As they passed a side street, Spaeth clutched Nathaway’s arm. “Nat, look!” she said.
A tall, silver-haired man was leaving a building with a dog on a leash. He looked perfectly unremarkable as he stopped to chat with a woman leaning out a window across the way. “What is it?” Nathaway asked.
“They’re Grey Folk, both of them,” Spaeth said. “They can live in the open here, as if they were free people.”
The farther they climbed, the more grey faces they saw. Spaeth stared at them, entranced and hopeful, but she herself drew few answering stares. Nathaway was another matter. He was aware of eyes following him with puzzled frowns, and suspicious glances from passers-by. It made him feel as if they had passed one of those invisible boundaries that exist in cities, into a protected enclave where he was an intruder.
The Stonepath came to an end in a broad, deserted square. Facing them was a tall building of white marble, friezed with ancient Altan symbols. To Nathaway’s eyes it looked like a court, or a college building. The main entrance was between tall, fluted pillars where the copper gates still stood open on the square. Hand in hand, Nathaway and Spaeth walked forward. No one was there to challenge them.
Inside the gateway was an open lawn planted with trees and shrubs, and lined on all four sides with a covered walkway set back behind airy arches. The little enclosed park was very quiet, and had a contemplative air, far removed from the world and its concerns.
At the very centre of the lawn was a marble plinth, and on it stood an ordinary boulder of granite. As they approached, Nathaway saw that its face was pocked where it had been battered in the past by blows from a sledgehammer that stood cradled in a wrought iron stand next to the stone. Some of the spalls were so worn by rain and time that they were just dips in the stone surface. But there was a fresher scar on the left side.
“Perhaps that is Ison Orin’s,” Spaeth said in a low voice. It seemed irreverent to talk loudly, here.
“How long ago was that?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Sixty-two years,” a voice answered. They turned around to find an elderly Grey Man watching them from under the shadow of one of the arches. He was dressed in an ancient, traditional style: a long tabard and leggings, with a short mantle around his shoulders. It reminded Nathaway of the legal robes worn by advocates in court. The man came forward, studying them curiously. He had a short fringe of white hair around his bald head, and was carrying a book.
“Is this the Isonstone?” Nathaway asked.
“Indeed it is,” the Grey Man said. He turned to look at it. “Those scars on the stone go back six centuries. They all stood here, the leaders willing to forfeit their self-will for the sake of the Isles. And out in that square is where the Heirs of Gilgen bled to erase all harm from those leaders’ hearts.”
They regarded it in silence for a while.
“I’m surprised it’s not guarded,” Nathaway said. “Aren’t you afraid someone might seize it? Considering its importance.”
The Grey Man frowned piercingly at Nathaway. “There are safeguards you cannot see. Still, I thank you for the warning.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“We don’t get many Inning visitors,” the Grey Man observed.
“Really? I should have thought . . . Is it all right? No one told me—”
“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly all right, if your intentions are good. I am just curious what brings you here.”
Nathaway looked to Spaeth, but she seemed shy to answer, so he said, “We were told to come here, by her . . . father, Goth.”
“They call him Goran now,” she said faintly. “Goran, son of Listor.”
There was a short silence. Then the Grey Man said slowly, “Goran is your father?”
Spaeth hesitated. “Not really. He created me.”
The man absorbed this a moment, then turned sharp eyes on Nathaway. “And you?”
“I’m . . .” he groped for some explanation of who he was that had any relevance here. “I’m her bandhota,” he finally said.
There was a long pause. “I can tell you have a story,” the Grey Man said at last. “My name is Auster. Could I offer you some hospitality? A cup of tea, perhaps?”
They readily accepted this invitation. Auster led them across the cloister to a doorway under one of the arches. Inside the building, the quiet, sparsely furnished corridor reminded Nathaway even more strongly of a college. They walked by a group of young Lashnurai dressed like Auster, whose conversation fell silent as they passed.
