The Eye of Night

by Pauline J. Alama

  Hwyn had not let me go. “Jereth, I need you now, alive, in the present day, not holding on to a long-lost time, to a moment's decision made when you were scarcely strong enough to hold on, let alone swim to anyone's rescue.”

  “I can't stop wondering whether I chose wrong. I wanted to live so badly.”

  “It's not cowardly to love life,” she said.

  Now it was my turn to laugh bitterly. “In the past seven years I've done everything but love life. I've been eaten away inside like a rotten tree.”

  “Eaten away by useless guilt,” Hwyn said. “There's no use hanging back here. Life, and all the good you can do, lie beyond that gate. Now come with me.”

  Just before we passed through the gate, I turned to Hwyn. “You saw everything,” I said. “You saw the shame I've been carrying for seven years. Can you still—”

  I broke off, but she finished for me. “Of course I still love you, Jereth. Now let's go.”

  Trenara had already gone ahead of us out of the gate. Hwyn and I followed, clinging to each other, slowly but steadily leaving our dead behind us.

  15

  TREMORS IN THE EARTH

  I guess it's fish from now on,” Hwyn said glumly as we ate the last of the dried apples and salt meat from Hwyn the Weaver's saddlebags. We'd meant to make them last longer, living mostly on fish from the broad stream we followed, but the best-made plans don't wear well in the wilderness. For the past two days rain had pounded down; there was no dry wood I could burn to cook the fish I could catch, and we were not yet hungry enough to eat them raw. We'd forgone food as long as we could bear, but the rain did not subside, nor did any place of shelter appear in the day's travels.

  “There's about a handful of barley meal left,” I said. “Other than that, it'll be whatever we can find on the way.” In other words, fish—varied at times with bitter boiled acorns or the tasteless, starchy roots of thistles, delicacies I'd never dreamed I'd try. There was small game in abundance, and even herds of deer where the woods thinned, but neither Hwyn nor I had ever learned to hunt or trap. So the meat to be had was not for us, and we expected to reach the rim of the world sooner than the next town where we could buy bread.

  Hwyn scowled. “Wouldn't it be funny if we escaped the sword in Kelgarran Hall and the gallows in Berall only to starve to death in the empty North, the quest undone?”

  “No,” I said flatly, and sneezed, for the leaves were still bothering me.

  “It's wet here,” Trenara said needlessly.

  “Yes, Trenara,” I said. “Can you walk some more?” She nodded and I turned to Hwyn. “And you?”

  “We may as well. I doubt any of us could sleep.” So we got to our feet again and staggered onward, cold and tired. It was the most miserable day of our journey since our escape from Berall, and it did not comfort us to consider that things could easily be worse, because soon enough they would be. Winter was at hand.

  As we trudged on through the mud, keeping the rain-swollen stream just barely in view to guide us, I paused a moment in astonishment. “Hwyn, do you hear music?”

  “No,” she said. “You do?”

  “I thought I did,” I said. “But this wind snatches away every sound except the drumming of the rain.”

  “Maybe you heard me wishing we were singing for our supper in a nice dry tavern,” she said, and we were able to laugh for at least a moment.

  Sometime later the rain abated to a trickle and the wind ceased its howling. It wasn't yet dry enough to tempt us to stop and rest in the mud, but we breathed easier, straightening backs that had been crouched forward against the wind. I turned to Hwyn. “Are you still dreaming of singing for our keep?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Because I can hear it again, clearer than before. The music,” I explained. “Can't you?”

  “No. Where do you hear it?” she asked. I pointed to my right, across the flood. She shook her head. “Pity. If there's another human being in this wasteland, I want to see. But there will be no crossing that stream for days.”

  “Do you think there's really someone there?” I said.

  She shrugged. “You're the one who heard it.”

  “I do hear it. But who would be out playing the flute in the pouring rain? I must be losing my mind.”

  “I thought that was settled long ago,” she said, “when you decided to come with me.”

  When the rain stopped at last, we practically dropped down where we stood to sleep on the ground, wrapped in our cloaks and heaped together for warmth. It was night, and we'd grown accustomed to sleeping by day, but we were in no state to be fussy.

