There’s a story I’ve heard, about another minstrel, like yourself, only more my age. His name was Ain Harad and—”
“Of course, of course. I know that story. Sometime I’ll perform my version of it. You must admit he didn’t come to a happy end. To this day he sits on top of the world, playing and singing away. Poor wretch. Imagine how hoarse his voice must be by now.”
“But he lives forever.”
“No, in the version in my repertoire he lives only until the universe is remade and there is a new goddess, or god, or the like born. That’s not forever. It’s the power of the guardian who sent him where he is. They can do that sort of thing. Guardians are the most powerful magicians in the world, you know.”
“Yes,” said the boy quietly. “I know.” He said nothing more.
“What’s the matter?” said Gutharad after a while. “You seem glum suddenly.”
“I was thinking of something.”
“Well don’t. If you forget your troubles and just go where your feet take you, you’ll be happy. That’s the real secret of life. Not that load of camel crap I fed you this afternoon.”
Ginna forced a smile. In mock seriousness this time he asked, “Do they really, ah, do it differently in Zabortash?”
In similarly facetious solemnity, Gutharad replied, “When you are old enough to understand those things, young man, I shall tell you, but not before. Now it is the time for all sensible souls to get some sleep, lest they lie around in the daytime and the vultures take them for corpses and dig in.”
They sat up for a short while longer. Amaedig rejoined them and watched the lights on the hills.
* * * *
In Estad, the Nagéan capital, whole groups left the caravan, natives returning home and others who had business there. The rest camped in the middle of the great square. Much trading was done with the folk of Nagé, all of whom wore identical robes of plain grey, explaining when asked that anything else would be vanity. News was circulated and tales were told. Gutharad sang and, later, when a high-caste citizen requested it, chanted endless verses of a slightly turgid ancient epic about a hero wandering across the darkened, barren face of the Earth, seeking the great black pyramid in which his beloved dwelt. The adventure took place in the far past, in another cycle before the birth of The Goddess. More than that no one knew. The poet who wrote it had dreamed it for a year and a day while he dwelt in a cave alone, rising from his sleep only to write the verses down, never eating or drinking, and dropping dead of hunger and thirst as soon as he was done. Everyone listened attentively when the epic was recited. There was a strange beauty to it, despite the archaic stiffness of its language.
Later Ginna and Amaedig slept together in a tent, and he told her what the.minstrel had said about happiness. That night, as they lay alone and all Estad slept around them, they touched each other as man and woman for the first time, and they spoke in whispers afterwards.
“I want to go on like this forever,” he said. The two of us and Gutharad if he’ll have us, just going wherever we want, not bothering anyone or being bothered. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
“Yes, it would.”
“So let’s forget about Ai Hanlo, about everything.” He yawned and dropped off to sleep.
CHAPTER 8
Now that the Light of Reason Fades
Shouting and horns blowing woke them. They crawled out of their tent into the dim, grey dawn and found themselves surrounded by men and women scurrying in all directions, gathering goods into bundles, loading burdens on animals, and filling waterskins from the fountain in the middle of the square. The caravan was making ready to depart. Ginna and Amaedig folded their tent and joined the rest.
Gutharad walked up to them, less in a hurry than most of the others. His pack was on his back; his lute hung from one shoulder, and he looked ready to go anywhere.
“Good morning.” he said.
“Good morning,” said Ginna. “Why are we leaving in such a rush? I thought we were supposed to stay in the city for several days.”
Amaedig looked from side to side. “These people act like they’re scared. They don’t smile or sing as they work.”
“I don’t know for sure,” said the minstrel, “but there’s a good chance they are scared. Nobody tells me anything, but my guess is the caravan master wants to be on his way before bad luck catches up with him.”
“Catches up? From where?” Ginna asked.
