The Shattered Goddess (15 page)

“Maybe it couldn’t get up anywhere else.”

“It failed anyway.”

She yawned and went to sleep. He remained awake for half an hour or so, remembering cosmologies he’d seen in musty old books. What if the world had fallen on its side? What if it rolled away from the sun entirely,
into the eternal cold and darkness?

The next morning when they came to a stream to drink, they had to break the ice on its surface first.

The moon made no further attempt to show itself.

They came to other towns, all deserted, but in various ways. In one every shutter and door was firmly barred. Thinking someone huddled within the buildings, they pounded on doors and shouted.
Their voices echoed back in answer. In another every roof had been removed and dropped into the streets, as if some giant had been rummaging through jars and throwing the lids every which way. The place was almost impassable with wreckage. But no tower had fallen. No house had been smashed. In the middle of a square, a statue of a hero stood undamaged. The giant’s touch had been selective.

A village behind a stockade of logs was simply gone. The gate to the stockade was still locked from within. Amaedig boosted Ginna up and he climbed the wall high enough to see over. There were only bare patches where houses had once been, swept clean, without any rubble.

They found it more comfortable to sleep in the open, away from the towns.

Once there was a weasel to eat. Ginna
bludgeoned the cold, sluggish creature to death with a stick. They ate it raw.

Now nearly delirious from hunger and weariness, having lost all count of how long they had been journeying, they came to the forest country. The land flattened out quickly, which was a relief, but the open stretches of dead grass or bare soil were more and more frequently interrupted by clusters of the largest
trees Ginna or Amaedig had ever seen. When the sky had its faint streak of light in it, they looked like an endless array of black towers, vaster than anything Ginna had seen in the dead places beyond Ai Hanlo. The tops could not be seen at any time. Branches closed overhead like a roof, enclosing the gloom in a new kind of smothering closeness. By the time clearings were few and far between, and
the underbrush had given way to the more open forest floor, it seemed they were indoors again, in some endless vault of wooden pillars. Each opening between two trunks was the mouth of a tunnel, part of an entangling maze. Shadows never lessened. Even during the brief days it was often impossible to see more than a faint and faraway suggestion of grey. Ginna thought of that grey sky as the last remnant
of some body otherwise wholly covered with a cancer. It was dying. The world was dying. Merely to see, when the trunks were a solid wall and he and Amaedig could not pass, he made glowing balls with his hand. When he could, when the branches were not tripping him and scraping at his face, he juggled the balls, but eventually he would miss and they would drop to the ground and burst, or drift
up and vanish like the last fireflies expiring in a world grown hostile and strange. He was not cheered by the sight of them. When he could, he preferred to make a single sphere, cage it between his fingers, and use this as a lantern. Amaedig followed him, holding onto his cloak.

Always he would stumble and crush the ball, or his fingers would become numb with cold and it would slip away
and go out. He would always make another one.

When the distant grey was gone or hidden behind the trees, when actual night came, he had to have light to keep away the sheer terror of the dark until they managed to sleep somehow—always back to back for warmth, both of them wrapped in the same blankets.

Once he slept fitfully and had a dream. His soul did not leave his body and he did
not drift over the landscape, he merely saw with eyes more sensitive than any other creature born in the light. At first there was nothing more than vague shapes against the deeper murk, but then a clearing appeared, ringed all around with trees like the legs of an army of titans. Walls and towers were rising out of the open ground, growing like crystals forming impossibly fast. The walls were vaguely
shiny, like hard coal, and they seemed to reflect where there was none to reflect. The outlines were clear. The architecture was wholly alien. What were the inverted stairs for, slowly revolving around the tilted column? Stranger was the solid pyramid, without any means of entry, which seemed to shift and flicker as he looked on it. It was a pyramid, and then it wasn’t. Some walls were almost
horizontal. There were bubbles of black stone rising out of the ground. As the vision became clearer he could see the folk of this place scurrying along the thick, heavy bridges that stretched between the walls. They were hunched over. They did not walk like human beings. Every so often one leapt off one of the buildings and flew.

And then he understood. This was a city of the new world,
as Ai Hanlo had been of the old, and the inhabitants were of the darkness, spawned like flies out of a puddle. They were claiming their Earth and taming it in their fashion. Kaemen had created all this. To them he must be a god. To them Ginna was an alien, perhaps frightening. He could not live among them in their world. It would be death. Their world was to come. His would pass away. It was the
future he beheld. There had always been prophets, he knew, and he wondered if he were one of them. At times like this the past, present, and future seemed to run together like pigments being mixed. He understood.

