He looked over his shoulder and nodded once, and in that nod I knew he’d been to the cave often since our first visit together, worrying at the ancient portraits like a dog at a bone.
All too soon we got to the cave. Just at the entrance, it seemed to me something uncoiled and snarled. I did not know what it was, or even if there was anything. Leonardo whispered a word I did not understand, and the moonlight shone on an empty patch of ground and the cleft in the rock that led to the cave beyond.
We walked into the cleft and, in the dark, it seemed to me that shadows flitted and that dark beings or ghosts or animals ran just outside our field of vision. Rats, I thought to myself. It would be rats. But the thought was hardly reassuring. After all, one or two people could easily be eaten by a tribe of rats.
“It’s all right, Antonio,” Leonardo said, evenly. “It’s all right. We are protected. Caterina told me what to say.”
She had? I didn’t remember. Somewhere, amid the buzz of Caterina’s words, I’d lost track of what she’d told him.
But I stepped close to Leonardo’s heels, and I told myself I was imagining the movement, the scurrying. That it meant nothing. That I was a fool. My own heartbeat was so loud that it sounded like a drum in my ears.
We stepped into the cave and I stopped, drawing breath sharply. The cave was lit with a big bonfire. A fire, burning brightly. Someone had to have made the fire. How?
“What—” I said.
“I came earlier today,” Leonardo said. He whispered, as if we were at church. “I came at sunset and laid it all in readiness. It only needs a little stoking.” As he spoke, quietly, he added wood to the fire. The wood was laid by, in a neat pile, and my mind spun around this thought because I could neither imagine Leonardo cutting the wood nor making the fire. Leonardo, in the normal way of his life, avoided such tasks as much as he possibly could.
Then Leonardo pulled from his lamb’s skin vest a packet of herbs, which he filtered between his fingers onto the fire. He murmured words, under his breath.
I didn’t understand the words and started to open my mouth to ask him about it, but he only shook his head, wordlessly telling me to be quiet.
So I remained quiet and watched Leonardo throw herbs on the fire and mutter words in an increasing tone of exasperation.
The smoke from the burnt herbs writhed around me like incense at church, but much stronger.
I knew it. Caterina had made a joke. She’d lied to him and now . . .
I realized I was sitting cross-legged on the rough ground of the cave, and there was music. I did not remember sitting and where did the music come from? Who was making it?
Startled, I started to rise. And then I realized that the figures in the wall were dancing—moving round and round with vigorous movements, stomping their feet into the ground with such vigor the entire cave trembled.
I rose, confused, trembling. Was I dreaming? Leonardo stood, without moving, smiling a little with a curious but serene expression much like his mother’s.
“Leonardo,” I said, and grabbed for his sleeve. I wanted to tell him we must be out of here, we must run, we must—But this was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Didn’t he want to to wake the gods?
I hadn’t wanted to see him disappointed. I’d never thought . . .
“What do you wish, pilgrims?” The voice that wasn’t a voice was all around us, demanding, absolute.
And in that voice, my own wishes rose up. I wanted to be like Leonardo. I wanted a life just like he had—to belong to a powerful family with a big house, and be wealthy enough to have piped water in the kitchen. Even if I were nothing but an illegitimate member. I wanted . . . to be better than I was.
I heard my own voice say all this, fumblingly, but the god was waiting, was waiting—waiting, I realized for Leonardo. It sensed Leonardo’s greater hunger, his greater need, and it would hear from him.
“I want to be so important that everyone in the world knows me,” Leonardo said. “I want to be remembered long after I’m dead.”
The naked feet of the dancing creatures on the walls made a final stomp, and there was a sound like laughter. Not mocking laughter, but bitter laughter.
And out of the middle of the creatures, one walked, who stood head and shoulders above the rest. He had flying white hair and beard, but his side was gashed open, bleeding. He pressed a hand to it, seemingly without any pain, and smiled at us, a smile full of curiosity and of a hunger at least as strong as Leonardo’s.
