The Eye of Night

by Pauline J. Alama

  I hung there, half disbelieving what I'd done, and looked down at my boat below, perched across the edge of an abyss, where the waves broke off like the edge of a table. The sky quaked, pulling me both ways at once. I strained against the pull to force the two parts together. Then for some minutes the universe was only darkness and pain and an animal reflex to hold on, not to fall. There was nothing else; I could scarcely remember why I needed to hold on, to stay on this rack, but something in me refused to let go.

  I could not reason out a better plan; I could only hold on, and scarcely that. I felt my heart would soon burst, my breastbone crack under the strain. I remembered Hwyn, pierced through the heart by the fulfillment of her quest; I remembered the Holdouts in their unsheltered northern land, who would bear the brunt of this wind if I did not fight it for them; and I held on.

  Hands stronger than mine grasped my wrists, plucking me down from the sky. I tumbled, dazed, into the boat. When my head cleared, I looked up to see Trenara standing where I had hung—standing on the sea's bottom, up to her waist in waves, hands raised above her head, holding the sky together. “Jereth son of Garmund,” she said, “did you think you could be one of us on the world's rim—one of the gods, holding sky and sea together? How long did you think you could hold on?”

  “More presumption,” I gasped, when I could speak at all.

  The goddess drew breath to respond, but before the words left her lips, her face contorted in pain, and the only sound she made was a long groan of agony.

  “It pains you too?” I said fearfully. “Do you bear pain here for all ages?”

  She shook her head. “The pangs of birth,” she panted. “Hurry away!”

  “But—there's so much you haven't told me,” I protested. “What must I do now to finish the work?”

  “Leave here!” she commanded. “Leave at once, or the waters of birth will drown you.”

  “But—”

  “You will know what to do, my child,” she said. “Go. Live to tell the story.” She grimaced in pain again, but mastered it. “Go now. You tried to bear my burden, and for that you have my blessings forever, Jereth of World's End. Now farewell.” With that, she drew a long breath and blew on the sail, spinning the boat around, driving me back from the Rim of the World, back toward the faint trace of life I had left far behind me. The last I saw her, shining far off on the horizon, she looked almost like a silver tree with its roots in the ocean and its branches in the clouds. Then the storm broke, and I saw her no more.

  It broke from behind me, driving the boat before it crazily fast. It unleashed torrents of frozen rain to hammer down on me, nearly filling the boat with ice. It blew the lantern down from its perch to smash on the icy deck, flames flaring a moment as though the boat might catch, then dying in the damp, leaving me sightless on the wild sea. I thought of Hwyn, so sure in the dark, and wondered what she would do in this situation. There was a brief flash as lightning stuck the mast. Then there was nothing.

  20

  DRIFTWOOD

  I woke to a crashing headache and the sound of the sea and the smell of fish cooking. And something else, something I never thought to awaken to again: light, a soft glimmer along the horizon. “Dawn!” I gasped, sitting up cautiously. “It's here!”

  “Yes: the morning has come after all,” said Conor of Kelgarran.

  He sat in the stern of the boat, calmly roasting a fish over a small fire on a long splinter of wood that must have been part of the mast, because pieces of the mast lay everywhere. The sea had grown almost calm, though clouds still veiled the sky.

  “Lord Conor,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

  “Bringing you in to land,” he said. “Here, take this fish, and I'll take up the oars again. I'm glad you had the sense to tie them, so they weren't washed overboard.”

  “You've been guiding the boat?”

  “Since you lost the lantern, and consciousness. Yes. I've done it before, you know,” he said. “I sailed about a little in my youth.”

  “You saved my life. Again.”

  “You're welcome,” said the ghost dryly. “Now take this fish off my hands. You need it to keep your strength up; I don't. The fish is real; luckily you had some nets among your gear. The fire, I'm afraid, is an illusion. Kindling a real fire on a wet deck and keeping it contained once I'd started it—all that would be well beyond my powers now.”

