Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (75 page)

Sometimes the women spoke to me. They were never present at the same time, but their voices became the same sound. “I don’t know if you can hear me,” they would say, “but I’ll tell you anyway. Our ships reached the army and ferried them from Kleeiom to Charnos. Kirith Kirin was on the first ship.”

Dream time wove in and out. Sometimes I thought she was with me but she was not speaking. This was always one of the women but not the other. The one who would watch me sadly, as if she had seen my face before.

“I tried to care for your mother,” she said, “I tried to save her but I was very weak.”

This made me uneasy in the rest I had sought and so I would turn away from the voice, but still it would go on, as though she meant to draw me back. But I would not come back.

“Now there are only five hundred of us left. We’re sealing up the rest of the house. He knows where I’ve brought you now, little magician. But there’s nothing he can do about it, apparently. You won’t let him come close. And yet you’re fast asleep.”

I knew she meant Drudaen Keerfax and I understood, even in my sleep, that he was searching for me everywhere, on all the levels of magic. Somewhere far away, as if in the memory of some country I had once visited, I could hear his voice. I understood also that some part of me was protecting the people near me, in rooms of stone. But none of this understanding meant much. I was asleep, far away, nearly dreaming.

They came to visit me again and again, and in that way I understood much time was passing. Now the one who came and sometimes said nothing wore a veil over her face, as if she were ashamed. But she was more apt to speak by the end, in a dry, despairing tone, as if certain I heard nothing.

I’ll never know if you’ve heard me, if you know anything of what’s happened. You broke Senecaur and nearly killed him and we brought you into what was left of Aerfax, and you have kept us safe from him all these years. But all the rest of the world is his now. Except Arthen.

Fragments, pieces from different times.
There are four hundred of us left. His army is still camped outside. It does some good having you here, I guess, since he wants you so badly… There are three hundred left now. He’s spread shadow as far north as Vyddn. He’s burned Genfynnel to the ground and torn the walls to shreds, but he can’t get close to your Tower. I see Edenna’s ring glimmering on your finger in the darkness. You’re fighting somehow, aren’t you? We don’t know how… There are only two hundred now. He’s bringing another army here across the bay. He’s never been able to break through the end of Kleeiom, he can only come here by ship… We’re sealing up the house now, we’re lighting the lamps.

I remember little of it, when all’s said and done. But I could feel the change in the world, like the touch of storm in the distance. Shadow was everywhere. We had lost.

The women came in together, that was how I knew it was the last visit. The oldest of them, and she was very old, told me, “There are a dozen of us left. A long time has passed. Shadow has taken hold everywhere, our people are changing, our enemy has won, if he calls a dead world a victory. I’ve stayed as long as I can but now I have to get back to Arthen.” She spoke to me as if she had no faith that I could hear. “It will take a long time for him to find you here, even when we’ve gone. Stay alive and we’ll come back for you.”

“It’s time to go, my dear,” the other woman said.

“I know.” She bent over me, speaking into my open eyes. “I know you’re there somewhere, my silent one. You’ll only have to protect yourself, now. Find your way back to us if you can. I’ll tell Kirith Kirin you were alive when I left you. That’s all I can do.”

Then, emptiness, the ringing of the chamber, the closing of some heavy door, and the echo of waves crashing against the rock of Durudronaen.

2

Silence. I lay in darkness, far from the room and from my body, in a place where no one came. Now and then water dripped on me from the rock.

Stillness. The sleep, which Queen Athryn had troubled with her presence, deepened again.

Sometimes I heard the sea. Sometimes I heard soft singing. Mostly I heard nothing at all.

From outside, from all the places I knew to be outside, came the smell of rot and shade.

3

At first Drudaen came to me only in that realm, the non-place in which I floated. He could not see me but he knew where I must be. He wore the porcelain face of his ancestors and he spoke my name gently, as a cousin.

I can let you out of the room, I can set you free from sleep. You could return to your body if you would serve me.
He spoke in no voice, only the ribbon of thought trailing through me, and the aura of his kind benevolence.
I could always make use of someone who speaks Wyyvisar as well as you do.

But in the depth of my sleep he brought no trouble to me. I dreamed him, as I had dreamed everything, all of time. I could see the whole curve of him from beginning to end. What he offered me, the motion of the body, was nothing.

He crooned on as if I were listening, but the sea washed over his voice, the sea engulfed him and I listened to its pulse.

When he returned the next time, his voice was harsher, and I had the feeling he was nearby. For some reason, even in the deep folds of my somnolence, this thought troubled me. He spoke again, and I could almost hear the sound.
I can let you out of the room, I can set you free from sleep. I can give you this gift willingly or I can wrench it from you by force. The choice is yours. Open and let me enter.

In my languor a wave of trouble began to resonate. I clutched at tatters of sleep but they fled.

I can let you out of the room, willing or no;
and this seemed the uttermost cruelty to me, who had wanted nothing more than to lie here, who had conceded the whole world for this peace.

He began some song then, a thin sound of ungainly Words which I had heard before. The song troubled me some and so I sang a tune to drown it out.

This went on for a while. He would change his song and so would I, when it started to trouble me. Soon this became automatic and I spared it little thought. Sleep deepened some, in spite of the nettling noise of him, who refused to go away.

