A Time of Omens

by Katharine Kerr

  “I’m not talking about the rest of the world.”

  “Oh, very well, then. I’m not like that.”

  Jill hesitated, struggling to understand.

  “Well,” he went on. “You had your own doubts about taking up the art, didn’t you?”

  “True spoken. But that’s when I didn’t know what it offered. You do know. I honestly don’t see how you could get so far and then give it up.”

  “Ah. It’s because you do the work out of love, while I have only duty and grim obligation as my whip and spur.”

  “You honestly and truly don’t love the dweomer work?”

  “I should have thought that such would be obvious after all these years.”

  She knew him well enough to know that he was skirting the edge of a lie.

  “Well here, consider this.” Salamander spoke quickly, before she could pin him down. “Wasn’t your father the greatest swordsman in all Deverry? Didn’t he gain great glory for himself wherever he rode—the silver dagger, the lowly outcast of a silver dagger, who put the best fighting men in the kingdom to shame? But did he relish that life? Did he revel in his glory and his position? Far from it!”

  “Well, true spoken. What are you driving at?”

  “Only that a man may have great skill and talent and not give a pig’s fart about the life they lead him to.”

  “And do you feel that way about the dweomer?”

  “Not exactly, literally, precisely, or even in substance. A mere example only.”

  But at that exact moment his thumb slipped on the knife, and he sliced his hand. With a yelp he tossed both bird and blade onto the wagon bed and started cursing himself and his clumsiness. Blood welled and ran.

  “You’d better let me bind that for you,” Jill said. “I hope that wretched knife was clean.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The cut’s deep enough to wash itself out.”

  It was, too, though mercifully not deep enough to cause permanent harm. Later Jill was to remember that accident and its unconscious confession only to curse herself for not seeing the meaning at the time,

  Among the Host, Evandar’s people, Dallandra searched on a sunny day through a meadow, bright with flowers of red and gold. In their bright clothes and golden jewelry, the Host too bloomed like flowers amid the tall green grass, ‘and as always, their exact numbers eluded her. Even in the sunlight of a summer noon, shadow wrapped them round, blurring the boundaries that define a person for us in our world. Out of the corner of her eye she would see a pair of young girls, sitting gossiping on the grass, turn to look and find a bevy giggling together, then rising to run away like a flock of birds taking flight. Or it would seem that under the shade of an enormous tree a band of minstrels played, their conjoint music so sweet that it pierced her heart, yet she would find but one man with a single lute. Like flames in a fire or ripples in a stream, they became distinct and separate only to fall back again and meld.

  Some of the Host, though, remained discrete, with minds and personalities of their own. Evandar himself, of course, and his daughter, Elessario, were the two she knew best, but there were others, men and women both, who wore names and faces like a mark of honor. In the dancing sunlight they waved in greeting or called out some pleasant remark as she made her way across.

  “Have you seen Elessario?” she would ask, but always the answer was no.

  By the meadow’s edge a river flowed, and at that moment it flowed broad and smooth. At other times she had seen it narrow and churning with white water or come upon it to find a swamp and nothing more, but at the moment the broad water sparkled in the sun, and green rushes stood at the bank like sword blades stuck into a treaty ground. Out among them on one leg stood a white heron.

  “Elessario!”

  The heron turned its head to consider her with one yellow eye, then rippled like the water and became a young woman with impossibly yellow hair, wading naked to the bank. Dallandra offered a hand and helped her clamber out. Elessario picked up a tunic from the grassy bank and pulled it over her head. Although at first glance she seemed beautiful, with human ears but elven eyes, at second glance one noticed that the eyes were as yellow as her hair, cat-slit with emerald-green, and that her smile revealed sharp-pointed teeth.

  “Did you need me for something, Dalla?”

  “I did. Come see something with me.”

