She got to her feet and went outside, into the apricot glow of early evening. The tide had retreated since their arrival and the falling sun stretched her shadow out before her on the sand, impossibly tall and thin; beyond it, the leisurely rollers drifted ceaselessly inshore, crumbling into gold in the last rays of day. On the headland to her left she saw the white pillars of a house, partially concealed by a cluster of trees. But she could see no sign of human occupation and even at that range she thought a section of the roof was missing. Rafarl was nowhere about but his clothes were drying on a rock and the small pack his mother had given him still lay on the floor of the cave. She decided to follow his example, rinsing her things in a pool and then spreading them out beside his. The advancing shade of the ridge would soon eclipse them but it remained very hot, though the air was fresher than in the city. She ran down the beach and plunged in among the golden waves, tumbling over and over in water almost as warm as her bath of the previous night. Then she swam out farther and watched the dancing sunfire dying around her and a pale mauve twilight spreading swiftly across the vast discus of the ocean. “Fernani!” came a call, and there was Rafarl, standing at the water’s edge with the foam frilling his ankles, naked but for a brief loincloth secured with a thong about his waist, his arms, legs, shoulders flushed to copper in the sunset. He raced into the sea toward her and she knew a sudden spasm of panic, or something like panic, realizing she too was naked, and she turned and dived like a seal, but too late, too late, he caught hold of her and they were sinking down together, down into deeps of blue in a chaos of tangled limbs and spiraling bubbles. And then he must have pushed off from the sea-floor because now the rush was upward to emerge in an explosion of spray and light, and Fern was gasping for the breath she had not had time to take, half furious, half laughing, and Rafarl’s arms were around her, and her breasts against his breast.
Slowly now they swam ashore, and lay side by side in the shallows with the fallout of breaking waves swirling around them. He opened her mouth with his tongue, and her body seemed to awaken at his touch, even as at the touch of the Lodestone, but this was a different kind of burning, more heat than flame, closer to the dark heart of Earth, a magic of this world and not another. Her mind floated away and she was lost in her senses, and her resistance was merely a fleeting hesitation, and there was a stab like a knife-thrust deep inside her, stab on stab, thrust on thrust, but the pain turned all to sweetness, and the tears of the sea tasted salt on her lips. Her Task was forgotten; the broken memories which eluded her, the destruction of the Stone, Zohrâne’s madness, the key—gone and forgotten. There was only Now. The sun had vanished long since and a purple dusk drew over them like a cloak. And still the sea, untiring, surged and sank, surged and sank, against the island shore.
Later in the night they returned to the cave and slept a while, out of reach of the rising tide. Before dawn they got up and swam out toward the sunrise, and the morning came sparkling across the water to meet them. A couple of thin cloud-wisps straddled the horizon like wide-winged birds, fire-bellied in the advent of day. “Once,” said Rafarl, “men would have believed they
were
birds, the albatrosses who were the messengers of the Unknown God, bringing Him news of all that passes in the world. Now, we believe only in ourselves. All else is fairy tales and nonsense.” Fern wondered if the edge in his voice was scorn or regret, and if he himself knew what he really felt.
“Which aspect of nature would you worship,” she asked, “if you could make a god for yourself? The sun? The moon?”
“The sea.”
“What about Love?” she teased him.
“Love is not meant to be worshipped,” he retorted. “It’s meant to be enjoyed. Anyway, it’s the business of men, not gods.”
Back on the beach he inquired, idly: “Where did you learn to swim so well? The Viroc mountains are a long way from the coast.”
The Viroc? For a few seconds, her mind was a blank. The
Viroc . . .
“I expect there were lakes,” he suggested, disturbed by the sudden emptiness in her face.
The lake came into her thought as if at his bidding, a blue-green spit of water between snow-capped heights, cold as a glacier. “Yes,” she said, “there was a lake. It was freezing, even in summer. I suppose . . . I must have learned there. Anyway, I thought everyone could swim. It’s natural, like running. You don’t have to learn to run.”
