by Nancy Kress
When, before long—it was now nearly spring—Kirila and Chessie left on their Quest, Granny Isolda would miss them, although not enough to go with them. Chessie had, as a matter of fact, asked her—Kirila was unaware of this—and Granny Isolda knew that despite her age, she was better suited to the physical rigors of the journey than was Kirila. But not for a moment had she been tempted to travel so far beyond reach of a paintbrush. What, after all, could possibly be at the Heart of the World that she could not create right here?
Anyone, thought Granny Isolda, who survived his childhood had a lifetime of raw materials for art. Nonetheless, she sighed before she knew she was going to do it, a vigorous rusty sigh like a strong wind rushing through old machinery.
“Are you sure the color for my coat is right?” Chessie asked Kirila anxiously.
“Perfect.”
“It’s a difficult color to mix, I should imagine. That rich purple bordering on black.”
“You know, Chessie, I really think you’re going to miss being that color after we reach the Tents.”
“I was thinking about having some robes made up in it, for afterwards. It looks royal, don’t you think?”
“Oh, definitely. Stop twitching your left ear.”
“How’s it coming now?”
Kirila squinted at the portrait and dabbed daintily with the end of her brush. “Fine...I think.”
“How is your work coming, Granny Isolda?”
“Not as well as it would without all this chatter.”
“You moved your ear, Chessie!”
Granny put down her brush, trying not to slam it, and stood up. “I must go...go help in the kitchen.”
Kirila looked up and smiled. “I’ll clean your brush for you.”
“Thank you.” She left, pressing her fingertips to her forehead, spotting it with desert ochre. Chessie abandoned his pose and sat by Kirila’s easel.
“One look.”
“No.”
“Please, Kirila!”
“Oh, all right. It’s nearly done anyway.” He trotted around and gazed at the canvas. There was a long silence.
“The color is good.”
“Thank you.”
“That flower...is that growing out of my head?”
“No, it’s behind you.” She grinned at him. “You know, Chessie, it’s a good thing we’re leaving in a few weeks. Granny Isolda will be relieved.”
Chessie frowned. “She wasn’t this jumpy when I was here before.”
“She didn’t have to watch me paint.” Kirila began cleaning the brushes, one globbed with purple, the other barely touched with desert ochre.
“You know, Kirila, originally I was hesitant about bringing you here, to Granny Isolda, after you said you’d come with me to the Tents.” Chessie’s tone was solemn and Kirila stopped working, her back to him, the sticky brushes suddenly clenched tightly in her hand.
“Why?”
“Because I thought you might...that you would feel...”
“That I would feel what?” she asked, her voice strained.
“Well...that you would feel really interested in the paintings, and want to stay here and be an artist instead of finishing the Quest. Like at Rhuor, or the Quirkian Hold.” After a moment he reluctantly added, “Or Talatour.”
“Is that the only reason?” she demanded.
“What else?” he asked, his long face genuinely astonished. He was sharper, now, at spotting rabbits than spotting nuances of human relationships, and had never noticed the change.
Kirila relaxed her grip on the brushes—the bristles were all bent, and her fingers were a smudged purple—and sat on the edge of Granny Isolda’s cluttered bed. “If you had brought me here twenty years ago,” she said, ignoring his question, “it might have happened that way, I suppose. Everything new in the world—new to me, I mean—seemed equally interesting. But now...”
Unconsciously she began to chew on a strand of hair—it had grown quite long—while she searched for words. “I’m not an artist, Chessie. As you can see. But I don’t mean only that I paint badly, but that it doesn’t absorb me, doesn’t make me lose track of time or myself, as Granny Isolda does. Or as Larek did, jousting.”
“It’s not the same!” Chessie protested, outraged. “Jousting is just a game; an artist creates, he takes the ragged ends of the world and—”
“No difference,” Kirila said. “Art just suits you better, at least as an observer. But painting a picture means the same to Granny Isolda as riding in a tournament meant to Larek.”
