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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  She met my eyes in a gaze so frank and intimate my throat closed again. My heart thudded against my sternum.

  “I wish I had known you much earlier,” I said. Before her commitment to Iminor. Maybe tonight I would be doing more than staring at her, if I had.

  Her mouth quirked. “When I was a child.”

  I found myself smiling, and wondering why it hurt. “Yes, then. And when you were an old woman.”

  Her smile crumpled; she glanced quickly away. Once again I couldn’t figure out how to fix things.

  “I’m sorry,” I croaked.

  She didn’t look at me, but a hand stole out from beneath her cloak to grasp mine.

  “I am, too,” she said quietly. “I’d better go to sleep.”

  Just as quickly her hand withdrew, leaving a lingering, immediate sense of where it had been. She rose and walked back into the boathouse proper. I forced myself not to gaze after her, to stare instead across the water, as Telliyn re-emerged from behind the cloud and painted everything in pale glamour again.

  When I woke in the morning, the lake appeared to have drained once more. But the captain had enjoined us to meet him on the dock at midmorning; so after a cold breakfast we packed up our gear, saddled the horses, and took the short ride to the dock.

  Morning light shimmered in the mud flats, glittered on the water. The Tansy, the boat Amien had engaged, still rode below the dock, but someone had dragged a gangway from the dock to the deck. Amien paid the captain the fare, and we coaxed our horses down the swaying gangway while the crew stared: mostly at the Tana. Amien and I stared back at them, twice as intently, and most of them got the message.

  Even as the party straggled across, the water rose a few inches. Within half an hour, the dock from which we had embarked lay lower than the boat on which we waited. An hour after that, the tide stilled briefly and then began running in the other direction; the crew raised the sail; and we were gliding south across the Black. Relief broke across Tanaan faces at the knowledge that we were, once again, temporarily safe from attacks. Faster and faster the tide ran, until the flow of the water outpaced the wind and the crew lowered the sail again.

  And suddenly, as sometimes happens on the Ruillin, on a ship in the grip of the tide, everything was glorious. Brilliant sunshine revealed all the subtle hues of gold and white in Tanaan hair, glinted on the hilts of their weapons and the mail they wore; the wind of our passage brought color to their fair cheeks, sent their cloaks whipping and warrior tails streaming. Easca’s head moved as if she might be scenting prey on the lake air, beautiful and deadly as a hawk’s; Tru laughed, evidently for the pleasure of the flight across the water, and the music of it made the crew stop what they were doing and stare once more. This time I let it slide. The contingent might have stepped out of a song, and even Iminor, with his unsmiling face and eyes that saw far too much, fairly sparkled. I wondered when this exotic company had come to seem commonplace, and how much beauty I had failed to observe in my preoccupation with survival.

  All of them paled beside Letitia, however. The red of her cloak sang against the profound emerald green of her eyes; her hair glowed in the water-light like spun gold. I kept catching myself trying to commit her profile to memory, trying to memorize the way her hair escaped its braid to tangle in the pin on her cloak. As if any effort would be necessary. As if it might be possible to forget.

  Sometime after noon, we reached the south end of the lake. The crew anchored the boat a little distance from the dock; we resaddled the horses and waited with barely-contained impatience as the crew brought the gangway into place. From the dock we stepped out to a little fishing village whose name I didn’t know, where all the houses stood on stilts and a narrow, weatherbeaten walkway served in place of a street.

  I’d heard about this crossing between the lakes at the head of the Ruillin and the river proper: at low tide the flats stretch perhaps two miles between the Black and the Grey to the north and the river proper to the south; as the tide rises it sweeps straight across to spill into the lakes, eventually dashing itself against the Nemetona coast and whatever corresponding town lies at the head of the Grey. Evidently the transition between the river and the lakes is unnavigable at any time.

  I tried and failed to imagine what it would be to have the land on which one lived invisible for most of the day. A man would have to love boats to tolerate it.

  “Ya got mebbe five hours afore ya c’n get out and cross the flats to Goibniu,” the captain said as we filed off. “Then mebbe two hours afore the water comes up too high again. Don’t wait for the water to clear; ya’ll never make it. Just get right out there soon’s it’s shallow enough.”

