The movements of the man, who hadn’t noticed the phenomenon at all, became more and more urgent, and the sounds he was uttering more and more amusing.
‘Whooops,’ said the girl on the black mare. ‘Another mistake! It’s not this place, not this time. And what’s more, I see, it’s a bad time. I’m sorry.’
The image blurred and shattered, as painted glass shatters, suddenly fell to pieces, disintegrated into a rainbow-coloured twinkling of sparkles, gleaming and gold. And then all of it vanished.
‘No!’ screamed Nimue. ‘No! Don’t disappear! I don’t want you to go!’
She straightened her knees and tried to free herself from under the man, but she could not – he was stronger and heavier than her. The man groaned and moaned.
‘Oooooh, Nimue . . . Ooooh!’
Nimue screamed and dug her teeth into his shoulder.
They lay on his sheepskin coat, quivering and hot. Nimue looked at the lake shore, at the caps of foam whipped up by the waves. At the reeds bent over by the wind. At the colourless, hopeless void, the void left by the disappearing legend.
A tear trickled down the novice’s nose.
‘Nimue . . . Is something the matter?’
‘Yes.’ She cuddled up to him, but carried on looking at the lake. ‘Don’t say anything. Hold me and don’t say anything.’
The man smiled proudly.
‘I know what happened,’ he said boastfully. ‘Did the earth move?’
Nimue smiled sadly.
‘Not just the earth,’ she replied after a moment’s silence. ‘Not just the earth.’
*
A flash. Darkness. The next place.
*
The next place was tenebrous, baleful and foul.
Ciri involuntarily hunched over in the saddle, shaken – both in the literal and the metaphorical sense of the term. For Kelpie’s horseshoes had thudded against something as painfully hard, flat and unyielding as rock. After a long time of gliding in very soft limbo, the impression of hardness was so astonishing and unpleasant that the mare neighed and suddenly lunged aside, beating out a staccato rhythm on the ground that made Ciri’s teeth chatter.
The second shock, the metaphorical one, was supplied by the smell. Ciri groaned and covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve. She felt her eyes immediately filling with tears.
All around rose a sour, acrid, thick and glutinous stench, a smell of burning both choking and dreadful, impossible to define, resembling nothing Ciri had ever smelled. It was – she was certain of it – the stench of decay, a corpselike reek of final degradation and degeneration, the odour of disintegration and destruction; in addition, there was the impression that whatever was decaying hadn’t smelled any more pleasantly when it was alive. Not even when it had been in its salad days.
She bent over in a nauseous reflex she was unable to control. Kelpie snorted and shook her head, contracting her nostrils. The unicorn, which had materialised beside them, leaned back on his haunches, jumped up and kicked. The hard ground answered with a shock and a loud echo.
All around was the night, the dark and filthy night, muffled by the sticky and reeking tatters of darkness.
Ciri glanced upwards, searching for the stars, but there was nothing above her, only an abyss, lit up in places by an indistinct, red glow, like a distant fire.
‘Whooops,’ she said and grimaced, feeling the sour and rotten mist settling on her lips. ‘Yuuuckk! Not this place, not this time! Under no circumstances!’
The unicorn snorted and nodded his head, his horn describing a short and dynamic arc.
The ground grinding beneath Kelpie’s hooves was rock, but strange, unnaturally smooth, emitting an intensive stench of burning and dirty ash. It took some time for Ciri to realise that what she was looking at was a road. She had had enough of that unpleasant and annoying hardness. She guided the mare to the side of the road, marked by something that had once been trees, but were now hideous and naked skeletons. Corpses hung with shreds of rags, quite like the remains of rotten shrouds.
The unicorn gave a warning by neighing and sending a mental signal. Too late.
Just beyond the strange road and the dead trees a heap of scree began, and further away, at its edge, a steep slope running downwards, almost a precipice. Ciri yelled, stuck her heels into the sides of the mare as she slipped down. Kelpie jerked, crushing whatever the heap was made of under her hooves. And it was waste. Mostly some kind of strange pots. The vessels didn’t crumble under the horseshoes, didn’t crunch, but burst repulsively softly and stickily, like great fishes’ bladders. Something squelched and gurgled, and the odour belching forth almost knocked Ciri from the saddle.
