Chains of Gold (19 page)

The little baby, lying in a nest of folded blankets amid a wreath of snakes, which did not offer to harm him. Lonn did not answer. He had not spoken for days, and my heart was melting for the sake of his infant body, his petal-pink skin and the soft, fragant hair of his small head. But his eyes looked hard and knowing out of that innocent face. What lay there was not really my baby son at all.

“Why have you not taken your passage? What is your grudge?”

Lonn would not answer. but Ophid persisted, gently but relentlessly, through the morning of the day, and as the day waned Lonn grew angry and spoke.

“Go away.”

“But I live here,” said Ophid with no sign of triumph. “Why are you here?”

“They brought me here, you know that!”

“But you should be dancing in the meadows of the blessed, you who were valiant and good. Why have you not taken your passage? What holds you here?”

Lonn grimaced and panted with rage, a terrible thing to see in a helpless babe. “She is mine!” he shouted hoarsely at last.

“Who is?”

“The lady, the bride. She is mine by right. I paid the price.”

“But such was your gift of love to Arlen, freely given.”

“Damn Arlen! Arlen be cursed! I would have let him die on the esker, the fool, but she saved him, and then I had to save her.… He would have died still, but she loved him back to life.”

Arlen went rigid, trembling on an edge between rage and anguish. I put my arms around him, constraining him as much as comforting him. Lonn spoke on. He was well started now, and if he had heard the word “love,” he seemed to remember only one meaning to it, and one beloved.

“She's mine! I loved her from the first time I beheld her,” he declared in that dark, hoarse voice. “And if the winterking glamour had been on me to start with, she would have loved me instead of him.”

Probably true. But it made no difference in my love for Arlen now. I held him more tightly, trying to shut out the pain.

“I have a body now again,” said Lonn. “I will grow strong enough to take her from him.”

Lonn ranted on, and after a time Ophid considered that he had heard enough and tried to hush him. Then, as Lonn would not hush, Ophid picked him up and glanced at me in surprise when the baby struggled against him.

“There is power already in these infant limbs,” he said.

I nodded. I had noticed it as well, saying nothing.

“Unhand me, freak!” Lonn raged. “Morphodite! He-she!”

Expressionless, Ophid carried him off to the other end of the island so that we need no longer hear him. Later, by firelight, when the baby lay asleep, he told us the third tale.

“In the days of the high kingship, when all the wars were against the fierce folk from undersea, the fell folk out of the deep, there were two warriors of the sunlit kingdom who shone above all others in valor, in strength, and in loyalty to their lord, and their names were Elidir and Eladu. They were brothers—and more than brothers, blood brothers, and friends with a friendship forged in war, and comrades. When they fought side by side, as they always did, they were well nigh invincible, and only by sorcery did the undersea folk at all stand against them. And the king gifted them mightily with chains of gold and silver-gold for their valor, the chains that bind a warrior to his lord in love and loyalty.

“And as folk will make compare, even between their own children, so the castlefolk and even the countryfolk began to say to each other, ‘Elidir is mightier than Eladu,' or ‘Eladu is more courageous than Elidir,' or ‘Elidir slew the more enemies in the recent battle,' or ‘Eladu is the more honorable,' until coins and even landholdings were placed at stake, and all eyes looked to the king, as if for a decision. But the king dealt evenhandedly with the two heroes, and honored one as he honored the other.

“Then courtiers tried in subtle ways to set Elidir against Eladu, and in ways less subtle to set Eladu against Elidir, and finally quite openly they bribed and dared them to combat each other, and in all these attempts they failed. For Elidir and Eladu stood up together in scorn of those who would make them adversaries. And in defiance of all such scheming they made a pact with each other: that when they went into war thenceforth, they would chain themselves together each to the other, chain themselves together leg to leg and arm to arm with chains of gold and silver and glowing bronze, so that if one were to fall the other must fall also, and neither would be accounted mightier than the other. And they sealed this pact with their word and handbond and blood.

