The Shattered Goddess (18 page)

CHAPTER 11

The Wood at the World’s End

Dreaming in the light, drifting like the shadow of a cloud, Ginna somehow sensed himself going far, far, in all directions and none, infinitely beyond the ends of the earth and infinitesimally between die angles of space, inside inside, collapsing into a boundless void within himself.

The world was wrenched away. He fell out of darkness,
into light, into a place of blue stretching out forever like a flawless daytime sky with no ground beneath it

The gentle hands bore him into the light, into the sun, the blinding center of all. He saw flames against flames, patterns of brilliance, the outline of a rose as huge as the world, burning without being consumed, slowly turning, rising to swallow him up.

Dreaming in the fight—

— his body was nothing but light—

— suddenly dropping into wakefulness out of a higher space, back into material substance, he found himself lying on solid ground. He pressed against it. For a moment it wavered, became like water, but quickly resumed its solidity.

Something dry rustled beneath him as he stirred. Dead leaves.

The air was pleasantly cool. A light breeze brought
the scents of damp earth, moss, flowers, of a living world.

He opened his eyes and was blinded by the light, but slowly his vision adjusted. He saw the leaf-covered ground stretching away from him, brown and gently rolling. Above, tall columns resolved themselves into the trunks of trees. He was in a forest, the first he had ever seen in daylight.

Or was it daylight? As he watched,
the leaves began to glow one by one, flooding the place with gentle green light. Among them whites and yellows sparkled. He sat up, turned, and saw that in one direction the very air was aglow, as if the sun rested on the forest floor a short distance off.

Around him were wisps and motes of light in the comers of his vision. He could almost see their shapes, but when he looked on them directly,
they were gone. He knew them to be the Powers.

And the Powers whispered within his mind,
It is time. She is risen from the dead. Come.

He got to his feet and followed them as if in a dream, and he was dimly aware of Amaedig at his side, as bedazzled as he. They held hands as they walked, but spoke not, for no word may be uttered in so rare a dream.

The Powers rushed by them like
zephyrs.

He took all this to be a final vision, some last refuge invented by his dying mind as he sank drowning into the sea, but he tried to put that thought aside and lose himself in it, indeed to find final refuge. But the details were too realistic. His clothing was still wet. He was cold, but the air was warming him. He smelled of salt water. Amaedig’s hand in his was no illusion.

Thus they went slowly, quietly, as the Bright Powers gathered about them and their light dispelled the light of the trees, and the Powers took on definite shapes, becoming stately lords and ladies, winged, clad in gowns of scarlet and azure, bedecked with crowns so splendidly jeweled they became halos of light

She is risen.

They came to a clearing and gathered in a circle, In
the midst of them the earth opened up, revealing a pit filled with golden vapor, the surface of which lay so still, so seemingly solid it resembled nothing more than some kind of soft, beautiful cloth.

The Powers raised trumpets to their lips and blew a blast, but the sound was feint and faraway to Ginna, almost beyond the range of his hearing.

She is risen,
came their litany.
Behold,
out of death she comes into life, out of darkness into light.

And the golden mist parted and vanished away, and standing on solid ground in the middle of the circle, was the figure of a girl child dressed all in flowing green. She held a scepter of green jade carven in the likeness of a dragon holding a glowing yellow ball in its teeth.

One look to her face was enough to tell she was
no child, this being of magic, ageless and untouched by time.

“Come forward,” she said to Ginna and Amaedig. As she spoke the Powers lost their shapes and began to disperse, becoming a faint cloud-ring of light.

Ginna, leading Amaedig, stepped gingerly forward, afraid the ground would give way beneath his step.

“You have nothing to fear.”

“Who... are you?”

“You possessed
the power to come to me and you came, and still you do not know? Who else? I am Assiré Naydata Kamatharé.”

He looked at her blankly. An expression of dismay came over her face, and for the first time she seemed human, even though she was an adult or more than an adult in a child’s body. All the while Amaedig stared like one bewitched and helpless.

