Starman

by Sara Douglass

Two weeks after Faraday began planting she reached the semicircle of the Ancient Barrows. This was one of the most sacred sites of the Icarii, and Faraday knew that she would likely find an encampment of Enchanters here. It was also where she had first told Axis she loved him, where her mother, Merlion, had died, where Jack and Yr had spirited her away from the man she loved to the husband who had taken so much of her spirit and her youth. It was, she mused, a place of death, and not only because of the tombs of the twenty-six Enchanter-Talons. For three days she planted in a circle about the Barrows, ignoring the Icarii who flew overhead and who, respecting her wishes and her mission, left her alone. Then, finally, late one evening, she entered the Barrows.

  She had not known what to expect. The massive Barrows still stretched in a crescent from south to north, but they had been cleared of much of their undergrowth so that their lines rose even more starkly into the night sky. An aura of power and spirituality hung over them in the twilight, so that the air almost hummed. But what instantly caught Faraday’s eye was the column in the very centre of the hollow between the Barrows. A slender obelisk of twisted bronze, erected by the Icarii, soared into the night sky, so high that Faraday had to crane her neck to follow its path to the stars. At its apex rested a large shallow bowl, from which seared a blue flame that leaped and flickered in the dark—during the day it was almost invisible.

  “Faraday?” a gentle voice said behind her, and she turned reluctantly.

  An Icarii Enchanter stood there, his white-blond hair and pale blue wings reflecting the shadows of the blue flame. “My name is StarRest SoarDeep,” he said, taking her hands in his. “The Enchantress sent word that you would pass this way and asked us to watch for you.”

  His eyes darkened in concern as he saw the circles of weariness under Faraday’s eyes and felt the scabs and abrasions on her fingers. “You are tired,” he said.

  Faraday straightened her back with an effort and tried to smile. “As would you be, StarRest, if you spent your days on your knees planting out seedling after seedling.”

  “It goes well?” StarRest could sense that she did not want his concern or his pity.

  Faraday shrugged. “Well enough. I plant where I must, and I sing to the seedlings.” She smiled again, more genuinely this time. “They are pleased to finally escape their cribs, StarRest.”

  He let her hands go and indicated a small campfire close to one of the Barrows. “Will you share our meal with us, Faraday? And perhaps the Healer with us can look at your hands.”

  Faraday clenched her hands by her side. “I will eat with you, StarRest, and be glad of the company, but my hands are well enough. They do not need attention.”

  StarRest did not press the issue. “Then come. We are not many, but we are cheerful enough company.”

  They joined the small encampment of some ten or twelve Icarii, and Faraday sank gratefully down by the fire after StarRest had introduced her to the other Enchanters. She stretched her hands out to the warmth, and the Icarii winced when they saw them, but, following StarRest’s lead, they said nothing. For a while they talked of inconsequential things as they passed bowls of food about, then, as Faraday set her almost untouched bowl to one side, she asked them what they did at the Barrows.

  “At the Barrows itself, very little,” replied one of the Enchanters, a small birdwoman with exquisite features and flame-coloured hair. “As you have seen, we erected the beacon over the location of the Star Gate, and we have cleaned many of the Barrows, but that is all we want to do for the time being.”

  “My mother is buried here,” Faraday said quietly.

  StarRest shared a glance of concern with his colleagues. “Really? We did not know. There is evidence of graves here…the StarMan once told us he lost a number of his men to a Gorgrael-driven tempest in this place.”

  “Yes. My mother died in that same storm. She must be buried with them.”

  “Then we will pray over the graves for your mother, Faraday Tree Friend, and wish her peace in the AfterLife.”

  Touched, Faraday watched the blue flame flicker far above them for a few minutes, thinking of her mother. “The flame reminds me of the blue shadows that chase across the vault above the Star Gate,” she said eventually.

  “You have seen the Star Gate?” StarRest asked, startled.

  Faraday turned her head towards him. “Yes. Two of the Sentinels took me to the Star Gate two years ago. We went through…through…”

  She looked about her, her eyes straining in the night, then pointed to one of the shadowy Barrows that had collapsed at one end. “We went through that Barrow, then down the stairwell to the Star Gate.”

