Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  “Tell me,” said Shaldis. “Teach me. A friend of mine was taken. And my grandfather has a—a glass ball, an ancient thing that came out of a tomb, that I think is drawing the Dreamshadow to it.”

  Puahale’s eyes widened. “Wika told me about that! On the Old Islands the wizards would trap it in something called glass. Do you know glass? Wika says it was made out of melted sand—”

  “My people have it, yes.” And a little wryly, despite her fear, she added, “Sand is something we have plenty of.” She held up the amulet Twinkle had given her, with its huge central bead of pink glass.

  Puahale touched it wonderingly, brushed its smoothness against her lower lip. “Our people who came here didn’t know how to make it,” she said. “And our wizards found that obsidian works better, the black glass from within the volcano’s crater.” The last words she used, Shaldis could form no mental image for. But Puahale went on, “That’s where the Dreamshadow dwelled, here, where the molten heart of the island seeps forth. What you called the lake of fire. It was weaker here, because it hadn’t been devouring the dreams of the dead for all those lifetimes as it had on the Old Islands; from the first the wizards put boundaries against it, of obsidian rocks, and gave the dead to the birds of the air. But it’s still deadly dangerous.”

  Puahale stopped her grinding to touch one of the several disks of highly polished obsidian that she wore, strung on braided strands of fish sinew around her neck. “It will go into obsidian before it goes into a living person.” She held up one, not a disk, but a small, flaked blade. “In the Old Islands, some of the wizards used to make glass traps for it that men would put under their pillows, so they could dream the dreams of the dead. When I went up to the crater and saw you there, I was seeking the learning of the dead, hoping there might be a way to hear it without being trapped. But Wika my teacher stopped me, as I stopped you. Wika said the men who used such dream-traps were ensnared by the dreams within them, until they’d rather dream than do anything else and so went mad. And because of the dreams concentrated in the glass, the Dream-shadow was drawn to them also, drawn out of the ground, out of the tombs, and took those men and whoever else was nearby.”

  “Damn him!” Shaldis’s hands shook so badly she dropped the fever bark. Rage burned up in her at her grandfather, at Noyad the jeweler. At the ancient king or landchief, whoever he had been, who’d had the glass trap made, the repository of poisoned dreams, for his own pleasure.

  The Dreamshadow was being drawn to it, glutted and strong with the energies of deaths it had been feeding on for ten years, since the old spells had failed, that had for centuries kept it at bay.

  It was drawn to her house. To her father, her mother, Twinkle, Foursie.

  “I have to get back,” she whispered, fighting to steady her breath. Feeling as she had felt, when the masters had blindfolded her and whirled her around, had shouted at her and shoved her and she had to form spells neatly and accurately through and against all the distractions and panic. “Before I go, show me how to cut and what to say, what spells to use. But now—” She steadied herself with an effort. “This is what you do with this bark, to bring down fever. You’ll soak it in hot water, the hotter the better, for a count of two or three hundred. But while the water’s heating, make a diagram, like this, in the earth. Call on the power of—”

  She stopped herself from saying the sun and asked instead, “Where does your power come from? What is its source?”

  “The moon,” said Puahale, and sounded a little surprised. “Like all women’s power. The moon, and for some women, for the strong women, the sea.”

  “You’re not going out in it?” Opal turned from the open door of the bedroom, through which she’d been staring, hypnotized, out at the weird, still gloom of the court. Though dinner was just over and it was the hour of siesta, the dust storm had swallowed the sun in impenetrable brown haze. Torches burned dully in the murk within the arcade around the house’s central court, the flame struggling against the dust that hung, despite Red Silk’s ward spells, heavy in the motionless air. Beyond the compound walls—and the edges of Red Silk’s spells—the wind could be heard shrieking like the damned in torment. On her bed of folded blankets, Eleven Grasshoppers rocked back and forth with her arms wrapped around herself, gazing at the girls with wide, apprehensive eyes.

