The Eye of Night

by Pauline J. Alama

  “Of course,” she said. “Where else would we house a saint?”

  “I wish you'd stop calling me that,” I said. “Now tell me, what made you ask who I was?”

  “When you laughed like that,” she said, “you looked just like him.” She pointed to the western quadrant of the dome, to the icon of the Upside-Down God with his sardonic grin and his mirthless, haunted dark eyes. I stared back into those eyes, not knowing what to say.

  Renn brushed a hand over my forehead. “I'll return soon,” she said, and left.

  21

  JERETH OF WORLD'S END

  Renn soon returned with the porridge, watered down and reheated. After convincing her that I could feed myself, I took a spoonful of it, cautiously waiting to see if it stayed down.

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  “Strange,” I answered, swirling the spoon around in the bowl, delaying. “Tell me about yourself, Renn.”

  “There's not much to tell,” she said.

  “Have you always lived in this godforsaken town?”

  She nodded, seemingly unaffected by the epithet. “My father kept a shop on Westmarket Lane, not far from here. He was a wheelwright. We all helped out: my mother, my brothers and sisters, and I. There were five of us. I was the middle child—the hub of the wheel, as Father liked to say …” she trailed off. “Then eight days after the Feast of the Turning God, the Winter Sickness came … and now I'm alone. The elders let me live in the Temple because it was empty, after the priests fled ghost-ridden, so I was here already when they brought you in from the water. The elders thought it fitting.” Her eyes, which had wandered away when she spoke of the Winter Sickness, traveled back to me. “Why do you want to know about me?”

  “Why not? You're the only friend I have in Berall. Unless—”

  “What?”

  “There was one man who was kind to me. I wonder if I can even find him—if he is alive, after the winter, after the sickness you speak of. A beggar named Vokh. He lived in a makeshift shack somewhere south of the marketplace. I'll look for him when I'm stronger.”

  “I'll look for him,” Renn said. “If he's still here, I'll find him, I promise.”

  “You promise much,” I said. “I can promise so little in return.”

  “So you say,” Renn said. “But you say, too, that you sailed to the world's end and back, alive. If you can afford to despise such a feat as that—” she lifted an eloquent hand, palm up. Then, her expression suddenly young, natural, she asked, “What did you see there? Could you see beyond the rim, or is it dark?”

  “Everything was dark; it was the Longest Night,” I said. “But let me start at the beginning.” She acquiesced, and I began telling her all the whole story, beginning with my pilgrimage. It was slow in the telling: I was still weak. I paused now and then for another mouthful of food, and Renn asked many questions, diverting me from the main path. I thought I would soon tire, but instead it seemed to strengthen me, telling my story to a sympathetic ear, letting loose all the impressions of a year that had been the crown and the scourge of my life. I began little by little to feel more human than I had since Hwyn died. Renn hung on every word, and I left nothing out except my fleeting attempt to hold the sky together; gods alone knew what her hagiographic imagination would have made of that.

  Toward sundown we were interrupted by the entry of a group of men, well-dressed, gray-bearded burghers, looking like any of the merchants my father had known, except a little worse for a winter's strange fortunes. “How goes it with our guest?” they said. “Will he speak to us?”

  “I don't know,” Renn said. “He brings heavy accusations against this town: he says we have killed saints and innocents. He says that when he was last here, he was not welcome, and he would never willingly have returned. We must answer these charges and not take them lightly, for he is a great saint, Jereth of World's End, who traveled with the Hidden Goddess to the Rim of the World.”

  “I am no saint,” I interrupted. “I did sail to the world's rim, as Renn says, but gained no wisdom there. What I saw and heard, Renn must interpret. She is obviously a priestess; after six years in the Tarvon Order, I can at least recognize a true calling. I will tell her all I know, and that is probably all the good you'll have of me. It's Renn I'll tell my story to, mind, not to any of you elders—and least of all to Lord Var, that murderer of prophets.”

  “Var no longer rules,” said one of the men.

  I sat bolt upright in bed. “Since when?”

