Valdemar Anthology - [Tales of Valdemar 02] - Sun in Glory and Other Tales of Valdemar (9 page)

Darius' voice.

She realized then what was so wrong, so cutting, about this man's cry of terror: it reached her the same way that Darius' words did, in a silence that spoke of knowledge and intimacy. Without thought, she bent to the man huddled against the floor, and without thought, she tried to lift him.

Realized that lifting him would strain the muscles she had built in the hold, lifting even the largest of the children; he was not a small man.

And she was a small woman. But determination had always counted for something. Always.

She caught him in her arms. Caught his face in her hands as his head sought the cradle of arms and breasts.

His screaming was terrible.

But hers was louder, longer, as insistent as his own.

He whimpered, but the sound was a real sound, a thing of throat and breath and lips. His eyes, glassy, brown, deep, shifted and jerked, upward now, seeking her face.

“The darkness,” he whispered. “The darkness. The emptiness. I've lost them. I've failed them all.” For a large man, his voice was small, tiny. She should have been terrified, then.

But as he spoke, she felt what he felt, and she knew,
knew,
that she had passed through it herself.

 

Her own children were gone.

And she was young enough that the visiting merchants never realized that she had had a husband—gone, too—and a family; that she had had everything she had desired in her youth.

And what was the point of that desire, but pain? In the end, what was the point? Her children had not disappeared in the mining accidents that killed the men, when the men did die; they had not gone missing in the terrible snows that could strand a person feet away from the doors of the hold, and bury them there, as a taunt, a winter cruelty.

No. She had held them.

She had held them, just as she had held this man, in this dark, cramped room, in this empty place that had no words of comfort to offer her.

The cabin in which she had lived was hallowed by the terrible silence of their absence; she might walk from room to room—for there were only three—and listen furtively to catch their ghostly voices. This was the way she evoked memory, and memory, in this dark place, this gloom of log and burning wood and little light—for light let in cold—was unkind. It led her into darkness.

And that darkness might have devoured her, if her mother had not held her, held on to her, filled the emptiness with her words and the blessed sound of her voice. Mother's pain, always.

She spoke to this stranger.

She spoke to this man who understood, who was somehow—at this instant—a part of all the losses she had faced.

And as she did, she opened her eyes to a dream.

Heard the voice of the devourer, all his voices, the cries of terror and emptiness.

She forgot the cathedral, then. Forgot the lines of this stranger's face. She held him, as if a storm raged just beyond her bent shoulders, her bowed back. She found voice; she sang. She sang to him.

And the singing did what the words she had spoken—for she was aware that words had left her lips, aware that they were a failure before she had finished speaking them—could not.

Dark eyes turned to her; dark eyes saw her; the agony written and etched in terrible lines across a gray face shifted as eyes she would have sworn couldn't grow any wider, did.

He clung to her; his face made her breasts ache, her spine curved in until it was almost painful just to sit, but she sat. She sat.

And the priest came.

She heard his voice at a distance. She heard his words as if they were spoken from within her. He was praying. After a moment, she joined him, although she didn't know the words that he spoke. Hers were as heartfelt, and they were all she had to offer.

“Come home,” she whispered, kissing the sweaty, damp strands of this stranger's hair, stroking his face as if it were the fevered face of her eldest. “Come home.”

 

Darius was waiting for her. Companions, it seemed, were not considered beasts of burden in even the grandest of venues; he stood in the light of the windows as if he were a dream. He walked forward slowly as the priest helped the man to his feet.

:Kayla,:
he said gravely.
:What you did here was bravely done.:

“What did I do?” she whispered softly.

The priest was staring at her. She turned to him and bowed. “I–I'm sorry,” she stammered. “But—I—I—”

He shook his head. “He came to this place seeking help. And you came to this place offering aid that we could not offer. Do not apologize, child. But—”

She shook her head. “I don't know. I don't know what—what I did.”

“You saved him,” the priest whispered. “I was so certain—” He closed his eyes a moment; she thought he might retreat into prayer again. But he shook himself free of the words, and when he stood, she saw that he was over six feet tall, his shoulders wide and broad. As her father's had once been, before the mines.

“There are others,” he said after a moment. He turned and bowed to her Companion. “She is your Chosen?”

