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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  Letitia cracked a reluctant smile. “It has been a while since we’ve seen the honey-tongued harpist.”

  I felt myself flush, suddenly grateful for the poor light. “Ah, sweet lady, I am trying to speak truth. Will you hear it?”

  Her smile faded. “Your pardon, my lord. Go on.”

  I nodded, unable to resist the urge to glance away. “Because—Beallan men… so desire the beauty of Danaan women, the night butterflies try to look like them.” There: the worst of it was over. “Or what they imagine they look like, since most Bealla never meet a Danaan. Mostly what they go by is the songs—”

  “The songs?” Letitia said.

  I offered her a rueful glance. “Which praise the wonder and depth of Danaan eyes, which are sure to enchant a man—” Mattiaci guffawed; Tru whacked him again.

  “Among their many other beautiful attributes,” I finished lamely.

  “Sweet Lord,” Iminor said. “Bealla are insane.”

  I nodded. “Indeed, ouirr, every one of us.”

  Everyone fell silent, surveying the night butterflies again. Amien spotted the inn he wanted and beckoned; we all followed.

  “Oh, I wish Manannan could have seen this,” Ogma said.

  “Especially the part about the drug,” Tuiri added. “He would have laughed…”

  Most of the party went directly down the alley between buildings, to the stable behind the inn. I followed Amien inside. The place failed to impress, although I had stayed in worse inns: it was reasonably clean and well-lit, with stout, scarred plank floors and walls half-timbered. I’d seen that style of building before: the plaster concealed not stone but packed straw or rushes, whose coating of plaster served to keep vermin out but would do little to prevent the spread of a fire.

  Like most inns on the Ruillin, this one was set up to accommodate four men to a room—though a single bed was laughingly assumed to be enough for them all, be they lovers or strangers. We were now only eleven, so Amien let three, and paid extra for locks for the doors, using the name Rinnal Ruthin.

  “Ruthin?” the innkeeper said, looking puzzled. “Why do I—? Oh! Somebody left a message for you!” He rummaged around in the cubbies of his desk, finally coming up with a folded piece of paper with Rinnal Ruthin written on the outside.

  Amien received the page and unfolded it—and laughed.

  “What?” I said.

  “Note from my friend,” he said, and handed it to me.

  Sry we missed you. Inn w sausage & blood-pudding 3 dys. R.

  R must be Rohini, High Chief of the Essuvians. I wondered which inn she meant, and why sausage and blood pudding, obviously a code, was funny.

  “She remembered,” Amien said wonderingly, taking the note and stowing it in his pocket as we walked out to collect our horses. His smile made me suspect the rumors about the nature of his relationship with Rohini might be true, after all. He had always maintained they were friends, no more, though stories suggested they had traveled together under different circumstances before she stepped up to the Uxellian throne.

  “It’s one thing to remember which inn I’d choose, but the name…” He smiled again, shaking his head.

  “What does she mean?”

  “Ah! She’ll meet us at Ballarona.” Abruptly he sobered. “Assuming we can’t find a ship, of course.”

  “Of course.” My mind skipped forward of its own accord: tomorrow morning we would part company. And I would have to choose between lying to him and humiliating myself at Teamair.

  The wizard cleared his throat, and I knew his mind had run in the same direction. “Ellion, I—”

  We stepped through the door. Our horses stood waiting at the hitching post—and Fiacha was with them, smiling at me as if I were the still-green knight who needed reassurance after a difficult encounter and he the one who had more scars than his companion had years.

  “Let’s see what happens with the ship,” I said.

  Amien nodded, and we mounted and followed the alley to the stable, where we claimed the last three stalls. I began unburdening my horse and discovered, as shocking as if it belonged to another, my harp case still lashed to the saddle. Of course it was soaked. I groaned, leaning my forehead against the saddle while grief welled in my chest.

  “What is it, Lord?” Fiacha said from the stall across the corridor.