“Long ago,” he said, and spoke in a voice that seemed wholly human and echoed with the sing-song tone of the peasants of the region. “Long ago we could have granted you all that and more, little one. But we are old ones. Old. We were old when Rome was new. When their Jove shackled us. We are the gods who danced at the dawn of humanity.” He pointed with his free hand at the fire. “I gave humans fire and farming and letters. And for it I must be devoured endlessly by Jove’s eagle. My name is Prometheus and all those others—” he pointed to the wall, and to the other creatures now frozen in the act of dancing. “Those others, my brothers, my cousins, my uncles, all of them lie in their own prisons, unable to die, but unable to live. We have just life enough to present ourselves to you. But we are shadows . . . shadows and nothing more.”
He looked at me, and for a moment I read such nobility and humanity in his gaze, that I felt sorry for him.
And then he spoke. “And I cannot do what you wish . . . unless . . . you would allow us to merge with you?”
“Merge?” I asked, trembling.
This earned me a quick smile. “Yes,” he said. He picked a sharp sliver of stone to the ground and handed it to me. “If you prick your finger and let the blood drop into this fire, we’ll be able to come to you, to use your body to make you what you want to be. To make your wish come true.”
My mother had told me, long ago, that everything had a price. And so I asked, “What will it cost me?”
The noble features turned towards me and the mouth opened fully in a smile that revealed sharp, needle-like teeth. “To be devoured,” he said.
I let the sliver of stone drop. I heard it fall to the ground of the cave as if very far away. And I was already running, running, past the scurrying shadows and the darkness, past the narrow corridor to the outside, past the forest and the pasture and the vineyard, till I was snug and still in my pallet in my father’s house, crossing myself and muttering pater nosters to sleep, seeking to interpose the new God before the old.
Before going to sleep, I realized, I knew, that Leonardo had taken the bait and cut his finger. And I wondered what it would mean.
What it meant was that I lost my friend. Oh, nothing was changed, not really, not outwardly.
The scab in Leonardo’s finger healed. And instead of spending his days running wild in the fields, he started to draw. He would take pieces of his grandfather’s papers, the scrap left over from household accounts, and, with deft strokes draw a face, to the life. Or a horse so real it might have been running through the pasture outside. Or strange devices, machines that, he said, would one day fly through the skies.
I wondered if that was the gift the gods gave him and sometimes I felt sorry that I had not pricked my finger, but not sorry enough to return to the cave. Still, when Leonardo was taken to Florence, to become an apprentice painter, and when his painting and the costumes he designed for the elegant set in town became all the talk in tiny Vinci, I wondered why if I had missed my one chance of getting my wish. And what it meant being devoured. Leonardo seemed whole to me.
But life went on, in the way life does, and I acquired fields and married a woman who brought me a little in her stocking foot, with which I bought yet more fields. I had three sons, all strong men who married and gave me grandsons.
Two years ago my eldest grandson took me to Florence with him. Leonardo was there. He had been away a long while, but came back to finish a fresco under contract.
My grandson left me at the door to Leonardo’s worksh
op, while he went to talk to some notaries about the purchase of a vineyard.
I went in, hesitant, tapping my cane on the floor, more for reassurance than out of real need. My legs were yet steady enough.
The workshop was a busy place, full of apprentices of all ages, sketching and talking and calling to each other and making bawdy jokes. I asked the nearest one, an impish young man of maybe twenty where Leonardo was.
He pointed me towards a wall where a man knelt, painting the hem of a cloak in small feathery strokes. Under his hand, the hem had the look of real silk, flowing in an unfelt wind.
“Leonardo,” I said.
He turned to look at me, and a look of recognition sparked in his eyes. “Antonio,” he said, softly. “I remember . . . long ago. You ran.”
I swallowed. I could not speak. Because the face looking at mine—flying hair and white beard—looked like a face in a cave, long ago. Not Leonardo’s.
