The Weaver's Lament (30 page)

“But because the Three never came, because you and Grunthor were not there to kill the F'dor with her, the demons were ultimately victorious. Anwyn had shattered the Purity Diamond, which was the only real weapon against them, and soon the world was on fire, drifting through space, alight with smoke, dying. The Wyrm within its bowels was awakening.”

Achmed removed his hand from the baby's face as he settled back into slumber. His own sallow face, etched with sorrow and exposed veins, grew even more somber.

“The remnants of the council took shelter in the mountains of the Deep Kingdom with the surviving leadership, particularly Faedryth, who had built his own Lightforge and had seen the end coming. Manwyn, also sheltered in the mountains of the Deep Kingdom, had uttered a prophecy about the unnatural child born of an unnatural act, saying it was the only hope of undoing the inevitable destruction of the Earth. Only after she had made that pronouncement did she warn Rhapsody about childbirth, that the mother would die, but the child would live.”

Meridion's voice dropped to barely above a whisper.

“So she knew, Achmed. On the first strand of Time, my mother knew the cost, and understood what the consequences would be, both of taking the action, and of not doing so.” He choked. “Even though she did not on the second strand.”

For the first time since he had begun his tale, Achmed nodded.

“Go on,” he said as if the words pained him.

Meridion felt tears stinging the corners of his eyes.

“Among the others taking shelter in the Deep Kingdom was Llauron, who had brought along his wounded son, Gwydion. Gwydion was almost a vegetable, a profoundly broken man who had undertaken the same brave deed he had on this Time-strand—he gone to the House of Remembrance alone, expecting to meet Oelendra there, and was torn apart by the F'dor on midsummer's night. As on the second strand, his friend Stephen Navarne found him, dying, Oelendra took him to the Veil of Hoen, and the Lord and Lady Rowan patched him back together as well as they could. But, because he had never met my mother in the old world, nor had he been healed with the Ring of Wisdom she gave to him on the second strand of Time, he had sunken into madness, drowning in unrelenting pain, his arms restrained, a gag in his teeth most of the time.

“Being a Namer of the highest order, my mother knew the lore of conjuring. The Council agreed, including Llauron, that Gwydion would be the one to be asked to provide the second piece of soul to bring this unnatural child into existence, this child that was to be ‘born free of the bonds of Time.' Just as my mother asked you to do with Graal in this Time.

“So she went to the cave that served as a protective cell for Gwydion with a birthing cloth, and knelt before him, aged as she was. He was ranting, spitting in pain and fury when she first came in, but she asked the guards to leave in spite of the danger. And then she smiled at him, which gave him pause in his ravings, and began to sing.”

Achmed exhaled.

“She sang his namesong, over and over, weaving calming and clarity into it, until he finally grew quiet and his eyes cleared of the madness. She took out his gag, and untied his arms, and rather than striking or biting at her, he smiled back. For a few moments, she had found the lost soul within the overwhelming agony.

“And when she had found him, she asked him if he could possibly bring himself to love her just for a moment, long enough to bring a child into the world with her.”

Achmed clenched his teeth until he could taste the blood in his mouth.

“He stared at her. Then he smiled again. And he uttered the first coherent word he had pronounced since that night at the House of Remembrance—
yes
—and let his hand come to rest on her heart.”

Meridion stopped. A thin trail of blood had spilled from the corner of the Bolg king's mouth.

“Shall I finish?” he asked, uncertain.

Achmed nodded curtly.

Meridion took a deep breath that rattled against his lungs. “She sang the incantation of conjuring, during which Gwydion remained calm. And, when she felt ready, she rose with the cloth, lifted her arms aloft, and the baby appeared in it from the air itself.”

He was now struggling with tears that were choking his words.

“Me, Uncle—that was me.
I
was the unnatural child born of an unnatural act—the child she knew would kill her to bring into the world. I was not born of blood and love, but of ancient lore and Naming science. I was her
second
son—the one without flesh or substance, the same state that Graal is condemned to now. He was her firstborn on the first Time-strand—her child of blood, of love—and yours.

