The Stone of the Stars

by Alison Baird

  They all shook their heads.

  The prior groaned. Damion Athariel had been raised in the orphanage of his monastery back in Maurainia, and ordained to the priesthood a little over a year ago. Though he was a fine theologian for his age and strongly committed to mission work, the prior often worried about him. “If there’s trouble of any kind, one thing’s for certain,” he fretted, his annoyance masking a rising anxiety. “Damion will manage to be right in the thick of it.” How like him to go for one last walk about the city only moments before news broke of the Armada’s approach!

  The prior went back inside and stood in the main hall, blinking as his sun-dazzled eyes readjusted. People milled about him in the dim light.

  “A Zimbouran galley is here, with priests and soldiers—and there are more ships on the way!” someone shouted. The crowd in the hall buzzed at the news, like a hive struck by a stone. Prior Vale, forcing down the panic that rose in his own mind, fought his way to the Kaanish monks stationed by the main doors. Yes, they said, Father Damion had gone out; but no one had seen him return.

  “I am sorry,” one monk told him, speaking with the same quiet fatalism the abbot had shown. “But there is nothing to be done. I understand you were close to this young man, and I promise that if we find him we will take him in. But you must get your own people down to the harbor before very long, or none of you will be able to leave.”

  Prior Vale knew it was useless to argue. As he turned away there was a fresh outburst of cries and exclamations from the other end of the hall. The refugees were scattering in apparent panic. Not the Zimbourans already? he wondered, staring in alarm at the scene. Then he saw a lone figure, swathed entirely in rags, limping in at the door. The man’s face and hands were completely covered, and even from here the prior could smell the foul odor of decay that emanated from him.

  Dear God—a leper! The man’s fear of the Zimbourans must have driven him to seek sanctuary here, despite his terrible illness. One of the monks hastened toward the ragged figure and, standing at a safe distance, remonstrated with him. In response, the man unwound his head-cloths to expose, surprisingly, a healthy, youthful face surmounted by fair hair. He called out something to the monk, who came forward looking bemused, and handed him what appeared to be a bundle of dirty rags.

  Prior Vale started. “Damion Athariel!” he shouted, rushing forward. “For the love of Heaven, what do you think you’re doing? And where have you been?” He felt weak at the knees with relief.

  “Down in the city, Father,” Damion replied. He began to struggle out of his foul-smelling rags, like an insect fighting its way out of a chrysalis.

  “What games have you been up to?” Now that Damion was safe, Prior Vale was free to be angry. “A priest of the True Faith dressing up as a leper! What do you mean by this behavior? What were you doing?”

  Damion bent to massage his shin, wincing: apparently the lameness at least was unfeigned. “I . . . well, the truth is, I’ve been having a bit of an adventure, Father. I’ve been hiding at the bottom of a rubbish heap—sorry about the smell—and to get back here safely I had to disguise myself with these rags. No one interferes with a leper, so—”

  “What did you give to the Brother just now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. I just wish I could have helped the lad who gave it to me, even if he did land me in a mess. I hope he got away from the Zimbourans . . .”

  Zimbourans! “Has the Armada come, then?”

  Damion stared. “Armada? No, it was just some soldiers off a galley in the harbor. Is the Armada on its way, then? That would explain why they were so bold.”

  “I should have known this was another one of your escapades,” complained the bewildered prior. “Yes, the fleet’s on its way and we’re leaving, thanks be, so you’ll have no more chances to get yourself into adventures.”

  “Brother Damion?” The monk who had spoken with Damion at the front door had reappeared. “The abbot would like to speak with you in the chapel, as soon as possible.”

  “I’ll be with him directly,” Damion answered, wondering, Why in the chapel? He turned to Prior Vale. “And the Kaanish monks, Father? Are they leaving with us?”

  “No, they’re staying here, of course! It’s their country, after all.”

  Damion looked troubled. “I hate to leave these people, Father. I was beginning to like this place—to feel I belonged. I wish there was something we could do, instead of just turning tail and fleeing back to Maurainia. It makes me feel like the proverbial rat abandoning ship.”

  “I always did think,” the prior muttered when Damion had moved out of earshot, “that that rat showed a certain amount of sense.”

