Jinian Stareye

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘Oh, Jinian, lots of shadows. Lots of thick ones, all full of juices.’ So Molly-my-dear addressed me, jigging heavily upon her root hairs. ‘Fat, so fat, like a moon, like the sun, I am glorious, so glorious.’ She began to swing on my trouser bottom, laughing like a maniac.

  ‘Isn’t she beautiful,’ giggled Big-blue. ‘Like a great waterox cow, she is, bigger than big. And the seeds, you know’ - giggle, nudge - ‘they’re ready!’

  I didn’t know what to make of this. No such slowness on the part of Little Flitch, however, who begged them with every show of sincerity to give him their seeds, all of them, to be planted at once.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Big-blue. ‘If there had been many more shadows, we couldn’t have eaten them all. We need more of us, Jinian. Little Flitch can have the seed.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘they won’t grow in time to -‘ I didn’t finish, ashamed of myself. I had forgotten I was a Wize-ard. There was a spell. Of course. Hatching to Follow. A spell to make things come to fruition very quickly. They rolled about, laughing, seeming to read my mind.

  ‘Oh, you Wizardly ones, so silly,’ said Molly-my-dear. ‘Gardener knows how to do that. He does it all the time. You or him, makes no never mind,’

  And so was our morning spent, Little Flitch’s and mine, in planting turnip seed. These two had not been the only ones ready, and by noon there were vast tracts of fertile soil scratched and sown and spells muttered over. Fronds of green were showing by afternoon.

  And at noon Peter and Himaggery emerged from their tent, physically somewhat the worse for the late and spirituous vigil they had held, but otherwise the better for it. And Peter came to me.

  ‘We’re taking Mavin down to the Tower. When the Tower is raised again, we will build a catafalque for her there. Until then, it is a good place for her to lie.’ He was silent then awhile, staring out with bleak eyes at the ruined city. ‘During my trip here, I thought it might be better to give it up. Better not to love anyone than to feel like that when they go. Better just shut all the feeling down. I really did think that, Jinian. I was even trying to do it. And I felt so guilty. She had wanted just to hold me for a time when I escaped, just for a moment or two, but I was in such a fever to get to you. I felt I didn’t deserve to live.’

  So that had been it. Guilt, simple guilt, over a boyish - no a human failing. I leaned against him, put my arms tight around him as he went on.

  ‘I told Himaggery. He said it was a natural feeling, but silly. He wouldn’t trade his pain now for his joy then - back when he and Mavin were lovers - so he says. And I mustn’t, either. So. I won’t. And I think -well, I think we must take whatever time for love we have, and the time of your oath must be about done.’

  ‘It will be soon,’ I said, wiping several tears away surreptitiously. ‘Murzy says the time is probably already past.’ Then I made myself get busy with something else or I would not have done anything all that day but cry.

  We made a ceremony for Mavin. There had been no time back at the caverns. We lit candles. We placed her upon a temporary catafalque, one great stone that Dodir and several of the other Tragamors had moved beside the^empty pool in the ruined Tower. I longed for music, but there was none. Most of the Gamesmen of Barish were there. Barish-Windlow, Hafnor, Wafnor, and Shattnir were away east, setting up the power transmission from the Bright Demesne. Trandilar was there. She wept. I kept my eyes away from Dorn the Necromancer, knowing Peter was struggling in the same way. Dorn could Raise up the dead. But Mavin was not dead. And yet she was. For a thousand years dead.

  Beedie and Roges were there. When the ceremony was done, they bid me good-bye before setting out to return over the sea. ‘It may be we will never come to the chasm alive again,’ Beedie said. ‘Never see the children again. If you fail in what you are doing here, then all will fail. I know that. Sometimes I wish we had not come. ...”

  ‘Beed,’ said Roges. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Well, and no, I don’t,’ she confessed. ‘Mavin was my friend. She saved my life and the lives of many in the chasm. It was she brought Roges and me together. No. I would have come. But it is a sad thing, nonetheless.’

  I agreed with her it was a sad thing, then let them go, setting such spells of protection on them as I could, and thinking it was wise of them to get out of the city while they still could.

