Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ancestors of Avalon (8 page)

The shaking finally ceased, but the tension did not. Through the window, Micail could see that the Star Mountain’s summit was gone—no, not gone,
displaced.
Smoke, or dust, rose all about the distinctive little pyramid as, still lighted, it slid slowly toward the city.

Micail closed his eyes tight and reached beyond himself again as a roiling onslaught of energies whipped through him. He tried to visualize the layers of rock that made up the island, but the restraining vision only flickered and shifted, until finally it became the image of the crossed arms of the faceless man, bound and chained but stirring, that had haunted their dreams. His muscles flexed and links popped as the man strained against his bonds.

“Who are you? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” He did not realize he had been shouting until he felt Tiriki’s thoughts within his own.

“It is—the Unrevealed!”
came her mental cry.
“Dyaus! Do not look at his eyes!”

At this, the vision rose, snarling. The floor shook anew, more roughly than before, and would not stop. Micail had grown up with the whispered tales of the god Dyaus, invoked to bring change by Grey Mages of the Ancient Land. Instead, he had brought chaos whose reverberations had eventually destroyed that land and now seemed about to destroy Atlantis as well. But Micail had never been to the crypt where that image was chained.

At once Micail felt Tiriki’s unflinching rush of compassion.

“Let Light balance Darkness—”
Her thought became a song.

“And Reaction, Rest—”
He followed.

“Let Love balance Hatred—”
Warmth built between their clasped hands.

“The Male, the Female—”
Light grew between them, generating power to transform the tensions of the opposing forces.

It seemed a long time that they stood so, while the vacant howling of the chained god receded, gradually, grudgingly, sullenly.

When the shaking ceased at last, Micail drew a deep breath of relief, although his sensitized awareness felt the constant tremors beneath the equilibrium they had imposed upon the island.

“It’s over.” Tiriki opened her eyes with a sigh.

“No,” he said heavily, “only restrained, for a little while. Beloved—” Words failed him, and he clasped her more tightly. “I could not have held back that power alone.”

“Do we have—time?”

“Ask the gods,” Micail replied. “But at least no one will doubt our warning now.” He looked past her, his shoulders slumping as he saw on the floor beneath the window the shattered pot, spilled earth, and naked roots of his little feather tree.

People died in that quake,
he told himself.
The city is burning. This is no time to weep over a tree.
But as he shoved his spare sandals into the bag, his eyes burned with tears.

 

The mood of the city had certainly altered, thought Damisa as she picked her way around a pile of rubble and continued toward the harbor. After the terror of the early morning, the bright sunlight seemed a mockery. The smoke from a dozen burning buildings had turned the light a strange, rich gold. Now and again, a vibration in the earth reminded her that though the dust from its toppled summit had dispersed, the Star Mountain was still wakeful.

The taverns were doing a roaring business, selling wine to those who preferred to drown their fear rather than take steps to save themselves from the sea, but otherwise the marketplace looked deserted. A few insisted that the morning’s quake would be the last, but most people were at home, packing valuables to take on the ship or into the countryside. From the roof of the House of the Twelve, Damisa had seen the roads jammed with wagons. People were heading for the harbors or the inland hills, or anywhere away from the Star Mountain, whose crowning pyramid had come to a precarious stop about halfway down the slope. From the new, flattened summit, a plume of smoke continued to rise, a constant promise of more violence to come.

And to think that there had been moments when she had resisted the Temple’s orderly serenity, its incessant imposition of patience and discipline. If this morning was a taste of what was coming, she suspected she would soon be remembering her life here as a paradise.

In the emergency, even the twelve acolytes had been pressed into service as common messengers. Damisa had claimed the note meant for Prince Tjalan, and she meant to deliver it. Determined, she tiptoed around a pool of noxious liquids spilling from a market, and she headed down a reeking alley to the waterfront.

The harbor yards were crowded and noisy as on any normal day, but now there was a barely restrained hysteria. She tugged her veil into place, and hastened her steps into the hubbub. She heard the drawling accents of Alkonath everywhere she turned. It must have been some kind of instinct that allowed her to distinguish Tjalan’s voice, ringing above the babble of men who toiled to stow a hundred different kinds of gear.

