Wintermoon

by Mercedes Lackey

  They hurried to the gates, and reached them as the final golden wash faded on the sky’s edge and darkness bloomed like a long sigh over the earth.

  “Look! The gates are closing—”

  Together, not thinking, caught by some primal instinct, they bolted between the slowly joining gates. Clirando cursed herself even as she did so—to pelt into this unknown enclosure that might contain anything—and heard Zemetrios curse louder.

  But by then they were in.

  The gates padded together at their backs.

  And, in a fiery chorus, at once every lamp, torch and candle in the village was, or began to be, lit.

  The village street, the houses and other buildings, blushed to sudden life. Faces appeared at windows and figures emerged on terraces. Others came strolling along the thoroughfare. Two men, that neither she nor Zemetrios, she thought, had previously seen, were securing the gates with bars.

  “Just in time, travelers,” one of the men remarked to them.

  Then down the street came striding a giant creature, tall as the roofs, her black hair swinging as she swung her impossibly long legs, a lighted brand in her grasp with which she brought alive the last torches leaning from house walls.

  Zemetrios laughed. Clirando glared at him. Had he gone crazy?

  “A stilt-walker, Clirando,” he said.

  And looking back, Clirando saw the woman, who was dark skinned as a Lybirican, was perched on two long poles, each swathed in her abnormally long white skirt.

  A child ran up then. She carried a basket of apples and dates, and offered it to them.

  Zemetrios reached out at once.

  Clirando said, “Be wary.”

  “I’m hungry, Clirando.”

  “Yes, but if you eat that you may also be dead.”

  “Or,” he conceded, “this is magic food.”

  But the child waited there, smiling and holding up the basket, which had been lined with vine leaves.

  Before either of them could decide, a man rode by on a brown horse and called the child to him. Bending from the saddle, he took a fruit and bit into it.

  “Are these truly people?” Zemetrios asked, “that one there on the horse, the child—or are they another sort of demon—illusions—even figments come from our own heads?”

  “We both see the same things here,” said Clirando, “men with snakes, lamps lit, a horseman and a child. A basket of fruit.”

  “Yes. But suppose—”

  Another man tapped Zemetrios on the shoulder. Zemetrios shot around to find the fellow bowing low. He wore the leather apron of tavern staff.

  “Come to our inn-house, warriors. It is a fine house. The best wine on the Isle. Good meat and new-baked bread. Our rooms are of the nicest—though we’re full for the celebration of the Seven Nights, still one or two choice chambers remain. We also boast a bathhouse, and water always hot from a steamy spring. Come to our house, warriors.”

  “He sounds like any tavern tout from Rhoia to Ashalat,” murmured Zemetrios.

  The man swayed, beaming and bowing.

  All through the village circulated the usual evening street sounds, laced now with rills of laughter and notes of music.

  Above, a woman called across from one balcony to its neighbor, and in another window another woman appeared with a little pet dog on her shoulder.

  The scene was normal. Perplexingly so. As he had said, Rhoia—or anywhere thriving in the civilized world—would parade like this after sundown. Even Amnos.

  Clirando said to the taverner, “What’s the name of your inn?”

  “The Moon in Glory.”

  Zemetrios added, “And why does your village hide until the gates are shut? And why is there no one out in the fields and not a single light?”

  “Oh, master, it’s our custom on the Seven Nights. Soon as the sun starts to sink, we sit in quiet and not a candle’s lit till the last ray’s gone. Then we shut the gates and every light is kindled. As for the country about, why—everyone’s here. Of course they are. Where else to see and salute the great moon?”

  Zemetrios turned to Clirando. “Do we believe him?”

  “Oh, believe me, master—” The taverner had a round face that now grew anxious. “The innkeeper will be displeased if I lose him custom.” Sidling nearer, the man whispered, “He’s a skinflint, and he loves to make money.”

  “Ah, money. Then I reckon this is real enough.”

