Stargate (37 page)

That memory, so clear in Chilka's brain, gave Danarion much to ponder as the body trudged toward the spur of rock that grew steadily larger. He had remembered the old man's words with such clarity that Danarion knew, in spite of the scoffing, that Chilka longed deeply for the legends to be true. But I know the truth, Danarion thought, or most of it. Is it the Unmaker himself who lives in Sholia's body in the palace? Then where is Ghakazian? His essences took possession of Sholan bodies, that much is obvious, and they are trapped here. Such knowledge is of no use to me, for it will not help me find the Gate. Must I face the Unmaker alone, in a mortal body, with no power to speak of? Surely he is not here. Surely it is only his breath, not his presence, that has infected Shol. My only task is to find the Gate and render it safe for Danar if I can. If I become caught up in the mortals' struggles with one another, I will lose the distance that separates me so narrowly from this flesh and become half-mortal myself. My concerns must be for Danar and Janthis.

The body was sweating and stumbling. Its side ached where the scar ran, raised and an angry red, and thirst swelled the throat. It mutely demanded more rest, and water, and for one blinding second Danarion hated it. Then, trembling, he sat it down and passed the hands over it gently in a gesture of apology, the hate turning to pity. He looked out over the landscape and realized he was sitting in the shadow of the spur, which had now taken on definition and ran like jagged teeth into a haze in the distance that Danarion knew was the ocean. The sand had largely given way to a coarse, gray grass and straggling clumps of trees, and the end of the spur was fuzzed in green growth. As he sat, the body ceased to pant, and the heartbeat slowed. Sighing, he rose and had begun to pick his way forward when he heard a shout.

“Chilka!” It struck him like a blow and echoed from the shaking, heat-seared slope of the mountain.

He turned. Six men were running toward him, and in Chilka's brain the need to flee was a surge of energy and panic that gave way to relief as their faces wavered and came into focus. He stood still and let them come. But ten paces from him they stopped. Danarion read their uncertainty, a doubt tinged with awe and fear. He smiled.

“Yes, it is I,” he said steadily. “I am so glad to see you.”

They still did not speak. Finally a young man stepped forward. He lifted Chilka's arm and ran his fingers down the scar, and his touch smoothed wonderingly over the scabbed shoulder and drifted hesitantly along the cheek and over the lined mouth.

“What is the matter, Sadal?” Danarion said, and the hand dropped. Sadal shook his head.

“We saw them shoot you,” he said flatly. “We saw you running by the lake. I couldn't believe it was you so soon after the last escape. We saw the arrow go in. After they had taken your coat and knife, they rode away, and we came to look.” He swallowed, and Danarion felt the eyes of the others fixed on him darkly, suspiciously. “You were dead,” Sadal said flatly. “Candar tried to pull out the arrow, but the flesh was ripping too badly, and even though you were dead, we did not want to … to mutilate …” He broke off and looked at the ground.

“I broke the arrow,” Candar's harsh voice almost shouted. “Your eyes were open and filling with sand. You no longer bled. Your chest was still. The breath had gone. What in the name of Sholia are you?”

The old oath jolted Danarion. “What happened then?” he said quietly.

Sadal shrugged. “We did not dare to carry you away just then for fear the soldiers might come back. We withdrew a little and waited. When we returned, you had gone. We thought they might have come back and thrown your body in the lake, but the tracks said no. We followed your footsteps, not knowing what we might find.”

“And here I am,” Danarion finished for him. “Did it not occur to you that I might be merely wounded?”

Candar laughed. “Even if there was life in that body, it would have needed more than Lallin's care to get up and walk away. Who are you?”

Immediately the true fear sprang to life behind their eyes, and Danarion saw their hands move cautiously to rest on their weapons. “You think that somehow in the House they have turned me into a two-mind,” he said slowly, “or that it happened there by the lake. And I am now an enemy. You are wrong.” What shall I tell them? he thought dismally. They would twist the truth in their minds because mine is too nearly the condition of the Shol-Ghakans, and they would not take long to decide to kill Chilka. I could once more knit the body together, but such an effort would serve no purpose.

“Where were you going?” Candar asked sharply. “Only Ishban lies that way.”

