by Tad Williams
“What kind of foolishness is this, Deornoth?” Josua asked crossly.
“But did you hear? People like this are waiting for you to do some-thing. You are their prince.” It seemed so obvious. Surely Josua could see?
“Prince of what? Prince of ruins, prince of empty lands and grass? I have nothing to offer these folk…yet.” He got up and walked to the edge of the camp. Ielda’s children peered out at him, a cluster of white-rimmed eyes gleaming in the darkened doorway.
“But how will you gain anything without folk to follow you?” Isorn asked. “Deornoth is right. If Fengbald now knows where we are, it is only a matter of time until Elias brings his full anger to bear on us.”
“Suspicion may keep these people away from the Stone of Farewell, but it will not keep Earl Guthwulf and the High King’s army at bay,” said Deornoth.
“If the king on the Dragonbone Chair is going to bring his armies down on us,” Josua replied hotly, throwing his hand up in a gesture of frustration, “a few hundred Gadrinsett-folk will be no more than feathers in a gale against them. That is all the more reason not to drag them in. We few at least can vanish into Aldheorte once more if we must, but these folk cannot.”
“Again we plan to retreat, Prince Josua,” Deornoth replied angrily. “You are tired of it yourself—you said as much!”
The three were still arguing when Ielda returned. They broke off into guilty silence, wondering how much she might have heard. Their conversation, however, was the last thing on her mind.
“My cakes!” she shrieked, then pulled them off the hot rock one after the other, making little cries of pain as she burned her fingers. Each cake was charred black as Pryrates’ soul. “You monsters! How could you? Talking all your high-flown nonsense about the prince, then letting my cakes bum!” She turned and smacked ineffectually at Isorn’s broad shoulders.
“My apologies, goodwife Ielda,” Josua said. producing another quinis-piece. “Please take this and forgive us…”
“Money!” she cried, even as she took the coin, “What about my cakes? Will I give my children money to eat tomorrow morning when they are crying!?” She snatched up a broom of bound twigs and swung lustily at Deornoth’s head, almost knocking him off the rock on which he sat. He bounded quickly to his feet and joined Josua and Isorn in full retreat.
“Don’t come ’round here any more!” she shouted after them. “Swords-for-hire indeed! Cake-burners! The prince is dead, my friend said—and your talk can’t bring him back!”
Her angry cries slowly faded into the distance as Josua and his companions stumbled back to their horses and made their way out past the fringes of Gadrinsett.
“At least,” Josua said after they had walked a while, “we have a good idea of where the Stone of Farewell lies.”
“We learned more than that, Highness,” Deornoth said, half-smiling. “We saw how your name still inspires passion among your subjects.”
“You may be the Prince of Grass, Josua,” Isorn added, “but you are definitely not the King of Cakes.”
Josua looked at them both disgustedly. “I would appreciate,” he said slowly, “going back to camp in silence.”
22
Through the Summer Gate
“It is not a road that takes us there,” Aditu said sternly. “It is a sort of song.”
Simon frowned in irritation. He had asked a simple question, but in her maddening Sithi way, Jiriki’s sister had once more given an answer that was no answer. It was too cold to stand around talking nonsense. He tried again.
“If there’s no road, it must still be in some direction. What direction is it, then?”
“In. Into the forest’s heart.”
Simon peered up at the sun to try and orient himself. “So, it’s…that way?” He pointed south, the direction in which he had been traveling.
“Not quite. Sometimes. But that would more often be when you wished to enter through the Gate of Rains. That is not right at this time of year. No, it is the Summer Gate that we seek, and that is a different song altogether.”
“You keep saying a song. How can you get to a thing by a song?”
“How…?” She appeared to consider this carefully. She inspected Simon. “You have a strange way of thinking. Do you know how to play shent?”
“No. What does that have to do with anything?”
“You might be an interesting player—I wonder if anyone ever has played with a mortal? None of my folk would ask such a question as you did. I must teach you the rules.”
Simon grumbled his confusion, but Aditu lifted a slim-fingered hand to halt his questions. She stood very quietly, her web of lavender hair trembling in the breeze, everything else still; in her white clothing she was nearly invisible against the snow drifts. She seemed to have fallen asleep standing, like a stork swaying on one leg among the reeds, but her lustrous eyes remained open. At last she began to breathe deeply, letting the air out again with a chuffing hiss. The exhalations gradually became a crooning, humming sound that hardly seemed to come from Aditu at all. The wind, which had been a cold-fingered push on Simon’s cheek, abruptly changed direction.
No, he realized a moment later, it was more than just an altering of the wind. Rather, it seemed that the whole of creation had moved ever so slightly—a frightening sensation that brought on a moment of dizziness. As a child he had sometimes whirled himself around and around in a circle; when he stopped, the world would continue to reel about him. This dizziness felt much like that, yet calmer, as though the world that spun beneath his feet moved as deliberately as the unfolding petals of a flower.
Aditu’s wordless, airy drone solidified into a litany of unfamiliar Sithi speech, then trailed off into silent breathing once more. The drab light slipping down through the snowbound trees seemed to have gained some warmer color, an infinitesimal shift of hue that leavened the gray with blue and gold. The silence stretched.