  Clirando looked about her. Her weariness pushed against her back and shoulders. Who cared if it was a trap or an illusion… She should not think this way. But she said, “We can see for ourselves.”

  The man skipped before them up the street and along an alley to a blue-plastered wall, out of which a lemon tree grew, its hard green fruit scenting the air.

  A boy, all smiles as well, whisked open a gate into a yard. Torches blazed on walls, night-perfumed flowers spilled luxuriously from urns. There was additionally the smell of good bread and roasting joints, and over the low wall steam puffed from the domed roof of a little bathhouse, just as promised.

  “Oh, Clirando—forgive me. I can’t resist.” Zemetrios sounded both amused and charming.

  “Nor I,” she admitted, but with chilly reserve.

  Yet from nowhere the oddest feeling fled through her. What in the Maiden’s name was it? In dismay, Clirando accepted it had been a moment’s natural pleasure. As if her life was quite natural too, and the town her friend, and Zemetrios, this unknown fighter from another country, someone she trusted, liked, and perhaps much more…

  Night unfolds her wings

  With the white moon in her hair

  And love rises from her bed of dreams

  To waken all the sleeping earth.

  “What is it, Cliro?”

  She gazed at him, stricken. “I can hear a song—”

  “I can hear it, too. About night and the moon and love. I’ve heard it in Rhoia. It’s an old tune.”

  Something loosened in her. She thought, Even if this is fakery, we both see and hear the same things now. Something in that. And besides, that voice singing is a boy’s. Not hers—not Araitha’s—

  It was only after they had parted to seek the male and female sections of the bath that she recalled Zemetrios had called her Cliro. As if long familiar with her, and close.

  Despite the taverner’s boast, the inn seemed not that full—or certainly not the bathhouse. Clirando had the three narrow rooms to herself. She washed in the first under the tepid fountain, and then soaked in the second in a pool of delicious heat that blanketed her up to the chin. An attendant in the first room washed her hair. Now it spread about her in the hot pool, scented like the perfumed shrubs outside. Finally she sprang into the last cold pool, with a hiss of anguish that quickly disappeared as the water toned her muscles, closed her pores and awarded her a feeling of vigor. She might have slept a whole night through. It seemed to her there must be special salts in the spring that fed the bathhouse, which was often the case. She felt literally renewed, her eyes clear and well focused, her blood moving like waves of light.

  Unnerving her less now, the feeling of pleasure, almost of happiness and anticipation, continued and grew stronger.

  She thought of Tuyamel tilting her head doubtfully, and Vlis chuckling, and young Draisis enthusiastically vindicating happiness at all costs.

  I’ll find them, Clirando thought, kicking her feet in the cold water as a child might. I shall find them here. This village, tonight—or tomorrow. I’ll ask, and I’ll look for them.

  But she knew her exhilaration had to do also with Zemetrios.

  She felt lenient with herself. Why should she not be glad at the company of an apparently decent and highly attractive man?

  Every reason.

  But as that warning voice stirred at the back of her mind, Clirando kicked it up in the air with the sprays of cold water. Then she climbed out and dried herself, shaking her hair like a dog.

  He had already commandeered a table for them and tw
o benches, tucked into a wall nook. He had ordered beer, which generally Clirando preferred to wine. She thought he himself did not care that greatly for wine—understandable, if he had seen its ill effect on Yazon.

  They talked to each other now freely, again as if well-known to each other and quite at ease. But the subjects of the conversation were only the excellence of the hot water, the types of food the inn offered. All around, a crowd massed at the tables, and serving girls and men went to and fro. Clirando saw no one else she knew.

  “I have hopes my band of girls reached this village,” she said at last. “I was separated from them after we brought in the boat.”

  He looked at her, consideringly. It was like a question, and reluctantly, after a few seconds, she heard herself say, “They vanished from the beach. They’d been sleeping—and I too—I fell asleep, which now I never can, unaided. There was some drug in the wine.”

  Before she knew it would happen he put his hand briefly, and warm, over hers. “I’m sorry, Clirando. I’ve heard so many tales like that about Moon Isle. It will come right. You’ll make it so.”

