Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (15 page)

“Let me see that… We meant to trick you into moving the books to a new place—a place we’d be watching, of course—but never that you’d come to harm.” She reached over to her wet clothes and disentangled her belt-pouch from the mess, drawing out several small packets of herbs wrapped securely in waxed cloth. “We didn’t even know we’d been seen until we ran into your spells of misdirection…”

“Well, they must have been pretty good, since I walked back through them and got lost myself,” Rhion sighed. “At least, I’d like to think that was what happened and not that I just got lost like any other fool who goes wading around the marshes at night… Ow! If that cut didn’t get sufficiently washed in three hours of wading I don’t know what it
would
take to get it clean…”

“That should hold till we get back in the morning.” She bent over the bandaging of the makeshift poultice, murmuring herbwife spells; at the touch of her fingers, Rhion felt the pain lessen. Reaction was stealing over him, with the warmth of the little stone room and the fatigue that follows prolonged exertion in the cold. He leaned back against the wall and listened to the low, sweet voice as he would have listened to the rain, without trying to disentangle the spells she wove, only hearing in them the sounds of healing and of peace. He found himself wondering what her name had been and whether, if she had been born in some inland village or hill march, she would have found apprenticeship to some Earth-witch and eventually have become a village healer…

Or would the call of the Goddess have brought her to this place, wherever she had been born?

What would have happened to him, he wondered, had he been born a farmer’s son a hundred miles from the nearest city, with no way to learn of wizardry and magic, no way to meet Jaldis. Or was it like the summoning spells on the books, he wondered. But then who was the summoner, and whom the summoned?

In the firelight, without his spectacles, her face seemed younger but very tired, the face of the girl she had been.

And if she had been born the daughter of a Duke?

Father needs an alliance… It isn’t a question of what I want…

But that was something of which he could not bear to think.

She raised her head, her eyes seeming darker, like blue amber, mingled browns and russets and treacle golds. “The books would have been returned, you know,” she said. There was apology in her voice.

She moved around to sit beside him, the rough stone wall poking them both in the back. “You would not even have known they’d been taken, read, the major spells copied…” An expression almost like pain drew at the corners of her generous mouth, and her broad brow darkened.

“The Goddess enjoins us to welcome sojourners in need, to help them. I know that what I have done is not the act of a host.” She sighed, and passed a hand across her face, shaking aside the wet trail of hair from the blanket where it lay across her shoulder.

“But you have told us how you live and what became of Jaldis’ other books in Felsplex. You’ve seen the books in our Library—old and crumbling, some of them, and some of them the only copies left of certain volumes, certain spells, certain knowledge… And of some books we know only their names, know only that they existed once. Paper is only paper, Rhion. Flesh is only flesh.”

Profiled in the amber nimbus of the fire her face was tired, and infinitely sad. Perhaps it was that which broke the wall of his mistrust: the hunger, the sadness, and the yearning that were his own birthright of wizardry. The fire burned out of its first leaping brightness and settled down to a steady, crackling warmth, the rain’s drumming eased as the sea-wind carried the somber clouds west to the stony uplands of Way, and their talk turned to other things. He had not forgotten the cold, bright power of her voice as she drove the grims away, nor the dreadful strength of the spells she had cast upon his mind—but he perceived that the power she held was only a part of her, and that at heart, within, she was very like himself. In the warmth and pleasant weariness as they sat together he put his arm around her shoulders, and later, when she turned to him, he did not turn away.

Rhion was the Gray Lady’s lover until the equinox of spring. He never did quite trust her where the books were concerned, but he liked her enormously, both as a lover and as a friend. In an odd way he felt safer, sensing that she was not a woman to weave the secrets of a man’s bed and body into spells of coercion; there were magics, too, that wizards used in the bedroom which nonwizards—the tavern girls in Felsplex, or the Marshmen—found unnerving.

It would have been different, had he not known that Tally could never be his.

He knew that the Lady had had other lovers. Indeed, two of the children who sometimes accompanied the Marshfolk to the Islands had her square face and snub nose, and he had heard Channa the cook speak matter-of-factly of “the Lady’s husband.” But it wasn’t until shortly before the equinox that he saw this man, a slender, gray-haired Marshman with a deeply lined face and twinkling eyes, when he came to the Islands to speak to her about the forthcoming spring rites.

