by Janzen, Tara
Before he’d left, Dain had set her to work dusting the shelves in his solar. There were hundreds of earthenware vessels to be cleaned, containers made out of boiled leather, small wool pouches, open dishes and baskets holding whole herbs, glass cruets and more jugs and pots than she’d ever seen in one place. He wanted them all tidied, though she guessed his true motive was to keep her occupied and out of trouble while he was gone.
There had been a slight accident, which in no way had been her fault, that had nearly set them afire the previous day. By the time Dain had gotten them both down to smolders sans sparks, he’d been in no mood to continue her studies. The damned distilled wine was what had caused all the commotion. She might have set it too close to the brazier, but she was not the one who had spilled it into the coals, sending an inferno of flame whooshing toward the ceiling. Numa’s wagging tail had done the deed. Still, ’twas an interesting thing, aqua ardens, water that burned, and she was taking plenty with her when she left.
Her cleaning eventually brought her to the door that led to the tower’s upper chamber. Carved in stone above the door, nearly obscured by years of soot and grime, were Latin words. “Amor... lux... veritas... sic itur ad astra,” she murmured.
“Love... light... truth... such is the way to the stars.” The translation took her a moment and still left her wondering what the words meant.
If the answer lay on the other side of the door, she would have to do without it, for unlike the Druid Door, the door to the upper chamber was never opened. Never. Erlend was frightened of the place, though she didn’t know why. As much as he prattled, he wouldn’t say anything beyond “strange, demn things” when asked what it was Dain kept in the eyrie. If she probed further, he became incoherent in his mutterings. Whatever was beyond the door defied either the old man’s comprehension or his power of description, or both, and was no doubt the most interesting thing in the tower. She was sure, too, that it had something to do with Dain’s alchemical dabblings, with the Philosopher’s Stone he was never able to successfully conjure in the lower chamber—the very key to the machinations of nature, time, and transformation, he’d told her. Few of his concoctions and containers made it past the thirtieth distillation on his still, let alone the seventieth some of his receipts required.
She bent down from where she stood on a stool and tried the latch, giving it a little wiggle, then a stronger one. She put her shoulder to it, but nothing happened. It never did.
Yet the door had a lock like any other lock, and where there was a lock, there was a key. Somewhere.
Expecting nothing, she ran her hand across the stones jutting out above the door, doubting that the mage would be so predictable. She got exactly what she expected, with the addition of a bit of cobweb. She’d had the same problem at Usk, trying to get into the library. Her solution then had been a cannily wielded kitchen knife and a sturdy oak twig.
Time was running short, she told herself, looking around for a knife other than her precious Damascene. She could not afford to respect Dain’s privacy when any piece of knowledge she gained could be the one to save her.
The lock turned out to be a simple affair, yielding easily to her prodding and poking. Dain must not have thought it necessary to protect the eyrie beyond the Druid Door, for she had no doubts that he could have made it impossible to enter the upper chamber, if he had chosen to do so. Llynya had been wrong about the magic word, “sezhamey.” Ceridwen had tried it time and again to no avail.
With her strong push, the door opened on creaking hinges, revealing a stairwell filled with dim light and dripping water. She stuck her hand in and touched the curved wall. The stone was cold and wet. A pool of water glistened on the floor, a cache of rain from that morning’s shower caught in a smooth indentation of rock. She skirted it as she stepped into the stairwell. Streams of sunlight broke through the ceiling boards far above her and filtered down, setting the dust motes alight.
Halfway around the first curve, she looked up and, indeed, something strange caught her eye. Her heart skipped a beat and her breath stopped. An orb hung above her in the air, a metal ball with no visible means of support. She stepped back a stair, planning to turn and run as Erlend must have done, when the curved rod that held the orb came into view.
But what held the rod? she wondered, poised between flight and curiosity.
She continued forward, daring all, yet keeping her hand firmly on the wall to insure a quick escape if needs be.
