Authors: Alice Borchardt
“Life is certainly more interesting with you than with the Fand,” my unseen companion said. “Why are we doing this?”
“I want a sun cape.”
Micka was walking a little ahead of me. She turned and glanced suspiciously at me. “You talk to yourself?”
“Mmmm, sometimes.”
She seemed satisfied.
“You will need instruction,” my companion said. “All I can give you are the basics.”
“Go ahead.”
“Take off into the wind and in the sun. The sun gives the cape life, its motive, power. The air will buoy you up. Understand, this air is only another ocean. You cannot feel its force in the wind.”
I didn’t understand, but I nodded as if I did.
“Hot air rises. The air in this desert gets very hot. The sun cape will allow you to ride the rising hot air higher and higher, but as you rise, you will feel the air cool.”
I remembered the fierce sea eagles hovering over the coast and I saw what my friend was trying to say. They seemed to fly without moving their wings.
Yes,
I thought.
So that is the way of it.
“When you feel the air catch another rising column of air, or if the day is hot, by then the cape will have absorbed enough of the virtue in the light to carry you forward. Turn in the direction in which you wish to go. If you go against the wind, expect a bumpy ride. If you go with the wind, take the best advantage you can of it and soar. You can’t go too high, I think, but beware if you do, this ocean of air ends high above this world. Don’t stop when you fly. If you do, it is much the same as in water. You will sink and the cape will drag you down. If you overshoot your objective, circle back. But I warn you, don’t try to stop.”
“Here!” Micka said.
She paused beside a narrow overhang that cast a light shade into the ravine. I glanced up and saw the sun was nearly overhead. It isn’t good to travel at noon.
“There are gourds a little further on.”
I sat down in the shade gratefully. She returned with what looked like a melon with a horny, segmented skin and spines, one spine to each segment.
“This is a big one. I don’t know if I can get it with my knife.”
I drew my sword and sliced the thing in half lengthwise. It had pink pulp with a nasty taste.
“Don’t eat it,” she said. “Just tear out the pulp and squeeze it into your mouth.”
I followed her suggestion and quenched my thirst with the pulp while chewing jerky. It made enough of a meal that we were able to walk along the shadowed side of the ravine until dusk. As the sun was going down, the sides of the ravine began to grow lower and lower, until it played out, vanishing into a sea of low-growing plants that I recognized as the same kind that produced the dreaming jewels, Gorias Purples. These appeared stunted.
“Don’t go near them,” Micka warned.
“No,” I said. “I encountered them when I first came here. I know how dangerous they are.”
“Yes, well, these are worse,” Micka said. “They used to send sacrifices here from the city, but the elders among my people tell me they died too fast. Only a few ever managed to get more than half a dozen.”
The evening breeze began and the mass of vegetation stirred oddly in the soft rush of air and seemed to whisper, sounding to my ears like the distant murmur of a curious crowd. Yes, they were stunted. While the first I had seen were over a foot tall and had leaves the size of a platter, these were only a few inches and the leaves no bigger than a cup, a small cup.
“He is out there with the sun cape. Nobody knows about him but me,” she said.
In an odd sort of way, the view was beautiful. The dying sun washed the leaves on the ocean of plants with deep orange and made the violet margins of the leaves near the stem seem to be black. The small white flowers glowed gold.
But there, out in the center of the lake of vegetation, I saw something flash and glitter. I shaded my eyes with my hand and saw the spread of the sun cape among the plants.
“So you can crash them?” I said.
“Oh, very easily,” my companion said.
“Think the one who piloted this one is still in it?” I asked.
“Very likely,” my companion said.
“Oh, yes,” Micka answered also. “You can see his bones from the top.” She pointed to the low bluff above, where the ravine ended.
Micka had a small pack. She opened it while I made fire. As you know, this is not difficult for me. What I burned were last year’s melon vines. Withered and dried, they lay in profusion along the sides of the ravine. Micka had a leather vessel, and she filled it with dried berries of some kind, a few wild onions, and more jerky. She had two stiff leather bowls that she filled with the resulting soup.