  His touch chimed upward through her flesh. She stared resentful at her own hand, as if waiting to see a burn or scald appear where his fingers had rested. Gruffly she said, “I mean to walk about the village, to see if I can learn anything.”

  “Don’t ask any of them here,” he said, surprising her. “I’d guess you’ll learn nothing that way.”

  “I thought you believed this inn—this village—trustworthy.”

  “Did I say that? No. I said it was all irresistible.”

  She saw he too was looking intently at her hand. Suddenly he said, “I like your hand, Clirando of Amnos. Forgive me, but the firmness, and the callus there from a warrior’s knife. My first love, I have to tell you, was a warrior woman. Even before that, my mother had belonged to a band. But then she wed my father and gave it up.”

  Clirando frowned. “Did he force her to?”

  “No. He was an honorable man. It was her choice. She never lost her edge though. She would wrestle the other girls for practice, and she could ride as well as any man, better than many. She was the one who taught me horses.”

  The food came, and they ate, dipping the warm bread among the sauces, tearing off chunks of the succulent roast.

  Around and about, the inn went on as inns did everywhere in the known world. Clatter of dishes, clink of metal cups, mirth and singing, the occasional quarrel roused and calmed. Abruptly a long, high call went through the room. “The moon! She’s risen!”

  Not one person kept their seat. Even the servers went out. They all stood on a high open terrace above the yard. There on the wall balanced the moon, round and blazing white.

  “Yes,” said Zemetrios, “something new after all. She looks whiter here, don’t you think. Clean and cold.”

  A man spoke behind them. “It is the snows that cover her.”

  Clirando turned.

  A merchant, well dressed and well groomed, wiping his ringed, dinner-greasy hands on a napkin.

  “Snow?” Zemetrios queried. He smiled.

  “Indeed. So our sages tell us. At midsummer in this, our world, up there midwinter comes. The snows fall thickly. And so the moon shines so white.”

  “The moon is also a world, then?” Clirando asked innocently. It was what the priestess had said. But she thought of Zemetrios’s stricture: to ask anything here would be profitless. Perhaps something so esoteric would not matter.

  “Do you see that mountain?” The merchant pointed back over the roof of the inn, the other roofs of the village, and up into the sky where all three peaks showed, as if faintly drawn on by a brush. “The central height is known as Moon’s Stair. There is, they say, an entrance up there that leads between the worlds and out onto the surface of the moon. Sleepers often travel to the moon, as do sorcerers, or priests in a trance. But physically there’s only one way, and that is by climbing the mountain called Moon’s Stair.”

  Zemetrios said, “I’ve heard of an entrance to the lands beyond death. That’s in the East.”

  “Like that, then,” said the merchant. “Or maybe it’s all lies.” His grin was crafty, knowing. It seemed he understood quite well what Zemetrios had said to Clirando earlier.

  Down in the yard, servants were lighting the tails of firecrackers. Now they dived upward on flights of glittering topaz.

  Clirando thought, Surely they would have done this last night, too—we should have heard something of it, seen it even, far above the forest….

  She was unable to feel alarm at this, not even suspicion.

  When she glanced back, the merchant had gone in, returning apparently to his meal.

  Others were jostling down the terrace steps and across the courtyard.

  “Come watch the magicians!” came the cry now.

  “Shall we go and see the fun?” he said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “If your girls are here, no doubt they’d go to see. Isn’t that the best chance?”

  Clirando thought of Draisis and fifteen-year-old Erma. She nodded.

  As they followed the rest of the people out of the alley and along one of the wider village streets, Zemetrios said in her ear, “One further thing, Clirando. The inn’s so full the taverner could offer us only a single apartment—I mean it has only one bed. He seemed to reckon us partners, but I assured him you would use the room and I would take a place in the common area.”

  Clirando was jolted. She did not know why, then thought she did. “No, Zemetrios. You take the room. You know I never sleep. A place on a bench is less trouble for me.”