Slowly, she crept up the stairs, listening for danger and hearing naught beyond the same breeze she’d felt in the solar. She was protected from its windy kiss in the stairwell, but she heard the fluttering of cloth in the chamber above her, and the metal ball dipped and swayed ever so slightly.
As she rounded the curve, more of the rod came into view, along with another and another, each with its own orb, though every orb was a different size. ’Twas just as Erlend had said, a strange demn thing.
Her head peeked over the topmost stair, bringing more of the room into view, and her eyes widened. “Sweet Jesu,” she whispered.
~ ~ ~
Dain hung his cloak by the hearth and glanced again toward the door to the upper chamber. ’Twas open. A smile curved his mouth. The maid was nothing if not adventurous.
He’d been caught in a rain shower at dusk, a half league from the tunnel, but the journey had been worth the dousing. He’d had news of home.
Laughter floated down the stairs, and his smile broadened. Night had fallen, and he could well imagine what brought the laughter to her lips, the same thing that had sent Erlend cowering into the alchemy chamber. He picked up the package he’d set on the table and palmed a handful of rihadin out of a bowl on his materia medico shelf, then followed the sound of her laughter.
He mounted the stairs into darkness. Halfway up, he tilted his head back and found stars spinning slowly above him. As he’d thought, she had wasted no time in lighting the orbs. Seven were larger than the rest, representing in ascending order Mercury, Venus, Earth, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Numerous smaller orbs, stars, circled and danced around the outside of the planets, their number, if not their arrangement, corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. The orbs themselves were made of thinly pounded copper patinated by the years to a rich verdigris and put together like two hinged bowls, each one connected by a long, slender rod to a great, skeletal framework of bronze rings, and at the center of the rings, a true wonder of the world—a smoke-smudged pillar quarried out of rock crystal, a semi-precious stone as wide as any oak tree and three times as high as a man. ’Twas a daunting thing to behold, the sphere of bronze rings set at half a dozen angles encircling the massive pillar at its core. The whole of the wondrous device was Nemeton’s celestial sphere, the bard’s heretical, heliocentric map to the cosmos, and looking at it now, he wondered if the pillar was more than the simple rock crystal he’d always thought and mayhaps had elusive and dangerous properties he had yet to encounter, like Madron’s dreamstone.
He’d long since surmised that the pillar represented Helios. The idea of the Earth and her sister planets revolving around the Sun was not new to Dain. Jalal had once taken him to an astrologer in Damascus who had seen such a diagram in an ancient manuscript said to have come from a land that was no more. The East had been full of such missives, though most were not nearly as ancient as their sellers professed. ’Twas not until the Hart, though, that he’d seen any recounting in the West of a Sun-central cosmos. Nor had he foreseen in Damascus how an old man’s ramblings would give him the key to a new life as the Mage of Wydehaw, a key in fact as well as theory. In a clever bit of wordplay, Nemeton had incised three rays of the Sun in the keystone of the stone arch around the Druid Door, showing that brightest of celestial orbs at eventide, noon, and morning rise. Three nights into his delicate assault upon the lock, Dain had forsaken the alchemical order of metals—what he’d considered his cleverest idea—and the more obvious Ptolemaic order of the cosmos, which had the Earth a
s its center, and begun manipulating the iron rods in the pattern of heresy. Still, it had not been an easy thing, for each rod had to be moved in a prescribed order within the circular pattern of the lock. That he had opened the door in a sennight had seemed like magic even to him, despite his endless calculations and drawings.
Dain came into the room on silent feet and reached up to touch the first star he came to, designated by its markings as the polestar. The barest shift in pressure sent the orb circling in the opposite direction, dipping and swaying in a graceful arc around the grooved edge of one of the bronze rings. He could not see Ceridwen through the darkness surrounding the spinning lights, but he could hear her on the other side, opening each orb to light the candle within and then setting the sphere adrift to drift in its lazy circle.
