Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (87 page)

They came at last to a country rich in rocks, and here their path led them to the edge of the sea. Zacharias had heard tell of the sea, but he had never seen it, a river so broad the far shore lay beyond view. Waves pounded on the shore below at the base of a rugged cliff. Farther along, the cliff gave way to a crescent of sand where spume lay in pale arcs at the highest reaches. A stream poured down through rocks and cut a channel through the sandy beach to reach the sea. Salt stung his dry lips, and he wept tears of astonishment and exhaustion as he stared at the horizon and the westering sun. The ceaseless motion of the waves made him dizzy.

"Soon we will be there," she said, shading her eyes against the sun. She licked her lips, as though tasting the salt in the air, then pointed west—to the horizon where the setting sun gleamed on surging waters. Or was that gleam the sun? Something else lay out there, so far away that it flickered bright against the dull waters and vanished, then reappeared as the angle of the sun brought it back into view.

"Churendo,"
she said. Behind them, two goats had ceased their grazing along the rocky verge to examine them suspiciously. A tern waded along the crescent shore below, head dipping into the water, and out, in and out. Another joined it, then a third. Clouds brushed the sea to the south.

"We wait," she said, "until the round moon returns."

They camped in a hollow where weathered driftwood had collected. He built a rough shelter while she wove walls and roof from the tough sea grass. There they waited as the crescent moon waxed to full, and in long hours of observation he learned the sea's rhythm as the tides rose and fell with uncanny regularity. The stream gave plentiful, sweet, cold water. They caught and ate the goats, netted some fish, and scraped off the inner bark of pines for bread. Zacharias even found a few shrunken radishes, which they threw together with withered leeks to make a stew.

On the day of the full moon, she insisted that they bathe. The water was desperately cold and the day no warmer, but she was adamant: to approach the churendo, they must be clean. They had become intimate in the way of companions on the road, and she was not afraid to examine his every crevice, his ears, his nostrils, the folds behind his knees, the place where Bulkezu had mutilated him, the skin between his toes. She used her knife to clean dirt out from under his finger and toenails. He felt like an animal being prepared for slaughter; when he was very young he had seen his grandmother wash a lamb for the spring sacrifice in this very way, checking it carefully for imperfections. But since Kansi-a-lari prepared herself in the same way, he thought maybe this was just part of some other ritual: one does not approach the holy places of the gods with unwashed ears and dirty toenails. He knew now that she had long since stopped considering him a man because she washed in front of him and allowed him to wash and check those places she couldn't reach or see. He felt desire for her, for she was beautiful in a strange and uncomfortable way. Bulkezu had not mutilated his brain, after all. His skin flushed, and his heart beat faster, and the familiar hand of the Enemy reached into his gut to stroke at him temptingly. But there was nothing left to respond.

She let him wear tunic and leggings but no sandals, and on his hands and feet she painted white circles, like a slave's manacles. Her own tunic and their cloaks and sandals she stored in the horse's saddlebags.

It took her all afternoon first to oil herself and then to dress herself. From her five-fingered pouches she drew tiny gourds and cunningly carved nuts capped by equally tiny lids of leather, which contained seeds and dyes. She painted herself in strange swirling colors to match the tattoo that ran from shoulder to hand: burnt orange spirals on her belly and breasts, four-pointed yellow lozenges on her hips, small red circles on her buttocks, and harsh blue zigzags on her legs. On her hands and feet she painted white marks like leopard's claws. She put on her skin skirt, tied tasseled bands around her ankles, calves, and knees, and around her neck she hung two necklaces made of polished mandibles. Into her hair she braided beads and into this beaded headdress she stuck a slender needle of bone, and three feathers: one as gold as the sun, one as green as the spring earth, one as black as the pit. She garlanded her spear with ribbons, and to the base of it she tied on the bells that she had stored away.

At dusk, they drank their fill of the sweet stream water, and she filled two leather bottles. After that, she gave him three seeds to eat, one dry, one bitter, one sweet. Then she led him and the horse down to the crescent beach. The tiny melody of the bells accompanied them, and every fifth step she shook the spear hard to make them sing loudly. There was no wind, but it was still bitterly cold. The tide was out, far out, as if the sea had been sucked away into the maw of some great monster who lived in the nethermost depths. They walked out on the crescent beach beyond the ridgeline of vanished breakers and then farther yet as the waters seemed to recede before them and the land behind them. On they walked, the sand gritty beneath his feet but amazingly firm. He turned once, to look back, and saw the cliffs so far behind that for an instant terror blinded him.

Long ago, he had known how to swim; a child in the marchlands learned early, just as he learned how to fish and weed and cut wood. But he had lived among the nomads for a long time, and they never entered the water because it was bad luck. Maybe he had forgotten how. Maybe the surging waves would sweep him away—

And then where would he go? Would his soul ascend through the seven spheres to the Chamber of Light? Nay, he was no longer welcome there. Would he fall endlessly and eternally in the Abyss? And yet, what did he have to fear from the Enemy? Who was the Enemy to
him,
since he no longer feared and loved God?

She knelt to draw markings in the sand, then prayed in her language, making certain gestures first to the north, then to the east, then to the south, then to the west. From her pouch she drew pebbles, and she laid a green one to the north, a reddish-orange one to the east, a dull brown one to the south, and a white one to the west. Sand glistened under the full moon. Rivulets of water coursed toward the hidden sea, a hundred fin-gerlets probing west through the seabed.

Were they getting wider? Was the tide coming in?

"We stand halfway," she said, rising. She unstoppered one of the leather bottles and allowed him three swallows. "We must walk quickly."

The horse snorted nervously. A wind touched his cheek. Then it was still again. They walked on.

"Teach me how to pray to your gods," he said suddenly.