I ate and drank what tasted like the best soup I’d ever had. I was so tired that when I rose to walk back up the ravine to relieve myself, I found that I could barely stand. The few feet back to a bend in the ravine seemed like a mile, and the heat of my own urine scalded me. My body was so cold. I had barely enough strength to walk back. But I did.
“Cats?” I asked Micka. “What about the cats?”
“They don’t come here. No one, nothing, does. It is a very dangerous place.”
“What happened to the one riding the sun cape?” I asked.
Micka shook her head, but my companion said, “It could have been any one of a number of things. Maybe he tried to push the cape too far and he was caught by the oncoming darkness. Maybe he tried to fly too high and perished when the air grew too thin for him to breathe. Or he grew so cold from trying to fly high up that he froze. Any number of things. See, the sun cape is like me. It tries to take care of its rider. It has a strong sense of duty, so if he perished high up, it would try to bring him down safely to where his friends could help him. But by then, it may have been too late.”
“Micka,” I said as she rose to go down the ravine herself. “Stay close.” In the far distance I heard a cat scream. The last of day was only an iridescent blue line on the horizon. “One of those cats might pick up our spoor and think she has herself an easy dinner.”
She nodded and returned quickly when she finished her necessary actions. I made her sleep on the inside between me and the ravine wall.
“I have,” I explained, “weapons that don’t show. You are more vulnerable.”
When we were settled, I asked, “Micka, I think I can easily pluck a dozen or so of those dreaming jewels before I must fly away. Show them to Goric and Albe. They will help you sell them. You could become a wealthy woman and buy anything you want.”
Oddly, she began weeping quietly, but with deep, gulping sobs.
“What I want, I can never have,” she mourned. “My own world back again.”
I thought of Albe. Albe, whose family had been killed and whose life had indeed been stolen by the pirates she licked.
“You can’t give me that.” She sounded almost accusing.
“No,” I said. “I can’t.”
The simple admission seemed to quiet her. Her breathing grew more even.
“What was your world like?” I asked.
She spun me a marvelous fantasy of a green and white world of unending, open plains and magnificent forests where her people lived to follow the herds of elephant, wild cattle, horses, deer, and giant elk. In winter they subsisted on the gifts of the sea, hunting small game and gathering shellfish and finfish on the coast. Come summer, the herds moved north out of the forested lowlands and up high onto the steppes, rich plains teeming with burgeoning life.
Of necessity, the humans must follow them, and in the brief summer hunt, kill enough of them so that they could dry and store adequate meat to get them through the winter. Then when the herds turned south again, they had to follow. An arduous and often short life, but one she longed to live again, even in all its brevity and struggle.
I fell asleep listening to her tales of an elephant with long, shaggy hair and curled tusks so big he swallowed the sun. I didn’t listen as well as I should have, but in my own defense, I will say I was very tired still from my many battles and I was sodden with weariness. So I walked all fat, happy, and stupid into the jaws of the trap.
They were eating trilobites and something that might as well have been a shrimp, except that where legs can be found on a shrimp, these things had gills. They were very small, but then you could eat the whole critter, crunching the head and shell up with the meat. So far as the trilobites were concerned, the edible part was the long set of muscles that formed the mound along the length of the back running from the carapace to the tail.
They curled up when caught, but uncurled when they were steamed. The head shield was cracked and removed, then the shell on the back was lifted, exposing the musculature of the tail. The meat was extracted rather the way a lobster’s is pulled out, all in one piece, dipped in butter and then eaten. It was a bit better than lobster, because the stored roe near the carapace tended to drip down on the meat, giving it a light, mustard taste.
Lancelot was on his sixth. She was on her fifth, and Merlin had eaten three and could eat no more. The wine in his cup had undergone a subtle change to a white that tasted good with seafood. He was eyeing her speculatively. Being her prisoner wasn’t going to be so bad. In fact, after the youngster was gone for a while, possibly, just possibly, she would let him comfort her.
She turned to him, the last morsels of buttered trilobite in her hand, and said, “In your dreams, you louse. In your dreams.”
He turned scarlet at allowing himself to be so easily read. Lancelot looked baffled for a moment, then his expression changed to truculent. The boy would kill him in a second. In fact, sorcerer or not, probably could kill him if he succumbed to a fit of jealousy.
