Stargate (47 page)

He felt himself lifted. He did not want to move, he wanted to stay lying on the Mountain, curled in upon himself, but someone was panting, crying, pulling him upward, and then there were other hands and a low voice, his son answering with breathless hope, but the ocean slapped against him, buffeting him without mercy, and he sank beneath its surface and was at peace.

He woke to a raging thirst and a body throbbing with aches and stiff along the left side. For a long while he lay looking at yellow light that flickered across a low ceiling, content to be hypnotized by its slow, comfortable movement, his mind half-dreaming, half-sleeping. He had decided that the light was a fire's welcome glow and that he was warm and lying on a low, soft bed when there was a whisper of movement and someone sat beside him, cutting off the fire's somnolent, silent lullaby. He blinked.

“So you are Chilka one-mind, the man who would not die,” a voice said. The tone was soft, amused. “I have heard of you. You are lucky I was out on the Mountain yesterday morning, or you certainly would have died this time. Are you thirsty? Lift your head so I can guide the cup to your mouth.”

Everything in him seemed to falter. His labored heartbeat slowed. His breath stopped, and a tingle shivered over his body. Slowly, fearfully he turned his head, and when he saw her face, he tried to speak and could not. She hushed him, still with the amused lilt to her voice.

“Don't try to say anything until you have drunk. Your son is safe. I sent him home to tell your wife that you will be with her in three days. I promise it.”

His hands lifted. His throat worked. “Sholia!” he whispered. She started violently, and water splashed from the cup onto her lap. “Sholia, it is I, Danarion, I Chilka. Chilka-Danarion …” With a convulsive movement he turned his face into her bosom and wept like a child.

When he was spent and she had helped him to drink, cradling his head and lifting the cup to his lips, he lay back, and they talked quietly together, their hands linked, their eyes meeting with a bewildered joy. For a while they spoke of the past, of days of power and endless freedoms, but too many years of darkness lay between that time and this, and it hurt both of them. Finally Danarion told her why he had come to Shol, and how. She listened soberly, her head averted, the white-streaked golden hair laid in neat coils against her neck, the firelight playing on one cheek and the fan of tiny lines radiating across her temple. When he had finished, she sighed, and her body sagged. “I knew about Ghakazian,” she said in a low voice, “even before … before the Unmaker came to my Gate, I suspected. There was something about Rilla. She made me afraid. And later, when I had made this cave my home and heard how she had gathered the two-minds around her and was building a new city, I was certain. I mourned for the Rilla I had known, and for many years I heard nothing of her brother, Yarne. When word did begin to spread, the rumors about him were contradictory.”

Danarion nodded. “I've heard some of them. Sholia, why did you do nothing? Why hide here in a cave when you have command of Shol's remaining sun? Couldn't you have imprisoned Ghakazian?”

“No.” She turned to face him, her lips quivering. This was the first time she had been able to speak of the years since she had closed the Gate, and Danarion saw tears gather in her eyes. Like me, he thought wonderingly. Like any common mortal. “After I drove the Unmaker back and closed the Gate, I ran away. I was tired, Danarion, more tired than you can possibly imagine. I had been a sun,
been
a sun, and until Shol ceases to turn, I shall never forget the ecstasy of that moment. But for a body, even an immortal one, to open itself to the full power of a sun was a kind of death. I wandered for many years. I could not rest. Often I longed for mortal sleep. I could not rid myself of that terrible exhaustion. I tried to go into my other sun and discovered to my horror that it no longer heard me or recognized me. I had burned myself out. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he whispered, thinking of the sufferings he had shared with Chilka. “I do.”

“I am scarred inside, hollowed out. It shows on my face, my hair. I am still tired, but not with the unbearable weight I carried for so long. It seems to be abating slowly. But all my power has gone. I cannot command the sun to restrain Ghakazian, and even if I could, what profit would there be? The Gate is closed. The Ghakans cannot return to their home. In the end I returned to the Hall of Waiting and found a great city and a ruling Lady, and a precarious balance worked out between two minds in one body. I found something else. We were not healers, were we, Danarion? Our mandate was to preserve, to maintain. Yet in place of the power I have lost, I have gained the ability to heal. I am careful not to make myself obvious, for I am afraid of Ghakazian. He still searches for me once in a while. But people come to me if they dare. They fear the Mountain.”