He worked his way around the pillar, changing orbits as he went and dropping in a pinch of rihadin here and there. “Fire eggs,” Jalal had said when he’d asked for a translation of the word, a word from a language spoken beyond the edge of the known world, a place lost in the frozen deserts that lay along the far reaches of the caravan routes.
Mutterings of consternation met his ears as the newly directed stars floated by her, defying their original course.
A fire burned in the chamber’s hearth, warming an iron pot. He set his package on a nearby table and picked up a wooden stirring spoon to taste the cauldron’s steaming, savory-scented contents. The soup was hot and flavorful and good for chasing away his chill. He dipped the spoon in again and brought it to his lips, blowing. Ceridwen had spent a busy afternoon, making soup and discoveries. As the broth cooled, the polestar came back from whence he’d sent it. With his gentle touch, the bright orb went spinning off in reverse.
He ate from the pot and waited, and confounded her from his side of the room. She nearly had all the orbs lit. He found a flagon of wine next to the hearth and tipped it to his mouth. ’Twouldn’t be long now.
The first fireball sparks showered blue and elicited a startled gasp from her. He grinned. Quickly on the heels of the blue came a shower of yellow and a short squeal. He laughed softly and took another swig of wine. Red followed yellow, and green followed red. Another blue rihadin took to flame, but she made no more sounds.
Curious, he walked toward where she’d been, peering through the sparks and circling spheres. When he didn’t see her, he kept walking.
“You!” she accused him from behind, nearly stopping his heart. “I knew ’twas you.”
He whirled, spilling wine onto his hand and across the front of his tunic. He laughed, his own startled sound.
“You ought to be ashamed.” She stood a scant distance from him with her hands on her hips, a warrior’s stance, but he thought he detected a smile on her mouth. He tilted his head to put her better into the light and confirmed his suspicion.
“I am ashamed,” he assured her, grinning, then lifted his hand to his mouth and sucked off the wine. With his other hand, he offered her the flagon.
She took it, one eyebrow arched to let him know a little wine would not absolve him.
“Want to help?” he asked, holding out the rihadin. She did not reply, only reached out and took three packets from his palm.
“Not too much in each,” he warned. “Just a pinch. I’ll do the northern orbits.”
They worked in opposite directions, her filling the lower spheres and him filling the higher ones. When they met again where they’d begun, the first rihadin were sputtering.
“Hurry,” he urged her, taking her by the hand and pulling her along. “We have to open the—” A fountain of yellow and green sparks burst into the air from the nearest orb, cutting off his words and their forward progress. They halted suddenly, bumping against each other. He instinctively protected her by holding her face against his shoulder. He could feel her laughing in his arms.
After the first fiery moments passed, she peeked up, grinning. “I put in the green, but I had no yellow.”
“And I had yellow, but no green.” His own mouth curved into a smile. She had understood as quickly as he. “I fear we’ve doubled up on our pinches.”
“Aye.” His smile broadened.
A shower of red and blue sparks followed by a burst of blue and green confirmed their mistake. He put his mouth close to her ear so she could hear him over the growing din. “We have to open the roof.”
She tilted her head back and gave him a quizzical look.
He pointed to a series of pulleys climbing the wall on the north side of the tower. A web of ropes laced through the wheels and led to the horizontal portcullis that comprised the ceiling of the upper chamber.
They closed the distance in a rain of blue and yellow sparks and put their backs into coaxing the oak-plated roof into giving way. It complied with a shudder and a groan and the high-pitched grating of long-unused gears. Moonlight streamed in through the first crack and spread farther down the dark walls with each crank of the wheel, until half the tower was bared to the heavens, and none too soon.
One after the other, the “fire eggs” burst into flame, shooting bits and flashes of hot color upward into the night sky.