“Is this magic?” Simon heard his voice shatter the stillness like the braying of a donkey. He immediately felt foolish. Aditu swung her head to look at him, but her expression showed no anger.
“I am not sure what you mean,” she said. “It is how we find a hidden place, and Jao é-Tinukai’i is indeed hidden. But there is no power in the words themselves, if that is what you ask. They could be spoken in any language. They help the searcher to remember certain signs, certain paths. If that is not what you mean by ‘magic,’ I am sorry to disappoint you.”
She did not look very sorry. Her mischievous smile had come back.
“I shouldn’t have interrupted,” Simon muttered. “I always asked my friend Doctor Morgenes to show me magic. He never did.” The thought of the old man brought back a memory of a sunny morning in the doctor’s dusty chamber, the sound of Morgenes mumbling and musing to himself while Simon swept. With that memory came a fierce pang of regret. All those things were gone.
“Morgenes…” Aditu said musingly. “I saw him once, when he visited my uncle in our lodge. He was a pretty young man.”
“Young man?” Simon stared again at her thin, waiflike face. “Doctor Morgenes?”
The Sitha suddenly became serious once more. “We should delay no longer. Would you like me to sing the song in your tongue? It could cause no harm that is worse than the trouble we are already brewing, you and I.”
“Trouble?” Confusion was piling on confusion, but Aditu had taken her odd stance once more. He had a sudden feeling that he must speak quickly, as though a door were being closed. “Yes, please, in my tongue!”
She settled on the balls of her feet, poised like a cricket on a branch. After breathing measuredly for a moment, she again began to chant. The song slowly became recognizable, the clumsy, blocky sounds of Simon’s Westerling speech softening and turning liquid, the words running and flowing together like melting wax.
“The Serpent’s dreaming eye is green,”
she sang, her eyes fixed on the icicles that hung like jeweled pennants from the branches of a dying hemlo
ck. The fire absent from the muted sun now burned in their scintillant depths.
“His track is moon-silver.
Only the Woman-with-a-net can see
The secret places that he goes…”
Aditu’s hand drifted out from her side and hung in the air for a long moment before Simon realized that he was expected to take it. He grasped her fingers in his gloved hand, but she pulled free. For a moment he thought he had guessed wrong, that he had forced some unwanted, oafish intimacy on this golden-eyed creature, but as her fingers flexed impatiently he realized in a rush of confusing feelings that she wanted his bare hand. He pulled his leather mitten off with his teeth, then clasped her slender wrist with fingers warm and moist from their residence in the glove. She gently but firmly pulled her wrist away, this time sliding her hand against his own; her cool fingers curled around his. With a head-shake like a cat awakened from a nap, she repeated the words she had sung.
“The Serpent’s dreaming eye is green,
His track is moon-silver:
Only the Woman-with-a-net can see
The secret places that he goes…”
Aditu led him forward, ducking beneath the hemlock bough and its burden of icicles. The stiff, snow-salted breeze that clawed at his face brought tears into his eyes. The forest before him was suddenly distorted, as chough he were trapped inside one of the icicles, staring out. He heard his boots crunching in the snow, but it seemed to be happening at a great distance, as though his head floated treetop-high.
“Wind-child wears an indigo crown,
Aditu crooned. They walked, but if felt more like floating, or swimming.
“His boots are of rabbit skin.
Invisible is he to Moon-mother’s stare,
But she can hear his cautious breathing…”
They turned and clambered down into what should have been a gulley lined with evergreens; instead, to Simon’s misted eyes the tree limbs resembled shadowy arms reaching out to enfold the two travelers. Branches swatted at his thighs as he passed, their scent spicy and strong. Sap-covered needles clung to his breeches. The wind—which breathed whisperingly among the swaying branches—was a little more moist, but still shiveringly cold.
“…Yellow is the dust on old Tortoise’s shell.”
Aditu paused before a bank of umber stone, which thrust from the snow at the bottom of the gulley like the wall of a ruined house. As she stood singing before it, the sunlight that fell through the trees abruptly shifted its angle; the shadows in the crevices of stone deepened, then overtopped their clefts like flooding rivers, sliding across the face of the rock as though the hidden sun were plummeting swiftly toward its evening berth.
“He goes in deep places,”
she chanted,
“Bedded beneath the dry rock,
He counts his own heartbeats in chalky shadow…”
They curved around the massive stone and suddenly found themselves on a down-slanting bank. Smaller outcroppings of dusky rock, pale pink and sandy brown, pushed up through the snowy ground. The trees that loomed against the sky were a darker green here, and full of quiet birdsong. Winter’s bite was noticeably less.
They had traveled, but it seemed they had also passed from one kind of day to another, as though they somehow walked at right angles to the normal world, moving unrestrainedly as the angels that Simon had been told flew here and there at God’s bidding. How could that be?
Staring up past the trees into the featureless gray sky. Aditu’s hand clutched in his, Simon wondered if he might indeed have died. Might this solemn creature beside him—whose eyes seemed fixed on things he could not see—be escorting his soul to some final destination, while his lifeless body lay somewhere in the forest, slowly vanishing beneath a blanket of drifting snow?