  “So the fish only seems to be cooked?” I said, taking it from him, relishing the illusory heat in my chilled fingers before taking a bite.

  “That's right,” he said, taking the oars and moving carefully to the bow. “The illusion should at least make it palatable. The bread you brought with you would be more comforting, I guess, but the ocean took it.”

  I was almost hungry enough to eat it without the illusion. I wondered how much time had passed since my last meal in Larioneth Hall. I'd said I never wanted to taste fish again, but I attacked this one eagerly. When I was done, I said, “Thank you. You keep turning up when I need you.”

  “I couldn't leave you alone, after what I saw,” Conor said. “When you last summoned me—when I witnessed your wed-ding—I saw the expression on Hwyn's face. In my time as a ghost I've come to know that look.” He sighed. “Whoever wears it is not far from death. Jereth, I'm sorry. I know how you loved her.”

  “And you tried to warn me once, back in Berall,” I remembered. “But this time you said nothing.”

  “I knew you'd learn of it soon enough. Why spoil your fleeting hour of happiness?” Conor said. “Besides, Hwyn knew. I was sure of that. Either she would tell you herself, or she withheld it for a reason.”

  “She withheld it,” I said, “to shield me. But I suppose you know how it happened.”

  “No,” he said, “I only know what I saw that moment.” So I told him everything that had happened. Conor listened sympathetically and did not interrupt, keeping up a patient rhythm with the oars.

  When I had finished the narrative, I said, “And so Hwyn sacrificed everything—all she had, all she was—and I still don't understand what it was for. What did Trenara give birth to? Was it a new sun? Was the old one dying? What new life has risen out of the night?”

  “That I don't know,” Conor said. “But the world seems changed; it feels different.”

  “You haven't seen Hwyn, have you, in the ghost-world?” I asked, voicing at last my greatest fear. “You—I guess you can't have seen her. She is nameless. She—isn't.”

  Conor gave me a look of tortured compassion. “I wish I could reassure you,” he said gently. “I can't confirm your fears either. In this time of confusion I don't even know where my own brothers may be. All I know is that the time when ghosts walked the North is ending, and I soon must go.”

  “Where?”

  “I don't know even that much,” Conor said. “But something calls me, calls me away. When you reach the shore, I will not be with you. I was scarcely allowed to show myself now, under this new dawn.”

  “But you came anyway,” I mused, “as you have always come for Hwyn and me.”

  “I took an interest in you bold fools,” he said. “No, more than an interest. Better call it love.”

  “I always thought you loved Hwyn,” I said.

  Conor nodded, smiled. “And you too—my son,” he muttered, half embarrassed. “I wonder if you might really be my grandson, at long remove.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, and then remembering the history I'd learned, added, “I thought you had no children?”

  “None by my own wife,” he said ruefully.

  “I wish you were my father,” I said.

  Conor rested the oars and put a spectral hand on my shoulder. It seemed I could almost feel it. “No you don't,” he said gently. “I was terribly neglectful of my own bastards; and then the one I acknowledged was murdered by the usurper. But I know what you meant. And I thank you.”

  I wanted to clasp his hand in return, but that would only emphasize the distance between us, Lord Con
or a ghost, insubstantial, myself still alive and solid. So I said the only thing I could think of to touch him. “As long as I live, I will keep alive your story.”

  He grinned, and might have said more, but something caught my eye ahead of us.

  “Look: land!” I said.

  “I must leave you soon, then,” the ghost said.

  “Farewell,” I said, “and thank you. Wherever you are going, may it be good to you.”

  “Godspeed,” he told me. “Jereth, my lad, take courage. You still have more to suffer. Do not despair.” With that he vanished, leaving me alone in a half-ruined boat. I took up the oars myself and discovered how weary I still was, scarcely able to fight the current with such puny weapons. To think I'd believed myself strong enough to hold the sky together! Well, Syrc would enjoy the story, I thought, if only I could win my way to land to tell it all.

