by Judith Tarr
“Rama,” she said.
He wasn’t listening. “I can smell them,” he said. “Hear them. Feel them, like sun on my skin. But I can’t—”
“You can feel them? It’s coming back, then.”
He tossed his head the way his people did, not quite a headshake. “It’s not the same.”
“It will be.” She thought about pulling him forward, but the tightness in his shoulders warned her not to touch him.
Someone came toward them down the road, a shadow against the rising sun. Aisha recognized the height and the way it moved, like a big cat.
Her name burst out of Aisha. “Daiyan! Where is my aunt?”
Daiyan didn’t break into a run, but she could walk very fast with those long legs. “Umizad?”
“You first,” Aisha said.
Daiyan dipped her head: half bow, half concession. “We had casualties. Most survived.”
“We had one,” Aisha said, and watched Daiyan’s face stiffen—as if she hadn’t known it the moment she saw Aisha and Rama alone on the road. “He’s on the ship. We’ll bring him down now we know there’s something to bring him to.” She advanced a step. Her voice lowered, almost a growl. “Where is my aunt?”
“Alive,” Daiyan said. Aisha sagged, but didn’t quite fall. “She’s still recovering.”
“So are we,” Aisha said, once she had her legs back under her. “Are we welcome here?”
“Here and in every city and town and village in our world,” Daiyan said, bowing and spreading her hands in a gesture that took in Aisha and Rama together. “We didn’t feel you coming, or we would have given you a proper welcome.”
“So you were just going for a walk in the morning?”
“Khalida tossed me out,” Daiyan said. “She said I was hovering. And that I should look for something in the field.”
Aisha found she could remember how to breathe. That was her aunt exactly. Whatever had happened to her, she was still herself.
Rama didn’t move or speak, but something Aisha couldn’t see or sense made Daiyan look past her to the darkness of him in the swelling light.
Her expression went blank. She dropped to her knees and then to her face. “Kalendros.”
“Don’t call me that.” Rama sounded exhausted beyond telling. “I wasn’t your king before. I won’t be your king now.”
“Not everyone will agree with that,” Daiyan said. She was back on her feet again, and back to herself, too—though she looked as tired as Rama sounded. “Come and have breakfast. Anything else you want or need, we’ll be happy to provide that, too. We owe you this world and everything in it.”
“You owe me nothing. Without all of you, I’d have failed.”
“Without you, that thing would still be up there, getting ready to swallow this universe whole.” Daiyan bowed again, much less deeply, and waved him on. “Come and eat.”
~~~
They went by back ways to Daiyan’s house, but people knew. People always knew. By the time they reached the door, there were eyes in every window, and random persons just happening to wander by.
Nobody tried to storm the doors. Aisha was glad to be inside in the cool dimness shot with rays of early light.
She was gladder to see her aunt sitting in the central room, waiting for them. Khalida had looked worse when she came to Nevermore from Araceli, but not by much.
She was alive, at least, and worn out but not visibly damaged. She was even hungry, which was amazing.
“I dreamed we fought a dragon,” Khalida said when breakfast was mostly done. “And I was the haft of the spear.”
“Magic works in metaphors,” Daiyan said.
“Or psi,” said Rama. “You were all there. I felt every one of you. I needed every one. To the very smallest and least.” His eyes flicked toward Daiyan. “I’ll want the count of the dead, to honor them.”
“It will be done,” she said.
She used the formal phrase. Aisha had enough of the language now to recognize it. It meant she hadn’t let go what she’d said in the field. Rama had won back what he’d lost, whether he wanted it or not.
He didn’t want it. She could feel him, a little—like someone singing far away. The song was in a minor key, but it wasn’t terribly sad. Just tired.
After six thousand years asleep, he finally, really wanted to sleep again. Though not nearly so long. A tenday would be enough.
He caught that. He was startled, and then amused. And then, very tentatively, hopeful.
“I told you it would come back,” she said inside.
~~~
A messenger from the council brought Rama the roll of the dead from all over the world. There were seven hundred and sixty and three. Not so many compared to how many survived, but he spent a good tenday learning about each one. Name and age and where each lived, family, friends, anything that mattered.
At the end of the tenday he began a long flight from city to city, to honor each one of the dead, and the living, too. He spoke to as many of the survivors as he could, and to the friends and kin and loved ones of those who had died.
Aisha went with him, to make sure he slept and ate, and to keep him from draining himself dry.
For the people it was a victory procession. They celebrated, as they should. A terrible thing was gone, and they all had helped to send it away.
For him it was penance.
“Should I find you a whip and a hair shirt?” Aisha asked him one evening, after he’d been gracious enough to sit at the feast that the people of ten towns and villages had got together to make for him. He barely ate and only pretended to sip the wine that was the pride of the region.
They’d given him the largest house in the largest town, and shown him to the largest room in the house. The bed was enormous and so new it still smelled of paint.
He wanted to sleep on the floor. Aisha wanted to kick him. “What’s with the holy martyrdom? Haven’t you just saved your world?”