“But all the—”
“No difference,” she said quietly, and laid down Granny’s clean, bent brush. “Are you coming to dinner? It’s soup, again.”
“How can you say that not falling off a horse—”
“No difference, Chessie. None at all. Not from the inside.”
“But the—”
“None.”
●●●
The mountain spring came slowly, trying to make up its mind whether the territory was worth the effort. A morning of experimental warmth would be followed by an evening of snow. Small animals dug out of their winter burrows, blinking in the sunlight, and wandered around disgruntled whenever more snow fell on the budding food supply. Finally the snow thinned to frost, the frost became isolated frozen crystals mixed in with the nightly dew, and spring arrived. In unexpected places, in depressions between rocks and under mounds of dead grasses, wildflowers bloomed. Scrubby mountain bushes put out scrubby white blossoms, and various birds nested on the rocky ledges, screaming and fighting for the best places. On the high plain below the mountains, however, nothing bloomed or nested or blinked.
On their last night at Coldwater Castle, Kirila and Chessie and Granny Isolda sat late around the fire in the Great Hall. It was an applewood fire, and it hissed and crackled loudly. The air, still cold at night, was heavy with fragrances of applewood, tallow and spring wildflowers, and with the wordless gravity of parting. Before going to bed, everyone else had already wished the travelers good speed, except for one preoccupied young man who was under the impression that they had just arrived, and introduced himself with courtly grace. He had done the same thing in the autumn.
“They still amaze me,” Kirila said after fifteen minutes of firelit silence. She was squinting at the paintings, half-shadowed on the stone walls.
“You haven’t done badly,” Granny said. She added hastily, “At Seeing, I mean.”
“Which is your favorite, Kirila?” Chessie asked.
She didn’t hesitate. “This one, right by the fireplace.”
Look again, Granny had told her all winter, over and over, in various tones of exasperation, cajoling, and frenzy. Look again.
It was a picture of an old apple tree, hollow and twisted and covered with snow. But as Kirila looked, as she Saw, there was a shoulder-high seedling limber with new sap; heavy red apples lushly bending resilient limbs; a stump shivering into splinters under a woodcutter’s ax. Lightning struck a great branch and it fell. Early ice dragged the apples to the ground and they rotted in pulpy piles. A family of squirrels nested in the mud-smelling hollow. All of these things happened simultaneously, and none of them had happened yet at all. Caught in the branches were three feather-tipped arrows—one was bloody—a bride’s wildly thrown bouquet, a baby dragon too scared to take wing and fly, a dangling rope noose knotted from the strongest limb, and a kite painted with gaudy turquoise flowers. The bark was streaked with insect trails, with carved initials in a wobbly heart, with spear holes, with bird droppings. Deep under the perpetually thirsty roots was a patch of rich, fertile earth where a man’s body had once decomposed -but into that patch Kirila could not See.
“My favorite is that crown,” Chessie said. The rich bronze paint had been mixed with gritty gold dust, and in the firelit gloom the picture glowed with sepulchral splendor. “All the things packed into that one are staggering—and not always so pretty.” He stirred restlessly on the hearth. “There are no portraits
of people,” Kirila said suddenly.
“No,” said Granny Isolda. “There are limits.”
“Do you have a favorite?” Chessie asked Granny Isolda. She smiled thinly. “The one I haven’t painted yet.”
“What will it be of?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Kirila turned her head to look at the massive old lady ruddy with firelight, and after a moment she nodded, smiling the same thin smile. Granny Isolda nodded back sadly, and the three of them sat there, nodding at each other, until Granny Isolda said, “This is ridiculous; I feel like a pendulum. I’m going to bed.”
“Will you be up to see us off?”
“No.”
Neither Chessie nor Kirila seemed surprised. Granny Isolda said, working the words around in the back of her throat like a piece of gristle difficult to bring up, “Stop off here on the way back, if it’s on your way.” She hurried from the room, and after a moment Chessie followed her. Kirila stayed where she was, gazing into the fire and flexing the fingers in her hands.
