Dying of the Light

by George R. R. Martin

  He sighed, blocked at every turn. Through all the long conversation, he had never even touched her. He felt helpless. “I take it that Jaan doesn’t call you Jenny?” he asked finally with a bitter smile.

  Gwen laughed. “No. As a Kavalar, I have a secret name, and he calls me that. But I’ve taken the name, so there’s no problem. It is my name.”

  He only shrugged. “You’re happy, then?”

  Gwen rose and brushed loose sand from her legs. “Jaan and I—well, there is a lot that is hard to explain. You were a friend once, Dirk, and maybe my best friend. But you’ve been gone a long time. Don’t press too hard. Right now I need a friend. I talk to Arkin, and he listens and tries, but he can’t help much. He’s too involved, too blind about Kavalars and their culture. Jaan and Garse and I have problems, yes, if that’s what you’re asking. But it’s hard to speak of them. Give me time. Wait, if you will, and be my friend again.”

  The lake was very still in the perpetual red-gray sunset. He watched the water, thick with its spreading scabs of fungus, and he flashed back to the canal on Braque. Then she did need him, he thought. Perhaps it was not as he had hoped, but there was still something he could give her. He clung to that tightly; he wanted to give, he had to give. “Whatever,” he said as he rose. “There’s a lot I don’t understand, Gwen. Too much. I keep thinking that half the conversation of the past day has gone past me, and I don’t even know the right questions to ask. But I can try. I owe you, I guess. I owe you for something or other.”

  “You’ll wait?”

  “And listen, when the time comes.”

  “Then I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “I needed someone, an outsider. You’re well-timed, Dirk. A luck.”

  How strange, he thought, to send off for a luck. But he said nothing. “Now what?”

  “Now let me show you the forest. That was why we came here, after all.”

  They picked up their sky-scoots and walked away from the silent lake, toward the thick of the waiting forest. There was no trail to follow, but the underbrush was light and walking easy, with many paths to choose from. Dirk was quiet, studying the woods around him, his shoulders slumped and his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Gwen did all the talking; the little there was. When she spoke, her voice was low and reverent as a child’s whisper in a great cathedral. But mostly she just pointed and let him look.

  The trees around the lake were all familiar friends that Dirk had seen a thousand times before. For this was the so-called forest of home, the wood that man carried with him from sun to sun and planted on all the worlds he walked. It had its roots on Old Earth, the homeforest, but it was not all of Earth. On each new planet humanity found new favorites, plants and trees that soon were as much a part of the blood as those that came out from Earth in the beginning. And when the starships moved on, seedlings from those worlds went with the twice-uprooted grandchildren of Terra, and so the homeforest grew.

  Dirk and Gwen passed through that forest slowly, as others had walked through the same forest on a dozen other worlds. And they knew the trees. Sugar maples there, and fire maples, and mockoak and oak itself, and silverwood and poison pine and aspen. The outworlders had brought them here even as their ancestors had brought them to the Fringe, to add a touch of home, wherever home might be.

  But here these woods looked different.

  It was the light, Dirk realized after a time. The drizzling light that leaked so meager from the sky, the wan red gloom that passed for Worlorn’s day. This was a twilight forest. In the slowness of time—in a far-extended autumn—it was dying.

  He looked closer then and saw that the sugar maples were all bare, their faded leaves beneath his feet. They would not green again. The oaks were barren too. He paused and pulled a leaf from a fire maple, and saw that the fine red veins had turned to black. And the silverwoods were really dusty gray.

  Rot would come next.

  To parts of the forest, rot had come already. In one forlorn glen where the humus was thicker and blacker than elsewhere, Dirk noticed a smell. He looked at Gwen, asking. She bent and brought a handful of the black stuff to his nose, and he turned away.

  “It was a bed of moss,” she told him, sorrowing. “They brought it all the way from Eshellin. A year ago it was all green and scarlet, alive with little flowers. The black spread quickly.”

  They moved farther into the forest, away from the lake and the mountainwall. The suns were nearly overhead by now, Fat Satan dim and bloated like a blood-drenched moon, unevenly ringed by four small yellow star-suns. Worlorn had receded too far and in the wrong direction; the Wheel effect was lost.

