Chance (18 page)

“You are welcome, Gage,” she greeted me, “for you spoke me well last night.”

“These—my friends,” I whispered. “How can they be already gone?”

“Nay,” she laughed, with a laugh that gave no comfort, “the battle is not yet. These are but semblances, these and many others, to set the reckoning straight. You see I care for them well—I will do yours now, if you like.”

My blood ran cold. Desperately I turned the talk away from her latest words. “And you—are you also a semblance, and no Goddess?”

She laughed again, but more gently. She was amused at my challenge, I think. “My form is true,” she told me, “as are all the forms I take. I am mother and maiden and ancient hag, ancient as these stones. I am hill and stream and the bride of the sacred King. I am swan-white steed and blood-red stag, and today I shall be the black battle-raven. Which do you prefer?”

“I like well the stag and the steed,” I answered wistfully. “But I like best your present form, Blessed Maiden. You are as fair as high grassland in the sunlight.… Grant me a boon, Goddess, since I seem doomed to die. Lie with me, fearsome lady.…” I stood quaking at my own boldness, yet I had made the venture with all my heart, for I had not lied when I named her fair.

She regarded me gravely, but she did not seem affronted. “Gage, they call you,” she remarked. “One who will keep a pledge. Make me a pledge, then.”

“Name it.” I was reckless with a strange recklessness made of lust and despair.

“That when you have done, you will abide by my judgment.”

“Indeed, lady, all my life has been under your judgment.”

She came to me then, straight and sober, like a warrior queen. With silent grace she lent herself to my pleasure. She was a virgin, but she made no moan. She had been a virgin, I thought, many and many a time, for many a King.… I grew weak and tearful with the marvel of her, for she was indeed fair beyond perfection. I rolled away from her and lay still, and she said not word.

“The judgment,” I spoke at last, oddly without fear. I lay at ease in the soft green grass.

“It is what it has always been,” she said quietly, “that you are finally at one with me, I who am earth. I mother you forth, and at last to me you have returned.”

“Yet Kings can bed you and live,” I argued, almost lazily.

“Ay. Only the sacred King can rightly wed me, for in me he weds the land which is his domain.… You are no King, Gage. Yet this will I say for your bedding: it has won your King the victory this day. Of all his force only those three yonder will die.”

Bellory and Breca and Loren. They would owe me small thanks for my friendship, I who liked to think of horses.

The Goddess bent her gaze on me with a tiny smile.

“Pleasant has been your returning, I trust?” she chided gently. “But there is further judgment. Since you have known no pain of returning, you who have united with me in death, neither can you know forgetfulness. My birds will not sing for you, Gage.”

I sighed away my mortality then. Home and homefolk and my sharp-tongued sweetheart Mindy … not until then had I quite given up hope of seeing them again. Yet I was not overly sad. The spell of the Goddess lay strong on me, though I did not understand all that she was saying.

“A strange fate is yours, Gage,” she mused. “Ask of me a gift to lighten it, if you will.”

I had no time to think. I opened my mouth, and the words came forth.

“Music,” I said. “He who makes songs and poetry cannot ever be entirely sad, I think. Or if he is, then the sadness is sweet. So let me be a singer of sweet songs.”

“You have chosen wisely,” she assented, and rising, she left me. Like morning mist she was gone, and gone in like wise were the corpses in the stream. As I blinked and looked, a black raven flapped away.

The sun had long since found its way into the cleft. I did not feel its warmth, but nevertheless I made my way up the slope and took shelter under a tree. There I might see all that came to pass.

In a little while the men of Merric arrived to set an ambush. I did not move for them—could I lose my life more than once?—but they took no notice of me, walking past me as if I were not there. They settled themselves among the trees and were silent. By noontime I could see the heat shimmering off the rocks below. Then, in the distance, I saw the dust of a marching army. Closer they came, and closer, with our golden King at their fore. I could see the faces of my comrades, streaked with sweat. I started down the slope to warn them and to join them; how could I do otherwise? But not a man of them glanced at me. Already some laid spear and shield aside and knelt by the stream, dipping water with their helms. Then the ambush struck. I have never been loath to fight, but being helpless was more than I could bear. I turned away to my tree, lay beneath it and closed my senses to the tumult below.

