by Angus Wells
“I thought,” she said, favoring her friend with a glare, “that it were better to end this war before too many die.”
“Were there a way, aye.” Gwyllym nodded soberly, his craggy face grave. “But there is no way; not that I can see.”
“Destroy the Sky Lords!” Chiara’s pretty face became a harpy’s mask, her voice strident. “Send every one of their God-cursed skyboats down in flames! Build boats of our own, to take the battle to them and lay waste their land!”
Her hands clenched in angry fists; her blue eyes flashed. Rwyan heard Gwyllym sigh, thinking he grew as bored with Chiara’s fanaticism as she. Even Cyraene looked askance at she younger woman.
Gynael said, “You know we cannot build such boats. We can only endeavor to destroy theirs.”
Her tone was soft, as if she delivered a reprimand to a willful child. Chiara turned defiant eyes on the silver-haired woman, lips parting to reply. Before she had chance to speak, Cyraene took her hand, still fisted, and patted gently. “Little one,” she murmured, “you must learn to curb that ardor. You waste your anger, dreaming of what cannot be. We’ve our magic; they, theirs—so it is, and we must accept at.”
For a moment, Chiara seemed about to argue, but then she nodded, her flushed cheeks paling. Rwyan was surprised Cyraene could affect her so; and grateful, for she was in no mood to suffer another eruption. Mildly, she said, “Were it only possible to speak with the Kho’rabi. Perhaps …”
Chiara interrupted with a snort laden with contempt. “You listened too much to Daviot, Rwyan. His mad dreams taint you. I give you Cyraene’s advice—leave off dreaming of what cannot be.”
Rwyan shrugged agreement, not wishing to fuel argument. Tempers grew short in such heat, and likely Chiara was right: Daviot had seeded an idea in her, and likely it was wild as the notion of Dhar airboats, or living dragons.
“Gently, gently.” Gwyllym’s tone was moderate, but beneath lay the steel of authority. “Could we build skyboats, aye—but we cannot. Could we speak with the Sky Lords, aye—but we cannot. We can only do our duty, and that shall be hard do we quarrel amongst ourselves.”
Rwyan said, “Forgive me,” thinking she had done little to warrant apology. Still, she’d not lose Chiara’s friendship, for all the woman grew tiresome. Had I such vehemence, she thought, I’d likely be happier. Surely I’d not entertain such doubts as plague me.
Almost, she smiled at that—another impossibility—but she held her face solemn, attentive again as Gynael said slowly, “Upward of a score, Gwyllym? Why so many, think you?”
The big man shrugged, rough-hewn features expressing incomprehension.
Gynael lowered her wrinkled face as if in thought. “As many came against every one of the Sentinels, and as many were felled. Would they make such a sacrifice? It seems costly to me.”
“The Sky Lords count lives cheap,” said Cyraene.
“True,” Gynael said, her hoarse voice contemplative. “But even so, it seems to me a terrible waste. It prompts me to wonder if all their scouting is not done. If they’ve garnered all the knowledge of Dharbek they need.” She smiled sadly. “I think that what we saw today was a testing; perhaps the last. We’ve seen none of the great vessels in a year or more; nor lately the little skyboats. Now, of a sudden, they come like flies to a midden. Why should that be, think you?”
Her rheumy eyes found Rwyan’s face, and as none other spoke, Rwyan said, “They’d know what magicks we command. Discover if we’ve learned aught to defeat them this past year.”
“I think it so,” said Gynael. “I think they sacrifice their little boats to gain that knowledge.”
Beside her, Rwyan felt Chiara stiffen and “saw” her hand find Cyraene’s. The dark-haired woman’s face was paled; her sharp white teeth worried her lower lip. Across the table Gwyllym sat with clouded visage, his eyes intent on Gynael. His deep voice was a rumble as he said, “The Great Coming.”
“I’d guess it so.” Gynael nodded, then smiled as if amused by their expressions. “Why such startled faces? Is this not what we expected?”
Aye, Rwyan thought, it is. But to expect a thing and to face it are not the same. We are not ready; we’ve not the magic.