  The Enchanters looked troubled. “The ninth,” one said under his breath.

  Now it was Faraday’s turn to look surprised. “That was WolfStar’s Barrow?” she asked, and StarRest nodded. Then his manipulations go deeper than any realised, Faraday thought.

  “Do you intend to rebuild it?” Did they know that WolfStar had come back through the Star Gate? Had Axis or StarDrifter told them?

  Apparently not. One of the Enchanters shrugged, unconcerned. “No, I think not. You may not realise, Faraday, but the ninth Enchanter-Talon, WolfStar, is not well remembered among the Icarii. If his Barrow collapses, then none of us truly care. It is well that he be totally forgotten.”

  An unlikely event, Faraday thought. “And the Star Gate? Have you reached that yet?”

  “Yes,” StarRest replied, smiling. “Yes, we have. If you have been into the chamber of the Star Gate you know that there are many entrances, not only through the Barrows.”

  “I know. We exited through an ancient tunnel that Jack told me was once your main entrance to the Star Gate. But that collapsed after we had scrambled free. Have you dug it out again?”

  StarRest shook his head. “I know the tunnel you refer to. No. That is totally destroyed now. But there are several others that lead down, one of them here among these Barrows that apparently your Sentinels did not know about. It is only small, but we have all been down.” He paused. “We have all gazed into the Star Gate.”

  For a long time there was silence. Faraday remembered the power and the beauty that the Star Gate contained, remembered the multicoloured stars and galaxies singing as they reeled across the cosmos. Remembered the lure of the Gate as it called to those who gazed into its depths. “So what will you do?” she asked eventually.

  StarRest sighed and stretched his hands towards the fire. “Wait. Wait until more of the Icarii have flown south. Wait until StarDrifter has relit the Temple of the Stars. Wait,” he looked at Faraday, “until the Barrows are once more enveloped by the trees. Then we will have a ceremony to reconsecrate this ground. Though I imagine that few but Enchanters will ever see the Star Gate. It is too beautiful…too dangerous. You have been blessed, Faraday, to have seen it.”

  Faraday took a deep breath, turning the conversation away from the Star Gate. If she thought any more on its beauty and power she would burst into tears. She had been filled with so much hope then, had expected so much. “Have you had much trouble from the Acharites about here?”

  “No,” StarRest said. “The borderlands between Tarantaise and Arcness were sparsely populated to begin with and, with the signing of the Treaty of the Barrows—”

  Faraday’s eyes widened. She had forgotten that Axis and Raum had signed the treaty with the Barons Ysgryff and Greville that gave most of this land back to the Avar and their forest at this spot.

  “—the few farmers that were here have moved south and west to new farms.”

  “Yes,” Faraday said. “I noticed how lonely the plains are.”

  One of the male Enchanters leaned forward, concerned. “Faraday, we know what you do here. You are Tree Friend and you replant the great forests. Would you like company? Assistance? This is a hard task for one person, and we cannot help but notice—”

  “No,” Faraday interrupted harshly. “No,” she repeated, softening her tone. “I am well enough, and this is a t
ask I must accomplish on my own.”

  And I cannot bear to have any Icarii with me, she thought, for your eyes and your power remind me too much of Axis. But thinking of Axis made her ask if they had heard any news of the StarMan or Azhure over the past few weeks.

  “Almost nothing, Faraday, and what news we have is old. We know that Axis leads his army north into Aldeni to meet the Skraeling horde and we heard that the Enchantress has sailed for the Island of Mist and Memory with StarDrifter.”

  StarRest smiled. “Soon this small flame will not be the only beacon lifting into the stars.”

  From Tare the Goodwife Renkin marched resolutely east. After she had left StarShine EvenHeart in the marketplace, the Goodwife wasted only enough time to entrust a brief message to her husband and the coins from the sale of the ewes with a sheep-herder returning to northern Arcness, and restock her pack with food before leaving the town.