  “Eight days after the close of the autumn festival—after the last of the executions, when they hanged the prophet Hwyn— Var went mad. After that the ghosts came in, angry, howling for vengeance, and the plague soon followed. We didn't know what to do with Var; he'd run afoul of his own law, and the sentence of death he himself had established. But he was our Lord, and we loved him; how could we condemn him?”

  “What became of him, then?” I asked.

  “He is a prisoner,” the elder said, “the only one, now. Did we do wrong? What should be done with him?”

  “I suppose he should go to St. Fiern's Town,” I laughed grimly. “They like madmen there.”

  “How should he reach it? The land is flooded,” said the elder.

  I realized then, with a shock, that he took my answer seri-ously—that he had asked me as I had asked the Mirror of St. Fiern what to do with my life. Suppose I'd said, “Kill him,” I thought, barely suppressing a wicked laugh. But then a new realization shocked me harder: the answer I'd given carelessly, flippantly, not expecting it to matter, was right, right in ways I hadn't considered when I spoke. Var should go to the Mirror of St. Fiern, look in it, and see the truth he'd hidden from. He should do penance at the shrine of a saint of the Hidden Goddess, whom he'd thwarted, and the Turning God, whose festival he'd defiled—and Fiern had been devoted to both. He should go as a pilgrim, humbled. I hadn't meant any of this—yet I'd hit upon the truth.

  “My Lord?” said the elder. It took me a while to realize that he meant me. “How should he travel? All our roads south are cut off by the flood.”

  “By sea, of course,” I said. “Why, the pilgrimage has become almost too easy!”

  “We have no knowledge of the sea,” said another of the elders, “and no oceangoing vessels. We are lost to all we knew. That is the last and most lingering of our curses: we are an island now.”

  “And you call that a curse?” I laughed. “Iskarron is all islands, and richer than any part of Swevnalond. But I see I have work in Berall after all—not in the temple, but on the shore. I am not the best shipbuilder or sailor you could hope for, but I'm the best you have. As soon as I'm well I'll make a boat to send your Lord away for you—and good riddance, I say.”

  “And you, you who came from the sea according to the prophecy—will you be our Lord henceforth?”

  I choked.

  “I know you are angry with this town,” said the elder. “The gods are angry with us, too. You can amend what is wrong with us.”

  “No,” I said. “You are mistaken in me. I am not holy. And Be-rall has had enough of the worship of lords. Better you should settle things in council together, like the Holdouts of Larioneth, than take another lord and treat him as a god, like Var. That was wrong; but worse yet to follow one who has cursed you, and whom the gods have cursed.” I meant myself, but they did not listen to the last part. Instead they said, “We will do as you say. We will follow the example of Larioneth.”

  When they had left, I turned to Renn. “You called me Jereth of World's End?”

  “It seemed to fit,” she said. “What use calling you by your patronym in a town where your father is unknown?”

  “It's what the goddess called me,” I said, “the last time she spoke to me.”

  Renn put a hand over her mouth and sat stone-still.

  I reached out and touched her arm. “I know how you feel,” I said. “You're not the only one to have found out today how disconcerting it is to speak truth without know
ing it.”

  “Is that what it's always like—priesthood?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Not for me. In the Tarvon Order, I never felt like a priest. Maybe I just became one today.” I laughed at that, dryly: “Today, when all I can do is blaspheme the gods! They have a strange sense of humor.”

  “You scare me,” she said, but in a quiet, level voice that belied her words.

  “I'm sorry. I scare myself lately,” I said. “But you've had more than enough of it for one day. Go and rest, Renn. I'll still be here tomorrow.”

  “I sleep here,” she said. “I've been nursing you—remember?” But she did leave for a while to walk alone, and I was asleep before she returned.

