Authors: Alice Borchardt
We sat down on another bench where we could watch Meth. He was making me uneasy. I didn’t know if he could do anything to harm us, but my ignorance of this strange world was such that I didn’t care to take any chances.
The table and bench distracted me. They seemed to be made of woven wood, polished on one side, left covered with bark on the other. Then I realized there were bands of green dipping in and out among the branches. The bands of green were tiny leaves. The table and benches were alive.
The table legs were roots that entered the stone floor through cracks in the glassy surface. The bench was the same. We sat on the smooth side of the richly patterned wood. Bark and clusters of leaves formed the other side. I could look down into the basket weave of both table and bench and see the tiny green clusters filled all the openings between the tamed withes. Table and benches glowed green-gold and brown in the amber light.
“How can it live?” Albe asked wonderingly.
Ilona entered with a platter of roast meat just then. Cateyrin followed with a mat and spread it to protect the living table from the platter’s heat.
“To answer your question, it does very well for itself and has been growing here since before my great-grandmother formed this place into her dwelling,” she told Albe.
Cateyrin returned with a tray that held bowls of broth, vegetables, and platters of bread, three or four different kinds.
“Wererooor!”
Tuau roared, demanding his share. He was behind Albe and me.
Ilona studied him. “Raw or cooked?” she said.
“I don’t care. I’m starving!”
“Mind your manners,” Albe said. “Please! Thank you! And tear it asunder and crack the bones on the stone floor.” She pointed to the entry hall.
Tuau hissed and the hair on his neck stood up. His tail brushed out.
“Quiet, or I’ll send you to play with what lurks outside in the darkness,” Albe said.
“Can’t!” Tuau said.
“Can!” Albe gave him one of her slow grins. “Can! And will. Behave yourself.”
Ilona returned with a haunch of something or other. Tuau glared at Albe, but took the meat politely enough, marched over to the stone-floored hall, and began to dine. Cateyrin brought wine and we followed Tuau’s example and fell to.
Cateyrin and Meth began trying to fill Cateyrin’s mother in on the doings of our day. Ilona stopped both Cateyrin and Meth when we got to the part where I collected the mariglobes without injury. I demonstrated my armor for Ilona. I thought she looked frightened when she saw what it would allow me to do.
I was puzzled by her fear, but by then, sheer exhaustion was taking its toll. This day I had passed beyond the barriers of one world and entered another. Fought battles here and traveled many miles on foot. Except for the few days’ mental and mortal fatigue I had suffered after burning the first fortress, I had never been so weary in my life.
The food and wine sank me into a stupor, and I had little energy to devote to questioning our hostess, and even less will for looking—as I saw it—a gift horse in the mouth. I was warm, ostensibly safe, and well fed. More than that, I could not ask. But that expression of sudden fear tugged at the edges of my consciousness, whispering a warning—her fear of what I could do, and the expression of dismay on Ilona’s face when Cateyrin recounted our adventure with the Circe.
She and Meth fell to quarreling about it again. But I was simply beyond caring about what went on around me. I put one arm around Albe and rested my head on her shoulder.
“I must rest or die. I cannot think what has drained me so. But if my life depended on it, I could go no further.”
Albe helped me to a pile of cushions in the corner of the room.
“Mighty magic have I seen you do this day, my lady and queen. Such power as you exerted leaves no sorceress unscathed. Sleep now. I will watch.”
“Take care of those stones. We may need . . .” That was all I managed to say before darkness took me.
Down and down I went, drifting through dark waters from whence, both Maeniel and Dugald agreed, all life arose. Arose from the shadowed volcano-lit, lightning-limned storms of the first seas.
“It rained then,” Maeniel told me. “Forever, the water cascading from the skies to boil away from the earth’s fiery crust, become clouds, and rain down again. In time, the cycle slowed and the vast basins of the oceans filled. Rivers ran, sometimes boiling hot but pouring through canyons of black lava, basalt churning the stones in their beds into the first soil and sand on earth.
“Then there is mystery,” Maeniel told me. “God’s spirit brooded on the face of the troubled new waters. The young moon drew them into tremendous tides that licked at the edges of the contents, wore away rock, and drew the building blocks of life from cold, dead stone and volcanic ash.”