  Vitior Vulpas Queynt was there. When I had told him about the Oracle and its followers, about Ganver and the other Eesties, he had flushed with anger. ‘Evil,’ he muttered to me. ‘What we did, what men did, was heedless and stupid, but what they do is purposefully evil.’ At the ceremony he was grim-faced and said nothing.

  Chance was there, of course, close beside Peter, offering his shoulder and his strong arm. Mertyn and Himaggery were both good, strong men, but I loved Chance.

  When it was over, I stood looking around at the shattered stones of the floor and remembering the lamp. I had fallen over it in memory, kicking it into that corner. A large stone lay there. Finding me tugging at it, Dodir asked if he could help me, and when he moved it away the lamp was there, flattened but whole.

  ‘Ganver said the Tower was a gift from Lorn which contained three treasures,’ I told him. ‘The Bell, the book - by which he meant the music - and the lamp. Here is the lamp. Can it be repaired?’

  He looked at it doubtfully. I knew they had recruited smiths among the laborers and said something to that effect. Shaking his head over it, he took it away. When I went to see Mavin the next day, the lamp stood upon its pedestal, and I could not even see where it had been mended. It glowed dimly from a candle burning within it. I wondered how the lambent light that had come from it in times past might be restored.

  The metalworkers had set up their foundry just outside the Tower walls. There an artist had labored over the fragments of the Bell, piecing them together. Now it was complete, he told me, he was making a mold from it. Then he would smooth all the broken places in the mold itself so the Bell, when melted and recast, would be as perfect as it once had been.

  ‘You were lucky to find it all,’ I mumured, lost in admiration for what would have seemed to me a hopeless task.

  ‘Not quite all of it,’ he complained. ‘Here on the rim is a line of writing, or symbols, perhaps. There is a nick. One small piece we cannot find. Perhaps one symbol or letter upon it, and no way of knowing what it was.’

  I stared at the line of symbols,” strangely evocative, as though I might once have known their meaning. As an Eesty I would have known what they meant, but my Talent for understanding speech did not extend to writing. ‘Perhaps the piece will turn up. The Tower floor isn’t completely cleared yet.’

  He nodded gravely, going on with his work. ‘We can’t wait,’ he said. ‘We must try to cast it soon, while there is still enough life in us to do so.’

  And it was true. Life burned low in all of us. There were no smiles, no laughter. If it had not been for the turnips, we would have wept our way into silence. We were calm, too calm. Only the antics of the shadow-eaters kept us moving, irritated but alive.

  We had three laborious days after that during which no attacks came. On the fourth day came an Elator to tell us of an assault of the blind runners, those wrho had lived in the city before we came. We seven went to the outskirts and waited for them. They had befriended me when I was a child. I thought it might be possible to talk to them.

  Which it might have been, had they not come hooded and blind and unhearing, running on the road itself, naked as eggs. We did the only thing we could; both Night Will Come Turning and Silence and Shadow, the two spells reinforcing one another and both invoked on all of them, leaving them sleeping in heaps by the roadside.

  ‘How long?’ I asked Murzy, for it had seemed the night spell had been done with a twist to put a very long sleep upon them.

  ‘Until someone wins this battle,’ she said flatly. ‘Us or the shadow. Until Lorn lives or dies. If Lom dies, they are better off asleep,’

  It
was the first time anyone had said we were near that time. We had all known it, but it was the first time anyone had said it.

  Back at the camp we met Barish-Windlow and the Gamesmen who had been with him. The linkage to the Bright Demesne was complete. ‘Though how it will stand up under assault, I cannot say,’ Barish-Windlow commented wearily. Then he looked at me, and I knew it was Windlow seeing me, for he said in a quiet, old-sounding voice, ‘You know, Jinian, long ago I saw a happy future for Peter. I knew that was a true vision.’ And I knew he was trying to cheer me.

  That day the eye of the storm moved over us and was the last of our calm.

  Toward evening two Elators arrived almost simultaneously at Dodir’s tent. Peter and I happened to be there.

