Roberson, Jennifer - Cheysuli 08

by A Tapestry of Lions (v1. 0)

  He wet dry lips. "Granddame—"

  Aileen's face was white and terrible. "How do you think it feels to know that your grandson—the only heir to the Lion—lacks the balance that will maintain his humanity; that if he does not gain it, the beast in him will prevail?" Aileen leaned close. "He is my husband," she declared. "He is my man. If you threaten him with this, be certain you shall suffer."

  It shocked him. "Granddame!"

  She was not finished. "I wasted too many years not honoring him enough. That time is past. I will do what I must do to keep him from destroying himself because a spoiled, defiant grandson refuses to grow up."

  "Granddame, you cannot know—"

  "I know," she said. "I saw his face when he looked at you. I saw his fear."

  The Erinnish possessed his tongue. "I'm not knowing what to do.”

  Aileen stepped close to the bed. Her hand touched Sima's head. "Be what you are. Be a Cheysuli warrior. You're in need of the gods' care more than any man I know."

  It filled his mouth before he could prevent it, lashing out to punish. The question was utterly unexpected, yet even as he asked it, Kellin knew he had desired to frame the words for many, many years. "Does it mean nothing to you at all that your son repudiates you?"

  Color spilled out of her face.

  Kellin was appalled. But the words were said; he could not unsay them. "I only mean—"

  "You only mean that he deserted his mother as well as his son, yet she does nothing?" Aileen's eyes were a clear, unearthly green, and empty of tears. "She has not done nothing, Kellin—she has done everything within her power to convince him to come home. But Aidan says—said—no, when he answered my letters at first. He answers nothing now; he said I need only ask the gods." Her chin trembled minutely. "He has a powerful faith, my son—so powerful it blinds him to the needs of other people."

  "If you went there—"

  "He forbids it."

  "You are his jehana.”

  Her fingers folded themselves into her skirts. "I will not go as a supplicant to my own son. I have some measure of pride."

  "But it must hurt you!"

  Her eyes dimmed behind a glaze of tears. "As it hurts you. As it hurts Brennan. We are all of us scarred by the absence of Aidan."

  Cold fury filled Kellin. "And you wonder why I want nothing to do with a lir, or with the gods! You have only to look at him, and what obsession has made of him. I will not be so bound."

  "You will be Mujhar one day. That will bind you even as it does your grandsire."

  Kellin shook his head. "That is different. What kind of a Mujhar risks himself by bonding with an animal who might be the death of him? Does he not therefore risk his realm as well—and the prophecy?"

  Aileen's voice was steady. "What is worth having if you are naught but a beast, and your people desire to kill you?"

  Sixteen

  One hundred and two steps. Kellin counted them as he climbed down from the Great Hall into the undercroft of Homana-Mujhar, where the Womb of the Earth lay within lir-warded walls. As a boy he had gone once with Ian, and once with the Mujhar. He had never gone alone.

  Not entirely alone. The cat is with me.

  He did not want her there. But she was the reason he went down to the Womb at all.

  One hundred and two steps. He stood in a small closet made of stone and depressed the keystone.

  A wall turned on edge, and the Womb lay before him.

  Air was stale, but did not stink of an ending.

  The passageway walls were damp-slicked and shiny. He carried a torch; it smoked and streamed, shedding fragile light as he put it forward to illuminate the Womb.

  Kellin tensed, though he knew what to expect; three visits were not enough to diminish the impact. Lir leapt out of walls and ceiling, tearing free of stone. They were incredibly lifelike, as if a sculptor had captured living animals and encased them in marble rather than carving them. They stared back at him from hard, challenging eyes: creamy ivory veined with gold.

  The Womb gaped. Its rim was nonexistent in distorting light, so that he could not see the rune-worked edge. Only the deeper blackness that marked its mouth.

  Kellin wet drying lips and moved past the lir-carved door slowly, holding the torch outthrust so he did not mistake the footing and tumble to his death.

  But would I die? I am meant to be Mujhar ... those to be Mujhar can survive the rebirth.