Six
The descent to the plain presented certain difficulties. Kirila was on foot, one of the men at Coldwater Castle having taken the horses back through the tunnel before winter had set in. There had been no place to stable them. Thus, the food supply necessary to cross the barren plain had to be packed in knapsacks and carried. After Chessie had finished posing for his portrait, he had turned his whole attention to this project, overseeing, with a cocked purple head and a critical eye, the drying of various meats and fruits. He had also worked out an elaborate system of nutritious rationing.
Strapped onto Kirila’s shoulders was a large canvas knapsack—Granny Isolda had moaned at the waste of canvas—which matched a smaller one on Chessie’s back. All the less fragile items, the cooking pot and bedroll and towels and spare underwear, were bundled into a canvas-wrapped parcel, tied with stout rope, which Kirila rolled down the mountain whenever practical. Chessie blocked from below, so that the bundle didn’t gather too much momentum. After awhile he got the idea of making a formal game out of it, and wanted to set up foul boundaries and a scoring system, but Kirila wasn’t interested. She climbed down the mountain absently, thinking hard about something, chewing on her reddish-gray hair. Chessie had to settle for working out a flashy head-block and admiring it himself.
At nightfall they camped at the bottom of the mountain. The spring night was soft and clean, smelling of blossom and mud and air so new that no one had ever breathed it before. Overhead wheeled a new season of constellations, each star blurred at the edges into a soft mist.
Chessie sang all through supper. Immediately afterwards, exhausted by the rigors of single-handedly launching a new national sport, he fell asleep, luxuriously stretched full length before the fire. Kirila lay quietly awake, looking at the milky stars, still chewing on her hair.
●●●
“So this is the plain,” Kirila said next morning.
“This is it,” Chessie said, without enthusiasm. His ebullient-puppy mood of yesterday had vanished, and he padded over the hard ground with mechanical efficiency, his head down. The plain was devoid of plants, of insects, of mud, even of energy. The small gray rocks on the cracked earth sprawled as if eternally exhausted, worn out by the heavy demands of being gray. The air did not shimmer, as warm still air can usually be counted upon to do, and it didn’t smell of anything at all, not even dust. Whenever Chessie and Kirila found water in featureless shallow pools fed by invisible underground springs, the water tasted neither sweet nor brackish, warm nor cool. No winds blew.
Kirila followed Chessie through this neutral emptiness—it couldn’t properly be called a wasteland, since there was nothing to waste and no one to cluck over its loss—with the light, springy step of a young girl, smiling a little to herself and swinging her bundle rhythmically in her right hand. Around her the world was an unbroken circle. Even the mountains, which had seemed to loom so forbiddingly from their other side, had soon shrunk below the featureless horizon.
“Why are you humming?” Chessie asked peevishly in the late afternoon. “I don’t see what there is to hum about. And how come I’m always in the lead?”
“Because you’re the one who knows the way,” Kirila pointed out. “And besides, I like looking at your purple back. A spot of color is welcome here.”
“But that way I don’t see any color.”
“Then walk next to me.”
“Coming to heel, I suppose.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t, then. Anyway, I’m not as colorful as you are. We can’t all be purple.” She grinned and began to hum, “The Black Knight’s Other Lady.” There was a warm, clear glow on her coarse skin.
“Your last note flatted,” Chessie said sourly. He fidgeted beside her, churning along too fast and having to wait while she caught up, falling into frowning reveries, peevishly scratching his ears when they didn’t itch, and sighing loudly. Finally, with the air of a man who would rather run into a brick wall than wait for it to fall on him, he blurted, “Kirila—what do you think really happened on this wretched plain?”
Without breaking her easy stride, she said calmly, “I think what really happened here was just what the Chronicles said really happened here.”
“The whole story? Cast-out humans and ungrateful battle and survival gifts from the Lielthien and all?”
