The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods)

by Barbara Friend Ish

  I stared, mind full of whirling black emptiness and tears streaming until I forgot about trying to focus my eyes. I startled when a hand closed around my arm. I blinked; gradually the world swam back into focus.

  The sun had dipped down below the hostile ground; clear daylight had faded into the long orange glow of sunset and the charcoal shadows of trees. I’d been standing there staring at nothing for hours. Deaclan and Fintan were gone. None of this mattered. Dica, my father’s seneschal—oh, gods, my seneschal now—stood in front of me, wiry hand grasping my arm and shadow-smudged eyes searching my face.

  “Lord?”

  I startled. The voice wasn’t Dica’s. The hand on my arm belonged to Easca, and her moonlit face was full of concern.

  “Lord, do you know where you are?”

  For the space of a breath I thought I was in Tellan. But I stood in the midst of barren basalt: stars stretching above me, wild energies caressing my skin and teasing the edges of my mind. Now the hunger they roused in me just made me ache.

  “Hell,” I said, offering Easca a wry smile.

  Her answering smile held no more humor. “That place is sometimes mistaken for this one,” she allowed.

  I tried and failed to formulate a witty reply.

  Easca nodded as if I’d said something insightful. “Lord, will you walk in with me?”

  “By all means,” I said, and fell in beside her. “This is no place for an evening stroll.”

  Her mouth quirked. We lapsed into silence, keeping company with our private thoughts. Finally it occurred to me that I had once again managed to compromise both her honor and her safety with one thoughtless act.

  “I thought you had the watch?” I said, as if it might shift my attention from today’s lengthening list of failures.

  Easca shrugged. “Lord Iminor came and claimed it. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “I will add it to the list of things I failed to observe today,” I said, eyes on the barren horizon.

  “Tomorrow will be a better day,” Easca said after another long silence. “I spoke to Indech a little while ago. He knows where the old yachts were dry-docked. And he says if we can get one into the water, he’s sure he can sail us there.”

  I nodded, digesting this. “People here think he’s mad, am I right?”

  Easca’s head whipped around for a look at me, astonishment written in her face.

  I shrugged. “People always think men who dare difficult things are mad.”

  Easca nodded silently.

  “Women, too,” she said after a moment.

  14. A Draft of Remembrance

  Easca’s kinsman Indech had redder hair than I had seen since Sanglin, who had been Amien’s right hand while I was at Aballo. And still was, I surmised, though I didn’t open that basket of snakes with the wizard. Indech wasn’t as young as his obviously radical ideas had made me expect; but as is the way with Tanaan, I couldn’t form any useful estimate of his actual age. He led us past the place where the river Arnemetia veers to the northeast; we trotted up a narrowing channel, towards an immense wall of rock. Too vast an edifice to call a bluff, it rose to an improbable height, stretching east and west beyond visibility: as if the land on which we rode had dropped suddenly away, or the area we approached had risen like a loaf left too long. It seemed the stream we followed would come to an abrupt end at the wall; but as we approached, I saw: the stream issued from a cleft at the wall’s base. Indech paused long enough to kindle a torch and led us inside. More than one of the Tanaan cast anxious glances backward as we rode in.

  Before long, the ceiling of the passage dropped, and we had to dismount and lead the horses through the water. I began to despair of my boots ever drying out. But the stream grew shallower and narrower as we walked, eventually veering into some side corridor. We continued northward, through a tunnel of damp basalt. Rivulets streamed down the walls; odd colonies of fungus caught the light of Indech’s torch and glowed, in colors rarely seen outside wizards’ dreams. Eventually daylight showed ahead, and we walked out to the shore of the Devadore.

  The water stretched away to the horizon, shockingly bright blue-green and stippled at the shore with white-foam waves, beneath a sky that had gone steel-grey with a ragged tissue of clouds. Mist rose from the water’s surface in wisps of rainbow hue. Several of us walked to the shore.

  “Don’t drink,” Indech said behind us. “Better to stay out altogether.”