  Amien nodded. “Thank you.” He glanced around at us. “Five hours.”

  Five hours with nothing to do but wait for the tide to go out. I would willingly have postponed Goibniu and the parting that must come there as long as anyone asked; but this just felt like the gods having a laugh at our expense.

  “Let’s see if they’ve got a tavern,” I said. “And get some lunch.”

  The place had a tavern, but the owner clearly hadn’t been expecting anyone this early in the day. We found him in a chair with his feet up, repairing a fishing net, as we arrived.

  “Ho!” he said as we walked in, feet slamming to the floor. His gaze slipped past me and Amien to the Tanaan, and his eyes widened. “Damn,” he said softly, then seemed to remember his manners.

  “Welcome,” he said, eyes still on the group behind me. “Where ya travelin’ from? And what c’n I do for ya?” The inflection on this last question was nearly innocent, but only nearly so, and I felt myself bristling. Suddenly his eyes were on me again, and a little of the wind went out of his sails.

  “We’re on our way from Gorias,” Amien said, as smoothly as if it were the truth. “Bound for Goibniu after the tide clears. We need—lunch? Maybe some news?”

  “Gorias, eh?” The tavern-keep’s gaze flicked back to the Tanaan again. “Ya’ll be Tanaan, then? I never—”

  “Yes,” Letitia said calmly in Ilesian, ignoring all the ways she might have corrected him.

  He gave vent to a long exhalation that spoke of wonder, longing, and a strange sort of relief.

  “What is the name of this place?” she asked.

  For half a second his mouth formed a perfect O. “Land’s End, Lady.”

  In my peripheral vision I saw Letitia nod. “Yes. It does seem to be. What does one eat for lunch in Land’s End, sian?”

  “For you, Lady, anything ya want.”

  She smiled and pulled off her gloves; he looked as if he might faint. “Anything you have is fine.”

  The man stammered something about getting something for the lady, sketched a bow, and hurried into the recesses of the weathered building. I hoped he would remember to bring enough for the rest of us. We all pulled off our gloves, jackets, and cloaks—except Letitia, who pulled at the throat of her cloak a bit but didn’t take it off—and settled on the benches of one of two long tables in the room. The place was dim after all the light out on the lake this morning, but through the tavern’s open back door, the water to the south was easy to see. How would we know when the tide was receding? The Ruillin stretched away beyond sight; the only thing visible on the water was the faint protuberance of some tiny island a mile or so distant.

  After a moment the tavern-keep returned with a pitcher in hand. A young woman I guessed to be his daughter followed him in with a tray full of earthenware cups, cast a glance among the Tanaan warriors gathered around the table, and turned as red as Letitia’s cloak. She distributed cups around the table and retreated in a haze of confusion; the tavern-keep began pouring: not ale or beer as I’d expected, but wine. Evidently he had decided a Tanaan Lady rated nothing less.

  Letitia smiled graciously at him, but I realized how precarious a path we meant to tread here on the Ruillin: no matter what we said, no matter what adornments Letitia wore or put aside, anyone who had heard the tale of the bount
y on the neck of the Lady of Finias was likely to connect Letitia with what they had heard. How could people who couldn’t differentiate Finias from Gorias, let alone know their true names, do otherwise? I should be grateful for the prospect of chartering a ship at Goibniu and extracting Letitia from this mess before too many people had a chance to see her.

  “Ya’ll be here for the moon rites, Lady?” he said shyly as he poured her wine.

  “The moon rites?” she echoed.

  To his credit, the tavern-keep flushed. “They say the Tanaan practice the old religion,” he said softly, with a surreptitious glance at Amien. “Is’t true?”

  She cast a quizzical glance at him, head cocked. “I couldn’t say, sian,” she said courteously. “Which religion is the old one?”

  “I believe,” I said quietly, “he means the worship of the goddess.” I couldn’t work out whether I was being helpful; more than anything else, I was curious to see where this would lead. “The goddess of the Ruillin still has many followers here.”