  In the morning I went down to the sea, leaning on a crutch sturdier than my atrophied limbs, trying not to ask the help of Renn, who stayed anxiously close to me. I swayed a few times, but didn't fall. When I reached the easy slope where I'd landed on the First Morning, I said, “This is where the harbor should be. It's the easiest landing—unless there's another one farther south; this was the best I found where I sailed. We could build a quay over there.” I pointed. “And even without it, we could start building fishing boats here. If we brought this plan to the elders, do you think they could find people to help us? Anyone who used to navigate the river, when there was a river, and any woodworkers—plus weavers and sempsters to make sails. Would they agree to it?”

  “The elders would be glad of it, and most of the people,” Renn said. “But Kelab will complain. This is his field.”

  “Not much good for planting now,” I commented.

  “No,” Renn admitted. “But he keeps hoping the sea will give it back.”

  I shook my head. “There's a time to accept your losses.”

  Renn nodded silently. I went back to planning my shipyard, scratching my thoughts onto the wax tablet I'd brought, limping about from one spar of land to another, then to higher ground to survey the sweep of the bay. Before long I was expounding to Renn on tides and currents, on everything that made the spot favorable and everything we'd have to take care of when we actually launched our boats, falling into a sailor's lingo I thought had died on my tongue years ago. How much of it Renn understood I don't know, but she listened tolerantly, bless her. Very likely she was used to hearing her elders drone away at nonsense, and could let it wash over her, as I used to do with my Magyan tutor. No matter. I was talking to myself, really. For the first time since the Longest Night, I had found something to absorb me beyond regret.

  After we trudged back to the temple, I collapsed on the bed at once. “I should take this to the elders,” I said wearily, waving the tablet.

  “I'll take your plans to them,” she said, “if you like.”

  “Thank you,” was all I had a chance to say before dropping off to sleep.

  From then on I was blessedly busy. I had boats to build. I had apprentices to train—a horde of them, more than the richest shipwright in Swanroad, from a ten-year-old orphan to a white-bearded, bent-backed farmer whose livelihood lay beneath the sea. They hung on my words, worse than the Holdouts had when I built the boat Trenara had demanded. But this time I minded it less: unlike the Larioneth fishermen, these were truly ignorant of the sea, and my little knowledge meant much to them. Besides, my own hastily built craft had carried me to the world's end and back, so perhaps I knew something after all. I patched my world's end boat, built a few more with the help of my new following, and soon we were hauling in nets full of incautious fish from the swollen sea. We gave the best of the first catch to Kelab to soften the loss of his land. He joined my crew the next morning.

  I did not, at first, warm to any of them; in my bitterness I attributed half their compliance to the proven truth that Berallites were a servile lot, easily led and without genius. But I had some companionship beyond my shipyard; for one thing, Renn proved a better friend than I might have expected from her youth, my age, and our stormy first meeting. After the first day, she ceased to be shocked by any of my rantings; on the contrary, she listened with understanding, and I think enjoyed hearing her elders rated as fools—well, so would I, when I was fourteen. I took her equally at her word as she, hesitantly at first, but with ever more confidence, spun plans of a new order, the Sisters of the Dawn, to replace the priests who'd fled in the hard winter. She also had more immediate plans to solace the orphans of the Winter Sickness and those still ailing. She meant to bring them to the temple and assemble her own crew of apprentices to care for them. She'd learned much from the healer during her family's illness, and I harried him into teaching her more. I seconded all her plans, and as the elders feared me, they came around to her ways, until in time it became habitual to them to hear and obey their fourteen-year-old priestess.

  She kept up some of the fiction that she was destined for my bride—I suppose it served to drive away more eager suitors. She had an intermittent follower—a boy of about fifteen who lacked neither wit nor heart, and seemed almost as interested in her theological opinions as in her rose-petal lips—but she seemed chary of encouraging him in anything but theology, at least for the time being. Wise girl, I suppose: she was not made to marry young, as my mother had, to be worn away by the demands of an older husband or the needs of a young one until her character was as indistinct as the face of a century-old coin. She needed to grow alone, and she had not Hwyn's marred face to ensure the solitude she needed. She had me instead. That may have been the best service I did her, as a scarecrow for suitors, and if so, I was glad to serve: I could almost be glad of the elders' nonsense, humiliating as I found it, if it helped me repay her kindness.