“She—she had just enough time to—to kiss me, to whisper my name and that she loved me—before Death took her, and took her violently, grotesquely, in agony, splitting her from her throat—”

“Stop,” Achmed said tonelessly. The word had all the gravitas of a Namer's command, filling the corridor with heavy silence.

Meridion waited for his tears to stanch, for Achmed's breath to return.

“That is her legacy to Graal as well—she did exactly the same thing in her remaining moments, in his first ones of existence,” he said finally. “At least her death this time was not painful—because of a boon she had asked of the Lord Rowan long ago.

“And you, Achmed, you granted her last wish, her last boon—you gave her Graal, when my father wouldn't. She could not deny his namesong—the tone, she called it, of a child that was waiting to come forth into the world. Perhaps Ashe knew that he wasn't meant to be this child's father. But you were willing to do as she asked.”

Achmed let all of his breath out slowly.

“You make it sound so altruistic,” he said darkly. “In fact, my participation was utterly selfish. It was
my
desire to give him to her, to help bring him forth—to make a child with her.

“And, in doing so, I killed her.”

 

30

For a long moment, no sound was heard but the whine of the wind in the cavern.

Meridion looked across the chasm where the Heath was now impossible to discern from the darkness.

“A funny thing about Time,” he mused. “As far as I know, it has only been altered once, at least in the world that we see.

“You didn't kill her, Achmed. You gave her what she wanted, what she asked of you. And you have given the world this child, again, for what purpose, who knows, but the air around him indicates that it is an important one. I cannot tell you how to feel, what to believe, nor would I deign to do so, but at least to me, there are some things that are foreordained, that happen no matter what goes on with the threads of Time.”

He looked at the Bolg king, who was now staring at his son—Meridion's half-brother.

“Gwydion fell back into madness, as everyone knew he would,” he continued. “I don't know what became of my father after that—there is nothing reflected on the burnt strands of Time that I have seen. But at least for a moment, he saw sanity again, and in that moment, chose to father a child with an extraordinary woman, a child who had a role to play in undoing how Time had originally run—a scenario that allowed for the F'dor to escape the Vault, and wake the Wyrm—leaving the world dying in flames. So whatever the cost to him, or to me—to you and to Graal—at least the potential exists now for that to be made right.”

Achmed looked up. Until he did, Meridion was not certain he even was listening.

“And how precisely do you know that?” he asked quietly, with a nasty undertone. “For all you know, all will result in the same outcome anyway.”

Meridion turned away from the ashes being taken in plumes by the wind and came over to where the Bolg king sat in the tunnel, the baby in his arms. He crouched down in front of them.

“May I see him?” he asked.

Achmed glared at him with his mismatched eyes for a moment, an expression that over time had caused a great number of men to lose their water, pissing themselves in fear. But Meridion maintained a pleasant expression in return, and so the Bolg king relented finally and turned the baby toward him.

The motion caused Graal to open his eyes, his father's eyes, free of the dragonesque pupils that all of Rhapsody's other children had inherited. The baby looked at him curiously, his mouth puckering in interest.

“Hello, little brother,” Meridion said softly, cautiously extending a fingertip in as nonthreatening a manner as he could manage and caressing the back of the little boy's curled fist. “Welcome to the world.”

The baby's hand opened at the caress, and Meridion moved his finger under the child's palm, so that his tiny fingers would encircle it.

“Apparently I was both motherless and fatherless upon
my
appearance in the world, so Faedryth took me under his wing, with the help of the other members of the council, and taught me all the lore of the Earth he knew, and much of the engineering and mechanics as well. Eventually, he helped me to build a laboratory, a glass dome of a sort suspended above the Earth, with a viewing window below, where I could see the planet burning. I imagine my ‘childhood' was a rather rapid one; since the whole point of my conception had been to make use of me to offset the coming devastation, I suppose that I grew to a manhood of a sort very quickly, ‘born free of the bonds of Time.'