I had something he wanted. I remembered it but the thought left me indifferent. He went on singing and disturbing me and now and then I wondered why it was he thought he could offer me anything. After a time I wondered who he was altogether. I had this knowledge somewhere but I could hardly be troubled to recall it. His insistence surprised me, for it seemed to me, now that I had time to think about it, that a person was really better off without wanting things very much; and here was this voice insisting on something. Insisting that I cooperate. In some work. Some scheme of his. Which involved my waking.

He tried to find me forcibly. As if he stood battering at a door. Only the sound of the door kept blending with the sea. This was really too much, I thought, for him to go on like this; the songs were bad enough but now this bullying. Still, one did not have to wake up, not entirely, not to deal with such a small problem.

I knit up my sleep again and pulled it close. I drank its warmth and nestled into it. He was close to me and tried to harm me again but his touch hardly reached me. I understood, without much caring, that I had traveled very far from him, very far from all he wanted. His thirst seemed paltry to me, when compared with my own perfect and beautiful indifference.

It seemed to me this only took a little time. How time ran for him, I could hardly say. But finally, one day, I found myself drawn away from my kingdom of silence and rest to the room again, the chamber beneath the sea. Torches had been lit and shadows danced. My body lay motionless on the slab of stone. Drudaen Keerfax was there with me.

4

He had been in the room for a long time. The effort to travel here had told on him, and now he was afraid to come closer. He harbored a fear of the place, something terrible had happened to him in the vicinity. I realized, with a slow start, that the terror was connected with me.

No one had come with him. Wrapped in a drab cloak, hooded, he wore the weariness of the lone traveler, and I wondered at this since it hardly seemed his style. In the center of that room he stood, smelling of wind and horses. Aging. He was aging.

On the slab of stone I lay. On my body I wore only an earring, a ring and a bracelet, and each of those pieces of jewelry made him wary. Light clung to my skin, which was fair and soft. I had never thought of myself as beautiful but there, from the awful distance at which I watched myself, I saw differently. Dark curves framed my fine-boned, ivory face, the full cut of lip, the flare of graceful nostril, the heavy-lashed lid. It was finally this image that held him, this enchanted youth in deepest sleep.

What had he come to do? Even in his own mind his purpose remained unclear. He had come to kill me but now that he was close he couldn’t. He had come because he heard a rumor I was alive, and as long as I lived he still had something to fear. I read that thought easily. He had come a long way, and found me sleeping more deeply than his magic could reach. He also found he could not approach me with a single thought of harm in his head.

Murmuring. Beneath his breath he muttered the Words that presently guarded him. They were easy to hear and comprehend; I was surprised he considered himself defended when I could read his every thought so plainly. He moved toward me slowly — toward my body on the stone. Of me, of my disembodied presence, he had no inkling.

No malice in him. He had forgotten the thought that brought him here. He pulled back the hood and I saw how old he had become, this enemy of mine. But one could see, looking from the elder to the younger, that we shared blood. This was part of what troubled him: it was as if in seeing me he were seeing himself as a boy in the dawn of the world.

He did the strangest thing. Using the water from his flask, with the tips of his fingers he pressed the slight moisture into my cool, nearly lifeless flesh. The touch returned me, aching, to the shadow of life: I felt it even at a distance: I could not escape that much. The memory of other hands.

He performed this work and stood silently beside me. I had needed the moisture, I was far away. But he was murmuring still, ignoring my gratitude, as if the proximity of my flesh placed him in the gravest danger. Without malice he watched me. He bent to kiss my brow, and the touch of his lips on my cool skin resounded.

What a curious enemy, so tender! Some sound from far above alarmed him, and he moved away. Stones tumbling, stones falling to the ground. He had brought an army of workmen to pull down what was left of Aerfax stone by stone. He returned to the center of the chamber and stood murmuring.

He meant to bury me. He could not harm me with his hands or even with his magic, so great was his fear of what I had become. But he had thought of another way. He had come to build a tomb over me.

A sound distracted him, and finally fear took him over. At the exit he hesitated, turning to my body on the stone a last time. Babbling that nonsense that I could have taken from him with the merest touch. So I did touch him, once, in the lightest way, through the layers of his protection; I lay my fingers on the beating of his heart and said into his ear See? I’m still here, Drudaen. Go and don’t come back.

Such was my delicacy that he almost thought he had imagined the moment. He closed the door and locked it carefully, from the outside, as if that gesture were important.

Patient, I waited, in the same room with my body if not actually inside the flesh. Presently one heard the thunder of his voice and the shaking of those ancient stones. There are stories people sailed in pleasure boats from Ivyssa to watch. Favorites of his. He pulled down the wreck of Aerfax and what remained of Senecaur. Places more ancient and holy than can be recounted, leveled stone by stone. He shook the ground, hoping to crack the foundations of Senecaur, where I slept. But he had warned me of his intentions with his ill-considered visit. When he came to kill me and found he could not keep the thought in his head. My chamber survived.

Soon he left the place; he had come to hate it anyway. Silence, and the sea again. But my sleep had been too thoroughly troubled. I began to dream of the world.

5

One day I began to sing.

I dreamed I lay over my body on the stone and sang, at first with no voice, but an ancient song, the Wyyvisar song of making, and I was suddenly in Jiiviisn Field in the sunlight and this was Vithilonyi; I danced and sang and felt the brightness of the field. True dawn resounded through my bones, and I, aching for light, basked in plenty. I sang the song and the sun rose over the horizon.