  The dry dock lay a mile or two to the east, apparently; we mounted and Indech led us up the black-pebble beach—not to a warehouse, but to an immense cave on the shore. We walked in: it was too vast for Indech’s torch to give any sense of what might lie within. Amien called an arcane light and tossed it into the dead air, where it rose for an improbably long time, glowing as it grew, revealing a space easily the size of Mourne Palace in Ilnemedon. An astonishing array of ships stood tethered to the walls or anchored farther out, white-frilled water lapping at their hulls. Someone gave a low whistle.

  “Mabon would give his right—” Mattiaci stopped. “Pardon, Mora.”

  Letitia waved dismissively.

  “Who do all of these belong to?” she said.

  Indech shrugged. “No one living, Mora.”

  “Which one should we use?” she asked after a moment.

  “That depends,” Indech answered. “Do any of you know how to sail?”

  The knights looked at one another. Indech grunted.

  “Once we’re out on the water,” Amien said slowly, “I can call you a wind. I’m not a trained windcaller; I won’t know without you telling me just what wind direction or speed you need… ”

  Indech gave the wizard a slow, thoughtful smile. “That’s all right, Lord, I wouldn’t know how to order one in a way that would make sense to a sorcerer. But we’ll sort it.”

  “Indeed.” Amien smiled. We all looked out at the ships again.

  “Which could we get the horses on?” I asked. “Can we use this first one, here?” It stood only a few feet away from the narrow ridge on which we had gathered, which seemed to suggest easy access; but I had little knowledge of ships. Beyond the fact that it had two masts, and the deck stood higher above the water than a man on horseback could reach, I could have given little useful description. It looked well-made enough.

  “It would be the easiest to maneuver out,” Indech said thoughtfully, but his eyes were on another ship, which stood anchored a little distance out in the water. I didn’t know what made that ship more attractive. He shrugged, wistful.

  “How will we get it out, once we’re aboard?” Letitia asked.

  “There’s a sluice-gate at the entrance,” Indech said. “Once we open it, the water will rise enough for the ship to move freely. I think the ancients must have towed them in and out…”

  “If they were using windcallers, they might have moved the ships with their minds,” Amien observed.

  Everyone looked at the wizard again. He smiled, just a little.

  “Yes, I expect I can,” he said. “With Indech’s help.”

  And so it went. Indech climbed a crumbling rope ladder up the side of the ship, and after a few moments let down a gangway across which we could lead the horses. My horse balked at the way it swayed underfoot and had to be persuaded to each step. Tru, crossing behind me, clucked in sympathy—for the horse, I suspected.

  “Nobody’s happy, sweet boy,” she crooned to him. “Everything is stranger than the last. You’ll be all right.”

  I looked at her, and at all the other troubled Tanaan faces. Most of them had been getting farther from home each day, I realized, and now they were about to sail away from their native country: assuredly for the first time in their lives. Only Indech looked happy at the prospect.

  “Courage,” I said to Tru, but pitched my voice so the rest of them would hear it. “Remember the undead cannot cross water. We can be sure of almost two days of peace once we’re under way.”

  A number of faces brightened at that thought.
The tension around Tru’s blue eyes relaxed, and she crooned reassuringly to my horse as I coaxed him to take another step, and another.

  “What’s his name?” she said.

  “What?” I said, reflexively, barely looking up.

  “His name?” she repeated.

  “Oh!” Another step. Soon we would gain the deck. He’d been calm enough on Letitia’s barge on the Crearu. “I haven’t named him yet. Well—that is to say—he’s got a name, a show name, but those show names aren’t real names.”

  “A show name? Like for the races?” Tru said.

  I nodded. “I always like to wait and see what name would fit a horse before I give him a private name.”

  “So he’s new,” Tru said. “Good boy!” she added, evidently for the horse’s benefit, as he set a tentative first foot on the deck.

  “I’ve only had him a couple months.”

  “Any names so far?” Tru asked.

  “I’ve decided against Nervous Wreck,” I said, smiling. “I don’t think it would be good for him to hear that all the time.”

