The undersea origin of the Isle could not be doubted. It was attested to by the fact that the entire place was a single enormous mass of chalk many hundreds of miles across and more than half a mile high, having the form of three giant circular tiers set one atop the next; and chalk is a substance made up of the shells of microscopic creatures of the sea.
Those great chalk ramparts gleamed now with overpowering whiteness in the bright blaze of the sun, filling all the sea before them like an impassable barrier. Varaile and Prestimion stood staring in wonder. “I think I can make out two of the three levels from here, and maybe just a hint of the third,” he said. “The big one that forms the base of the island is called First Cliff. There’s a forest along its rim, hundreds of feet above sea level. Do you see? And that must be Second Cliff that begins there, set back a goodly way from the one below. If you follow the white wall up and up, you’ll see a second line of green—that’s the boundary between Second Cliff and Third Cliff, I suppose. Third Cliff itself begins several hundred miles inland. You can’t really see it from below, except perhaps a suggestion of its summit. That’s where Inner Temple is: the place of the Lady.”
“It dazzles my eyes. I knew the Isle was made of white stone, but I never thought it would shine like that! Will we be going all the way to the top?”
“Probably. The Lady rarely descends to meet her son; it’s always the other way around. The custom is for her hierarchs to meet the Coronal at the harbor and take him first to the lodge they maintain for him there. He’s the representative of the world of action, you see, all noise and masculine bluster, and he needs to go through some transitional rituals before he can be admitted to his mother’s contemplative domain. Then they conduct him upward to her through the various terraces of the three cliffs. Eventually we’ll arrive at Inner Temple itself, up at the top, where my mother will receive us.”
So steeply did the Isle’s tremendous white rampart rise from the sea that there were only two harbors where ships could land, both of them difficult of access: Taleis on the Zimroel side, and Numinor here, facing Alhanroel. To these, at certain specified times of the year, came pilgrims from the mainland, some merely to retreat from the world for a year or two of meditation and ritual cleansing, others to join the Lady’s realm and spend the rest of their lives in her service.
The swift vessel that had carried Prestimion and Varaile across from Alaisor was too big to enter Numinor harbor. It had to anchor well out at sea, where its passengers were transferred to a waiting ferry whose pilot knew the secrets of the narrow channel, much beset by swift currents and treacherous reefs, through which the shore could be approached.
Three tall, slender elderly women of great dignity and gravity of bearing, clad identically in golden robes trimmed with red, were waiting at the pier when the ferry arrived. They were hierarchs of the Isle, lieutenants whom the Lady Therissa had sent to greet him. “We are instructed to conduct you first,” the senior one told them, “to the house called Seven Walls.”
Prestimion was expecting that. Seven Walls was the traditional guesthouse for newly arrived Coronals. It turned out to be a low, sturdy building of dark stone that stood atop the rampart of Numinor port, at the very edge of the sea. “But why is it called Seven Walls?” Varaile asked, as they were shown to their chambers within it. “It looks perfectly square to me.”
“No one knows,” Prestimion replied. “This place is as old as the Castle itself, and most of its history is lost in legend. They say that the Lady Thiin, Lord Stiamot’s mother, had it built for him when he came to the Isle to give thanks for his victory at the end of the Metamorph Wars. Supposedly seven Metamorph warriors were entombed in its foundations—warriors that Lady Thiin killed with her own hands while defending the Isle against an army of Shapeshifter invaders. But the building’s foundations have often been reconstructed and nobody’s ever found any Metamorph skeletons down there. Then there’s a notion that Lord Stiamot had a seven-sided chapel constructed in the courtyard while he was here, but there’s no trace of that, either. I’ve also heard it said that the name’s just our version of ancient Shapeshifter words meaning ‘the place where the fish scales are scraped off,’ because there was a Metamorph fishing village here in prehistoric times.”
“I like that one the best,” said Varaile.
“So do I.”