  “Hssh. It’ll be over an hour before daybreak tomorrow.” Foxfire rolled her veils into a tight ball—and some spares, if she could induce Eleven Grasshoppers to keep them on—and tied them around the strap that bound two of the waterskins together. “I’ve been listening—I can sense the far edge. The winds will be worse in the early part of the night, but we’ll be following the road then. They’ll be less by the time we need to leave it. You know the city, Grasshoppers?” She turned and bent to lay a comforting hand on the old teyn’s shoulder. “City?”

  “City,” agreed Eleven Grasshoppers.

  “Foxfire, you can’t trust her as a guide! Not through a dust storm!”

  “City,” asserted the old jenny more positively.

  “See? She knows where I want to get.”

  “Oh, please! Grasshoppers, Hell?” She mimicked precisely Foxfire’s nod and optimistic inflection.

  Eleven Grasshoppers replied in the same tone, “Hell.”

  “She doesn’t know what you’re saying.”

  “She does, too. Grasshoppers.” Foxfire walked the fingers of her right hand along the bed’s edge, bound for her spread-out left one. She patted the left hand. “City. I want to go to the city.”

  “City,” agreed Eleven Grasshoppers again, the pupils of her pale-blue eyes widened to black pits by the dimness.

  Foxfire turned back to the carved chest at the bed’s foot, dug out the earth-colored peasant robes she’d worn for the expedition to Nebekht’s Temple and the satchel containing the food she’d been stashing away, bit by bit, from every meal. “The sand will cover our tracks,” she said. “With luck I’ll be able to reach one of the others and tell them to get horses and riders to meet me at the edge of the hills, to get me into the city. Don’t stop me, Opal.”

  She turned back to her friend, caught the girl’s small, burn-scarred hands. “The stuff I’ll give you should keep you so sick it’ll be the day after tomorrow before Grandmother can even talk to you,” she promised. When Opal gulped and nodded bravely, Foxfire added, “It won’t be so bad. You’ll be mostly dopey and half asleep. Just don’t tell her anything. Not that she’ll ask,” she added. “I mean, out here, there’s only one place I could be going.”

  “And one reason to go there tomorrow,” whispered Opal. “Can’t I go with you?”

  “Sweetheart, I wish you could. But we have to travel really fast. And I think the tracks of two people and a teyn would be hard to hide. Besides,” added Foxfire half jestingly, “I checked our horoscopes and tomorrow’s a bad-luck day for Air Butterflies—you’re Air, aren’t you?”

  “I’m Air,” agreed Opal glumly. “And if your grandmother decides I let you go, it will be a bad-luck day for me.”

  “What could you have done?” argued Foxfire, and poured a little water from the skin into a gourd bowl stolen from the guards. From a twist of cloth hidden in the folds of her sash—she knew far better than to leave it anywhere in the room—she took several pinches of the powder she’d made up from the stems and roots harvested in the scraggly courtyard garden, dropped them in the water and laid her hands over the bowl. “My horoscope says—for Fire Butterflies”—she and Opal were almost exactly one year apart in age, but had completely different stellar aspects according to the complicated patterns of women’s horoscopes—“that the sixth day of the moon’s last quarter is well aspected for travel as long as I wear yellow. Can I borrow your yellow hair ribbons?”

  “Is there anything you need?” Geb wrung out the sponge into the cloisonné bowl of herbed water, drew the sheet up over Oryn’s chest. Useless gestures, and rather silly, thought Oryn. He could feel the ambient dust that fuzzed the air wi
thin the royal tent already sticking to his damp face, could see where it scummed the water in the bowl. “Anything I can do?”

  Somewhere beyond the wall of wind and dust and flying sand is the moon, thought Oryn. The dwindling crescent that no amount of magic, no amount of strength, no amount of money or intelligence or prayers to the gods will prevent from wasting away.

  Somewhere beyond the wall of wind and dust and flying sand Summerchild is dying.

  Command of time and distance is what I need.

  And there is nothing anyone can do, including myself.

  But he smiled at his chamberlain, who in the sicklied lamplight looked as exhausted and grief-twisted as he guessed he appeared himself, and said gently, “No, Geb, thank you. I’m fine.”