  Hand in hand like mother and child they wandered downriver, looking for Bardek. Here in the world of the Guardians, as the elves named Evandar’s people, images could become real rather easily, that is, for those with minds trained to build them. First Dallandra created an image of Jill in her mind, as clear and as detailed as possible; then she moved this image out through her eyes onto the landscape—a mental trick, that, and not true dweomer, strange though it sounds to those who don’t know how to do it. These mental images were lifeless things, even in this world, and broke up fast like a picture imagined in a cloud or a fire. Every now and then, though, one image would linger for a while longer or seem brighter and more solid. With a fascinated Elessario trailing after, Dallandra would walk to that spot and cast another round of images. Every time, one of the new crop would become solid and endure long enough to point out the next step of their journey.

  As they followed these clues, the landscape changed round them. The river narrowed, ran shallow; the lush grass withered till brown and dry. They passed big boulders, pushing up through thin earth, and eventually found a graveled road, leading forward into mist. All at once, twilight turned the world an opalescent gray, shot with lavender.

  “Here we are,” Dallandra said. “Come look at a city of men.”

  In the mist they seemed to float, like birds hovering on the wind, then spiraled down and down in ever-twisting arcs till at last the mist vanished in a starry sky. Below lay a white city, shimmering in the heat of a Bardek evening. Here and there in the dark streets a gold point of light bobbed along, a lantern carried in someone’s hand. Down in the center of town a vast sea of lamps flickered among the brightly colored banners and booths of the public market. Around this small geometry of streets and light stretched the dark and arid plain out to a horizon glowing faint green with the last of sunset, With a little gasp of delight Elessario began gliding down, following the drift of music that came to them, but Dallandra caught her arm.

  “Not now, I’m afraid. It is lovely, isn’t it?”

  “Shall I see marvels like this once I’ve been born, Dalla?”

  “Well, yes.” Dallandra hesitated, caught between truth and sadness. “But you know, they probably won’t seem so marvelous. You’ll take them for granted, then, like we all do.”

  One last image of Jill pointed their way to a caravanserai out on the edge of town. Among a scatter of palm trees horses and mules drowsed at tether, and human beings wandered back and forth. Fires bloomed here and there, but far off to one side a silver-blue pillar of water force, glowing like a beacon to guide them down, rose from a fountain. Beside it, sitting with her feet tucked under her on a little bench, was Jill. To Dallandra it seemed that they walked up to her in the usual manner, but judging from the way Jill yelped in surprise, she must have seen them appear all at once.

  “Jill, I’ve brought Elessario. She’s the one who’ll lead her people into our world.”

  “You’re very brave, then, Elessario.” Jill got up to greet them. “I salute you.”

  The child stared back, all solemn eyes and sudden shyness.

  “Does she truly understand what all this means, Dalla?” Jill went on.

  “I hope so.”

  “You’d best make sure of it. To put this burden on someone without them truly knowing what they’re doing is—”

  “But, Jill, if they don’t come through, her people will die. Fade away. Vanish. And until one makes the journey, none will.”

  “But still, she needs to know what—”

  “I’ll do my best to tell her. To make her understand.”

  “Good.”


  For a moment they considered each other. Although Dallandra could only wonder what she might look like to Jill, to her the human dweomerwoman seemed made of colored glass, glowing and shimmering as they peered at each other across a gulf of worlds. Such niceties as facial expressions and nuances of voice simply refused to come clear, yet Dallandra could feel Jill’s urgency as a barb in an old wound of guilt. As she turned inward to her own thoughts, she began to lose the vision entirely: Jill’s image flattened, then dwindled as if it were rapidly flying away.

  “Jill!” she called out. “The islands! Evandar will look for them!”

  She had no way of knowing if Jill had heard her. All round them in a rushy vortex the worlds spun by, green and gold, white and red, faces and parts of faces, words and names flung into a purple wind, strange beings and glimpses of landscapes, round and round, faster and faster, yet flowing always upward. She clutched Elessario’s hand tight in both of hers and swept her along as they tumbled, spun, flew higher, ever higher through a rush of voices and images, until at last, with a crack like the strike of a sword on a wooden shield, they fell into the grass of the river meadow, where the Host was dancing in the summer sun. Elessario rolled over onto her back and began to laugh.