~ ~ ~
Outside in the bailey, Father Aric stopped midway to the chapel and fell to his knees. His mouth was agape, his eyes wide as he stared at the top of the Hart Tower. Hellfire was spewing from between the battlements. The lurid colors defied any aspect of holiness and unequivocally indicated the workings of evil power. That damnation should arrive so quickly upon the heels of sin—truly before he’d even gotten himself tucked back into his braies and while the scent of the woman still clung to him—could only mean the worst. The Apocalypse was upon them. The Antichrist had come and—terror of terrors—had chosen Wydehaw as his point of ascension from the bowels of hell. Limb-numbing guilt assailed the priest. All knew the Devil followed naught but paths ripe with the stench of vile sin, and Father Aric feared his was the sin that had brought Satan to their door.
Fire sparks arced and streamed out of the tower, making God knew what demonic signs against the sky. The priest tried to cross himself, but his hands had turned to lead at his sides. He was helpless. Mud churned up by the earlier rain oozed around his knees, sinking him deeper into the cold, wet ground. His body trembled with a palsied fear. His voice could not but croak, “Gloria Patri, gloria Patri...”
~ ~ ~
In a protected corner of the rose garden, Vivienne shook out her skirts and smoothed back her hair. The priest had been quick, too quick. A sigh escaped her, then a tear. Perhaps ’twas no more than she deserved.
She sat down on one of the rosary benches, and another sigh left her lips. Her pride had cost her much that she had not been able to replace. Of the five years she’d been wed, she’d spent four scrounging through the depths of humanity to get a man in her bed.
Her birthday would be upon her again soon, and Soren’s also. ’Twas time for children to come into their lives, an unlikely occurrence given their current arrangement, and she was far too careful to end up breeding another man’s brat. She would not do that, not even for the sorcerer—as if he’d given her even half a chance.
When Lavrans had first come to Wydehaw, she’d thought she was in love with him. There was something appealing about a man who never lied, even if the truth he spoke was often disguised and much less flattering than what she wanted to hear or expected to be told. But ’twas not love she’d felt for him. He was a challenge, a delectable one, true, but not her heart’s desire. Foolish girl that she’d been, she’d given her heart to Soren in their first year of marriage, when he’d courted her as a stranger and won her as a lover, showing an appreciation for her wit and no penchant for shyness or sweetness—or virginity—in a bride. He was no warrior, but then she was no maiden in distress. He held Wydehaw through judicious alliances and the willingness to fight if all else failed. They had been a good match, one a mite close for some ecclesiastical tastes, but a good match nonetheless.
A smile flirted with her mouth. I
n some courts, harboring a tendre for one’s own husband was considered gauche, yet for Soren, she’d defied fashion, loving him beyond reason, beyond common sense. For the first time in her life, she had been happy and loved in return, secure within the walls of her own home and free to explore any sensual adventure she might imagine. Then Soren had thrown it all away in his lust for a boy.
A bitter sadness replaced her smile. Her defiance had gotten her naught but an endless supply of lonely nights and an occasional crude swiving. Love was such a tangle. She had taken another man in retaliation, and Soren had stood by, angry but silent. She’d taken another, and another, and another, until not even her husband’s anger had remained.
Now they both had nothing. Her pride could no longer withstand his indifference, and it seemed his sworn love had not survived her faithlessness.
Tears welled in her eyes. Father Aric had been a mistake: he’d exhorted their sinfulness even in the midst of their joining. Had she been reduced to so little worth, to the taking of hypocritically pious and premature priests? Had she abandoned her faith and her marriage vows only to be abandoned in turn?
The tears fell, making damp tracks over her cheeks and running into the corners of her mouth. Was there no hope of love? No light of truth left to guide her?
She lifted her gaze to the heavens, prepared to beseech the Lord, but the Lord answered before the words could form on her lips. Far above her, floating over the wall between the upper and middle baileys, was a light, a bright yellow light with a blue aureole. She stared, transfixed. The light floated closer, carried upon a gentle night wind, a golden star falling to earth within an azure halo.
Gold and azure, the colors of Soren’s standard. There could be no clearer sign. Her heart beat faster as the bit of celestial fire drifted over the rosary wall into her garden. It descended then and delicately extinguished itself on the damp petal of a rose, the flower of love.