“The chieftain of the Marshfolk is always the Lady’s husband,” Jaldis explained on one of the rare clear evenings when he and Rhion sat on the ruinous stone terrace along the water, observing the movement of the stars. The Moon had not yet risen—sprinkled with diamond fire, the huge arch of darkness seemed hard and shatteringly deep. “I’m told sometimes another man—or occasionally a woman—will ask to take the husband’s place in the rites, but it’s usually the Lady’s husband… Have they asked you to preside over their rites at the turning of spring?”

The old man spoke without taking his concentration from the silver astrolabe he held, sighting above the lacy clouds of trees on the next island for the first appearance of the star called the Red Pilgrim. But there was, in spite of his efforts to conceal it, an edge to his voice. Across the marshes, the ducklike quacking of the first wood frogs could he heard; farther upriver, Rhion knew, in the wet meadows the sheep would be starting to lamb. The old man had only shaken his head when Rhion had told him about the Lady, but Rhion was aware these days that Jaldis was keeping a rather close eye on the hidden books. As soon as he’d been strong enough to go there himself Jaldis had marked the place with his own seals and, Rhion knew, had fallen into the habit of checking on them often.

This stung him a little, though he perfectly understood the concern. He didn’t
think
the Gray Lady would—or could—use magic on him without his knowledge, but that conviction in itself, he was well aware, might have been induced by some spell more subtle than he could fathom. That she was stronger than he, he had always known.

He sighed and propped his spectacles back into place with his forefinger, keeping his attention on identifying the positions of various changeable stars. “They asked me if I’d attend, but they didn’t say anything about presiding. Wouldn’t the Lady herself do that?”

“Male magic and female work differently in their system,” the old man replied, “as I’m sure you know. Here, see? The Pilgrim star is in twenty degrees of ascension, in the constellation of the Child.” Since both of them knew that a quarrel would be based, at heart, in completely irrational feelings, neither was willing to step over the tacitly drawn lines. Thus many of their conversations had an oddly informational quality these days, something Rhion guessed would pass in time, when they left Sligo.

“Talismans of protection seem to be influenced by this position, those made while that star is in ascendance having a greater efficacy, especially against poison, though conversely poisons, too, brewed in conjunction with death-spells, have greater strength… Very curious.”

He turned to regard his student, pinpricks of starlight twinkling deep within the bulging plates of jewels which hid what remained of his eyes. “Certainly men and women are trained in different techniques. They generally have a man to preside over the rites.”

“Is it something you don’t advise?”

“There is no reason why you shouldn’t attend.” The old man flicked back a spider-floss strand of his hair, and cocked his head like a bird. “You’ll find it interesting. The principles of magic
per se
have become deeply corrupted here and mixed with what was, originally, a religious cult, as I’m sure you’ve seen. The equinox rites clearly have their roots in what elsewhere came to be celebrated as the Carnival of Mhorvianne—the powers evoked at the turning of the four balance-points of the celestial year they attribute to the favor of their goddess rather than to the strength of their own wizardry and the nature of the cosmos itself. But it is never an ill thing to witness the raising of power, nor the shapes taken by the human soul.”

Still, it was with an irrational sense of disharmony, almost of guilt, that Rhion made his way in company with the Ladies and nearly all the folk of the marshes along the curved, gray beach of the Holy Isle at sunset of the equinox eve. Jaldis had remained behind in the main cluster of the islands, perhaps the only man in the lands of Sligo to do so, in order to work his own conjurations, calling the powers generated by the stars’ balance to strengthen the spells on their medicinal herbs.

Without a word being said, Rhion knew that what Jaldis had really wanted to do was weave another Dark Well and search in its depths for the wizards who had begged their help, but he knew also that the old man was not about to do such a thing where there was a risk of having his secrets discovered, particularly by those whom he considered little better than Earth-witches. Jaldis was certainly capable of imbuing herbs with healing-spells unassisted—such was his power that he could probably have cured the plague with common grass—and, in any case, he would never have given Rhion an ultimatum of any sort.