  ABBOT SHAN MET HIM at the chapel door.

  “You sent for me, Father?” Damion asked.

  The abbot nodded. “Come in.”

  Inside lay a cool stone interior, the tropical sun pouring through tinted windows to pool in molten hues along the floor. Damion entered, then stopped short. There was another person in the chapel, seated in an ornate gilded chair to one side of the marble altar—a figure clad not in the white western-style robe worn by the monks, but in garb more like that of a Kaanish holy man: a robe richly patterned with red, gold, and saffron, and a tall golden headdress fringed with scarlet tassels. From behind the tassels light blue eyes gazed at him out of a fair-skinned face.

  The face was that of the street waif.

  But now that the grimy rag-turban was gone, a braid of long blonde hair was revealed hanging down the figure’s back, and the slender silk-clad body showed curves that the ragged shirt and baggy trousers had concealed.

  “You . . .” Damion lost his tongue; sputtered; found it again. “You’re a girl!”

  She grinned at him from underneath the fantastic headdress. Now that her face was clean, he noticed its features more: they were strong and regular, not pretty in the classic sense, but with a bone-firm beauty of their own. “You didn’t guess?” she said in her clear contralto voice. “I only wear boy’s clothes when I’m down in the city. It’s safer that way. Here at home, though—”

  He stared. “Home? Are you saying that you live here?”

  “Yes. I’ve lived here all my life.” The girl turned from him to the abbot, tassels swaying around her face. “May I go now, Father?”

  “Yes, Lorelyn. Return to your room and pack your things: I will summon you soon.”

  Lorelyn. In the old Elei tongue the name meant “Daughter of Heaven.” As the girl rose he noticed how tall she was, her head on a level with his. She swept out of the room with a rustle of her silken robe, and the abbot gazed after her with pensive eyes. “The ways of God are mysterious to men,” he observed when she had gone. “We have tried for years to forbid Lorelyn from leaving the safe confines of the cloister, but always she would climb the walls and steal out to walk the streets on her own. The girl has no real understanding of danger, having led such a sheltered life here. When we warned her of the risks facing one of her sex in the city’s alleys, she merely assumed male attire, taking discarded clothing from trash heaps. We thought her willful and difficult, and all along it was a plan of the Almighty to thwart our enemies. He intended that she should be down in the city today, and do what no one else dared.”

  Damion stared at the abbot in perplexity. “Father—why is a woman living in your monastery? Where did she come from?”

  “We do not know,” the abbot replied. “She appeared quite mysteriously, sixteen years ago: we arose for our dawn prayers one morning and found her sitting on the grass in the central court. It was as though she had dropped down out of the sky; indeed, some of the Brothers called it a miracle. She was very small then, scarcely old enough to walk and speak, so we could not question her. We do not usually take in orphans—ours is a contemplative order, and we never leave the walls of the monastery once our vows are taken. But she was a special case.”

 
Damion was puzzled. The child of a Kaanish beggar might be smuggled into a monastery as an act of desperation, but there was no such thing as a poor westerner in the Archipelagoes. Only merchants came here as a rule, apart from the celibate missionaries. Was she illegitimate? She did not look like a child of mixed race—and if she were unwanted wouldn’t she have been abandoned at birth? Why would her mother wait until she was old enough to walk?

  “Her unexplained arrival is not the only curious thing about her,” Abbot Shan continued. He gestured to Damion to sit in a pew and the priest was glad to obey: he was beginning to feel slightly giddy, and his twisted ankle was throbbing. The abbot sat down beside him. “She hears voices in her head—the voices of saints and angels, or so we believe. As a small child she would often laugh at nothing, or babble away at empty space, or follow with her eyes things no one else could see. Sometimes we could not reach her at all: it was as though she dwelt in a world of her own, some realm apart from this earthly one.”

  “What do these, er, voices say to her?” Damion asked.

  “She cannot say: she does not hear them clearly enough.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The heavenly voices are indistinct—she says that it is like hearing people talking in a closed room some distance away. The sound of the voices comes through, but not the words. In time, though, I am sure they will become clearer. We believe that she is a holy being, and will one day be a prophetess—perhaps even a saint.”