  Poor Lady, poor Lady Faraday. Fancy travelling into the rolling plains all by herself. What could she be thinking of? What can she be doing out here by herself? I should never have let her leave my home, the Goodwife berated herself. Never let her leave the warmth of my fire.

  “She needs a friend,” the Goodwife muttered every morning when she rose at dawn and shouldered her pack. “She needs someone to help her.”

  And as she marched, the Goodwife remembered many things.

  First, the recipes and spells that her granny had told her bubbled to the surface. Every day, with every step, another memory resurfaced and the Goodwife was constantly stopping, her eyes round with astonishment. “Oh!” she would breathe, “how could I have forgotten that?”

  And as she walked, she would spy a herb, and she would pause to touch its leaves, muttering to herself its purpose and the words that needed to be spoken to augment its particular powers.

  Occasionally she picked a plant, or plucked a few leaves from it, and placed them carefully into the pocket of her coat. After several days, the Goodwife found she had accumulated such a collection that she spent an entire day drying them before carefully packing them in her pack.

  Some of the things the Goodwife remembered she knew her grandmother could never have told her, nor could she ever have witnessed for herself. She remembered struggling out of a cave, with those other few people who had managed to survive, only to see the world they had known devastated by fire that had fallen from the sky—and the great craters they had left in the earth, now gradually filling with steaming water until, within only a few weeks, they were hidden beneath gentle and wondrous lakes.

  She remembered standing on a mountain and seeing a great forest, a sea of emerald swaying in the gentle breeze. Bright-hued butterflies fluttered from tree to tree, but when her memory deepened and strengthened, the Goodwife realised that they were not butterflies at all, but more of the beautiful flying people she had spoken to in Tare.

  Many fluttered about pastel-coloured spires reaching from the forest canopy into the sky.

  She remembered a time when flying people were not the strangest folk she could expect to meet in her local market, and when song and music were so widespread that life was lived among their phrases and according to their beat.

  She remembered a time when the stars were closer and when there were more gods, more than Artor, who walked the land.

  At that memory the Goodwife paused and stamped her foot on the hard soil. “And damn that plough,” she muttered, “for it did nothing but wreck my good man’s back and keep his feet mired in the mud day after day.”

  After several days of walking (or was it longer—she had been so mired herself in memories that she’d lost all sense of time), the Goodwife approached the Silent Woman Woods. For many hours she stood at its southern border and stared into its dark depths. All her life she had been taught to hate the forests that had once covered this land, but the Goodwife felt no fear gazing at these trees. The teachings of the Seneschal had receded so far by this stage that she just stood and admired, and thought that the Woods’ depths were not so much dark as pleasantly shaded from the sun.

  And the trees spoke to her, although she could hear no words.

  After a while, the Goodwife nodded, then turned and walked north-east, hefting her pack more comfortably onto her back.

  The next day she reached the first seedling.

  The Goodwife stood and looked at it for a very, very long time. Poor thing, struggling to survive here in this wasteland, the tough grasses waving three times its height over it. Lost and lonely it was, a little like the Goodwife imagined the Lady Faraday was at the moment.

  The Goodwife grunted and scratched her chin, thinking. Shouldn’t she do something at this point? Wasn’t there something about these seedlings that she should remember? So lost, so lonely, so tiny, struggling for life in this hostile soil.

  It reminded the Goodwife of her first child, her daughter, a baby born so small and still that no-one thought she would survive. All night the Goodwife had sat in her bed, her husband snoring at her side, holding the baby, willing her to live. Then, as the dawn light had crept through the cracks in the door, the Goodwife—very hesitantly, and making sure her husband was still soundly asleep—had hummed a lilting cradle song over the baby, one of the few tunes she had retained from her granny’s teaching. It was a pretty song, and the baby had taken heart from it and had thrived from that morning on.

  As her other children came the Goodwife had hummed that cradle song to them in the first hours of their lives (and always out of her husband’s hearing), and none of her children had died from the plagues and diseases that carried off so many of her neighbours’ children. Artor’s luck, her neighbours said enviously, but the Goodwife knew differently now, and she knew that this dear little seedling also needed that old lullaby to give it the encouragement to take a firm grip on life.