Nevertheless, Rhion knew the old man hadn’t liked being left alone.

In many ways it had been an uneasy winter.

Jaldis was right about one thing. The rituals practiced by the Ladies of the Moon were those of a religious cult rather than of wizardry, cluttered with curious practices having no apparent bearing on magic as Rhion understood it.

They were profoundly unnerving nevertheless.

The sun sank over the green-brown wall of the sweet marshes. Shadows flowed forth across the murky tangle of sawgrass and salt-oak that lay in long, uneven crescents seaward of the Holy Isle as the Marshmen began to assemble in the sacred place. The flotilla of canoes had left the Ladies’ islands in the black dark long before dawn—at one time, Rhion guessed, soon after the days of the earthquake, this islet had been the last point of land facing out over the sea. From the crumbling double circle of menhirs on the beach, twin lines of unshaped standing stones extended out into the brack brown waters of the marsh, their heads gradually vanishing beneath the surface like the Sea-God’s silent armies; a cloud-streaked mauve twilight lay upon the black, decaying shapes like a smoky shroud. When darkness was fully on them, the tapping of a drum began, and the men and women of the Marshfolk took hands, forming long winding chains that wove between the stones of circle and lines, looped far out onto the beach and into the waters and so back again, treading in the sand and the water the ancient shapes of the Holy Maze which had been passed down the years. Chill salt wind stirred their tangled hair and coarse garments, shredded the torch smoke and carried over the desolation the single, hoarse cry of a bird; Rhion, seated alone on a small boulder just above the tide line, drew his cloak about him and shivered. The lines of the dancers passed by him unseeing, though the stars that came to shine through the wispy clouds gleamed silver in their open eyes.

The dance began, and ended, and began again, now walking, now hastening, now bending down with long, shuddering ripples that passed through the lines like waves of the sea or the turning of a serpent’s tail. Though torches ringed the stone circle thrust upright in the sand, the dancers carried none—as the darkness deepened their forms seemed more and more like the passing of a spirit host, lost between the realms of the living and the dead. The music was oddly random, strange knockings and dronings broken by shrill bird cries, and yet, through it all, moved a rhythm that eluded the seekings of Rhion’s mathematical mind. More than ever, he had the sense of visiting a world that was half-invisible half the time, a world where things appeared to make little sense and yet moved to patterns unguessable—where things that seemed common were lambent with power. In other parts of the Forty Realms tonight was the Carnival of Masks, the feast of Mhorvianne the Merciful, the rite of forgiveness. Here, it seemed, atonement involved something beyond a sheltered remorse.

The night drew on. The sea’s whisper was hardly louder than the dragging of hundreds of feet through the heavy gray sand. Soft wind herded the clouds westward and the stars turned their courses unimpeded above the headless stones. The tide of the equinox lifted and stirred in Rhion’s blood.

Beside the altar in the midst of the ring of stones and torchflame the presiding mage raised his arms to the sky—an old Hand-Pricker from up the marshes who looked ancient enough to be Jaldis’ grandfather. It was close to midnight; Rhion felt it in his bones. He could feel, too, the spiral whisper of magic that floated now like a glowing mist all around the holy place. Magic rose from the dancers, from the sea, from the maze they had trodden into the sand, and from the ley that crossed through the island and plunged down the lane of stones to drown itself in the waters of the marsh; magic closed tighter and tighter about the altar-stone like the wool winding on a distaff, like the twisting ropes of a catapult’s spring. In a high, shaky voice the mage was chanting the words of the raising and concentration of power, and the lines of the dancers changed their pattern and drew the circles smaller yet, giving him the power they raised.

Though Rhion had not seen her approach, the Lady stepped forward out of darkness into the bloody glare. He saw that she wore the garments of the bygone priestesses of An, red as the anemones that grew in the sweet marshes in spring, sewn with plates of pierced gold. Her face was painted white and black after the ancient fashion, framed in the smoky rivers of her hair; she wore the old diadem of the priest-queens on her head, the white moon jewel, the flowers and the bones. And to the altar her husband came, as the husbands of the Lady of Sligo had come for centuries past, naked to the waist with his silvery hair unbound and his twinkling eyes solemn.