Chains of Gold (23 page)

“Rae,” said a sharp voice, sharp and frightened. “Stop that! Be of some use!”

I blinked. The boat was brown. It was Ophid! I lifted my hands to him, and he hauled in my chains, then me. I lay in the bottom of his cormorant, sodden and gasping. “I—thought you were no hero,” I panted when I could speak.

“Briony is not the only one who thinks often of you,” he snapped. He had the cormorant speeding, his fair hair lifted by the wind of its skimming, and he looked terrified. Sitting up, I could see why. The Gwyneda followed no more than a furlong behind us, and the savagery that showed in their faces sickened me with fear.

Splashings and shoutings sounded from another direction. Turning, I saw the Island of Fugitives close ahead of us, and beyond it the minions of Rahv in the water on their swimming steeds. They had been content to sit and watch, it seemed, as long as I was to drown or be taken by the Gwyneda. But when Ophid had saved me, my father had roared an order and leaped his charger into the Blackwater to deal with me himself.

All this I saw in a blurred glance before the cormorant struck the shore. We beached with a shock that sent me lurching forward, and almost before I had gathered myself Ophid had me up and hugging my burden of chains and headed toward the holy ash. “Run!” he cried, giving me a push, and he whirled to face the Gwyneda.

I ran, hearing my father's horse splash up on the opposite shore. I ran, knowing I had to prevail, not only for myself but for Ophid now, to gift his daring with victory. I ran, hearing a snake hiss from the white-robed ones he confronted.… The ash loomed ahead: graceful, lofty, pearl gray of bark, the many chains hanging in clusters, garlanding its spreading branches like some grim sort of festal ornaments. I saw nothing else. It seemed never to draw nearer. I ran, hearing a pounding sound, my heart, my own feet, the hooves of horses—no telling, through exhaustion and the roaring in my ears—

“Mother Meripen,” I panted, “
please.
”

And I was there, and I flung my arms around her, holy, hard, and rough, and with a high, chiming sound the bracelets of captivity fell from my wrists.

My chains lay on the ground. With a barbaric yell, a wordless, uncouth whoop of triumph, I scooped them up and flung them skyward, and they caught in the boughs and hung there, swaying. I surveyed the world as if it belonged to me. At some small distance, near the island shore, my father stood glaring at me, and by him stood the five Gwyneda. Ophid came hastening up to me, his thin face alight with joy.

“Ten thousand thanks,” I told him.

“My lady,” he said, “the debt is mine. I have found that I need no longer be afraid of them.”

“Why, what has happened?”

He shrugged dazedly. “I have outfaced them, that is all. Power I had not known I possessed.… I will be able to return to my island without fear.”

I embraced him, but the embrace reminded me of something. “How did you know,” I asked slowly, “about Briony?”

“He told me, that is all. We see each other from time to time at the circling dance. Well, Rae, go claim what is yours.”

“Ten thousand thanks,” I told him again, and I strode down to where my father and the Gwyneda waited, strode arrogantly, insanely certain that they would honor the custom that had brought me here. For surely there was no use in uncertainty, after all that had happened.

The eldest of the Gwyneda faced me first, her watery eyes unblinking in her gray face. “The goddess has smiled on you and taken you into the palm of her hand,” she said to me. “You are highly favored, and free of the land forever, and whoever thinks to emperil you will bear our curse.”

A murmur of accord sounded from the other Gwyneda, and with only small astonishment I realized that they willingly now embraced me and my cause, they who some few minutes earlier would just as willingly have killed me.

“Arlen?” I demanded.

“He is your consort. Your protection extends to him.”

I nodded curtly, not wishing to speak overlong with them. “And Erta?”

“She died quickly,” the eldest said, with no unease in her gaze. Killing Erta had been a minor matter at the time. Fervor grew in me to be gone from that place.

I wheeled on my father. He stood—if I had not felt such good reason to hate him I would have pitied him, his pallid face so mottled with emotion—he stood choking on wrath and frustration. One of his men was riding Bucca, I noted. “My horse,” I told him.

He complied with a gesture that ordered the man to bring the steed to me, and his hands curled into white-knuckled fists.

