Stargate

by Pauline Gedge

  Then a rumble began as though the drums of the earth were rolling far beneath city and palace, and Shaban began to shake on its deep-sunk foundations. Sholia stood pale and still, feeling the throbbing in her feet, watching her walls shudder. The sound grew fainter, rolling away to trouble the ocean and stir under the far valleys, but the fear that had come with it remained to tingle in her blood like some dark poison, thinning her fire and dispersing her power like blown mist. Awkwardly she turned to face the door, both hands clasping the sun-discs, which hung heavy and rapidly cooling on her breast, as though they also cowered before the one who was coming. He had placed a foot over the edge of the Gate and even now was walking out of the Hall of Waiting; she knew it. He was striding the shrinking soil of Shol, he was coming.

  She wanted to die then. She wanted to throw herself to the floor and let her life ebb away so that she need not see him. Run to the suns, her mind hissed desperately at her, leap back into the past. But even in the midst of her terror she was aware that he could easily call her back from both. In her imagination she saw him begin to climb the stair, tall and beautiful as she had seen him last at council so many eons ago. As he came she felt the ache of longing for him begin.

  A rush of chill air that began to blow through the door found her and snatched the last of her warmth, so that her fire died to a dim pulse. She began to shiver, fumbling to release the sun-discs, which stuck, frozen, to her fingers. A voice moaned in that wind, whispering her name with all the hopeless loneliness of the Unmaker’s dominion, and it filled her with a new, quiet sorrow. Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside, firm and confident, each one matched to her heartbeat, and she brushed aside the tears and strove to stand straighter. He did not come to Falia, she thought dimly, or to Ixelion. But he comes to me in person, as I have always known, deep inside me, that he would. Will he torment me? She tried to bring the bright gaiety of Danar to mind and the faces of Danarion and Janthis, but they hovered momentarily behind her eyes like pale, insubstantial essences and then were gone.

  A shadow fell across the threshold, long, black, and menacing, reaching almost to her feet as she stood at the far end of the vast hall. This is the final power in the universe, she thought. This rules and has always ruled. Light or dark, good or evil, it is the ultimate reality. Then the shadow retreated, and he himself filled the archway. He paused, then crossed the floor. He was exactly as she had remembered him, tall and graceful and perfectly made, his long brown hair waving back from a face so exquisite in the contours of its flowing bones that it sent a stab of painful delight through her. The arms were held out in greeting to her. The mouth was parted in a smile of joy, and the wide-set eyes mirrored back to her, as freshly and gloriously as though it had happened a second ago, the burst of wonder that had been her first emotion at the time of her making. Slowly, regally he came on, the smooth, naked body flexing with an easy power that glimmered silver and rose-pink around him, and Sholia fell to her knees. “Maker,” she sobbed, the fear, the agonies of panic and terror gone, so that only an adoring and repentant child remained. “Maker, Worldmaker.” He came to a halt before her, and she could no longer look up at him, so dazzling was the beauty of his face. She dropped her gaze and, putting out a hand, touched the thin foot resting so close to her. “Oh, Maker,” she whispered, “I have needed you for so long, all of us, trying to live without you, and you deserted us and went away. What did we do that made you angry with us?”

  17

  He bent and placed both hands on her head, letting them slide soothingly down until they rested on her shoulders, and then he took her arms and raised her gently to her feet. “Sun-child,” he said, and to Sholia his voice was like the stir of a million first breaths on the dawn of the first day of his making. “I am not angry with you. Am I not here with you again on Shol? I have come to take all anxiety and all need from you. Put yourself in my hands, dear Sholia. Take your rightful place as my subject, the fruit of my thought, and I will remove from you all responsibility. I have come to rule on Shol. If you obey me, you shall never be separated from me. We will feed on each other. Can anything be more glorious?”

