Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (16 page)

He stretched himself upon the stone and a priest and priestess came forward—the priestess, Rhion noticed distractedly, was Channa the cook—taking knives of meteor iron that the Lady gave them, the blades glinting blue in the starlight. At a word from the Lady, the torches were quenched in the sand, but the dancers continued to turn and weave along the maze’s invisible tracks in the darkness, silent as wind. Even the music had stilled, but it seemed to Rhion that he could hear, along with the hiss of their feet in the heavy sand, the beating of the blood in their veins. The old Hand-Pricker stretched forth his hands to the stars. The priest and priestess moved to either side of the man who lay upon the altar. The blades glinted as they were raised—then they bent and cut the victim’s throat.

Rhion shuddered, looking away as the Lady stepped forward, her crimson gown a darkness now broken only by the white shapes of dangling bones. He’d seen that the cuts were carefully made, slitting the veins, not severing the arteries or the windpipe. Still, even allowing for the added power that the turning of the equinox midnight gave to healing magic, it would take a tremendously strong spell at this point to save the victim’s life. Thin, icy wind streamed up from the salt marshes of the east, carrying to his nostrils the sweet, metallic repulsiveness of the blood; the dancers’ feet swished in the sand, starlight flashing on the sweat of their faces, the curled tips of the waves, their feet weaving and re-weaving the maze between sea and earth.

A flute awakened, crying wild and sad and alone; somewhere a tiny drum trembled with a skittery beat in the torchless dark. When Rhion looked back the altar was empty. Priest and priestess, Lady and mage and victim, were gone. The air seemed to sing with the aftermath of magic, drawn from the turning of the heavens, dispersed along the leys to the four corners of the sleeping world like a shuddering silver heartbeat and called back from them again. A dark thread of blood ran down the side of the stone, gleaming black in the starlight.

But whether the Lady’s husband had walked away alive, or had been carried off dead—which as he later learned frequently did happen in these rites—Rhion did not hear for many days.

Spring rains had started a few weeks previously, turning the waters of the marsh to sheets of hammered steel and transforming all the familiar channels as the water level rose. Waking early, to meditate on the old stone terrace or walk to the library to study, Rhion heard among the reeds the cries of the returning birds.

One day shortly after the rite at the standing stones, Jaldis announced that enough dry weather lay ahead to permit them to take the road once again.

“It will be good,” he said simply, “to be home.”

Nerriok
, Rhion thought, the green City of Bridges, walled with golden sandstone upon its island in the midst of ring after ring of
crinas
, floating eyots of dredged silt and withe anchored by roots to the bottom of Lake Mharghan and thick with trees and flowers—corrupt, sprawling, and unbelievably colorful, with its markets heavy with the perfumes of melons and bread and flowers, its majestic temples and marble baths, its periodic riots among the students of different schools of philosophy and its huge concourses of foreigners that turned certain quarters into strange bazaars of the East or grubby, sprawling barbarian villages…

The noise, the smells, and the excitement of the place came back on him in a wave of strange nostalgia—libraries, playhouses, poetry, music, and the meeting of minds…

And at the same time he thought about the shaggy green silences of the marshes of Sligo and the faint speech of wind chimes on foggy mornings mingling with the cawing of crows.

He pushed his spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, and said, “The Gray Lady has asked me to stay on here as Scribe.”

Jaldis said nothing. His bent and crippled fingers turned over and over the seal-hair brush he’d been wielding, to write talismanic signs on a luck-charm. The breeze off the marsh, sniffing like a little dog across the terrace upon which Rhion had found him sitting, stirred the cream-colored parchment under its weighting of river stones. Cool sunlight flooded a cloud-patched sky overhead and glanced across Jaldis’ spectacles. The vines that cloaked their crumbling old house had begun to put out leaves. Within a month the Drowned Lands would be a jungle of whispering green.

The brush made a little silvery
tinck
as it was set down on the pitted limestone table-top. “Perhaps you should.”

Rhion shook his head. “I couldn’t leave you alone.”

He made his face as noncommittal as his voice. When Jaldis was wearing his spectacles it was difficult to tell whether he was using them to see or not.