“From the way we came. Come here, the two of you.” He led them up a stairway which mounted a wall. Even at this height the towers and outer wall of Estad blocked much of the view, but they could see the sky to the southeast and make out part of what seemed to be a dense black mass hanging over the world in that direction. Overhead the sky was an unpolished steel, but one could make out movement as darker and lighter wisps of cloud moved before each other. The blackness in the distance was featureless.
“It isn’t smoke,” said Gutharad. “If it were, all Randelcainé would have to be burning to produce so much. You two wouldn’t have noticed—” he winked and the boy blushed; Amaedig remained stonily unperturbed—”but last night that quarter of the sky slowly became as you see it now. The moon was up, dimly showing through the clouds, which made the sky brighter. But when it got over there, it vanished suddenly, well before it should have set. That was at the fifth hour. The thing is expanding. If s coming this way. That’s why everyone wants to get going. I’ll wager there won’t be any moon in Estad tonight.”
“What does it mean? A storm?”
“Storm? Why, my boy, you don’t have to be a master astrologer to know a bad omen when you see one. Or maybe it’s a portent. But it’s obviously bad. It’s as if all the color in the universe, all the light, were being sucked out.”
“Or like an infection spreading,” said Amaedig.
“Yes, like that.”
“Is there any cause for it? Any reason?”
“No idea, but I don’t like it.”
“Nor do I,” said Ginna slowly. He could find no other words. He had many ideas, but they were too terrible to express.
In silence the three of them came down from the wall and rejoined the caravan. Amaedig hurried off to return the tent to the camel-driver they had borrowed it from.
The caravan assembled and moved quickly through the streets, out a gate, and onto the plain. As soon as they were a little ways beyond Estad, the immense black stain covering the southeastern sky was in clear view. Few looked at it. Most kept their eyes fixed ahead.
Ginna held Amaedig’s hand tightly as he walked. He felt glad to be going away from the anomaly, and he desperately wished that his fancies of the previous night could come true. Now more than ever he wanted to wander like Gutharad, carefree and footloose, through all lands. But with a sinking feeling he knew he was deluding himself. He knew that the darkness would not go away, that the sky would not clear. Footloose wanderers were reputed to sleep under the stars. He had seen no stars for quite some time.
Like the others, he averted his gaze from the strangeness. Few spoke. The only sounds were the jingling bells on the camels and the occasional whinnies of the horses. Once a packhorse went berserk and reared up out of its master’s grip, its cargo tearing loose and scattering over the ground. There was much shouting and the men astride the katas trotted quickly to the scene, but the company as a whole merely rerouted itself, like a stream of water flowing around an obstruction. When Ginna passed by, the excitement was over. The horse had been slain with a lance and several men were gathering up the spilled goods.
The sun did not rise that day. After a time the sky overhead seemed slightly brighter, but there was no warmth in that brightness. The air was chill. A dry wind blew. Ginna held his cloak tightly around himself.
When the caravan began to move again after the noon meal, some of the drivers began to sing, but there was no joy in that song. They went through it like a chore and stopped after a while.
At night encampment Gutharad and Ginn
a performed together before an unresponsive audience. The boy had learned to time his golden balls to the minstrel’s music, and the results were sometimes amusing, sometimes spectacular, but no one was in the mood for it.
“What a waste. What a shame,” muttered Gutharad as they sat around a fire afterwards, chewing on some of the meat from the butchered horse. In a proper city with a proper crowd, we could have made a fortune just from the coins they’d throw up on stage.”
“I’m not sure anything in the world is proper anymore,” said Ginna glumly.
“Oh, come on now...”
“You yourself said the sky, the way it is now, is a very bad sign.”
“I know I did, but is it the end of the world?”
Someone bumped into Amaedig, who was seated on the other side of Gutharad, all but walking over her.
“Blind oaf!” she snarled.
All three of them looked up at the man, who turned briefly toward them. All three caught their breaths. The face was pale and almost featureless, with mere suggestions of eyes, nose, and a mouth. Ginna was not sure if there were any ears. The flesh looked like putty.