“My gold,” I said when I held Bucca's reins in my hand.

He drew the chains out of his pouch, fingered them a moment—and turned and flung them full force into the depths of the lake. “Go dive for them,” he told me, with hatred grating in his voice.

“Thank you, but nay. I have had enough of swimming for today.” I mounted Bucca. It would have been too much to expect, I suppose, that Rahv would have handed the gold to me or even hurled it at my feet. Indeed, if a horse could have been thrown so far, I think Bucca also would have been in the water.

“Slut,” he muttered.

I said farewell only to Ophid, then swam Bucca across the lake to the eastern shore. The water lay quiet, very still; not even birds were calling. I remember that quiet. The sun was setting, dusk coming on, and thin wraiths of mist rising as I turned northward again toward the Adder's Head. I was on my own again, quite alone, with only the sodden frock on my back, no supplies or wherewithal either. I hoped the goddess who held me in the palm of her hand would somehow favor me with a bit of food.

EIGHTEEN

Food was fish, mostly, as it turned out. Almost at once I found someone's lost net, snagged in the lakeside trees. I mended it with tough hairs plucked from Bucca's tail and netted fish in plenty, as well as a few snakes, which slithered away. Bucca's gear contained flint and steel for the making of a cooking fire and a knife for the gutting, so I was content. It was midsummer; there were strawberries growing in the meadow grass and currants coming ripe in the bogs. On fish and berries I could live.

And so I did, and I traveled northward along the Blackwater, up the Naga past the Isle of Elders all in white bloom, past the four small linked tarns called the Lakes of the Winds, Lausta, Faris, Hirta, and Bora, four forms of the goddess. Then along the Naga again. The land had grown steep and high and rocky; presently I rode along the top of a gorge, and the water far below foamed and hissed between boulders with a sound as of a thousand serpents. There was a waterfall, and a rocky ait, and a waterfall again, and when I came to Adder's Head I looked down on it from far above, the water deepest greenish black, the eyot of rounded water-worn rock, wet and unblinking. No human had ever lived here, I could feel it, not since primal times. Only by hasty travelers like myself, uneasy in the stare of that shining eye, had this place been named. At the far end of the Adder's Head, at its blunt apex, the forked tongue of water came whitely down the surrounding rock, and between the cataracts I could see the dark entry, the passageway, the serpent's burrow.

I left Bucca in the best place I could find for him, a glade where the grass grew thick within a grove of alder, took off his gear and patted him, and went down the rocks afoot to seek the realm of the dead.

There were the guardians just within the entry, as I had expected. And they were black, the glossy black of lacquer, and sizable, their uplifted heads standing as high as mine, and their eyes amber gold, and on their backs patterns like chains of shining gold. How lovely they were, for all that they were serpents; I could not be very afraid of them. “May I pass?” I asked. “My name is Rae—”

Before I could tell them more they turned and flanked me, as if to assist me or provide me with a guard of honor, and as I walked they slipped along beside me, keeping me to the center of the way.

It was very dark at first, and damp-smelling, and rocky underfoot, another cave or a large tomb, the largest of tombs. I felt my way downward, shuffling along in the dark. Once one of the serpents put its head up to my outstretched hand—to guide me, I think. But the touch startled me badly, and I leaped back, stood and sweated until I gathered courage to go on again.

Soon, though, a dim light began to show, and it grew, a white and spectral light. Then the stony passage leveled off into a floor of polished marble, and I saw that I was in a place such as had never been on earth, a place a world and a life apart from the river and trees I had just left behind.

Jeweled pillars and, spiraled around them, great serpents of fire. It was from them that the light glowed; they shone white with the soundless, motionless fire that is hotter than any flame, fire as of white embers, fine as thistledown. The jewels beneath their coils took their light and splintered it into shards, sent it darting off the water—for there was water, snake-loop meanders of water as smooth as the marble floor; I scarcely could tell where stone stopped and water began save for milky lilies floating and the white fish beneath them. The water formed still black pools, and amidst the pools a silver serpent the girth of a man lifted its head and sang. Nor have I ever been able to remember what melody the serpent sang, or whether there were words. But the feeling that song gave me haunts my dreams.

