Mother! She is part of the answer to the abyss. The question: Why anything? Why not nothing?
She is life and guides it from generation to generation, even as both my mothers did.
Mother had no easy life, even for a wolf. The mantle of procreation fell on her young as the last surviving female in her pack. Her first get were born when she was little more than a yearling. Not long after, Maeniel became her mate, and she was after not too many years saddled with me. A strong creature, the she wolf, strong and wedded to her duty.
But she was also free and no wise Maeniel’s property. Had he returned to Gaul the next spring, she would have danced in the moonlight with new suitors and gone on with her sacred task of ensuring the future.
“This is what we do,” she told me once.
“Why?” I asked.
She laid her ears back, a sign of great displeasure. “Why does water flow downhill, a river to the sea?” she asked. “I cannot think your kind has any sense at all. Even as I remember when long ago ice and snow covered the whole world, so I know this is God in me. God the mother.”
I was full of myself. “Maeniel says we must exercise discretion in the matter,” I told her.
“I can do that also. I know when the weather has been bad, humans have been particularly insane or for whatever reason game is scarce. I know not to summon my lovers in springtime but wait and protect what I have. It is you—your kind—who are feckless, lecherous, and stubbornly blind. A wolf too aggressive would meet my teeth. But your men will force a woman, especially a woman they see as theirs, without a second thought. As though one could own another.”
Then she left me to ponder her words.
Yes, everything they, Maeniel and Mother, said was true. And it had mattered little to me then. I was only a young girl with her way to make in the world. I could do little about such philosophical conundrums.
But now! Now! I was reaching for power. And I must give the lessons of war and love some thought. I must decide what course my life would take. As Maeniel pointed out—though as usual, Dugald did not agree with him—Christ pointed the way for the rest of us.
Could I change things?
The sun was down, but the sky was still suffused with light. Beyond the chair where I sat along the cliff, people were gathering on the slopes around the broken dance floor. Fires were leaping at the edge of the remnants of the dragon dance floor. The people arriving to watch my performance carried torches; neither candles nor lamps would stay lit in the omnipresent wind from the sea.
The sky was a bowl of bright blue above, still catching the light shining upward from the sun. But the stars were finding their way out against the glowing blackness. When the sky was fully dark and the crowd an island, a kingdom of light between the sky, the mountains, and the thundering sea, Kyra would summon me.
Could I change things? And if so—how? Need war be an eternal necessity among humans? Need lust and greed always determine the fate of men and women? Especially women?
I heard footsteps and knew Kyra was coming with the ladies of heaven, the rulers of the ancient houses set among the stars. They were here to escort me to the dance floor.
The stars vanished. instead, they were in a pit.
“Congratulations,” came the voice, dry and ancient. “You have won the right to face me in single combat. Few of your kind get so far. But none has ever survived this final test.”
Arthur tried to see into the murk surrounding him, the not quite darkness.
“Trying to look at me?” came the ironic question.
“We are uncomfortable when we cannot see,” he answered.
“Oh, discomfort, not terror. Not pissing, shrieking madness.”
“No!” Arthur replied. “Only discomfort.”
“I’ll see if I can remedy that.”
The flame seemed to shoot from the floor near his foot, a wash of fire rather like that of a smelter fueled by the air from a bellows. It was hot. He moved away, but then another, closer, roared into life. Then another.
Now he could see, but it wasn’t comforting. It seemed a vast metal dome covered them both. It was stitched together with iron bolts. But even though it seemed formed of something grayish, harder than the steel that was the hardest metal he was used to, the dome was beginning to deteriorate and shards of metal were peeling off the thick plates. Not rusting, but undergoing some much slower process, which rendered it brittle. His booted foot crunched a piece at his feet, and he watched it disintegrate.
Another flame leaped from a jet on the floor and illuminated the thrones around the walls.
The voice laughed. “See! We are all dead.”