  Toward dawn I woke, shivering. The mud had frozen during the night. I forced my eyes open and checked anxiously, reassuring myself that the two sleepers beside me were breathing. Then I would have pressed closer to Hwyn and slept again—but I noticed that the sound of my dreams had continued into waking life. I could hear it again, the sweet round tone of the flute playing a tune I knew well. Gingerly I raised my head and looked around, but there was no one in sight. One thing, however, had changed: the musician was definitely to the west of us, on our side of the river. It all fit then: the bizarre image of a flutist calmly playing in the rain-drenched wilderness. No earthly being had crossed the flood in this weather to haunt me with an old tune. I knew beyond doubt, then, what musician serenaded me, and why Hwyn's sharper ears detected nothing. He played for me. I knew this musician, but I did not know what I would say to him.

  Straining my ears to hold the song, I did not expect to fall back asleep, but I did. When I woke again it was gone. I told none of this to Hwyn and Trenara, weighing my feelings privately. The day passed in commonplace worries: how close dared we go to the stream, now swollen over its banks and powerful with its new weight of water; how far dared we stray from it lest we lose direction; what would we eat until it could be fished again; where would we sleep. In the night I listened for the flute half in hope, half in dread, but finally in vain.

  The path eased for a while: frozen ground tired our feet less than treacherous mud, and thickets that had offered scant shelter from the rain were tolerable shields against the wind. We discovered a grove of nut-trees, perhaps the remnant of an orchard, and gathered as many as the squirrels had left us. Trenara wandered off into the woods to eat some evil-looking whitish berries off a low shrub, and when we realized she hadn't poisoned herself, Hwyn and I also picked our fill. “They're good,” Hwyn admitted, surprised. “Have you had these before, Trenara? What are they called?”

  “Berries,” Trenara answered patiently.

  We sang as we traveled; it made the land seem less lonesome. I taught Hwyn the song I'd heard in the night, forgetting for a while both the dangers ahead and the darkness behind my memory of that music. But it could not last: on the fourth day after the storm, the wind began to snatch my song away, and snow blurred our view of the path ahead.

  “There's higher ground over that way,” I said, pointing away from the river. “Maybe we could find a dry cave, or at least an outcropping that would give a little shelter.”

  Hwyn agreed, so we trudged uphill, notching trees along the way to mark our path back to the river. The hill rose sharply beneath our feet. Scrambling upward, Hwyn tripped on something to land on her hands and knees. She shrieked, and I rushed over to help her before I realized that it was a cry of excitement, not pain. “Jereth, look! These flat stones I tripped on—they're a stairway!”

  “Are you sure?” The snow hid them, but when I groped in the snow with freezing hands, I admitted that the arrangement seemed too regular for anything natural.

  “It must lead to something,” Hwyn said. Dusting the snow off her hands and knees, she started upward, and Trenara and I followed eagerly. Sure enough, at the crest of the hill stood a stone house, its shutters hanging off at their hinges, obviously disused and therefore ours for the taking. The door yielded easily. Inside we found what looked to us like luxury: a wood floor half covered by a moth-eaten rug, some broken
chairs and footstools under a thick coat of dust, a northern-style closet bed, like a long cupboard with slots cut in it for breathing, and a broad fireplace with a massive cauldron that must have been too big for the owners to take away with them when they fled the treacherous north. I brought in snowy branches from outside and set them by the hearth to dry while I started a fire with some ends of broken furniture. We melted snow in the cauldron for much-needed baths, and more in our own cooking-pot to boil our meal of acorns and whiteberries.

  “This was a lovely home once,” Hwyn said. “Imagine a lamp on the table, curtains at the windows, fresh bedding, embroidered cloths on the walls to hold the warmth in. These northern houses could be very comfortable.” She tossed a twig into the fire, experimentally; it sputtered a little but caught soon enough. “In fact, it's still a good home.”