  She wanted to fall down before him again, to cling to him forever. She wanted to do anything he asked, for she knew that if he left her again, the anguish of his absence would be a drug of death in her veins until her suns grew old. But she could not answer him, for her eyes had fallen on the collar around his neck, half-hidden by the shining hair. It was not like that when I used to sit at the council table and look up at him, she thought, bewildered. She felt a soft blanket of balm, murmuring of the unimportance of small things, of inconsequentials, try to warp the thought, but she fought against it. His collar of authority, which had been made of white starlight and the energies of the Lawmaker, was now black and twisted like the dross that falls from metal as it is purified. He saw where her eyes had been drawn and laid a finger lightly on her cheek, and from somewhere deep within her a voice began to cry and wail in the agony of betrayal and loss. Ah, no, no! Let them all be liars, let the sun-lords down all the ages be deceived, let Janthis be a guide into illusion, but let the Worldmaker be true! She could not lift her gaze from the thing around his neck to the mild rebuke in his eyes, but with an effort that cost her everything she had, an effort like that of ripping her essence from her body, she took one step backward, away from him.

  “You are the Unmaker,” she choked. “More than anything in the universe I wanted to believe that you had not changed, that somehow the past had been wiped out, and when I saw you coming to me, the one who made me, the one who was my only good, when I saw that you were as beautiful as I remembered, I was full of joy. But you caused my eyes to lie to me.” She stopped speaking to gather what little strength she had left, the voice of wounding keening in her. “You come to Shol in maliciousness and hatred, seeking to break and blacken what you have made.”

  As she spoke she saw the pure glimmer of his body thicken to a sullen gray shot through with dark red, and the light went out of his face, leaving it harsh and full of a poorly veiled hostility. Sometimes she had wondered what he would look like if the moment should ever come when they stood face to face. The moment had come, and she was conscious of relief. Although he had changed, he was the same. The edge of awesome purity and joy had gone from him, but he had not lost his unmatched loveliness. A little confidence returned to her. Hope fluttered in her, and her eyes still showed him to her as the Worldmaker. For a long time he measured her, and once more that strange wind out of the depths of his darkness came to whine about her, chilling her heart and stultifying her mind. Then he spoke.

  “Come outside, Sholia,” he said, and his voice now was grating and flecked through with the ice of his turbulent, servile wind. “I want to show you something.”

  The words were a command. He took her arm, and now his fingers flooded pain through her flesh. She went clumsily, his closeness an overwhelming confusion of joy and revulsion, and like a dream-walker she followed him, her arm numb, her mind blank. He halted her at the top of the steps and let her go. “Tell me what you see,” he ordered, and immediately the gray fogs lifted, shredded, and were gone. Weak sunlight filtered over the plain, ran down the sides of the Towers of Peace, and pricked on the ocean, and Sholia scanned it all slowly. It did not seem real to her, a flimsy paper world without a third dimension, a vulgar slipshod imitation, and she answered brokenly, “I see Shol.”

  “And what is Shol to you?”

  Distaste for her world seeped into her. Shol was a heavy, thick place, earthy, odorous, and she saw herself streaking toward one of her suns, light and free. But she knew that the Unmaker was again giving her a lie to see, and somehow it was easier now to shrug off his subtle message. “Shol is my responsibility,” she replied, her arm still numb, her lips feeling twice their proper size. “I am the guardian of Shol.”

  “Yes, guardian,” he sneered. “Lord without power to rule, immortal without permission to intervene. That was how I wanted it in th
e beginning, but that is not my desire for the sun-lords any longer. Look well upon Shol, child. I am ready to put real power into your hands. Power to rule, to control every living thing under the suns, to order Shol, Shon, and Sumel exactly as you wish. You will no longer be custodian. You will be monarch. Real power, Sholia, to break or bind, to create or annihilate. No Law will touch you. You will be above and beyond the Law, even as I am. The last four Shol-years have brought doubt and misery to you. With what I offer, you could have smashed the Ghakans and reshaped Shol as you wished. No more doubts, Sholia, no more hesitation, no more Law. Be ruler of Shol. Receive the homage of your people, which is your right. You are an immortal, and what are they compared to you? You are a god. Take up the power of a god.”