  ‘There are forms massing in the hills,’ they told us. This was more ominous, in that they had come from opposite sides of the city. We were surrounded. When I questioned them, they identified what they had seen. Shadow forms, and more shadow forms. Shadows taking the forms of beasts and monsters. Shadows building themselves into siege towers. And with the shadows, those of the Oracle’s Brotherhood, hundreds of them, flapping among them in their ribbons and painted faces like great bats.

  Peter and I went among the turnips. Each large one now had a train of fifty or so tiny ones at its - I was going to say heels. At its roots, I suppose one should say. The tiny ones spoke in sparrow voices, shrill and twittering, and were no less mischievous than the big ones. We surrounded the city with a thin line of them, wishing there had been more seed. They called to one another, mocking the shadow, burying themselves, then digging themselves up again to wander about and find neighbors more to their liking. Five or six times Peter and I and Little Flitch went around the lines, straightening them out, begging them to fill holes, at which they jeered and mocked, coming out of the soil to hang on my trouser bottoms and the ends of my sash, swinging madly and screaming at one another.

  Then, when we had done with the turnips what we could, the seven began its work together with Himag-gery and Queynt. Nine of us Wize-ards - Wizards, trying to dam a flood or block a hurricane. We set spells and protections and traps, trying to feel they would apply to shadows, though we had no idea whether shadows were subject to the art or not. We were not sanguine about our future.

  Down in the city, however, Sorcerers were storing power from the Demesne linkage. It was as though new blood had run into the city. The depression lifted somewhat. The workers felt more energetic. If the city was a focus of infection (as one of the Healers said), then the Bright Demense was a healthy body that fought that infection.

  At evening we went up to the hills, all of us Wize-ards, and Peter, and all the Great Gamesmen who could take time from their tasks in the city. As darkness began to fall, came the first assault.

  We saw it as a low, breaking wave upon the hills, flowing toward us, dark under the emerging stars and the light of the half-made moon overhead. Upon the wave, the Oracle’s brethren danced, ribbons fluttering, fantastic silhouettes against the sky. They howled as they came, not loudly, so that first we thought it was only our blood singing in our ears. Even the howling was mockery, war cries but in treble-ironical tones, odd words stressed. We were to have no dignity in this battle. They would mock us into the jaws of hell, and I wondered, not for the first time, what they would do with themselves when Lorn was dead. I wondered if they were all as insane as the Oracle itself, busy feasting upon our deaths when our deaths meant their own, mad for destruction, avid with hate.

  We had set fire spells upon the closest rim of hills, fires that blazed forth in fountains of white sparks when the shadows came near. Their structures broke before these jets of flame, broke and flowed around and reassembled again. We had set traps within the valley, triggered when the shadow came near, and these, too, were tripped when the shadow neared, broke, flowed out and around and on.

  ‘So much for that,’ murmured Murzy. ‘I hadn’t thought it would work, but it was worth a try.’

  ‘Where do you think Ganver is?’ Peter asked me. ‘Why isn’t Ganver here?’

  ‘Because, ‘I said, counting the possibilities off on my fingers, ‘Ganver is in the Maze, recalling better times to Lorn. Or Ganver has gone back to the grave, to die there.. Or Ganver is meeting with others of his kind and they have reached no agreement. Or Ganver has been found by Mind Healer Talley and is being used as a guide. I am as perplexed as you are about Ganver, Peter, and oh, I wish Ganver had acted against the Oracle long and long ago.’ I knew in my heart why it had not. I could not find it in me to blame the old Eesty too much, even now.

  The shadow came on, tickling at us, advancing a little, then retreating, the Oracle’s followers dancing along, watching every movement, continuing their whooping and calling, yip-yip-yip, a high, teasing call.

  ‘I wonder if I could Beguile them,’ said Trandilar from my side. ‘Beguile the shadow?’

  Cat shook her head. ‘No. There is nothing there to be Beguiled, great Queen. Can one Beguile nothingness?’

  Then they reached the line of turnips. Now, for the first time, they were slowed by something. The shadow-eaters began to suck them up, making a keening noise as they did so. The Oracles leaped and danced, calling words of encouragement to the shadow, piling it higher, higher and higher. . . .

  ‘By the old gods,’ Murzy gasped, ‘the shadow’s burying the creatures.’