Certain rituals of purification were required of him before he could proceed higher on the Isle, and he spent several hours that evening performing them under the instruction of one of the hierarchs. He and Varaile slept that night in a splendid chamber overlooking the sea, amidst dark weavings of a style so antique that Prestimion found himself wondering whether Lord Stiamot himself had selected them. He imagined that the ghosts of all the kings of bygone years who had slept in this room would be crowding around him in the night, offering anecdotes of their reigns, or advice on how to deal with the problems of his own, but in fact he dropped almost instantly into the deepest of sleeps, and the dreams that came to him were peaceful ones. The Isle was a place of tranquility and harmony: all anxiety was banished here.
In the morning began the journey upward to the Lady. Varaile and Prestimion alone would go, not any of the others who had made the journey with them from the Castle. Permission to ascend to Third Cliff and the Inner Temple was not ordinarily granted to those who had not passed through the full rite of initiation.
The hierarchs led them to the terminal along the waterfront from which the floater-sleds in which they would make their ascent departed. Looking up at the glittering white wall of First Cliff, rising skyward virtually in a straight line, Prestimion was unable to see how it could be possible to traverse it. But the sled rose silently and easily, making the steep climb without effort, and nestled into its landing pad at the summit of the cliff like a great gihorna folding its wings. When they looked back, they could see Numinor port like a toy town below them, and the two curving arms of its stone breakwater jutting out into the sea like a pair of fragile sticks.
“We are at the Terrace of Assessment, where all novices come first. They are evaluated there, and their destinies are decided,” one of the hierarchs explained. “Beyond it, a short distance inland, is the Terrace of Inception, where those who will be allowed to continue to a higher level undergo their preliminary training. After a time—weeks, months, sometimes years—they go on to the Terrace of Mirrors, where they are brought into confrontation with their own selves, and make their preparations for what lies ahead.”
A floater-wagon was waiting to carry Prestimion and Varaile onward. Quickly they left the pink flagstone streets of the Terrace of Assessment behind and journeyed across a seemingly endless realm of cultivated fields to the Terrace of Inception, whose entrance was marked by pyramids of dark blue stone ten feet high. Here they saw some novices working at menial farming tasks, and others gathered in outdoor amphitheaters receiving holy instruction. There was no time to pause for a closer look, though, for the distances here were great, and Second Cliff’s formidable white bulk, standing large in the sky before them, still was very far away.
Indeed, the afternoon was beginning to wane before they reached the cliff’s base. They halted for the night at the third of First Cliff’s terraces, the Terrace of Mirrors, which lay right below the mighty facade of the new wall that reared up over them. At this terrace huge slabs of polished black stone were set edgewise into the ground all about, so that wherever you turned you saw your own image looking back at you, transformed and intensified by the mysterious light of this place. And in the early hours of morning it was upward for them once again, a second dizzying floater-sled climb to the rim of the next level.
There atop Second Cliff they could still see the sea, but it seemed very far away, and Numinor itself lay tucked out of sight, hidden from view just beyond the perimeter of the Isle. They could barely make out the pink rim of First Cliff’s outermost terrace. The Terrace of Mirrors, directly below them, seemed to be aglow with green flame wherever its mo
numental stone slabs were struck by the morning sun. “The outer terrace where we stand now,” a hierarch told them, “is known as the Terrace of Consecration. From here we will come to the Terrace of Flowers, the Terrace of Devotion, the Terrace of Surrender, and the Terrace of Ascent.” Prestimion felt a touch of awe as he contemplated the complexity and richness of the system by which the realm of the Lady was constructed. He had never suspected so elaborate a structure of preparation for the tasks that were carried out here.
But there was no time to linger and learn. The holiest sanctuary of all, Third Cliff, the abode of the Lady of the Isle, still had to be attained.
One more breathtaking vertical sled-ride and they were there. Prestimion was struck at once by the singular quality of the air up here, thousands of feet above the sea. It was cool and amazingly clear, so that every topographic detail of the Isle below them stood out as though magnified in a glass. The unfamiliar quality of everything—the light, the sky, the trees—so enthralled him that he paid no attention as the hierarchs called off the names of the terraces through which they were passing, until at last he heard one say, “And this is the Terrace of Adoration, the gateway to Inner Temple.”