She ran along the sand to prove it, and he chased her, and there was no more talk for a while. Afterward she thought: I have no memories anymore. The package of images she had been carrying around with her seemed to have faded; her hovering confusion had ceased. She existed only in the moment, caught in a teardrop of Time, without past or future. Strangely, it did not trouble her. She was pillowed on Rafarl’s chest, their limbs interlaced; the beat of his heart was loud in her head. She thought: I am his lover. They had made no promises, no vows; this was an interlude which might end with the next sunset or ebb with the changing tide. Yet she knew, with a certainty that belongs only to the young, that this was for always. Whether she had a year, or a week, or just a few hours, she would make it last forever.
“We can stay here till the hunt loses interest,” Rafarl murmured, echoing her thought. “A fortnight maybe. Or less. The temple hierarchs must have other problems to concern them.”
“What will we eat?” asked Fern pragmatically.
“Fruit. Fish. Each other.” He bit her arm, gently. “I’ve been wondering . . . Ixavo almost seemed to recognize you. Have you met before?”
“No.” Doubt made her brusque.
“It’s you he wants, not me. I’m just an accessory. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Abstractedly, he stroked her hair. “There are too many things you don’t know.” And, after a while: “They say the Gifted can see beyond knowledge. Maybe that is how he saw you—in a basin of moonlight, in the smoke of a spellfire, in the eye of his mind.”
“Maybe,” said Fern; but she didn’t believe it.
Around midday they climbed the headland to the deserted house. “This is where Tamiszandre spent her last days,” Rafarl said. “No one comes here now.” It was a still, sunlit place, filled with a tranquility that felt like sadness. Around the back an orchard had run wild, sending exploratory branches through the stricken roof, beginning the invasion of the courtyard with questing offshoots and saplings that elbowed the paving-stones aside. They plucked silver and golden peaches and ate them on the terrace overlooking the sea. Here, too, the garden was taking over, insidious tendrils snaking round the pillars and miniature creepers, goblin-fingered, working on the demolition of balustrade and walls, finding a roothold in every chink and cranny. Divided from the continent since the ending of the Age of Ice, Atlantis had inevitably evolved its own ecosystem, with flora and fauna unlike their mainland cousins. The radiation-field of the Lodestone had stimulated or enhanced each variation, and now the island gloried in a thousand kinds of uniqueness. Rafarl told her the names of those flowers he knew: the pale, diminutive bloom with the bloodred heart called starwound, the clusters of yellow paramour hanging from every rafter, fantassels, speckled fairyfoot, deadly venomel. Birds as small as butterflies and butterflies as large as birds came to sip at the copious supplies of nectar. Coral-pink swans with black beaks, nearly twice the size of their mainland relatives, flew overhead: the
phénix
of Atlantean coinage. Somewhere high up they saw an eagle, with a wingspan that dwarfed the swans.
When they had eaten their fill they helped themselves to water from the well and some cooking pots from the neglected kitchen and went back to the beach. Rafarl took his hunting knife and disappeared in search of dinner, returning sometime later with an assortment of shellfish. They cooked the mussels and crabs over a makeshift campfire but he taught Fern to eat the oysters raw, though she was never entirely convinced by the delicacy. “I couldn’t find much else,” he said. “All I saw was a manta-ray flapping off into deeper water and a patrolling shark. And this used to be such a good spot for fishing. Usually, I take a spear—I wasn’t sure how I’d fare, with only a knife—but in the event, it didn’t matter. Something’s wrong here—the very denizens of the sea are fleeing our vicinity. I don’t understand it.” He was scowling as he spoke, evidently perturbed. His temperament appeared often mercurial, his customary flippancy and cynicism interspersed with unexpected flashes of gravity, light underlaid with dark, weakness veined with strength, rashness, carelessness, folly flecked with the glints of true courage: all contradictions. Yet Fern sensed in him, amid the tangle of character and anti-character, of positive and negative energies, a fiber of steadiness, as yet undeveloped, almost invisible, like the stealthy glimmer of a seam of gold in a tin-mine. She thought: I love him, he won’t fail me. It was the logic of youth, optimistic, defective; but still she was sure. She would have staked her life on that certainty.
She said: “Maybe it has to do with the breaking of the Stone.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me?”
“No,” said Fern.
They slept little that night, making their newfound love like people for whom the world is running out. Fern did not think of her Task, not because she had abandoned it, but because she felt it would present itself for her attention when the moment was right, and until then she had an intermission, a suspension of hostilities, given by whatever gods there were. They lay in the cave while outside the tide rose and fell, and she thought that in this life and maybe in all lives she would remember that love sounded like the sea, and the beat of her heart was waves on a beach, and she would hear its echo in the nucleus of every shell.