Kelpie, neighing wildly, trampled through the rubbish dump, struggling back upwards towards the road. Ciri, choking from the stench, grabbed the mare’s neck.
They managed to get up. And greeted the weird road’s disagreeable hardness with joy and relief.
Ciri, trembling all over, looked down onto the rubbish dump which ended in a black lake filling the bottom of the basin. The surface of the lake was lifeless and gleaming, as it wasn’t water but solidified pitch. Beyond the lake, beyond the rubbish dumps, the piles of ash and heaps of cinders, the sky was red from distant glows, and was marked by trails of smoke.
The unicorn snorted. Ciri was about to wipe her watering eyes with her cuff, when she suddenly noticed her entire sleeve was covered in dust. The flecks of dust also covered her thighs, the pommel of her saddle and Kelpie’s mane and neck.
The stench was stifling.
‘Disgusting,’ she muttered. ‘Repulsive . . . I feel like I’m sticky all over. Let’s get out of here . . . Let’s get out of here with all haste, Little Horse.’
The unicorn pricked up his ears and snorted.
Only you can make it happen. Act.
‘Me? All alone? Without your help?’
The unicorn nodded his horned head.
Ciri scratched her head, sighed and shut her eyes. She focused.
At first there was only disbelief, resignation and fear. But a cool brightness – the brightness of knowledge and power – quickly came over her. She had no idea where the knowledge and power were coming from, where their roots and source originated. But she knew she could do it. That she would do it if she wanted.
Once more she cast a glance at the hardened and lifeless lake, the smoking heap of refuse and the skeletons of trees. The sky was lit up by a distant glow.
‘I’m glad it’s not my world.’ She leaned over and spat. ‘Very glad!’
The unicorn neighed meaningfully. She understood what he wanted to say.
‘Even if it’s mine,’ she wiped her eyes, mouth and nose with a handkerchief, ‘it’s at once not mine, because it’s far away in time. It’s the past, or—’
She broke off.
‘The past,’ she repeated softly. ‘I deeply believe it’s the past.’
*
They greeted the heavy rain, the proper downpour they fell under in the next place, as a blessing. The rain was warm and aromatic, smelling of summer, weeds, mud and compost. The rain washed the filth from them, purged them. The rain was quite simply a catharsis.
Like any catharsis, it also became monotonous, excessive and unbearable after a short while. After some time, the water she was washing herself in began to wet her annoyingly, run down her neck and chill her unpleasantly. So they got out of that rainy place.
For it wasn’t that place either. Or that time.
*
The next place was very warm, the weather very hot, so Ciri, Kelpie and the unicorn dried off and steamed like three kettles. They found themselves on some sweltering moors at the edge of a forest. At once it could be deduced it was a very large forest, quite simply a dense, wild and inaccessible wilderness. Hope that it might be Brokilon Forest thumped in Ciri’s heart, the hope that at last it might be a familiar and appropriate place.
They rode slowly along the edge of the forest. Ciri was looking out fo
r something that might serve as a sign. The unicorn snorted, raised his head and horn, and looked around. It was anxious.
‘Do you think, Little Horse,’ she asked, ‘that they might be following us?’
A snort – comprehensible and unambiguous even without telepathy.
‘We haven’t managed to flee far enough away yet?’
She didn’t understand what he telepathically told her in answer. There was no far or near? A spiral? What spiral?
She didn’t understand what he was talking about. But the anxiety infected her.
The scorching moors weren’t the right place or the right time.
They understood it in the early evening, when the heat eased off, and instead of one, two moons rose in the sky above the forest. One large, the other small.
*
The next place was a seashore, a steep cliff, from which they saw breakers crashing against strangely-shaped rocks. They smelled the sea wind, and terns, black-headed gulls and petrels screeched, covering the ledges of the cliff in a restless white layer.
