“If you can be happy at all,” Syrc qualified, her tone gentle. “I've watched you. Your heart has not come out of shadow.”
I hunched my shoulders. “It's a defect in me. I have always been like this—except for a few hard, blessed months with Hwyn.”
The baby, hearing her name, blinked and looked up a bit, then fell back asleep. Syrc bowed her head. “Have you spoken to her since—I mean— You used to speak to ghosts.”
“Hwyn— She may—” I could not say it. “That wasn't even her name, you know. I never knew her name. She wouldn't tell me—though she used to tease me with the riddle that I knew it, and knew it not.”
“But you had the Gift of Naming,” Syrc said. “Or was that lost at the world's end?”
“No,” I said. “But when—when she lived—the Gift was never meant to reveal the names of the living. And after—” again it stuck in my throat. “Hwyn may not even be a ghost now. Her name was broken when the Eye of Night hatched.”
Syrc stared in horror. “So all this while—whenever we leave you idle—you search and find no answer?”
I shook my head. “I have not searched.”
Syrc stopped in midstride. “Not searched!” she echoed impatiently.
I shrugged.
“How can you stay in torment, not knowing, and never even look for her?”
“Because if I search and don't find her, I'll know,” I said. “What could I do then? How could I live?” She had no answer for me; we did not speak of this for the rest of the day.
But after an unquiet night I woke just before dawn, turning it over in my mind. I wrapped myself in my cloak and crept out, down to the seashore, where the waves murmured prophecies I could not understand.
“She always insisted that I knew her name—that I had spoken it,” I told the sea. “Why would she tease me with that riddle if she didn't mean me to solve it, to call to her? She knew her fate far in advance. But at the end, she said her name was broken, irrecoverable. And, oh! she was unreadable, a riddle herself: a mystery, like the Mirror of St. Fiern, whose visions only make sense too late, when the battle is done and the dear comrade is dead.”
Suddenly I jumped to my feet and smacked my forehead, crying, “Mirror of St. Fiern!” Oh, gods, for the thousandth time, what a fool I'd been! In my memory, I could hear myself saying on our first day's journey together, “You are the Mirror of St. Fiern to me.” That was her name. It had to be. “Mirror of St. Fiern,” I repeated, marveling.
The sea came in; the sea went out. I heard no other answer.
“Will you take me now?” I called to the sea. “Now that I have forgiven you, solved the last riddle, and released the last binding, will you take me away from my sufferings? Will there be, even at the world's end, any peace for me?” I walked toward the sea, spiraling down toward an inlet where I knew the slope was easier, a perfect doorway to the waters. “Come: drown me or carry me anywhere. I am a rudderless boat. I know no destination, nor will I try, any longer, to guess whether I should live or die. Choose for me. Only don't leave me becalmed, without change, without hope.”
Ahead of me, at the water's edge, I saw some flotsam on the beach, more leavings of the drowned lands cast up by the sea. We found those at Berall, too: everything from broken chairs to the jeweled comb of some long-dead princess washed ashore. But as I drew closer I realized that this flotsam had a human form: a small body, thin and pinched, with ragged light hair.
“Hwyn! Hwyn!” I shouted, running toward her. But as I ran, the body seemed to change shape, like water pooling into new form. It stretched and grew in my sight: limbs long, hair luxuriant, flesh rosy with health. The figure stirred and sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees: a woman with wheat-colored hair, eyes dark as storm-clouds, and a round moon-face that I had never seen before. She wore only a crescent-moon pendant.
“You're not Hwyn,” I said as I neared her.
“But I'll be Hwyn if you want me to,” she smiled wryly, and there was something familiar about the smile. But it lasted only a moment. “Jereth, why do you shrink back?”
“How do you know my name? Who are you?”
“What? Don't you know me?” she said. “You named me yourself. Has it been so long?” She crept closer. “You are much changed. How many years has it been?”
Well might she ask. My hair was bone-white. “Only two. Grief aged me. Oh, gods, this is foolish! I have never seen you before. You are not Hwyn.”
“What, am I so changed?” Suddenly she looked down at her hands. “My finger! It grew back. But that's a small thing. What more? But of course: it seems I can see so clearly, better than I have seen since childhood. My eyes are straight, aren't they?” She touched her face with both hands. “My face—what's become of my face?”
“You're beautiful,” I said.
She burst into tears. Remorseful, I took off my tunic and offered it to her. “You must be cold,” I said. She slipped it on. I was cold, too, in my shirtsleeves, but it hardly mattered.
Soon I was weeping too. She noticed, and took her turn to accuse: “Now I begin to think you are not Jereth—Jereth who never wept, who could not weep, not even when I lay dying.”
That cut me. “I wept after you—after Hwyn died. I wept till my eyes burned. I wept oceans.” The tears flowed faster and she, pitying in turn, reached out as if to brush my tears away—but hesitated, a few inches from my face.
“I don't know anymore how to touch you,” she said. “You don't know me anymore, not without my scars. Oh, why did I have to be changed!”
