Stargate

by Pauline Gedge

  23

  He did not wake until his door flew open, when he sat up with a jerk, his body a mass of odd aches and strains from his climb. Nenan was swinging his legs onto the floor.

  “Chilka!” said a man with a red tunic emblazoned with the yellow and black suns. His face had gone livid with shock. “You’re dead. They shot you while you ran. I know. The captain told me he shot you dead. What magic is this?”

  Chilka grinned at him. “Not dead enough, Sigran. The captain is a bad shot on horseback. I crawled away and licked my wounds and decided to come back and stick my head once more into the two-headed beasts’ lair. The mountains are harsh masters. I’m tired of running.”

  Sigran backed away as Chilka rose and stretched. “Keep away from me! This time we’ll make sure! Three escapes means execution, and I will bury you with my own hands. You were dead!”

  Chilka yawned. “This is Nenan, my son,” he said. “Nenan dragged me home, and when I decided to come back, he came too. Where is Yarne?”

  The man was too shocked to ponder the glib story. At the mention of Yarne’s name he slumped. “You’re right,” he snarled. “Yarne will never let you be shot. He’s with his precious relics.”

  “Good. Nenan, stay here until I send for you. Sigran, get the boy some food, and see he is not molested.”

  “Who are you to give orders to me, one-mind?” the man blustered, but awe was still in him, and he made no move to stop Chilka as he pushed past him and into the passage.

  The House was full of bustling life. Chatter and laughter, the sound of many feet coming and going, sunlight pooling bright through the slit windows, the smell of cooking—it was as if, Danarion thought, two Houses existed in two different dimensions on the same spot, and there was no point of contact between them.

  He went out into the sunny courtyard, crossed to the big doors which stood open, and entered the hall. Here voices echoed, and feet slapped on the mighty stone stair that lifted dizzily to be lost in the height of the roof. A fire was burning, and though the day was young, petitioners and administrators already jostled around it, gossiping, waiting to see the three judges who ruled Ishban. Chilka named them as he began to mount the stair. Melfidor. Veltim. Fitrec. Ancient and honorable Sholan names, to be carried by foreign scum.

  He circled higher, and the babbling crowd in the hall shrank to small, gaily capped heads nodding against one another. The smoke from the fire thinned to a gray haze up here and made him cough. He passed one small door set into the curved wall on his left and then another, his shoulder grazing the stone as he hugged the wall, for though the stair was as wide as his full height, there was no rail on the outer side. At the third door he stopped and knocked and pushed it open.

  As he entered, the smoke and the booming echo of voices from below vanished. He shut the door quietly, and the cessation of noise was like a blanket flung over him as he advanced into the room. The silence was more than an absence of sound. It was a climate of deep thought, a cup full of the still, purposeful peace of mental industry. Chilka remembered this and found it natural, but Danarion sensed another quiet here, the passionless enigmas of ancient mysteries, the invisible eddies of the past. Two tall windows looked out upon the winding streets of the city, now full of people hurrying to and fro about the day’s business. Flags ripped and fluttered in the wind, carts piled with merchandise rattled over stone, shopkeepers leaned against the lintels of their establishments and gossiped, and almost out of sight a faint white glitter told of the ocean. The walls of the room were lined with waist-high cases, some open, all bathed in sunlight, and light lay also on the smooth stone floor, shafting across the wooden desk piled with paper at which a young man sat, facing the thin windows.

  He was slim, with a small waist and delicate shoulders sloping evenly under his white tunic. The skin of his sun-touched face and the graceful hands poised before him was exquisitely fine-grained and so transparent that it had a faint bluish tinge. He turned his head abruptly at the closing of the door, his white-gold hair waving loosely around a smooth neck. His eyes were the pale, brilliant blue of sapphires. He embodies all that I remember of the Shol that once was, Danarion thought in surprise. He is pure Sholan, all white, blue, and gold.