  “That sounds like a racer name, anyway,” Tru said with an answering smile.

  Eventually we all gained the deck, and Indech slipped into the water and swam to the sluice-gate. After some struggling, he opened it. The entering wave raised every ship by several feet and swept Indech straight past the one we had chosen. He was still coughing and sputtering when he climbed onto the deck again.

  Once everything was settled, he freed the ship from its tethers, then went to stand beside Amien at the prow. Energy prickled across my scalp as Amien enveloped the ship with his will and moved it slowly away from the wall, adjusting under Indech’s coaching, and nudged it through the little channel into the Devadore.

  The mist I had seen from the shore enveloped us; the sun was a pale, flat disk peering through tattered ribbons of clouds. The knights and I divided ourselves into two crews and did our best to follow Indech’s instructions for raising and manning the sails. When the first tentative breaths of Amien’s wind filled the sail I was manning, pleased wonder shivered through my middle, surprising me: it had been a very long time since I had any sense of the ferries on the Ruillin as anything but routine, and even my first time aboard a boat manned by professionals had not given me this sense of the everyday magic involved in a ship’s flight across water. Indech grinned like a madman; even Amien looked happy.

  Once we had the ship on the correct course, there was little for the rest of us to do but gaze at the scenery. Out on the open water, the mist dissipated. The sky held onto its tattered clouds and steel-grey hue, but now I could see all the way to the horizon. The ship danced and skittered across the waves; several of the knights grew notably green around the edges. Tru, Mattiaci, and Manannan leaned against the rail at the back of the boat and watched Fíana recede behind us until there was nothing but water in every direction. Most everyone else clustered in the ship’s prow, looking forward as if they might glimpse Ilunmore before it climbed over the horizon. Though I knew better, I found myself doing the same.

  What would we find at Ilunmore? As recently as yesterday I had looked forward to this part of the journey, even more than I had anticipated visiting Arian. I had spent more hours than I could count, at Aballo and afterward, collecting everything written or sung about Ilunmore that is available to humans. Even now, I could call to mind the maps of the island on which I had spent so many dreamy moments, could see the vision of their great goddess that the Tanaan had projected on their sacred isle: the mountain at the island’s northern shore they call the Great Barrow, which corresponds to their Lady’s Head; the Temple Mount at the Lady’s Heart; the mysterious lake-within-a-lake they call the Lady’s Womb. For days I had looked forward to finding some high point from which I might see that vision for myself, might contemplate the other as-above-so-below mystery that is projected on the isle: the five concentric circles into which the ancient Tanaan divided the isle by taming the rivers, and the echo of the heavens those rivers created. I knew Aballo had been modeled on the structures at Ilunmore’s great temple, from the fourteen gates, thirteen galleries, and twelve-times-twelve stelae to the layout of the enclave entire; the idea of walking the paths of the original raised a strange longing in me: as if seeing those places might bring me back, after so much time, to stand face to face with the goddess.

  The precision of the celestial alignments at Ilunmore was said to exceed even those at Aballo. But I had found no record of any human actually setting foot on the Tanaan sacred isle. I had looked forward to finally pacing out the galleries and confirming the symmetries of which I’d read, and perhaps even talking with one of the Tanaan astrologers. Now, of course, I wondered how much of their ceremonial center still stood. And I suspected there would be no one to talk with who wasn’t on this boat.

  Listening to the Tanaan converse as we sailed across the Devadore, I realized everyone had his or her own agendas for the visit, and I had somehow failed to notice the most important of all. There had been nothing of it in the histories I’d read. While any Tanaan might make a religious pilgrimage to Ilunmore, it seemed no mora could be invested without making that journey. There were sites she must visit, ceremonies she must perform—and the whole royal progress culminated in a visit to the summit of the Temple Mount, where stood the Tuaoh Stone: the great god-stone that once marked the center of Hy-Breasaíl.