“The whole thing.”
Chessie stopped fidgeting and stood still. “Then if that’s the Truth—if you believe that’s the Truth—” he said, his voice so jerky with dread that each word came out a different pitch, “will you be going back to Rhuor, back to look for...them?”
Kirila sat on one of the plain’s gray rocks, dropping her bundle beside her. “No, Chessie. And I’ll tell you why—because that was the Truth.”
He blinked at her stupidly.
“Was, not is,” she continued. “So the Lielthien were once at the center of men’s world—that time is gone. They don’t affect the world anymore, they have chosen not to, except at Rhuor—and that contact is not human, and also not a spreading thing, despite all their power. You know, all winter I’ve been worrying that when we get to the Tents of Omnium, they will be full of Lielthien. But now I know there won’t be any there at all. Whatever they once were to men at the beginning, now...” Kirila let her voice trail off, frowned briefly, and then shrugged. Little glints of light in her eyes concentrated and gave back the plain’s diffuse, watery sunlight. “Now they just don’t matter.”
“A difference that makes no difference is no difference,” Chessie said slowly. “But what if the Lielthien change their feathered minds, and choose to affect the world again?”
“Then that would be different. The whole world would be different.”
“But what if they are affecting it now, secretly, and so are really at its Heart that way? Through falcon furtiveness?”
“I would know about it, since...just since,” Kirila said, a little grimly. “I would know. They’re not like that.”
“But what if they just happened to have changed since you were in Rhuor, and for some reason they’ve become that way?”
“It doesn’t seem likely, when you set that twenty-five years up against all the centuries they haven’t changed.”
“But what if they have?”
“Oh, go chase a rabbit,” Kirila said crossly. “I didn’t say I could predict what the Lielthien would do or not do now and forever world without end. I only said that they’re not going to be at the Heart of the World when we get there, so something else must be.”
“What do you think it will be?”
“I don’t know, Chessie. I just don’t know.” She wiggled her toes inside her scuffed boots; the long hours of unaccustomed walking had made her feet ache. Chessie considered gravely, squatting on his haunches with his head cocked to one side, his left ear flopped downward, and suddenly he laughed, a high bright laugh shiny with relief.
In the west, the sun went down. It didn’t
flame downward in a blaze of color or slide gently away behind veils of pearly clouds—it just went down. One moment the sun was there, small and utilitarian in a gray-white sky, and the next it had left as unemotionally as a draft horse leaving a plowed field. The odorless air began to turn colder.
“I just noticed something,” Chessie said. Kirila looked around to see what he could possibly notice on the empty plain.
“When we started on this Quest,” he said slowly, “it was you who asked the questions and I who answered them.”
Kirila looked startled, and then laughed softly. “I’m twenty-seven years older than when we started, Chessie. Didn’t you think I learned anything in twenty-seven years?”
“And I didn’t age at all,” Chessie said sadly. Kirila gazed at him, and when she spoke there was a new note in her voice, a note born of two days of steady hair-chewing and one of walking with her new confident stride, each leg moving freely from the hip, like a dancer. Kirila didn’t know the note was there. It was the same tone in which a practiced nurse talks to a patient with real, but not fatal, symptoms, who persists in spending his time moping in bed and planning his own funeral.
“Well, you are going to be aging again shortly, aren’t you? Aren’t we nearly to the Tents?”
“Yes...”
“Well, then—there you are.”
Chessie’s long purple face, gazing back at her, looked confused, and obscurely disappointed. He opened his mouth to say something, closed it again with a snap of his strong jaws, frowned, and then suddenly cried, “Race you to that rock!” He shot off, a long purple streak in the gloom.
“No fair—you had a head start!” Kirila shouted. “And which rock? They all look alike!” She snatched up her bundle and raced after him with her new dancer’s stride. The bundle bounced awkwardly against her knee and she winded easily, but even after she had slowed to a puffing walk, her boots sounded loud and confident on the sterile, ancient ground.