  Remembering her rough and reckless behavior in the alley, Damion felt the girl was an unlikely candidate for sainthood. But he restrained himself from saying so.

  “When she has reached an even higher state of grace, no doubt all will be made plain to her,” the abbot continued. “She will converse with saints and angels, and convey their revelations to other mortals. We have been instructing her in the holy scriptures and the lives of the saints, to prepare her for the role she must play.”

  The poor girl’s mad, Abbot—mad! That’s why her parents abandoned her: they must have seen the signs. None of what Damion thought showed in his face, however: it was a mask of attentive concern. He had no wish to offend a good and kindly man, who was sheltering Damion and the western monks at his own risk: a man who might well be dead in a few days’ time.

  “We would be grateful if you would take Lorelyn away with you, to Maurainia,” said the abbot. “Her fair coloring stands out here, and the Zimbourans will kill her if they find her.”

  “I will take her to the Continent,” promised Damion, thinking: I can leave her with the nuns at the Royal Academy. They’ll care for her, give her shelter and schooling. Perhaps she can even be cured.

  “If, as we believe, she truly is a saint, then she has some great destiny to fulfill. Perhaps she has already done it, by taking the relic from the Zimbourans.”

  Damion now noticed the cloth bundle lying atop the altar. “What is this relic, Father?” he asked.

  The abbot stared into space for several moments before replying. “Five hundred years ago, before the last Zimbouran invasion, brave monks of your country brought the True Faith to the Archipelagoes. In those days there was a monastery in Jardjana that guarded a great secret.” He looked at Damion. “You know of the Meraalia—the Star Stone of Trynisia?”

  “The Star Stone . . .” The words came to Damion along with a memory: the musty smell breathing from the pages of ancient books, long happy hours spent with the other orphanage boys in the Royal Academy’s library. “Yes, of course: it’s mentioned in the scriptures, and in some of the apocryphal writings too.”

  A soft gleam lit the depths of the old man’s eyes. “Then you know the Stone was a holy gem, made by the angels—whom the ancients called the gods. And the angel Modrian, whom we call the Fiend, wore it in his crown before he was cast out of Heaven. The Fiend plots to seize it again, with the aid of his earthly servants, to keep its power out of his enemies’ hands.”

  “So,” Damion ventured, translating the abbot’s words, “the Zimbourans want to find the Stone.”

  “Of course. For to them, also, the Star Stone has great significance: it belonged to Modrian whom they call Valdur, their god. They wish to return it to him—or rather to his new avatar, that great warlord whom the Fiend will send to challenge us, a man in whose mind and body Modrian-Valdur will dwell.”

  “King Khalazar.” Damion nodded. “I believe I understand now. If Khalazar were to display the Stone before his people, it would prove that he is their god returned in human form? And he would have the priesthood under his thumb as well. But why doesn’t he simply pretend that he has it? Any large gemstone would do—”

  “You do not understand,” Shan said. “Khalazar believes in the Stone, as devoutly as we—as firmly as he believes in his own destiny. A false Stone would not give him the powers he needs to defeat his prophesied adversary.” Shan rose and went to the altar, and Damion followed him. Carefully the abbot peeled away the stained layers of cloth, revealing a wooden box about twice as long as his hand. The sides were intricately carved, with six-pointed stars and crescent moons in a repeating pattern, and on the lid was a relief of two gryphonlike creatures facing each other, with another star between them. The stars had tiny blue gems at their centers, and the eyes of the gryphons were chips of some yellow stone—topaz, perhaps, or yellow diamond.

  Damion stared from the box to the abbot and back again. “You’re not saying the Star Stone is in there?”

  “Not the Stone itself, no.” Shan lifted the lid—it was not hinged, but came straight off like a pot-lid—and took from the box’s interior a small parchment scroll. It was obviously very old, brown with age and webbed with fine cracks.

  “What is it?” asked Damion.

  Shan opened the scroll slowly and with infinite care. “The relic of which I spoke was the lost scroll of Bereborn. It is told among us that a knight of that name came here long ago after the fall of Trynisia, bringing with him a scroll from the holy city of Liamar—a scroll that the monks of Saint Athariel here on Jana guarded throughout the early days of the Dark Age.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember that story now,” Damion said. “But wasn’t the scroll destroyed?”