  He did not have the courage to accept the challenge.

  Kellin stepped inside. The Womb's maw expanded as the torch, held in an unsteady hand, illuminated the truth: a perfectly rounded hole that had accepted men before and refused to give them a second birth.

  "Carillon," he murmured. "The last Prince of Homana to enter into the Womb and be born in the shape of a king."

  He had learned the histories. He knew his birthline. Carillon of Homana, the last Homanan Mujhar.

  "After him, Donal. Then Niall. Then—Brennan."

  Kellin's jaws tightened. The next should have been my jehan, had he the courage to understand.

  But Aidan had renounced it. Aidan had been a coward.

  Should I leap into the Womb to prove my worthiness? Can I atone for my jehan's weakness with my own strength? He stared hard at the marble lir. "Is that what they want?"

  No answer. The lir stared back in silence.

  Kellin turned and set the torch into a bracket.

  Carefully he took three steps to the edge of the Womb, then squatted down beside it. Buttocks brushed booted heels. Sore thighs protested, as did newly knit ribs.

  Silence.

  Kellin's mouth went dry. In the presence of the Lion, he had felt many things. But the Womb was not the Lion. It spoke to him of a heritage far older than the Lion's, who was, in the unbiased nature of measurement, naught but a newmade thing. A cub to the Womb's adulthood. The walls were man-made, and the lir carved within stone, but before men had meddled to glorify what they perceived as the tangible proof of power, there had been the Womb.

  "A gate," Kellin murmured. "How many have gone through it?"

  Movement caught his attention. A black shadow paced into the vault, then rounded the Womb. It sat down across from him so that the Womb lay between, black and impenetrable. Gold eyes threw back smoky torchlight, opaque and eerily slanted.

  Now, she said. Your choice.

  He did not speak as a lir. "Is it?"

  It has always been your choice.

  "According to the prophecy, there can be no choice. If a warrior repudiates his tahlmorra, his service to the prophecy, he is denied the afterlife."

  Her tail twitched once, then folded over arched toes. He had seen housecats sit so; incongruity.

  She was not and could never be tame. A man may turn his back on life after death. It is his right to do so. It is the price of living.

  "To choose how he will live after he is dead?" Kellin grinned derisively. "I sense obscurity. I smell the kind of argument that must content my jehan, who trafficks with the gods. How else could a man be made to repudiate his son?"

  He did not. He answered his tahlmorra. Her tail twitched again. He created your tahlmorra in the following of his own.

  Kellin frowned. "I mislike oblique speech. Say what there is to say."

  That it is a warrior's choice to be other than the gods might prefer him to be.

  "And therefore alter the prophecy?"

  Your jehan might say that altering of the prophecy also follows its path.

  Kellin swore and sat down upon his rump, letting his heels slide forward. With blatant disregard for proprieties, he dangled both legs into the void. "You are saying that a man who turns his back on the prophecy also follows it by that very repudiation. But how? It makes no sense. If I made myself celibate and sired no more children, there would be no Firstborn. How would that serve a prophecy that exists solely to make another Firstborn?"

  You have already sired children.

  He thought about it. So he had. They, too, each of them
, claimed the proper blood. Save for the final House, the final link in the chain. Kellin drew in a deep breath. "If I went to Solinde and found myself an Ihlini woman with whom I could bear to lie and got a child upon her, the task is finished. The prophecy complete."

  Sima's tail twitched. She offered no answer.

  "I could do it tomorrow, if I decided to. Leave. Go to Solinde. Find myself a woman, and end this travesty."

  Sima displayed her teeth. No one ever said it would be difficult.

  Kellin exploded. "Then if it is so easy to do—"

  But he let it trail off. "The blood. It comes to that. Ian lay with Lillith and sired Rhiannon. Rhiannon lay with my grandsire and bore—who? A daughter? The one who in turn lay with Lochiel and bore him the daughter with whom I shared a cradle?" Kellin hitched his shoulders. "And who, no doubt, would be the unlikeliest woman with whom I should be matched—and therefore is, in the perversity of the gods, the very woman they intend for me to lie with. To sire the proper son. Cynric, the Firstborn.'"