“Is it the rumor of you that they fear?”

She smiled through her unshed tears. “No. There is something else here, something pathetic and yet threatening, some great essence that cannot escape.”

“Tagar,” Danarion murmured. “He accused me of being an essence called Tagar.”

“Perhaps. I still have some small tricks left, like the one you played when the funeral came past you, which I used to hide you and your son from the soldiers who were seeking your body. But we needn't discuss this now, for the news you bring of Yarne is very serious. Are you certain?”

He moved against the tight bandages, and pain rippled through him. “Yes. He can't be explained in any other way. He is dead, a corpse. Whatever lives in him is not the essence of mortal or immortal but is something with sentience. Ghakazian gives him words to say and the key to unlock Yarne's memories when he needs to. How did Ghakazian do it? And why?”

“Lie still. I can heal quickly, but not if you thrash about. I don't know how he did it, but then, how did he learn that he was able to take the essences of his people through his Gate and across space? He must have studied the Book of Lore. Perhaps he learned other things there.”

Silence fell on them. Danarion drifted into a light sleep, the sudden loss of identity that comes to the injured, and dreamed that Lallin sat beside him, holding his hand. Sholia watched him, getting up sometimes to replenish the fire and stand at the cave mouth, where snow was melting and running in cold rivulets down the Mountain. When he woke again, he was stronger, able to sit and eat. “If I had completed the task I was set, a Messenger would have come for me,” he said as he ate the food that she had prepared. “I have found the Gate, but I am still on Shol, and therefore I am required to undo the evil as best I can. To tell you the truth, Sholia,” he confessed, smiling at her, “I am strangely reluctant to go back to Danar. I think of Janthis and see only Nenan's face. Danar is like a fading dream in my mind.”

“I dare not think of Danar at all,” she replied, a catch in her voice. “It is forever unattainable to me now. I shall never again greet Janthis. I shall grow old on Shol. I have been … lonely, Danarion.”

He wanted to embrace her, kiss her on the mouth, drive the loneliness away with his body. But remembering his dream, he knew that it was Lallin he wanted to hold, not Sholia. “What shall we do?” he said unsteadily.

“Tomorrow you will be able to walk. The next day you will feel well again. The arrow pierced your left side, did you know? I think Ghakazian will come looking for you himself. He will know by now that an arrow struck you but that your body has disappeared. He will be frightened. He will bring many soldiers and will come to the Mountain.”

“Then we will go down and wait for him in the proper place, by the Hall of Waiting. You will come with me?”

She sat still for a long time, her expression unreadable, and he thought how fear had ruled her life since the moment when the Worldmaker had stood before them on Danar and claimed all the worlds of making for his own. Her one act of desperate courage had been to cast him from Shol, an act of lunatic bravery he did not think he himself could ever have accomplished, and she should have been purged by it, but he saw that she was not. Fear was still there, a residue in her essence that would never be washed away. At last she pressed her hands together, a gesture of pain, and glanced across at him and away. “I will come,” she said.

The next day, as she had promised, he was able to walk about the cave. He felt weak but whole again. She removed the bandages, and he saw the swollen red welt, almost identical to the older scar, before she covered it again with one thin strip of linen. She had washed his clothes, and he struggled into them and felt immediately himself.

That night they sat by the fire and talked of inconsequential things: the changing weather, the people she had cured. He slept long and deeply while she sat outside and watched the constellations appear in the night sky, a dusting of sparkling shapes that did little to alleviate the loneliness Danarion had rekindled in her.

In the morning they prepared to leave the cave. Danarion took the knife he had stolen from the guard and hesitated, turning it over in his fingers, but then shrugged and tucked it inside his shirt. Sholia wrapped herself in a short, sleeved cloak, and they went out into the dawn.

