ALSO BY PAULINE GEDGE
Child of the Morning
The Eagle and the Raven
The Twelfth Transforming
Scroll of Saqqara (Mirage)
The Covenant
House of Dreams (Lady of Reeds)
House of Illusions
Lords of the Two Lands trilogy:
The Hippopotamus Marsh
The Oasis
The Horus Road
The King’s Man trilogy:
The Twice Born
Seer of Egypt
The King’s Man
Copyright © 1982 by Pauline Gedge
All rights reserved
Published in 2016 by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373-508-4
Cover design: Jonathan Hahn
Cover artwork: © Leo and Diane Dillon
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
For Elisabeth, my sister and my friend.
With love.
Thank you, M.R.S.
ONE
1
Ixelion stepped under the archway of his Gate, the box clutched tightly in his hand, and the guards with their silver wands and stiff capes of scales greeted him with soft, deferential voices. He smiled at them briefly and absently, passing them to walk quickly along the causeway, lit now by the fire that welled up through his pale skin and conjured reflections on the mottled surface of the river that flowed through the tunnel. Ixel the fair, he thought with a burgeoning relief. Ixel the pure. There is no water in the All like the waters here on my world. I feel as though I have been away on a long journey fraught with terrible dangers and have come home exhausted and changed, but of course that cannot be. You change. I do not. To right and left the rock tunnel curved, throwing back to him the constant low rumble of the flowing water, and as he paced he brushed the familiar wall carvings which invited his fingers to move along them with the same slow, majestic weight of the river itself. He bent and saw his likeness fragmented by the water. He held out a hand in a gesture of reassurance, spreading his fingers to see the delicate, opalescent webbing between them, and then went on until he came to the mouth of the tunnel, where the river foamed out to spread like gray twisted tresses laid upon the flower-burdened earth. Here he sat for a moment, wetting his feet, closing his eyes and inhaling the damp coolness. She thrust it at me, he thought. I did not want to take it. With a shudder of distaste Ixelion opened his eyes and looked down at the pale-blue wood of the box, and its tiny runnels of gold winked back at him his own fire. Not now, he thought, rising. Now I simply wish to go home.
He skirted the massive, motionless forest from out of whose wet trunks and dripping leaves the ever-present mist seeped. He soon could see the pinnacles of his palace, reaching up to be lost in the grayness of the heavy sky. As he came to the ramp over which another river poured he met a group of his people emerging from the forest, nets full of flowers slung over their shoulders. When they saw him, they ran to him, calling with their light, high voices, and he was quickly surrounded by cool, naked bodies and questioning eyes.
“Sun-lord! It is the sun-lord. Ixelion has come back!”
He stood still while they reached to touch him, unconsciously cradling the box in both arms so that they might not brush against it.
“You have been gone for many years, sun-lord,” one of them said when they had all drawn back a little and regarded him. “Look. My son has left the water!”
Ixelion bent and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “And have you given up chasing the fish entirely,” he asked gravely, “now that you have hung up your tail?”
The boy laughed. “No, sun-lord. The fish gather on the beach outside my house every morning. They would be disappointed if I did not chase them away again.”
“The sun has sulked since you went away,” a woman remarked. “We have not seen his face once.”
Ixelion talked to them a moment longer and made his farewells, and immediately they picked up their nets and left him. He went up the ramp, crossed his terrace, and entered the green dimness of his hall. Water from the room’s many fountains splashed into pools that opened one into another and finally spilled out through the doorway, echoing loudly in the ceiling, where mist hung. Through the passageways more water swirled, ankle deep, cool and pale. He crossed his hall, passing under the waterfall that sprinkled down through the balustrades of balconies high above, mounted stairs, and came out at last in a room with one wall open entirely to the roof of the forest and the ocean beyond. The river that ran down the hill on which the palace was built had been diverted in order that it might fill the great square pool that formed most of the floor of the room. It poured down the wall, troubling the otherwise placid surface of the pool, and spilled out on the other side to cascade through the gap in the floor to the hall below. Ixelion paused. There was no sound in all his vast house but the voice of water, dripping, splashing, running, dancing with itself, singing to itself as it moved from spire to floor and so out to meander through the forest. He walked around the pool and stood at the window, so wide that many spans of his arms could not measure it. The sky met the forest, mingled with it, and filtered to the earth as fog. The air was still. No wind ever trembled in the marshes or riffled the oceans of Ixel, and the sun had never shone full on the crystal domes the people lived in or heated their white skins.