Danarion feigned surprise. “Does it?” he said. “I was in such pain of mind and body when I got up from the lake that I lost my bearings. Think for a moment, Candar! If I had become a two-mind charged with spying on you, would I then get up and go back to Ishban? In any case the two-minds cannot increase their numbers.”

“You do not talk like Chilka,” Candar growled, “yet it is true that the two-minds cannot multiply. Sadal?”

The younger man smiled, and his blue eyes lit up. “Lallin will tell us.” He grinned, and the others laughed. Danarion found a face in the body's brain, small, framed in fair hair, with brown eyes and a quick, large smile. Chilka's wife, Lallin. With her was a boy, and the memory embraced him lovingly. “If this is a mystery, then it is a sweet one,” Sadal went on. He touched Chilka's mouth again. “We all knew that they could not hold you for long. Welcome back to the mountains, Chilka one-mind!”

“But not to this mountain.” Candar glanced up at it and then to the sinking sun, still high in the heavens but beginning to lose its midafternoon heat. “The dead crowd this place. I can feel them.” He turned away, and the others followed. Sadal fell into step with Danarion and offered him bread and a flask of water as they walked, but Danarion found it difficult to follow the man's sporadic conversation. There was other vital knowledge to be gleaned from Chilka's remains, and he put a name to the bulky jut of blunt mountain. The Mountain of Mourning. The place where the dead were brought. The place, Danarion surmised with a pity for mortals he had never felt before, where the essences, denied a Gate, were condemned to wait down all the long years. Was it so on other worlds, Fallan, Ixel, Ghaka? No, not Ghaka. What is happening to my own memory? he worried. Here the Sholan essences are released while those of the Ghakan invaders find other bodies to inhabit. How? Chilka's brain could supply no answer.

“What did Yarne say to you when they dragged you back a year ago?” Sadal was saying. “Two escapes in six years must have made him angry.”

“Yarne is never angry,” Danarion replied automatically, and realized that he was nestling ever more deeply into Chilka's consciousness. “He warned me that the next would mean my death and said he would be sorry to lose me.”

“Is it true that he's a renegade one-mind? Is that why he's so high in their Lady's favor?”

“There are many rumors about him,” Danarion found himself replying. “Some say that she had a brother once of the same name, but he was mortal and died, and she used her magic to make Yarne in his image. Others say that there have been many Yarnes, that she sends secretly to the slavers for young men who match her dead brother's likeness and then puts their essences to sleep and gives them his memories. I myself cannot say what is true. I only know that she loves him profoundly and sends for him often, and that he does not age. Perhaps she gives him potions in the night, to keep him young. Perhaps he is immortal after all. I cannot help liking him.”

“I know you cannot,” Sadal said grimly, “and I wonder why. In the mountains we say that he is nothing more than a renegade who caught the Lady's eye and now goes softly clad, with all freedom and much authority, and does nothing to help his own people.”

“That may be true,” Danarion replied, “but it cannot be held against him. He only cares for his dabblings in history. He is an innocent. Immortal or sham, he understands nothing else. He wanders happily and obliviously in the past.”

Sadal glanced across at him sharply. “You never cared to understand much yourself, Chilka,” he said, “and all you cared to know about a man was whether he was for or against us. You have changed.”

“I have been away for a long time,” Danarion said lightly, “and perhaps I have been learning caution. Forget about Yarne. He is harmless.”

“He cannot be harmless if the Lady thinks so highly of him. I think he is a clever one-mind traitor taking advantage of her obsession with a dead brother, hiding behind a mask of inoffensiveness.”

“You have never met him,” Danarion retorted shortly, and they lapsed into silence, walking swiftly with the long red arm of early sunset laid over them and the Mountain of Mourning once again sinking into a blur behind them.

In the five days it took to retrace their steps past the shallow, stagnant lakes and enter the cover of the mountains, the men watched Danarion carefully. At night, as he deliberately lay under full starlight, he felt their eyes on him, and while he kept Chilka's eyes closed and body limp, he himself gazed into the heavens. Ghaka's sun was indeed barely visible, as Chilka had pointed out so skeptically to the old man, a sullen reddish star that pulsed unevenly through Shol's atmosphere, and Danarion could only just make out Ghaka itself if he concentrated. Looking west, farther down the sky, Ixel's sun was a faded creamy color and Ixel itself a steady dull white, and only Lix sparkled coldly and cheerfully through the blackness.