  They had been walking for more than an hour when the character of the forest around them began to change. Slowly, subtly, the change seeped in, almost too gradual for Dirk to notice. But Gwen showed him. The familiar blend of homeforest was giving way, yielding to something stranger, something unique, something wilder. Gaunt black trees with gray leaves, high walls of red-tipped briar, drooping weepers of pale phosphorescent blue, great bulbous shapes infested with dark flaking splotches; to each of these Gwen pointed and gave a name. One type became more and more common: a towering yellowish growth that sprouted tangled branches from all over its waxy trunk, and smaller offshoots from those branches, and still smaller ones from those, until it had built itself into a tight wooden maze. “Chokers,” Gwen called them, and Dirk soon saw why. Here in the deep of the wood one of the chokers had grown alongside a regal silverwood, sending out crooked yellow-wax branches to mingle with straight, stately gray ones, burrowing roots under and around those of the other tree, constricting its rival in an ever-tightening vise. And now the silverwood could scarce be seen: a tall dead stick lost in the swelling choker.

  “The chokers are native to Tober,” Gwen said. “They’re taking over the forests here, just as they did there. We could have told them it would happen, but they wouldn’t have cared. The forests were all doomed anyway, even before they were planted. Even the chokers will die, though they’ll be the last to go.”

  They walked on, and the chokers grew steadily thicker, until soon they dominated the forest. Here the woods were denser, darker; passage was more difficult. Half-buried roots tripped them underfoot, while tangled branches interlocked above them like the straining arms of giant wrestlers. Where two or three or more chokers grew close together, they seemed to merge into a single twisted knot, and Gwen and Dirk were forced to detour. Other plant life was scarce, except for beds of black and violet mushrooms near the feet of the yellow trees, and ropes of parasitic scumweb.

  But there were animals.

  Dirk saw them moving through the dark twistings of the chokers and heard their high, chittering call. Finally he saw one. Sitting just above their heads on a swollen yellow branch, looking down on them; fist-sized, dead still, and somehow—transparent. He touched Gwen’s shoulder and nodded upward.

  But she just smiled for him and laughed lightly. Then she reached up to where the little creature sat and crumpled it in her hand. When she offered it to Dirk, her palm held only dust and dead tissue.

  “There’s a nest of tree-spooks around,” she explained. “They shed their skins four or five times before maturity and leave the husks as guards to scare away other predators.” She pointed. “There’s a live one, if you’re interested.”

  Dirk looked and caught a fleeting glimpse of a tiny yellow scampering thing with sharp teeth and enormous brown eyes. “They fly too,” Gwen told him. “They’ve got a membrane that goes from arm to leg and lets them flit between the trees. Predators, you know. They hunt in packs, can bring down creatures a hundred times their size. But generally they won’t attack a man unless he blunders into their nest.”

  The tree-spook was gone now, lost beneath a labyrinth of choker branches, but Dirk thought he saw another, briefly, from the corner of his eye. He studied the woods around him. The transparent skin husks were everywhere, staring fiercely into the twilight from their perches, all small grim ghosts. “Th
ese are the things that get Janacek so upset, aren’t they?” he asked.

  Gwen nodded. “The spooks are a pest on Kimdiss, but here they’ve really found their element. They blend perfectly with the chokers, and they can move through the tangles faster than anything I’ve ever seen. We studied them pretty thoroughly. They’re cleaning out the forests. In time, they would kill off all the game and starve themselves to death, but they won’t have time. The shield will fail before that, and the cold will come.” She moved her shoulders in a tiny weary shrug and rested her forearm on a low-drooping limb. Their coveralls had long ago become the same dirty yellow color as the woods around them, but her sleeve slid up and back as she brushed the branch, and Dirk saw the dull sheen of jade-and-silver gleaming against the choker.

  “Is there much animal life left?”

  “Enough,” she said. Pale red light made the silver strange. “Not as much as there used to be, of course. Most of the wildlife has deserted the homeforest. Those woods are dying, and the animals know it. But the outworld trees are sterner, somehow. Where the forests of the Fringe were planted, you’ll find life, still strong, still hanging on. The chokers, the ghost trees, the blue widowers—they’ll flourish right until the end. And they’ll have their tenants, old and new, until the cold comes.”

