power. Damisa had seen a bear once, in Alkonath’s Great Zoo of Wonders, but it had been considerably smaller, and differently colored, and she had been assured that it only ate vegetables. But then, there had been very few animals in the Sea Kingdoms, other than those that served men.

“That is
all
we need.” Damisa tried to pull herself together. “But didn’t Otter say there are no dangerous animals in this valley?”

“There aren’t—usually. That is why this is so wonderful,” said Iriel, her face alight with enthusiasm. “Taret says that Bear Mother is the oldest spirit, mother of all the animal powers. It’s good luck to see her!”

Damisa wasn’t sure about luck, but she did not doubt the power. Looking into those golden eyes, she had felt a frisson of awe in the depths of her spirit unlike anything raised by ritual.

Iriel continued, “Taret says the Old Ones who lived here worshipped her. They had caves where they worked magic. Some of them might still survive! Not the Old Ones, the caves. Maybe the she-bear has found one and lives there now! It would be a place of great power—”

“This is a
marsh,
Iriel!” Damisa gritted, exasperated. “How could there be caves here?”

Iriel turned, eyes narrowing. “There are caves in the Tor,” she said, as if it settled the matter. “Come on,” she added, getting up at last, “didn’t you say they were waiting for us?”