"How old were you?"
"I was five. Oh, they did let me see her afterwards, but she had nothing more to tell me. She was broken right enough by then."
"How?"
He snorted. "You don't want to know."
I picked another grass stalk and put it in my mouth. The tumid mass to the east was growing. The air was dying around us, heavy and gelid and still. Shree lifted his head as if listening for thunder.
"I didn't give her a thought for years after that. I was made into a good little warlord, Scion, and I did what I was told; and later, when what I was doing began to revolt me, I thought it was only weakness and hid it even from myself. But the damage, if you can call it that, had already been done."
Far away to the east, lightning flickered.
"When they posted me to my mother's country, it was the beginning of the end. I was split down the middle, Scion, I became two people, Sherkin and Gilman, and I thought I was going mad. Maybe I did go mad. And I'll tell you honestly," he shot out a hand and clutched the straps of my Sherkin breastplate with sudden violence, "it might have gone either way this morning. I could just as well have given you to my uncle at the last moment, the way Krisht gave the Lady to me."
I gently disengaged his fingers. "That possibility had occurred to me. Why didn't you?"
He was silent for a moment, then grinned again. It gave him a different face. "I decided I wanted to die as a Gilman. That would please my poor mother—may her bones bring forth flowers." Then he jumped to his feet, the grin freezing, and drew his sword and flung it, really an astonishing distance, in the direction of Sher. "Raksh take you all!" he screamed.
At that moment, a giant finger tapped the tight membrane of the earth. A burst of light in the east, as broad as the horizon, washed the sun out of the sky; then came the rumble, not thunder, but a thousand thunders crashing in unison with a thousand immeasurable surfs. The mountain shuddered, tumbling us sideways towards the drop; Shree recovered first, grabbed my swordbelt and pulled me after him, away from the edge. Together we crawled through the rocks to safety, the ground undulating under our bellies. I raised my head and looked to the east where a lurid glow was building in the sky.
My fingers closed around the Lady. The mountaintop, the glassy sea, the burning sky, instantly wavered and became indistinct, like a picture painted on a gauze curtain. Behind it was another world—a world seen, as it were, from a great height, higher than the jagged mountain in the middle distance, much higher than the towers of the city in the mountain's shadow. Not Gil—this city was built like a wheel, with a dark, forbidding castle at the hub, and beyond the mountain a grey desert stretched to a distant southern sea.
Iklankish. It had to be. It looked no bigger than the cities I used to build in the sand when I was a child, adorning them with shells and pebbles and feathers that would whirl away with the scum of the next tide. There was a tide here, too: a massive swell of water that swept under me as I watched and broke at the shoreline, its crest elongating into a great green slab that overhung the city for a moment before collapsing, rolling over the mountain, sweeping across the desert to meet another wall of water advancing from the south. The earth seemed to fall away; the sea boiled over Iklankish. I cried out and let the Lady drop from my hand, and immediately that other layer of vision disappeared.
"By Raksh and Oballef," Shree whispered, "what's happening to the sea?"
I stood up unsteadily, bracing myself against the fading aftershocks. The sea was still a pearly mirror halfway to the eastern horizon; beyond that was a tortured landscape of silver hills and mountains and ephemeral towers that rose and collapsed and rose again in seething turbulence, surging ever closer on a broad front. I watched with mounting horror as the specks of Calla's flotilla sailed helplessly into the edge of the ferment and vanished among the shifting peaks. Nothing could survive that sea.
"Calla!"
Frantically, I scooped the Lady off the ground. No vision this time, no sensation of throbbing life in that shining cylinder of glass. The power was elsewhere, and too busy to bother with my feeble personal will. I cried out anyway to the Lady, I prayed, I willed, I cursed her in as many languages as I could remember, and in the end I sat down on the ground and put my head in my hands, knowing that it was too late to stop what I had started.
Shree was shouting, but his words were lost in the thrum of blood in my ears, the roar of approaching chaos. He pulled me to my feet and dragged me to the edge of the cliff to see the first waves slam into the side of Gil, hammering the lower ramparts of the Gilgard—but the ramparts held; and then the immense spumes and billows of the first assault were past Gil, washing along the seaway to the Archipelago, and the second and third assaults were already weaker, and the fourth was scarcely higher than a spring tide. To the east then were calmer waters, clear of ships; to the west, a series of vast ripples, perhaps mast-high, spreading majestically as far as the horizon.
"What was it?" Shree shouted. I could hear him again. "What have you done?"
"I gather," I said gravely, "that I've sunk Sher into the ocean."