“In the course of time the forces of the glycon gathered and made ready once more to assault the land, and Elidir and Eladu met them with the others on the strand. Their helmets were of bronze, and their shields also, and their swords and greaves and breastplates were of orichalc, the glowing bronze, and they were chained together with chains of precious metal, arm to arm and leg to leg. They shone gloriously upon the field of battle. Then, seeing scorn and challenge and defiance in their splendor and their chains, the fierce undersea folk bent all their malice upon felling them, and as Eladu was the worse off, his sword arm being chained to his brother's shield brace, they focused their assault on him. In the long course of a bloody day, they succeeded in harrying him to his knees and then to the ground, and Elidir was staggering.

“Then Elidir felt the weight of his doomed brother dragging on him, his brother who was as good as dead, and he knew that chains were on him also to die in like wise. Chains were pulling him down to lie by his brother's side. But he wanted to live.”

Ophid paused and merely glanced toward Arlen, who sat listening as if entranced.

“He cut the chains,” Arlen whispered, and Ophid nodded.

“He cut the chains with his sword. But Eladu saw him do it, and with the last of his strength he reached up and caught at the dangling ends with his hand and pulled his brother down, and the sea folk swarmed over them both.”

“Why?” Arlen breathed. There were tears in the word, and the ragged ends of dreams.

“Because the pattern tends always toward balance, and the wheel turns. Those who are born strangers to each other meet and cleave and become comrades or lovers; those who were born brothers must someday go their separate ways—or love turns to venom in them.”

“But they were heroes,” Arlen said.

Ophid pointed up at his great carved wheel, at the twenty-eight segments, the full moon and the dark. “Hero is all light,” he said. “Villain is all dark. The one strives to overtake the other, and death attends them. We who live, we are more in the balance of the pattern. We are fools and churls and lechers and misers and madams and sluts; I could name you twenty more. We are dames, clerics, merchants, farmers, soldiers, maids. Some few of us are oracles who sit aside and talk.” He grimaced, mocking himself. “We live. Are you a hero, Arlen?”

“No,” said Arlen promptly, though his voice was low.

“Long life to you, then. And may you find the large joys and the small in all the days of it.”

We lay down by the fire, but we did not sleep much that night, in spite of Ophid's warm words. We had sensed the weight of doom in his story, and we knew that in the morning he would tell us more of it.

He did, after we had eaten. “I have been lying to you,” he admitted.

We stared at him, for of all things that was the last we would have thought of him, that he should mislead us.

“The signs have been plain,” he explained, “all along, not obscure. But I had to be quite sure.…”

We sat silent and gazed at him, waiting.

“It is also in the pattern, the ancient pattern,” Ophid said, “that the son of the winterking will wed his mother. And this is the pattern that seeks to conceive itself, the abomination against which the Gwyneda so carefully guard.”

He looked at us, but we would not speak, and reluctantly he went on.

“I have searched and searched for a name for your babe, the boy babe who is truly yours, Arlen and Rae. And I find none except the one you have already given him—that is to say, Lonn—and one other, which is: Arlen. And whichever of those two you give him, his doom remains the same: that he should love you in the way of a consort, Rae.”

FIFTEEN

I sat like so much wood; I could not speak, and I did not dare to think. It was Arlen who spoke at last, wetting dry lips. “What are we to do?” he whispered.

“Send the babe away,” said Ophid.

We looked at each other numbly, not willing to comprehend, and Ophid got up and walked back to some recess of his cave where the snakes lay. When he returned he was carrying a basket, and he laid it before us. It was a plain wicker basket, such as I had seen once before bumping against the shore of a certain crannog, and of a size and shape to accommodate a baby snugly. I looked at it with a chill, and in spite of myself I understood.

If the baby had been sleeping, the beloved little one, I think I could not have done it. But he was awake, Lonn was awake, peering at us with those unnatural violet eyes of his, and he saw the basket and yelled out loud. “You cannot!” he shouted. “Plotting to kill me, call it by no other name—”

That hated, husky voice. Arlen must have loathed it as I did. “What do you care?” he retorted, swiftly and savagely. “You are already dead.”