“You’ll have to one day, you know.” The set of the old man’s back, the way he tilted his head up at Rhion as if he could see, were calm and matter-of-fact. “I do not want that it should come to it, that you would begin to wish me dead.”

“I won’t.”

Jaldis drew in his breath as if he would speak, but let it out again, and the rosewood box upon his chest only murmured, like the drawn-out trickle of the marsh winds, “Oh, my son…”

Rhion reached down and took his hands. In a way he knew that Jaldis was right. Unsettling as the sojourn here had been, at heart they had both known that Rhion’s affair with the Lady, like his other relations with the tavern girls and flower sellers of Nerriok and Felsplex, was not something that would alter his life, or change what lay between them. Yet somewhere in the course of the winter something had changed. Learning the mazes of the marshes, studying the scrolls left by ancient wizards, meditating on the healing spells the Lady had taught him, Rhion had realized—or, more accurately, had come to believe within himself—that he could be a wizard away from Jaldis’ teaching.

But now was not the time. For one thing, Jaldis needed him. In the misted silver light he could see the marks of the winter’s hardship on that lined and weary face:
How could he even REACH Nerriok if I stayed behind
?

And there were other things.

“You’re my teacher,” he said quietly. “My friend. Ten years ago when I was going insane trying to—to crush out the fire inside me—you told me that it was possible to have that fire, to hold it and keep it, not as a secret that I had to hide but as a way I could make my living and as a glory, a joy in itself. You told me that dreams were not insanity. Just for that, if you’d done nothing for me from that moment on, I’d still owe you…”

“You owe me nothing!” The crippled fingers tightened fiercely over the soft, stubby ones in their grasp. “Owe—it’s a filthy word! We are not permitted to marry, but we need sons and daughters, Rhion, to whom we can pass our knowledge. To whom we can pass what we are. Not children of the blood, but children of the fire.” There was long silence, broken by the far-off mewling of gulls.

“Ah,” Rhion replied, as if he had at last understood some great piece of wisdom. “I see. So you really
enjoyed
spending all those hours getting migraines teaching me to scry through a crystal. It gave you heartfelt fulfillment, that time I lit the attic on fire back in Nerriok…”

The scarred ruin of Jaldis’ mouth flexed, the closest he could ever come to a laugh, and he pulled his hands free of his adopted son’s. “You are an impertinent boy,” he said.

“Besides,” Rhion added with a grin. “Every time I think you’ve taught me all about magic, either I bollix something up and you have to remind me I need five hundred times more practice, or you pull out some obscure spell that you’ve forgotten to tell me about, like the come-back spells on the books. I’m not about to let you get away till I’m damn sure I’ve got it all, which should be in about another thirty years. So I’ll just go inside and start packing…”

The crippled fingers, startlingly strong from eleven years of supporting his weight on the crutch handles, caught at his wrists once more. It never failed to surprise Rhion how accurate the old man’s awareness was of where things were.

“You will have to leave me one day, you know,” he repeated, refusing to be put off, as he had always refused to be put off by his pupil’s elusive clowning. “One day you will need to seek your own path, to establish yourself. Don’t give that up for the sake of looking after me.”

Rhion looked about him in silence. Under a cloak of weeds, the marble pavement was pitted and broken; beyond it stood the library, the huge stone blocks of its walls being forced apart by the roots of trees. All around them, ancient marble faces peeped like ghosts from the foliage that wound this island in a flowering shroud. Gulls circled overhead, and distantly he heard a bittern’s harsh cry. Chilly spots of sunlight flashed in the reed beds and on the brown waters beyond. A silence of peace lay upon the lands, and everywhere, like the murmuring of the waters, he could breathe the whispering scent of magic.

He made himself grin again, so that the lightness would carry into his voice. “When I find a path I want to tread by myself, I’ll tell you.” Turning quickly, he went inside.

Later he sought the Gray Lady at her loom. By the way she raised her eyes to his face when he came in he saw that she read what his answer to Jaldis had been, and thus his answer to her. Even when he had gone to seek his master on the terrace, Rhion had not been clear as to what his decision would be.

“I can’t leave him,” he said quietly, sitting down on the bench beside her. “Not now. Not yet. He was hurt enough by my—I don’t know, deserting him, I suppose, for you, or even seeming to. It sounds silly…”

She smiled, shook her head, and laid the shuttle by. “All fathers want their sons to grow to manhood and walk alone,” she said. “But they are all sure they know best about the direction in which their sons should walk.”

