W
HEN HE AWAKENED, he was still as tired as if he had run for hours. It was impossible to tell how long he had slept; the luminous gray sky outside, the swirling clouds and damp, ancient rooftops seemed unchanged. He sat up on the bed, thoughts blurry and wordless, then put his feet on the floor and had to stop there, dizzy. He remained that way, head in hands, until he heard the queen’s voice.
“Manchild.”
He opened his eyes to find her standing over him. He was in a room that was plain but comfortable. Beside the bed a window with an open shutter looked down onto an enclosed courtyard and an overgrown garden of white-and-blue flowers. All of the other windows Barrick could see were shuttered.
“I had a dream ...” he began.
“It was not a dream,” Saqri told him. “You were on your way to the fields beyond, almost obliterated by the strength of the Fireflower. But my husband is with you now, helping you. Or a part of him is—the part that your need has prevented from going on.” Saqri’s dark eyes were solemn. “I do not know whether I should hate you for that or not, Barrick Eddon. Ynnir was meant to go on. He chose to go. But now because of the bond of responsibility or shame he feels to you, he lingers.”
“Ynnir is . . . inside me?”
“They are
all
inside you, it seems, all the men of the Fireflower, in almost the same way the women are all inside me, my mother and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, our family stretching back entirely to the days of the gods. But though a part of them remains with you, the Ancestors of the Father have in truth gone on to whatever lies beyond ...” She shook her head. “No. There are no words that will truly speak it from my thoughts to yours. But my husband . . . my brother . . . he cannot ...” Her face changed and she fell silent again. He heard a batwing whisper in the dark depths of his own being, but from a voice that was neither hers nor his own—“
Sad she is sad she misses me even through the fury oh proud sister you are still beautiful . . . !”
“I must spend some time in thought about this—about everything,” Saqri told Barrick at last. “I will go. Harsar will attend to you until I call you.”
Shortly after she had left the room, the strange little servant Harsar came to him with a tray containing what Barrick could only regard as a feast—bread and salty white cheese and honey and a bowl of the fattest, sweetest, most thin-skinned plums he had ever tasted. Harsar did not leave immediately, but stood watching Barrick eat.
“I have never seen one of your kind, except in dreams,” the manlike creature said to him at last. “You are neither so fearsome nor so strange as I would have expected.”
“Thank you, I suppose. I would say the same for you, except I’m not sure I’ve ever seen your kind even in dreams.”
Harsar gave him a squinting look. “Do you joke? Never seen the Stone Circle People? Your people used to dance with ours by moonlight! We took you down into our towns beneath the hills and showed you wonderful things!”
“Doubtless,” Barrick said, wiping honey off his chin. The excellent meal was improving his mood by the instant. “But I’m young, you must remember. Still, I’m sure my grandfather danced the Torvionos with your grandfather at every festival!”
The squint deepened until Harsar’s eyes had disappeared. “You are jesting. Foolery.”
Barrick laughed. It felt strange—he could not remember the last time he had done it. “You are right, sir. You have caught me.”
Harsar shook his head disapprovingly. “Just like ...” He stopped himself with an obvious effort. “To jest is to mock the seriousness of things.”
“No.” Barrick found himself needing to explain. “Jesting is the only way to make sense of some things. Perhaps because your people don’t die . . .”
“We die,” said Harsar. “Mostly at the hands of men.”
For a moment Barrick faltered. “Perhaps it’s because my people are mortal that we must jest. Sometimes it is the only way to live with things that cannot be lived with.”
“Not simply because you are mortal.” A sort of frown stretched the fairy-factor’s face; when he spoke again, it was almost as if to himself. “There are those among the People—yes, even the highest—who do this, who jest and speak meaningless words when they should be acting ...”
His anger is at me,
a voice in Barrick’s thoughts said.
And his frustration. He is not the only one, but he was the closest to me . . . except for my own sister-wife . . .
This new voice seemed so clear that Barrick thought against all sense and memory that Ynnir must be standing in the chamber. He looked around, hopefully at first, then increasingly wildly . . . “Lord? Where are you?”
Harsar stared, but with no more than polite concern, as though this kind of gibbering madness must frequently overtake the residents of Qul-na-Qar.
You told me I could not leave you—not yet.
The king’s voice was as clear as if he stood beside Barrick.
But now you must rest again. It takes no deathly wisdom to know you will need all your strength for whatever comes next, and you still are not strong enough to withstand the full bloom of the Fireflower. I need your attention. Send Harsar-so away.
Barrick began to mumble excuses, but whatever else he might have been, the exotic Harsar was by training a royal servant: he glimpsed what was wanted and promptly made himself scarce, taking the empty tray with him.
“You said he was angry at you . . . ? Harsar?”
You need not speak aloud,
the king’s voice said.
And you have no need to stand or sit, either. Lie down, for you are still weary. Rest. What Harsar thinks of me does not matter anymore. He is faithful to the Fireflower.
Barrick stretched out on the bed, found a delicate but surprisingly heavy blanket to pull over himself. Even with the king’s comforting presence so close, he began to feel the Fireflower voices stirring in him, threatening to pull him down, to drown him in an ocean of alien memories. How would he ever find the strength to reach the shore . . . !
Do not think of a shore,
said the king, startling him with how much of Barrick’s mind he had understood.
You are not drowning, but neither can you climb safely up from the Fireflower and leave it behind. It is part of you, now and forever.
Instead, think of the light of a single star low on the horizon. Swim toward that light. You will not reach it, but in time you will learn to be content to swim eternally in that endless ocean. In truth, you will never reach that glowing mote, but neither will it ever disappear from your sight. . . .
The king continued to speak these riddling words to him, over and over, his voice as soothing to Barrick’s thoughts as the song of summer crickets. He tried to swim toward the light, but instead found himself sinking deeper and deeper into weariness and, at last, back into the oblivion of sleep.
