Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ancestors of Avalon (41 page)

“Marriage?” She looked at him in surprise. Reidel had always seemed so self-contained. Who would have suspected he had so much passion dammed up inside?

“Did you think I would have dared to touch you if my intent had been dishonorable?” He sat up, shocked.

Do you think that if mine had been honorable I would have let you?
Damisa bit back the bitter words, remembering that she had wanted this as much as he, if for different reasons. She sat up in turn, reaching for her gown.

“The matings of acolytes are ordained by the stars . . .”

“But I am of the priesthood now, so surely—”

“Nothing is sure!” snapped Damisa, driven beyond patience suddenly. “Least of all me! Do you consider what we just did a commitment? I descend from the princes of Alkonath and may not mingle my blood with any lesser breed!”

“But you lay with me . . .” he repeated, uncomprehending.

“Yes. I did. I have needs, just like you—”

“Not like me . . .” Reidel drew a long, shuddering breath. She felt a twinge of compunction as she realized he understood her at last. “
I
love you.”

“Well . . .” she said when the silence had gone on too long. “I am sorry.”

Reidel grabbed his tunic and belt and got to his feet, slinging them over his shoulder as if disdaining to hide his nakedness. “Sorry! I could find a cruder word.” But he did not say it, and by that she understood that what he felt for her was indeed love. For a moment she saw the graceful line of muscled shoulder and tapering hips stark against the stars, then he turned and strode down the path, leaving her alone.

I spoke truth,
she told herself.
I don’t love him!
So why, she wondered, was her last sight of that departing figure suddenly blurred by tears?

Chedan woke sweating in his rough blankets, his mind still reeling from images of standing stones dancing wildly, whirling away in the mist.

Micail!
his spirit cried.
Where are you?

Since coming to the Tor he had dreamed of Micail often. At times they were back in Ahtarrath or even in the Ancient Land. They would be walking together or sitting over a carafe of Hellenic wine, indulging in the kind of far-ranging conversations both men loved. Chedan was half aware that the talks were a kind of teaching, as if in sleep he was trying to pass on all the wisdom he had not been given time to impart in the waking world.

Where, he wondered, was all that information going? He knew that Tiriki, in her secret heart, believed her beloved was still alive somewhere in this world. But Chedan knew that it was equally possible he had been meeting with Micail in his dreams to prepare Micail’s spirit for rebirth in this new land . . . Yet this last vision, if that was what it had been, was different. He felt the same sense of release that always followed trance. And though Micail had fled from him, Chedan had been able to contact him.

But I was young again.
The memory of that vigor still filled his awareness—and yet with every moment, his body reminded him more painfully that it had served his soul for more than seventy years. And the five years that had passed since they arrived at the Tor had been hard ones. He would not be sorry to lay down this aching flesh and fare to the Halls of Karma, even though it meant he must face judgment.

He shook his head ruefully.
“Complete the work that you must do,”
the voice had said. At this moment Chedan would be doing well to get out of bed.
Perhaps it was a promise,
he thought hopefully.

 

A brisk wind stroked across the plain, flattening the new grass beneath the stalks bleached by winter, then letting the blades spring back one by one—green, silver, and green again.

The afternoon sun had warmed the air, but the day was fading, and the hope that had lifted Micail’s heart contracted like some winter-chilled bloom. A memory of the dream that work had driven from his head returned—he had been a dragon, or a hawk—some creature fierce and wild—struggling wildly to escape the stones. And once more, Chedan had been there.

Micail eyed the men working before him ruefully. Tjalan’s dream was, he now realized, simply to create something that would outlast them all; but there were times when the five great trilithons seemed to project an arrogance beyond even the imaginings of a prince . . .

The unfinished sarsen ring was less daunting, at least to Micail, perhaps because it was incomplete. Twenty-four uprights had been raised around the trilithons, including one shorter stone that allowed even casual users to sight down the Avenue to the point of the midsummer sunrise . . . The six missing stones would be hauled in next summer, by levies which would probably be drawn from the Blue Bull tribe.

Six more lintels had already been brought in, and two of them raised to better suggest the final effect—a Sun Wheel a hundred feet across. Finding and transporting the remaining twenty-four stones to complete the pattern might take another year of labor.

