Stargate

by Pauline Gedge

  “He came back from the dead!”

  “He took an arrow that opened his heart, my husband told me.”

  “The Lady was there disguised as a soldier, and she breathed life into him again …”

  “The Lady has made him a two-mind …”

  “No, he’s a god in disguise. He’s come to Shol to learn wisdom from her.”

  The guard had jumped to protect Chilka, and Nenan was elbowing his way through the excited people.

  “Is it true? How did you do it? Have you seen the Lady? What does she look like?”

  Chilka tried to prevent his basket from being upset and looked around with a momentary bewilderment.

  Above the noise of the crowd came a louder, more insistent cry. “Save us!” The shouting ceased. Quiet pooled out, and the people suddenly became still. Then someone else took it up, and the square became full of chanting. “Save us! Save us! Save us!” The sound had an undercurrent of both desperation and an ominous threat. Chilka, catching Nenan’s eye at last, saw that the young man’s reserve had dropped around him again. His glance was frightened and respectful, the regard of a stranger. Chilka reached out and grasped his arm.

  “Begin to walk slowly toward the House,” the guard said, himself white under the bluster. “Whatever you do, don’t run.” Nenan shouldered his way to lead. Chilka followed him, careful to look only at his straight back, and the guard brought up the rear. Slowly they left the market, but the crowd surged after them, still chanting. Bystanders joined it, not knowing what was happening but happy to shout and wave also, and it was a flood of humanity that washed up against the gate and broke when the three men slipped through.

  The guard mopped his brow. “God indeed!” he snapped. “I don’t know how these rumors get started. Not from the captain, but from his soldiers, I suppose. Go about your business, Chilka. They’ll soon get tired of wasting time, and besides, when night comes, they’ll go home quickly enough.”

  Chilka and Nenan walked unsteadily to the kitchens. “I had almost forgotten,” Nenan said in a low voice. “I wanted to forget!”

  Chilka stopped and turned to him. “I want you to forget also, Nenan,” he replied, deeply troubled. “Sometimes I myself forget, and it is good to be Chilka alone. Let us both forget, until the time comes when I must act.”

  Nenan smiled tremulously, but Danarion sensed the distance in him, the drawing away, and was hurt beyond measure.

  The crowd scattered just before sunset, but that night it seemed to Chilka that the sounds of loss and anguish were louder than before in the shadows beyond the sheltering gate, and he fancied that he heard his name called in the House several times. Nenan lay on the bed and answered his attempts at conversation with noncommittal grunts. Presently he slept, but his sleep was troubled, and Chilka sat and watched him twitch and moan.

  “Are you really a god?” Yarne asked him the next morning before they began their work, and Chilka laughed.

  “No, master. I am Chilka, your slave.”

  “Well, why do the people stand outside the gate and shout for you? The captain went out and told them how you were only wounded.”

  “They do not believe it. They have a need to believe something else.”

  “What?”

  “That I have come to save them from themselves.”

  Yarne did not reply. Again that curious stillness fell on him, the seeming absence of all the tiny movements that show life in even the most motionless of men. In his throat the heartbeat throbbed, unchanging and unvarying in its ponderous rhythm. When he did speak again, it was to begin the dictation.

  24

  For many days crowds continued to gather at the gate. Soldiers tried to drive them away, but they always came back. The three judges, Melfidor, Veltim, and Fitrec, who processed across the courtyard in their stiff brocaded robes of gold and blue with their guards before and their slaves behind, spoke to them scornfully, but it made little difference. At night it often seemed to Chilka that the whole of Ishban was congregated just outside the frail protection of his cell, moaning and wailing for him in reproach and longing. Time finally did what soldier and ruler could not. Chilka took care to stay in the House unseen by them, and eventually they forgot why they had come, lost interest, and went home. Only a handful stubbornly came every day, convinced that behind a slave’s lined face there was a thing of exotic power or an example of miracle, but Chilka was able to slip past them with Nenan unremarked.