  Letitia nodded. “Yes, sian, we honor the goddess.”

  A smile broke across the tavern-keep’s pale face. “Ah, then ya’ll’ve come just in time. This eve’s the moon rites, down at the Lady’s Well.” He glanced along the table again at Amien, who was studiously engaged in missing the entire conversation, looking lost in thought and staring out the door. “The Bealtan moon comes full tonight.”

  “And her sister, as well,” I observed, borrowing the phrasing I’d overheard in taverns and ferries and places less reputable, up and down the Ruillin: the Lady moon, and her little sister. In certain contexts those phrases are not only epithets for the moons but euphemisms for the tender bits of a woman.

  The tavern-keep shot me a look of frank astonishment, as if I’d cracked some sort of hedge-row code; behind him, Amien caught my eye with a glance that said he knew I was toying with the man, and he couldn’t decide how to feel about it. Still, I couldn’t have said whether toying was the right word for it at all.

  “Yah,” the man said finally, nodding, and turned to Letitia again. “Ya’d be welcome at the Lady’s Well this eve.”

  “Thank you, sian,” she answered gravely. “But they tell us we must cross to Goibniu while the tide is low.”

  The tavern-keep nodded, smiling. “Sure. The Lady’s Well is on the way, and the low tide is the only time ya can visit. Ya c’n see’t from here,” he said, pointing out the back door.

  I followed his skinny arm, frowning. “All I see is a little island, sian.”

  “Yah! Those are the Pillars ’round the Well.”

  I nodded slowly. “So when would a man make the crossing, if he were going to visit the Lady’s Well, and make it to Goibniu after that?”

  The tavern-keep’s mouth folded into a thoughtful moue. “Hour before sunset, give or take.”

  “And how long is the trip to Goibniu?” Iminor said.

  The tavern-keep’s head swiveled quickly for a look at the Tan. It took him a moment to formulate an answer.

  “Mebbe two hours,” he said finally.

  “Putting us at Goibniu around nightfall.”

  The tavern-keep nodded gravely. “Not much time to spare when the tide’s this late in the day. Ya don’ wanna miss the gate.”

  “No doubt,” I said. All the cities on the upper Ruillin lock their gates at night. Getting caught on the riverward side of the gate at the rising of the tide didn’t bear contemplating.

  “Then we must leave as soon as we can,” Letitia said decisively. “I don’t want to miss the chance to honor the goddess. Tonight is our night for observances as well. Can you tell us as soon as it’s safe to start out?”

  A look on his face that suggested far more than information would have been hers for the asking, the tavern-keep nodded. She smiled; he murmured something about checking to see if her lunch was ready and retreated.

  Lunch consisted of fried fish and pan-bread. Two months ago in Ilnemedon, I would have been completely unimpressed; today it was delicious. The caution with which the Tanaan approached the food made me wonder how I had looked at their tables.

  After lunch, the waiting began. Several of the knights walked out the door through which we had entered to explore the weathered-plank street, evidently exhausting the possibilities of that amusement in a short while. All of us walked out the back door, through which the main body of the Ruillin was visible, to meander around another, narrower plank walkway that extended only to the edges of the building and peer across the water for signs of the tide beginning to recede. From here the so-called pillars at Laverna’s sacred site still looked like a little island. Back inside the tavern, Tuiri dug out a bag of dice, and several of the knights began a game on the table at which we hadn’t eaten, as if a different table constituted a change of scene. I unpacked my harp and began tuning it, realizing only as the sound chest came to rest against my shoulder how much I had missed playing. Everyone looked at me expectantly; I shrugged.

  “I’m really just plinking around,” I said. At the other end of the room, the tavern-keep’s pretense of ignoring our proceedings evaporated into a double-take; abruptly I realized I’d thrown the Ilesian phrase into Tanaan without even thinking about it, and the Tanaan had all understood.

  “And I haven’t tuned it in half a twelvenight. With your indulgence, Mora,” I said to Letitia.