  Yarne showed no surprise. “So you came back,” he said, rising, a mild reproach in his light voice. “And looking older and more tired than when you ran away. I suppose they will want to shoot you now. This is your third attempt, you know. But I won’t let them. I missed you. Are you ready to go to work this morning? You had better wash your hands, and bring me fresh ink.” When he had finished speaking, he stood perfectly still, one long-fingered hand flat on the desk, a smile on the delicate mouth. The only movement lay in his throat, where the slow, regular flutter of his heartbeat showed against the collar of his tunic. It was as though some contact had been made deep inside him, and he had spoken, and then the contact had been broken, leaving him lifeless and stiff until he might be required to speak or move again. His head was on one side. The smile did not slip.

  “I have missed you, too,” Chilka said. “I reached the mountains, Yarne, but I am no longer as willing to endure their hardships as I once was, so I came back.”

  Yarne nodded, and the silken hair fell over his shoulders. “I have heard that you encountered more than hardship in the mountains,” he said. “I heard that they had killed you. By sunset the whole city will be talking of the one-mind who came back from the dead. Did you?”

  Danarion looked at him in amazement. He might have been asking cheerfully how well his slave had slept. “Yes,” he found himself answering. “I did, in a way.”

  “Only in a way? But I understand. I myself am born again every morning. I think of death a great deal, I suppose because my sister and I are immortal and never die. It is like a game to me, imagining what it must be like. The two-minds never die either, but that is different, not true immortality, because they put on the bodies of their sons or daughters. Like giant birds of prey, aren’t they, Chilka? But you have the same body, a bit more battered than before. Do the one-minds somehow refresh their essences? Is that what you mean?”

  “You are a one-mind yourself,” Chilka retorted. “You were born in the mountains.”

  “So they say.” Yarne sat down. “But it is not true. I have no memories of the mountains. I think we will work now.”

  “One thing before we do.” Chilka came to the desk and faced again that odd, sudden suspension of vitality in Yarne. “I have brought my son, Nenan, with me. Without your protection he will be sold to someone in the House. Will you take him?”

  “How extraordinary!” Yarne said, but again without surprise. “If you one-minds begin to bring your families into voluntary slavery, we shall have an embarrassing situation in Ishban. If I don’t take him, he will doubtless be given to Maltor, who burned his father yesterday and, as master of his house, now needs a slave. All right, Chilka. He needn’t do anything, but I will let it be known that he is under my cloak. They grumble at me already for treating you more like a brother than a witless slave.” He grasped Chilka’s arm, and his touch was cold, but his eyes were full of a timid affection. “They laughed at me each time you ran away,” he said. “They do not dare to do it to my face, but I know. I felt betrayed, yet I do not hate you. I cannot tell you how glad I am that you have come home.”

  Chilka recoiled in mingled love and shame, like a man driven to treason against his nation yet seeing clearly the necessity of betrayal, and it was Danarion who bent and kissed the transparent knuckles that lay like white flowers against the grime and roughness of his shirt. He felt a warmth for this youth, who reminded him of the Traders who once used to move between the worlds. Like them he seemed apart from both good and evil, simple and guileless. “I would not willingly cause you grief, my old friend,” he said. “Thank you on behalf of my son. Now I will wash my hands and bring you ink.”

  Yarne smiled. Chilka went to a door behind the desk which let onto an anteroom containing a
washbasin, jug, and walls lined with cupboards. He washed quickly, took down two small pots, mixed powder, added water, and carried extra pens with him when he went back to Yarne.

  “Now bring me the book,” Yarne said. “Set it on the pedestal.”

  Chilka went to one of the cases and, lifting the lid, took the book carefully in his hands. His memory of this room, this work, this book had told Danarion nothing unusual. To Chilka the book was simply his master’s passion. But Danarion, as he looked down on its thick red cover spidered in gold lettering, felt those memories grow brittle and sift away like pieces of scattered autumn leaves, and for a moment he forgot that he was in Chilka’s body. He saw his own golden hands cradling the book, bathing it in light that brought the faded lettering to a brief semblance of life. Again, as when standing in the ruins of the Hall of Waiting, he felt unbearably old. I am more ancient than the stone of this House, he thought, older than the mountains from which it was wrenched. This book, as yet unstained by Sholia’s pen, was on Shol before the Worldmaker formed the ocean and set the mountains in their places. The weight of such an unimaginable accumulation of time was suffocating him, pressing above and around him. I am imprisoned in my own immortality while the whole universe has shuddered into other shapes around me, leaving me stranded here in this strange room, on this strange planet that I once dreamed was different. I dreamed I was a sun-lord, one among a thousand bright immortals, that there was war in the heavens, a million million years of slow attrition. Did I dream? There is only this book to link me with my dreams. I am a slave, but to what? To whom?