“Yes,” he said, “after nearly destroying it once. Now people have died once more through my fault. In my old life I lost count of my dead. I won’t do that again. I’ll remember every one.”
“You’ve spent too much time with my aunt,” Aisha said.
“She has a conscience.”
“Yes,” said Aisha, “and how has that ever helped her? I liked you better before. You were too crazy to care about most things, but you weren’t always moping and glooming.”
That struck home. “I am not—”
“Oh, aren’t you?”
He glared at her. “What do you want me to do? Dance on a pile of skulls?”
“Wrong Govindan divinity,” Aisha said.
He sank down on the floor, drawing into a knot of pure, unrelenting No.
She was just about ready to throw up her hands and leave him to it. “Maybe I’m the idiot. The more you wallow, the more people think you’re the great tragic hero. People love tragic. They adore it. Just a little bit more and they’ll give you anything you want. Make you king. Worship you like a god.”
He spoke through clenched teeth, enunciating each word with vicious precision. “If I still had my power, you would never have dared to say such things to me.”
“Of course I would,” Aisha said. “I’m an idiot, remember?”
She did leave him with that, before she really lost her temper and started to scream at him. She didn’t even try to see inside, to know what he was feeling. She didn’t care.
In the morning he looked for once as if he’d slept. He was maybe a little less morose. Aisha didn’t let herself hope she’d woke him up to himself, but there did seem to be a difference.
~~~
He kept on with his pilgrimage, town by town and name by name of the honored dead. When he came to the council’s own capital, on the other side of the world from the mages’ city, they were waiting for him with the offer he could hardly have failed to expect.
“No,” he said.
They tried to trap him into it. Lay
in wait for him in a huge green bowl like an amphitheater, full and spilling over with wildly cheering people. Even for the rites of the dead they could barely keep their jubilation in check.
He wouldn’t put on the gold and silks and jewels that people kept trying to give him. He’d let Daiyan have a coat made for him, terribly plain as things went here: a sturdy construction, made for use, black embroidered with red and gold. The belt was only slightly ornate, and the trousers that went with it were plain soft leather, tucked into high boots that matched the coat.
He looked much better than he wanted to, with his ancient gold. Nearly everyone out-glittered him, which only made him more noticeable.
The councilor who had been rudest of all had her own penance to pay: she knelt in front of Rama and said, “My lord, we have all decided. We will accept your rule. You are king and emperor. We bow before you.”
And he said, “No.”
They hadn’t expected that. They hadn’t been paying attention.
People like that, Aisha had noticed, knew what they knew. These were completely shocked, or pretending to be. “Majesty!” said Elti.
“No,” Rama said again.
“You refuse the wish and prayer of all the people?”
“With gratitude and deep respect, I do refuse it.”
She narrowed her eyes. Her old self was back, striking sparks off him, and daring him to punish her for it. “What will you do, then?”
He smiled. Aisha hadn’t seen him do that since before he fought the beast. He turned his face to the sun and said, “Go home.”
A long sigh ran through the crowd. Not of homesickness. They were too far from Nevermore, too many years, too many generations. Still, it was a powerful word.
“There is no way back,” Elti said.
“There is if I can find one,” said Rama.
“You’ll abandon us, then? Leave us alone on the far side of the sky?”
“Did I say that?”
Elti rocked back on her heels. “You won’t rule us, but you’ll lead us out of this place?”
“I’m a pirate captain,” he said. “I have a ship. It won’t hold all of you, but those who really want to go, who really want to see…”
“Who really want to die,” Elti said. “You can’t do it.”
Rama laughed. Aisha hadn’t heard that, either, in much too long. “Oh, you know how to make me spark and snap! Maybe I can’t. But if I can—if it is at all possible—I will do it.”
~~~
“I don’t think it is possible,” Daiyan said.
They’d come back to the mages’ city that morning. Tomorrow they would take the shuttle to Ship and bring Umizad’s body down, and honor him last of all the dead.
Tonight they sat in Daiyan’s house. Here of all the places they’d been, nobody crowded in on them. Mages—psi masters—had that courtesy.
“It is theoretically possible to go back the way we came,” Dr. Ma said through Aisha. “The mathematics and physics are complicated to say the least, and our psionics are so rudimentary as to be effectively useless, but—”
Kirkov rode smoothly past her toward a conceivable point. “She means that if we can find a way to restore the link, then lock in a course, we may be able to do what we did in reverse.”
“It won’t be the same route,” said Dr. Ma. “Orientations will have changed. Distances. Relative locations. We could aim in what we think is the right direction, and find ourselves in a universe even less hospitable than this one.”
“The link is key,” Kirkov said. “Our command of psionics is miserably bad, but this world has been developing and studying it for centuries. You said yourself, if we combine forces—”
“There is still a gate,” said Rama. “We closed it, but the connections remain. Here, and there.”
“Are you sure?” Khalida asked. “There was a very real possibility that the anchors would be killed when we broke through.”
“Zhao, you mean,” said Kirkov. “Our one and only trained psi. With the nulls as deflectors.”
“He was alive when we came through,” Rama said.
