Authors: Pauline Gedge
He felt as though his thoughts were dropping with infinite slowness into his mind, each shining with well-being and a brilliant coherence, but he could not hold them. Finally he ceased to think at all. The universe drifted by him, the waterfall shimmered, and he allowed it all to simply be, just as he had relinquished himself to simply being. He did not know whether time was moving backward or forward or had stopped altogether. He began to believe that he had always hung suspended between the stars and would remain so forever.
Then full consciousness returned to him, for the Messenger had paused and was contracting itself. The transparency wavered violently and reformed into the misty silver net Danarion had seen flung out between himself and his sun. Through it, hazy and very far away, he could discern Shol's one sun, trapped in the mist of gray as he had seen it last in the mirror.
Danarion held out arms he did not have in a gesture of supplication, and the sun came closer. He thought he heard it crying, and the slow tendrils of grayness surrounding it licked toward him as the Messenger hurtled toward it, the silver net shrinking to a hard brilliance that broke the starlight into white spears and turned back the questing mouths of the darkness.
For a moment Danarion felt himself buffeted as the Messenger was itself tossed to and fro, but then the sun was behind them, and Shol came into view, a tiny prick of dim light which grew as they sped silently toward it. The Messenger slowed to a long glide, and the stars ceased to move and became single crystals quivering, green and red through the net. Shol was a half-moon whose horizon curved mistily against blackness, and time began to beat against Danarion once more.
The horizon rose and flattened, and the mist became low cloud tinged with the pink of a rising sun. To his left Danarion saw a range of mountains dominated by one massive, blunt peak. Rivers oozed from the rock like gray blood, but he was still too high to see the movement of the water. Below him was a vast plain, also gray but dotted with dark lakes, and to his right the flat expanse of the ocean. He looked ahead so that he might not see the earth come racing toward him, and far in the distance he thought he caught the reflection of a flash of early light. The bells of Shaban, he thought with a stab of relief and anticipation, but then he remembered, and the terror was back. The mountains dipped and reared up beside him. The plain unrolled, flattening the lakes into invisibility, and the Messenger came to rest just above the ground. Danarion looked down.
Lying on the verge of a lake was a man, his black, untidy head turned to one side, his hands open and reaching for the dark water. Under his legs grew coarse grass which straggled away from him and followed the wandering are of the beach, and thorny shrubs struggled for rootholds in the sand and rocks beyond him. He was very still. There was no movement in the broad shoulders under the stained brown tunic.
Suddenly Danarion saw metal bands about both thick wrists, each band set with closed hooks, but before he could wonder, the Messenger stirred, and the scene began to blur. “Not this body!” Danarion whispered, horrified. “This mortal is dead!” But the Messenger said nothing, and for a moment a great calm enveloped Danarion, as though at last he might taste mortal sleep. Then it seemed as though the Messenger broke into many pieces. The net shredded and whipped away. The mountains creaked, the rivers roared, the constant thirst of the ugly, dusty bushes was a murmured groaning.
He felt himself propelled downward. Instinctively he called to his sun, but there was no response. Don't leave me! he thought wildly, don't abandon me in this terrible place. When will you come for me again? Where? Will you be able to find me?
Sight and sound were blotted out as he found himself in a place of utter darkness, like a cavern deep under the earth, so empty that even the awareness of it was itself a void that had always existed. This mortal is dead, he thought. His essence is gone. He should have been taken to the Gate, where essence and body would fuse closer together, become a white cargo for a Messenger. In his momentary panic he had forgotten, but then, as he fought to remain calm, a curious thrill, half revulsion and half anticipation, went through him. Of course, death on Shol is different now. But where do the essences go? Where is this man now? Shadowing by a Gate that is no longer in place? I am in a dead body. I am a mortal, and I am dead. This is the body I am to use. I am sorry, so sorry, whoever you were who looked out through these black eyes.
He began to expand himself, searching for the limits of the emptiness. He felt into the marrow of the bones, the secrets of the cells, finding in each the fading imprint of the mortal whose thoughts had warmed them, whose energy had permeated them, saturating them with life and purpose. The nebulous, pervasive force had left a faint aura that was alien to Danarion, but he thought of the time he had spent sitting with his own mortals by their hearths, striving to understand them, to be as one of them, and he did not shrink. There was something in this mortal that would not have been in an inhabitant of Danar, a mingling of wholeness and complexity, a fear for the safety of his body and a suffocating drive to change and destroy, a swirling giddiness of hate, love, pride, and selflessness, all fractured yet intertwined. So this is what it means to be a fallen mortal, he thought. This terrible interior war that can have no resolution. Sholia closed the Gate, but too late to prevent the posing of a threat that can have no end and no victory for either the Unmaker or herself. I must not let it pierce me, although here in this body it is as close to me as an indrawn breath. Now, who am I?