XI
In the morning,
she
came. She came to the cave-mouth because she knew it and stood there in the early light, as slender as Fern but much taller, with hair that fell to her knees. Her skin was dark without a tan, greenish-ochre; her slanting eyes were neither green nor blue but the aquamarine that lies in between; the fall of her hair was dead straight and dead black, without any gleam of a lighter shade. She was angry with the rage that has no reason and no rationale, a firework that spits and crackles, singeing anyone in the vicinity. Fern identified her at once and the too-familiar pain returned tenfold, gripping her in a vise of silence.
“I knew you’d be here,” the
nympheline
said. “I knew I’d find you, skulking in a cave like the coward you are. Running. Hiding. That’s what you’re best at, isn’t it, running and hiding? I showed you this place: it isn’t yours to skulk in. Bury yourself in the sand like a worm! Crawl in the coral like a sea-slug! Go and skulk somewhere else, somewhere I can’t find you, somewhere I can’t see you and hate you! You ran away and left him to die.
You left him to die!
” Tears were leaking through the fury, misting her bright eyes. Fern drew aside, pulling the veil around her nakedness, more from diplomacy than modesty; but Uuinarde ignored her completely.
“He died before I got there,” Rafarl said. “There was nothing I could have done.” Even at the dawn of history it sounded like a cliché; Fern felt him grow tense with self-disgust.
Uuinarde didn’t hear, didn’t care. “You promised me you would save him!” She was crying openly now, sobbing with pent-up grief and frustration and hurt, choking on her own misery. “You gave me your word—the word of a Dévornine! Word of a recreant—a bastard—a mongrel! I offered to
love
you—”
“You never loved me.”
“I would have loved the man who saved my brother! But all your oaths, your brave declarations meant
nothing
. When it came to the crunch you didn’t think of him or me: you thought only of your own skin. You just ran—taking the nearest woman with you. Not even a woman: a foreign half-girl—an outsider—a nobody. I would have given you
myself
—”
“I didn’t want a trade.” Rafarl’s tone had sharpened. “You didn’t need to whore yourself for your brother’s sake.”
“
Whore
myself? You—you—
scum
! Guttersnake—
fourgané
!
Ourunduuc!
” She flung herself toward him, a sudden knife in her hand: the blade shone bright and thin. But there was no intention behind the attack. Rafarl had wrested the poniard from her before Fern reached them and Uuinarde threw herself against his shoulder, weeping like a rainstorm. Rafarl comforted her with routine gestures, looking both reluctant and inadequate. Fern’s jealousy flared at the sight, and burned up in a minute, and was gone.
When the storm was over Uuinarde was persuaded to sit down and accept a drink of water, daubing her face with the corner of her veil. She was unrepentant, but the initial fervor had gone from her rage, leaving her sullen and resentful. She was one of those for whom the cruelty of an unexpected bereavement is too much to deal with, and in consequence she was desperately looking for someone to blame, someone accessible, near at hand, not the remote faceless figures of the powers-that-be. Fern surveyed her with a certain abstract curiosity. Under the influence of the Lodestone mutations were commonplace, she knew:
nymphelins
were the result of one such quirk of nature. She was vaguely aware that they were supposed to be able to store oxygen and control their heart rate in a way that allowed them to stay under water for far longer than the norm, though they were still basically human, unlike the mermaids of fishermen’s tales, who were reputed to have small gills hidden behind their ears as well as air-breathing lungs. Fern thought: I should have known it was she who found this cave. It’s the kind of hideout only a
nympheline
would find. She brought Rafarl here, and he— brought me. She wondered if it was important and came to the conclusion, rather surprisingly, that it wasn’t.
Rafarl had sat down beside Uuinarde and was listening to a further tirade on his shortcomings, this time
sotto voce
, evidently meant for his private ear. “If you really think your brother’s death is my fault,” he responded, stung to a maddening evenness of tone, “you should have betrayed me to Ixavo. That way you could have obtained revenge and made a profit on the side.”
“Blood money!” Uuinarde spat out the words. “Just because you’re beneath contempt doesn’t mean I am too.” She flung a sulky glance at Fern. “Why is
she
here, anyway? Why doesn’t she say something? She just looks at me in that cold fashion like a fish on a slab. Make her go away.”