Thanks largely to the efforts of Timul and Elara, the king had survived the wound’s fever, but the javelin blow had permanently ruined his shoulder. Khattar would never again wield any battle-ax, of bronze or of orichalcum. There was talk, mostly from the younger warriors, that he ought to abdicate as high king and allow Khensu to take his place. But only the matriarchs could make that decision, and the Women’s Side had conspicuously refused to decide.

Did they too fear Prince Tjalan’s spearmen? There were times when Micail himself felt uneasy with the continual display of Alkonan potency, yet he had to admit that Tjalan’s show of strength might be necessary. Until Khattar’s ability to rule was proven, the Red Bull tribe had declared they would provide no further assistance. So far the other tribes had not joined the rebellion, but Micail knew that they could not rely on their full support.

“Lord Prince, dark is coming,” said the old man who acted as foreman for the White Bull work gang. “We go back to our fires?”

“Yes, it is time,” Micail nodded.

He sat down against one of the half-polished stones and watched the men walk away one by one toward their camp by the river. He would not have had to go far, either, to find food and shelter and the company of his own kind, but he found himself reluctant to move. Too much speech—that was the problem—the petty bickering, the constant maneuvering for status, was driving him mad.

He continued to sit, half watching the cryptic play of twilight and clouds, thinking that if he came in late enough, he might persuade Cleta or Elara to bring him some food in his hut, away from the others. It occurred to him that he rarely felt any need to be on his guard against the acolytes—not even after Elara had told him that if the king became too insistent that he take a mate, she herself was willing to bear him a child. But she had not pressed him, and now as he sat alone in the sunset he found himself beginning to actually consider her offer, if only because it distracted him from the disturbing memory of how Anet had felt in his arms.

Just thinking about her lithe dancer’s body lit a fire in his flesh. He frowned, the half-illicit visions washed away by the sudden memory of a native legend that he had recently heard, in which the stones in some of the older circles were said to wake with the darkness, and even dance at the times of the great festivals. The stones here were already moving toward awareness, the whispers ran.

The original ring of stones had obviously been part of a simple cremation cemetery, like the earthwork that had so frightened the acolytes on their journey here. Most of the other circles had apparently been built for that purpose as well. Yet it could not be denied that nightfall always made this place seem a little more distant, and at the same time a bit larger, turning it into a looming presence that made it difficult to think about other things. Sighing, Micail got to his feet and, trying not to think at all, began the long walk back across the plain.

That night, sleep was slow in coming. But in the still hour before the dawn his troubled dreams yielded to a vision of far green hills and a golden pathway whereon he saw Tiriki approaching, robed in blue light.

 

Spring was always a time of hope in the marshlands, when the earth grew green and the sky clamored with the cries of migrating birds. Whenever the waterfowl settled on the pools, their muted calling turned even more musical, as if the wind gods themselves were singing hymns for the earth. It was a time to gather eggs and tender new leaves, and the increased food supply renewed the confidence and the energy of those who lived around the lake. It was a time of fair weather and improved circumstances, but it was also a time to get back to work on the spiral maze, which after the wedding feast for Kalaran and Selast they had started to cut into the Tor.

Tiriki straightened, digging the knuckles of her left hand into the small of her back to ease its aching, while she rested the antler points that tipped her hoe on the ground.
The priests’ caste was never bred for such labor,
she thought ruefully, surveying her segment of the new pathway of the spiral maze that they were making around the hill. The shadow she cast was, she observed, quite slender, and what flesh she had, she knew, was mostly muscle. It occurred to her that she was probably healthier than she had ever been.

The same was true of the rest of them. Ahead and behind her she glimpsed other diggers, bending and rising as their hoes dug into the soft ground. She and Chedan and a few of the others had sung to the earth along the track and loosened it a little, but she doubted that even an experienced stand of singers could have shifted so many particles at once . . . though they certainly could have moved that boulder by the foot of the path much more easily.

Just ahead of her, Domara stabbed her digging stick into the ground and laughed. She had turned five the preceding winter, and a recent growth spurt had stolen away the plump sweetness of babyhood forever. Now Tiriki could glimpse the child she was becoming. Not the woman—thank the gods, that was still far in the future—but the slim, leggy youngster with the mop of red curls.
She is going to be like Micail,
thought Tiriki,
tall and strong.