When the stranger was gone, they stared at one another in silence.
“He hasn’t been out in the open air very long,” said Ginna after a minute.
“A disease? Was he a leper?” asked Amaedig.
“Leprosy isn’t like that, believe me,” said the minstrel. “I’ve seen it, but... we’d best see what is going on. I have a hunch...”
They rose and hurried among their fellow caravan members. The groups were seated around their fires as usual, but just as they came near one a man rose to greet a newcomer who was clad in an ankle-length black robe.
“Ebad Andoram! Is it possible? I haven’t seen you in years!”
Another similarly garbed figure approached and another man stood up, slack-jawed with astonishment
“Spoochka Li! I can’t believe it!”
This was happening all over the camp. Men were on their feet, shouting and greeting familiar faces. Some recoiled from the unnaturalness of it all. And then there came a scream.
“You! But you’re dead! I saw you die a year ago!”
Ginna, Amaedig, and Gutharad grabbed hold of one another. Each of them drew out their long knives in an unthinking simultaneous action.
As if the scream had been a signal, chaos erupted. There were other cries as the frighteningly familiar strangers leapt upon those who greeted them. Ginna saw a man fall to the ground nearby, wrestling with his adversary. Companions came to his aid, slashing with swords. Any mortal man should have been cut to pieces, but the enemy tightened his grip around the victim’s throat until his hands crushed the neck to a pulp and the head rolled off in a spout of blood.
The slayer rose to his feet and confronted the swordsmen. Now his face no longer resembled any friend or associate. It was a blank oval. The hands sprouted sharp claws. With a single swipe a swordsman fell, his guts slipping through bloody fingers. Another hooked a man under the chin and the front half of the head was gone, the faceless corpse a staggering fountain of blood before it finally fell. Everywhere men were shouting, fighting, praying, fleeing, dying. Many were trampled as animals galloped in all directions, mad with terror. The Zaborman magician stood his ground, waving his arms, conjuring furiously. Swords passed through the attackers without resistance, but those hands were solid enough. Some of the creatures had bony blades growing out of their elbows, knees, and feet. Those were solid too.
Ginna, Amaedig, and Gutharad ran without making any attempt to fight. They didn’t know where they were going, but as one, holding hands, they raced through the camp. When something lurched against them, they slashed with their knives, turned, and fled in another direction. The night was filled with motion, with silhouetted figures flickering back and forth in front of campfires, with flames from slipped lanterns licking up the sides of tents, and with screams. Yet beyond the periphery of the unsteady, garish lights, the night was dark indeed.
“Ginna! Ginna! Don’t run away! Come to me!”
He knew the voice. He knew die face. It was the old nurse, the one Kaemen had killed. Now she was alive, running toward him, a broad smile on her face, arms outspread.
His mind froze. His body lurched. His feet slipped away from under him for a moment as the others dragged him away.
They caught glimpses of the blank-faced figures as their flesh dissolved away, revealing flowing masses of blackness beneath. All resemblances to human beings ended, but the new forms were just as deadly. Something like an oily, half-liquid snake poured out of a sleeve, and a gown dropped to the ground empty. The thing wrapped itself around a woman who had stumbled. She screamed. Over all the noise, Ginna could hear her bones snap.
Without hardly knowing it, they had reached the edge of the camp. They plunged into the night and soon the screams and the burning were far behind. Still they ran until they came to a stretch of white sand. Here, because the ground was lighter than the sky overhead, they could see a little bit, enough to make out large boulders and to tell they were still three.
Amaedig sobbed and hugged Ginna. He was beyond all emotion, numb with terror. He felt sick. He wanted to vomit. He felt like his blood had all run out and he was standing weak and hopelessly empty.
“Quiet!” hissed the minstrel.
Something as large as a castle wall, yet serpentine was moving in the void nearby. The pale whiteness of the sand was slowly covered over as it approached.