Is it warm in Heaven? he wondered absently.
He rubbed at his face with his free hand and felt the reassuring pain of his chapped skin. In any case, it mattered little: he was going where this one led him. His contented helplessness was such that he felt he could no more remove his hand from hers than remove his head from his body.
“…Cloud-song waves a scarlet torch:
A ruby beneath a gray sea.
She smells of cedar bark,
And wears ivory at her breast…”
Aditu’s voice rose and fell, her song’s slow, thoughtful cadence blending with the birdsong as the waters of one river would meld indistinguishably into the flow of another. Each verse in the endless stream, each cycle of names and colors, was a jeweled puzzle whose solution always seemed to be at Simon’s fingertips but never revealed itself. By the time he thought he might be making sense of something, it was gone, and something new was dancing on the forest air.
The two travelers passed from the bank of stones into deep shade, entering a thicket of dark green hedges pearled with tiny white flowers. The foliage was damp, the snow underfoot soggy and unstable. Simon clasped Aditu’s hand more firmly. He tried to wipe his eyes, which had blurred again. The little white flowers smelled of wax and cinnamon.
“…The Otter’s eye is pebble-brown.
He slides beneath ten wet leaves;
When he dances in diamond streams,
The Lantern-bearer laughs…”
And now, joining with the rising and falling melody of Aditu’s song and the delicate trill of birds, came the sound of water splashing in shallow pools, tuneful as a musical instrument made of fragile glass. Shimmering light sparkled on melting snowdrops; as he listened in wonderment, Simon looked all around at the starry gleam of sun through water. The tree branches seemed to be dripping light.
They walked beside a small but active stream whose joyful voice reverberated through the tree-pillared forest halls. Melting snow lay atop the stones and rich black earth lay beneath the damp leaves. Simon’s head was whirling. Aditu’s melody ran through all his thoughts, just as the stream slid around and over the polished stones that made its bed. How long had they been walking? It had seemed only a few steps at first, but now it suddenly seemed they had marched for hours—days! And why was the snow vanishing away? Just moments ago it had covered everything!
Spring! he thought, and felt a nervous but exultant laughter bubbling inside him. I think we’re walking into Spring!
They strode on beside the stream. Aditu’s music chimed on and on like the water. The sun had vanished. Sunset was blooming in the sky like a rose, singeing all of Aldheorte’s leaves and branches and trunks with fiery light, touching the stones with crimson. As Simon watched, the blaze flared and died in the sky, then was swiftly supplanted by spreading purple, which itself was devoured in turn by sable darkness. The world seemed to be spinning faster beneath him, but he still felt firmly grounded: one foot followed the other, and Aditu’s hand was firm in his.
“…Stone-listener’s mantle is black as jet,
His rings shine like stars,”
As she sang these words, a scattering of white stars indeed appeared against the vault of the heavens. They blossomed and faded in a succession of shifting patterns. Half-realized faces and forms coalesced, pricked in starlight against the blackness, then dissolved again just as rapidly.
“Nine he wears; but his naked finger
Lifts and tastes the southerly breeze…”
As he walked beneath the velvet-black sky and wheeling stars, Simon felt as if an entire lifetime might be passing with incredible swiftness; simultaneously, the night journey seemed but a single moment of near-infinite duration. Time itself seemed to sweep through him, leaving behind a wild mixture of scents and sounds. Aldheorte had become a single living thing that changed all around him as the deathly chill melted away and the warmth came pushing through. Even in darkness he could sense the immense, almost convulsive alterations.
As they walked in bright starlight beside the chattering, laughing river, Simon thought he could sense green leaves springing from bare boughs and vibrant flowers forcing their way out of the frozen ground, fragile petals unfurli
ng like the wings of butterflies. The forest seemed to be shaking off winter like a snake shrugging its old, useless skin.
Aditu’s song wound through everything like a single golden thread in a tapestry woven of muted colors.
“…Violet are the shadows in Lynx’s ears.
He hears the sun rising;
His tread sends the cricket to sleep,
And wakes the white rose…”
Morning light began to permeate Aldheorte, spreading evenly, as though it had no single source. The forest seemed alive, every leaf and branch poised, waiting. The air was filled with a thousand sounds and numberless scents, with birdsong and bee-drone, the musk of living earth, the sweet rot of toadstools, the dry charm of pollen. Unmuffled by clouds, the sun climbed into a sky that showed purest pale blue between the towering treetops.
“…Sky-singer’s cape is buckled in gold,”
Aditu sang triumphantly, and the forest seemed to throb around them as though it had one vast and indivisible pulse.
“His hair is full of nightingale feathers.
Every three paces he casts pearls behind,
And saffron flowers before him…”
She stopped in her tracks and released Simon’s hand; his arm fell to his side, limp as a boned fish. Aditu stood on her toes and stretched, lifting her upraised palms to the sun. Her waist was very slender.
It took a long time before Simon could speak. “Are we…” he tried at last, “are we…?”
“No, but we have traveled the most difficult part,” she said, then turned on him with a droll look. “I thought you would break my hand, you clutched so hard.”