They were; and in addition, none of them was human. She sat before him, a rack of bones clothed in silk, gold mesh, and shadows. He could clearly see her hands and face. The hand bones were long, four fingers— no, three fingers—and something that looked like a very flexible thumb. The skull was simply a nightmare, longer than a human’s but broad at the back with a lot of room for brain. The front was fanged with long teeth, which protruded at the jawline. It reminded him of a bird, a bird of prey, because the eyes faced the front.
The one next to her was covered by strips of something that had fallen into a pile from the seat of the chair, stretching to the floor. But between them, the rust colored bone and some sort of almost unbreakable ligament clung together. The rest were heaps of tattered remnants, sometimes on the chairs, others scattered on the floor.
The torches roaring around him sent flickering shadows over a scene that would have done credit to the Prince of Darkness himself.
Arthur laughed. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” he said. “But don’t you think it’s getting hot in here?”
It was. However large the airless place was, the fires couldn’t burn like this for very long. Soon, when the heat became too great, he would fall to prostration and suffocation.
“Is that it? Am I supposed to smother?” he asked.
“You must be here long enough,” she said. “Unless… unless you want to stay.”
Arthur looked down. Some of them had. Quite a lot, in fact. They were in all stages of disintegration, a few sloppy wet and stinking, but most of the rest with dry skin clinging to the bones stretched over them like parchment. Others were shattered brown heaps of crumbling bone and a few only shadows marked by a crumbling skull, one or two long bones, or a scattering of teeth.
It was getting hotter and hotter in the shell.
“Will you ride the wheel?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Why not?”
The water was a relief. It was icy but that didn’t seem to trouble him. He tried to close his eyes, but found he couldn’t. He could feel the water around them, but was no more troubled by it than he would have been by air.
What? Where?
he thought, looking at the pebbled streambed beneath
him.
The stones had a polished glow brought on by water. As he watched, a fish slipped into the field of vision belonging to his right eye. A salmon, greenish black back, red belly.
Why isn’t it afraid of me?
he thought. It was close enough for him to reach over and touch it. He moved to stretch out his arm, but his muscles wouldn’t obey him.
He leaned toward the fish. An extra sense from somewhere told him he was leaning as the pressure against his side changed. With an elegant and utterly inhuman motion, he righted himself.
I am,
he thought,
also a fish. Yes, a man breathes, a fish swims. Neither has to think about it much.
He willed himself to rise toward the rippled, gleaming ceiling of the stream in which he was swimming. He felt the strange sense of lessening pressure as his body approached the surface. He didn’t need to see to know his depth.
Trees along the stream smothered it in dark green. The black of wet, broken rock, the brown of splintered shards of broken trees washed downstream by the winter snow melt. All crowded around the water.
Down
, he thought. And his fins carried him toward the bottom.
Faster, he moved past the fish he still saw to his right. And suddenly, with a shock of fear, he found himself stranded, gravel under his belly, the air, the cold spring mountain air an icy shock of deep pain.
A
few minutes more and you will die,
something in the dark instinctive matter of his brain warned him, and nudged him toward panic. But he was still a man and beat back the fear.
Think!
His eyes were clear of the water. Ahead was a death trap; the shallows continued for as far as he could see. And indeed, he saw the desiccated and scavenged bodies of those who had made the same mistake he had.
One chance. He took it. A fish can bend almost double when it wants to. He wanted to.
His powerful musculature snapped his head around toward his tail. A second later, he found himself still in the shallows but looking toward deeper water.
Now, fish, pretend you are a snake.
He did, wiggling forward, ignoring the occasional sharp rock that poked at his soft belly. A few seconds later, he found himself part of the resting crowd in deep water, gills working. He could feel them now, relieved to be safe for the moment.
Everything eats salmon! Hawks, eagles, bears, men!
Ah, yes. But a lot of them survive.
The stream bottom was a road, a gleaming tunnel roofed by a surface that showed him broken images of an ancient forest of pine, yew, and evergreen. A path of clear water floored with glowing stone. He and some others who had rested enough started along it, this time more cautiously than before. He kept to the deeper channel.