“I am back, my brother, I am home,” he said softly to his sun, and for a moment a faint gleam of diffused gold bathed him, pushing down through the gentle rain that had begun to fall, but then the mist closed in again, and Ixelion left the window.
In one corner of the room was a chest made from the pastelled pink, blue, and mauve shells that littered Ixel’s beaches. He went to it and raised the lid, placing the box that Falia had forced upon him carefully inside. Tonight I will turn the pages of Fallan’s history, he promised himself, caressing the warm, dry haeli wood, his finger tracing its gold veins. Tonight I will go to Falia. And will you also look upon the thing that is forbidden? some other voice in his mind prompted gently. He closed the chest quickly. Going to the pool, he plunged in, swimming from one end to the other and back again, letting the cool, slippery greenness fill his mouth and slide like a loving hand over his skin. He could not forget how Fallan’s soil had cringed away from him, the alien, the one who was whole and did not belong in a place of dying and fracture. Falia’s touch had sullied him, and he wanted to wash the decay from his body, but Ixel’s clear water could not flush the pictures from his mind. At last he left the pool, descended to his hall, and went out under the rain.
He made his way into the forest, his feet sinking into the sopping undergrowth. He shook back his heavy wet hair and raised his face so that the broad, drooping leaves could brush it. As he walked he plucked flowers for Sillix, stars and diamonds, ellipses and crescents and circles that spun from root to petal, spears and threads that wove in and out, flowers like eyes and flowers scaled like fish, all scentless and colorless yet possessing in their multiplicity of shape an unexcelled beauty. They grew everywhere: on the trunks of the trees, on the ground, in the bosoms of the rivers, where they clung, drowned, to the mud and stone of the beds. Ixelion knew that Sillix had no need of flowers, but it was a politeness, a gesture he would welcome.
He came out of the forest and walked along the ocean, its beach the only place where nothing grew, stepping over crabs and streamers of black seaweed. Out of the translucent crystal domes lining the beach the people came, the children running to hold his hand, the adults waving and greeting him, their round, pupilless eyes bright.
“Sun-lord!” they called. “Ixel has no soul when you are gone. Welcome home! Did you see
a Messenger while you traveled? One came for Grenix, and Lanix has also taken his last journey through the Gate. Has the Worldmaker made anything new?” They were as avid for news as ever, and though he called answers to them as he passed their doors, the last question he ignored. The Worldmaker would never again make anything new. He now raged and roared through the universe, bellowing his hatred for all that he had made, flinging his malevolence against the worlds still shining with his first light, and sucking strength from those he had gathered under his fiery black wings. But he will not take Ixel! Ixelion thought fervently as he left the beach and approached Sillix’s doorway. Never! Not my gentle, curious people. Only by my death. He stopped on the threshold, stunned. My death? How can I have come to consider such a thing? I cannot die until my sun and I burn away together at the end of time. Suddenly he felt the box of haeli wood in his hands again and with a cry dropped it, but then he looked down and saw that the flowers he had picked lay scattered over his feet. Bending, he gathered them up, and Sillix appeared, bowing gravely.
“So you have returned, sun-lord.” He smiled. “That is very good. Enter.”
Ixelion preceded him and then turned, laying the flowers in his arms. “I did not bring you a gift from another world this time, Sillix,” he said. “I have not been in places where there is happiness.”
Sillix’s brow furrowed. “Are there places without laughter, Ixelion? How strange that the Worldmaker should have made beings that do not laugh. I thank you for the flowers. The gift of your presence would have been enough. Please sit.”