  The sun had risen up under the clouds: a gray day, but so bright to my unaccustomed eyes that it made my head throb. Nonetheless it revived my spirits to row toward a visible destination, to see the daylight returned, to know that life would go on after all. Not for all; not for the best, the one I most loved—but some life would go on. Morning followed night, and night followed morning, and stories followed the deaths of heroes, bearing them into new ages. I had not Hwyn's gift of inspired lyric, but I could do one thing she couldn't: I could write. Someday I would write her story, and lame though my words might be compared to hers, they would outlast her sweetest songs. The voice fades; the parchment remains; thus we mortals struggle with time, preserving the dry husk of what was vibrant and vital. The best, the worthiest passes away; we must be content to preserve the remnant of former glories. The worthiest passes away; the least worthy survives, as I did.

  By inches I neared the shore. The storm must have been wild indeed, for the coast was changed beyond recognition. I wondered how long I had lain unconscious, how much of the gale I had missed. Perhaps I had been driven off course to the uninhabited lands farther east or west along the northern coast. Still, it seemed best to go ashore to try to find my bearings, and perhaps something I could fashion into a makeshift mast and sail, before setting out to follow the coast back to Larioneth. Avoiding a rocky point beneath a towering cliff, I rowed around eastward to a low, sloping beach. There I landed and dragged my boat up the sand. But no—not up the sand, for it was no sand I found underfoot, but black soil, planting soil. Farther from the sea, the parallel tracks of the plow still marked it. It was a field lying fallow for winter, half swallowed by the waves. This could not be Lari-oneth, where the farms lay south of the town, away from the sea. And yet it was not quite desolate, as most of the North had been: had this field not been tended as recently as summer, weeds would have overtaken it. Where could I be?

  At the top of the rising land I left the boat and trudged forward through what seemed more and more clearly to be wintering grainfields. After passing an orchard, I saw the walls of a town. I hastened toward them; they were high and forbidding, too plain to be the sculpted walls of Larioneth. Seeing no opening, I circled around looking for a gate, and found myself atop the cliff I had seen from my boat. There I found a gate facing the sea. It was shut, but a watchman called down from the guard-tower: “Greetings, stranger! Did you come from the sea?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I set sail from Larioneth in the Longest Night, and meant to return there. I seem to have been blown off course in the storm. What town is this?”

  “Welcome to Berall,” he said. “Come in; we have been waiting for you!”

  “Berall!” I shouted. “Impossible! Berall is inland.”

  “This was inland, until the storm,” said the watchman. “Didn't you know? The sea must have taken the whole north country. We are an island now.”

  “The whole north country? Larioneth? Sunk beneath the waves?” My right hand, jammed in my pocket against the cold, clenched spasmodically, closing on something hard and sharp: the gilt star Rand had given me as a token. I clutched it, driving the points into my skin, as though the pain would drive from my mind the words I heard. “It can't be!”

  “But it is. Thank the gods that those ghosts drove everyone south before the deluge,” said the watchman.

  “Not everyone,” I gasped, “not the best of them. Oh, Hidden Goddess! How could you abandon them?—your children!”

  “What are you saying?” the watchman called.

  “Another city—a better city than this—the bravest, best people in the world,” I cried. “Larioneth! Oh gods! What is the good of this new dawn? Why did the sun rise at all?” I thought, when Hwyn died, I had suffered the worst; I thought I could fall no lower. But this was worse, infinitely worse. Hwyn had at least chosen her fate, accepted a death that had meaning to her when she accepted it, if not amid the pain of her last moments. A hundred Holdouts, drowned by the storm, had not chosen. Ash's children had not chosen. They had died for nothing. And now Hwyn too had died for nothing, for worse than nothing, for a force that could break loose and drown a hundred brave souls. The waters of birth, Trenara had warned, might drown me; why had she given no warning to them? Either she was as cruel a goddess as I had thought her when Hwyn died, or stupider than she had seemed when she couldn't lace her own tunic, criminally stupid for one who held the world in her care. Something might have been worth Hwyn's sacrifice; nothing could be worth this carnage. If this were the new world to rise out of the Troubles, I wanted no part of it. I turned away from the gates of Berall, back to the sea.