Under his scrubby beard Rhion’s mouth twisted at the sudden memory of his own father’s constant moan about the ways of modern youth. But the thought inevitably brought back that sweaty red face trembling with anger above its tight embroidered collar.
You are dead to me as from today. My son is dead. My son is dead
…

And so, Rhion thought, he was.

After his ejection from the family home, he had scried for sight of his father in the fire of the cellar where he and Jaldis had been sheltering. He had seen him in tears, alone, locked in his counting room where not even Rhion’s mother would find him. He had never sought for sight of him again.

“I’m sorry.” He sighed, and looked up at the Gray Lady’s face, then around at the little stone chamber, a round room like a dovecote built onto the back of what had been a temple, its hearth where the altar had been. Through a doorway he could see the gray pine poles and white curtains of the bed where they had lain. “I would have liked to stay longer.”

Even as he said it he felt guilty, as if he had said to Jaldis,
I’d rather study with the Lady than with you. I’d rather sleep in the Lady’s arms than look after a lame old man. I d rather stay in a place where they have hundreds of books, than follow after a cripple who’s down to his last dozen…

And a voice still deeper within added,
I’d rather be a man than a boy
.

But right now, to Jaldis, lame and blind and set adrift, it all came to the same thing:
I’m leaving you
.

And that, he could not say.

She smiled and shook her head. “Never be sorry when the Goddess leads you somewhere by the hand. She’s usually very clear about what will be best for us—it’s just that sometimes we think we know more about it than She does. I will miss you, Rhion.” She drew him to her and kissed him on the lips, the warm, brief kiss of friendship. Wan sunlight, falling through the open window beside the angular black skeleton of the loom, picked out the crow’s-feet around her hazel eyes, and the first threads of gray at the part of her smooth-braided hair.

“We see time like wanderers in a maze,” she said. “She sees it from the top. I’ll have Channa put up some supplies to take on the road. But I wouldn’t advise you to go to Nerriok. The queen has lately come under the influence of the priests of Agon, the Eclipsed Sun. Like most of the sun cults, they are intolerant and jealous of wizards’ powers. My advice, if as you say you have done a favor for a member of the ducal house, is to go to Bragenmere instead.”

They reached Bragenmere in four days. Their speed on the road was greatly assisted by the half-week of dry weather Jaldis had foreseen and by the two small donkeys and the Marshman servant the Lady had lent them for the trip. Able to carry blankets and foodstuffs as well as Jaldis’ books—which Jaldis tested with spells the first night on the road, as soon as he thought Rhion was asleep, to make absolutely sure that the Gray Lady had not handled them—the two wizards were thus able to avoid spending what little cash remained to them on inns. They reached Bragenmere with enough in hand to rent two small but clean rooms—one upstairs and one down—in one of the hundreds of little courts of which that dry upland city consisted, a court which was owned, ironically enough, by the local Temple of Darova, a god whose disapproval had gotten them thrown out of more than one town in their time.

Rhion fell easily back into the role of housewife, sweeping out their new dwelling place and scouting the nearest markets and fountains. They were lucky in that, though Shuttlefly Court itself didn’t possess a fountain, which was one reason the rents there were cheap, it backed onto the Laundry of Fortunate Sheets, also owned by the Temple of Darova, which operated a small banking house and a very large bordello in the neighborhood as well. The laundry master was willing to sell surplus fountain water after sundown and all the ‘used’ they cared to carry away for bathing and dishwashing purposes. Bragenmere, perched on the high, arid knees of the Mountains of the Sun, was watered by a number of springs, two very fine stone aqueducts, and the Kairn River’s sluggish marshes below the Lower Town’s walls, all of which had been sufficient for its population back in the days when it had only been a trading town for the upcountry hunters and shepherds. Since the increase of the weaving trade under the patronage of the Dukes of Mere, the city, capital of this realm, had grown vastly, and as was the way of things in any city of the Forty Realms, the great public baths and temple fountains, and the water-gardens of the Duke, the nobility, and the wealthy, tended to get larger shares than any number of the poor.