Halfway between dream and waking he reasoned thus, and as he drew more out of the dream, the scene faded. When he asked himself, “How am I asking myself anything when I am dreaming?”
he was fully awake at once.

The forest was moving around him. A wind blew between the trees with ever increasing fierceness. Branches snapped and crashed down. Leaves struck his face. There seemed to be other sounds besides the wind: chitterings, pattering footsteps, coughings and chatter, as if the very darkness itself had come to life.

He slipped an arm around Amaedig and held her
close. She muttered something in a dream of her own, but did not wake. He felt safer holding her, the way a drowning man clings to a log. Indeed they were drowning, scraps and flotsam of the old world sinking in the chaos of the new.

The wind tore at his hair and clothing. A bough fell on him hard enough to make him grunt, but Amaedig slept on. He let her sleep. He envied sleep. He could
not sleep now himself, and if he did, what might his dreaming eye see?

Hours seemed to pass. He had never known anything so cold as that wind. It rose into a raging tempest, and all he could do was huddle against its fury.

He was afraid that Amaedig wasn’t sleeping, but dead, that she had frozen. She felt cold. He shook her awake, and she sat up and looked around. Her hair whipped
around in her face. She huddled with him.

Then the wind brought a trilling, cackling sound, which drew closer and closer, changed direction, and approached again. There were heavy footsteps, the sounds of trees crashing and uprooted, but the thing did not seem wholly defined by direction and place. There was a crash of thunder and something massive, immensely long and heavy, passed overhead,
making the night even darker as it cast shadow upon the shadows. Trees bent and snapped. Branches rained down.

He imagined that it was the very spirit of Death passing over, coming at last to remove the remnants of mankind from the world.

He did not imagine that, after it passed, it turned around, very obviously in one place and direction now, and started back.

Amaedig took him
by the hand and dragged him through the trees. He groped, allowing himself to be led. He didn’t know where they were going and was sure she didn’t know either. They went away from the sound, but the thundering was everywhere, and the wind tore at them like an army of ghosts. The trunks were almost a solid barrier, with only occasional and hidden openings. Once through, it was like diving into a
raging, bottomless sea.

The huge thing passed overhead again, flapping on enormous wings. They froze against a tree. All the forest trembled.

Ginna found himself detached from the midnight forest, the danger, the flight, and somewhere in the back of his mind part of his consciousness paused to marvel at how much he could hear when sight was denied him. He sensed spirits and powers
all around him, the forest closing in like an animate thing, a smothering avalanche of rough bark and wood and leaves. Somehow he perceived, by the sound of the wind passing through the dead leaves, that those leaves and their branches rose up tier upon tier until they formed a world of their own, divorced from earth and sky.

He heard the laughter of the thing that followed him coming from
every direction. Flight was useless. There was no place to run to when the foe was something not confined to one place. But his instincts and his legs and Amaedig paid no heed to reason. He ran. Amaedig ran.

Suddenly the wind told him that the trees were on one side of him and not on another. Then the ground began to drop and the wind came with less force. The forest had broken. They were
running down an embankment until it became too steep, then sliding among mud and stones. Into a valley. A new sound came: water rushing. A river bank. A new terror came with it, the realization that they could not cross the river and would be trapped on its shore.

But then there was a light up ahead and both of them let out wordless cries of relief and astonishment Ginna saw it as something
totally impossible, a miracle, a mirage.

By the edge of the river a large campfire was burning and, even more impossibly, there were clear outlines of many men around it “Hey!”

“Hello!”

Instantly there was commotion in the camp. Forms scurried. Metal clanked. When they were close enough to see, they held their arms up to their faces lest they be blinded by the firelight. They
could make out twenty men or more standing before them with swords drawn and spears pointed. Many bore shields of polished metal which gleamed in the reflected light “Wait!” cried Amaedig. “We’re friends.”

A massive figure pushed through the throng and stood between die newcomers and the fire. He was a head taller than the rest and wore armor which glittered golden from the fire at his back.
His beard was long and white and draped over him like a cloak. They couldn’t see his face.

“What are ye that would come out of the darkness?” he barked in a strange accent.

“Two... people. A girl and a boy.”

“Or be ye two evil shapes, here to lure us to doom?”

“No, we don’t want to lure you anywhere.”

“Really,” said Ginna. “We don’t.”

The spears still pointed.
None of the shields was lowered.

Behind them, up the bank in the forest, the thunderous passage continued, echoing trilling laughter in its wake. The thing seemed to move up and down the river, passing them, moving on, returning.

“That spirit has haunted us these many nights,” said the leader. “Whenever we put ashore it is there, and it calls out to us when we are on the river.”