Ginna and Amaedig screamed together, and they were running again, without thought, without sight, without any place to run to. It seemed to the boy that he had always been running, that he had always been in the darkness, in some bad dream where one is running, running, running from unseen terror, but feet are stuck, legs mired in quicksand it...is... impossible ...to... move...
There was no sound, not even screaming.
Suddenly he was snapped back into concrete reality: the gravel underfoot as the patch of sand ended, the chill of the night air, the burning in his lungs as he ran, ran—
Two limp hands were dangling from the sky, the fingers tapping gently against his face like a bead curtain.
They hung there. He was still running. Warm blood poured down over him, the stream keeping pace with his flight His mind refused to believe, refused to accept the paradox—
He collided with something solid which dropped out of the sky in front of him. It landed with a thud. He tripped over it, and fell in a screaming, mindless tangle of limbs. He slashed with his knife until somehow it was no longer in his hand.
Amaedig was with him, screaming. She crawled over him, her arms around his neck, screaming mindlessly in his ear, as if she ludicrously wanted a piggyback ride.
A lute banged in a hollow clangor of strings as they fell on it.
Choking, straining under the weight of Amaedig, he forced himself into a kneeling position. And then, for no reason as rational as a desire for light, but merely because in a hopeless situation nothing else made any more sense, nothing heroic or stupid or even instinctive, he folded his hands together, willed the thing to be so, and unfolded them. A glowing ball the size of a walnut drifted slowly upward. He made another, and another. Like an inscrutable figure in a prophetic dream he created them, letting them fall onto the ground for a while, and then he began to juggle them.
His mind was completely detached from all this. It was an unreal vision of something which could not be. For a flickering instant he was self-aware, and he thought, this is what death is like, to be suspended inside an eternal now. This is the last thing my mind conjures up, and here I am, like an insect in amber.
His hands, moving of their own accord, continued to juggle, and the darkness around him paused. The immense, encircling shape paused. Man-shaped things which padded as they walked came no closer. They did not recoil out of fear. It was no panicked retreat, but more of a recognition followed by a deliberate withdrawal. After a time it slowly registered in his mind t
hat they were gone.
He juggled in the silence of the night, not even feeling the weight of Amaedig on his back, until at last his body collapsed out of exhaustion. He fell over backwards, onto Amaedig, rolled off her, and the two lay side by side for a long time.
He awoke later, trembling and dizzy, in a feint twilight that could have been either dawn or dusk. The blackness now filled three quarters of the sky. Only from the northwest did any light come. In that direction he could see the end of the great plain, and low, rolling hills outlined against a grey sky the color of slate.
He was on rough, rocky ground. He untangled Amaedig’s arms and sat up. His legs were beneath those of another. He beheld the corpse he had fallen over and somehow half wriggled under. It was headless, but by the clothing, he knew it He also knew the smashed lute beside it.
“Please no... not you.”
Amaedig stirred. “Huh...?”
Tears streamed down his face. He staggered to his feet, bent over, and took her by the hand. With his other hand he covered her eyes. He helped her up.
“If you never do anything else I say, please, please, do this one thing. Don’t open your eyes. Don’t look. I’ll guide you.”
Slowly they made their way through the stones, towards the hills. When they were far enough away, he uncovered her eyes. She did not look back, nor did she ask what he had prevented her from seeing, but by the despair on her face and in her voice the few times she spoke, he knew that she understood.
The day didn’t seem to get any darker or brighter. They trudged in silence for a long time. The whole earth was still and cold around them. There was no wind to sway the sparse tufts of grass. They came to a stream and drank from it, their slight splashings the only sound. The water flowed sluggishly. No fish swam in it. No birds flew overhead.
At last they found a grove of scrubby trees. There they paused to rest Ginna turned to Amaedig and she to him and both tried to speak, but only babbling sobs came out They fell into each other’s arms, weeping. After a while, they slept.
* * * *
The Shattered Goddess Page 10