  It was true. The shadow piled around them, over them, making great lumps and protrusions of black over which the further shadow flowed as over some hilly road. We stood below them now, and nothing stood between them and us.

  Then the bell sound.

  For a moment I thought it truly was the Bell. For a moment I forgot we had not cast the Daylight Bell. For a moment I believed in miracles. Then I saw it was Peter, Peter Shifted into a great, brazen shape and donging out the sound, so near the real sound I could not tell the difference.

  And the shadow fled, fled away from the shadow-eaters, away from the dancing Oracles, leaving them upon the hillside still prancing, still leaping, under the pale cold light of the growing moon. And another sound under the bell sound.

  Laughter.

  The Oracle, high upon the hillside, laughing.

  ‘Oh, very pretty,’ it called to us in a voice of whetted steel. ‘Very clever, little Shifter man. And it will work, once. Perhaps even twice. But not more than that.

  ‘And we will be back, loves. We will be back!’

  We stumbled down into the camp, exhausted. Behind us the line of shadow-eaters lifted a shrill complaint into the dark.

  ‘We can’t hold them away from the city,’ said Dodir.

  ‘No,’ Murzy agreed. ‘We can’t hold them. The shadows left when Peter made the bell sound, but only because it suited the Oracles to let them leave. The Oracles are playing with us.’

  In the foundry the furnace glowed red, a strong, ruddy glow that brought us toward it like bait, as though we hungered for honest fire.

  ‘How long?’ asked Himaggery.

  ‘We’ll pour at dawn,’ said the foundryman, his eyes distant and possessed of some vision. I knew at once he was right. The Daylight Bell must be cast at dawn. Beside him the great cauldron seethed, ruddy now, lightening as it grew hotter. ‘We found all but the one piece, but some of the metal will stick to the sides of the crucible. There won’t be enough to fill the mold. We have to have more metal.’

  Trandilar took off her bracelets, dropping them into the crucible. Murzy looked long upon the flowing metal, then she took the pool fragment from her locket and dropped it in. The others did the same. Except for me.

  I stood there, hypnotized, drawn into the flowing surface of the metal. It wanted something else, more. Pool fragments, yes. Bracelets, yes.

  I reached into the neck of my blouse and drew out the star-eye pendant Tess Tinder-my-hand had given me all those years ago. The most precious thing I had, really. Next to life and Peter. With death so close, precious things could not be kept. I dropped it ont
o the surface of the molten metal and it lay there, shining with a light brighter than the sun. I had to shut my eyes. When I opened them again, it had vanished, melted.

  ‘For luck,’ I said, and the foundryman smiled, taking note of the level of the metal.

  ‘Enough,’ he whispered. ‘Barely enough.’

  ‘The star-eye held a power you might have used,’ said Cat, not belligerently but matter-of-fact.

  I shook my head at her. ‘I have not understood the lessons Ganver tried to teach me, Cat. If I had understood those lessons, I could have used their power without the amulet. In the cavern of the giants, the Oracle mocked me, saying the star-eye was only a sign, a symbol. In saying that about the pendant, it was right. The true meaning of it is more than that, but I do not understand it any more than the Oracle did.’

  It was warm there. The others wandered away. Peter still stood by me in the light of the furnace. After a time he led me back into the ruined Tower, against the wall which the furnace had warmed from the other side. There was no one else there. From beyond the wall we could hear the muffled voices of the workers pumping the bellows and putting fuel onto the fire. Across the pool, Mavin’s profile stared upward at the moon. In that strange light, she appeared to be smiling. Peter was wearing a great, heavy cloak, and he spread it on the smooth floor against the warm wall near the pedestal with the lamp. We lay down upon it, covering ourselves with my own cloak, and he turned my face toward him for a kiss.

  Before he kissed me I would have said we were too weary for feeling. After he kissed me there was nothing else but feeling.

  Peter came to his skin much more easily than I. He merely Shifted the clothing away. I, bound about by laces and thongs and ties and belts, came to it more gradually. Still, it was not long until we lay skin to skin between the warm cloaks, forgetting where we were, not hearing the workmen from behind the wall, not seeing the cold moon staring from the sky top. My oath was over, that day or some previous day, but over.