“What is this place?” Nathaway asked.
“This is the Pavilion,” Auster said. “We have a little community here.”
“Are you scholars?”
Auster seemed pleased at the description. “Why yes, I suppose you could say that. We are healers, historians, guardians of the stone. We strive to keep our ancient traditions alive.”
Nathaway felt as if he had stumbled on a priceless discovery. A seat of ancient learning, here in this secretive city, utterly unknown to the outside world. Perhaps no other Inning had seen this place. Certainly, no other Inning had had the key to it that he did, coming as bandhota to the Heir of Gilgen. He felt elated, awed at his good fortune.
They passed a door standing ajar, through which Nathaway glimpsed bound volumes on shelves, and another where racks of seedlings stood under a window. A third room, lined with cabinets full of tiny drawers, had a medicinal scale on a marble counter that looked like it came from an apothecary shop in Fluminos.
He was burning with questions by the time Auster led them up a staircase and paused before a tall, closed door. The Grey Man knocked on it, listening for some response; then he signalled them to wait. “I want to introduce you to someone,” he explained, then disappeared inside.
When they were alone in the hall, Nathaway turned to Spaeth. “This place—this institution—did you know it was here?”
She shook her head. “Goth never mentioned it.”
“I wish I could spend a month here,” Nathaway said. “It’s utterly undiscovered. I could write a treatise.”
Before long the door cracked open again and Auster gestured them inside. They stepped into an office whose walls were crowded with artworks—botanical sketches, complex astronomical diagrams, coloured maps—whose antiquity made Nathaway’s throat go dry. A tall, austere woman rose from a table spread with ledger books. Her face was strong-featured, with sharp, intelligent eyes, and her coarse grey hair was pulled back in an untidy bun. She looked around sixty.
Auster said, “Allow me to introduce you to Agave, the namenda of our community. I’m sorry, what’s your name, my dear?”
“Spaeth,” she said. “Spaeth Dobrin.”
Agave was studying her face with a fierce intensity. She held out her hands, and after a slight hesitation, Spaeth reached out to clasp them. The older woman’s eyes fell for a moment to Spaeth’s arm, where the false scar from the attempt to cure Jory made it look as if she had given dhota. “You say you are Goran’s daughter?” she said.
“No,” Spaeth said. “He made me, seven years ago. From his own flesh. For sex.”
Agave dropped Spaeth’s hands and stepped involuntarily back. “That is so like him,” she said. Her voice was pregnant with anger.
Defensively, Spaeth said, “You don’t know him. You can’t judge him.”
“Oh, but I do know him,” Agave said bitterly. “Too well.”
“You do?” Now Spaeth’s curiosity overcame her resentment. “How?”
Diplomatically, Auster interrupted, “Perhaps we should sit down for a chat. Let me put the kettle on for some tea.”
He ushered Spaeth and Nathaway into chairs, but Agave was still too disturbed to sit, and roamed the space between them and the window, her lean face restless with memories.
“I knew him years ago, in his youth,” she said. “Oh, he was a charming man then. Handsome, yes, but shallow as a pie pan, promiscuous as a cat. You should have seen him, flirting with the merchants’ daughters like some sort of Inning prince. For that’s what he was, you know: a weakling corrupted by the Innings.”
“No!” Spaeth interrupted. “He knew nothing of the Innings.”
Agave turned on her. “You’re wrong. He was raised in the Governor’s family at Tornabay, back when the Governor was still an Inning, before Tiarch arose. It was clever and cruel of them, to try and corrupt the child who was the very soul of the Isles. The rest of us could only watch, and feel our hearts ache.”
“But it didn’t work,” Spaeth said.
“Didn’t it? Then why, when they set him free, didn’t he come here to Lashnish, to take up his responsibilities? No, he went off somewhere to soak in his carnal pleasures, while the land cried out in need.”