When next I looked all lay dark and silent in the dark of the moon. Only stars shed faint light. I picked my way down the slope once more. Bodies lay strewn like the rocks, but I could not distinguish among them. I could not find my friends, to care for them. So I wandered away, restless and stumbling, wondering whether I might ever be at peace. But I had not gone far when a shape of whiteness approached me in the dark, chill night, a shimmering shape of wonder: the white horse.

Tall, high-crested, small-muzzled and sleek of flank it stood. The twin orbs of its eyes glowed like the absent moon. It came to me with silent, powerful steps and bowed with courtly grace for my mounting. I got on it gladly enough, and we were off with a flash of silver hooves—whether on land, sea or air even from the first I could not tell.

There is little to say of that journey. I was lost from the start of it, and whether it was time we traversed or eternity, a thin stream or a broad pool, I could not say. I remember only darkness with flecks of gold and the swimming of the steed, that liquid flight.… At last we came to a place of somethingness, and there we stopped.

It was a silvery, misty, twilight land, yet not dim. Rather, it shone with its own muted splendor. Tall trees spread dusky silver leaves that rustled like silk. Between the trees meandered dark streams with scarcely a ripple; the water shimmered almost black. Half-moon bridges arched over the streams, and beyond, soft lawns rose to a castle and many dwellings, hazy even at that slight distance. Gray stone buildings they seemed to be, but changeless as mountains.

As I gazed, still sitting on the moon-white steed, an eerie music sounded from behind me, like tones of living flutes. I turned and saw the shore of the dark, glowing pool from which, I guessed, I had come, for it spread to no other side. A high-prowed, beech-gray boat sailed there, bearing many men. Beside it in stately procession swam many fair white swans. It was they who sang. They glided up the streams toward the distant castle, still singing. Their song was subtle and drifting, but in no wise sad; all hard and delicate truth was in it.

Then the folk disembarked from the boat, quietly, with faces both intent and serene. In their midst I saw Bellory and Breca and Loren. I sprang down from the steed and hurried toward them.

“Friends,” I told them mournfully, “I am sorry.”

“Sorry?” Bellory turned on me wondering eyes. “For what? This is a fair place.”

“Ay, that it is. But earth was as fair, and I have caused you the pain of parting from it.”

“Earth? Parting?” Breca and Loren too were puzzled. “Of what is this you speak, friend? Have we lived and met before?”

I stared at them and spoke no more. “It is as I said, Gage,” a quiet voice told me. “My birds will not sing for you.” I turned to the swan-white steed and knew it for a form of the Goddess; even as I looked it melted away and a woman stood there. But she was not the maiden I had known.

“Hail, All-Mother,” said Bellory and Breca and Loren in soft unison.

“My greeting to you,” she answered courteously, and they passed on. But I stayed, gazing, for even in the vastness of her age she was lovely—lovely and chaste.

“You must make your own music of comfort,” she told me. “Be my bard, Gage.” She handed me a silver harp wrought in shapes of all the marvels of that silver land. I took it and touched it with clumsy fingers, and music rang forth—music of all mortal joy and longing, music in harmony of imperfection such as the swans did not possess. And somehow words came to me, and I sang for her.

Thus I stayed and sat in her great hall and performed from the place of honor after many a feast. The guests listened with a bittersweet pleasure they scarcely understood, for my songs were of remembrance rather than of forgetting. After a turning of time that could have been a day or an eon, Bellory and Breca and Loren were returned to the world of memory; and after a while I, like them, reluctantly had to go.

But the fair Maiden's gift has not failed me. And so it is that I am here, in this strange garb of female flesh and this thrice strange land and time, to tell you the tale: still singing of my brown-haired Mindy and my bold companions and the horses running upon the soft, far reaches of the grassland beyond the golden halls of the sacred King. For I was ever one who liked to think of horses.

O alien age, where are the very steeds,

The jewel-bright, the lovely ones,

The swift, impassioned carriers of the Kings?

