Stargate (14 page)

Then he saw Tagar, and at the same moment he glimpsed the Trader. Tagar had begun to run. He was shouting something to the Trader, but Ghakazian was too high to hear the words. He hovered, watching, and suddenly he recognized his danger. Tagar would repeat his threat to the Trader. The Trader would go to Danar, and Danarion and the others would come to Ghaka. The plans would be ended. Wretch! he thought, a fume of wrath rising in him. Ungrateful mortal! I offer you Shol, I offer you an end to the danger that sits, unwinking, at the Gate, and this is how you serve me. His knees rose to his chest, then his legs shot out behind him. His arms and his wings spread wide. Like a falling star he plunged toward the road, coming to rest in a shower of golden sparks before Tagar. The man fell, scrabbling at the stones like an ungainly beast, then came awkwardly to his feet. Ghakazian folded his arms.

“Oh, Tagar,” he said softly, sorrowfully, though his great anger pulsed through the light flaring from him. “I know your every thought. Where is the trust between us? Where your obedience, your love? The Trader has gone upon his way.” He shook his head in mock sadness, and Tagar looked beyond him. The road was empty and silent. With a muffled cry he hung his head. Ghakazian watched the trembling of the blunt hands, the effort to quiet the still-heaving lungs. “You would betray me, Tagar?” the deep, sweet voice went on. “Me, the only hope of the universe? Shame! Shame!”

Tagar said nothing. He had closed his eyes, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets. One of them found the feather he had placed there while the sun still shone and the grass was still green and fresh. Tears trickled down his cheeks, but pride forebade any sound.

Ghakazian damped down his fire and came closer. “I will ask you one last time, Tagar. Will you lead your mortals to Shol with me?”

Tagar shuddered. Then his head came up and he found his voice. “The corridors are forbidden to mortal men. So is the taking of one's own life or that of another. The All will not be saved by the breaking of laws, Ghakazian. I love you. I have loved you since I was a child upon my mother's knee and you came to her house and amused me by making the sunlight into a ball and rolling it about the ceiling. That I can never forget. I will go on loving you no matter what my fate. But I can no longer obey you, for when you speak of obedience, you are already acknowledging that everything has changed.” Finality, weak but definite, was in his tone.

For a long time they eyed each other, Tagar full of fear but upright, Ghakazian brooding sullenly, light pooling now from his feet, now trickling yellow from his hidden hands and welling up through his arms. Where it met the night, Tagar could have sworn that it acquired a darker blackness.

When Tagar could bear his scrutiny no more, Ghakazian loosened his arms. His actions were brisk, assured, his words crisp. “You must come with me,” he said, and quickly he laid hands on Tagar, spinning him around as though he had been a feather himself. With a quiet word to his sun he lifted Tagar, bearing him lightly. Tagar bit his lip to stop himself from crying out as the road swayed dizzily and all at once the dim land fell away from his feet. Ghakazian's arms held him surely, effortlessly. Tagar felt their warmth, and the sun-lord's neckleted chest fed the same steady comfort into his back, but he shrank now from the power latent there, for Ghakazian's easy breath was icy.

For a time that seemed to Tagar to be the dreaming unreality of eternity, Ghakazian flew, straight and evenly. Tagar had no sensation of speed until he glanced down and saw how the clustered lights fled and the glittering of stars on the rivers was like a flash of white fire that snaked over the land and was gone. Then all at once Ghakazian muttered in surprise and checked his flight. Tagar's fingers clutched emptiness, and his heart gave a lurch. Slowly Ghakazian began to circle lower and lower, and Tagar strained to see what it was that had caught his attention. Ahead of them, looming dark and jagged, was the peak that held the Gate, while all around them the stone ancestors frowned at one another, motionless presences in the night. But below, on the road that wound from both mountain and valleys and ended at the foot of the stair, there was movement. Tagar could not discern what it was, but Ghakazian suddenly shook him and shouted, “What mischief have you fomented, faithless one? Where are they going? To Roita?”

Tagar looked down in despair, and all hope left him. People were moving slowly along the road, without light or laughter, a long, straggling column of uncomprehending tiny forms with faces turned to the Gate stair, obeying his frantic, half-hysterical command. But it was too late, he wept to himself, too late. They should have kept to the fields, crept along in the shelter of the rocks, anything but used the road. Ghakazian roared out a word, and sunlight flooded the road beneath. The people tumbled to a halt, shrieking, but suddenly a calm fell on them, and every face was upturned. “The sun-lord,” they whispered, their eyes sparking in the circle of brightness that held them, their hair shining as though they stood under a noon sun. But there was no gladness in the shiver of sound, and Ghakazian noted its absence.