  “Oh, that was exciting! It was truly a splendid sort of game! Will being born be like that, Dalla?”

  “Yes, but backward. That is, you’ll go down and down instead of up.”

  “And where will I come out, then?” Elessario sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees.

  “To a place where it’s all warm and dark and safe, where you’ll sleep for a long time.” Dallandra had told her this story a hundred times before, but the girl loved hearing it. “Then you’ll find yourself in a bright place, and someone will hold you, and you’ll really, really know what love is. But it won’t all be easy, Elli my sweet. It truly won’t.”

  “You told me about the hard bits. Pain and blood and slime.” She frowned, looking across the flowered fields. “I don’t want to hear about them again now, please.”

  Dalla felt her heart wrench, wondering for the thousandth time if she were doing the right thing, if indeed she had enough knowledge to do the right thing for this strange race, trapped in a backwash, a killing eddy of the river of Time. Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when they were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, “stayed behind.” Without the discipline of the worlds of form, they were doomed, but after so long in the magical lands they’d found—or created, she couldn’t be sure which—the stinking, aching, grieving inertia called life seemed hateful to them. One by one, they would wink out and die, sparks flown too far from the fire, unless someone led them down into the world. I’m too ignorant, Dalla thought. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t have enough power, I’m doing this for the wrong reasons, I can’t, I’ll fail, I’ll never be able to save them.

  Unfortunately, there was no one but her to so much as try.

  The vendor had spread his wares out in the shade near a public fountain. An old man, with pale brown skin and lank white hair, he sat on his heels behind a small red rug and stared out at the crowd unblinking, unmoving, as if he cared not at all if anyone bought his wares. Neatly arrayed in front of him were three different kinds of fortune-telling sets, ranging from a stack of flimsy beaten bark packets filled with cheap wooden tiles to a single beautifully painted bone set in a carved wooden box with bronze hinges. Marka counted her coins out twice, but still, she didn’t have enough money for even the cheapest version. As she reluctantly hid her pouch again inside her tunic, the old man deigned to look her way.

  “If you’re meant to have them, the coin will come,” he remarked. “They have the power to pick out their true owners.”

  “Really, good sir?”

  “Really.” He leaned forward and ran a gnarled hand over the lid of the bronze-fitted box. “I’ve sold these sets for years, traveling round Orystinna, and I’ve come to know all about them. Now, the cheap things, they have no power whatsoever. A man I know up in Orysat brings them in from Bardektinna by the crateful. They’re slave-made, I suppose. And those there in the cloth sacks, well, they’re good enough, especially for a beginner. But every now and then a really fine set comes my way, like these. You can just feel, somehow, that they’re different.”

  He picked out a tile and held it faceup in his palm. It was the prince of birds, exquisitely carved with a flare of wing and a long beak; into the graved lines the craftsman had rubbed some sort of blue and green dye, staining the bone beyond the power of fingers to rub it away. As she looked at it, Marka felt a peculiar sensation, that somehow she recognized that tile, that in fact she recognized the whole set and particularly its box.

  “There’s a wine stain on the bottom,” she said, and then was horrified to realize she’d spoken aloud.

  “Well, so there is.” The vendor made the admission unwillingly. “But it’s just a little one, and it’s faded, too. It hasn’t hurt the tiles any.”

  In the hot summer day Marka turned icy-cold. She managed to smile, then stood up. All she could think of was running away from the box of tiles. When someone touched her shoulder from behind, she screamed.

  “Well, a thousand apologies!” It was Ebañy, half laughing, half concerned. “I thought you’d seen me come up. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Oh, well, I was just, uh, well, talking with this man. He, uh, has these interesting things for sale.”