“Then we’re safe from it with you?” asked Ginna.

“There’s none that be safe from it anywhere, but it will not take us all at once. That is not its way. But it is cunning. What proof have ye that ye be not shapes created and sent by it? We have not seen a true human on these shores for a long time now.”

Some of the warriors began a low, droning chant, either a prayer or an exorcism.
Ginna looked at the unmoving leader, then at the fire. The fire seemed a wonderful thing. More than anything else he wanted to sit by it. He thought of all the comforting fires he’d known on the road with the caravan and Gutharad by his side, or even in Ai Hanlo.

Tears ran down his cheeks from the hopelessness and despair of all the things he had lost, from being so close to that fire and
still so far away.

“Please... you must not send us away... We’ve come so far and we’ve been afraid for so long. We’ll die if we have to go. We’ll do anything you want us to…”

“Come forward, both of you, and come slowly.” Carefully they approached the cluster of men, looking apprehensively at weapons, then at faces, then at the leader.

When they were close enough, that ancient
warrior reached out and grasped each of them by the shoulder, squeezing hard. Then he touched their faces lightly. Ginna flinched as the hard, cold hand brushed his cheek. A ring on one of the fingers hit him in the eye. “Where have you come from?”

“A long way,” said Amaedig. “From Ai Hanlo. In Randelcainé.”

“That is a long way indeed.”

The men stopped their chanting.

Ginna and Amaedig were led to the fire and allowed to sit. Cautiously they got down, but as soon as he touched the ground, Ginna lost all sense of care, of fear, of everything. Every muscle in his body went slack. His breath came long and deep. He fainted into sleep, crumpling over sideways, his head in Amaedig’s lap.

CHAPTER 9

And Fires Burn on the Sea

Ginna awoke to a song and the sound of rushing water. They were on the river. He was lying beneath a blanket on a gently swaying wooden deck. Torches were set around him.

He sat up and saw that he was at the front of a long, open vessel with a single mast. The sail hung limply. The wind was gone. Below him, all the company sat at the
oars, save for their captain, who stood at the opposite end, holding the tiller. All sang in low voices interrupted with grunts, and the oars moved in time.

“Oh we don’t know fear and we don’t know greed,

But we’re there to die when there is a need.

First a stroke and then a stroke,

We are the good companions!”

There were many other verses, mostly about fighting and
high ideals, and some he did not understand. After a while he stopped listening. He let himself lie back on the deck. He felt the river flowing beneath him, and the ship leapt forward with every stroke of the oars. He looked at the torches set atop the ship’s mast and along its sides. He tried to pretend they were stars. He felt himself dropping off to sleep again.

But then it occurred to
him that he didn’t know where Amaedig was. He drew the blanket off him, then paused as he noticed that the arm which had been slashed by her knife was now neatly bandaged. There was no pain and the wound felt greasy from a salve put on it.

Amaedig was lying a little ways off. She was awake, and was sitting against the railing, watching the rowers.

He crawled over and sat beside her.
They watched i wordlessly for a while. The song went on. The water rushed past. Somewhere a monster of the river coughed.

“Have you noticed something?” she said at last.

“What?”

“They’re all old men. Every one of them.”

Indeed, now that he looked, he saw that all of them had long white or grey beards. Like their leader, they wore their hair down over their shoulders, and
this too was white or silver.

“Who are they?”

“No idea. I was hardly more awake than you when they carried us aboard.”

“How long ago was that?” he said.

“I don’t know. Since dawn, I guess.”

The sky was pitch black above.

“Dawn?”

“Yes, look.” She pointed ahead and to the right—the direction the sailors would call the starboard bow—at a thin line of grey
sky. It was the faintest dawn he had ever seen. Suddenly it came to him that it would be the last. The only lights left now in the whole universe, it seemed, were the ship’s own.

“I heard of a witch once,” he said, “who wanted to kill a man. She conjured his image in a bowl of water, which she kept covered with a lid. Every night she would remove the lid and glare at the image with all her
hate. The image glowed with the light of the man’s soul, but gradually it diminished, and when the light was gone entirely, he died.”

“And?”

“What if the world is like that, and when the daylight is gone—”

“Let’s not talk about it. There’s nothing we can do now.”

They slept after a while. Ginna dreamt that he was a small child again, running barefoot with Amaedig through
some vast, dark, damp tunnel, looking for a way out. He was not frightened. They were playing. Their shouts and laughter echoed in the fathomless distances. It was a pleasant dream.

He awoke to silence. The crew had drawn in their oars, and the ship drifted with the current.