  The Annals of Shol, he read and turned back the cover. Before the beginning was the Lawmaker, he read in Sholia’s flowing, sure hand, and the Lawmaker made the Worldmaker and commanded him to make according to his nature. And the Worldmaker made the worlds … The shock receded, leaving him shivering. He turned the page hurriedly, clumsily, and it tore with a tiny rasping sound. No spells of protection could last through the eons since her last entry. Yarne gave a cry. “Chilka, what is the matter with you? It is priceless, without value! For Sholia’s sake, put it down!” Again the old oath, meaningless now, as much an anachronism as Danarion felt himself to be. Unsteadily he walked to the reading pedestal and set the book upon it. “I have done nothing since you left,” Yarne grumbled quietly. “The slaves work in the strange room in the mountain, but what they uncover simply adds to the mystery.” He had risen and glided to the pedestal, and Chilka knew what he had to do.

  He walked to the desk and lowered himself behind it, setting out clean paper, dipping a pen into the ink. “So little progress, though I think about it night and day,” Yarne was whispering half to himself as he gingerly turned the pages. “Legends for the folk historians, myths and stories for the one-minds, death for the two-minds who dare even to begin to believe. And for me a tangle of all three, with no link to the Shol of today, none at all. What do we labor over, Chilka? A clever riddle to hide a truth so terrible that the words could not be set down uncovered? A cipher?” He had found his place. “Are you ready? I forgot to tell you that the diggers in the sand to the east have unearthed a jar, and in it a love poem, or a song. I have not yet decided which it is. I will show it to you later, and you can set my thoughts about it on a separate sheet.” His glittering eyes found the window for a moment. “A hundred years of digging,” he said sadly, “and what do we have? Love poems. A few stories that seem ridiculous, like the one about the four men sitting under a tree like no tree on Shol and touching fingers for a day. No sagas of war, no accounts of strife, yet war there must have been, and something fell from the heavens to bury Shaban. If Shaban ever existed.” He sighed and cleared his throat. “Begin.”

  Danarion began to write with a trembling hand as Yarne read from the book and interspersed his reading with his own observations. “‘Sholia went through the Gate to Danar. Janthis refused her pleas for help. In the room the Book of What Will Be was guarded by Chilorn, yet Sholia was tempted and almost fell …’ At least we know that by Danar the writer must mean the constellation Danic, though what the symbolism of the Gate is we can as yet only guess. Perhaps it was a matter of religion. If the ancients worshiped the stars of Danic as a god and had built a temple to it with a sacred Gate, the problem is partially solved, and perhaps the vast hall the new digging has uncovered in the mountain may be such a temple.” Danarion wrote the words. A sickness was on him, and if Yarne had asked him a question, he would not have been able to reply.

  At noon a bell rang, very clear and sweet in the room, and Yarne closed the book and stretched. “My Lady calls me,” he said. “Put the book away, Chilka, and go and eat. Bring your son to me later. Take care to cover the ink.” He went out, and Danarion went to the book, placed it back in the case, and then walked slowly along the other cases.

  Yarne’s gleanings were small. Scraps of brocaded cloth, bells corroded and thickened with age, the flue of a fountain made in the likeness of a corion of Danar, some timber from a ship, now crystallized but still with the haeli wood’s faint glow of blue, and most incongruous of all, a sea-rotted roof tile from Shaban. Fuel for an obsession, Danarion thought, fuzzy with emotional exhaustion. Why is Yarne so obsessed? Why do I sense some lack in him, something unfocused? And why is he, so wealthy and favored, unable to write? Chilka had no answers. Danarion’s essence ached with pain. He covered the ink pots and went out into the echo of ceaseless babble and the miasma of smoke which columned from the hall below to the unseen ceiling.