  Sima held her silence.

  The image was vivid before him. "Lochiel will geld me. He will show the woman to me—or, rather, me to her—and then he will geld me! So that I know, and she knows, how very close we came—and how superior the Ihlini are despite our Cheysuli gifts."

  Sima bent her head and licked delicately at a paw.

  "No answer?" Kellin asked. "No commentary? But I believed the lir were put here to aid their warriors, not obfuscate the truth."

  The cat lowered her paw. She stared directly at him across the black expanse of the Womb. Feral gold eyes dominated the darkness. I am not your lir. Have you not declared it? Have you not renounced me as your jehan renounced you?

  Had he? Had he?

  A lirless warrior was destined to go mad. A lirless Cheysuli was not a warrior at all. A lirless Cheysuli could never be Mujhar. Could never hold the Lion.

  Could never sire the Firstborn because the Cheysuli would look to another.

  A solution presented itself. An answer to the questions.

  Kellin shuddered once. Sweat ran down his temples and stung the scratches on his face. Breathing was shallow, though the ribs now were healed. A flutter filled his belly, then spilled to genitals.

  He swallowed painfully because his throat was dry and tight. He pressed both hands against cold stone on either side of his thighs. Fingertips left damp marks. Within the link, he said, Let the gods decide.

  Kellin, prince of Homana, thrust himself into the Womb.

  No top. No bottom. No sides.

  No beginning, nor an ending.

  Merely a being.

  Kellin bit his lips bloody so he would not scream. It would diminish him to scream. Such noise would dishonor the gods.

  Gods? What did he know of gods? They were, he had said, little more than constructs invented by men who desired to rule others, to keep lesser men contained so that they maintained the power.

  Gods. His father worshiped them. Jehan, father, sire . .. there were so many words. None of them made sense. Nothing at all made sense to a man who leapt into the Womb.

  The only sense in such folly was the search for sense, so he might understand what manner of man he was and what he was meant to be in the context of the gods.

  Gods. Yet again.

  If he renounced them, if he repudiated them, would they permit him to die?

  If there were no gods, then surely he was dead.

  Kellin fell. There was no bottom. He did not scream at all.

  What were the Cheysuli but children of the gods? It was what the word meant.

  Upon such unflagging faith was a race made strong, so others could not destroy it.

  Men who had nothing in which to believe soon believed in Nothing. Nothing destroyed a man.

  Nothing destroyed a race.

  Was Nothing, then, a demon?

  Belief replaced Nothing. Belief destroyed the demon.

  The Cheysuli were, if nothing else, a dedicated race. Once a thing made sense within the context of their culture, belief was overriding. Belief was their champion; it overwhelmed Nothing so the demon died of disuse, of DisBelief.

  In the Womb, Kellin laughed. What had Sima said as Kellin looked upon flesh-bound wrists?

  "You believe too easily in what the Ihlini tells you to. His art is illusion. Banish this one as you banished the Lion."

  Illusion was another's successful attempt to make a man believe in something that did not truly exist. The key to banishing illusion was to disbelieve.

  Corwyth, and other Ihlini, had tried very hard to make the Cheysuli disbelieve in the prophecy.

  The Ihlini disbelieved. Teirnan and the a'saii had—and did—disbelieve. And if disbelief could defeat illusion, and yet the prophecy survived, was it therefore a true thing, a thing with substance?

  Or was it simply that the Cheysuli who believed in it believed so strongly that the weight of their faith, the contents of their spirits, destroyed the disbelief?

  The champion of the gods, called Belief, destroyed the demon whose true-name was DisBelief.

  Kellin cried out in the confines of the Womb: "I do not understand.'"

  History rose up. So many lessons learned. The hours and days and weeks and months Rogan had spent with him, laboring to instruct so that Kellin comprehended the heritage of the races he represented. He could name all his races, all the Houses in his blood. They were each of them necessary.