“You mean my name is unknown to you?”
the stranger said.

He could find no words.

“You haven’t lost your voice, have you?”

“Yes—I mean no... I mean, I am sorry, but—”

“You mean that you are confused,” she laughed. “Well you might be, considering. I have watched your progress. My servants have told me much, also.”

“I am Ginna. This is Amaedig.”

“You are the one who is to come. You are the great counterweight
I am sure of it Therefore you should know me. I am called the Mother of light”

He hung his head. “Great Lady, I am sorry, but I do not know you.”

“It would seem that your education is sadly deficient, or else men have forgotten much since last I walked on Earth.”

“Are we—where are we? I mean, are we spirits now, in the place where the dead go? Is—is, Tharanodeth here? Can I see
him?”

“So many questions at once—”

Amaedig let out a grunt as words formed in her throat, but fell back on one another in confusion. After a gasping pause, she was able to blurt out, “Are you a
goddess?”

“My dear,” said the diminutive lady, “there was only one goddess,
The
Goddess. I am not The Goddess. She was my daughter.”

The words struck Ginna like a physical blow.
He leapt back, let out a startled shriek and tried to run—now he was sure this was some kind of dream, nightmare, that he was going mad—and stumbled and fell over Amaedig, who had feinted dead away.

“I see a lot has to be explained,” said Assiré Naydata Kamathar, the Mother of Light.

* * * *

She came to him again in mid-day, when the light was generally diffused throughout the
forest She was no child then, but older, a young woman, even though mere hours had passed. Her voice deeper, her manner stately and grave.

“I suppose I am the lady you were sent to seek,” she said. “Your teacher called me what he did to confuse your enemy, but indeed, by the practitioners of the hidden arts I am called the Lady of the Grove and the Fountain. We stand in the grove. Come,
I’ll show you the fountain.”

She raised her hands. Birds made purely of colored light swarmed around her, chirping in a language she seemed to understand. She spoke a word, and they led the way like a weaving rainbow, singing a single, harmonious song. She followed, and Ginna came after, with Amaedig at his side, staying very close, staring wide-eyed.

They went a short way or a long
way. Ginna could not tell in this place. Distances were confusing. They doubled back on each other. Space was distorted, like a reflection in a rippling pool. The woods around them were like a deep, green sea, and walking between the trees was as wondrous as somehow swimming to the very bottom of the ocean to view the wrecked argosies, coral-covered skeletons, all the treasures hidden from mankind.
Branches curved above him like the roof of some vast temple. Behind every trunk he half expected to see some secret alcove containing an image, or perhaps some newly embodied spirit there waiting. It filled him with awe, but as long as the lady was with him he was not afraid.

It was comforting to hear the dry leaves rustling underfoot.

They came to a place where any of the trunks would
have required fifty men hand-to-hand to encircle it. Above, leaves and branches were all but indistinguishable in the soft light. The birds left the lady and flew upward, and the forest glowed with their passing.

They looked upon a stone fountain in the center of which a carven fish was frozen in mid-leap, an hourglass held sideways in its mouth. Water trickled from either end of the hourglass.

It was the sound of the water running that awoke Ginna’s memory. It came to him that he had been in a lighted forest before, or at least the image of one, and it had been
this
forest Hadel had conjured it for him in his study, warning him not to drink the water lest he too become an illusion. He had slammed his face into a stone wall that time, and found himself back in Ai Hanlo.

Now
he was in that grove again, entering from, the other side, and part of the answer was clear to him: the end of his quest was at the beginning. Yet he wondered, why hadn’t the Nagéan merely sent him here if he had the power, or at least told him? Perhaps the matter was not so simple. Perhaps the enemy would have overheard and followed him. Perhaps, for him to come to this place and for it to be real,
not an illusion interrupted by stone walls, he had to reach it in his own way, in his own time, and of his own power. It was the difference between the shallow magic and the deep.

The lady sat on the edge of the fountain.