But Lonn spoke only to me. “Lady, if you do this thing you will bear my curse,” he cried, babbling in his haste to save himself. “Your breasts will sag forever full of milk, and they will pain you. Serpent dreams will harrow your sleep. Your face—”

I picked him up, leaving the blankets behind, and put him in the basket, and did not let my hands linger on him.

“Lines of sorrow will come on your face!” he shouted. “Your lovemaking will give you no joy—”

I picked up the basket, not touching the babe, and what more Lonn said I do not remember, for I shut my ears and my mind to it, though I know he shouted all the way down to the shore. I carried him to the water myself, and Arlen and Ophid came with me, and with my own hands I placed the basket in the Naga. It spun and eddied in the backwater by the island's shore. I remember that spinning, the turning and turning of Lonn's hard, hateful eyes in the baby's furious face, but I remember no sound. I think Arlen said something, and he went into the water and pushed the basket out so that the current took it, went into the water up to his knees. Then Lonn was gone, was only a speck floating down the Naga, into the mist and gone forever.

We walked back to Ophid's cave, and Arlen brought Bucca out of the hazel coppice and began to saddle him at once. We could not soon enough be gone from that place.

“Stay a minute,” Ophid offered. “Sit by the fire, dry yourself.”

Arlen wordlessly shook his head.

“Very well, if you must go.… Have you provision?”

“We have wherewithal,” Arlen muttered. I brought our blankets, a few other possessions, and he tied and loaded them on Bucca.

“Be watchful,” Ophid told us. “The lords will yet be riding homeward from the Sacred Isle.”

We had forgotten. We stopped our preparations and looked at Ophid for a moment. His face had gone bleak, and we reached out of one accord and touched his shoulders, as if to say, It is not your fault. Then we mounted Bucca and departed as quickly as we could, sending him springing into the Naga and swimming across in the freezing cold.

We did not speak to each other. Ophid's warning concerning the lords gave us excuse enough to be silent. But in fact we met no one to fear. Arrow-straight and nearly as swift, we left the region of the Naga. We slept that night in an outlander's warm cottage, with no taint about us but not much cheer either, and we shivered beneath down comforters, not touching each other, and told ourselves the night was chill.

The first of Lonn's imprecations did not come to pass. My milk dried up within two days, and my breasts ceased to ache after three. On the fourth day a snowstorm whistled down from the north, a fierce winter storm as deadly as the one that had driven us to a cenotaph a year before. We took shelter with a homesteader this time, and I tried not to think of the baby out there, pelted by ice, somewhere on the Naga. He should have been dead before then even of the milder winter chill. I hoped he had not cried too much, my Spriggan. For my own part, I could not weep, could not grieve for the one I myself had cast away. I thought of him as floating, floating, forever floating, down the Long Lake and through the Wondermere and past the Isle of Promises and all the way down the Lake of the Lost City and out on to the great vastness of the sea, a speck, still floating. I myself felt as if I were floating, adrift in my world, lost, and I would not think of him in any other way, as aground in death, drowned, disintegrating, returning to earth; such thoughts hurt me. In my mind I kept him my pink-petal babe, forever rocked on the waves of the sea.

It took us a month and more to return home, in the snow, and in all that time we scarcely spoke to each other, Arlen and I, and the worst of it was, I did not care.

We reached our mountain haven on a gray day of deepest winter, and all stood so silent, so still, so cold, that we sat on Bucca staring, reluctant to dismount and begin again. But there was nowhere else to journey to. Finally I slipped down, and Arlen went off to the village to fetch our chickens and our cow, and I began in a drifting way to lay a fire on the hearth.

We went through the motions of our days. Arlen tended to his animals, his friends. I cooked food, swept dirt, sat idle the rest of the time. I could have gone down to the village for companionship; there was no taint on me any more, no death dog. But I did not. Arlen tried harder than I did to find a way back to the contentment we had known before. He took up his calling as a healer again, went to the village every day, smiled at the folk he met. Sometimes he touched me on the shoulder or caressed my hair. I seldom responded. One day, as I sat by an empty cradle, he knelt beside me and placed gentle hands on mine, which lay twisting in my lap.