It was a place of low, rambling buildings of whitewashed stone, set in gardens of surpassing beauty and serenity. The Lady, they were informed, awaited them; but first they must refresh themselves from their journey. Acolytes conducted them to a secluded lodge in a garden of venerable gnarled trees and arbors of serpentine vines laden with many-petaled blue flowers. A sunken tub lined with cunningly interwoven strips of smooth green and turquoise stone seemed irresistible. They bathed together, and Prestimion, smiling, ran his hand lightly over the swelling curve of Varaile’s abdomen. Afterward they dressed themselves in soft white robes that had been provided for them, and servitors brought them a meal of grilled fish and some delectable blue berries, which they washed down with chilled gray wine of a kind Prestimion was unable to identify; and then, only then, did one of the hierarchs who had accompanied them on their ascent tell them that they were summoned to the presence of the Lady. It was all very much like a dream. So solemn and majestic had the entire process been, and so beautiful, that Prestimion found it almost impossible to realize that what he was actually doing was paying a visit to his own mother.
But she was much more than just his mother, now. She was mother to all the world: mother-goddess, even.
They reached Inner Temple, where she was waiting for them, by crossing a slender arch of white stone that carried them over a pond of big-eyed golden fish into a green field where every blade of grass seemed to be of precisely the same height. At its far end was a low flat-roofed rotunda, its facade completely without ornamentation, that had been fashioned from the same translucent white stone as the bridge. Eight narrow wings, equidistantly placed, radiated from it like starbeams.
The hierarch gestured toward the rotunda. “Enter. Please.”
The simple room at the heart of the rotunda was octagonal in design, a white marble chamber without furnishings of any kind. In its center was a shallow pool, also eight-sided. The Lady Therissa stood beside it, smiling, holding out her hands in welcome.
“Prestimion. Varaile.”
She seemed, as ever, miraculously youthful, dark-haired and graceful and smooth of skin. Some said that all that was achieved through sorcery, but Prestimion knew that that was untrue. Not that the Lady Therissa had ever shown any disdain for the services of sorcerers: she had long had a magus or two in her employ at Muldemar House. But she kept them there to predict the fortunes of the grape harvest, not to cast spells that would guard her from the ravages of age. Even now she had a magical amulet about her wrist, a golden band inscribed in emerald shards with runes of some kind, but that too, Prestimion was certain, was there for some reason other than vanity’s sake. He was unshakably convinced that it was by her own inner radiance and not any kind of wizardry that his mother had preserved her beauty so far into her middle years.
But her ascent to the Ladyship had given her a new kind of luster, an unfamiliar queenly aura that enhanced and deepened her great beauty. The silver circlet about her forehead that was the Lady of the Isle’s badge of office enshrined her in a wondrous glowing aura.
He had heard tales of that, how the silver circlet inevitably transformed its wearer, and thus it must have happened to the Lady Therissa. Plainly this was the role she had waited all her life to play. Her chief claim to distinction, once upon a time, had been that she was the wife of the Prince of Muldemar, and when that title passed to Prestimion she had been known for being the mother of the Prince of Muldemar; but now at last she had become someone of distinction in her own right, holder of the title of Lady of the Isle, one of the three Powers of the Realm. A position for which, Prestimion thought, she had quietly been preparing herself all the time that he had been heir-presumptive to Confalume’s throne, and which now provided her with the duties that she had been born to perform, for years not in any way knowing that she had been born for them, but born for them all the same.
She embraced Varaile first, a long warm enfolding of her in her arms, several times calling her “daughter,” and tenderly stroking her cheek. She had never had a daughter of her own, and Prestimion was the first of her sons to marry.
Varaile’s pregnancy seemed to be no surprise to her: she spoke of it at once, and referred to the child as “him,” as though there could be no doubt of that. Prestimion stood to one side a long while as the two women spoke.