The sea reached all the way to the dark, cloudy horizon.
Down below, on the rocky beach, Ciri suddenly noticed the skeleton of a gigantic fish with a horrendously huge head partly buried in the shingles. Its great teeth, bristling in its sun-bleached jawbones, were at least three spans long, and it seemed one could have ridden a horse into its maw and easily paraded under the portals of its ribs without knocking one’s head against its spine.
Ciri wasn’t certain if fish like that existed in her world and her time.
They rode along the edge of the cliff, and the seagulls and albatrosses weren’t frightened at all, reluctantly moving out of their way. Why, they even tried hard to peck and pinch the feathers on Kelpie and Ihuarraquax’s fetlocks! Ciri instantly understood that the birds had never seen a human or a horse. Or a unicorn.
Ihuarraquax snorted, shook his head and horn, clearly anxious. It turned out he had reason to be.
Something creaked, just like canvas being torn. The terns rose with a cry and a fluttering, for a moment covering everything in a white cloud. The air above the cliff suddenly vibrated and became blurred like glass with water spilled over it. And then it shattered like glass. And darkness poured out of the rupture, while riders spilled out of the darkness. Around their shoulders fluttered cloaks whose vermilion-amaranth-crimson colour brought to mind the glow of a fire in a sky lit up by the blaze of the setting sun.
Dearg Ruadhri. The Red Horsemen.
Even before the crying of birds and the neighing of the unicorn had died away, Ciri had reined her mare around and spurred her into a gallop. But the air also ruptured in another place, and from the rupture, cloaks fluttering like wings, rushed out more horsemen. The semicircle of the noose closed, pressing them against the cliff. Ciri cried out, jerking Swallow out of its scabbard.
The unicorn summoned her with a sharp signal that penetrated her brain like a needle. She understood at once this time. He was showing her the way. A gap in the circle. He meanwhile reared up, neighed piercingly and charged at the elves with his horn lowered menacingly.
‘Little Horse!’
Save yourself, Star—Eye! Don’t let them catch you!
She pressed herself against Kelpie’s mane.
Two elves barred her way. They had lassos, nooses on long shafts. They tried to throw them over Kelpie’s neck. The mare nimbly twisted her head out of reach of one, but didn’t slow her gallop for a second. Ciri severed the other noose with a single flourish of her sword, and urged Kelpie with a cry to run quicker. The mare flew like a hurricane.
But others were now hard on their heels. She could hear their cries, the thud of their hooves, the flapping of their cloaks. What about Little Horse, she thought, what have they done to him?
There was no time for reflection. The unicorn was right; she couldn’t let them capture her again. She had to dive into space, hide, and lose herself in the labyrinth of places and times. She focused, sensing with horror that all she had in her head was a void and a strange, ringing, quickly growing hubbub.
They’re casting a spell on me, she thought. They want to beguile me with witchcraft. Over my dead body! Spells have a range. I won’t let them get close to me.
‘Run, Kelpie!’
The black mare stuck out her neck and flew like the wind. Ciri flattened herself on her neck to minimise air resistance.
The cries from behind her back, a moment earlier still loud and dangerously close, faded, drowned out by the screaming of frightened birds. Then they became harder and harder to make out. Remote.
Kelpie flew like a hurricane. So fast the sea wind howled in her ears.
A note of fury sounded in the distant shouts of the pursuers. They understood they couldn’t keep up. That they had no chance of catching up with the black mare, who was running without any sign of fatigue, as light, soft and supple as a cheetah.
Ciri didn’t look back. But she knew they continued to pursue her for a long time, even though it was futile. Until the moment their own horses began to wheeze and rasp, stumble and lower their foaming muzzles almost to the ground, teeth bared. Only then did they quit, sending after her nothing but curses and impotent threats she could no longer hear.
Kelpie flew like a gale.
*
The place she fled to was dry and windy. The keen, howling wind quickly dried the tears on her cheeks.
She was alone. Alone again. All alone.