  At his words Sholia’s mind was suddenly full of swirling, bright images. She saw herself seated in her chair, but it was now a throne. Her mortals came to her on hands and knees to receive a touch from her fire-filled hand. They spoke to her in reverent whispers, not daring to raise their eyes to her, for the power the Unmaker had given her had bestowed upon her also a terrible beauty, and her mortals loved her with the anguished, unslaked passion of slaves. Yes, she thought. It is my right. I deserve it all.

  “What of Ixelion, Falia, Ghakazian?” she managed.

  The Unmaker laughed, a sound without mirth. “I offered them nothing. Why should I have? You and Shol are the center of my universe. I offer this only to you, my beloved.”

  “And what must I give you, Unmaker, in return?”

  He swung to her, and in his eyes there blazed such greed, such spite, that she felt as though he wanted to devour her. “I ask only that you acknowledge me as your overlord,” he said, his voice shaking with the intensity of his lust. “You need not kneel before me. Just say the words. You have said them before, many times. They will cost you nothing, Sholia, and bring you everything.”

  Yes, I have said them before, she thought, shrinking from his convulsed face. But in those days they were always followed by other words. Over us both is the Law. She opened her mouth to say so, but the Unmaker had crouched away as though her very thought had wounded him.

  “Not the last words!” he hissed. “Not them. Just the first. You have nothing to lose. When the suns burn out, you will cease to be. Then it will not matter anymore, any of it. Say the words!”

  It was then that Sholia knew he no longer loved her, or anything that he had made. Janthis had told her so often enough, but with a seed of hope nestling in her she had not believed. How, she had thought then, could a Maker ever hate that which he had created? Surely some love would linger in him, no matter how deeply change had been wrought in him. But now she saw that the pain of his own terrible fall was with him still and had not diminished with the passing of the ages. It gnawed at him with teeth unblunted, and in his agony he reached out to revenge himself on the Lawmaker by maiming all that he had made. He would not suffer alone. He would take the worlds down with him.

  She tore her gaze from the panorama spread out below her and saw that he had recovered. Hard and bitter eyes bored into her own, and he seemed to lower over her like a storm cloud, black and threatening, but she drew herself up and found courage. “No,” she faltered. “I will not say the words. It is against the Law to place you at the pinnacle of worship, Unmaker, and if I acknowledge you as my lord, I place myself beyond hope of a favorable judging from the Messengers, for I will then be outside the Law, even as you are. It breaks my heart,” she finished in a whisper, “but I must refuse you.”

  “You poor, deluded little fool,” he snapped back, his voice shaking with the intensity of his rage. “Playing at purity and loyalty so blindly while the rest of the universe bows its head to me! I have offered you unlimited might, an omnipotence undreamed of, and I will not do so again. A moment of magnanimity stayed my hand, but I need not have paused to speak kindly to you. Think of the chance you have let go by in the years to come. I will shut you up in the mountain. I will slow time and make you feel it as the mortals do, so that every second passing is like eternity itself, and I will fill the minutes with such yearning for me that neither peace nor sanity will come to you again. I will cause this moment to be relived by you, over and over, so that you may fully taste the consequences of your arrogant error.”

  He surged toward her as he spoke, and she cried out, pulling her hair to hide her eyes, for the turgid gray and red light swirling around him had turned to rivers of blackness flowing around his knees, curling about his waist, licking from the gaunt, sickly paleness of his face. His mouth became a yawning cavern, and forked tongues of black fire slipped between his teeth as he croaked at her. His eyes had vanished, and in the sockets churned more fire, orange and black flames leaping. He was all the more horrible because the charred and ruined remnant of his beauty mingled with the thing he had become, and it was of Ghakazian that Sholia thought as she shrank away, Ghakazian at his Gate-closing, speaking silently to her of the ravished trance of death, the wooing compulsion to submission singing madly and unrestrainedly through his polluted glory.