As she drew nearer, she heard the sailor to whom the prince was speaking. “What does it matter if the seed grain goes above or below the bales of cloth?”

“Do you eat cloth?” Tjalan asked sharply. “Wet linen will dry, but salt-soaked barley will mold, not grow. So get back down there, man, and do it right this time!”

Damisa was relieved to see the prince’s expression lighten as he recognized her.

“My dear—how goes it up there?” A wave of his hand indicated the temples and the palace on the hill.

“How is it everywhere?” Damisa tried to keep her voice even, but had to look away. “Oh!” she brightened. “But there
is
good news! The priests who serve at the summit of the Star Mountain actually survived! They came in an hour ago, all except their leader. He sends word that he dwelled on that peak since he was a boy, so if the mountain wishes to be rid of the pyramid, he will return to the summit without it.”

Tjalan laughed. “I have known men like him—‘
deep in the Mercy of the Gods,
’ as they say. He may outlast all of us!”

“There are some,” she found herself saying, “who believe that when the earth began to shake, we should have made . . . a special offering . . .”

Tjalan blinked, brows furrowing. “Sweet child—do not even think such things!” His bronzed face had gone taut and pale. “We are not barbarians who sacrifice children! The gods would be right to destroy us if we were!”

“But they
are
destroying us,” she muttered, unable to tear her gaze from the flattened, smoking peak.

“They are certainly unmaking the islands,” Tjalan corrected gently. “But they granted us warning first, did they not—first by the prophecies and now by the tremors? We were given time to prepare an escape—” His gesture embraced the ships, the people, the boxes, bags, and barrels of provisions. “Even the gods cannot do everything for us!”

He is as wise as any priest.
Damisa admired the strength in his profile as he turned to answer a question from the captain, a man called Dantu.
I can be proud to be kin to such a man,
she thought, and not for the first time. She had not originally been destined for the Temple—it was her grandmother who proposed her as a candidate for the Twelve. When she had dreamed of a royal marriage as a little girl, Tjalan had been her model for a worthy consort. It was a relief to find that a more mature judgment justified her original opinion. He made Kalhan look like the boy he was!

“Mind yourselves!” The prince was glaring at a group of sailors who stopped work to goggle at two buxom, saffron-draped saji girls who were pulling a cart full of parcels from the Temple of Caratra.

One of the men smacked his lips and made a kissing noise at the girls, who giggled behind their veils. “Wouldn’ mind packing
you
into my hold . . .”

“You there!” Tjalan repeated. “Back to work. They’re not for such as you!”

What the sajis
were
for had been the subject of much wild-eyed speculation among the acolytes. In the old days, it was said, sajis had been trained to assist in certain kinds of magic that involved the sexual energies. Damisa shuddered, glad that she had not experience enough to guess what those might be. The acolytes were free to take lovers before they married, but she had been too fastidious to do so, and Kalhan, chosen as her betrothed by some arcane procedure of astrology, had not tempted her to experiment ahead of time.

“I almost forgot!” she exclaimed. “I have brought a list of candidates to sail in the royal vessel, with—with you.” As Prince Tjalan turned to her again, she opened her scroll case and gave him the parchment.

“Ah yes,” he murmured, running a finger down the list of names. “Hmm. I don’t know if this is a relief or not—” He waved the paper at her. “I can see beside it like a shadow the list of those who will not escape—either because they choose to stay, or because there is not enough room. I had hoped that the only decisions required of me would be where to stow their gear.”

Damisa heard his bitterness and had to quell a powerful impulse to reach out to him. “Lord Micail and Lady Tiriki will be sailing with Captain Reidel, but I am on
your
list,” she said softly.