On the waterways floated a boat shaped like a silver harp, and an old hunchbacked boatman poled it toward me. His robes were of velvet twinkling with brooches and clasps of precious gold. I remembered that I had not gold to pay him with, and the black serpents, my retinue, had left me.

I spread wide my hands as he came up to me. “I have nothing,” I told him. “They have taken it all from me.”

He gestured me on board, and by the merry glance of his old eye I saw that he was not at all perturbed.

I seated myself. “Thank you,” I said. “They told me I would have to pay you.”

He said nothing, but poled us smoothly to the far marble shore, and with one hand he helped me out. A cluster of maidens awaited me there, lovely maidens but strange, and in a moment I saw that they were elementals. Sylphs, clad in airy, floating garments, themselves so pale as to seem nearly transparent; and the nagini, the snake women, very slender, very beautiful; and nymphs—I was wary of the nymphs, though perhaps they did not, like undines, have razor-sharp teeth. The brown earth maidens were most like me, they in their peasant frocks, though there was a glow about them as of polished wood, whereas I—

“But she cannot go before the Presence like that!” one of them exclaimed.

“My baby,” I started to ask them. “Lonn—”

They hushed me gently and hurried me off. I was to have audience, they told me. Ask it of the mighty one at that time. We walked through splendor. Past gardens walled with chalcedony, where fountains bloomed into motes of gold and trees stood leafed in jade, where birds bright as jewels flew—I blinked. They spread feathered wings, but they were small plump serpents flitting past me, red as rubies or lapis blue, as lovely as any songbird of the world I had left behind.

I do not know when we came inside. Perhaps we had always been inside. But presently there were chambers filled with the rustle of silk, a bedchamber and antechamber with walls draped in spiral-patterned silk and cloth of gold. I was seated on a couch, and a basin of water for washing was brought to me, and a white linen towel, and when I had cleaned my hands the cup of the house was presented to me by a nagini on bended knee. And when I had drunk it down, a meal was set before me. Three sorts of meats, and more sauces and pastries and sweets than I can remember or tell. Long-starved as I was, I ate without thought, immediately. Only when I came to a small bowl of fresh elderberries—and it was not yet the season for elderberries—did I remember Briony's warning. I pushed it aside and sat, my hunger and my pleasure abruptly gone.

“It will not hurt you,” said one of the sylphs, and she laughed at me softly, not unkindly. “Go ahead, eat! The dead do not eat nearly so heartily.”

“I might as well be dead,” I muttered.

“Indeed, my lady, no! When you are dead, you will need gold for the boatman. Now you come and go as you please.” She laughed again, a wafting, summery sound. “Are you truly finished eating?”

I looked at her, feeling the birthing of an unreasonable hope, but indeed I was no longer hungry. “I am done,” I said.

“Then you should bathe.”

In the antechamber a great silver basin of warm water awaited me, attended by the nymphs. I reclined in it and was bathed, and afterward they wrapped me in furs to dry, and when that was done they lightly rubbed me with scented oil, so that I glowed as they did and could not help but feel my own well-being.

“Now,” said one of the earth maidens, “we must properly attire you if you are to speak with the goddess. Or would you rather sleep first?”

Nervousness took hold of me at the mention of the goddess, and though I was tired, I knew I could not have slept. Best to brave the goddess and have it over with. “I am not sleepy,” I said.

“I thought those who lived were always sleepy after they had eaten heartily,” said my sylph, puzzled.

“Not always,” I told her.

So they clothed me in the colors most sacred to the goddess, in a gown of green samite, as green as new leaves, and over it a tabard of white trimmed with fringe of gold, and a girdle of linked gold around my waist, and on my feet slippers of red leather, and on my shoulders a cloak of red wool, as red as oxblood, lined with red satin and edged in ermine. My hair was braided and dressed with emeralds, rubies, and pearls.

“Green for birthing, growth, and dying,” the maidens chanted as they arrayed me.

“Green for birthing, growth, and dying,

Green for grass and red for blood,

White for the mystic moon.”

And they fastened my cloak with a silver brooch, the wheel brooch of twenty-eight spokes. Then, under golden archways molded in links as of chain, they escorted me into the great hall of that afterworld place.