I looked at the Lady, glowing innocently in my hands. Such a small thing. All the towers and courts, the black fortresses and dismal mines, the warlords and armies, slaves and merchants, Sherkints and shints, innocent and guilty, Calla and her silver ship, I had sunk them into the sea. I was the greatest conqueror in history, the destroyer of Iklankish, the hero of Gil; and I was a greater killer than Kishr himself.
"We're damned," I said to the Lady.
I raised the shining cylinder and dashed it against the hard ground. And again. It seemed my arm would break first, or maybe the mountain. But on the third blow, the cylinder shivered and cracked in a hairline, half across its thickness; on the fourth, the far half snapped free and tinkled away across the pebbles. The last of the glittering clouds poured out of the shards and rose into the air around my head.
When I came to, Shree was loosening my breastplate with one hand and slapping my face with the other. When he saw my eyes open, he stopped slapping me and poured about a quarter-flask of fith liquor down my throat. This felt like a small building falling on my head.
"Are you all right?" He slapped me again.
"I'll be fine if you stop helping me," I said crossly. "What happened this time?"
"You broke the Lady."
"I know that. But what happened then?"
He met my eyes squarely. "You fell over. Are you sure you're all right?"
"Yes, I'm sure."
"Quite sure?" He was looking at me oddly—perhaps the oddest of all the wide range of odd looks I'd received in my life, and I'd received more than my fair share. I stared back at him.
"Let me see. I'm guilty, grief-stricken, and I think I'd throw myself off the mountain if I didn't feel obliged to suffer some more first. Why?"
"Just asking." He hoisted me to my feet. "You've finished here—we'll go down now. Can you walk?"
"One more thing."
I searched among the pebbles for the shards of the Lady. They were there, two ugly jag-ended tubes of muddy grayish glass, no longer shining. I flung them one by one over the side of the cliff, my eyes losing them well before they hit the water. Then I turned to Shree.
His face was still cautious, but not disapproving. He raised the silver flask in a salute, took a deep draught and offered it to me. I waved it away. Together we found the slope that led back to the castle and descended, side by side, into the new Gil.
* * *
EPILOGUE
I AM FINISHING these memoirs seated on a bench in the Great Garden and once I am done, I will go home and file them safely and inaccurately away where the Flamens will never find them.
It is a garden again—that is one small thing to the Primate's credit. New grass grows thickly on the fertile ground, the young trees are in bud. Children are playing on the spot where the Pleasure used to stand. The statue of the Lady is still here, twice life-size, clean white stone luminous in the su
nshine, the damage plastered over, the obscenities scrubbed away, and she smiles over the children with a kind of remote, benign blankness. The adults sometimes scowl at her when they think no one is watching. It is five years to the day since she and I sank Sher into the ocean.
Would I still have done it, had I known what it would lead to? Possibly—given that this is an imperfect world, and an exchange of evils now and then may be the best we can hope for. But I was younger when it happened, and I think that in the core of my heart, behind the terrible deluging rage, I had hoped only for good; I could not have foreseen the curious truth that Sher, for all its appallingness, had been the glue that held the old order of the world together.
This truth became manifest at the next congress of the League of Free Nations, held in Luc some two months after the destruction of Sher. The opening ten minutes or so were spent in expressions of thankfulness that the Sherkin menace was removed, which was the first, last and only point upon which the conference agreed. The Lucian envoy then started the entertainment with a long speech claiming special privileges for Luc on the grounds that, naturally, it had been the Lucian Monotheus, on the urging of the Lucian priesthood, who had at last prevailed over Sher.
The Zainoi envoy rose graciously to correct his esteemed Lucian colleague—it was, in fact, the Pantheon of Zaine which had wrought the miracle of the world's deliverance, and Zaine expected the world to show its proper gratitude in the form of certain territorial concessions on the eastern edge of the Great Known Sea.
At this, the envoys from Grisot and Miishel both shot to their feet and made determined efforts to outshout each other: Zaine was talking arrant nonsense, the islands in question belonged by rights to noble Grisot/glorious Miishel, and anyway Iklankish had been swallowed up by the inexpressible might of the Grisoti Numen of War/Miisheli Great Ones, as every right-minded nation must surely recognize—or else. Then they stopped shouting and started glaring at each other, and the festivities began in earnest.