Danarion studied the jeweled blackness, naming the other constellations to himself, remembering the soul of each one. It seemed to him that the sky was tired, that the heavens hung wearily in place in a kind of stupor. The soft sounds of sleep around him, the warm breaths of men, their mutters, the still moon-shadows cast by the rocks, the far calling of some night creature were like a cloak of security and peace, while the faces of his true kin seemed pale and unearthly, like ripples on far water.

He watched the sun rise, and with it came the daily hope that light brought to the world of men. He struggled but could not imagine himself buried deep in the heart of that searing fire. He thought of his own sun, and the Messenger who had brought him to Shol across the deeps of space, and by the time he had risen, fed and watered Chilka's heavy body, and picked up the skin bag, he had renewed his consciousness of his immortality.

Before noon they had arrived. The mountains were not sheer and unbroken, as Danarion had thought. Between each range there were wide, river-slashed valleys full of trees and small fields of crops, and one or two villages always wandered along the banks of the water. They walked through three such valleys and then came out of a shadowed cleft that funneled the river, to stand high above a fourth. “Home again!” Sadal said and smiled at Danarion. An uprush of pride and release flooded Danarion, and he grinned back, jogging down the steep path and entering a grove of trees that he knew. His eyes, Chilka's eyes, picked out his own cottage, far below, and he found he was trembling. Chilka's legs began to run. The trees fled behind him. It was as though some quiet force still left in Chilka's brain had woken to joyous life and was forcing Danarion into submission.

Finally Chilka had to slow. His side ached, and his chest heaved. He strode through the ripening crops, and all around him birds started up with alarm and flew away screaming. Chilka winced, but Danarion ignored them, feeling this body, this brain tense with one desire only. The fields came to an end, and flowers burst into view, blue and scarlet. He turned between the cottages that lined the river. By each door hung a cluster of small bells, and with a rush of nostalgia Danarion heard them tinkle as Chilka went by. Sholia's face sprang to him on the vibrations of that ancient music, pouring light that drenched her golden hair and flowed from her eyes, her nostrils, her parted mouth. She was laughing. So strong was the vision that he was almost unaware when Chilka stopped, turned, and ran up to a door, lifting the latch and almost tumbling inside.

A woman sitting in the light from the one small window rose in astonishment, one hand going to the spear propped in the corner, but then the hand came up to her face and she shouted, “Chilka!” Danarion was jolted back to the present, and in place of Sholia's immortal and unchanging loveliness another face flew toward him, small, wrinkled about the eyes, the hair short and untidy, whose mortality was like a blow to him. No! he thought in revulsion. Don't touch me, for I am a god. Don't sully me! But Chilka's arms rose, widened, and the woman flung herself upon him.

“Chilka! I cannot believe … You got away after six years … I cannot believe!”

He folded her in upon himself, holding the warm, tiny body, and in spite of himself Danarion was infected with the overwhelming relief and pleasure that filled Chilka's body. That so much should remain once the essence is gone! he marveled. All else has faded but this! For a long time they cradled each other, and then Danarion lifted his head and stood her away from him.

“Nenan?” he asked huskily.

“He is grown now,” she replied in a whisper. “Six years is a long time, Chilka. He has gone hunting for us. He has cared for me very well. They said you had escaped once before but got no farther than the wall. Six years …”

An odd formality fell on them, and for a while they simply smiled at each other, until Chilka motioned to the fire.

“Make me some of your stew,” he said, “and fill my cup with water from the river. I do not want to speak. I just want to watch you.” She came to him shyly, kissed him on his bearded cheek, and busied herself by the fire. Danarion sat in the chair by the window and observed her. The room was stark in its simplicity but comfortable, the floor covered in thick, handwoven rugs, the fireplace pointed in gray fieldstone, the furniture carved skillfully from mountain trees. “Have there been many raids since I was taken?” he asked. She paused, knife in hand, and smiled at him again long and gleefully before she replied.