  “The Tuaoh Stone?” I blurted. The stone was another of the treasures of Hy-Breasaíl that no one, at least no human, knew how to find: just like the Great Spear of Lugh Lámfhada, which Macha had so casually mentioned the Fíana morae holding at Irisa. Some of the histories mention the presence of the Lia of Fáilias, the Fáillian righ-stone, at Ilunmore; but the Lia Fáill is only one of several stones that people claim to be the lost Tuaoh. I’d always thought the tales of the Lia Fáill as the true Tuaoh a conceit of human harpists, not something to be considered seriously.

  All the Tanaan gathered in the prow looked at me, nonplussed.

  “Yes, the Tuaoh Stone,” Iminor said finally. “Before the Deluge a mora couldn’t be invested without a visit. It was where the goddess would designate Her favorites.”

  I laughed, surprised. “Which of you is carrying the Great Sword Fragarach, then?”

  Letitia gave me a puzzled little smile. “That is the treasure of Banbagor.”

  I swallowed a second laugh. “Of course.” Next you will tell me they are making soup in the Great Cauldron at Muir, I thought, but didn’t give it voice. Once I was sure my voice would sound composed, I added, “You plan to visit the Tuaoh today, then?”

  Letitia nodded. “This evening. First we visit the Lady’s Womb, and bathe in the waters.”

  A sudden image of all of us bathing together skipped across my mind. The idea of not only Letitia but also Easca, Tru and Bruane in the nude competed with that of Iminor and Amien in similar condition. I wasn’t sure what showed in my face, but the wizard chuckled.

  “By we she means the Tana,” he said. “By tradition only the outer circle is open to men.”

  “Oh,” I said, unable to restrain my disappointment: I would miss the wonders of Ilunmore’s sacred geography, after all.

  “We will suspend that, today,” Iminor said smoothly. “It was traditional for a mora-in-waiting’s approach to the Tuaoh Stone to be witnessed by the priestesses at the temple. Today the mora will make do with us.”

  I glanced at Letitia, waiting for her polite protest of the phrase make do. But she was abstracted, her gaze on the far horizon and a tension that looked less like anticipation than apprehension on her lovely face.

  “Lord Amien, I understand you need visit the Tuaoh Stone as well?” Iminor continued as if there had been no lapse.

  The wizard nodded. “I may be able to contact my second from there. We may be able to arrange reinforcements as early as Goibniu.”

  He was right: whether or not the Lia Fáill was actually the Tuaoh, it was a power stone, and the Temple Mount mus
t be a potent power-site. It should make a useful location for a dream-sending.

  Iminor nodded, too. “No doubt the Holy Mora will lend you Her aid.”

  I wondered how anyone who had ridden through Arian yesterday, who sailed on a centuries-old relic of a ship across a sea rendered toxic by that goddess’s Own Hand, could maintain such misplaced faith. But I didn’t give it voice, and I refrained from looking at Easca. I no longer doubted their goddess truly existed, but I knew the best we could hope for was to escape Her notice.

  No sooner had I birthed the thought than it began to worry at me like an underfed dog with a bone. Amien planned to step into their holiest of holies and tap one of their greatest power objects. How could She fail to notice? What if the Tanaan were right and the Deluge had been Her declaration of a ban on magic in Her lands? Might a human be granted an exception, or would he be singled out for yet greater wrath? I spent most of the remaining voyage trying to imagine how we might protect Amien without abandoning the idea of contacting Sanglin, but the only idea I came up with that might actually work was attempting the operation myself: no better than Amien taking the risk in some ways, far more dangerous in others. I stared out at the water and chewed my lip. The hours dragged.

  Eventually Ilunmore climbed over the horizon: first the peak of the Temple Mount, then shortly afterward the Great Barrow. Gradually the shore came into view. The mountains surprised me: I had always imagined the sort of great, rugged peaks that define the landscape of Tellan. These were smaller, more weathered: like the prominences that line the Ruillin.

  Even before we gained the shore, I saw: Ilunmore was as ruined as Arian. The gardens of which I had read were gone, and only bare black basalt and the occasional stubborn stunted tree had taken their place. The cove into which we sailed had once boasted a graceful marina; now it was all Indech could do to find a place where we could tie off and disembark.