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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  On shore, everyone stood for several moments, looking around. The edge of the wrecked marina abutted a wide path of white quartz, speckled with egg-shaped stones of pockmarked black, that stretched north and south beyond sight. This must be the Way of Endeáril, the devotional path of the outer circle. The motif of the inverse night sky is sacred in any context, from the white-and-black granite of the ceremonial center at Aballo to the speckled-hide harp case that only one of the Lords of the Harpist Gorsedd may carry. The Way gleamed, stark and strange, amid the island’s black basalt: like an echo of the Way of the Gods that divides the night sky.

  Leading east, towards the Temple Mount, the remains of a broad processional road stumbled across the broken surface of the island; the low, relief-carved walls that had once enclosed it were little more than trails of rubble on either side. In the distance I saw a bridge rise up from that road: the span across the outermost of the river-rings, I guessed. That must be the path an arriving mora would follow.

  “Well, then,” I said finally. “Do we take separate ways?”

  For a moment no one spoke. Iminor and Letitia exchanged a glance; she nodded.

  “Tru, Bruane, and Easca will accompany me to the Lady’s Womb, and then to the Temple Mount,” Letitia said quietly. “I’ll make the devotions at the sacred spring below the temple. If we can find the Inner Ways, that’s how we’ll come up to the Tuaoh Stone.”

  Iminor nodded, too. “The rest of us will take the Way of Endeáril to the Great Barrow. After, we’ll come up the Outer Path to the temple summit.”

  “We’ll meet you there at sunset, then,” Letitia said, trepidation in her face. “Give me my pack?”

  Iminor reached for her hand with a reassuring smile. “Already behind your saddle, milady.”

  Letitia glanced back at her horse, surprised, then produced a smile. “Thank you.”

  Iminor smiled again. Letitia climbed into the saddle, so the rest of us did, too. For a few moments we sat and watched the women ride away. I knew each of the men around me felt the unease of leaving the mora with so few blades, and each must be working his mind around the strange fact of temporary safety in his own way. Then we turned our horses north and followed the Way of Endeáril along the barren basalt shore.

  Every so often, we passed elaborately-carved stelae, which stood beside the Way on the seaward side. A number of them had fallen or broken, and few of them looked stable; most bore splotches and streaks of lichens in a variety of unnatural hues. The stelae made a complete circuit of the island, hugging the Way of Endeáril, I learned; and each told the story of some episode in the lives of the Lady’s Consort Endeáril or the hero Cúchulainn.

  No matter that Cúchulainn was mortal, and human; the Tanaan had claimed him for their own and installed him with their god on Ilunmore itself. Reeling at the utter strangeness of it, I could barely absorb the story the first standing stone told. Our lore teaches that the god Lugh fathered Cúchulainn on a mortal woman; the Tanaan, I learned, believe that Cúchulainn became the god Lugh: after his encounter with the Green God that is described in the classic Fare and Fir. I didn’t ask if they knew the song; the Tanaan with whom I rode were far too busy relating the portions of Cúchulainn’s life covered by the stelae we passed for my benefit, tripping over one another in their eagerness to tell the tales. When some detail finally made me realize that the Tanaan consider Cúchulainn an avatar of their great god Endeáril, the whole thing snapped into place for me: Tanaan warriors, almost to a man, adopt Endeáril as their particular deity for private devotions; Cúchulainn, the greatest of mortal warriors, folds quite neatly into the story of Endeáril—especially into their version of the episode of the goddess’s kidnap into the underworld and subsequent rescue, which was the topic of this series of stones.

  As with many of our oldest histories, we share the essentials of that tale with the Tanaan. In human lore it is the young goddess Ara Who is kidnapped by the Lord of the Underworld. Among the Tanaan, their great goddess Dana is tricked by Donn, their god of the dead, into killing Her Consort Endeáril, and further deceived into swallowing the Acorn of His Soul; and finally, defenseless in Her grief, kidnapped into Donn’s domain: all because Donn has tried and failed to fairly win Her Hand. There was no bardic recitation in the version the Tanaan knights told me as we rode, but they loved the tale as well as any warrior loves a lay of Cúchulainn.