  She fell to her knees, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, groveling before him on the pavement, which had cracked and blackened under his feet, and he bent over her and screamed, “I will stay on Sholl I made it and it is mine! For ages beyond ages I have craved to feel it under my thumb, and I will prowl the fringes of the universe no longer! But you I will grind under my heel, Sholia, and surely you will wish that I had never formed you!” He turned and strode to the top of the stair, pulling his oily wreath of unfire with him. Raising his arms, he seemed to grow, a tower of menace that dwarfed the pillars, vaster than the mountain, more arid and desolate than the plain across which his shadow spread. “Shol!” he roared, and his voice boomed out. Once more the Towers of Peace shook on their deep foundations, and the city trembled.

  Then a madness came upon the inhabitants of Shol, who woke from their trance of death to find death rushing to meet them. The Ghakan essences had thrust the weaker Sholan minds behind them and rose up to slay, the voice of the Unmaker boiling and bursting within them, a red goad of destruction. Mothers turned on children, kitchen knives in their hands; wives saw their husbands lurch toward them, hands curving for their necks. In the boats, out where the nomads rode, in the mines, beside the ocean death struck with a frenzied arm. The city began to scream. Blood streamered pink in the water. The Unmaker shouted to Sholia without turning, “You see? You hear? You dared to refuse me?” Then he laughed, and Sholia turned her head away and covered her ears.

  At the moment of stillness Ghakazian stood on the plain, his heart racing with excitement. Sholia had disappeared into the Hall of Waiting, but he was certain that in spite of her words she would not close the Gate. His time of testing had come. Watching the birds wheel and settle unsteadily on the grass, he wondered whether he should follow his people into the city, go back into the palace, or simply wait and see what Sholia would do. He decided to wait. The path crossing the plain was too vulnerable. He lifted his shoulders uneasily, trying to free them of the same weight that kept the birds silent. He found it difficult to breathe. Apprehensively he glanced toward the entrance to the Gate. Plumes of gray mist trickled from the Hall of Waiting, and through them Sholia came running. Seized with a momentary panic, Ghakazian rushed to hide behind the frail cover of the shrubs before the palace. He knew that Sholia saw him as she fled up the palace stair, but she no longer concerned him, for out of the Hall a thicker smoke began to pour, clouding the being who followed her.

  Time stood still. Ghakazian berated himself for his weakness, knowing that he must soon be vindicated, but his will had deserted him. Then he heard footsteps above, and with all the strength he possessed, he looked up.

  Sholia and the Unmaker emerged from the dimness of the entrance hall, he with his hand on her arm, and behind Ghakazian’s undeniable throb of joy at the sight of the one who had made him was a swift-rising wave of exultation. The Book spoke true! he thought feverishly. I remember! I saw
myself thus, hiding behind the shrub, hiding behind Rilla’s slender form, while the two of them welcomed each other. Through Rilla’s dark eyes he watched them talking together while behind him he felt Shol tensed on the edge of its doom. The Ghakans are ready, he told himself. At any moment now they will begin to kill, and I must mount the stair and face the Unmaker. A thrill of anticipation mixed with fear went through him but quickly died, leaving puzzlement, for the Unmaker had suddenly rushed at Sholia, who stumbled back and fell before him, her face ashen. Then the Unmaker changed before Ghakazian’s eyes. Black he became, and very terrible, and he leaned over Sholia like a hungry predator that pauses in its moment of triumph to relish every throe of its victim.

  All at once Ghakazian felt something move in his mind, shift from its place, and as it jerked it rearranged his thoughts, dropping them into new positions, giving them new colors. He felt as though he had been lifted and taken apart, then settled gently in his former place, but he was not the same. He understood. The truth burst upon him, and he gripped the coarse branches of the shrub with both strong, feminine hands to keep himself from howling aloud. No! he thought aghast. It cannot be! I have done all as the Book commanded, and the Book is under the Law. It cannot lie. No, Ghakazian, it did not lie, something sane and cool whispered inside him. It showed you here, behind the bush. It showed them there, talking together before the palace. These things have come to pass. But you shaped the naked visions in the Book with your own imagination. You were the liar, not the Book. The future has become the present, and you have been led to your own destruction.