“It is well that ye be waked. I watched ye sleep, and know ye to be of mortal flesh.”

He looked up, startled.
The leader was standing over him, smiling, his thumbs hooked in his belt. He wore a long sword in a jeweled scabbard, which sparkled by torchlight.

Stiffly Ginna got to his feet He realized his bladder was full.

“Where do you—?”

“Where do you what?”

“Ah... ah…” He gestured vaguely. The man understood.

“Perform a euphemism? Over the side, ye fool! Then join us down
below.”

He and Amaedig climbed down to the lower deck, where all the men sat among the benches, eating from bowls. A brick stove heated a pot of stew.

They were given food and drink and a place to sit. Ginna looked from side to side uneasily, wondering what was expected of him, but everyone went on as if he were not there. It was the first properly cooked food he had eaten since—when?
He’d lost track of time since they left the caravan. It was all a jumbled nightmare.

When the meal was over, the leader clapped his hands once, and suddenly they were surrounded by solemn, hoary faces. Ginna felt sad looking at them. He was not afraid. They reminded him, every one, of a pair of kindly old men he had known and forever lost, Tharanodeth the Guardian and Hadel of Nagé.

The leader sat down before him. “I am called Arshad,” he said.

“We are... Ginna and Amaedig.”

“Welcome among us, Ginna and Amaedig, for it was revealed to me in a dream that something would happen while we camped at a certain spot along the river. So we did, and ye came. For some purpose, it is certain.”

“Yes, to get away from what was chasing us.” said Amaedig.

“No, it
was something more, perhaps not known even to yourselves. I dreamed it.”

“I have had many dreams,” said Ginna.

“So do all of us, but were the dreams deep or shallow? Anyone may dream of some little thing, or learn that his sheep are menaced by wolves because he sees it in a dream, but those are petty things. Few have deep dreams of vast import.”

“Well I don’t know if I do or
not,” said Ginna, and he went on to relate some of his dreams. Before he scarcely knew what he was doing, one thing led to another and had to be explained by yet another, and he was telling them the story of his life, from the time he had first visited Tharanodeth to those events of the past few days. He omitted, however, any hint of magic in himself, what Hadel had said, or even the fact that he
could make light with his hands. But he told of what he had seen at Kaemen’s banquet, how his soul had travelled far in the night to confront The Guardian, and what had become of the caravan. He explained how he and Amaedig had chanced upon Arshad and his company by the water’s edge. All listened in polite silence. When he was done, Amaedig was the first to speak.

“Now wait—meaning no discourtesy
to you, generous sirs, but we have told you much of ourselves, and still we know nothing of you—”

“Fairly spoken,” said Arshad. Turning to Ginna, he said, “Young lad, your friend is right. Put not all your gold on one side of the scale before the other has shown any of his.”

“But you asked—”

“No matter. Listen, both of ye. We are the Tashadim, a brotherhood formed when all of
us were as young as ye are. We heard the call of the great warrior-prophet, Tashad, who had a deep vision, telling him that one day the world would be filled with darkness, and his followers would seek an island of light, the final refuge, and there fall one by one, fighting bravely to the last. All of us who believed devoted our lives to his teaching, waiting for the day. Perhaps ye wonder why we
are all so old?”

“Yes, I—”

“It is because ours is a hard creed, and not a very attractive one. When the end came, though, we were prepared, while all others were beset as were ye. A few survivors must surely wander about, but in all our long voyage we have met no others.”

“Then, has the world ended?”

“Certainly it has changed, never to be again what it once was. Our past
is lost forever.”

“What became of Tashad?”

“He went to seek the isle ahead of us. He spoke his prophecies as he died, and all of us saw his spirit rise up from his body clad in armor bright as the sunrise, with a golden spear in his hand and a silver shield on his arm. First he rose slowly, then hovered above us. It was a sacred mystery, even then. We fell to the ground, covering our
eyes, but he spoke to us, saying, ‘Arise and take up my sword and my shield.’ When we uncovered our eyes, he was gone.”

There was silence for a little while. Ginna could think of nothing to say. The water was silent. They were far out from shore, in the middle of the broad river. Only the ship seemed real, floating in the darkness like a tiny world in the vastness of space.

“And now,”
said Arshad, turning again to Ginna, “a tale I shall tell to ye. There was a man who built a boat. He put all the planks in place and caulked all the seams, except one. So the water rushed in through that seam, sank the boat and he drowned.”

Again Ginna didn’t know what to say.

“That’s not much of a story... is it?” he managed.