The sky was a clear, watery blue, and gulls rustled overhead on their way to the beaches. The ground was wet with melted snow, although here and there in the places of perpetual mountain shadow small patches of white remained. The cave was a natural hollow, its entrance hidden by a short slope that rose at its mouth and then plunged away to join the main sweep of the Mountain, and Danarion saw that it was not far from the tunnel through which he had groped with Nenan, lit by his own small light.

He and Sholia skirted the slope and began the short climb to the uneven, rounded plateau where the funeral had taken place. The path they took was narrow but well-worn. Beside it, wherever there was a hollow in the rock or a hint of shelter, bones lay on the tattered remains of woven mats, bleached and worn by summer sun and winter rains, often drifted over with the always-moving sand. Many of the corpses had been wrapped in white shrouds, which had loosened and blown away to hang netted against the tough mountain scrub and be picked at by birds eager for threads to line their nests.

Once on the plateau Danarion breathed a sigh of relief. He paused to look out upon the plain, miles of sand and rock to the left, its brown grass ahead leading to the dark blur of the orchards out of which the road ran, and far away to the haze of the ocean. He missed Nenan, and in that moment Sholia was more of a stranger to him than his son. “Nothing is moving,” Sholia remarked, and he did not reply, his eyes traveling slowly over the view. The snow he and Nenan had floundered through on their wild dash for safety was gone, melted away into the dead grasses, taking with it the reality of that night, that dawn. “He may not come today,” Sholia went on. “The wait could be long.”

I don't care, Danarion thought mutinously. I don't care about anything anymore but the well-being of my wife, my child. He touched the knife resting against his skin and started down the Mountain.

By noon they had angled across the plain, avoiding the orchards in order to strike the road where it began to hug the long side of the Mountain. When they reached the road, Danarion stopped. “I'm hungry,” he said. “Is there any bread?”

Wordlessly she sank to the ground and opened the pouch she carried, and he wolfed down the bread and herbs she offered. Thirst began to trouble him and he found a small pool of melted snow caught in a dip in the grass. Kneeling, he lifted the freezing water to his mouth, lapping it up like a dog, aware of Sholia's eyes on his back.

By sunset they stood outside the excavation in the cliff, and Ishban itself reared from the plain in the distance, its walls and leaping spires stained blood-red, as he had seen them with Nenan by his side. The gulls that had flapped overhead on their way to the ocean in the morning now streamed inland against the placid pink sky, and Danarion winced at the sight and strident sound of them. “We will wait in the Hall,” he said peremptorily. “At least we will have shelter there.” He led the way into the darkness, under the timber props and beside a clutter of workmen's tools. The sunset followed him, laying a shaft of red light under his feet.

Once in the Hall he turned to face the entrance and lowered himself to the floor, his back against a wall. He was tired. Sholia dropped her pouch beside him and began to wander, touching the places where the copper reliefs lay exposed to the last of the daylight. When she came to the lintels of the door that led so irrationally onto the raw rock face, she stood very still gazing at it, her hands loose at her sides. “Sun-lord,” she whispered. “It was all so long ago. I can no longer believe that it was I.” She stayed there until full darkness overflowed from the world outside and washed up the walls in a soundless tide, blotting them out, and then she came and sat beside Danarion. He held out a hand, groping in the darkness, and she took it. He thought of giving a little of his own light to make the darkness more bearable, but he was too weary to make the effort and had almost forgotten how. In any case, neither of them had anything to fear from this place. They were a part of it. Their time had been its time. They felt as quietly, calmly useless as it was now and sat clasping hands, each sunk in far dreams. At last Danarion's eyes grew heavy, and his head slid onto her shoulder. It is ridiculous, an insult, for two such as us to face a sun-lord, he thought drowsily as her arm went around him. We are two children whose spirit of make-believe has led them into realms of unknown danger. He slept and dreamed of Nenan and Lallin again, and the feel of the mountain stream against his skin on hot summer afternoons, but something of the ancient magic of the Hall drifted softly over him as the night wore away, and his dream changed to one of Janthis waiting by his body in the jeweled council hall on Danar and a Messenger flashing like white starlight through space, coming to take him home.