  Gwen moved her arm idly, this way and that, and the armlet winked at him, screamed at him. Bond and reminder and denial, all at once, love sworn in jade-and-silver. And he had only a small whisperjewel shaped like a tear and full of fading memories.

  He looked up, past a wild crisscross of yellow choker branches, to where the Helleye sat in a murky slice of sky, looking more tired than hellish, more sorry than satanic. And he shivered. “Let’s go back,” he told Gwen. “This place depresses me.”

  He got no argument. They found a clear spot away from the chokers that pressed around them, a place to spread the silver-metal tissue of their scoots. Then they rose together for the long flight back to Larteyn.

  3

  They raced again above the mountains, and Dirk did better this time, losing by less than he had before, but the improvement did not lighten his mood. For most of the weary trip they flew in silence, apart, Gwen meters ahead of him. Their backs were to the broken, muted Wheel of Fire as they went, and Gwen was a witch figure vague against the sky and always out of reach. The melancholy of Worlorn’s dying forests had seeped into his flesh, and he saw Gwen through tainted eyes, a doll figure in a suit as faded as despair, her black hair oily with red light. Thoughts came in a colored chaos as the wind swept past him, and one more often than the others. She was not his Jenny, was not and never had been.

  Twice during their flight Dirk saw—or thought he saw—the jade-and-silver flashing, tormenting, as it had tormented him in the wood. He forced his eyes away each time and watched black clouds, long and thin, skitter across the barren, empty sky.

  The gray manta aircar and the olive-green war machine were both gone from the rooftop lot when they reached Larteyn. Only Ruark’s yellow teardrop was unmoved. They landed nearby—Dirk’s landing yet another clumsy stumble, now oddly humorless, only stupid—and left the sky-scoots and flight boots out on the roof where they removed them. Near the tubes they spoke briefly, but Dirk forgot the words even as he said them. Then Gwen left him.

  In his rooms at the base of the tower, Arkin Ruark was waiting patiently. Dirk found a recliner amid the pastel walls and sculpture and the potted Kimdissi plants. He reclined, wanting only to rest and not to think, but Ruark was there, chuckling and shaking his head so the white-blond hair danced, thrusting a tall green glass into his hand. Dirk took it and sat up again. The glass was a fine thin crystal, plain and unadorned except for a fast-melting coat of frost. He drank, and the wine was very green and cold, incense and cinnamon down his throat.

  “Utter tired you look, Dirk,” the Kimdissi said after he had found a drink of his own and seated himself with a plop in a slung-web chair beneath the shadow of a drooping black plant. The spear-shaped leaves cast striped darkness on his plump, smiling face. He sipped, sucking the drink noisily, and very briefly Dirk despised him.

  “A long day,” he said noncommittally.

  “Truth,” Ruark agreed. “A day of Kavalars, heh, always long. Sweet Gwen and Jaantony and last Garsey, enough to make any day last forever. What do you say?”

  Dirk said nothing.

  “But now,” Ruark said smiling, “you have seen. Me, I wanted that, for you to see. Before I told you. But I was sworn to tell you, yes, a swearing to myself. Gwen, she has told me. We talk, you know, as friends, and I have known her and Jaan too since Avalon. But here we’ve grown closer. She cannot talk of it easily, ever, but she talks to me, or has, and I can tell you. Not violating trust. You are the one to know, I think.”

  The drink sent icy fingers down into his chest, and Dirk felt his weariness lifting. It seemed as if he had been half-asleep, as if Ruark had been talking for a long time and he had missed it all. “What are you talking about?” he said. “What should I know?”

  “Why Gwen needs you,” Ruark said. “Why she sent . . . the thing. The red tear. You know. I know. She has told me.”

  Suddenly Dirk was quite alert, interested and puzzled. “She told you,” he began, then stopped. Gwen had asked him to wait, and long ago the promise he had made—but it fit. Perhaps he should listen, perhaps it was simply hard for her to tell him. Ruark would know. Her friend, she had said in the forests, the only one she could talk to. “What?”

  “You must help her, Dirk t’Larien, somehow. I don’t know.”

  “Help her how?”

  “To be free. To escape.”

  Dirk set his drink down and scratched his head. “From who?”

  “Them. The Kavalars.”

  He frowned. “Jaan, you mean? I met him this morning, him and Janacek. She loves Jaan. I don’t understand.”