  As day flowed into day Danarion felt himself tied ever more strongly to the man that had been, his essence nestling closer into Chilka’s warm cells. With an increasing effort he tried to remember his purpose in Ishban. He suspected that the mysterious Lady would hold the answer to the whereabouts of the Gate if only he could reach her. He prowled the House in the evenings before his guard came for him, climbing the stair to the door without handles or lock behind which she lived, following little-used passages that might reveal another entrance to her chamber but which always ended in dusty storerooms or forgotten balconies. Sometimes he stood outside the House, craning upward to the slitted windows of her room, overcome with frustration at the sheerness of the rock wall. He read Shol’s Annals in the hours when Yarne was with his sister, hoping that Sholia’s words might provide a clue. He listened to the gossip of the streets and the often incoherent babbling of the two-minds in the night but heard nothing of consequence. Gradually his sense of urgency began to fade, until a moment came when he stood facing the Lady’s door and wondered why he was there. He knew he wanted to see her, that somehow she was connected to the thing that had happened to him by the lake, but Chilka whispered in his mind, You were so badly wounded. Death entered you for a second, bringing strange visions, changing you. There is a scar on your mind to match the visible weal on your body. This insanity will heal, this dream of sun-lords and worlds in space, this spurious other self who has such power will slowly weaken as the memory of death recedes. Lallin was right when she told you you had gone mad. His hand slid under his shirt, fingering the scar, and the feel of it was reassuring. Fate was kind to me, he thought as he turned back down the stair. It gave me back my life.

  Summer faded into autumn, a brief season of rain and strong winds that collapsed into light snow and watery skies. Something told Chilka that Shol was a stranger to such seasonal definition, that snow was a new thing, that once the seasons could only be measured by a changing color on the trees and in the ocean and by the smell of the air, but he did not follow the thought.

  He missed Lallin more as time went by, thinking of her sitting alone in the cottage, her shawl around her shoulders, her face turned placidly to the firelight, and sometimes he thought of her naked, that same firelight playing on her small, compact limbs and soft breasts, but those thoughts were old, dark memories, broken by the thing that had happened to him in the summer, by the lake.

  Only at work with Yarne in the muffled quiet of the relic room did he reflect. Yarne puzzled him in a way he could not remember being puzzled before. The routine of his life had not dulled that nagging doubt. Yarne was a man distressed as much by a slave’s empty belly as by the occasional execution in the city. He was easy to love, warm in his concern for Chilka and Nenan, uncomplicated in his devotion to the task he had been allowed to take on himself by the Lady. His beauty made one hold one’s breath, and every morning Chilka was struck anew by the smooth transparency of the skin, the glittering blue eyes, the grace of hand, voice, and walk, the shining paleness of the matchless hair.

  Yet under all this was a mystery, a sea of things unknown. Sometimes Yarne seemed like an object caused to move and speak, smile and laugh, and between these things to be shut off, like the closing and opening of a gate. He seemed to feel neither heat nor cold, and when the snow fell and Chilka shivered at the desk, he would be garbed in a thin, sleeveless white tunic, and his feet on the stone would be bare. Yet when he touched his slave in affection or gentle remonstrance, his long fingers were always cold. He was a man, Chilka refl
ected, without emotions, save the slight ripples of convention. Chilka knew that he must know Yarne, that it was important to pierce to the heart that caused the steady flicker in the white throat, but it often occurred to him that perhaps within Yarne there was nothing.

  He worked and watched and was unaware that he also waited. He cooked and served, washed Yarne’s clothes and made his bed, mixed his inks and took his notes. Twice a day the tiny bell would send out its polite summons, and Yarne would tell him to tidy the room, leaving to climb the stair to its summit, where, under the ragged roof of the House, the Lady lived.

  No one ever saw her, but she was everywhere. Nothing was done without reference to her. She dominated every conversation in the city and in the cells of the slaves. She was the subject of worship, conjecture, oath-making, and fear. Sometimes Chilka would go to the door to watch his master run lightly up the stair, and to peer into the shadows that always seemed to lie inside the great summit spires of the House, but though he often saw the vast double doors open to admit Yarne, he caught no glimpse of the hand that swung them inward.