“Faedryth and I built a machine called the Time Editor—its name explains its purpose. I was a little concerned when I discovered this part of the history on the Weaver's tapestry while I was awaiting my mother's arrival at the Gate of Life, but it may actually be an evolution of something I've been working on in this iteration of Time.”

He removed his finger gently from Graal's tiny hand and drew forth the Black Ivory box again, opened it and took out the burnt strands of time-thread that Faedryth's miners had discovered deep within the Distant Mountains of the Nain, and held them up before the Bolg king's eyes.

“If you hold these to the light, you can hear the last conversation—just an exchange of a few words, really—that Faedryth and I had before I was sent up into the laboratory to do what I could to rewrite Time.”

Achmed stared at the Time-strands. They looked like clear parchment, though it was filmy and inconstant, yellowed with age, seemingly made of part translucent gem, part gossamer, changing moment by moment before his eyes.

“On the second strand, in the current, remade version of Time, these were found in the deepest reaches of the Nain crystal mines, where the diamond-like formations were believed to have been brought to the Earth from the stars in the form of meteorites. They lay beneath tons of age-old granite for tens of thousands of years before the Nain finally broached the mine, survived the pressure and the cold of the crystal bed—truly a miracle.”

He smiled as his young half-brother stretched and yawned in his sleep, then handed the timefilm to the Bolg king.

Reluctantly, Achmed looked at the strand.

It was as if he was himself standing in the place where the image had been captured, a dark hall that could have been within the mountainous caverns of Ylorc, though he knew immediately that it was not. Gauging by the thinness and striations of the stone, he guessed it was in some mountain peak in another range, most likely similar or even adjoining of this one.

At the end of the hall was an opening, past which there appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, within a large, clear sphere suspended in the open darkness of the sky. Uniform lines of light were set into panels that encircled the transparent room.

Beyond the clear walls of the sphere he could see the world down below, burning at the horizon, as fire crept over the edges, spreading among the continents he recognized from the maps of the Earth.

Hovering in the air before him was a being, a man of sorts, with characteristics of several different races, and all the aspects of youth, except for his eyes, blue eyes, deep as the sea, scored with vertical pupils, resonating wisdom.

He glanced up at Meridion, and into those exact eyes, except solid, corporeal, unchanging, then back at the Time-strands once more.

The man's skin was translucent, like that of the child in his arms, motile, altering with each current of air that passed by or through it. The man actually glowed, especially his hair, curls of brilliant gold that almost seemed afire, like Graal's hair more than Meridion's. It was a slightly altered picture of the young man he had known in Meridion's youth, a young man for whom he had been asked to be the guardian.

And despite the young man's obvious wisdom, the image of his clenched jaw betrayed a quiver of nervousness.

His lips moved. Achmed did not hear what words the young man formed in his own ears, but they resonated in his mind nonetheless.

Will I die?

Another voice, immediately and annoyingly recognizable to the Bolg king as that of Faedryth, Lord of the Nain of the Deep Kingdom, answered.

Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.

The translucent young man nodded and turned away.

Achmed shook his head to clear his eyes of the image, but as he did, he heard the young Meridion's voice in his head again, but with the ring of maturity, as if he had been somewhat older at the time of the utterance.

Forgive me. In my place, I think you would have done the same. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.

“I suspect at the time I said it, I was speaking to you,” Meridion said as the Time-strand returned to its changing state. “I don't know why.”

“You don't know anything,” Achmed said in a low, deadly voice. “You have no idea what I would have wanted. Even I do not know that.”

“I suppose,” Meridion said, putting the Time-strand back in the Black Ivory box. “But either way, this is how my mother was meant to die. The way I look at it, she would have died in horrifying agony, but producing the child that went back to rewrite history, which allowed the world to survive at least a bit longer. That new course of history gave her a love that lasted a thousand years and produced many great descendants that the first Time-strand did not, as well as allowing her to still know and love a strange, irascible man who fathered her child in both iterations of Time, and who lives to watch that child grow up. In any case, as the Lirin say,
Ryle hira
—Life is what it is.