The birds that hung around him were always in evidence. When he had gone fishing, the youngster had stretched out his hand and received a helmet with a transparent face shield. Then he had pulled a jointed spear out of the air. The shield covered only his eyes, nose, and mouth, but it allowed him to walk on the bottom, breathe, and see whatever prey he wanted to take with the spear.
“It’s been a rough last few months,” she said.
“Got any advice for me about King Bade?” Lancelot said.
“Try not to let him kill you,” she said.
“Thank you,” Lancelot said. “Thank you oh so very much. Anything else helpful you can think of?”
“The sword is in the stone,” Merlin said. “She has to give him the sword in the stone.”
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“We were talking about the ins and outs of divination. One of the diviners told me that—told it to me several times for that matter,” Merlin said. “She was most insistent. In fact, boring on the subject.”
“You don’t get swords out of stones,” she said.
“Shows how much you know,” Lancelot said. “Of course you do. Stones are where they start. Fire from heaven.”
Both Merlin and she stopped eating and glared at him. “What do you mean?” Merlin said.
“Simple,” Lancelot answered.
There was a fire on the beach. Next to it was the bowl of cold boiled shrimp things. A pit near the fire, a mass of sea grass and three red, steamed trilobites. Lancelot tried to pick up a trilobite, burned his fingers, and yelled, “Ow!” He licked the tips of his fingers.
“Leave off worrying about your stomach for a moment and explain that statement,” she said.
“Swords are made from wire. Wire is steel, and it is drawn from iron ore that looks like a pile of rocks. I ought to know. When Gray ran out of scrap, which is better since some of the work is already done, we had to render iron ore and get bloom iron. That’s something I never want to do again. It’s dirty, hot, hard work. And we would be at it for two or three days at a time. Gray said that’s why the smith was so keen to have him marry his daughter—so he had a son-in-law who would spend the rest of his life making bloom iron out of the ore he buys from Italy.”
“So,” Merlin said thoughtfully. “So.”
“I’ll tell Guinevere when I get there,” Lancelot said.
“That still doesn’t fully explain the statement,” Merlin said.
“No,” the Lady of the Lake agreed.
Lancelot was juggling the last trilobite.
“Hell,” she said. “You ate the other two already. You’re going to burst.”
“He’s a growing boy,” Merlin purred.
She gave him a long, slow look through her lashes.
“You do that again,” Lancelot said, “and I’m going to cut his head off before I go.”
“God!” she whispered. “Then hurry up and finish eating. We need to say good-bye. And I’ll bet when we get finished, you won’t have the energy to go slicing up anything.”
“If you’re in love with him, why are you sending him off to help a woman he idolizes?”
She didn’t answer, and Lancelot stood up. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips without touching her anywhere else.
“I’m salty, sticky, and greasy,” he said. “I want a bath.” Then he walked away down the long beach toward her . . . home?
“Why?” Merlin repeated.
This time she answered. “Something wonderful and terrible hangs about them. Some fate both dark and bright.”
Again the sorcerer said, “That doesn’t explain.”
“One,” she said, “I’m not a goddess and I’ve learned that successful intervention in the lives of others is rare. It is best when humans work out their own destiny. Two, the fate that shimmers around those three is as gigantic as the aurora borealis. To interfere with such a powerful convocation of forces might be to do evil. In fact, I think it would. And I will not lend my very considerable powers to an immoral course of action. I won’t knowingly do wrong. I don’t own him. Young and mortal he may be, but the choices he makes are his own. I cannot . . . will not make them for him.”
With that, she rose and followed her lover along the beach and into the darkness.
When the birds came, Arthur knew they were no natural beings. Those eyes and their coal-like glow disturbed him profoundly.
“Are you from the king? Are you his emissaries?” he asked the first, a bird who flew out of the cool gray mist that hovered between first light and dawn.
Arthur was munching on a handful of berries. They stained the skin of his left hand dark purple. His right was occupied with digging a shallow pit to cover the ashes from his fire and such scraps left from the fish he had eaten the night before. He tossed a berry at the bird’s feet. It looked at him with one eye, then the other, and last, in a most un-birdlike fashion, with both.