  So was it necessary for him to have a lir; to renounce the bond was to renounce his very self and the legacy of the blood.

  A lirless Cheysuli had hurled himself into the Womb. He had placed his fate within the hands of the gods.

  Kellin's shout echoed: "Tahlmorra lujhalla mei wiccan, cheysu!"

  He had invited them to decide. If a man did not believe, would he risk himself so? If DisBelief ruled him, he would therefore commit suicide by issuing such a challenge, for a challenge with no recipient was no challenge at all but the substanceless defiance of an ignorant child.

  Suicide was taboo.

  Paradox, Kellin thought: Suicide was taboo, yet a lirless Cheysuli undertook the death-ritual. His sojourn in the forest was meant to find his death however it chose to take him; it was nothing else but suicide, though a man did not stab himself, or drink poison knowingly.

  He died because of beasts. He died as prey to predator, as meat for the gods' creatures.

  From flesh-colored clay in the hands of the gods, a man became meat.

  The Wheel of Life turned so that the clay was fired in the kiln of the gods and set upon the earth to live as the clay willed. Believing or DisBelieving.

  Kellin understood.

  "Y'ja'hai!" he shouted.

  Clay without the blood of a lir was nothing but colorless powder. Unmixed. Unmade. Never thrown upon the Wheel.

  Kellin understood.

  Kellin Believed.

  The image of Sima's face flashed before blind eyes.

  "I accept," he said. "Y'ja'hai." Then, desperately, "Will you accept me?"

  The words rang in his head. Ja'hai-na, she said.

  Y'ja'hai.

  The lir-link meshed, locked, sealed itself together. Nothing could break it now but the death of warrior or lir.

  That knowledge no longer mattered to Kellin.

  He was whole. He was Cheysuli.

  The Womb of the Earth was fertile. The Jehana gave birth once again after nearly one hundred years, to suckle the newborn man upon the bosom of his tahlmorra.

  The Prince of Homana would one day become Mujhar.

  He roused to torch-smudged darkness and the gaze of marble lir. He lay sprawled on his back with arms and legs splayed loosely, without purpose or arrangement, as if a large negligent hand had spilled him from its palm onto the vault floor.

  He thought perhaps one had.

  "Lir?" He gasped it aloud, because before he had refused to honor her in -the link. "Sima?" And then, scraping himself up from the floor, he wrenched his body sideways, to
grasp frenziedly at the cat who sat quietly by the hole into which he had pushed himself. Lir? This time in the link, so there was no room for doubt. There would never be doubt again. He would not permit it; could not allow himself—

  Sima blinked huge eyes.

  He scrabbled to her on awkward knees, needing to touch her fur; requiring to touch the body that housed the blazing spirit. Lir? Lir?

  Sima yawned widely to display fearsome fangs.

  Then she shook her head, worked wiry whiskers, and rose. She padded all of two steps, pressed her head into his shoulder, then butted him down. She was ungentle; she wanted him to acknowledge the power in her body despite its immaturity. She was lir, after all; far superior to cat.

  He could say nothing but her name. He said it many times despite the fur in his mouth as she leaned down upon him; despite the weight on his chest as she lay down across him; despite the warping of his mouth as her tongue reshaped his lips.

  Lir—lir—lir. He could not say it enough.

  Sima kneaded his shoulders. Smugly, she said, Better now than never.

  While the tears ran down his face.

  Seventeen

  Kellin clattered down the stairs to the first floor, intent on his destination. Behind him came Sima, glossy in mid-morning light; gold eyes gleamed.

  Daily her gangliness faded and was replaced by a burgeoning maturity, as if full bonding had at last loosed the vestiges of cubhood. She would one day, Kellin believed, rival Sleeta for size and beauty.

  A month ago you would not have considered it, she told him.

  A month ago I was lirless, and therefore lacked a soul. What man without a soul can acknowledge his lir's promise?

  Within the link, she laughed. How we have changed in four weeks!

  He left behind the staircase and strode on toward the entryway. Some would argue I have not changed at all; that I still frequent taverns—

  But not those in the Midden.