Then at last she turned to him and embraced him also, but much more quickly, though at her touch he was able to feel the tingling power of her office, the force that marked her off from all other beings in the world. As she stepped back from him Prestimion saw that her demeanor was different now from what it had been with Varaile a moment before, her warm smile fading away, the expression of her eyes darkening. She was turning to the true business of the visit. “Prestimion, what has happened to the world? Do you know what I see, whenever I send my mind outward into it?”
He had been certain it was going to be this. “The madness, you mean?”
“The madness, yes. I find it everywhere. I encounter bewilderment and pain wherever I look. It is, of course, the task of the Lady and her acolytes to go up and down the world reaching out to those who are suffering and offering them the comfort of kind dreams, and we do what we can; but what’s going on now is beyond the scope of our abilities here. We work day and night to heal those who need us; but there are millions, Prestimion. Millions. And the number grows daily.”
“I know. I’ve seen it in one city after another as I travel. The chaos, the pain. Varaile’s own father has been taken by it. And—”
“But have you seen it, Prestimion? Have you? Not as I have, I think. Come with me.”
7
She turned and went from the room, beckoning him to follow her. Prestimion hesitated, frowning, and glanced at Varaile, not sure whether the invitation extended to her; but then he gestured to her to accompany him. The Lady Therissa could always send Varaile away if she was not meant to see whatever it was that the Lady Therissa meant to show him.
Already she was far down the hallway, moving past one and then a second of the spoke-like wings that spread outward from the core of the temple. Glancing in, Prestimion saw acolytes and perhaps hierarchs seated at long tables, heads bowed in what looked like meditation. Their eyes were closed. All wore silver circlets much like the Lady’s own around their foreheads. The mysteries of the Isle, he thought: they are casting their minds outward, searching for those in need, bringing dreams of healing to them. Was it sorcery or science by which their questing spirits roved the world? There was a difference between the two, he knew, although the means by which the Lady and her people went about their tasks here seemed every bit as magical to him as the spells and incantations of the mages.
She had gone into a small room brightly illuminated by natural light pouring through carved lacy tessellations in the marble
ceiling. It appeared to be her private study. In it were a desk made of a single brilliantly polished slab of some colorful mottled stone, a low couch, a couple of small tables. Three alabaster vases against the far wall held a lovely display of cut flowers, scarlet and purple and yellow and cobalt blue.
It did not seem to trouble her that Varaile had come to this room with him. But all her attention was turned toward Prestimion. From a shallow, elegantly inlaid wooden box on her desk she took a slender silver circlet similar to the one she wore and handed it to him.
“Put this on, Prestimion.”
He obeyed without questioning. He could barely feel that it was there, so finely made and slight was it.
“And now,” she said, setting two little wine-flasks on the table before him. She pushed one toward him. “This is no wine of our vineyard, but perhaps you’ll recognize the flavor. Drink it down all at once.”
Now he did question, at least with a puzzled glance. But she opened her own flask and drained it at a single draught, and after a moment he did the same with his. It was a dark wine, thick and pungent, and sweet with an aftertaste of spices. He had tasted something like it before, he knew, but where? And then Prestimion realized what it was: the wine that dream-speakers employed in consultations, so that the minds of those who came to them for help would be open to them. There was a drug in it that dissolved the barriers between one mind and another. It was years since he last had been for a speaking—he preferred to puzzle out his own dreams rather than have a stranger help him with their meaning—but he was sure that this was the wine.
“You know what this is?” she asked.
“Speaking-wine, yes. Shall we lie down now?”
“This is not a speaking, Prestimion. You will be awake for this, and you will see things you’ve never seen before. Frightening things, I’m afraid. Give me your hands.” He extended them toward her. “Ordinarily one must have months of training in the technique before one is permitted to do this,” she said. “The power of the vision is simply too great: it can burn out an unprepared mind in a moment. But you will not be traveling on your own. You’ll merely be accompanying me on my own voyage, the one I take every day across the world. You’ll see, through my eyes, the things I see on those voyages. And I will protect you from overflow effects.”
Lord Prestimion Page 41