When we got back to Vinci, I made my grandsons take me back to the cave, and I walked the great length of its corridors, tapping my cane as I went along.
We took lanterns. I was not about to light the old fire once again.
The figures were still there, one and the other arms linked, eternally frozen in their primeval dance.
But the figure with the flying white hair wasn’t there. Prometheus was gone. He had become Leonardo and was making Leonardo’s name immortal.
I walked back out and ordered my grandsons to seal the cave shut with the biggest boulders they could find.
To this day, it remains sealed.
SHADES OF TRUTH
Jana Paniccia
Jana Paniccia was born in Windsor, Ontario, but grew up in the country—just outside the town of Essex. After extended stops in Ottawa, Vancouver, Australia, and Japan, Jana moved to Toronto, where she now works at an advisory services firm. Jana’s work can also be found in the anthologies Women of War and Summoned to Destiny. She is also co-editing the upcoming DAW anthology Under Cover of Darkness with Julie E. Czerneda.
IGNORE THE COLORS.
Standing on the banks of the Melrada River, his back to the ancient oaks whose wood was essential to the livelihood of Arboran’s secluded mountain community, Jaryn Dalsayan tried to remember his sister’s words of caution even as he tensed under the onslaught of new perceptions.
Once clear water now glowed a luminescent aquamarine, deepening in richness as it swirled downstream. Silver-grey sparkles pierced its flow, singing with the lives of young salmon and trout. Trees whose branches’ shadowy pall had once brought shivers of unexpected nervousness running through him picked up an emerald lustre none could consider frightening. And the sky . . . the sky danced with streaks of gilded gold whose brilliance melted all thought and offered a promise of change.
Without thought for consequences, Jaryn reached out with both hands seeking to grasp the radiance giving the entire world a new face. His arms and legs tingled as arrows of rainbow light pierced his skin. With each new touch came emotional knowledge—awareness. Maple trees on the eastern bank wallowed in the warm spring air, their branches growing outward as water trickled in through their roots. A sparrow twittered in one of the trees, calling out to another farther down the river. He knew the joy in the bird’s song, and echoed with its faint sense of longing. Sunbeams shimmered along the tanned skin revealed by his short-sleeved tunic, working to relax taut muscles and draw him into a new alignment.
For long moments, he revelled in the vision granted by the connection—vibrated with its crystal note of life.
Ignore the colors.
Shuddering, he clenched his eyes shut and dropped to his knees in the damp grass, trying to push out the knowledge of worms slinking their way beneath the soil. Tightening his hands into fists, he refused to accept the new awareness.
None of this is real!
There was no joyful bird. No questing worms. No energy coursing through his spine, seeking to change his being.
There was only himself and the Trial of the Lowest God.
Closed eyelids did nothing to dispel the attraction impinging on his every conscious thought. Struggling to deny the sense of power taking root in his soul, Jaryn cursed the Lowest God.
Please—let Alya be right. Let me reject this. Give your temptation to someone else!
At fourteen years and a season, Jaryn had believed the Lowest God had passed him by . . . ignored him to offer temptation to his more mischievous year-mates. He would not have been surprised. Most of the people in the settlement took his maturity for granted and had begun treating him as an adult. Already he was allowed to tend to the nets at the edge of the river a candle’s mark east of the town’s gates. Collecting fish was a chore; it added benefit to the provisions of the town. It was a man’s job, and one he took pride in.
He had been certain the Lowest God would chose not to lure him, that he would slip into adulthood without experiencing the moment of temptation his elder sister had described—the temptation that had killed several in the town including her closest year-mate. He had believed this without thought, forgetting the truth that without exception every child of Arboran would at the turning to adulthood face the Trial of the Lowest God: the moment where he had to reject the powers of the Lowest God and accept instead the struggles and challenges of life without gifted, tainted aid. Or at least he had forgotten the Trial until the events of that morning had proved his assumption disastrously wrong.