  And a tale of Cúchulainn it turned out to be: in their version, with the goddess kidnapped to the underworld, and Her Consort no more than a spark of life in Her belly, it falls to Her champion Cúchulainn to effect a rescue. Mortal though he may be, Cúchulainn crosses the barrier between life and death and lays siege to Donn’s great House; even here, Cúchulainn’s reputation has preceded him. And rather than risk the destruction He fears Cúchulainn might wreak, Donn releases the goddess back into the world of the living, and She gives birth to the god en route.

  A worthy interpretation, I judged, but in the end it worked out muddy. I tried and failed to make what I had heard resolve into a sensible whole. In Tanaan lore, Cúchulainn became Lugh after his encounter with the Green God; yet Cúchulainn was trapped in the underworld after the goddess’s rescue, being mortal and unable to return once he had made the crossing. So was the god Lugh in the underworld?

  The Tanaan temporized. They exchanged puzzled looks. No, they said; well, maybe, during winter-dark. And then, finally, Lord, don’t you know you can’t expect these things to line up like pickets in a fence?

  Well, yes, of course I did. But I never remembered until I hit that unresolvable knot. The Tanaan seemed relieved when the entrance to the Great Barrow drew into view and I gave up the futile effort.

  The Great Barrow on Ilunmore, I knew, held the skulls, the ashes, and in some cases the long-bones of the morae of the Tanaan nations. The entrance to the barrow-cavern stands only feet from the shore, facing southeast: too close to the true for an alignment with midwinter sunrise. I wondered whether it might be situated to catch the first light on the Day of the Dead. Whatever the case, the exterior walls at the entrance are painstakingly inlaid with brilliant argentel, clear crystals nearly as hard as diamonds which the Tanaan hold in even greater esteem: making the black basalt twinkle like a moonless night. Inside we would find more argentel: inlays of spirals in endless profusion that stretched farther into the mountain than even midsummer sunlight can reach.

  But all these things of which I had read and heard paled beside the thing no human source could have told me: the Great Barrow is not merely the burial chamber of the Tanaan’s great leaders. They maintain it is literally the path to the underworld, the doorway through which the ancient Tanaan emerged from the Lady’s Underground Ways during the time both our races call the Transition, the period of retreat from Hy-Breasaíl.

  I stopped in the entranceway, stunned: staring at Tuiri, who had carried most of this afternoon’s tale-telling and who tossed this shattering fact over his shoulder as if it were just one more feat of Cúchulainn. For a moment I suspected I was having a problem with the Tanaan language. Maybe I had caught a whiff of mine-gas.

  “Do I understand you?” I managed finally. “A man can walk down that tunnel and find himself in…?”

  “In the House of Donn?” Tuiri said. He shrugged. “That’s how my Amma tells it, Lord. I don’t know anyone who’s tried it.”

  “No indeed,” I breathed. Truth be told, I was far less compelled by the idea of visiting the Tanaan underworld than finding a route to Hy-Breasaíl. But even were such a thing possible, there wouldn’t be time this afternoon. No, this was another thing I must put off for some quieter period.

  Nevertheless, I trailed after the Tanaan into the Barrow. Most of them had followed Indech and his torch beyond sight; I walked a little distance inside: watching slivers of sunlight spark in the argentel spirals in the walls, finding myself infected with their awe at this sacred pilgrimage site. As poorly used as the island outside was, all the inlay work here seemed to be intact.
A stray sparkle above me caught my eye; I looked up and realized that the spiral inlays stretched right up the walls and across the curve of the ceiling: some larger, some smaller, some spinning left and some spinning right. Some joined at the tails to make three-petaled or nine-petaled whirligigs. All the spiraling sparkles made my head threaten to spin into magic; by the time I regained my sense of the here-and-now I stood alone.