It was all talk; the Lady's role was no secret, the story had spread almost as rapidly as the news of Sher's downfall, but the truth was irrelevant because nobody had anything to gain from it. Indeed, I suspect that the Lady's destruction was as much of a relief to the nations at large as Sher's had been. I didn't mind. I didn't want the credit, the guilt was quite enough to handle. And I don't even remember why I was surprised at what came next. Power struggles, shifting alliances, broken treaties, flare-ups of old grievances that Sher's threat had overshadowed for seventy years—the League itself did not survive that congress. In time, great holes were torn in the fragile web of trade, and wars, famines, plagues followed on as implacably as winter follows autumn. The new Compact of Nations may offer some hope, but I'm afraid the study of history has made me a pessimist. Time will tell.
Naturally, Gil has had its own catalogue of troubles—although, since we are a poor and backward nation now, bereft of the Lady and not as interesting as we used to be to the rest of the nations, our woes have remained largely internal. At first, after the liberation, the people were happy to have the Scions of Oballef back in the Gilgard; but it took less than a year of the Primate's behind-the-throne highhandedness to disenchant them. Without the Lady, the people began to ask themselves, what right had the Flamens to take power? What right had the Scions of Oballef? What claim had the Exiles? Who were the invaders now? The Primate's only response was to borrow three full regiments from Sathelforn, after which the murmurs continued, but became harder to hear, and every so often fresh obscenities had to be scrubbed from the statue of the Lady.
There was, and is, nothing I could do. The Flamens-in-Exile were not pleased with me. It was bad enough that I had broken the Heroic Code; worse than I had broken the Lady. They explained this to me, time and again, in the months that followed their coming to Gil. How, they demanded, were we to rebuild Gil without the Lady's help? And how to regain our place as the wonder of the world, a race apart, the garden of the arts, the treasurehouse of learning? They were not interested in my answers.
Therefore, I kept my peace. When my brother Arkolef was installed on the throne of Gil, I paid allegiance and kept my peace. When the factions formed around Arko, around Hawelli's spiritual heirs, around the Flamens, around the mushroom-bed of new cults, I kept my peace. My part in history was played out; I retired to my natural place in the audience.
The old First Memorian, may the many new gods of Gil rest him and his bones bring forth flowers, died of the Gil-gut fever within a week of his homecoming. I mourned him, just as he (alone of the Flamens-in-Exile) had grieved for me when he thought I was dead. Then, since scholarship was the last thing on anybody else's mind, I appropriated a corner of the Temple Palace and began the long slow job of preserving the greatest treasure left to us, the archives.
I was helped in this by Angel and Shree—not surprising in Angel's case, for he had been reared by Parali, the foremost memorian of the old Gil; but Shree was a pleasant shock. I kept him close to me for his own protection at first, but he rapidly showed a real talent for scholarship. Under the circumstances, the monograph he is writing on the folkways and history of lost Iklankish will be the definitive work on the subject.
Apart from acting as recording memorians, we have been able to keep well out of politics. Quietly, unobtrusively, we have spent our time searching out and sorting the caches of old papers, mildewed books, sodden scrolls, crumbling tablets of clay and stone, which the Sherank had tossed into corners and mercifully forgotten. A surprising amount had survived. In due course I was also able to take custody of the archives from Exile, although the Primate left them to moulder on the quay for nearly a month first, out of simple spite.
We've even been gathering pupils. Lissula's little daughter, for example, comes daily for lessons—Lissula wants her to know more than the whorehouse, however brilliantly the business is doing. And my mother often comes to sit with us in the evenings, knitting underbritches for my father as she listens to us reading aloud from the recovered riches of the past. My father must have the largest collection of underbritches in Gil, but my mother can't seem to stop. After nineteen years of freezing in the dark, she says, he can't have enough underbritches now. He began to speak again three years ago; his nightmares have gone away.
My nightmares will never go away. No matter that I can look down from the Gilgard and see Gil being rebuilt, not on the brittle foundation of magic, but with toil and sweat and craft. No matter that children are playing on the blood-nourished grass of the Great Garden, and that not one of them will go home to a meal of maggots and shull. No matter that, from the confusion and struggle of these first hard years, I can see a new Gil emerging. I know what the Flamens planned for Gil; this is no worse, and probably better, and the Primate will not live forever. No, I do not regret destroying the Lady. My nightmares are not concerned with Gil.
My nightmares are of the Pleasure, and the crash of waters. I dream of towers crumbling and deserts flooding, of waves rolling over mountaintops; I dream of the cries of the dying, and then of a great silence. I dream of a child, a fairheaded boy, and I know from his face whose child he would have been. I dream of a golden mist and a silver ship and Calla, my other Lady in Gil, whom I also destroyed.
The millions, the child, Calla: the dead and unborn will be with me always. Such is victory. May their bones bring forth flowers.
Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil Page 29