  Ruark laughed, sucked from his drink, laughed again. He was dressed in a three-piece suit of alternating brown and green squares, like motley, and as he sat spouting nonsense Dirk wondered if the short ecologist was indeed a fool.

  “Loves him, yes, she said that?” Ruark said. “You are sure of it, are you? Well?”

  Dirk hesitated, trying to remember her words when they had talked by the still, green lake. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But something to that effect. She is—what was it?”

  “Betheyn?” Ruark suggested.

  Dirk nodded. “Yes, betheyn, wife.”

  Ruark chuckled. “No, utter wrong. In the car I listened. Gwen said it wrong. Well, not really, but you took the wrong impression. Betheyn is not wife. Part truth the biggest lie of all, remember? What do you think teyn is?”

  The word stopped him. Teyn. He had heard the word a hundred times on Worlorn. “Friend?” he guessed, not knowing what it meant.

  “Betheyn is more of wife than teyn is friend,” Ruark said. “Learn the outworlds better, Dirk. No. Betheyn is woman-to-man word in Old Kavalar, for a heldwife bound by jade-and-silver. Now, there can be much affection in jade-and-silver, much love, yes. Though, you know, the word used for that, the standard Terran word, there is no like word in Old Kavalar. Interesting, eh? Can they love without a word for it, t’Larien friend?”

  Dirk did not reply. Ruark shrugged and drank and continued. “Well, no matter, but think of it. I spoke of jade-and-silver and yes, often the Kavalars have love in that bond, love from betheyn-to-highbond, from highbond-to-betheyn sometimes. Or liking, if not love. But not always, and not necessarily! You see?”

  Dirk shook his head.

  “Kavalar bonds are custom and obligation,” Ruark said, leaning forward very intently, “with love latecoming accident. Violent folk, I told you. Read history, read legends. Gwen met Jaan on Avalon, you know, and she did not read. Not enough. He was Jaan Vikary of High Kavalaan, and what was that, some planet? She never knew. Truth. So their liking grew—call it love, perhaps—and sex happens and he offers her jade-and-silver wrought in his pattern, and su
ddenly she is betheyn to him, still not quite knowing. Trapped.”

  “Trapped? How trapped?”

  “Read history! The violence of High Kavalaan is long past, the culture is unchanged. Gwen is betheyn to Jaan Vikary, betheyn heldwife, his wife, yes, his lover, and more. Property and slave, she is that too, and gift. She is his gift to Ironjade Gathering, with her he bought his highnames, yes. She must have children if he orders, whether she wishes or no. She must take Garse as lover also, whether she wishes or no. If Jaan dies in duel with a man of a holdfast other than Ironjade, a Braith or a Redsteel, Gwen passes to that man like baggage, property—to become his betheyn, or a mere eyn-kethi if the victor already wears jade-and-silver. If Jaan dies of natural causes, or in duel with another Ironjade, Gwen goes to Garse. Her will in the matter is no concern. Who cares that she hates him? Not the Kavalars. And when Garsey dies, eh? Well, when that time comes, she is an eyn-kethi, holdfast breeder, degraded forever, free to use for any of the kethi. Kethi meaning holdfast-brothers, more or less, the men of the family. Ironjade Gathering is all huge family, thousands and thousands of family, and any can have her. What did she call Jaan, husband? No. Jailer. That is what he is, he and Garse, loving jailers maybe if you think that such can love truly as you or I would. Jaantony honors our Gwen, and should, for he is high-Ironjade now, she is his betheyn-gift, and if she dies or leaves him, he is fre-Ironjade, an old man, mocked, empty-armed, without voice in council. But he slaves her, does not love her, and she is years after Avalon now, older and wiser, and now she knows.” Ruark had delivered the last in a breathless fury, his lips drawn tight.

  Dirk hesitated. “He doesn’t love her, then?”

  “As you love your property, so a highbond and his betheyn. It is a tight bond, jade-and-silver, never to be broken, but it is a bond of obligation and possession. No love. That is elsewhere, if the Kavalars have it at all, to be found in chosen-brother, the shield and soulmate and lover and warrior twin, the ever-loyal bringer-of-pleasure and taker-of-blows and lifter-of-pain, the lifetime strongbond.”