Alya had noticed the signs even before he had. Waking before the sunrise, Jaryn had eaten the cold breakfast of cheese and crusty bread his mother had left out, then stood to make his way down to the shed to pick up the fish netting his father had mended the night before. As he was moving his dishes to the sink, his sister’s gasp from the stair had forced him still. It was she who had pointed to his face and called him demon. As she stood by, he had torn off his woolen cloak, certain of her mistake, only to be confronted by the sight of golden lines twisting an otherworldly glow through his skin. Lines spreading downward from his shoulders toward his wrists.
Please, Highest Lord—turn the Lowest God’s eyes away from me!
Silence met his stark plea. Neither the Highest Lord nor the Lowest God appeared to take back the temptation arousing in his very blood. A temptation that could cost him his soul as the town elders had warned.
“The power the demons in Lianshiavel call the Sanri, comes from the Lowest God. As you become a man, his minions will offer you power and bid you accept his evil into your heart. Yes, this power would give you immense abilities but to use it would cast you into the Lowest God’s hells. All in Arboran understand this; it is why we live apart. Living among the damned would taint us beyond reckoning.”
Kneeling on the grass, cornered by the intensity of the sensations ringing through him—merging with him, Jaryn wondered how he could deny such power. Trying to bar the new impressions, he focused on details: the dampness seeping through the knees of his pants, the impressions his nails were leaving in his palms, the swishing sound of his sister pacing along the ridge overlooking the river, surely wondering at their next move.
His sister, who had hurried him out of town even though they both had been taught that once lines of the Lowest God’s power had reshaped a person’s body nothing could be done. Killing then became a mercy. Better death than the betrayal of all the values they were taught to hold dear.
“Help!” he cried, forcing the words out loud to draw her attention.
From within, a murmuring came: a voice struggling to speak through the rush of an azure waterfall. A mantle of comfort brushed over his senses, muting them into a deep calm. Relishing in the gifted quiet, he turned his focus inward to search for the giver, for a line of sapphire light he knew was not his.
::Lord of the Sanri, brother. What’s happened to you? I can sense your pain from Lianshiavel. Hold on. I’m coming.:: It was a man’s voice, deep and filled with shock. His words echoed through Jaryn’s mind, soundless yet filled with concern.
/> Before he could respond to the strange words, a hand came down on his shoulder breaking the connection. Anxiety washed over him, tinged with an increasing fear.
“Brother, are you all right?” A halo of palest green wrapped his sister, brushing ghostly edges against his skin. With shuttered eyes, Jaryn shouldn’t have been able to see at all, but he could see her. He reeled as his senses merged with hers, giving him a taste of her growing apprehension.
Please, not like Felora. Please don’t take him . . . let him fight it! Her thoughts—not his own.
Shivering, he managed to straighten, using the knowledge of her to ground his awareness in the present and not in the singing offering he had no choice but to ignore. Opening his eyes, he met her concern while trying to disregard the glowing outline of her presence. “Low est God’s Trial. I never expected it to be this hard . . .”
“Oh!” Alya turned to take in their surroundings, her anxiety no less apparent with her back to him. Her movement drew his attention to a log held captive in the depths of the river’s center. Golden tufts of sea grass had taken root in its rotting husk and waved precariously in the light wind. Dark shadows crept through the rotting wood, clashing with the sense of living he received from its passenger.
“It might be hard,” she continued, unaware he could sense her every emotion. “But you have to fight him. You can’t give in. You have to live.” Alya reached out to him, her fingers shaking, tears painting her cheeks with liquid silver light. “Prove the elders wrong. Prove Felora wrong . . . You can still reject him. You can.”
Tensing, Jaryn took her offered hand and stood, leaning against her smaller frame when his own threatened to give. As they touched, her clear thoughts shouted through her fingertips. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe a quick death would be better. Highest Lord, what can I do? He braced himself against her growing panic, shutting his eyes tightly and trusting her to take the lead.
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