“Leave her alone,” said Rafarl, and the corner of his mouth twisted into a smile that was only for Fern. “She hasn’t injured you.”
“She’s the one they’re looking for,” Uuinarde said. The anger and the petulance faded from her face, leaving it vividly pensive. “They’re saying in the city that the Lodestone itself is broken—that it resisted Zohrâne’s will, and broke because it would not bend, and the Gift is gone forever. And Ixavo is searching for a foreign girl, a girl who came at the breaking of the Stone, a girl who is not a girl, not a boy, not a woman. He says she has come to destroy us.”
“Do you believe him?” asked Fern. “He sent your brother to the sacrifice.”
“What do you know of my brother?” Uuinarde snapped back.
“I have a brother of my own.” She spoke without thought: there was no brother in her pictures of the Viroc, none in the official record of her life. Yet she could see him in her mind: fair-haired, clear-eyed, candid, enthusiastic. Will.
“Do you believe Ixavo?” Rafarl repeated Fern’s question with more than a trace of scorn in his voice.
Uuinarde made an involuntary movement, half shrug, half shiver. “Of course not. But there is something in the air— a feeling—a smell. A smell of endings—of unimaginable change—a doom hanging over us like a great shadow. People talk of fleeing the city but it’s only talk. They stay because they must, because they feel part of this doom that we cannot see. Everyone goes about their business the same but it’s unreal, like a play where you know something is going to happen soon. Something terrible. The animals are nervous: dogs howl, cats scratch. And the fish are leaving, I saw them on my way here, huge shoals swimming away, all together like a living river, and crayfish marching along the seabed, and crabs scrambling after. I saw sharks and porpoises, scorpionfish and angel-fish, side by side. Even the tiniest things, the wisps of jelly and gossamer tentacles, even they are going. And behind them the waters are empty, like a graveyard.”
“What does it mean?” Fern demanded.
Uuinarde met her gaze with eyes that looked far away. “The Sea is angry,” she said. “When I touched the rocks I felt the whole island tremble in fear. The fish are going to safer shoals. The Sea is coming. Soon, it will be here.” Her focus altered; she asked Fern with sudden simplicity: “Are you the spirit of the Stone? Did you emerge in the moment of its breaking—to save us?”
“I’m supposed to save . . . something,” Fern said. “But I didn’t come from the Stone. It has no spirit, only power.”
“She fell from a star,” Rafarl offered, quoting his mother.
“What’s Zohrâne doing?” Fern pressed the
nympheline
. Her moods changed like weather; the clouds and the lightning had vanished; now, she was all mist and bewilderment.
“I don’t know,” she said. “She’s in the temple all the time, planning something maybe, arranging a new ceremony. The guards will let no one near, not even those of the highest rank. Only the senior priests. There is a rumor the Families are conspiring against her, but everyone knows it is too late. She doesn’t care. Morbis the street-seer says she has drawn all the power of the Stone into herself, she is glutted with power, and she will spin the world on her fingertip, and toss it into the firmament like a juggler’s ball.”
“Impractical,” commented Rafarl.
“When is this new ceremony?” Fern inquired after a minute or two.
“Tomorrow. At midday. There will be many sacrifices; the temple will run with blood. Already there is a strange nimbus about the broken dome, as if a light other than the sun is on it. A light from the ending of the world.” A tremor ran through her slender body; Rafarl frowned.
“Will
you
go?” he asked.
“Perhaps. I could follow the fish, to calmer waters where it’s safe.” She added bleakly: “I have nothing to stay for now.” She stood up in a swift, impatient movement, went to the cave-mouth. “The tide is going out,” she said. “Too far out. Look.”
They joined her. Sure enough, the sea was shrinking, retreating faster and farther than they had ever seen before, leaving in its wake a flotsam of drying weed, broken shells, and the carcasses of countless creatures too small to name. Rocks lifted up their heads which had never felt the sun. “It is the End,” said Uuinarde, and a shadow touched them, though the sky was cloudless. The beauty of the little cove was gone: it had become a place of decay. The departing water exposed a seabed unsightly and somehow unwholesome in its nakedness. “I shall follow the fish,” Uuinarde said, but she sounded uncertain. She removed her veil and tied it around her waist; underneath, she wore only a short dress or tunic of some thin material that clung. Her feet were bare. She walked out toward the shrunken waves, paused to look back. (Never look back, say the legends. To look back is death.)