  “No, Cliro. You must have the bed. It’s more comfortable, particularly if sleep eludes you.”

  “What?” She scowled at him. “You think me some soft little lady? Even when I could sleep, I managed as well on a rock as a couch.”

  Zemetrios burst out laughing.

  For an instant her annoyance increased—then melted. Clirando began to laugh, too. “Excuse me,” she said. “Of course you’d think of nothing of the sort.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It was only your fairness, offering me the bed. I thank you, but no need. You take it.”

  Still following the crowd, they were turning now into an open square.

  “We’ll argue it later,” he said.

  The moon fired white arrows through the garden vines that overhung the square. The tall narrow tower, seen previously, rose from one corner, and nearby was a temple to the Father, its crimson-painted columns gilded with torchlight. A grove of trees grew in the center of the space. They were clearly sacred, carefully shaped conifers, strung with baubles and little masks made from fine Lybirican paper. A line of four men sat cross-legged on the ground before the grove. They wore vivid clothing sewn with glinting beads, red, yellow, green, and blue.

  The people elsewhere in the square had also sat down except for latecomers at the back, among whom were Clirando and Zemetrios. Behind them was only the high wall of a house.

  To begin with, the four magicians acted out a short play. They were traveling performers, Clirando thought. But during the drama, a burlesque that concerned a runaway servant, a harsh master and a mischievous god, magical effects abounded. At first they were of the sort that Clirando had watched many times from such troupes at Amnos: birds flying out of sleeves, coins found in ears, objects disappearing and then reappearing somewhere unexpected. Bit by bit however, the magic became more miraculous, and much stranger. The man in the yellow robe, who played the servant, opened wide his mouth—and out darted a silver frog, swiftly pursued by six other silver frogs from the same spot. All these bounced about the square, finally leaping together and becoming a silver ball, which rolled away under the blue robe of another man, he who played the god. The actor who played the master meanwhile lit a fire on the bare earth by sneezing—or pretending to sneeze—directly at it. The fourth mage-actor, who had taken all the other parts, suddenly assumed the head of an ass. Clir
ando could not see how he managed this. One moment he was man-headed and the next not. The ass-head was also extremely convincing, waggling its ears and letting out mad brayings through wrinkling lips.

  The play ended with the cruel master punished and the servant rich. All four then danced a maniacal stamping dance to the twanging accompaniment of entirely invisible musicians.

  Laughter had rumbled through the crowd, shouts of approval, encouragement or chagrin at the plight of the characters. Clirando and Zemetrios were not immune. They had laughed and shouted, too.

  The fourth magician now reached into the fire, and drew out two handfuls of it.

  Flames burned and flickered in both hands, matching his red robe and lighting up his face. Then the fires froze. It happened slowly and completely. Then he held up before them two dully glowing bunches of steaming orange ice. These were passed into the audience, which in turn passed them around.

  When they had reached the back of the crowd, both Zemetrios and Clirando were able to examine these ice-flames. They certainly were ice-cold, sweating at the warmth of the night—as ice would have done. After she had handed them on to her neighbour, she rubbed her frozen fingers and thought, These mages are very great.

  Next thing, the magicians pointed up into the sky. Above, the moon was lifting toward the zenith. Only the most engorged stars gleamed strongly enough to be seen against her extravagant light.

  The magicians started to wave their arms and call up at the heavens. “Stars! Stars come down and visit us! No one will miss you up there, on such a moon-white night.”

  And the stars came.

  They detached themselves from the black sky, circling, swarming like diamond bees down toward the island.

  Clirando heard Zemetrios murmur beside her. She too was astounded, and filled by the wildest happiness. Why should stars not fall from heaven? If they did, what else wonderful might not be able to occur? The laws of the gods were often so harsh. Did this magic signify such laws might be broken?

  Scintillant, in drifts, the stars began to festoon the trees. Some were large as a platter, others small as a brooch. They lit up the square with a pure, bluish radiance.