When the servant wakened him again, it was not with a meal but a summons.
“The queen bids you join her in the Singing Garden.”
Barrick got up and followed Harsar, feeling protected still by Ynnir’s help and the king’s unfelt but still recognized presence. The Fireflower voices were not gone but at the moment they seemed muffled, as though some layer of protection had been woven between them and Barrick. He followed the small servant out a side door and beneath the gray sky, down a path of black gravel running through a bed of stones. They passed through one garden after another, concentric walled rings that used colors of flowers and stones, as well as their shapes, in ways he could not entirely grasp, but their effect was so strong and so varied that it tired him just to pass through them.
At the center was a gateway, an arch of stone wound with clinging white flowers.
“Go quietly,” Harsar said. “For your own sake.” The servant bowed then and left him.
Barrick stepped through the gate, wondering what exactly he was being warned against. Were there animals here that would harm him if they caught him—or even plants? He walked as silently as he could, grateful that the gravel path had been replaced here with a track of pure, deep grass that cushioned every step.
Water dripped quietly beside him, falling from a crack in the outer wall onto a stone,
plik, plik, plik
. A little farther along a series of slightly larger waterfalls trickled into shallow ponds beside the path with a sound like someone gently tapping a crystal goblet. Behind both these noises he could hear a delicate hooting which might have been the call of some contented bird sitting on its nest, but turned out instead to come from a slender tower of stone scarcely twice his own height, with a hole in its top like a needle’s eye that took in the passing wind and made it into sweet music.
The Singing Garden,
Harsar had called it. The Singing Garden. Even the voices in his head fell utterly silent; as if they listened to something they had loved once but had long forgotten.
He found the queen sitting in an open pavilion surrounded by flowering trees, her eyes closed as though she slept. As he approached, Saqri stirred in the depths of her white robes, like petals brushed by the wind, and opened her eyes.
“My husband . . . my brother . . . always preferred the Tower of Thinking Clouds,” she told him. “But that place is too stark for me. I like it here. I would have missed this place if I could not have returned.”
“Returned from where?”
“The fields we will all go to someday—the fields from which you nearly did not return only a short while ago.” She nodded. “But even here, in the middle of all this peace, I could not pierce the veil around your home, which we call the Last Hour of the Ancestor.” Saqri’s face took on a troubled shadow. “Something grave and strange is happening there—something I have never known before, that keeps the words of my great-aunt Yasammez from me and mine from her.”
“But if you can’t talk to her, what can we do? We have to stop her—tell her the Fireflower is still alive. She will destroy Southmarch, otherwise.”
“The fact that she has not yet conquered it—that, I can sense—means that things must be more . . . complicated than we can guess.” Saqri shook her head. “But it is pointless to speak of it any more. Unless things change, I cannot speak to her. She will make up her mind and do what she feels she must, as she always has.”
“Then we should go there. We have to tell Yasammez that the Pact succeeded. The trust of the People demands it!” Fireflower voices and ideas rose in his head like splashing water, but it seemed clear to him he had the gist of it correctly. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You sound more like one of ours than one of yours.” Her lips curled in a faint smile. “Still, go to her, you say? Manchild, hundreds of leagues lie between us and them.”
“But you have these . . . doors. Gateways. I came here through one!”
Saqri made a strange little hissing sound—she was laughing. “Grandmother Void did not invite everyone in the world to use her roads, child! Just her own great-grandson, Crooked. You came here on one of his, made long ago when the gods still walked the world, and my folk and the Dreamless were still allies. It only survives because the lore of making and unmaking such things is lost to us—and it would only lead you back to the city of Sleep.”
“But if we can’t use that one, there must be others!”
“A few. Some had already been discovered by accident before Crooked learned the great secrets from the old woman. In fact the gods built many of their houses so that they could use those which had already been found.”
“Then we can use them, too, can’t we? You said that Southmarch is on top of—in front of, whatever you said—the palace of Kernios. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? One of those doors?”
“Any of the roads that served Kernios would be banned to us,” she said. “Even with the dark one deep in his long slumber. It is a good idea, Barrick Manchild, but it will not serve.”
“What am I supposed to do, then, just . . .
pray
? My people will be killed! And so will the rest of yours!” He threw himself down on the steps of the pavilion at her feet and slapped the stone in frustration. “I used to think the gods didn’t even exist—now you’re telling me they’re blocking my way every direction I turn. And they’re not even awake!”
Saqri raised one eyebrow at this display but did not speak. After a moment she rose and drifted down the steps past him. She raised her hand as she passed, clearly bidding him to follow her.
“Where are we going now?” Barrick asked.
“There is another source of help that remains to us,” she said without slowing.
Barrick scrambled after her as she made her way back across the chiming, singing garden into the timeless halls of Qul-na-Qar.
There was a point at which the stairs they had been descending for so long became a level floor, but he could not quite remember when that happened; there was another point at which the inconstant, watery light of the palace dwindled and at last died, but he could not exactly remember when that had happened, either. Lastly, even the stone floor beneath his feet had ended; now he felt the give of loam beneath his feet, as though they had gone so deep beneath the castle they had left even the foundations behind. In fact, they had been walking in darkness so long now that it seemed no matter what Saqri might claim of the distance, they must have walked most of the way from Qul-na-Qar to Southmarch.
The silence of this endless dark place was of course not truly silent, at least not in Barrick’s teeming skull, but with the help of what Ynnir had told him and the feeling that the blind king himself was not too far away, Barrick was able to rise above the chaotic knowledge of the Fireflower and concentrate on staying close to Saqri, who led him not like a mother leading a child through an unfamiliar place, but like someone leading another family member through a place in which they had both lived their entire lives.