“No, it is not. The one ye tell is much better,
for ye are a seer of deep visions. I know this. But I know also that something is left out of your telling. Ye have not told all,” Arshad gazed at Ginna, patiently but intently. The boy felt himself melting before those eyes. He could not hide anything. This man read his mind like an open book.

Trembling, he brought his hands together and parted them. A ball of light rose, then fell. He
caught it with an outstretched hand, bounced it up again, and let it fall onto the deck, where it winked out. With a speed that brought a startled yelp from him, Arshad bent forward and grabbed both of Ginna’s hands, turning them over again and again, scrutinizing them. He pushed the boy’s sleeves up to the elbows. Then, just as suddenly, he let go and stood up.

“This is surely a great sign.
But I do not understand it fully. I must meditate on it.’

He retired to a small cabin at the rear of the vessel, beneath the deck on which Ginna and Amaedig had awakened. The others removed the rope loop which had held the tiller in place, and took the tiller in hand. The two passengers found themselves ignored between two rows of changing oarsmen. After a while they went up by the helmsman.

“What did Arshad mean when he said it was a great sign?” Ginna asked him.

The helmsman spoke the language of the Guardians, but with an accent so heavy he could scarcely be understood.

“He... be to mean... very holy man not know what mean... but discover out.”

They couldn’t get any more out of him. So they sat at the edge of the deck, watching the rowers working and the
river gliding by. There were two more breaks for meals. Arshad did not reappear for either of them. Then, as most of the men lay down to sleep, the leader came to the door of his cabin, at the bottom of a short stairway, his chest at deck level. All attention was on him, but he said nothing, looked about briefly, and went back into his cabin.

* * * *

The faint band of grey on the horizon
faded once more, and the sky was wholly black. After supper, all but the helmsman and a lookout on the bow slept, and the vessel was carried by the current. When they woke, the darkness was unchanged. The crew broke fast, then rowed.

When “day” finally came, Ginna and Amaedig sat on the foredeck, chatting with the lookout there. All three peered ahead into the gloom.

“You’re lucky
you came to the river where you did,” the man said. “Here cliffs drop right down to the water’s edge. There’s no place to land.”

The man’s name was Yanotas. He was from Laedom, a country of many marvels. Gradually he warmed up to his listeners, and with little prompting told of his homeland.

He was in the middle of a spirited description of a temple built entirely of little golden
bells, all of which rang different notes when the wind blew, when suddenly the water in front of the ship began to heave up and churn into white foam.

A wave crashed over the bow, knocking Yanotas off his feet. Ginna felt himself being swept along the slippery deck, but caught hold of the railing and clung there. He looked back to see Amaedig fall off the edge, down among the rowers.

There was much shouting as men were tumbled from their benches by the sudden force of their oars. The ship rocked and began to veer from its course, turning one side to the water which was not bubbling and splashing as if displaced by a mountain rising swiftly beneath it.

Ginna thought of whales. He had never seen one. He wondered what a thousand would be like, breaching all at once.

The sail twisted askew, the crossbar swinging around against the mast. Yanotas was crawling across the precariously swaying deck. The crew was in confusion as oars snapped off in their holes. Some men were down, flattened as another wave caught the oars and broke over the vessel.

Arshad emerged from his cabin, knee-deep in water, bedraggled, but shouting orders. Men raced to obey. Some
scurried up the mast to furl the sail. One lost his grip and fell into the river, his scream lost in the thundering of the water. Others wrestled with the tiller. The remaining oars were drawn in.

All this, Ginna knew, had taken place in a matter of seconds. But no more time was needed: with Arshad to lead them, the men began to set the vessel right. When the next wave came, the prow sliced
through it. The lookout, who had gained die railing next to Ginna, let out a cry. The boy looked forward and he too shouted in astonishment.

He was used to peering into darkness by now. He could see clearly enough that there was a mountain rising out of the water, impossibly huge against the faint glow of the western sky. There was a broad, curved shape large enough to be an island, and
then this was entirely above the surface, supported by a thinner but still massive column. He could not fully grasp its size. He thought this moving thing might be as large as Ai Hanlo Mountain, as absurd as his reason told him that was.

Still it rose. A head on a neck. Something broke the surface with yet another thunderous wave, setting the ship reeling. The new object rose and fell, its
dim form suggesting a flipper longer than the vessel by a good deal.

Arshad bellowed another order. Swords whipped out of scabbards. Lanterns and torches were lighted as best they could be. A man scrambled up from below with a large metal lantern. This was set up on the ship’s prow. Torches were set within; when the door of the lantern was opened, the light reflected off its three mirrored
sides, and a steady beacon was produced. Now they could see what threatened them. The company stood ready to face the monster.