  Nenan’s familiar voice happily recounting his adventures of the morning served to spread balm over Danarion’s hurts. Together they crossed the courtyard and entered the blackened dining room where the slaves ate under the eye of several guards, and Nenan greeted first one and then another slave with an easy grace that told Chilka how the young man had spent his time. “It is not altogether a place of nightmare,” Nenan said to him between mouthfuls of soup. “It seems to me that the slaves are not ill-used and have much freedom, limited of course. I have seen no two-minds yet, but how beautiful and populous the city looks through the cracks in the gate!”

  “And how beckoning!” Chilka grinned. “The girls are fair, Nenan, and the fruit ripe. The wine is sweet, and the sun is hot. But wait until night comes, when you and I are locked in our cell, not loose in the streets as we were last night, and you cannot run away.”

  That afternoon Chilka took Nenan to meet Yarne. Yarne seemed content to smile and nod at him and ask him what he wished to do, setting him a few small tasks around his own quarters and sending him away. Chilka spent the remaining hours of daylight at the desk while Yarne translated the ancient language of the book and added his musings, later preparing the young man’s food for him and serving it on the desk. Yarne slept next door to the relic room, where he had a bed, a chest for his clothes, and a table, all expensively appointed, yet he did no more than sleep there. He lived among the relics when he was not riding to one of his diggings.

  At sunset the guards came for Chilka, and he surrendered himself to them with a polite word of good-night to his master. As he was marched down the stair he heard the bell in the relic room tinkle once and knew that the Lady had summoned her brother again.

  Night fell. Chilka lit a candle, and by its light he and Nenan sat on the floor talking. Ishban was suddenly silent.

  “I wish the cell had a window,” Nenan complained, and Chilka shook his head.

  “I think when you have spent many nights here, you will be glad you cannot see out, even into the courtyard. At first it is not bad, but after a while the sickness of Ishban begins to prey on you. Sometimes it follows you into your dreams. And the two-minds are not always as harmless as they seemed to us last night. Once, just before I was taken for the first time, the cells were unlocked in the middle of the night. The slaves were dragged to the top of the House, up that winding parapet we saw, and dropped one by one into the courtyard. They say the two-minds did not speak. They simply disposed of all their slaves.”


  Nenan shuddered. “Surely the guards could have stopped them!”

  “The guards were taken also. Listen, Nenan. It has begun.”

  They sat for a while in silence while beyond the wall thin wails broke on the air and from above in the House the sounds of despair filtered down to them.

  In the cell next to theirs a man began to melody. He had a strong, lusty voice, full of life and sunlight, and the tune was a rollicking drinking song that drowned out the sighings and shufflings above. But soon he had exhausted his medley, and once more the madness seeped through their cell’s walls. Nenan played with the candle, picking off melted wax and passing his finger through the flame, and he was very pale.

  “What did you think of Yarne?” Chilka asked to take his mind off the insanity around them, and Nenan managed a smile.

  “He is very beautiful, but not womanish, although I have never seen a woman as lovely as he. Is he as gentle as he seems?”

  “I don’t think it is gentleness. Yarne simply does not think like anyone else I know.”

  “What does he do at night?”

  Chilka’s gaze focused slowly on the yellow beam of the candle. “He spends most of the dark hours with the Lady. His sister.”

  In the morning the sun shone, the cells were unlocked, and the life of the House resumed its cheerful, chaotic way. After they had eaten, Chilka took Nenan and a guard and went into the city to the nearest market, where the produce from the surrounding countryside was brought in fresh at daybreak. He chose food for Yarne carefully, and Nenan was allowed to wander in sight of the guard. He looked into the dark entrances of shops, teased smiles from the girls, and gaped like the country boy he was at the crowds pushing around him while the farmers stood behind their mounds of vegetables and their hanging rabbits and barked their invitations to buy.

  His purchases made, Chilka was lingering among the stalls when he heard someone say, “Isn’t that him?” Heads turned in uncomprehending curiosity. “That’s the one-mind!” someone else shouted, and before long they were jostling around Chilka, trying to touch him, pulling his hair, all talking at once.