After a long time, she said, "My gods are not your gods, and we do not pray to them as you pray. If you will not pray to the heaven god of your people, then you must find another god to pray to. You tell me before that your grandmother is a wise woman. Pray to the gods of your mother's mothers. Then you will be happy, and maybe they will protect you."

A narrow channel of water lay before them. She waded in, and he followed. The water was only ankle-deep, but beyond it lay a second channel, then a third, each one deeper than the last. They slogged over yet another sandbank to a fourth channel, and here she had to hike up her skirt to her hips to keep it from getting wet.

Unseen fish nibbled at his legs. When he turned to look behind, he saw only a dark line marking the shore. The horse grew more skittish. Water stirred and coiled in eddies like a nest of snakes coming awake. Wind breathed on his neck. The great monster was exhaling: the tide was coming in.

"How soon?" he asked hoarsely.

"There," she said.

There.
It loomed before them out of the seabed. Looking up, he stubbed his toes on stone. She led them up a shallow-sloped stone ramp that emerged seamlessly from the sea floor as from a forgotten city buried beneath the sand. As they walked, the water swirled in around them, swallowing the glistening sands and the narrow channels, all of it subsumed until only they on the stone ramp walked dry-footed as the sea returned and with it the night wind. The moon rode high in the sky, drowning the stars.

His grandmother had named the moon "the Pale Hunter," she who watches over the life and death of animals, and at full moon her strength was greatest.

"I pray you, Great Hunter," he murmured, trying out the words, feeling awkward, "give me strength. Lend me some of your power."

An island rose steep-sided before them, a stone fort with gleaming marble walls. They climbed until the ramp ended at the base of an ebony gate. A path paved with black stone curled away on either side, a wall rising sheer on one side and cliff dropping away sheer on the other.

She led them to the left, deocil, along the path as the waters rose along the base of the hill, slowly submerging the ramp.

"What if it comes up higher?" he asked nervously. She did not answer him, only walked forward on the black path that circled the island. He tried to remember the prayers his grandmother had spoken, but the words had fled long since, leaving only the memory of her, old and gnarled but hale, with a wicked sense of humor. She had after many years agreed to pray before the altar of the Circle God, and the frater had rejoiced and given the entire village a great feast to celebrate her conversion, and his parents had wept with joy that she had walked at last into the Light. But he had seen her hide a carved wooden figure of The Fat One, the bringer of wisdom and plenty, in the skirts of the hearth; every time she knelt and prayed before the holy image of the Mother and Father of Life, she was really praying to The Fat One.

They walked forever on the black path, but when they re turned to the ebony gate, the waters lapped the stone ramp two man-lengths from them. It was still rising.

"Now we are outside," she said. She drew her knife and drew the blade over her palm. She smeared her blood over the ebony surface of the gate, then cut Zacharias' hand in the same manner, and nicked the horse on the shoulder; this blood, too, she smeared on the gate.

Her fingers probed the shadows beside the gate, caught a lever, and pulled. The door swung open outward on silent hinges. She stepped over the threshold, and he followed her only to find that he stood in a narrow lane that ran parallel to the black stone path outside. High stone walls rose on either side. The horse balked, but when seawater lapped the threshold to drown its hooves, it bolted inside.

She tugged the gate closed against the rising tide. He glanced up anxiously: were the stone walls high enough, and watertight enough, to keep them safe from the waters? But when he knelt to brush the ground, it was as dry as bleached bone racked by a summer of rainless heat. She began to walk to the right, wid-dershins, and he followed her. After about the time it would take to sing the service of Terce, a short hour, they returned back to where they had started, at the ebony gate.

"Now we are inside," she said.

His hand smarted. He was very thirsty, but she offered him nothing to drink. He was abruptly so tired that, trembling, he leaned against the stone walls—

"Grandson."

He jerked back. "What is that?" he demanded. "There's something alive in the stone. It's speaking to me in my grandmother's voice."

"There is nothing alive here," she said firmly. "We have entered churendo, the palace of coils. Here the three worlds meet. Do not be surprised by what you see and hear."

"What are the three worlds?" he asked, but she had already started walking left, deocil, and he had to follow her with the horse in tow. "What's the use of walking around again?" he demanded of her back. "Isn't there a path that leads up?"

She stopped abruptly and turned. Her stare shut his mouth, and when she began walking again, he followed silently, humbled.

They walked the dusty path, grit scuffing and slipping under his toes. They circled the hill deocil, as they had outside, but when they returned to the ebony gate it was no longer ebony; it was no longer the same gate but rather a gate of palest rose stone. He gazed out to see the sea surging and rising below. Craning his neck, he could even see the corbeled entrance that marked the ebony gate, now half underwater below them. Then he saw the moon. They had been walking for a scant hour yet the moon lay low on the horizon, almost swamped by the sea, a waning quarter moon surely a good six days past full. Feeling dizzy, he swayed and caught himself, bracing a hand on the stone. But when he touched the stone; he saw through rose quartz onto a different sea, not a sea at all but a river snaking up through sharp-spined hills.

Ships ghost up the river, slender and predatory. The prow of the lead ship is long and lean, carved into the shape of a dragon's head. Creatures like men but not men stroke at the oars and sometimes, as they skate the shallows, their oars break through a skin of ice. Stone and metal spearheads gleam as sun catches them, rising low over the northeastern hills. Ahead, the river swirls white around a series of posts; someone has staked the river so that ships can't sail up it.

But the creatures in the ships merely anchor their ships to the stakes and from this base they harry the countryside, burning and killing. Halls and cottages blaze under the pale light of a sun that never rises more than halfway up the sky. Soon night falls, gray and icy. Fires dot the slopes and valleys like an uneven procession of torches. Late into the night they gutter and fade as a storm sweeps in. There is only darkness.