  “My harp,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Gods, how stupid…”

  A harp can be replaced, of course, even one as rare and expensive as an instrument crafted by the talented Bernatel. And there was a chance that, if I pulled out the gut strings, it would dry without warping. And yet I felt as though a friend had died, and I had no one to blame but myself. I gathered up my meager discipline, unburdened the horse and saw to his care, then dragged my sodden bags and harp up to the room I would share with Amien, Tuiri, and Fiacha tonight. Tuiri and Fiacha went straight down the hall to the bath, as delighted by the opportunity as boys on their way to a pond at the height of summer; Amien deposited his belongings in a corner and went back out to ask around for a ship for hire. I sat down and unpacked my harp.

  The speckled-hide case was so thoroughly soaked I feared even it was ruined; the harp felt sickeningly damp under my hands. I sighed and began removing the smaller, gut strings. They would surely shrink as they dried, pulling the harp irrecoverably off the true. The longer, metal strings I left in place, in the forlorn hope that they might help the drying wood maintain its shape. I pulled a towel from the wash-stand, dried the instrument as well as I could, and stood the harp on top of it, at a distance from the fire that I hoped would provide therapeutic warmth without drying it too fast. By the time I had pulled the last, wet things from my saddlebags and found places to drape them overnight, Tuiri and Fiacha had returned, so I left the false bottoms of the bags in place. The money hidden there would suffer no ill effects from the damp, after all.

  I stood surveying the array of things that had seemed important enough to pack, a hundred years ago when I left Ilnemedon. They looked like supplies for another man’s trip. I couldn’t imagine why I had bothered with half of them.

  Among the things I had packed and then more or less forgotten about was a razor. I took it with me to the bath.

  By the time I arrived, only Mattiaci and Ogma remained in the room, and they were nearly dressed. The floor was slick, the air heavy with steam. I found a tub that didn’t seem to be coated with half the mud of the Ruillin, drew fresh water, and mixed in enough hot to make it steam. As I pulled off my clothes, Mattiaci and Ogma left; I slipped into the tub and let the silence settle around me.

  I washed; there was much of which I needed to be clean, but little enough that soap and water might solve. All the day’s failures came crashing in on me, and I was helpless against the recollection of the illicit energies I had tasted: the seduction of Laverna’s Well on the flats, the terrible rapture of the lives sacrificed to feed the Básghilae, the cold, horrifying elegance of the Básghilae themselves and the wild mixtures of energies they carried after they fed. All of these raced through my memory, raising thrills and shame in equal measure. During those seconds when I managed to push the recollections aside, the omnipresent subterranean rumble of the power in this place and the deadly seduction of the river raced in to torque me further.

  Horrifying as all those things were, their implications were worse: they were tools my enemy could use to get through me to Letitia, forces that could make me lose track of the men who were my responsibility. Had I maintained focus on the flats today, would Manannan have left himself so open to death? I knew the answer. Yet after the first time it became evident he was setting and pursuing his own objectives, when he handed me my horse, I had been so consumed by the arcane aspects of the encounter that I completely failed to bring him to heel. Little wonder he had died on the gate road, out of reach of men who might guard his flanks. Little wonder I’d wrecked a harp, a Bernatel-made three-octave double whose like most harpists will never see.

  I shaved, rem
otely surprised that I had passed the point at which the stuff I shaved might be justly called stubble. Eventually I looked and smelled clean on the outside, but inside I was unchanged. I slid down in the water until my knees poked out into cold air and my skull rested against the rim of the tub, weight in my chest.

  The door opened; Amien walked in.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” I answered. “Success?”

  In my peripheral vision, I saw him shrug. “An airship. There isn’t a watership for love or money anywhere in this town.”

  I nodded as well as I might with my head on the rim of the tub, still staring at the ceiling. It would be tomorrow, then. Letitia and her companions would be far safer without me. I couldn’t feel good about it.

  Amien stopped mixing water in a tub and fixed me with a black-eyed stare. “What?”

  I groaned and slipped farther down in the tub. “I wrecked my harp. The damn thing was lashed to my saddle the whole time we were out there with the water coming up around us, and I forgot. Oh, gods, how stupid am I! How could I let that happen? You’d think I’d pay better attention!”