“I wish you luck,” said Rafarl.
“There is no more luck.” The wind blew her voice away from them. “It has gone with the tide.”
“Ré vidéva,”
Fern called. Till we meet again.
“I doubt it,” Rafarl said when the
nympheline
had disappeared. “She will follow the porpoises. Uuinarde had no loves, no ties but her brother.”
“Maybe,” said Fern. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
Rafarl sighed. “I thought I did. For a while.”
“And now?”
His mouth was wry. “I don’t know if I love you. But I know I never loved anyone else.”
Back in the cave Fern dressed quickly, tossing Rafarl his outer clothing. “How long will it take us,” she asked, “to get back to the city?”
“We’re not going back. I told you, we lie low for a week or two, until the hue and cry has died down. I’m not changing the plan because a grief-crazed nymph says the world is ending and the tide has gone out too far. It will turn in due course; it always does. If the sea starts playing rough we can climb up to the house: we’ll be above any storms there. The city is too dangerous for us now.”
“The danger doesn’t matter,” said Fern. “I have to be at that ceremony tomorrow. Something is going to happen there which I have to prevent, or change: I’m not sure what but I’ll know when the time comes. Uuinarde was right: this is the End. This is
an
end, anyhow. Afterward . . . I don’t know. Are you coming?”
“No,” Rafarl said bluntly. “You’re not going anywhere either. You’ll get lost without me.”
“I’ll manage.” She was strapping on her shoes, apparently unperturbed.
“You
won’t
. Forget all this nonsense about fate and doom. There’s nothing you can do. Zohrâne is the most powerful sorceress in history: the demon-gods of the mainland avoid her, the earth-spirits crawl from her sight. Even if you were able to attend the ceremony you’d be helpless against her. She’ll brush you from her path like dust, blast you into eternity like a feather—”
“Feathers ride the wind,” said Fern. “They’re too light to blast. Anyway, I didn’t say I’d be challenging Zohrâne.”
“You won’t get the chance. You’ll be arrested as soon as you set foot in the city, the guards will throw you in a dungeon, and Ixavo will interrogate you until you’re too dead to answer. You’ll achieve nothing, and you’ll probably get yourself killed in the process. I don’t intend to help with that.”
“Of course not.” Her demeanor was quiet, acquiescent, taking him off guard. “You’ve helped a great deal already. Thank you. I have no right to expect any more.”
“Is that all you can say?” He was on his feet, shedding cynicism, his stubbornness cracking against her resolution. He looked at her with wild eyes; a tentative finger explored her cheek. “You don’t even know the way.”
“I’ll walk south and west till I find a road. Then I’ll follow the road till I can hitch a lift. I’ll get there. It doesn’t signify if I’m arrested. At least they’ll take me where I want to be.”
They argued for another twenty minutes before he gave in. Or rather, Rafarl argued, expending passion and energy in vain; Fern merely maintained her position. At last he said: “All right. All right. I’ll take you back to the city, but that’s all. After that, it’s up to you. I’m not getting involved in some impossible crusade just because we made love on a beach.”
“Look at the beach now,” said Fern as they left the cave. A rising haze bleared the sun; dead things were blistering on drying sand. The scent of rottenness was carried from the naked seabed.
“The tide will turn,” said Rafarl with somber optimism. “The luck will turn.”
“Yes,” said Fern, “but when?”
They could not re-enter Atlantis by the secret way through the sewerage system since the route was impossible without an expert guide. Instead, Rafarl proposed to take the open road, if not in an open manner. Leaving the coast along the river-passage they had used before they crossed the arid plain, passing an occasional solitary farmstead set in a patchwork of poorly irrigated fields. Rafarl would wave to the farmer if they saw him; if not, he would scout round, checking the stable, until eventually he found what he wanted. Transport. Ensuring the owner was nowhere about, he harnessed the horse between the shafts of the cart and drove off, with Fern perched on the seat beside him. “Where do you think the farmer might be?” she inquired nervously, peering about her.
“No idea. Gone to market on his other horse, perhaps. Or simply having lunch. I suppose you want to leave him some money?”
“Well . . .”