  Ebañy glanced down and went as wide-eyed as a child. When he knelt down for a better look, she wanted to scream at him and beg him to come away. Yet, when he gestured at her to join him, she knelt beside him, as close as she dared. He picked the knave of flowers out of the box and held it up to let the golden blossoms catch the light. With an eye for Ebañy’s expensively embroidered shirt of the finest linen, the vendor leaned forward, all smiles.

  “The young lady found those most interesting, sir.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she did.” Ebañy was smiling, but his gray eyes were oddly cold and distant, like a flash of steel. “Tell me, where did you buy these?”

  “From a merchant up in Delinth, last year it was. He’d won them in a gambling game, he told me, over on Surtinna. He trades there regularly.”

  “You don’t happen to remember what city he got them in, do you?” Ebañy put back the knave and picked up a careless handful of other tiles. Seeing them lying in his long, pale fingers made Marka feel like fainting, but why, she couldn’t say.

  “Um, well.” The vendor thought for a moment. “Wylinth, maybe, but I wouldn’t swear to that. I’ve talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of tales since then.”

  “Of course. How much do you want for them?”

  “Ten zotars.”

  “Huh, and the moon would cost me only twelve! Two zotars.”

  “What! The box alone is worth that.”

  “But it’s got that wine stain on the bottom. Three zotars.”

  As they went on haggling, enjoying themselves thoroughly, Marka could barely listen. Ebañy knew about the stain, too, just as she somehow knew, when neither of them had picked the box up and looked at the bottom. She was sorry she’d ever stopped to chat with the vendor, sorry she’d wanted the set of tiles, even sorrier he was buying them—and then it occurred to her that he was buying them just for her, just because he knew she wanted them. When he happened to glance her way and smile, she felt as if she would die from happiness. At last five zotars changed hands, and Ebañy settled the lid on the box, picked it up, hefted it briefly, and gave it to her. Clutching it to her chest, she leaned over and on a sudden impulse kissed him on the cheek.

  “Oh, thank you. They’re so lovely.”

  He merely smiled, so warmly, so softly, that her heart started pounding. He rose, then helped
her up, taking the box from her to carry it.

  “Let’s get back to the camp. Oh, and by the way. This isn’t much of a place to ask, but will you marry me? I know that under your laws I should be asking your father, but going back to find that esteemed worthy would be a journey tedious beyond belief, and a reunion oppressive beyond sufferance.”

  “Marry you? Really actually many you?”

  “Just that.”

  When he laughed at her surprise, she realized just how ready she’d been to do anything that he might ask of her,

  “Shall I take your silence as a yes or a no?”

  “A yes, you idiot.”

  With one convulsive sob, hating herself for doing it, Marka began to cry, and she sniveled inelegantly all the way back to the caravanserai.

  “You stupid blithering dolt!” Jill was yelling, but she did remember to use Deverrian. “I could strangle you!”

  “Do calm down, will you now?” Salamander stepped back, honestly frightened. “I don’t understand why your heart is so troubled, I truly don’t.”

  Jill stopped, the anger ebbing, and considered the question as seriously as it did indeed deserve. She was worried about the girl, she supposed, who thought she was marrying a young traveling player much like herself while the truth was a fair bit stranger.

  “Well, my apologies for getting’ so angry,” she said at last. “I suppose it’s because she’s so young, and you’re not, no matter how handsome your elven blood keeps you.”

  “But that’s a reason in itself, Here, consider this. I’m well over a century old, my turtledove, old for a human being, young for a full-blooded man of the People, but I’m neither, am I?” His voice cracked with bitterness, quickly covered. “Who knows how long a half-breed lives? Marka’s little more than a child, truly. I keep hoping that this time, well have the chance to grow old together. Before, even if she hadn’t caught that fever, I would have lived long past her.”

  “Oh.” Jill couldn’t find it in her heart to reproach him. “Well I mean, none of my affair, is it now? Whether the lass marries you or no.”