Sillix’s home was one room made of green-tinted crystal that had been hewn out of the rock on Lix and polished to the smoothness of glass. Just outside the doorway was a small fire pit where Sillix cooked his fish and seaweed. A row of windows ran around the dome close to the ground, and within, under the windows, a circular seat, so that the occupant of the house could sit wherever he would and always be able to look out upon ocean, river, or forest. Mist blurred the upper reaches of the dome. There was no bed, for the people of Ixel slept under the surface of ocean or river, where they were born and where they spent the first ten years of their long lives.
Ixelion sat on the window seat, but Sillix folded his long legs and sank to the floor, tucking his webbed feet beneath him, his eyes on his lord. There was something different about Ixelion. The sea-green hair dewed with moisture still lay waving on the thin shoulders. The long, delicate body still filled the room with a faint golden light. The eyes still brimmed with the essences of sun, water, and living things. Sillix could not put a name to what he felt emanating from Ixelion, and in the end he mentally shrugged. It has been three years, he thought. I have not seen him in all that time, and of course there has been some change in myself. He can never change. He has sat in this house with all my elders, every one of them since the Worldmaker caused the people of Ixel to be, and he was here alone even before that, master of the waters. Ixelion sensed the quick scrutiny and smiled.
“Are the fish plentiful, Sillix? Do the rivers stay clean and the forests grow?”
“All is well, lord. Why should it not be? New homes have been built, for there are many children, and last year a group of the river-dwellers set out on the journey to the other side.”
“On the other side there is less water, smaller trees, more grass, and stronger sunlight. Did you tell them this?”
“I did, but they still wanted to go. They are young, Ixelion, and full of adventure, and the lands on the other side lie virgin, waiting for us to spread over them.”
“I am very glad, Sillix,” Ixelion said with a smile. “In the beginning, when the Worldmaker and I walked here together, he told me how there would be a slow maturing on this world, and much time would pass before the people would multiply. They are ready now to explore and change.”
“It is very good,” Sillix replied, and Ixelion repeated sadly, “Yes. It is very good.”
After a silence during which Sillix again studied his lord, he dropped his gaze and asked in a low voice, “Where is the Worldmaker, Ixelion? Is he still making? Has he left the All? Why does he not come to Ixel anymore?”
Ixelion glanced swiftly at the graceful, bent head, the supple webbed hands pressed against each other. Once he would have told the truth to Sillix. Once he would not have known the difference between truth and untruth, as Sillix still did not know it, but that had been in the times when the Worldmaker still took his place as head of the council, before he became the Unmaker, when there had never been any lies, not in the whole of the All. Even now, Ixelion knew, after so much breaking and disfigurement, the greatest weakness of the sun-people was their difficulty in separating truth from lie. It was becoming clearer to them, but that clarity was itself a small beginning on the path to the black fire. To discern a lie, he thought, we must have some knowledge of what it means to be a liar.
“The Worldmaker is not making anymore,” he replied finally. “He has not left the universe. He may return to Ixel someday.” And all those things are true, Ixelion thought, rising. True and unimaginably terrible. “I will welcome you whenever you wish to speak with me,” he finished. “My halls are not sealed from you.” He lifted the sun-disc from his breast and held it out, and Sillix kissed it. Ixelion embraced him and left, walking back along the beach in the increasing dimness of evening. The rain still fell. He held up his arms to it as he went, and by the time he reached his palace, it was full dark.