  “Wait!” called the watcher. “Where are you going? Hold on, I'll open the gate. We've waited so long for you. Your coming was foretold: we were promised hope from the sea.”

  “So were the Holdouts of Larioneth,” I shouted back, “and it drowned them.” Then I turned away again, ran to the cliff's edge, and dove.

  For what seemed ages I was falling, falling endlessly, as though I would never hit bottom. Then the water struck me like a giant's fist and I knew no more.

  I awoke face-down on the low beach, muddy and frigid and still alive. That last fact galled me the most. My head throbbed; my boots were swamped in wintry water; and nothing between the two extremities felt any better. The sea had washed me ashore like driftwood but soon enough, I thought, it might pick me up again and draw me down with the rest of them, down where I belonged. But then I noticed the damp soil far above me on the slope, the waves barely lapping my feet where they trailed close to the water. The tide was going out. I would have to swim into it. I made a motion to push myself up off the ground and was paralyzed by a spasm of pain that seemed to echo through my whole body. I didn't know it then, but both my arms had been broken on the rocks, and one leg as well. I could not move. The ocean lapped teasingly at my feet, but it was retreating from me.

  “You!” I shouted to the impervious ocean, “You've taken everything I loved; why won't you take me?” There was no answer. There was never any answer. I lay shivering in the mud, waiting for the cold and my wounds to give me the deliverance the sea denied me. Hours passed, and the waves shrank back from me as from contagion. The arm folded under me lost feeling; in the other, a fire raged. From the corner of my eye I saw a jagged edge of bone piercing my skin. I shut my eyes and clamped my jaw against a wave of nausea.

  “Look!” a voice cried after a time. “A man on the shore. It might be—”

  “Is he dead?” said another voice. I kept my eyes shut, kept still, hoping they would pass by. But the voices neared.

  “So much for our hope from the sea,” said a third voice. “Dead. Like all other hopes.”

  “No, wait,” said the first speaker. “I think I saw him move—a slight shiver.”

  “The wind stirring his garments,” said the third man—they were all men's voices, deep and resonant.

  “It can't hurt to look,” said the second one. Then I felt a pair of hands, shockingly warm, on my shoulders. I steeled myself not to respond, but it was no use: he must have felt the tension in my muscles. “Come quickly! I think
he's alive,” he said. Then with the greatest delicacy he tried to turn me face up. Even that was too much. The skin around the broken bone tore farther, and against my will I cried out.

  “He is alive—barely,” he said to his companions, and to me, “I'm sorry.”

  “Leave me,” I whispered, then gathered more breath. “Please, leave me,” I said again, my voice still weak, as though drained in one cry.

  “I didn't mean to hurt you,” the man said. “I'm sorry. It couldn't be helped. The healer will come soon, I promise.” Then, turning to his companions, he said, “One of you go for the healer, quick. He might die.”

  “Let me die,” I groaned. “Please, if you have any mercy, leave me here. By tomorrow I'll be past suffering.”

  “Hush now,” said the man who had turned me over. “You're past the worst of it. The healer will bring something for the pain.”

  “Should we move him first?” said one of the others. “Is the tide coming in?”

  “Out,” I said. “It's going out, gods curse it.”

  “He should know,” said the other. “He came from the sea.”

  He said it in such a tone of reverence that even through my anguish I had to laugh. “Yes, I came from the sea. I was trying to drown myself. How does that fit your prophecy?”

  “Then you did not come in that boat?” said the man closest to me. “You must have; you can't be from Berall, with that accent.”

  “I came in the boat,” I admitted.

  “Then you are the one promised, the hope from the sea,” he said. “Claron, please—the healer, while there's time.”

  “I'm going,” Claron said.

  “No,” I groaned. “I beg you, leave me to die. I will not trouble you long; a day at most, and perhaps then the sea will deign to accept me. Or if you pity my suffering, give me a quick death with a knife.”