Listening, Nathaway could easily reconstruct the situation in his mind: at the time Agave spoke of, after the battle of Sandhaven, Goth had been a political pawn, prisoner of the people who had killed his father. What could have been more natural than to mimic them? What better way to camouflage himself, than to appear feckless and irresponsible? But he had clearly alienated an orthodox faction of his own people.
“And now,” Agave said, “there he is, back in Tornabay, collaborating with the Innings again.”
“He is not collaborating,” Spaeth said hotly. “He is their prisoner, and it is nearly killing him. I know nothing about what happened years ago, but you are wrong about what is happening now.”
“And what do you know about it?” Agave said, her demanding gaze on Spaeth.
“I saw him ten days ago,” Spaeth said. “It was when he told us to come here, because he could not.”
Agave paused at this, arrested by some thought. She looked at Auster; his eyebrows rose quizzically. “He told you that?” Agave said.
“Yes,” Spaeth said. “We were to find the Isonstone.”
“Tell me,” Agave said slowly, “did he give you anything? Some sort of talisman?”
Spaeth shook her head. “No, nothing.”
“What kind of talisman?” Nathaway said suddenly.
Agave seemed to notice him for the first time. “Something ancient,” she said. “A token.”
“Something like this?” Nathaway pulled at the string around his neck, and brought out the green stone pendant Goth had given him.
The effect on the two Lashnurai was electric. They both gave involuntary exclamations and started toward it. Auster reached out, but pulled back without touching the stone. He looked at Agave, and there was strain in his voice. “Is it the real thing?”
“Bring me a lamp,” she said, and he hurried to fetch one. She bent close then, but looked to Nathaway. “May I touch it?”
“Yes, of course,” he said.
She took it reverently in her hands as Auster held the lamp close. She examined first one side, then the other, then sighed, returning it to Nathaway. She straightened, looking at Auster.
“What is it?” Nathaway asked.
The Grey Lady’s voice was tensely controlled. “It is called the Emerald Tablet,” she said. “An ancient artefact of Alta.”
He looked at it. “Is it really emerald?”
“That is what the records say.” She seemed about to go on, but stopped herself. “Only the Heir of Gilgen may possess it. It has been passed down for generations from one Heir to the next.”
Auster’s eyes on him were grave. “Son, are you sure he meant to give it to you?”
Self-consciously, Nathaway glanced at Spaeth; she was watching curiously. “I asked him if it was for Spaeth,” he said. “He said no, I shouldn’t give it away to anyone.”
“And you had no idea what it meant?” Auster said.
“No,” Nathaway said. “I still don’t. Why would he give it to me? Obviously, I’m no Heir of Gilgen.”
Once again, Auster and Agave exchanged a look. It seemed as if far more were going on between them than Nathaway could catch. Agave’s face was stern with anger. “That fool,” she said in a low voice. “The irresponsible fool.”
“Now, Agave,” Auster said to calm her. “Consider that he may have known something we don’t.”
“It was a message to us,” she said. “One last bit of defiance.” She turned her desperate, angry eyes on Nathaway. “What did he know of you?”
“Really, nothing,” he said. “We’d barely met.”
“And so he gave you this precious thing solely because this girl of his had given dhota for you?”
Nathaway hesitated, not wanting her to misunderstand, but not wanting to set her straight, either. But before he could think of something to say, Spaeth interrupted, “I never gave him dhota.”
Auster and Agave both turned to her. “You said you were bandhotai,” Auster said.
“Oh, we are,” she said, reaching out to take Nathaway’s hand. “He gave dhota for me. I would have died otherwise.”
A flush of terrible embarrassment heated Nathaway’s face. He couldn’t meet their eyes. He started to say, “It wasn’t really me, Spaeth. It was Goth—”
“Are you denying the bandhota bond?” she said, as if it cut her to the heart.
“No,” he said desperately. “Of course not.”
Turning to the listening Lashnurai, Spaeth said, “Do you think I couldn’t tell who was curing me? Just look at his arm.”