  Geb blew out three of the lamp’s four flames, and retreated to his own little annex of the big royal tent. To do what? Oryn wondered as the tent flaps dropped behind the servant. To read the treatises on astrology and perfume distilling to which Oryn knew he was addicted, trapped as they all were in the suffocating oven heat? To plan what he would do when Barún, or Mohrvine, took over residence in the palace?

  To lie awake in the choking gloom, ensnared by all the things that could not be done until the winds died down?

  Soth was right, he knew. Neither Moth nor Pebble, nor probably Raeshaldis, could trap the Raven sister whose strength was such that she could command the teyn, could force her into an alliance.

  Would his successor even recognize the degree of danger until it was too late?

  Oryn folded his hands on his chest, stared at the sagging tent cloth above him, propped by a forest of extra poles and leaking sand at every seam.

  The lion can be drugged, he thought—Soth had discreetly let him know that the matter had already been arranged—and the path through the fire secretly soaked with water rather than with oil. The scorpion traditionally sealed into the king’s mock tomb beneath the House of Khon, the House of Death, was usually one of the enormous black kind whose sting was barely more uncomfortable than an ant bite.

  But it wasn’t the perils of the world, or the perils hidden within the circle of the fire’s realm of home and pleasure, or even Death that he had to fear.

  It was the baffling two-faced seesaw of yearning and powerlessness that drove even the wisest to folly. It was the madness that rises from the abysses of the mind, masquerading as inspiration. It was the silent endlessness of time.

  And like the king entrapped with the fearsome-looking, harmless scorpion of Death, Oryn could only lie in the breathless heat, thinking of Summerchild, thinking of Bax riding through the storm. The commander wouldn’t even reach the city much before nightfall, and the gods only knew what could happen between now and then. If Bax did not reach it while some vestige of light lingered in the flying dust he would almost certainly be doomed. As poor Zhenus had been doomed, dead now in the storm if he hadn’t been before.

  And when he himself returned to the Yellow City, Oryn wondered, would it be to find what he’d found in Three Wells?

  He supposed he would even have to say that he’d welcome—or at least acquiesce to—being eaten by crocodiles if his people were still alive and safe to see it.

  And maybe that’s what it was to truly be a king.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Our people never had call to make these—these tisanes and poultices and medicines from plants.” Tentatively following Shaldis’s lead, Puahale spread the paste of aromatic sima leaves across the face of the oldest girl. The child stirred a little in her sleep and cried out, but the tall priestess laid a hand on her chest, and the girl did not wake. “The wizards, the wise men, would just lay hands on the sick, and the sickness passed away. This fever came on the people perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty years ago, and none died because the magic of the wise men was strong. But their magic did not pass to us in the same fashion. Many have died from wounds that turned dirty, despite all our repeating of the spells the wise men taught us. We even tried to summon the Little People of the forests to our aid; they did not come.”

  She shook her head and looked across the sleeping girl at Shaldis. “Thank you that you came at last. And thank you that you stayed to show me this, though I know you’re afraid for your family with the Dreamshadow glass in the house. Every night we have been dancing, to draw power from the moon, but it has been on the wane. Spells in the waning moon work differently.”

  She returned to the doorway, where the plants lay sorted in the power circles the two women had drawn. Sourcing power from the moon, following the marks Puahale had shown her, Shaldis could feel the strength of healing within the leaves, the bark, the roots, far stronger than she had ever felt it, when sourced from the sun or the earth. Fearful as she was, apprehensive as she was and fretting to return, she felt a wild surge of triumph at this new and steady power.

  God of mages, she whispered within her mind, don’t let me forget all this when I wake. Don’t let me forget the spells to source from the moon and the sea.

  “When I started dreaming about the plants,” Puahale went on as she checked the stones in the fire to see if they were hot enough to boil the water, “I had everyone search for anything that looked or smelled like the things I saw in my dreams. There’s a huge pile behind the healing house of things people brought that didn’t look or smell like what I saw in my dreams. As you see, we were able to find only a few, though canoes went out even to the Far Island, which is a journey of a week without sight of land.”