“I’d thought,” said Cyraene, her voice hushed, “to have more time. To find the key to defeating their magic …”
Her words tailed off. Gwyllym vented a bass chuckle devoid of humor. “As the seasons they send against us,” he murmured, “so the clock runs faster.”
“Too fast,” whispered Cyraene.
That night, Rwyan dreamed she flew. She sat astride a great winged creature that was simultaneously incorporeal and substantial. She felt the beat of massive wings, the rise and fall of vast ribs, the rush of air that washed her face and streamered her hair, but she could not see the beast. No matter how hard she tried, she could not quite capture its image, so that even as she knew she hurtled through a sky darkening to star-pocked night, borne aloft by what she knew must be a dragon, she felt she was alone, upheld by nothing more than a dream. She grew afraid then, thinking that she must tumble down to the sea below. And Daviot was there, before her, her arms about his waist, her cheek rested snug against his back. She raised her face to nuzzle his hair, and he turned, smiling confidently.
He said, “You see? The dragons live still.”
And she asked, “Where do we go?”
He pointed ahead, and Rwyan saw they had flown through the night, the darkness gone, replaced by the rising sun lifting from a horizon spread with three mountainous islands.
She asked, “Is that not the domain of the Sky Lords?” And he answered only, “Aye.”
Then, from one island, there rose a skyboat, rushing toward them. Rwyan saw the sigils glowing malign along the flanks of the bloodred cylinder and heard the eerie singing of the elementals. In the black basket beneath the cylinder, she saw the glint of sun on metal as bows were drawn. She felt the Kho’rabi wizards summon their magicks to send against her, against Daviot, and readied her own, unsure her strength should be enough to defeat so many.
She said, “Daviot, I’m afraid.”
And he answered her, “What other choice is there?”
Rwyan woke then, the question still loud inside her head. She could not understand it; nor, all that day, could she forget it. She told no one, for she could not believe any on the island should own the answer; and it was, after all, only a dream.
In the tense days that followed, the dream returned nightly, always the same, unchanged and inexplicable. Rwyan set it aside as best she could and endeavored to concentrate on her duties. That was no easy task, for like all on the island, she waited on the summons to battle. When she walked abroad, she was not alone in looking often at the sky, and all the time that part of her attuned to the minds around her listened for the call that should send her to the tower and the crystal, to war.
One night a storm arose and she neither dreamed nor slept very much for the crash of thunder and the vivid illumination of the lightning that danced across the sky. She dared hope the tempest was herald of the occult summer’s ending, but she was disappointed: the heat did not abate, and the next morning the air was again cloying, the sun a baleful eye overhead.
Then, when the storm was gone as if it, too, had been only a dream, her life was irrevocably changed.
The sun, although barely a handspan above the horizon, transformed the sky to a sheet of flawless blue silvered by the rising heat. The boundary line separating the heavens from the unbroken surface of the ocean was indiscernible, air and water merging in burnished union. No motion of waves disturbed the one, nor cloud the other: only the shimmering blue existed, fierce as a furnace, painful to observe and soul-destroyingly empty. The coruscating glory of the dawn was a brief memory, the interim between darkness and day burned off in an eye’s blink, like gossamer feather fallen in fire. What little cool the night had brought was gone as swiftly, replaced by the intensity of the ascending sun.
The man turned slitted
eyes from his observation to study the rock on which he lay, optimism flaring and dying as swiftly as the dawn. It had not changed since he had last seen it, despite his hope that he was somehow, in some manner he could not comprehend, caught in a dream that would end with the night. That forlorn solace evaporated as he cast his eyes—what color were they? he wondered—over the oblong slab of unblemished white.