The honey wealds are gone, the feral land,

And gone with it the windborn ones,

The sky-bred steeds that still the wanderer sings.

BRIGHT-EYED BLACK PONY

Wystan saw them coming from afar.

Coming through the forest, the tall black horse running between the twisted trees, so black in the somber shadows, the rider like a burr entangled in its mane, clinging, curled small against the assaults of twigs and boughs. Presently, as they came to a clearing, the rider straightened. He was but a slim youngster straddling the great war-horse, a lad with golden hair that flowed down around his shoulders and a long red cloak that reached nearly to his booted feet. Wearily he braced himself by his hands against the arch of the steed's neck as the horse plunged to a shying halt. Before him lay nothing but water, the wizard's lake, a seemingly endless expanse dimming into dusk and nothingness within a few furlongs.

“Forward,” the youngster ordered.

The horse danced backward, threatening to rear. Swaying behind the steed's withers, the rider kicked and shouted, raising a willow whip. Mastered, the black leaped forward, splashed through shallows and swam with rolling eyes and vast nostrils toward an unnatural gloom. Dark mist or midday dusk—once in it, the horse could see nothing; rider, nothing. Nothing.

The steed's breath comes roaring in its chest; how long can it last? Why do I care, I, the recluse?

Blaze of bright sunshine and wooded shore. The horse scrambled out of the water and stood, trembling and breathing in great heaves, on the island.

A different sort of place, this of my making, I am a fool to let him set foot on it. But he would have drowned.… Such a slip of a lad to come here so boldly on the great horse.

The youngster was staring as the horse caught its breath. Blue trees, slender, graceful as dancers, upreaching, with smooth skin of pearl blue and leaves blue as lapis. Presently he sent his winded steed through them at the slow walk, gazing as if half-frightened. Fear that no longer pursued him, sending him fleeing, but confronted him, slowing his headlong course … Forest ended at a sunny tilled clearing.

“Ho,” the lad murmured, and the horse stopped willingly.

Amber meadowland, chickens, sheep. A wisp of a rill leading up to a spring. A crazy sod cottage all in turrets and oriels, shapes no sod should take. An ordinary garden: rye, beans, cabbages.… A man, his strong, bare back turned to the sun, working the earth amidst the plants.

Swallowing, licking his dry lips, the youngster sent the horse forward, and the man straightened and watched intently as the rider approached. Meadow, rill, edge of the garden. The boy slipped down off his big black and covered it with his cloak before he spoke.

“I have come to see the sorcerer,” he said, his voice tight, but level.

“And who might you be who come to see Wystan?” the laborer asked.

“I'll tell that to Wystan alone,” the lad replied, tone hardening into sharp edge. He glanced angrily at his questioner, but the glance stayed and became a stare. The man stood lean, sturdily muscled, his mouth a flat line across the dun mask of his face. And his eyes, beneath brows as flat as his mouth, eyes like polished stone, unreadable.

“I see,” the youngster said, his voice still tight and steady. “You are Wystan himself. I beg pardon, but I did not expect to find you planting spinach.”

“Parsley,” the sorcerer corrected him, unsmiling. He held up a pinch of the fine seed. “And there is more magic in this than in all my spells.”

The boy stood at a loss for a reply. “As for my name,” he said after a pause, reverting to the former matter, “it is Merric, son of Emaris, prince in Yondria. My father was the ruler until lately. My uncle killed him and killed my older brothers, and now he sits on my father's throne and keeps my mother his prisoner.” The lad spoke collectedly, almost coldly.

“Assuming that this is true,” said the sorcerer harshly, “what do you want of me? I take no part in the quarrels of princes.” Wystan gave the youngster a piercing glance. Merric met his sharp stare unmoved.

Some sort of bitter strength in him. Not grief, perhaps, but certainly desperation.

“I want refuge, nothing more.” Merric's shoulders straightened beneath his fine tunic of silk. “No one comes here. They are afraid.”

“And you are not afraid?” Wystan asked with a hint of threat.

“Yes. Somewhat.” Merric looked straight into the stonelike eyes.

There it is, that odd strength still! Yet the lad is lying; I feel sure of it.