“God?” I asked.
“God,” he’d replied. “Or something else. I cannot say. But whatever it was, it set its hand to the task. Lightnings that lit the night like day were brighter than the distant sun seen through the eternal boiling storm clouds of midday, and between the anvil of raw new earth and the hammer of heaven, life flew up like a fountain of sparks from a forge or the flash of light when flint strikes steel. The sparks of life flew into the mother sea and the fire that we are—became us—began ever so slowly to burn.”
Because, as he said, we do burn. And the creatures of darkness I summoned to help me destroy the fortress taught me how hot we burn. They warm themselves at our fire and sometimes swarm around night-flying moths to our flame.
Once I asked Maeniel how he could remember these things that most humans, including Dugald, could not, or only do so under special circumstances. He told me that we gave up thinking with our whole brain long ago and buried these memories forever in order to become the smart animals we were. But he who enjoyed a dual nature, man and wolf, could still open these ancient passages to a past so distant it stretched beyond our crude measure of time and could only be traced back by changes in the seemingly eternal stars.
They, those stars, were the only measure of an almost infinite duration of life on earth. All animals shared in this capacity to remember life’s beginnings and understand its meaning, as it was written into the very fabric of the universe. We humans were the only exiles from the garden of the world, the garden of the universe. Only we could not remember.
I drifted deeper into the well at the core of all being and for a few moments, I lamented my state. Sorceress, Albe had called me, and sorceress I had become. A mighty keeper of magics. And even now, in the depths of sleep, my consciousness would not leave me and I wondered if ever again I would truly rest. Or each night, would I wander open-eyed through all the endless layers of time.
Time, the tree, the world tree that year by year adds another ring of girth. Time, the maze, all duration measured from its entry to the center. Time, the maze.
Suddenly I was me and not me, and I entered a summer forest. I could sense a body, not my own but rather like the being I had killed in the guise of the fish eater. I had killed it to protect an ancient king, the father of my own ancestress, Treise, his child. This was the body I inhabited now, one very similar to the fish eater’s.
I turned, looked back, and saw my own three-toed prints in the mud. Ah well. This is, after all, the point of memory: to know what is past, even if the past is not my own.
Such a forest I walked through. Never touched by human hands, it was filled by gigantic, ancient trees. I recognized an oak laden by ferns that had colonized the branches almost to the destruction of the tree. Under it, my toes bit into the thick mud of a sump crowded with low plants crowned by stiff, fan-shaped leaves.
Beyond the sump a stand of ash and linden so thick that I knew even with my great strength I could not force my way through them. So I turned, circled the tall, gray trunks, and found my way under a dark-barked, squat tree with shiny broad leaves that were such a deep green, they were almost black. It carried big, deep cream-colored flowers that drenched the air with fragrance.
An invitation freighted with regret entered my mind and directed me to a path through the grove of silver-barked trees. I followed the directions and picked my way among stately pillared trunks whose lowest branches began hundreds of feet above my head as I followed the meandering path through the damp, cool shadows.
At length I came to a small, sun-dappled pond thick with green waterweed. So like the sun-dappled stillness of the pond were the colors of the creature that even my eye didn’t pick it out of its green-gold surroundings until it moved, raising its crested, sun-marked head to meet my eyes. It calmly continued chewing the waterweed in its mouth, swallowed, and hooted softly, musically, a greeting.
It had a build similar to the one I now wore: three-toed feet, strong haunches, arms and hands not fitted for fine tasks, as I knew mine were, but splayed and blunt-fingered so the creature could support itself when it bent down to feed. The fine, large eyes in the crested head met mine, and the being I was knew it need not ask.
They were long thinkers, these beings, and first who brought order out of chaos when my kind had been squabbling scavengers with only a rudimentary consciousness of the breadth, magnificent complexity, and sheer beauty of the citadel of truth these beings had constructed since time out of mind.
My people had grown to maturity, a happy maturity, under their tutelage and protection. But now . . . now, I had to know. And I, Guinevere, and the being whose body I inhabited, had to know . . . what?