It was exactly as he recalled, and he knew that if he summoned the energy to rise and step out its confines, it would measure fifty paces by nineteen, slanting a little upward after the thirtieth pace, sloping about its perimeter into the ocean. That vast womb seemed to wait, patient, knowing that in time it would have him, just as it had welcomed the bleached bones he had cast upon its waters, as much to introduce some disturbance, some leavening of the awful monotony, as to rid the stone of the empty-eyed reminders that death stood close by his shoulder. They had provided a small measure of grim amusement as he tossed them out over the featureless water, watching the splashes, wondering what features had fleshed the skulls, what musculature once decorated the bones of arms and legs, the cages of the ribs. He doubted they had been fat, not in this place; but what expressions had they worn when death reached out to touch them, telling them the time had come? He grimaced at the melancholy thought, wondering what his own would be, wondering what he looked like now.
His body—those parts of it he was able to see—was tanned and hard, the belly flat, the muscles firm, laced with corded sinew. His fingers told him his mouth was wide and full-lipped, his nose broad; the hair that fell long about his face was straight and black; but the composition of his features, for all his attempts to catch his reflection in the sea, remained a mystery. As much a mystery as his name, or how he came to be here.
He eased stiffly to a sitting position, limbs grown adjusted to the hard contours of the stone cramping, his mouth dry, the tongue sticky, salted with the scent of the sea. To stand was an effort that spun his head, exploding brilliance behind his eyes, but he forced himself to it, flexing shoulders, turning a neck stiffened in fretful sleep to and fro until his body had resumed some degree of mobility. He performed a series of exercises he could not remember learning, their execution ingrained, habit.
Then with nothing better to do, he sat again, sighing.
He did not know how he had come here, nor how long he had been on this desolate slab, as unsure of those things as he was of … everything.
It was easier to enumerate those things he did not know than his knowledge of himself or his whereabouts. He did not know his name or the place of his birth; he did not know how this ocean that surrounded him was named; he had no idea how he came here, which in turn led to the thought that he did not know if he had enemies, or friends, a family, a wife, or children. He did not know what he looked like, or how many years he had lived, or how he had lived them.
He knew so little: and that was the most frightening thing of all.
It seemed he was born full-grown upon this rock, birthed by the ocean itself perhaps, that awesome mother waiting to take him back, watching implacable as the sun fried his brain and pitched him into madness.
What might he do then? Plunge into the depths and drown? Or die withered by thirst and heat, his skin tightening over his bones until it cracked and fell away, leaving, finally, only a skeleton, perhaps for some other such as he to find. He was aware that he did not fear death in the same way that he knew such exercises as loosened his cramped limbs, but not how or why, and that blankness, that absence of memory, of self-knowledge, was the most galling aspect of this strange limbo.
He grunted, rising again, seeking in movement refuge from such melancholy contemplation. He was not dead yet, and whilst blood still pulsed in his veins, he would not give up, not turn to find death but flee from that embrace. He shaded his eyes, staring over the remorseless blue toward the scattering of similar rocks that jutted above the water. They were empty of life, though he suspected they held their caches of bones, offering no escape. He had thought of swimming to the closest—until he had seen the dark fins that occasionally clove the surface of the sea, judging from their size that the bodies beneath were sufficiently large to possess maws capable of swallowing him. In time, perhaps that would seem the more preferable option; but not yet. No: he was not ready yet.
He walked to the farther extension of the rock and crouched on the rim, peering down. Yesterday—or was it before yesterday? Time blurred in the amnesiac miasma of his memory—he had caught two crabs here, where the stone slab descended in a sharper curve to form a shallow bowl before slanting at a steeper angle into the depths. There had been more, moving about the pool, but he had been able to snatch up only two before the rest scuttled to the safety of the ocean. Neither was large, though he had received a painful abrasion from the pincers of one before smashing its shell against the stone, and the extraction of the raw meat did more to tell him his teeth were sound than assuage his hunger. But they had offered some sustenance: now there were none, and the scraps of broken carapace he had set out in faint hope of catching fresh water should rain fall or dew form were empty, dry as his own arid mouth. He swept them aside, seeing them fly over the smooth surface of the ocean, watching the small splashes they made, and pushed wearily to his feet.