  Echoes of men’s whispering skittered into the chamber from one of the corridors that stretched back into the cavern. What were they finding back there? I walked carefully into the deepening dark, to the corridor entrance. I spied the faint glow of Indech’s torch a little distance within, and followed it down the passage for much longer than the teasing light from the entrance had suggested, fingers trailing against the densely-carved wall in an effort to keep my bearings. I walked as quickly as I could, trying to catch up, but the light ahead dimmed and receded altogether, and finally I was left in utter darkness. Of course they were faster; they had a torch.

  Still I pressed on, increasingly curious, keeping my hand on the wall. The wall fell away from my hand: the path had branched again, and I stood in darkness too dense to discern anything but the sounds of my own breath. If I couldn’t locate them now, there would be no sensible choice but to turn back. I stretched out my arm and found the wall again, and took two steps down the right-hand corridor, trying to catch some glimpse of the light—and something shifted. Without thinking I opened up arcane senses, trying to understand what I had stepped into; some power I couldn’t identify surged around me, and suddenly I felt nothing beneath my feet. Air rushed into my face. Lights flashed at the edges of vision; for half a second everything flared into a black-speckled white inverse of night. Then even the darkness was gone.

  Had I been asleep or unconscious? Had I woken? I had the sense that I might have been absent for a second or a year: that, finally, the question of time lapsed was impossible to ask or sensibly answer. No sooner had my sense of my own presence resumed than I wobbled and fell, finding myself on an unadorned stone path through grey-green grass which led to the portico of some great house. The stone of the house’s exterior was as grey as the grass, as grey as the sky; the windows looking down on me reflected white like the eyes sometimes seen in the blind. I knew when I looked up I would see no sun, not even a bright spot where I might imagine it lurked behind the clouds; but I craned my neck and scanned the sky anyway. When I returned my gaze to the grey, featureless plain on which I stood, I saw someone looking at me from the doorway: so I walked the little distance to the portico and climbed the steps.

  The man in the doorway was Tanaan. His black eyes repeated the void into which I might or might not have recently fallen; no, they were the green-grey of the Ruillin in winter. Usually I could guess whether a Tan’s age should be estimated in decades or centuries: with this man, neither was the right unit to use. But the only lines on his face had been created by laughter, and nearly all of those few were around his eyes. His clothing was rich, but it followed no fashion I had ever seen or read of, and every pattern and weave showed grey upon grey upon grey. His bottomless eyes appraised me; he made not even a pretense of a smile.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. “You’re early; she’s not here.”

  “What?” I said, reflexively, glancing past his shoulder to the interior of the house. The one room I could see was empty even of furniture; the place sounded vacant and smelled of dust.

  “You’re too early,” he repeated, as if I should have some idea what he was talking about.

  I shook my head, opening my mouth to protest.

  “Look you, don’t think I’m unaware of the havoc you intend. I’m telling you: this is not the time.”

  That was a code, or shorthand: it should have meant something to me. The Tan held my gaze as if waiting for its intended meaning to sink in, watching me with the patience of someone to whom time is of no relevance.

  Except, of course, that this was not the time.

  “Ah,” he said finally. “I see. Never mind, then; time for you to go back. Here—” He produced from some inner pocket of his fancifully-cut coat a flask of cut crystal and unstoppered it. Whatever lay within gleamed greener than emeralds, fractured into a hundred different tones of green behind the facets of the glass. He offered it to me.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “Good for what ails you,” the Tan answered. “Time to go back.”

  “Is this—” I couldn’t think of the phrase in the Tanaan language; I gave up and reached for the arcane term. “…a deoch diarmaid?”

  Something that might have become a smile flitted about his mouth and then changed its mind. “A draft of forgetfulness?” He shrugged. “More like a draft of remembrance.”

  And how could drinking send me back to where I had started, if I correctly understood the rules of such encounters? Wouldn’t it, rather, bind me here?

  The Tan sighed again. “No. I am not the fool here. Drink.”

  I did. Some liquor lighter than brandy, richer than wine, carrying the scents and flavors of a dozen separate flowers, flowed through my mouth and down my throat. Suddenly the eyes that met mine were as green as the liquor I had drunk. I blinked—and realized the grey grasses surrounding the house were a garden, my would-be host’s clothes were so many colors at once that they should have offended my eyes, and a party that paled any debacle I had yet been involved in was going on in the house behind him. I caught the barest hint of clear blue skies as I collapsed.