  “A week?” Shaldis couldn’t imagine water great enough that one could sail over it for a week.

  Puahale nodded gravely. “Those who came here from the Old Islands brought many plants and flowers, as well as animals—chickens and pigs and dogs. But for them, the power in the hands of the wise men was all they needed for the healing of the sick.

  “Those who came here first sailed for months. The Old Islands were that far away and there is nothing in between but the ocean. The canoes had to be very large, to carry enough water and food. Our families here did not make the journey back very often—once every few years, for twenty generations, and they would be gone for a third of a year.

  “Then one night something happened to that land.” She turned her face away and made a business of turning the rocks with wooden tongs, to hide the tears in her eyes.

  “Did the Dreamshadow destroy the people there?” Shaldis remembered again the carnage in Three Wells, the howling man running through the crowded streets of the Yellow City with a knife.

  Puahale shook her head so that her long straight hair rippled in the firelight. “No, nothing like that. The land itself was destroyed. My mother’s great-great-grandfather was a wise man, when on the dreadful night the wise men here and on the other islands all woke in shock and terror, all at the same moment. They spoke first to one another, mind to mind across the distances between our islands—it is a day’s sailing from here, from the Island of Rainbows, down to the Big Island, and two days to the Little Island and the Island of the Gods—and when they saw nothing amiss here, they all turned their minds together to the Old Islands. But there was nothing there. Only visions of the black sea steaming and covered with debris. They sent out a fleet to the place where the Old Islands were, and found nothing, only coconuts floating on the water, waterlogged almost to sinking, and some pieces of carved wood that had come from the temples and palaces. I think the gods must have gotten very angry with them, or else some terrible demon came out of the sea. My mother’s great-great-grandfather said that the air stank of doom and terror and that his dreams were fearful in that place.”

  “Did they come back?” asked Shaldis softly when Puahale’s silence had gone on for some time. “You said they needed extra-big boats even to get there.”

  “They tried to. They even made special boats, hoping they could thus carry enough. The wise ones here watched them in their dreams and their trances, night by night, and knew that even with all they took they were starving. I think when the great sto
rm struck them, there were simply too few men strong enough to keep the big canoes into the wind. They swamped, and the mariners all died, my mother’s great-great-grandfather with them. And since that time, there has only been the islands here.”

  “Like us,” said Shaldis softly, “in our desert, with nowhere to go but the coast of the ocean that is all rock and barrenness.”

  Puahale lifted the stones from the fire, dropped them into the gourd. Steam hissed, and Shaldis showed her how much sima to crush to make the healing paste and how much fever bark to use. For a time they spoke only of healing and of spells to keep life in the failing flesh until medicines could take hold. Shaldis thought again of the sisters of her circle, pouring their power into Summerchild’s frail body.

  Of the scars on a little gray cat.

  She could understand a nomad sister burning the ruins of Three Wells, lest the Dreamshadow still haunt them, brooding over the corpses as Puahale had told her it did. Could understand a nomad Raven sister summoning teyn to hold the king’s forces at bay until all the glass in the town could be smashed, to make spells of aversion and traps to absorb the Dreamshadow and channel it back into the earth, traps that would have protected poor Riis and his men, she thought despairingly, had they camped in the ruins themselves and not at a careful distance away.

  Strong with the strength it had drunk from the tombs, the Dreamshadow had come upon them in their sleep, as it had come upon Three Wells. Like poison rising from the ground. Like poison soaking into the adobe of the walls—adobe that was in truth only the earth that was the Dreamshadow’s home.

  She could almost understand a nomad Raven sister trying repeatedly to get her grandfather’s glass dream trap away from him and burning the White Djinn Tavern lest traces of the Dreamshadow linger there and summon more of itself, in greater strength, though it wasn’t really like the nomads to put themselves into danger for the sake of the town dwellers, who treated them with frequent scorn.