“Where are you going at this hour?” he demanded, and though they tried, they could not glimpse the form behind the voice, so painful was the light blazing down on them.

Natil stepped out from the crowd and, shading his eyes with a hand, answered boldly, “We go to Roita. The hour does not matter. Day or night, the Gate is open.”

Run! Tagar tried to shout to his descendant. Run, run, run! But he realized that he had not opened his mouth, and he knew that Ghakazian had overridden his will for the first time in five hundred years.

Ghakazian laughed. “It matters now!” he called back roughly. “Henceforth the Gate is forbidden to you. I have work for you to do, and you will have no time for visiting.”

A murmuring of astonishment rose, and while the people exclaimed to one another in voices that still betrayed no understanding, Ghakazian changed his grip on Tagar. At that moment Tagar knew that Ghakazian was going to kill him. Horrified and disbelieving, he struggled in his lord's arms, but Ghakazian only held him more tightly.

“Yes,” he hissed. “I will destroy you, Tagar, and in doing so I will teach the people the price of disobedience. You will wait at the Gate, but no Messenger will come for your essence. You will wait for me, and when I come, you will follow me, for if you do not, you will be a prisoner of Ghaka forever.”

“Sun-lord,” Tagar croaked, wide eyes fixed on the road that glimmered far below him, his spine, his limbs, his very being cringing away from the fearsome nothingness between himself and the distant people, “do not do this terrible harm to yourself. If you murder me, then you also will be wounded beyond hope of recovery.”

“What do you know of a sun-lord's soul, you worm of the earth?” Ghakazian retorted through clenched teeth. “Do not presume to be my teacher, wingless one, road-crawler. Die!”

He flung open his arms, and Tagar fell. Like a wounded bird he dropped, his limbs curling under him, his shirt flapping obscenely. Wind screamed at him, and its force made him close his eyes. He did not cry out. He had no thought. His last emotion was one of deep, agonized remorse. His body crunched against the stones of the road and lay there limply, arms and legs still crumpled beneath it, his gay red shirt spread like a flower blossoming under the weird bubble of daylight in the midnight calm of Ghaka. The people drew back, whispering in puzzlement. Several of them looked up, trying to see Ghakazian where he hovered hidden in white brilliance, and after a moment a woman went to Tagar and stirred him gently with her foot. “Tagar, Tagar, why do you not get up?” she asked. When she received no answer, she squatted, and then she saw the blood, pooling crimson under his head. She touched it gently, wonderingly, still caught in a more merciful time, but Natil, after one glance, understood. Ghaka herself had become an enemy.

Natil's head swam. All around him he saw the things he had always seen: dark sky, stars, the comfortable heights of the mountains, the farm-dotted valleys. He felt the breeze. He breathed in the odors of grass and stone, crops and animals. But a new and terrible awareness of these things came to him. He could not analyze it. It was as though all his life he had been sweetly asleep, dreaming of a Ghaka that had never existed. Now he had woken. Something had fallen from the sky, tearing apart the dream from the reality, and he would sleep no more. He tried to remember what that dream had been like, but memory had fled, leaving only shreds. Surely it was not all a mirage! he thought in panic. Such freedom I knew in it, such happiness and security! He did not realize that he had never used those words before.

He moved forward and, kneeling beside Tagar, turned him upon his back. A long sigh went up from the crowd, for Tagar's nose lay along his cheek, and blood was congealing down his neck and in his hair. This is death, Natil thought, calm and cold and very distant. The other was a pleasant piece of flimsy. This is how it ends.

Ghakazian fluttered lower. “Tagar refused to obey me,” he said levelly. “I punished Tagar. So will I punish any mortal who dares to oppose my will. Go home now, all of you, until I decide how I shall accomplish my great plan. Do as I say, and you will become heroes throughout the All. Tagar's essence awaits my pleasure at the Gate, and if I choose, it will stay there forever, but that is none of your business. Do not attempt to use the Gate. I will order winged ones to guard it.”