  So the Goodwife hummed the song through, bending down to pat the seedling reassuringly on its upper leaves when she’d finished.

  “Dear little thing. Your Mother loves you.”

  Then she walked forward until she reached the next seedling, and the next, and the one after, and always she sung the ancient lullaby over their leaves, stroked them, and told them that their Mother loved them.

  And on she went.

  And when she woke the next morning she sat up, blinked, and gaped in amazement.

  She did not enter the Ancient Barrows, not because she was afraid of the Icarii within, or of the blue flame, or even of the naked power that floated over the Barrows, but because she wanted to reach the Lady Faraday and she sensed that the Lady was only a few days ahead of her now.

  But the Enchanters stood atop the Barrows, shocked as they looked at the sight that lay behind the peasant woman tramping through the plains, listening to the sound that reached their ears. So that was the music that had been reverberating through their dreams for the past two nights!

  The woman smiled up at them and waved, but continued resolutely on.

  As she passed, the Enchanters spontaneously broke into a Song of Thanks Giving.

  The Goodwife thought it sounded very pretty, but not as nice as what echoed behind her.

  Faraday lay still and cheerless under her blankets in the cool morning. She could not bear to open her eyes, for she knew that again she would be surrounded by gently humming seedlings, impatient for her to transplant them. She was exhausted. When would she find time to rest?

  Faraday sighed and rubbed her stomach. She felt nauseous again and knew that she should try to force down some food. But even the delicacies that the magical saddlebags could offer didn’t interest her. Perhaps later, when the sun was higher and the first seedlings planted out for the day, she would eat.

  The wind pushed beneath her blankets, cold and insistent, and Faraday finally opened her eyes. She blinked then frowned, puzzled. Before her sat, as expected, rows of tiny seedlings, but beyond them…beyond them stood scuffed brown leather boots encasing a sturdy pair of ankles, and even sturdier legs that disappear
ed into a brown worsted country dress.

  Faraday sat up and looked at the peasant woman’s face. Briefly she thought she was a stranger, then she recognised the woman. “Goodwife Renkin! What? How…” Her voice trailed off. Goodwife Renkin? Here?

  “My Lady,” the Goodwife exclaimed, her face split by a great smile, her eyes shining, her hands clutching among her skirts. “Oh, my Lady! Please, let me stay with you, don’t send me away. I’d do anything to help, really I would!”

  “Goodwife Renkin,” Faraday said again, uselessly, as the Goodwife leaned down to help her rise. As she stood, Faraday looked at the plain behind the Goodwife…and realised that the sound of the morning which filled the air was not just the noise of the donkeys grazing or of the tiny seedlings humming.

  At the Goodwife’s back stood a forest. Great trees, a hundred paces high, reached towards the sun, their branches reaching out fifty paces or more so they embraced the limbs of their sisters. Beneath them the tough grasses of the Tarantaise and southern Arcness plains had given way to low fragrant shrubs and flowered walks dappled with the golden light that filtered through the forest canopy.

  And they hummed—a tune Faraday later recognised as the lullaby the Goodwife taught them. It was a breathtaking sound for, although not particularly loud, it was rich and vibrant, full of shadows and cadences, each tree adding her own distinctive voice that nevertheless harmonised perfectly with those of her neighbours and with the sound of the forest. Faraday could feel it vibrating through her body.

  What would it be like when they finally burst into song?

  The Goodwife looked at Faraday’s face, then at the trees. “Don’t they make a pleasant sound, m’Lady? They sound like a sea of minstrels, yes they do.” One of her booted feet tapped in time with the trees.

  Faraday wrenched her eyes away from the forest. “A sea of minstrels, Goodwife?” She took a deep breath of happiness. “Then why don’t we call this new forest Minstrelsea? It needs a name, and that will do as well as any other and better than most.” She paused. “Goodwife, what are you doing here?”