He heard the rapids. He had ears of a rudimentary sort, but the changes in pressure, the pickup of rapid staccato swirls of movement alerted him to their presence. He moved toward the surface. He found he didn’t have to will it any longer.
He saw the falls, a set of shallow stairs laced with tumbled deadfalls from upstream set in the emerald green of new leaves on the poplars, willows, and young water ash at their margins.
A beautiful place, but a lot of trouble for a fish.
He turned toward the shallows, but to do so, he must cross the deepest part of the pool below the falls.
No! No more recklessness. He did notice most of the fish entering the pool behind him broke to one side or another of the dark depths. He moved easily around them, keeping a wary eye out for movement until he reached a deep hole under a willow, an old willow, half rotted near the foot of the first falls.
Fish. I
am fish,
he thought as he sank toward the bottom.
Am I fish?
And he knew among the many dangers that awaited him here was one he hadn’t counted on if he remained too long. Or was it that if he became too comfortable with this shape, he might forget who he was? Who he had been. And, indeed, the human memories seemed to grow dimmer as he listened more closely to what the fish told him. As the images of silver sides flashed in his mind.
Then they were crisscrossing the shallows above him. At least a dozen. He struck, felt the recurved teeth in his throat. Crush, savor, swallow. Even as he dove toward the bottom.
Not very smart above, they were still darting as before. But then his mind saw the exquisite economy of it.
The mayflies were swarming, green lacy wings landing in the water by the dozen. Some might eat and die, but the rest would eat and that was what was important. But if it was important to them, and they were important to him, might it not be that he could be important to something else?
What?
He sank deeper, belly resting in the mud, fins barely moving.
What? Nothing!
Then the pike glared out of the gloom. A fish can’t stop breathing, can it? But he felt as though he had.
The first was delicious, but the second one he went for would have been his last. But then, he couldn’t be the only one on the hunt. Now, could he ?
A second later, he saw the hook jaw snap shut on another silver side, the red belly a scarlet splash in the light from the surface. The jaws that seized it were as long as he was. Blood crimsoned the water; he could taste it as it passed his gills. He watched the pike vanish into the depths with the still struggling salmon in its teeth. His eyes studied the pool, much movement, all of it small fish, though.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He struck again, and again, until his stomach was full. Then slowly he stroked out of the shallows, then shot forward. The leap carried him out of the large pool into the smaller one at the first step of the falls.
Get
to the top.
The fish was taking over; all the man had to do was let go. But he wouldn’t. Yet he knew he would obey the fish.
How
does a fish jump?
The thought made him clumsy. The salmon leap, a warrior’s tactic.
Don’t think! Act! Up!
And he was, after a brief journey through air, in a higher pool.
The falls were a buffeting pressure wave. He didn’t see the bear until the last second. It was fishing in the shallows, almost at the top. There was no time for a leap; there was no time for anything except regret and a question.
How
would 1 have been as a fish
?
The vicious jaws were falling toward him. The fish executed it, but the man invented it. One powerful slap of the muscular tail and the bear had eyes, nose, and mouth filled with icy water. It stumbled back with a roar, swinging a paw down, armed with gleaming talons.
Hero’s salmon leap, and the fish fought the current at the top of the falls. He was peeled away like a bird taking wing.
She seemed no longer dead this time, and they wandered through a strange, haunted wood, dark even by day. It was achingly silent; no insect buzzed, no bird called. They were walking along the riverbed. He wondered if it could be the same river, but she, striding along beside him, said, “No! Everything here is dead. Even the river.”
It was so long ago. The trees were green, smooth trunked, tall, green black at the base but growing lighter and lighter as they approached their twisted, feathery tops as much as a hundred feet above and more. Dappled with sun, the soft canopy above moved gently in every vagrant breeze, allowing dappled light to penetrate the ferns and mosses growing with equal thickness in the rock lined riverbed.