The water flowed on through his lofty rooms, now lit by great shafts of yellow light that his sun had left for him. It mingled with the mists gathered high above him, making rainbows in the frothing falls, turning the fountains into jewels that sprayed out like crystal haeli flowers and fell to the floor like dying stars. Ixelion walked beneath them slowly, thinking of his mortals diving deep beneath the warmer ocean on the other side, sitting under the benison of a sun no longer shrouded in fog, placing their feet on dry land. He mounted the stair, circled his pool, and stood for a long while gazing out onto the night. Though he could not see beyond the soft darkness, he knew that forest, marsh, and beach were deserted and his people lay under the water, rocked by the almost imperceptible swells, dreaming the hours away. A kind Time he gave us, Ixelion thought. A sweet, friendly Time. He allowed his mind to range near and far as his eyes gazed unseeingly into the night, but beneath the reveries was the chest, and the box that lay within it. At last he turned his back on the window and went to the corner. Lifting the lid, he drew out the box and carried it into an inner room where sunlight flooded the crystal walls and the only water present trickled in tiny rivulets across the doorway. He sat in his chair, conscious as never before of the busy voice of the palace. The box was fastened with a copper hasp, but it was not locked, and he parted it and lifted the lid. For a second the light in the room dimmed. Ixelion glanced up, startled, his heart all at once thudding against his breast, but soon the warm glow wrapped itself around him again. What makes you think that you are strong enough? something whispered in him. What madness has taken hold of you? He looked down into the box.
Within lay a thick volume, bound in leather and lettered in gold. Ixelion lifted it out and quickly closed the lid, for beneath the book he had glimpsed a dull, metallic glint, and his heart had leaped into his mouth. Not yet, he thought. Not yet? Not ever! I will live on Fallan for a while, and then I will take the thing, untouched, to Janthis. The book was heavy. He ran his hands lovingly and wistfully over the supple binding, the gleaming letters. The Annals of Fallan, he read, Being a History of Fallan and Her Worlds from the Time of Making. Ixelion opened it, and a wave of vanished laughter and lost innocence, broken dreams and wasted hope rose to him as Falia’s spiked red handwriting sprang out at him. She had written in the common tongue as the Law demanded. Before the beginning was the Lawmaker, he read. And the Lawmaker made the Worldmaker and commanded him to make according to his nature. And the Worldmaker made the worlds. … Ixelion could not go on. He riffled through the pages, aching with sadness.
The first chapter was well known to him. The Annals of every system began with the same words, and he did not want to see them again, in Falia’s hand, red against the yellow vellum. He sighed and leaned back, closing his eyes and grasping his sun-disc. I will go back, back to the pain of my last visit, he thought dimly, already tranced, the Annals under one limp hand and the box at his feet.
On Ixel the sun rose and set, the people swam and fished, and the endless rain fell. But Ixelion was now once again on Fallan, walking toward the deserted sweep of stone stairs that lifted to Falia’s palace, high above. It was noon, but the sun’s rays lay red and ominous over the treeless, rolling country, sliding stealthily through the bending silver grasses and changing to a dull ocher where they touched the blackened crops rotting in the fields. Furtive shadows moved on the periphery of his vision, and he forced himself to turn his head. A procession of vaguely human shapes was disappearing over the brow of the nearest hill. In their arms and slung over their shoulders, severed limbs gleamed dully like the fat stems of obscene flowers. They did not notice Ixelion, and he averted his gaze and quickened his pace.
As he began to mount the stair he heard a muted roar behind him and turned unwillingly. Fire flicked orange on the unbroken line of the horizon; silhouetted against it horsemen rode to and fro with lances raised, black men on black horses, crying out like hunting animals. Wails and shrieks came faintly on the wind, mixing with the acrid odor of burning, all imbued with the same cold essence of death. He turned back abruptly, stepping carefully where the steps had crumbled or split and grass now tufted, one hand going to the colorless gem hanging on his breast. A sense of oppression came burgeoning out from the palace’s great twin arches lost in dimness above him. “I am not a judge, I am a guardian,” he whispered as he passed under them. “I am not a lawmaker but an interpreter.” The hall was deathly silent. Ixelion crossed it, still whispering, fingers tight about the crystal, and by the time he had come to the far end and had passed Falia’s stone chair, he knew that he was himself again, armored against the decay around him, invulnerable to any lurking seed of dissolution. He climbed the black-sunk steps behind the chair, and above the first level the halls grew smaller and somehow lighter, as though some vestige of Falia’s quicksilver integrity still clung to the walls and lingered in the musty air. He went from room to room, climbing more stairs, searching quickly and methodically. He did not stop and seek an echo of her in his mind. He knew that she would no longer be capable of calling to him.
Stargate Page 1