  “It was. At the start of the Dark Age the Zimbourans returned to the worship of Valdur, and they raided the Archipelagoes, sacking the temples of all other faiths and burning their holy relics, including those of the western monks on Jana. But though the sacred scroll was destroyed in that raid, it was said that one day its prophecies would reappear in written form. We thought that meant a miracle would occur, but as you see, the explanation is much simpler.”

  Damion cast a dubious eye at the aged parchment. “Are you trying to tell me that’s . . . a copy of the scroll?”

  “It was found only recently,” said Shan. “The Zimbouran attack of five centuries ago was a sudden one: it seems the monks only had enough time to conceal their extra copy of Bereborn’s scroll before the marauders came with sword and torch. The good brothers were slain, and the secret of the second scroll was lost—until recently. The priests of the Kaanish shrine, wishing to conceal their own sacred treasures from King Khalazar, searched yesterday beneath their floors for hiding places and came across—this. Their shrine, you see, was built upon the original foundations of the old western monastery. Their high priest sent word to me this morning of his find, and asked if I wished to have it. He was going to dispatch one of his brethren to deliver it to me. But the Zimbouran priests invaded the shrine, as you saw, and had Lorelyn not been there to take the scroll from them in turn, it would now be on its way to Khalazar.”

  “What does it say, Father?” Damion asked. From where he stood he could see that the first section was written in Kaanish characters.

  Abbot Shan was silent for a moment. Then slowly he began to read aloud. “‘I, Brother Haran, servant of the One True Faith in this house of God, am honored with the great task of copying the holy words of our most sacred testament, the scroll of Bereborn, in this y
ear of 2530 of the New Era. The scroll, old when first it came to us, now suffers greatly from age, and the abbot fearing it will soon fade beyond legibility bids me prepare a copy so that when the original shall perish, its holy truths shall not.

  “‘These words were written by the enlightened people of the north, whose land is now lost. The scroll of Bereborn from which I copy them was itself but a copy of an older document: and so no man can say how ancient are these words I must now write.’” The abbot paused, then pushed the scroll over to Damion’s side of the altar. “The rest is in Elensi,” he said.

  Damion, like all western clerics, was schooled in the old Elei tongue. He looked down at the lines of crabbed writing and read aloud: “‘Hear now the words of Eliana, highest among sibyls: Behold, the Queen of Heaven shall bring forth a maid-child, the Princess of the Stars, in whom shall lie the hope of the world. For a warrior prince shall rise up in Modrian’s name, and ravage the Earth like a dragon spreading war and ruin.’” This much was familiar to Damion: there were similar prophecies of the Tryna Lia and her adversary in one of the old apocryphal writings. But now it continued: “‘By these signs shall ye know her time is come: the sun in the land of the west shall hide its face at noon; and a great star shall shine by day; and many of the sons and daughters of men shall arise and prophesy. In those days the Princess shall walk the Earth, and shall seek for the Stone of Heaven where it lies upon the holy mount. For with it alone can she conquer the warrior prince, the vassal of the Dark One; and he will pursue her across land and sea, to wrest the Stone from her.’”

  The passage ended there. Beneath this last section of text was a crudely drawn map of some unfamiliar landmass surrounded by the sea. And that was all.

  Shan placed a trembling hand upon the parchment. “The prophecy’s reappearance cannot be an accident: it must mean that the time of the Tryna Lia’s coming is very near.”

  Damion’s eyes drifted up to the fresco painted on the wall above the altar: a flight of angels, armored as for war, battling a horde of hideous bat-winged demons. In the foreground of the scene a black-scaled dragon with a jeweled crown between its horns was attacking a white-robed female figure. She also wore a crown, and set in it was a starlike object surrounded by rays of light. “To defeat him she needs the Stone of Heaven and the power it confers,” Shan continued, also looking at the mural. “And now King Khalazar has learned of this scroll, and is seeking it. He must not find it! He may well be that evil prince of whom the scriptures speak, the rampaging monster sent to destroy us. And in this, the oldest version of the prophecy, the Tryna Lia’s victory is not assured. Her enemy can wrest the Stone from her, and leave her weaponless!”