Nathaway sat staring at the floor, cooking in his discomfort. Quietly, Auster said, “May we see your arm?”
He was no longer wearing the bandage, but the scar was still ugly and inflamed. When he pushed back his sleeve, he heard Agave suck in her breath.
There was a short silence. Then Auster said, “There is something going on here that we don’t understand.”
Agave pulled a chair forward and sat down for the first time, facing Nathaway, close enough to touch him. “We need to get to the bottom of this—what’s your name?”
“Nathaway Talley,” he said.
For once in his life, there was no sign of recognition at the name. “Are you willing to help us, Nathaway?”
“Look,” he said weakly, “I really don’t care about the Emerald Tablet. If it’s so important, you can have it.”
She shook her head. “No. The artefact itself is not important. Or at least, not as important as the act of giving it, which is what holds all the meaning.”
“Then I’ll give it to you.”
“Not in your present state of ignorance. That would be no better than throwing it away. Goran gave it to you for a reason, and I have to know what that reason was.”
“Well, you can’t find out from me.”
“Yes, I can,” she said. She reached into a leather pouch at her belt, and brought out a stone knife.
“No!” Spaeth cried out, springing from her chair and clutching Nathaway’s arm. “He’s mine!”
“Don’t worry, girl,” Agave said, “I’m not going to give dhota. I simply have to see inside him. I promise you, I won’t change a thing. There will be no bond.”
Spaeth seemed unreconciled by this. “You can’t go inside him,” she pleaded. “He is private, my own.”
Auster moved to her side and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. “We cannot keep our bandhotai to ourselves, my dear,” he said gently. “We all have to share them with the world.”
“But I’ve only had him for a week!” she said. There were tears in her eyes.
“And you will have him still,” Auster said. “This will change nothing between you.” He drew her away to her chair. She looked desolate.
“Sit with her, Auster,” Agave said.
He sat on the broad arm of her chair, his ar
m around her shoulder. “Now, you must not touch him while Agave is working,” he said.
Nathaway’s heart was floundering, caught between his sharp sympathy for Spaeth’s pain, and nervous agitation for himself. He looked to Agave, who was watching him closely.
“You will need to help me,” she said seriously.
“What—” he started to ask. His mind was swarming with questions, conditions, scenarios, as if he were drafting a contract, seeking certainty. That was what the law gave you, certainty.
“You will have to trust me,” Agave said. “You will have to give yourself up, and surrender all your doubts.”
She was holding out the knife to him. He took the handle in unsteady hands. “Go ahead,” she said. “Just a drop, it’s all we need.”
He had to exhale twice before his hands were steady enough. Then he turned up his wrist and pricked it with the knife tip till a drop of dark blood flowed out onto the skin. He dipped his finger into it. Then, as he had seen Goth do, he touched it to Agave’s forehead, and to his own.
She took both of his hands in hers, holding on strongly. It felt as if she were supporting him. “Don’t be concerned,” she said softly. “No harm will come to you.”
Calmness seemed to flow into him then, and he relaxed, closing his eyes. He felt like the surface of a pool, agitated at first, but gradually becoming smooth and clear. Agave entered him delicately, like a drop of dye dissolving in the water of his mind, suffusing every inch of him, sinking deeper and deeper. He had accepted her presence completely when, deep inside him, he felt her move, reaching out. It triggered a flash of buried emotional memory, and he instinctively clamped down, struggling against her. For a moment he was back in his body, and she was stroking his face, saying “Shhh,” to calm him. He realized that he had cried out.
Under her control his heart slowed again, and she carried him back into the pool, sinking, wrapped around him, into the deepest parts of his mind. The next time a memory exploded into his consciousness he was better prepared, though he was still dimly aware of flinching and groaning. After that they came fast, a jolting cascade of experiences he had long forgotten, vomiting out into the open.
Ison of the Isles Page 4