  “We could winter here,” I suggested, feeding the fire a good-sized branch. “I could fix the shutters so we wouldn't be bothered by the draft. There are doubtless other houses nearby—a deserted village, most likely—and tools may have been left in some of them. We're close enough to the river to fish, and in time we might even learn to hunt. When the snow subsides a bit we could look for the remains of a vegetable garden. We might find some root plants still growing, something we could live on. We can survive here till spring more easily than anywhere in the north. Then when the ice thaws we can finish the journey.”

  She smiled a little, but hesitated to speak, staring into the fire until her smile disappeared. “I'd love to, Jereth,” she said. “But I don't know if I can wait. The Eye of Night may not let me.”

  “We won't do the quest any good if we freeze or starve to death in the wilderness,” I said. “The Eye of Night has waited at least thirty years; can't it hold out until spring?”

  “What you say seems reasonable enough,” she said, “but the Eye is rarely reasonable. All the same, I'll try to stay.” She looked away from me, into the flames again. “Of course, even if I leave, you could stay here with Trenara until spring.”

  “Don't be ridiculous.” I slipped my arm around her shoulders. “I haven't come this far to abandon you.” We sat holding each other, neither of us saying anything, both of us fearing the journey to come.

  We swept the cobwebs out of the closet bed; there was no bedding left in it, but it was still probably the most comfortable sleeping place in the room. We let Trenara have it and bedded down on the floor in our cloaks. Hwyn was asleep almost before we lay down. But as my eyes drifted closed, a thread of music insinuated itself into my consciousness. I sat upright, rubbed my eyes: the music did not fade. In fact it seemed closer now, louder. It might be just outside the window. I stood and groped my way to the window, pushed the dangling shutter out of the way, and strained my eyes against the dark. There was a glimmer near the trees. There, illuminated by a thin-strained trickle of moonlight through the clouds, or by some kind of ghost-light, was my younger brother, my favorite by far, Saeverth. Oblivious to the snow, he sat under a pine tree, playing his end-blown Magyan flute, the one I knew had drowned with him on the way back from Iskarron. He tilted his head back a little, seeming to notice me at the window, but did not speak or even stop playing.

  “Saeverth!” I called, but he took no notice. “Saeverth, won't you speak to me?” Suddenly my face flushed hot and my throat tightened. “Saeverth!” I called a third time, “you of all the drowned have no call to haunt me or reproach me with your death. By all the gods! I didn't even see you go under. What could I have done for you? Your death is not on my soul. I never did you harm. Do you grudge me my life?”

  He stopped playing and stared at me. “Once you liked to hear me play.” He turned and started away, the ghost-light flickering between branches. Suddenly remorseful, I dashed from the window to the door, threw it open, and ran out into the snow without bothering to put my boots back on. “No! Wait!” I called, but he was gone. Bereaved anew, lost in that old intermingling of grief and guilt, cursing my temper and the snow that froze my feet, I turned back to the house.

  Hwyn stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the hearth's glow behind her. “Jereth, what's the matter? I heard you shout. Was someone here?”

  “Yes and no. My brother,” I said.

  “Your brother who is—”

  “Dead,” I finished for her. “Yes, like the rest of my family, drowned in the wreck of the Sea-Bird.”

  “Another of those accusing ghosts? Don't follow them. They haven't the right.”

  “No, Saeverth is different,” I said, following Hwyn back into the house. We sat at the hearth again, stirring the embers to warm ourselves. “He wasn't accusing. But I didn't understand that until too late. I'm afraid I've driven him away.”

  “Why? What did he say?”

  “Very little. Mostly he just played that flute of his, the throat-flute as they call it in Magya. I thought, at first, that he was haunting me, following us through the wilderness for days, playing the same tune.”

  “That music that I couldn't hear,” she said, understanding. “You didn't want him to leave you now.”

  “No, but I knew it too late, too tied up in my own self-blame to realize that he didn't blame me.” I stared unseeing into the fire, remembering the body washed ashore after the storm, bruised and blue-lipped. I hadn't wept for him or for any of them, but I remember sitting long hours on the sand clutching that battered remnant of him, seeing nothing before me. The fisher families, accustomed to drownings, came finally to pry him from my hands and pull me away from the rising tide, and I neither resisted nor quite acquiesced to their rescue.