All at once the light went out and night collapsed upon the road. Natil, raising his eyes, saw the sun-lord dart away in a shower of red sparks. He rose stiffly, standing with one arm around Rintar as she cuddled their son and wept. The people were creeping away. Many were sobbing, though some did not yet know why they cried. The little family was soon alone with its ancestor under the soft night sky, in the new silence.

“Natil,” Rintar said, wiping her face on his sleeve and lifting swollen eyes to meet his own, “I have the strange feeling that I have never wept before. Isn't that foolish? I think … I have forgotten something …” She began to cry again, and Natil shivered as he felt the wind tug at Tagar's wet shirt and brush it against his ankle.

“I don't know what to do with him,” he whispered. “Should I carry him to the Gate for the Messengers? Or are Gates and Messengers a fantasy? Do I leave him on the road, lay him in the grass, what?”

In the end he sent Rintar and the boy home alone. He walked to the nearest farm and borrowed a cart. Dragging Tagar's heavy, loose body onto it, he set out for the Gate. Little by little the thin gray ribbon of stair loomed larger, winding precipitous and narrow around the mountain, but by the time he had hauled the cart with its pitiful burden to the foot, he realized he could do no more. With his last ounce of strength he pulled Tagar from the cart and propped him against the unyielding rock, then, groaning with exhaustion and misery, lay beside it himself. Is there a Gate? be thought in anguish. Are there worlds beyond worlds, where people still dream? He laid his face against his outstretched arm and sobbed.

When he was spent, he left the body of Tagar and went home. There was nothing else to do. He trudged back the way he had come, pulling the ridiculous cart behind him, unable to plan, to decide how to circumvent the coming day. He looked back once, afraid yet compelled to affirm the fact that he had indeed seen a terrible thing, hoping vainly that it was not so and that he had only been entangled in some fragmented vision, but Tagar still sat propped against the foot of the soaring rock wall, his head loose upon his chest, his legs splayed with his hands resting between them. The dark was lifting now as dawn breathed gray and soft upon the night, and the first steps leading to the Gate glimmered beside the body, still only blurs like strange, pale faces peering watchfully down the road. Natil whimpered, turned, and hurried on. The road unrolled slowly beneath his feet, a single curving ribbon of almost-light, bounded to left and right by darkness. A stifling silence went before him and filled the air behind. He found himself breathing quietly, with caution, and the merry rattle of the little cart's wheels sounded dangerously loud.

Why am I so afraid? he asked himself. He longed for new sunlight, the birds' morning songs, the safe, friendly sounds of slammed doors and voices. He did not dare to take his eyes off the road and fancied that its grayness was less dense, but he could not be sure. He reached the place where he had borrowed the cart and turned onto the path to the farmhouse, searching eagerly for light from the windows. When he saw that there was none and that the house squatted, watching him come with an impatient greed, he pushed the cart through the open gate and fled, racing back to the road, not slackening his pace now he was rid of his obligation. I did not imagine it, he thought. The sky is lighter. He glanced upward, his heart lightening for a moment, but then, far away, he saw the dawn limning the colossal effigies of the winged ancestors. They seemed to acquire definition with an appalling rapidity as the sun rose behind them, and although their mighty outlines shrank to harsh silhouettes and darkened momentarily, they did not lose the impression of power and malice they had given Natil in that second when he had sought the sun. They faced one another across the valleys, wings furled uneasily but for Hiranka, whose wide stone feathers boasted an exuberant, uncontrolled vitality. I have never seen them look like that before, Natil thought in despair. How can stone hold so much movement?

As the sun tipped the images Natil saw a small feathered form leave Hiranka's shoulder and swoop toward the neck of the valley, three others with it. They were still far away, four brown specks against the vast red semicircle of the rising sun, but Natil flung himself off the road and ran into the field that bordered it, curling himself into a ball, forehead rammed against knees, arms circling his trembling legs. Why am I doing these foolish things? he wondered. It was as though someone else were being born in him, someone with a long-dormant instinct for self-preservation suddenly awakened. It was as though when a part of him died, there on the road under the merciless glare of the sun-lord's light, another part had begun to bud and then blossom, garish blooms of action without thought, the purpose obscure but looming pregnant with disaster. They came toward him, gliding swiftly on the dawn wind, and he heard them calling to one another or to the sun, he could not tell. He closed his eyes. Now the rush of air under spread wings hummed to him, and he sensed that they had checked their flight, they had seen him.