He probed the brain, and a dark flow of fear and defiance beat him back as he struggled to approach, to unlock the frozen memories left by the essence. He knew that the fear belonged to the moment of death, when the man could run no more and had turned at bay, and the captain had raised his bow, and the arrow had found its target. Danarion tasted the terror and found the defiance to be against Ishban, and its Lady, and the emotion was so strong that even the moment of death had not eclipsed it. What is Ishban, he thought. And what Lady? Can Sholia be still in the city? Then why this death, this killing? I do not know enough, I do not know where to start or how to seek. But I must begin. He felt himself tolerated by every cell, a foreign but acceptable presence, and he took the last step and flooded his mind into the brain. He opened the eyes.
Pain burst in him, and he cried out, seeking the blissful shelter of Shol's sun. But it did not recognize the call, and the body still encased him like a clumsy, heavy shroud. He tried to sit up and could not, but he turned the head and saw a crust of dry color on the sand, brownish-red. He made the eyes look along the body. An arrow jutted from its side, the shaft broken off. As he looked at the wound the memories at last sprang to life for Danarion, and this time separate sensations came with them: a gulf of pain that had stilled the heart, and beneath it many lesser throbsâfeet and ankles swollen because of the running, the scabbed graze on the left shoulder where the body had fallen while climbing over the city wall in the darkness, the burning ache of punished muscles, the exhaustion of flight.
Danarion moved an arm, and the fingers took the arrow and pulled. It came slowly, the barbs tearing flesh loose, and the fingers dropped it and felt in the hole it had left. Danarion made the head lie back while he coaxed the heart into a flutter, and the wound to begin to knit. The blood began to flow again, cool and sluggish compared to his own. He made the eyes open onto sunlight, but the sight was blinding, and they closed again of their own volition. Behind the lids Danarion saw the dazzle, and with anguish he knew that most of his power was gone, sunk uncontrollable beneath this strange red blood and these slowly working, stiff organs, and all that was left to him was the power to command himself. The ability to order a sun was no longer in him. He felt naked, protected only by this arrangement of softness held up by brittle bones.
He made the body lie still as he quietly observed the new life he had brought, course through it, healing the wound, soothing the muscles, drenching the cells with a foreign vitality. While he watched he became aware of something else, something that reached out from this flesh, that had saturated it and now sought to inundate him, and he let it come. I am no longer outside time, he thought. Now it is within me. I feel it draining me as it does the mortals, a store of sand trickling slowly away, a minute and steady atrophy in these cells that cannot be touched by me. He tried to analyze the feeling. It was not merely a matter of changes in the cells from moment to moment as it would be for mortals on an unfallen world, a flux along the same plane. Time here was an active, hostile participant, interfering with the proper course of the changes, warping them into progressive stages of decay. Each second leeched vitality from the body. Time itself was feeding on life. Tentatively Danarion tried to stop the parasitic feast, but when he did so, the cells ceased to function. He knew he was being devoured. Once again this body is dying, he thought. So this is how it feels. I am set on the path to death, and there is no escape. The last mystery is open to me, and I must find the courage to bear it. Now, what is my name?
The brain cells responded. I am Chilka, slave to Yarne in the House of the Lady. I am a Sholan one-mind. Once again I am running to the mountains, where the remnants of my people live, where my wife and child have waited six years for me to return from hunting. The soldiers pursued me and killed me, and now I am free to go home, no more to see the sickness of the two-minds, to hear their sleepless whispers in the night, to be chained while they wander, vulnerable and mad, through the halls of the House. Free to run home, to run, run! I am Chilka!
The exultation of the thoughts brought Danarion to his knees, and he looked to where the mountains beckoned, the one blunt mass casting a long midmorning shadow. He scrambled to his feet, and now did not need to command the body to obey him. My legs straighten, he said to himself. My head turns. Firmly he fought down the urgent demands of memory and stood swaying, one hand to his side where the new scar had formed. “Of what use are the mountains to me?” he said aloud. It is the Gate that I seek, and Sholia's palace. Perhaps this House is the palace, and she is the Lady. I must go to Shaban, and Chilka must show me the way. Then he laughed. The clumsy mortal body bent and, scooping up the brackish water, drank until its thirst was quenched. It walked, loosely and without coordination, until Danarion realized that he need not speak directly to each muscle. Not it, he told himself. This is me. I am this. He peered into the bushes and found the skin pouch Chilka had worn across his chest. The pursuers had rifled it. The knife had gone, and the coat, but some bread lay baking in the sun beside it. Danarion squatted and broke the loaf, forcing the brittle pieces into his mouth.