I took both her hands and rested my face against them, feeling torn. They were the hands of a stranger—yet who but Hwyn could wish to be scarred, disfigured, rather than healed beyond recognition? “I want to believe,” I said. “I want it so badly that I can't believe. How can I believe this? Hwyn died in my arms. I held her body, still and cold, and touched the cruel wound in her chest, and my heart died. How can I dare to trust my wildest hopes?”
“You can only trust,” she said. “You will never find the certainty you seek.”
“She said that to me!” I cried, “Trenara said that.”
“Trenara?” she exclaimed.
“The Hidden Goddess.”
Her mouth fell open. “Was Trenara the Hidden Goddess? Sky-Raven's Bones! What a fool I was!”
“And I,” I said. “And here I am: confused as ever. And cold. You're cold too. Come inside.”
“I don't want to see the others yet,” she said, though her teeth chattered.
“There's a boathouse a little way up the shore. We can be alone there.”
We walked there in awkward silence, not touching. She was almost as tall as I, and surely stronger, glowing with life and vigor. When we found my cloak on the sand, she ignored my offer of it and wrapped it about me with a firmness that might have been Hwyn's—but with a stranger's hands.
“Do you still doubt me?” she asked as I kindled a fire in the boathouse.
“I don't know what can set my mind at peace,” I said. “Hopes are such liars.”
“So they are. And I was a thief and a liar—did you love me the less for it?” she countered. “Ask me something only Hwyn would know.”
I considered a moment, then asked, “What was between us after we left the temple on the Longest Night?”
“The Eye of Night was between us,” she answered, “for even when we lay together as wife and husband, I would not take off the pouch I had hung round my neck, so that we had to make love around it, like the gods around the world. Are you answered?”
I sighed. “No other mortal would know that. But the Hidden Goddess might. And she has deceived me before.”
“Trenara,” Hwyn repeated in an exasperated tone. “I might have known! It seems—it seems I almost knew,” she marveled. “And yet I lay in her womb and did not know her.”
“What child knows its mother? What fish knows the ocean?” I said. “I too almost knew. But I could not know, as I cannot know you.”
/> “Curse it, Jereth, you named me! Twice, now: once long ago, and again today.”
“Not Hwyn,” I said. “Mirror of St. Fiern. But Mirror of St. Fiern might be a stranger. I traveled half a year with a woman called Hwyn, and loved her, and lost her. But you— Are you immortal? How old are you? Have you lived since Fiern's day?”
“No,” she said. “I was born in St. Fiern's Town—how long ago I'm not sure, for no one counted my birthdays for me. Some thirty years ago, I think, or a little more—I always thought you and I must be the same age. And the whole crazy mouthful, Mirror of St. Fiern, was the name my lunatic mother gave me at birth. At least I think she was behind it; I can't remember her calling me anything but ‘Baby’ or ‘Little One.’ But in St. Fiern's Town, her words would be taken as oracle; I think that she must have uttered the name that the midwife hid from me. This midwife, my Little Mother as I called her, only told me that I had a name of power, which she would tell to me when I was old enough to keep my own secrets. I think she was a mage, for I never knew her name, either; the people only called her ‘Midwife.’ If I had stayed there, maybe she would have trained me in the secret arts.
“But before Little Mother judged me old enough to be trusted with my true name, my grandparents bundled me back to Tarn's Ford; not liking the nicknames I had been used to, Wren and Nightingale, they called me Yana, after a daughter of theirs that had died. When I returned to St. Fiern's Town as a woman, I found that my Little Mother had died and my mother could not be found. I did not know my true name till I dove into the Mirror of St. Fiern and it told me.
“No sooner did I have a name than I had a quest, formless at first, but gradually taking shape: my calling to free the Eye of Night. That is why I told you in Folcsted that my name lay on the road ahead of me: the journey and the name were one. But to own the name publicly would have made its power vulnerable, so I used the nicknames people had given me: Wren or Nightingale, Riddle or Patch, Midge or Half-Pint or whatever strangers called me, short of vulgarities. Then on the road I took the name of Hwyn the Weaver, and kept it till death.”
“She is dead now,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I saw her, brave soul, in the womb of the Hidden Goddess.”
It was too much to take in. “Is that where you've been?” I said. “Then she gave birth to the dead?”
“Yes,” Hwyn said. “To think of all the times I tried to protect her from getting pregnant.”
“And you said she miscarried once,” I remembered. “Dear gods, what was lost?”
“I don't know,” Hwyn said. “I tremble to imagine. It scares me now to think of the importance of a thousand small things I did—feeding Trenara, lacing her boots, making her keep her clothes on. If I'd known what I did every day, I might not have been able to go on.”
“What you did know was more than enough,” I said, still overwhelmed by the admission, now more than two years old, that Hwyn had walked open-eyed into death. “But I don't understand. Were you walking by her side and in her womb at once?”
“Not quite,” Hwyn said. “I am the last buried and the first born. I was almost too late—but I had to be almost too late, to carry the Eye of Night to its destination.”
“The first born,” I mused. “There are many, then?”
“Many and more than many,” she said. “The dead lie waiting under the sea.”