And I remembered in my lifetime standing in the cave watching the massive heavenly body collide with the beautiful blue-green earth and the dark clouds boil up to hide its splendor.
I tried to draw away from the being I inhabited, but it was too late, long too late, for a river of pain-drenched loss tore through my mind; and the reason that belonged to my fierce comrade was swept away by its passage. I knew that all I loved or ever would love would be destroyed, and it and I were seized by madness, as I had been seized by madness when I invited the evil spirits into my mind.
Nightmares—humans have nightmares.
Not real,
I thought, and fled.
I’ll die,
I thought, and I would die to escape the raging, endless, bitter sorrow.
Suddenly I stood with Mother beneath the falls where she drank from the pool filled with stars. From high above, the glowing falls flowed, sometimes forming a curtain of light when the wind wandering through the midnight forest blew the water out over the trees. Some of it dashed itself like a glowing mist across my face and eyes.
“Not you!” Mother said. “Not you, and long ago.”
Then she was gone. Consciousness went out like a candle when the wick is pinched, and I truly slept.
Cateyrin woke me wailing. Ilona, her mother, was saying, “Have done! Girl, have done! Didn’t you know this would happen once the weak-minded young fool saw the Circe?”
“But he has taken all the mariglobes, too!” Cateyrin shouted.
My eyes opened. I was sleeping on the cushions between Albe and Tuau. The cat’s head was resting on my outstretched arm, and Albe was curled up next to me, head on my shoulder.
“A curse on him!” Cateyrin was weeping now. “I hope the jewels send her nightmares.”
Next to me I heard Albe chuckle. “He has not got so many as he thinks,” she whispered in my ear.
“No?” I questioned softly.
“No,” she confirmed. “I knew once that thing—she is not human, you know—got into his mind that he would betray us. Hell, he was ready before she paraded her charms. After he saw them, it was a certainty. He has one box, no more. I have the rest knotted into a strip of cloth around my waist. I’m sorry I had to give him the contents of the top box, but I was afraid the young fool might stick his knife into me to get them all.”
“We had been together so long,” Cateyrin sobbed.
Tuau lifted his head from my other arm. “God, woman,” he snarled. “You are loud as a crying queen in heat. Be still. It might be worth the price of those jewels to be rid of him. Your friend damned near killed us on the stair.” Tuau’s spit and snarl temporarily silenced Cateyrin.
The room was bright, light pouring in from the multifaceted eye in the ceiling. The leaves on the table and chairs in the center of the room had unfolded themselves and were drinking in the sun. Cateyrin and her mother were standing near it.
“It is to be hoped,” Ilona said, “that it is to the Circe that he went. Because if he did not, we are all in grave danger.”
“Why?” I asked, sitting up.
“Because of your dangerous skills,” Ilona answered.
“Mother, they’re fighting women,” Cateyrin said. “The great families won’t dare—”
“Merciful God!” Ilona snapped. “She can—she alone can—give one of the great families hegemony. If they find out what she can do, they’ll keep throwing opponents against her until she drops with exhaustion. God-born she may be, but incarnated in mortal flesh, and however strong, she, like all mortals, has her limit.”
“Woman, why didn’t you tell me this last night?” Albe said. “If I’d known, I’d have killed him.”
One of Cateyrin’s hands was lifted to her lips. “No!!!”
“Cateyrin,” Ilona snapped. “Fetch curds and honey for our guests and make some bread.”
Then she turned to me. “We must talk. But eat first. It will take some time for Meth to convince his own family to try to gain control of you. They will certainly not believe him at first, and with luck, may kill him before he has a chance to explain. However, if he goes to the Circe . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Well, that depends on how smart she is.”
“He should know better,” Cateyrin said waspishly.
“Child! Child!” Ilona said, putting her arm around Cateyrin and pulling her against her breast. “Face facts. Meth had a nice face and a pleasant disposition, but he was gullible to the point of folly and suicidally self-confident. One of the quickest ways to tell when a Circe has her claws in a man is when he tells you he is sure he will be able to free himself from her whenever he wants to. I’m sorry your first had to be such a fool, but it’s as well the Circe captured him so quickly and you saw his true worth.”