A memory of his own came fleetingly. He was sitting at table on Danar in his neighbor's house, the little girl on his knee, and he was refusing the food she held up to him, feeling once again the wall that he wished to break down between himself and the mortals. The memory was indistinct and soon faded, and he crunched the dry bread with satisfaction. Now I know, he thought, and the knowing is good. He swallowed and then swept up the pouch and drew it over his head, noticing as he did so his reflection in the water. A tousled beard, two black, wild eyes, skin lined and filthy. Chilka, he thought, I greet you. The mouth smiled back at him. He stood straight and, turning his back on the lake, set off in the direction of the ocean.
He walked intermittently for a day and a night. He knew that Chilka recognized the land, and he plotted his path by the man's memories, but as Danarion it was all strange to him. He had visited Sholia several times, had known how the city clung to the steep sides of a cliff with the ocean at its foot, and had seen the grassy plain that swept to meet the palace. He knew that forests had grown on the edge of the plain where rivers meandered to the sea, and beyond the forests were miles of rolling, tree-clad country where the nomads camped in summer, and he could only suppose that he was very far from what he had seen then. His feet began to swell with heat that rose from the sand, and the sun made the huge rocks that lay tumbled in his path shimmer and dance. The mountains sent out a spur of land that dwindled to be lost in the distance, and it was toward this spur that he headed, with the mountains themselves behind him and marching on his left, very far away.
He drank from small rock pools hidden in shadow but found nothing to eat. As Danarion that did not concern him, but Chilka's body craved food in spite of Danarion's power to keep it moving. It also needed much sleep, and in the dark hours, when it lay uncomfortably behind some rock or pressed deep into grass, Danarion had time to investigate the memories. Chilka's ancestors were not there. Try as he might, Danarion could find nothing beyond a time when Chilka had been three years old. His birth, his father's life, his grandfather's life had never been a part of his consciousness, and in their absence there was a vast plateau of uneasiness, as though some rough hand had wiped them away and left only a faint pulse of dull pain.
The child had been reared in the mountains. Danarion saw cold dawns and the footprints of wild game clearly in the snow. He saw summer sunsets of red and gray which the boy stood naked to watch, and the heat was a thing he could smell as well as feel. Quickly Danarion sifted down the years. There was a woman, small, fair, and pretty, and Chilka was now a man, already sown with the seeds of bitterness against the two-minds. He listened avidly to the stories of Shol's past, his emotions mixed, longing to believe yet finding no correlation between legend and what he saw with his own eyes. Danarion, listening also to the memories as Chilka's body murmured and sighed in its sleep, heard for the first time of the destruction that had come upon Shol.
Legends told how an army of magicians had come from the stars and had brought a sickness of the mind to Shol, so that the people were no longer whole but divided within themselves, and with the magicians had come fire and death, and a great shaking in the heavens. Some said that Shol had had two suns, and that the magicians had flung giant rocks at one of them and destroyed it. That, the myth-teller had said as Chilka's dark eyes had narrowed in disbelief, was difficult to believe, and harder still to believe was the legend that told of other worlds in the heavens where the people of Shol came and went, worlds the magicians had also destroyed. What were these magicians like? Danarion heard the voice of Chilka's body, a little derisive, a little patronizing, yet with a longing to know. The old man smiled apologetically. The legends tell us that they were shaped like us but had mighty wings, and they flew down to Shol bringing fire and war. They could make a man mad in his sleep, and they caused Sholan to rise against Sholan. Only us, the one-minds, were not touched. Our fathers ran and hid in these mountains. We are the true Sholans. The two-minds belong to the stars. Where did they come from? Chilka asked, the wind howling around the cave and the firelight flickering red on his face. From Raka, the old man said softly, and Chilka had laughed out loud. Raka? A constellation barely visible to the eye, and then only in the depths of winter when the air is dry and cold? How could anyone sprout wings and fly across such a distance? A magician might, the old man replied, smiling faintly. I do not dispute. My task is only to keep the legends alive. Is there a child born who does not fear the birds? We kill and eat them reciting words that will fill us with their magic. Why? The people listening murmured among themselves. One did not speak lightly of such things. One killed and whispered the words, and ate, and one did not think too much. The two-minds are not happy, the old man went on. They fear the stars as we fear the birds. That is why we kill them in the dark, when their minds are clouded with terror and sickness. Perhaps they fear a punishment from the stars. Who knows? The legends say that their Lady who never dies was once one of us, and she let the magicians come in exchange for her immortality, and it was she who loosed fire on Ishban and made the mountains split and the forests burn. There is, of course, a happy ending to this child's tale, Chilka sneered loudly, and the old man looked at him mildly and nodded. Not happy, perhaps, for nothing can be as it once was. Sholans will never again go to worlds beyond the sun. But the legend says that a god will come and heal the two-minds. From another constellation, I suppose, Chilka said, and the old man smiled. From Danic, he said. Chilka yawned. I am more interested in your news from the city, he said. Stop telling stories and give me some facts. The old man complied, but the people listened without true concentration, their thoughts full of the old lore, their faces bright in the fire's leaping, reflecting their hope.