  She smiled wistfully and said, “As it may amuse you, my lord.” And I found myself smiling in return: remembering the time I had first played for her on the bank of the Crearu a hundred years ago; struck anew by the wonder of this company and how far we had all come. But up the heels of that awareness raced the fact that it was all ending. I turned my focus to the business of tuning, though I could have done the job with a fraction of my attention, waiting for the wave of things I couldn’t allow myself to say to pass by.

  But instead of passing, it intensified. I shifted from tuning to playing: an unscripted song whose ending I couldn’t predict, which evolved from phrase to phrase under my hands. There were no words; there could never be any words. I was a fool. I tried to lose myself in playing, but the people around me kept drawing my attention: Mattiaci rising from the dice game to draw Tru into an open space and dance to this song whose rhythms shifted from one moment to the next; Manannan, whose eyes had grown full of last times, crossing the room to pull the tavern-keep’s daughter from the inner doorway and wordlessly draw her into the dance as well; Amien, face etched with some grief I couldn’t identify; Letitia, whose face and hands and fragile bravery prompted phrase after phrase from my strings. And abruptly, although the song wasn’t over, I couldn’t play it anymore, because something inside me was ready to burst. I lifted my hands from the strings; I set the harp aside and strode out to the narrow walkway at the back of the room, feeling them all stare after me. For some minutes I just gazed across the water, waiting for rational thought to return. When it finally did, I realized how perilously far inside my walls I had allowed all of them to come. I must repair my borders or find myself making emotional mistakes of every sort.

  An hour before sunset, finally, we were ready to set out. Iminor paid the tavern-keep, in silver of Fíana I felt certain the man would never spend; Letitia thanked him warmly for his hospitality, and he flushed to the roots of his thinning hair.

  “Will we see you at the Lady’s Well?” she asked as she pulled on her gloves.

  Sudden shyness came over him; he smiled a little, glancing at his shoes.

  “No, Lady,” he said. “Only horses c’n cross from here during the spring tides. I woulda needed leave hours ago, and go ’round by way o’ the Grey, to reach the Lady’s Well in time.”

  Regret suffused Letitia’s face. “And we delayed you! Sian, I am sorry.”

  This time he dared to meet her gaze. “I’m not, Lady. There’ll be other Bealtan moons. Ya’re here today.”

  Out on the flats, I understood the meanings of all the puzzling things we’d heard about the crossing. I made the whole par
ty wait while I unlashed the harp case from my saddle and slung it across my back: the water still rose to my horse’s withers. The powerful southward flow of the tide would have quickly overmastered a man. But the tide withdrew steadily, and by the time we approached the rocks we had seen from the tavern, the water was no higher than my horse’s knees.

  The so-called pillars at the Lady’s Well looked for all the world like melting stelae in a sun-circle made of wax. They seemed not manmade but sculpted by the tide: a fitting tribute to a river goddess. And unlike the quiescent shrine to Lady Tella at Nemetona, the place pulsed with arcane energy so strong that I realized just in time how automatically I was opening myself to its flow. I managed to hold myself closed, but I still felt the seduction swirling around me, raising little rills of pleasure up my spine.

  No. No. If opening myself to power would be a violation of my vow, how much greater an offense would the goddess find it if the thing that finally seduced me was a site dedicated to one of the old gods? I didn’t want to imagine trying to explain myself to Her. I swallowed against the temptation, gathering the reins in my fists as if I might grasp my sad excuse for control.

  The flats climbed slightly as we approached the site; atop the rise, the mud lay exposed in ripples that showed the action of the tide. More than three dozen people already stood around the pillar-stones. At the base of the rise we dismounted, I gratefully pulled the harp from my back again and lashed it to the saddle where it belonged, and we walked up to join the crowd. A number of people looked at us, but most of them returned their attention to the goings-on within the circle, where three plainly-dressed women stood at the edge of a pool in the center, making offerings and reciting a prayer that sounded as if I should recognize it. Power hummed in my brain until I felt I might split open.

  The ceremony wasn’t long; by the time Telliyn had risen at the eastern horizon, the whole thing was over, and people had begun lining up to bathe in the pool.