  She tried to find Vokh for me, but everyone denied knowing such a man. After a few days in Berall I searched the back alleys where he had taken me, wounded and outcast, during the autumn festival. In the same shack where he had sheltered me, I found him wasting away with illness and want.

  He lay still and shrunken on his pallet. At first glance I thought him dead. Moved by regret, I knelt and touched him, murmuring, “Vokh. Brother.” He opened his eyes and stared.

  “The minstrel from the autumn festival,” he murmured. “Gar— no, Jereth. Are you living, or ghost? Is this my death?”

  “I hope not,” I said. “I live—and so will you, if I can help it. I have a debt to repay you.” I brought him to the temple and cared for him. Renn helped without being asked, eager as she was to begin her mission as healer-priestess.

  The next time the Elders of Berall came to the temple to talk at me and receive their answers from Renn, one of them, Aron, stared at Vokh with such a fixed look of shock and dismay that I moved protectively toward my guest to cut short what I was sure would be an explosion of scorn. I began my defense: “You cannot be surprised to see a sick man housed here; Renn has spoken more than once of her plan—”

  But Aron paid me no heed. Instead he reached out, as if for a handhold, toward the invalid. “Evokhion? Evokhion the Horseman?” he gasped.

  “You would not know me when I came home, maimed, from the wars,” said Vokh stiffly. “Why now, Aron?”

  “I would not know you—? You came—to me? Are you saying I turned you away?” Aron cried.

  “Not in so many words,” Vokh said. “But I begged in your sight often enough, these twelve years, in the marketplace.”

  “Strangers and friends may pass unseeing in the marketplace. Why did you never come to my door, old comrade?”

  “Why, I—” Vokh began indignantly—then stopped short. When he spoke again, his tone was softened. “I suppose I was too proud to cry out to old companions, ‘Here am I, Evokhion, your disgraced comrade, half dead now and no use to anyone. Give alms to me, for I ride to war no longer.’ Instead I waited to see if some passerby would call my name. But who looks a beggar in the face?”

  “Vokh, I swear I never knew you returned,” Aron said. “Var told us you were dead.”

  “He would,” Vokh said darkly. “He knew where my loyalties lay. But by the time I returned, m
y lady was dead, and there was none to speak for me.”

  Aron bowed his head. “It was sorrow upon sorrow that year, as it is again. I never knew you lived to mourn Lady Ruva. But that is past healing. For now, will you let me offer you a place at my table, a bed in my home, as I would have done at once after the war, had you come to me?”

  “Only if my newer friend is tired of keeping me,” Vokh said. “Jereth, you stand amazed. This mystery is a small thing: I was once a guardsman to the late lord, Voryon.”

  “The best rider of the guards,” Aron put in.

  “We two campaigned together many times, till I was demoted to a common horse-groom—for an offense best unmentioned. But when Voryon's army went to war with Tell of Myrcwold's, at the start of the Troubles, I was called to full service again; they needed every able man they could get, respectable or no. In that fight I lost my leg and was left for dead. I might have begged as well there as here, but when I could hobble around on crutches I was stubborn enough to struggle back to Berall. The journey took four years, and I aged at least ten. When I returned, I found the town changed in my absence—the Lord and the Crown Princess dead, the people trickling away southward—and I was much altered. No one knew me; or at least, none would acknowledge me. I knew no work but warfare, and I was unfit for it. And so I became a beggar.” He turned to Aron to explain, “And so Jereth found me during the autumn festival. We exchanged kindnesses.”

  “Vokh sheltered me when I was an outcast,” I said. “What I had given him was little enough.”

  Vokh shook his head. “It was not for an old coat you gave me,” he said, “but you looked me in the face when you gave it.”

  Later, when the elders had gone, I questioned Vokh further. “Var left you behind on purpose?”

  “Var maimed me himself,” Vokh said. “He never meant me to return.”

  “Was that why you had to return? For vengeance?”