  Ishban by day was endlessly fascinating to Nenan. He and Chilka explored it from wall to gate and back again, the only slaves within the House to be given that privilege. But a restlessness had begun in Nenan, growing with his increasing fear of Ishban’s haunted nights, and one evening in their cell he asked Chilka diffidently, “Father, isn’t it time we went back to the mountains? You can run away anytime you choose, you know you can. Have you done what you came back for?”

  Why did I come back? Chilka wondered. Wings, bells, and a Gate. I promised Yarne that I would not hurt him again. But is it worth leaving Lallin to wait uncomprehendingly for me and allowing my son to grow to manhood in Ishban? What am I waiting for? He shrugged and managed a wry smile. “I do not think so,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

  Nenan’s face mirrored frustration, anger. “Perhaps it is a cunning lie,” he whispered. “Perhaps they have put a spell on you, these past six years, so that no matter how you try, you can never tear Ishban out of your essence. Can the two-minds drug the essences of their slaves with words? Are fear and hatred themselves drugs? I have come to feel both. You were right. Ishban is a mirage, a vision just out of reach of my understanding. I am beginning to doubt my own memories.”

  “So am I.” Chilka tried to smile. “I know I have been on Shol all my life. I know I have a wife in the mountains who still waits for me with a damning patience. But sometimes I am equally sure that I only came to Shol last summer and I have an overlord on Danar who paces by my empty body and peers into his mirror at a Gate that is no longer there.” He sighed and lay on the bed. “Perhaps I am mad, but there is something within me that compels me to see my madness through to its end. I must wait, Nenan.”

  Nenan scowled. “You showed me visions on the mountain, and then I believed. But visions fade with time, and now I only want to go home.” He sat on the floor, prepared to argue, but saw that his father had fallen asleep.

  In the morning Yarne sent for Chilka. He climbed the stairs that seemed to hang suspended over the terrifying void of the hollow-House and knocked on the little door, hearing Yarne’s permission to enter as he swung it open. He had not slept well. He had dreamed vividly and frighteningly of nothingness, of the space between the stars, black and awesomely empty, and his dream came back to him as he advanced into the room. No sunlight fell through the straight, thin windows. The sky was sullen and heavy with unshed snow. Yarne stood by the window, lit palely, and Chilka fancied that the wanness of the day had somehow entered the blue-tinged skin and dulled the sparkling eyes.

  “I have ordered our notes,” Yarne said. “Today we will begin a discussion on the scrap of poem that was found in the jar. I am tired of the book. I don’t want to see it today.”

  Chilka was shocked. The book was Yarne’s family, his lover, his friend. “Very well,” he said and moved to the desk, uncovering the ink and picking up a pen. Clean paper lay before him. He lifted the mantle of the lamp and lit it and then sat waiting. The moments ticked by. Yarne still gazed abstractedly out the window, and presently a few flakes of snow drifted past his set face, gray and silent. Chilka noticed that he wore a white cloak, and his feet were booted. Then Yarne spoke, still without turning his head.

  “I had a dream last night,” he said. “I have never dreamed before. I dreamed that I was dead, that I was not immortal, that I had died a thousand times, over and over. My life was a thousand lives, all the same, and at the end, a thousand deaths, all the same. I dreamed a great nothingness, out among the stars. I dreamed of you.” Then he turned, and Chilka saw that he was shivering under the thick warmth of the cloak. “I dreamed of you,” he repeated, leaning wearily against the window frame, his face no longer in shadow but yellow in the lamp’s glow. “You were the book, and the book was you, out there where there is no life, only black nothingness. Tell me, Chilka, what is it like to die?”

  The snow was falling faster, swirling with a faint hiss against the window. Chilka felt his mouth go dry. “I did not die, Yarne. I have told you. I was only deeply wounded.”

  Yarne sighed. “You are the only one who believes so,” he said, his words slow and inexact. “When I woke, I was oppressed by the nothingness of my dream. I tried to fill it with memories, but I do not remember a father or mother, a childhood in the mountains, as some say I had, or a house other than this House. There are only my sister and I, forever. I am a nothingness, Chilka. I am a mystery even to myself.”