I stared at her a few moments. “I know,” I said, astonished with myself. “I've felt them there.” A commotion of names that had hovered just beyond the edge of my consciousness suddenly filled my mind, as a whisper can fill an empty temple. “Dear gods, why didn't I hear them before this? Their names. So many names.”
Mirror of St. Fiern put a hand on mine. “Do you believe in me now?”
“Almost,” I laughed.
And she laughed in return, dryly. “Almost. Jereth, it's so like you that I could shake you. You named me yourself—and the last thing in the world you can trust is your own judgment. Give it up, then. What if you don't know who I am? You never did—but you followed me, nonetheless, to the world's end.”
And that was so like the woman I knew that I pulled her to me and kissed her mouth. She clung to me; the strangeness of her touch, the unaccustomed size of her hands and length of her arms, still bothered me, but something began to triumph over doubt in me.
“Hwyn, my heart,” I murmured, “my life. Can it really be you? I have longed for you so.”
“You know me,” she said. “Close your eyes. Don't look. Who do you think is speaking in your ear?”
“Why did you leave me to this uncertainty? Why didn't you tell me your name—even when you married me?”
“I dared not,” she said. “You had the gifts to learn to use it. The Gift of Naming was strong in you, beyond even the custom of your Order, though you left without vows, and might not have been expected to keep the Gift at all. It was so strong that you might have entangled yourself in all my bindings and drawn on yourself the doom I had bound to my name.”
“You mean I might have managed to die with you.”
“Or in my place,” Hwyn said. “It might have fallen either way.”
“You know I would gladly have done either,” I said fiercely.
“I knew that,” she said. “And if you had, who would have called me back from the dead?”
That silenced me for some time.
“I almost lost it all,” I confessed at last. “I tried to die, more than once. Once at Hwyn's—at your funeral. And again—” and with that I told the whole story of my journey to the world's end, my landing in Berall, my despair, my second journey. Hwyn listened solemnly, gripping my hand all the while.
“I'm sorry,” she said when I had finished. “I thought I had protected you. But instead, you were sacrificed, much more than I. My suffering was brief, but you—you were made like the Upside-Down God, falling ceaselessly, never to reach the bottom, never to rest.”
“It's all right,” I said. “I was falling toward you. I've been falling toward you all my life, like the Upside-Down God to the Hidden Goddess.” Suddenly the rightness of it struck me, a blow that nearly unbalanced me. “Sky-Raven's Bones!” I swore like Hwyn. “At the risk of sounding blasphemous—what are we, you and I?”
“We are human creatures,” said Mirror of St. Fiern, “and in us, the gods are born anew.”
She was right, of course: she always led the way, and I followed, when I could. It was as Hwyn proclaimed: strange as it seemed, from two such hapless vagrants as ourselves was born an age of marvels, a world made new.
That was thirty years ago. That age is passing now, as it must, for the world cannot often bear such upheavals—even if they are the tremors of joy. Everyday life will return. Our children's children will say we were only legends, but I record here—for those that may believe and those that may cherish a little hope within a larger doubt—that the Sea People and the Sea-Born were real, and known to me. Ninety-nine Sea People of Larioneth traveled to other shores and worked wonders, rescuing ships in danger, fighting tyrants and oppressors. And three hundred and thirty of the dead were reborn from the sea, bringing wisdom from beyond the world's rim, a race of prophets, priests, and poets, like my beloved. I know them all, for I was keeper of their names, charged with calling each one at the hour of need, in the place that needed them. That was all I did: it was they who worked the wonders, carrying the sad world I had known into a new age of wisdom and justice. My wife says I am one of the Sea-Born, and that my knack for shipbuilding is one of the gifts brought back from the world's end, but that is only a lover's partiality. I was never quite dead or quite reborn. I am not one of this age's marvels; I have been privileged to see and touch them, and that is enough.
This age must pass, I know: even our wisdom will be forgotten; even our justice will be corrupted; even the Sea-Born will die in time, and I too will die, so that none will be called from the sea for another age of the world. But something of hope will remain even in the legend of them
, even when no one fully believes it any longer. And for all these things that will be lost again—and for all the unnamed dead not called back from the sea—I can only trust, like my patron the Upside-Down God, always falling, never certain, but always in hope. May he bring me at last to good harvest.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Warwick Daw for help with sailing terms; to Kendra Adema for information on rural life; to the staff of the Rutherford Free Public Library; to Alan Lupack and Diana Beach for great discussions; to Chris Nugent and Sarah Higley, who understood why I had to tell them about the gods of the World-Wheel one day before Beowulf seminar; to Sally and Joe Cunneen for introducing me to the perfect agent; to Hy Cohen for being the perfect agent; and to editor Juliet Ulman for making me write more.
About the Author
PAULINE J. ALAMA studied medieval literature at the University of Rochester, where she earned a Ph.D. in English, searched for the Grail in The New York Times On Disk, and learned a lot about snow, beer, and procrastination. Her Sapphire-winning story “Raven Wings on the Snow” is in Sword and Sorceress XVIII, and her work has appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine and A Round Table of Contemporary Arthurian Poetry. She writes grant proposals for New York Foundling, a children's services agency, and lives in New Jersey with husband Paul Cunneen and cat Crichton, both of whom are very supportive.
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