“Yes, little flower, and I am very glad of it!” Tjalan’s gaze returned to her face, and his grim look lightened. “Who would have thought my skinny little cousin would have grown so—”

Another call from Dantu cut off whatever he had been about to say, but Damisa was to cherish those parting words for a long time. He had noticed that she was grown up. He had really
seen
her. Surely, the word he had not had the chance to say was “fair,” or “lovely,” or even “beautiful.”

 

The house where Reio-ta dwelt with Deoris was set into a hillside close to the Temple, with a view of the sea. As a small child, Tiriki had lived in the house of the priestesses with her aunt Domaris. They had brought her to Ahtarrath as an infant to save her from the danger she faced as the child of the Grey Mage whose magic had awakened the evil of Dyaus. Deoris had feared her daughter dead until she came to Ahtarrath and they met once more. By then, Tiriki thought of Domaris as her mother, and it was only after Domaris’s death that Tiriki lived with Deoris.

Now, as she climbed the broad steps of the house, arm in arm with Micail, she could not restrain a sudden sigh of appreciation for the harmony of the building and the gardens around it. As a child, confused and grieving, she had taken little notice of her surroundings, and by the time the pain of loss had faded, she had learned her way about too well to really see the place for what it was.

“How glorious.” Chedan, ascending close behind them, echoed her thought. “It is a sad fact that we often appreciate things most deeply when we are about to lose them.”

Tiriki nodded, surreptitiously wiping away a tear.
When this is gone, how often will I regret all the times I passed this way without stopping to really look?

For a moment the three paused, gazing westward. From here, the greater part of the broken city was hidden by the glittering roofs of the Temple district. Beyond them was only the ambiguous blue of the sea.

“It looks so peaceful,” Chedan said.

“An illusion,” Micail gritted, as he led them through the portico. Tiriki shivered as they crossed the decorative bridge that had, she reminded herself, always swayed slightly beneath the lightest step, but since the morning’s quake, she had become preternaturally aware of the leashed stresses in the earth. Whenever
anything
shook, she tensed and wondered if the horror was about to begin again.

Here, she observed, there were no chaotic piles of keepsakes and discards, none of the frantic bustling that rippled through the rest of the city, just a soft-voiced servant, waiting to escort the visitors to Reio-ta and Deoris. Tiriki’s heart sank with a premonition that their errand here would fail. Clearly, her parents did not intend to leave.

Chedan had gone ahead of her into the wide chamber that looked out on the gardens, and stood, saluting Deoris. It seemed to Tiriki that his voice trembled as he spoke the conventional words. What had Chedan been to her mother, she wondered, when they were young together in the Ancient Land? Did he see the mature priestess, with silver threading auburn-black braids coiled like a diadem above her brow, or the shade of a rebellious girl with stormy eyes and a tangle of dark curls—the girl Domaris had described when she spoke of Tiriki’s mother, before Deoris came to Ahtarrath from the Ancient Land?

“Have you . . . finished packing?” Reio-ta was asking. “Is the Temple prepared for evacuation, and the acolytes ready to . . . go?” The governor’s speech stumbled no more than usual. From his tone, it might have been a perfectly ordinary day.

“Yes, all is going well,” Micail answered, “or as well as can be expected. Some of the vessels have departed already. We expect to sail out on the morning tide.”

“We have saved more than enough space on Reidel’s ship for both of you,” added Tiriki. “You must come! Mother—Father—” She held out her hands. “We will need your wisdom. We will need
you!
”

“I love you too, darling—but don’t be foolish.” Deoris’s voice was low and vibrant. “I need only see the two of you to know that we have already given you all that you need.”

Reio-ta nodded, his warm eyes smiling. “Have you forgotten, I . . . gave my word, in council? So long as any of my beloved people hold the land, I . . . I, too, shall stay.”

Tiriki and Micail exchanged a quick but meaningful glance.
Time to try the other plan.

“Then, dear Uncle,” Micail said reasonably, “we must drink deep of your advice while we can.”

“G-gladly,” said Reio-ta, with a modest inclination of his head. “Perhaps you, Master Chedan, will . . . drink, of something sweeter? I can offer several good vintages. We have had some . . . banner years, in your absence.”