  I had a much-too-immediate view of rough-hewn basalt. The edges pressed uncomfortably into my face. Now, finally, there was torchlight.

  “—on? Ellion! What the hell!” That was Amien. He skidded to a stop beside me, dropped to his knees to peer into my befogged eyes.

  I pushed myself onto my side and began formulating a strategy for climbing to my feet. My mouth still tasted of flowers; the heady vapors of the liquor still warmed my throat. Now I could see I lay in the Barrow’s entry chamber, not the corridor in which I’d lost my way.

  “Where were you? What the hell was that power surge?”

  I stared blearily into the wizard’s face. I wanted to tell him everything: he was the only person I knew who was likely to understand. I’d almost forgotten the thrill of walking realms beyond the mundane; I couldn’t get the statement You’re early; she’s not here out of my head. It rang of purpose, of some truly important mission awaiting me. And gods, I wanted something I did to finally matter, wanted to stop being the one who wrecked things at the critical moment. But I’d seen that look on Amien before: back at Aballo, right around the time the goddess started making public Her interest in me. This time I knew better than to discuss extra-mundane encounters and their meanings.

  “What?” I said. “Right here.”

  Amien shook his head.

  “I think I caught a whiff of mine gas,” I extemporized. “Maybe you did, too?”

  Amien shook his head. “There was definitely something… Some-

  thing—arcane.”

  “Hunh,” I said, and pushed myself to my feet. Reality performed a little spiral dance; I ground my tongue between my teeth to make it stop. “Isn’t it time we—”

  “Fouzh,” Amien whispered. Even in the torchlight I could see he’d gone pale, and his eyes were on something no one else could see.

  “What?” I said softly.

  “Letitia,” he breathed. “I’ve lost her. The wards—”

  Evidently I was not the only one unable to continue listening. The entire party rushed out of the cavern, scrambled into the saddles. Nuad, Iminor and Tuiri conferred briefly about the most efficient route to the Temple Mount, and then we were galloping southwest down a road as wrecked as the one Letitia had taken. After a moment I realized what we’d forgotten to try.

  “Iminor!” I called over the noise of pounding hooves. “Have you tried—” Damn it, what was the Tanaan word for a telepathic sending? “Mindtouch?”

  Imin
or reined, throwing the party into confusion. Several knights overshot him before bringing their horses to heel. The Tan stared at me.

  “How…?”

  I was even less interested in discussing this matter than what had happened inside the Barrow. No good would come of them realizing I heard their broadcasts.

  I shrugged. “I’m not a fool.” That was a lie, of course. “Have you tried?”

  Iminor shook his head; his gaze turned on something inside his own head, or something too far away for eyes to see.

  *Ti?* the Tan broadcast. *Letitia? Are you all—*

  *Im!* Letitia’s thought was as subtle and unmistakable as the scent of roses on the air. Relief flooded through me; the tension in Iminor’s shoulders dissolved. *Where are you?*

  *On our way to the Outer Path. You?*

  *Just coming out of the sacred spring below the temple. It’s all so… I don’t know.*

  Iminor nodded, there in the saddle. *Ti, Amien lost track of you a little while ago. Is everything all right?*

  *All right as it can be. I’ll see you at the—* Even through a broadcast not aimed at me, I heard the depth of dread that made it difficult for her to form the thought. *…summit?*

  *See you there,* Iminor broadcast. He turned his eerie blue eyes on me for a long, weighty second, during which I did my utmost to look as tensely curious as the rest of them; finally he looked at the wizard.

  “She’s all right,” he said.

  “What happened?” Amien asked.

  Iminor shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I can tell. She’d just bathed in the sacred spring at the temple. Everything—” Amien smacked his own forehead; puzzlement manifested in Iminor’s face. “Seemed… fine?”

  Amien shook his head. “The spring. The power of the spring must have knocked out her wards. I’ll have to rebuild them tonight…” He sighed. “Assuming that’s possible here at all.”