“I used to watch the world pass by,” she said. “I could see it all in the clear waters of my fountain. But now the world is dark and I see nothing.”

Indeed,
the water was clear when it poured from the hourglass, but in the pool there was only impenetrable blackness, as if the water had been turned into oil. Gingerly Ginna put his hand in. He could not see his flesh even an inch below the surface. Startled, he drew it out, holding the wet hand in the dry one as if hurt. The passage had made no splash or ripple.

He went into a fit of abstraction
then, forgetting all around him as he contemplated this thing. After a time he was aware that the lady was no longer with him. Amaedig led him away.

* * * *

Once they moved with the Bright Powers and were lifted up by them into that great dance which had filled the world. They saw again the rose of fire across which the Powers moved, but at the same time they knew that this rose at
the center of the Earth, this realm of the Bright Powers, had been usurped by darkness, and this was but the collective memory of all those beings which had come into awareness when The Goddess fell from the sky and shattered into a million pieces. They viewed the great All, the lakes, the mountain, the castles and rivers of the land of light, which the singer Ain Harad had actually visited many
generations before, but now they were only projected images, reverberating with the sorrow of the Bright Powers at their loss.

These things Ginna and Amaedig saw as they soared on the wings of light.

* * * *

The lady came to him again at evening, when the light had begun to fade from the forest and shadows grew long. She was no young woman then, but an old crone, her face withered
with the weight of many years, even though mere hours had passed. Her voice was hoarse, cracked, and wheezing.

“I was a mortal woman originally,” she said. “I came from Tobar, in the land of Cadmoc.”

“I have never heard of these places,” said Ginna.

“Our Lord was the Mountain Earl Hadormir.”

“There have been no mountain earls for a thousand years,” said Ginna. “The last
one was slain by Iboram the Scourge, who buried him beneath a cairn made of the skulls of his followers.”

“Yes, it has been a long time. I don’t know how long. I am very weary. Yes, as I told you, I am the mother of The Goddess. She was mortal too, born to me in blood and agony the way children are. But she had a vision. I told her it was an idle dream, merely vapors in her mind, but she
said no, it was more. I told her she must have eaten something too strong for her and her bodily humors were unbalanced. I told her she was in love with some boy and it had turned her head. But it was none of these, and even she did not know what was happening to her. She followed her vision and had another, and gained attributes and aspects, until the earth shook with her passing and her voice was
the thunder. Now the prayers of mankind had gone unanswered for many years. The God we worshipped did not hear us. Some claimed he had melted away, like mist rising in the morning. But when miracles happened again, at last I understood. I became her priestess. By the touch of her hand I became more than mortal myself, after my fashion. When she passed into the sky and was no more my daughter than
the wind is, she placed me in this pocket of a world outside the, world, and here I am to this day.”

“Tell me,” said Ginna after a long pause. “Did she want what happened to her?”

“I don’t think it was a matter of wanting. No one came to her with an offer. It just happened.”

Speaking no more, Ginna left the lady and went off by himself. He was deeply troubled.

* * * *

She is dead.

It was night in the forest. All the light had faded from the trees. The Powers gathered like pale constellations, bearing the wrinkled corpse of the Mother of The Goddess to the clearing, to the golden pit, where they laid her to rest. Then all of them vanished, like a flock of fireflies breaking up, each going its separate way.

Ginna lay with Amaedig in the darkness,
holding her close. He knew fear then, a fear that the lady would not return, would not rise again, that this would be the final night

He slept and dreamed that he was wandering across the plains with the caravan. He was very happy with Amaedig by his side. They were leading a heavily laden camel. Gutharad was behind them, singing merrily. But when he turned to speak to his friend, the minstrel
was not to be seen. He turned back, and Amaedig was gone. He called out, and no sound came from his mouth, and the caravan vanished. He was wandering blindly in the darkness, groping his way through a maze of stones. Then the earth gave way and he was falling.

After a time, when he could see nothing by which to measure his descent, the sensation of falling left him, and he seemed suspended
in space forever, helpless, like an insect in amber.