  There was a lonely vulnerability about the youth that tugged at Chilka’s heart. “Did you tell your sister the dream?”

  Yarne smiled wanly. “I did. She said nothing for a long time. She just looked at me. And then she asked me about you.” Chilka’s heartbeat quickened. He laid down the pen but kept silent. “She spoke sharply to me. I had to tell her all I have learned of you since you first stood before me in your chains.”

  “It was only a dream, Yarne,” Chilka said gently. “In sleep the mind wanders, that is all, and today it is cold and gray. Tomorrow the sun will shine on the snow, and you will have forgotten this thing.”

  But Yarne was looking at him through narrowed eyes. “I have already forgotten everything,” he replied hoarsely. “I have no memories, Chilka. Only the book and my sister thread my life together. Today, for the first time, I wish the rumors that I was a one-mind stolen from the mountains to be my Lady’s kin were true. I wish you were my father and Nenan my brother.”

  “But you have a sister who is the most powerful woman in the world,” Chilka reminded him, his heart still tripping and racing in his chest. “You are loved, Yarne.”

  Yarne turned away so that his face was hidden. “Though she and I go on forever,” he said forlornly, “I do not think she loves me.”

  Something strong and familiar began to stir in Chilka. “Tell me what she is like.”

  The stillness of death fell on Yarne. Chilka waited for the odd moment to pass. When it did, Yarne put one curved finger against the pane and followed the erratic path of a stray snowflake. Suddenly Danarion, half-blind and somnolent behind the wall of Chilka’s mind, which had been strengthening so rapidly over the months, saw that the finger’s passage left no trail of warmth to melt the frost on the pane. Who are you? he shouted silently, struggling to push aside Chilka’s thoughts. Chilka resisted stubbornly, fighting to hold to the reality of a wound, a healing that had left him dislocated in mind, while Danarion, with all his powers, strove to give substance to the truth. No, Chilka, he said emphatically within himself. You are dead. Nothing is left but memories that have no life of their own. Your mind is fostering a delusion of vitality you no longer have. You walk without limbs on the Mountain of Mourning. All your emotions, all your thoughts come from the past. You cannot make them new anymore.

  “What she is like.” Yarne repeated Chilka’s words tonelessly and then took his finger away from the pane. “She is beautiful. She touches me, and I am young again. She …�
� He shrugged helplessly. “She is.”

  She is. Danarion cut savagely at Chilka’s last despairing, self-delusions. She is who, she is what? She is the key. He rose and went to Yarne, taking the head between his hands, forcing the eyes to meet his own. As always, the flesh was cold and dead to the touch. “Yarne, I want to see her. Take me to her.” Looking into those pale blue eyes was like peering into space itself, like standing on the lip of the universe before launching himself through a Gate. Yarne withdrew himself from Chilka’s grasp, and with a consciousness of deepening mystery Danarion realized that he could not influence Yarne by an imposition of the will.

  “No, I cannot, unless she wants to see you,” Yarne said. “Very few mortals have ever seen her face. If you have a petition, take it to the judges or tell me. I thought we were friends, Chilka.”

  “I have told you that we are.” Danarion had moved away from the white-clad figure. “But you are unhappy. The Lady spoke sharply to you when you wanted comfort. Why did she do that?” He had gentled his tone, and Yarne managed a brief smile.

  “I suppose that I made her angry with my dream.”

  “Do you think that something in the dream made her afraid?”

  Yarne stared at him, uncomprehending. “Nothing can make her afraid. You do not understand about her. She is like me. She feels nothing beyond the small movements of convention. But last night…” He shuddered and plucked his cloak more tightly around him. “Last night I knew fear. It was my fear that made her angry.”

  And insecure? Danarion wondered silently. He closed his eyes in defeat. There were riddles within riddles here. “Perhaps if you and I went to her together…”

  “Why?” Yarne swung from the window, and his boots clicked on the stone floor as he gestured toward the desk and began to pace, one hand raised. “We will work now. I should not have told you of my dream. It was a foolish thing to do. Sit and write my words.”