Back, fifty paces to where the rock swept gently into the water, the stone was already warm beneath his bare soles. Soon it would be too hot to tread, and he would huddle, drawing in upon himself, seeking to reduce the area of skin exposed to the sun, cupping his hands over his head as he felt the rays burn into his mind, removing them only when he felt the heat become too great to bear and it seemed his flesh must take flame and burn. Then he would fight the temptation to dive into the seductive water, knowing that he must either give himself up or emerge salt-caked, easier prey to his fiery enemy, those parts of him already burned screaming silently at the saline caress.
The darkness was little better, though it brought a slight lessening of the heat, for then it seemed the ocean woke, great bodies moving within its suspension, half-seen things rising and diving, black bulks etched by the same moonlight that silvered the water, filigree patterns formed by the ripples. He looked then on stars he could not name, though he knew instinctively—or felt he did—in which direction north lay, and east, south, west, though he could not say what lands boundaried the water. Indeed, he could not say that the sea ended, could not be sure it did not extend forever, circling back on itself, this unknown world in which he found himself ocean-girt and he the only living human creature on it. Save that he felt in his bones his homeland lay to the east; and that others had preceded him: there was skeletal evidence of that.
He clung to the belief that he had come here through human agency: thus might he hope to escape by the same means. Perhaps some vessel would pass and take him off. Or grant him the boon of a boat; water and some means of shelter, at least.
Or perhaps not, said the unseen figure waiting at his shoulder. If men cast you away here, why should men succor you? Why should they not pass you by?
“Because they are men,” he answered, “and not all men can be so cruel.”
Can they not? Death asked mildly. Do you know that?
He paused before he shook his head and said, “No,” hearing soft laughter at the admission.
“You are not there,” he said, “I am talking to myself. Perhaps I am going mad.”
Perhaps, came the response.
“No,” he said, and shivered despite the heat, and drew his hands down over his face, tasting the sweat that already beaded his palms. “Go away.”
He forced his watering eyes to focus, studying his hands, hearing Death’s soft chuckling—or the steady murmuring of the sea, he was not sure which—as he fought despair.
They looked strong, his hands, callused about the bases of fingers and thumbs, across the palms, as if accustomed to wielding some implement. Hair grew dark from the backs, divided by the pale traceries of old scars, that patterning continued along h
is forearms: the blazons of remembrance. He sensed his past there, knowledge of himself: what he was, and what he had been, elusive as a rainbow’s ending. He struggled to pursue the hints, to chase them down, like a man seeking to define a fading dream. It was as if he tried to clutch fog in his hands: hopeless. He blinked as heavy droplets of perspiration ran down his forehead and clung thick to his lashes, clouding his vision like tears: he wiped at his face, his concentration breaking. He ground his teeth and shook his head lest he weep, unaware that innate pride shaped the movement, glancing up to see the sun risen higher, wondering how much longer he could last.
Not long; not without shade and fresh water, food. Already his lips cracked, and it seemed he could feel the swelling of his tongue, the engorged flesh cloying to the roof of his dehydrating mouth, tender against his teeth. Soon his skin would blister, likely the relentless shimmer of sky and ocean would blind him, and then …
I shall have you, said Death.
“But not yet,” he answered.
Why not? demanded the unseen speaker, gently. You must come to me in the end, and what reason is there to prolong this suffering?
“I do not know who I am,” he said. “I want to remember.”
Is that a reason? Death laughed, dismissive as the softly echoing sea. Does it matter who you are? You are a man alone on a rock in an unknown sea. What more need you know?
“Who I am,” he said. “What I am.”
You are nothing, said Death. You are a sack of flesh stretched over bone that soon will scorch and wither and come to me.
“Then wait,” he said. “Wait until I am ready.”
You draw out your agony, said Death. No more than that. You condemn yourself to needless suffering. There is no one to witness this, no honor in it
Honor: he felt the sharded strings of his memory tugged. “There is me,” he said.
And you are no one, Death countered. Come to me.
“No!” He shouted now, the sound startling him, so that he looked up and saw the sun had passed its zenith and was moving toward the western horizon. “You see?” he told his adversary; told himself. “I have survived another day.”