  Amien knew as well as I, of course: a harp is a sacred instrument, the vehicle not only of pleasure and learning but of the magical strains handed down by the Hy-Breasaílian gods. The proper care of a harp is a geas upon every harpist. But he shook his head.

  “Manannan was a champion, and he knew his time was up,” the wizard said gently.

  My head whipped around of its own accord, and I felt myself stare.

  “He chose his exit, Ellion.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead I hauled myself up and out of the tub, water surging in my wake like the incoming tide, and I knew I was still staring. There was a terrible heaviness in my chest.

  “What?” Amien said, apparently in answer to my astonishment. “You’ve had that same look every time we lost someone—since Arian. If I can’t—” He shook his head again. “It’s not your fault.”

  Oh, gods. A wall inside me was crumbling, as if those words had been the release spell for a binding. From behind that wall, a great weight of grief and guilt came spilling out. But even as the forgiveness I hadn’t known I needed threatened to shake me apart, I knew I didn’t deserve it, knew Amien would never have said those words if he understood. I could barely breathe. And suddenly I wanted to punch him. Instead I spun away and put my fist through the plaster.

  I’d been wrong: it wasn’t just straw behind that plaster, though I’d managed to leave a fist-sized hole. My hand began to bleed. I pulled on my pants, gathered up the rest of my clothes, and walked out.

  At the base of the stairs to the inn’s main room I encountered a night butterfly, a comely if perfectly mundane young woman with bright purple hair and a filmy blue scarf, who greeted me with a knowing smile and a movement of the shoulder that made me aware of the conformation of her breasts.

  “Hungry?” she said, in tones that made it clear she wasn’t offering food, surveying me from toes to hair with a great show of eyelashes and a languorous smirk.

  But rather than falling into the dance with her as I ordinarily would have, whether or not I was interested in a metaphoric meal, I found my mind stuttering like a cart with a stick lodged in a wheel. I blinked.

  “Thirsty,” I managed finally and brushed past her with an attempt at a courteous nod, then strode into the main room.

  Even this was exactly what I had heard: with the exception of the Tana with whom I traveled, the only women in the place worked here. All of our party but Amien were already present, gathered around two large tables someone had pushed end-to-end. I noted with relief that they had all had the good sense to leave their mail in the rooms, and all were dressed for an evening indoors—except Letitia, who wore her cloak again. The fire on the hearth and the heat of the stove in the kitchen made the room too warm for the heavy garment; her fair cheeks were flushed nearly as red as the cloak. Though I didn’t precisely understand her choice, I saw the sense of obligation that underlaid it. My respect for her honor grew again.

  None of the Tanaan seemed aware of the way men stared from tables all over the room, which I counted a blessing. They looked up as I approached, smiles breaking across somber faces. But as I settled at the table, Letitia’s gaze fixed on the hand I’d smashed in the bath, and horrified guilt flared in her eyes.

  “Your hand!” she said. “You’re injured! Oh, Holy—”

  “No, it’s all right,” I interrupted. “I’m just a fool.”

  “It wasn’t a—?”

  “Hush,” I said quickly, waving her to silence. “That’s not a topic for open rooms.”

  Her gaze shifted into a mixture of guilt and hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “And no, I managed to do it myself.”

  She nodded, but her eyes were on something behind me now. And there wasn’t time to address it, because a barmaid had arrived at our table and stood staring down at me. Her dark hair surprised me after all the flaxen or red-blonde hair on the Tanaan and the vibrant hues on the night butterflies.

  “Good eve to ya, sian,” she said, somehow embedding all the flirtation I should have expected of a barmaid in that simple greeting.

  “Good eve,” I answered. The polite smile I offered was in no way up to the standard of charm I had once carried without half a thought. I had lost the knack, and that wouldn’t do.

  “What c’n I get ya?”

  That was an opening through which a man might drive a team of horses. I tried out a more charming smile. “Something of which there’s enough to go around.”

  The fun had gone out of it. All I wanted was a drink.

  “Spirits,” I said, including the others at the table with my glance. “This is a night for strong drink.”