A wanderer, a permanent vagabond, a sailor lost on the boundless sea among the archipelago of places and times.
A sailor losing hope.
The gale whistled and howled, rolling balls of dried weeds over the cracked earth.
The gale dried her tears.
*
Inside her skull cool lucidity, in her ears a buzzing, a monotonous buzzing, like from the twisted interior of a sea conch. A tingling in her nape. Black and very soft nothingness.
A new place. Another place.
An archipelago of places.
*
‘This night,’ said Nimue, wrapping herself up in a fur, ‘will be a good night. I sense it.’
Condwiramurs didn’t comment, although she had already heard similar assurances a good few times. For it wasn’t the first evening they had sat on the terrace, the lake blazing with the sunset in front of them, and behind them the magical looking glass and magical tapestry.
The curses of the Fisher King reached them from the lake, multiplied by the echo rolling across the water. The Fisher King was often in the habit of using vivid language to emphasise dissatisfaction with his angling failures – the unsuccessful strikes, plays, landings and other techniques he used. It had gone particularly badly that evening, judging from the strength and repertoire of the oaths.
‘Time,’ said Nimue, ‘has neither a beginning nor an end. Time is like the serpent Ouroboros, which bites its own tail with its teeth. Eternity is hidden in every moment. And eternity consists of the moments that create it. Eternity is an archipelago of moments. You may sail through that archipelago, although navigation is very difficult, and it is dangerous to get lost. It’s good to have a lighthouse whose light can guide you. It’s good to be able to hear someone calling among the fog . . .’
She fell silent for a while.
‘How does the legend that interests us end? It seems to us – to you and me – that we know how it ends. But Ouroboros is still grasping its own tail in its teeth. Yes, how the legend ends is being settled now. At this moment. The ending of the legend will depend on whether and when the sailor lost among the archipelago of moments sees the lamp of the lighthouse. If she hears the calling.’
A curse, a splash and the banging of oars in the rowlocks could be heard from the lake.
‘It will be a good night tonight. The last before the summer solstice. The moon is getting smaller. The sun is passing from the Third to the Fourth House, to the sign of the Goat-Fish. The best time for divination . . . The best time . . . Focu
s, Condwiramurs.’
Condwiramurs, as so many times before, obediently focused, slowly entering a state close to a trance.
‘Search for her,’ said Nimue. ‘She is somewhere among the stars, among the moonlight. Among the places. She is there. She is awaiting help. Let’s help her, Condwiramurs.’
*
Concentration, fists at her temples. A buzzing in her ears, as though from the inside of a conch. A flash. And abruptly soft and black nothingness.
*
There was a place where Ciri saw burning pyres. The women bound by chains to stakes howled wildly and horrifyingly for mercy, and the crowd gathered around roared, laughed and danced. There was a place where a great city was burning, roaring with fire and bursting with flames from collapsing roofs, and black smoke hooded the whole sky. There was a place where enormous two-legged lizards fought one another, and garish blood gushed from beneath fangs and claws.
There was a place where hundreds of identical white windmills threshed the sky with their slender sails. There was a place where hundreds of snakes hissed and squirmed on stones, scraping and rustling their scales.
There was a place where there was darkness, and in the darkness voices, whispers and terror.
There were even more places. But none of them was the right one.
*
She was finding moving from place to place so easy that she began to experiment. One of the few places she wasn’t afraid of was those warm moors at the edge of the wild forest above which two moons rose. Calling forth in her memory the sight of those moons and repeating in her mind what she wanted, Ciri focused, strained and plunged into the nothingness.
She succeeded at the second attempt.
Now encouraged, she decided to attempt an even more daring experiment. It was obvious that aside from places, she also visited times. Vysogota had talked about that, as had the elves, and the unicorns had mentioned it. Why, she had managed – albeit unwittingly – to do it before! When she had been wounded in the face she had escaped from her persecutors into time, jumped forward four days, and then Vysogota couldn’t account for those days. Nothing added up for him . . .
Perhaps that was her chance? A leap into time?
The Saga of the Witcher Page 179