“But is he alive now?” Khalida stared them all down. “We can’t go back physically unless we have a connection on the other side.”
“Yes,” said Daiyan. Her voice was quiet, but Khalida, for a wonder, shut her mouth and lowered her eyes. “It’s a gamble, though maybe less of one now the eater is gone. Isn’t it worth taking?”
“Maybe not for me,” Khalida said.
They’d had that argument before, Aisha could tell.
Daiyan’s lips tightened, but she kept going. “We can’t take this world with us. That, when it was first done, needed more mages than we have, and the eater’s power to draw on—and the willingness to strip the energy of suns as we went. We’re not desperate any longer. We’re not trying to save a universe.”
“Only to go back to a world you abandoned millennia ago,” said Khalida. “There’s nothing left. Don’t you get that? It’s barely even ruins. They’ve all fallen into the grass, or the sea, or under the rubble of mountains.”
“But it’s ours,” Daiyan said.
“Was yours. Six thousand of your years ago.”
“Less than a thousand of mine.” Daiyan touched her shoulder lightly, a simple brush of a finger.
Khalida erupted out of her chair and bolted.
They all sat mute for a while after that. Aisha felt as if a bomb had gone off.
Finally Rama said, “I am going to try it. I don’t care if it kills me. I promised to take Aisha home. I will do that.”
“And then what?” Aisha demanded—surprising herself. She wasn’t angry like Khalida or, for that matter, Elti. But she did want to know.
He raised his hands. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
If he touched her the way Daiyan had touched Khalida, she would knock him flat. Or try to.
He didn’t touch her. Which was disappointing. “I don’t know what I will do. Do I have to decide now?”
“Decide to say alive,” she said. “Start there.”
“I can try.”
That was a promise. She intended to hold him to it.
66
It was not as easy to have something to live for as Khalida might have expected. The aftermath of cosmic battle left her feeling both more solid and more fragile than she had ever felt. She had done impossible things. She had helped to save a world.
Physically she would heal. Psionically, too, these masters assured her. She was stripped to the metal, that was all. Time and training would mend her.
It was her heart, her emotions, that left her in a state of furious confusion. Daiyan took it all in stride, as if she had always expected to fall in love with an alien from the other side of the sky. Most likely she had; she was a moderately strong precog, as the Corps would say.
Daiyan was a world in herself. She had children. Grandchildren. A whole tribe, and two men who were not her husbands and for whom she felt nothing of what she felt for Khalida, but they were able lovers, she said. And dear friends.
She would leave them all behind. Not without a second thought—she was hardly that cold—but they had their own worlds to conquer. She wanted to walk living on the far side of the sky, and set foot on the world of her ancestors.
Khalida wanted that. She wanted her own world back, if it could be done. Considering what she had aided and abetted Rama in the doing of, her piece of it might be three square meters of high-security prison.
The terror that kept her up at night, that made her heart beat so hard she thought it might burst, was that, having found Daiyan, she would lose her again in the not-space between universes. Her own death was nothing to be afraid of. Daiyan’s death—that, she could not endure.
“Life is a grand gamble,” Daiyan said.
She had taken her time leaving the breakfast gathering. She found Khalida in the room they shared, sitting stiffly on the ledge by the window. Mountains
soared above her and a grand storm piled up over the peaks, but she barely saw it.
Daiyan’s arm circled her shoulders. Daiyan’s lips brushed her hair. “If we die, we’ll die together. I plan to live. I expect you to do the same.”
“I’m out of the habit of that,” Khalida said.
“Then it’s time you got back in.”
Khalida wanted to snarl, but Daiyan would laugh. She pushed herself away instead, and said, “All right then. Where does this expedition start?”
“With the rite of the dead,” Daiyan answered, “and a gathering of mages.”
“Psi masters.”
Daiyan’s smile was her only response.
~~~
They laid Umizad to rest high on the mountain, where the masters of mages were set in a cave without door or barrier to the wind and the rain and any animals that fed on the bodies of the dead. The bones of his predecessors were arranged tidily in niches, skull beside skull and femur beside femur.
Khalida the archaeologist had much to observe and compare. Khalida the renegade and lover helped lay the mage’s body on the stone table in the center of the cave. It was cold and stiff and unexpectedly light.
She was more than a little sorry that they had removed it from the ship’s strange and beautiful storage chamber. That would have been a marvel in this place. But tradition was stronger than alien wonders.
Carrion birds were already circling as the mages began their ritual. That particular chant must serve as a summons, and the interplay of light and psionically manipulated air only served to keep them from closing in before the rite ended.
They played his life in the cave, images of Umizad as child and man, novice mage and journeyman and master. He was older than Khalida might have believed, though not quite as old as the crossing into this universe. He had done wonderful things, and terrible things, and one last, splendid, deadly thing. Now he rested, and they left him to it, descending on foot as they had ascended, back to the city and the preparations for departure.
~~~
A thousand would go. The Ra-Harakhte could hold that many, with the stores they needed. Many more would have gone, but if this insanity succeeded, and the gate held, it would only be the first expedition.