  “Pra-nu,” Letitia said.

  “Brandy?” I said to the barmaid. “Or water o’ life, if you’ve got it?”

  Her disappointment at my failure to flirt vanished into anticipation of a healthy pile of coin. “Uisge-Beal—that we’ve got.”

  The blasphemous name, Water of Beal, didn’t even surprise me. Of course everything here would be named for old gods. And all the gods knew I was in no position to judge.

  Nevertheless anticipation of the relief of a decent drunk made my smile real. “And some dinner?”

  “Stew? Or meat pies.”

  I’d seen enough stew in the past twelvenight to last me a lifetime. “The pies.”

  The barmaid looked around at the rest of them, then back at me. Even Iminor and Letitia seemed to be waiting for my cue.

  “Ah, pies for everyone,” I said. “Plenty of ’em.”

  She grinned and fairly bounced across the room.

  “Have you seen Amien?” Iminor asked.

  I nodded. “He’s in the bath. Probably done by now.”

  “Did he find a ship?” Iminor pursued.

  All at once I realized I hadn’t told any of them except Letitia. Even Amien thought I would be on that airship in the morning. My throat tightened.

  “An airship,” I said, using the Ilesian word. I couldn’t help glancing at Letitia. Her eyes conveyed all that might be said in this company: she remembered what I’d said, and she was both disappointed and frightened at the idea of my leaving her. And somehow, maybe because it was an airship and not a watership, she held onto hope that I would change my plan.

  “An—A ship of the air?” Iminor said in Tanaan. His voice was even, but trepidation lurked behind his eyes. He feared heights, but he’d seemed to get over it after the pass. Those complex shadows gathered around him again, despite the lamps in the room; I blinked them away and nodded.

  “You’re familiar with airships?” I said. All the Tanaan looked at Iminor, obviously waiting for an explanation they could wrap minds around; but he shook his head.

  “They—fly?” Ogma said, incredulous.

  I nodded. “Essentially an airship is a huge basket with a great silk canopy, into which a particular sort
of brazier blows hot air. The hot air makes it float.”

  “Do you know how to—sail one?” Tuiri said.

  I shook my head. “They have captains and windcallers, just like ships of the water. You hire the ship and the crew both. All you do is ride.”

  “But you’ve been in one?” Tuiri pursued.

  I nodded: I had. It was more amusing than sailing on the river, but not nearly as good as wearing the shape of an eagle. Though that was a thing I didn’t do anymore, either. It struck me that there were a great many things I no longer did, and the things I didn’t do anymore were vastly more satisfying than most of the things I still engaged in. Fortunately the barmaid turned up with a trayful of cups and a bottle of spirits, in glass.

  Glass. I almost laughed. She’d taken our measure and brought the most expensive thing they had.

  “Yah?” she said, meeting my eyes. And suddenly I just didn’t care.

  “Yes,” I answered, and she set a cup in front of me, pulled the stopper from the bottle, and poured.

  I drank; the familiar fire of uisquebae raced through me, sparking a memory of life-energies not my own that crashed through my being—and pushing everything just a little farther away.

  “Yes,” I said again, and set down my cup. She poured once more; the sound warmed my heart. “I predict we will need another soon.”

  “There’s more,” she said, and began passing out cups.

  Once all the cups were full, Letitia raised hers, looking up and down the table. We all joined her salute.

  “Manannan a Boind,” she said, voice and face carefully composed. “A champion. A man of honor.”

  She drank, so I did too. Her eyes widened, and she paused after a sip, gasping in surprise, but all the knights tossed theirs back and slammed their cups to the table. I smiled and slammed mine down too, so Iminor and finally Letitia followed.

  “Sláinte,” I said, and poured more for everyone I could reach. I was at the end of the table, so my reach didn’t extend far; I slid the bottle to Nuad, who met my eyes with a fey smile and poured for everyone else. Because I’d employed similar tricks in my own behalf, I could see that Nuad poured Letitia only a half-measure without making the difference apparent; I shot him an approving glance, and he astonished me with a wink.