  “He'll return,” Hwyn was saying to me. “If he's followed you for four days, he won't give up now; he'll be back. We can wait here, at least a little while. Not even the Eye of Night can be so unreasonable. We all need rest and shelter.”

  I nodded absently, still looking into the fire. She took my hand. “Tell me about him.”

  “He was the youngest, six years younger than I. We weren't always close. He had a twin sister who was naturally the closest to him. But she died of a sudden fever, quite young, and when I saw how desolate he was without her, I started to look after him. Before long, we were inseparable. He was the cleverest of us: he knew all the stars we sailed by when most boys were just learning to count their fingers. He learned the language of Magya so well that, but for his light eyes, he might have passed for a native. And he'd have been the one to have with us this summer, singing for our keep: Saeverth and his flute were almost famous from port to port.” I stared into the flames again. “He was seventeen years old when he drowned.”

  “You miss him,” Hwyn said.

  “Yes,” I said, “of all of them, he's the one I still look for.”

  “He'll be back,” she said, stroking my hand. “I'm sure he will.”

  “Even if he doesn't return,” I said, more to convince myself than Hwyn, “at least I've seen him. He's there somewhere, and he hasn't lost his touch at the flute. That's some comfort. If he didn't seem exactly content, he looked no less so than in life.”

  “I wonder if they're all out there—the dead,” Hwyn said.

  “Who knows? All we're taught—that they return to the lap of the Hidden Goddess—is too poetic to exactly mean anything or exclude anything.”

  “Well, the North is her land,” Hwyn said. “Maybe they belong here.”

  “Well enough for them,” I said. “They need no shelter from the cold.” We sat silent a while, hearing only the soft crackling of the fire and Trenara's rhythmic breathing. The red glow of the flames seemed to shine through Hwyn's pale hair. She was staring into the fire with an expression I could not read. I leaned closer, slipping an arm around her, taking comfort from the warmth and solidity of her body in this land of ghosts. She leaned against me trustingly; it seemed strange that we had ever distrusted each other, ever been apart.

  For a short, blissful time we made the house our own and did not speak of leaving. In the days we fished for our sustenance, or scaven
ged nearby houses and barns for anything of use: a half-broken axe, a covered pot for carrying fire, a blanket not too badly moth-eaten. We found old vegetable gardens and dug up roots to eat, often coarse and unsavory, but better tasting than thistles and more filling than fish. In one of the houses we even found a cask of strong, old wine; it lent a dash of festivity to our meals, a little flavor to our food.

  In the evening we sang by the fire; Hwyn was making a ballad of the tragic tale of Dirnlac of the Red Oak, singing a few lines, then appealing to me for a word or two when the flow of inspiration seemed blocked. We sat awake long into the night after Trenara was in bed, talking of everything and nothing. Hwyn asked me, “Whom did you love before me? There must have been someone; a sentimentalist like you doesn't live thirty years with his heart closed.”

  I laughed, embarrassed. “There was no one important. Growing up at sea, I didn't meet many women except the prostitutes at the ports—and they didn't appeal to me. Month after month seeing no woman but your mother or a boatload of whores—it can make a boy awkward with women, and gods, how awkward I was! And ashore, I was too much under my father's thumb to meet many girls—except the ones I met on his terms, the daughters of solid merchant families, decked out like bait to snare profitable alliances in a way that would have made the Bright Goddess unattractive.”

  Hwyn laughed. “But you must have liked someone. Come on, I won't be jealous—after all, this was before you knew me.”

  “All right,” I said. “There was a shipbuilder's daughter at Bellen that I liked well enough; I thought she liked me. She had a pretty singing voice, though it was nothing to yours. She liked riddles, as you do. She had a soft heart, and filched from her father's strongbox to give to beggars. But I was dragged out of my dreams to a long trading voyage with my father, and when I came back to look for her, she was married. I pined a while, and wrote some poetry of more than the usual awfulness.”

  “Oh, good,” Hwyn teased. “Tell me some of it.”