The Companion nickered softly.

“But she wears no white, no gray. Child, can it be that you have not yet made your journey to the Collegium?”

“I—no. I think we're on the way there.”

“Might I ask—if it's not too much—that you come to the infirmary?”

She looked at Darius. Darius was absolutely silent, as if he were adornment to the statues, the windows, the altar of this place.

Her decision, then. She nodded.

 

He led her through the cloisters; she realized later that this was a courtesy to Darius. Darius was comfortable in the apse, but once the halls narrowed, movement would be restricted, and it was clear what the Companion—no,
her
Companion—thought of that.

She even smiled, felt a moment of almost gentle amusement, until she glanced at the older man's face. Care had worn lines from his eyes to his lips, and she thought that no matter what happened in future, they were there to stay.

They grew deeper as he left the cloister; deeper still as he walked down a hall and stopped in front of a door that was slightly ajar. “Here,” he said quietly.

She nodded and opened the door.

And stopped there, beneath the lintel, staring. There was more than one room; she could see that clearly in the streaming light of day. And there were beds, bedrolls, makeshift cots, with only barely enough room between them to allow a man passage. Each of the beds was occupied.

:Kayla.:
The word was urgent, but real.

She was afraid.

“I can't—I can't go in there,” she whispered.

But the door was no protection; it was open. She could hear weeping, whimpering, screaming. Her hand caught the frame of the door and her fingers grew white as she held it.

:Bright heart.:
Darius said firmly,
:see with your eyes. Hear with your ears; hear only with your ears.:

She drew a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. See, she thought, with your eyes.

She could do that. She could look.

Men lay abed. Women. There were children as well, although they were mercifully few. They gazed up at the ceiling of the room, or at the walls, their eyes unblinking. They did not move; their lips were still. She shook her head to clear it of the sounds of despair, and as she did, the priest gently pushed his way past her.

“They have been this way,” he said softly, “for weeks. They will eat what we feed them, and drink when we offer them water; we can clean them, wash them, bathe them. But they will not rise or move on their own; they do not speak. Some of them have families in this town, but—but most of their families can only bear to visit for the first few days.” He walked over to one of the beds and set upon its edge, heavily.

“More and more of my people are brought here every day. And throughout the town there are others whose families can afford the cost of their care.”

“They—they have no fever?”

“None. No rash, no bleeding, no outward sign of illness. But they are gone from us.” He looked up; met her eyes.

“The man that you—you found, today, would have joined them by evening at the latest.”

“How do you know?”

“I've seen it. I know the signs. All of us do.”

“But—”

“We have no doctors who can aid us; no healers who can reach them.” He closed his eyes. Opened them again. “What did you do, Herald?”

She shook her head. “N–nothing. And—and I'm not—not a Herald.” She walked into the room, to shed the weight of the bleak hope in his eyes.

And as she did, she passed a small cot and stopped before it, frozen.

It held a young child, eyes wide, hair damp against his forehead. Were it not for the slack emptiness of his features, he would have been beautiful. She forgot Darius; forgot his words.

She listened with her
heart.

And her heart shuddered, and nearly broke, from the weight of what it heard. She had once been near the mines when a shaft had collapsed. The roar of falling rock had deafened her; the shouts of fear, of terror, the commands for action, had done the same. And through it all, one guilty thought had kept her still: she should not have come here. Children were not allowed by the mines. But she had wanted to see her father.

Standing in this room, at the foot of this anonymous cot, she felt the same deafness and the same guilt. Some part of her urged her to turn, to run, but she ignored it because she had heard it for most of her adult life.

What loss could she suffer that she had not suffered?

She took a step, and then another, pushing her way forward as if through a gale, until she stood by the child's side. And then she reached for him.

He was not large; she did not know if he had once been chubby, as children his age often were; he was not that now; he weighed almost nothing. She lifted him, as she had lifted one other sick child, almost two years ago.

He was screaming now, in the silence behind her silence, and she joined him because it was the only way she knew to answer the memories that even now threatened to break her.

Her son.

Her child.

Her own son had not wept or cried or struggled. The fever had spared him terror, and he understood, in the height of its grip, that she held him in the safety of her arms.

Almost unconsciously, she shifted her grip on this stranger until it was the same embrace; her shoulders were curved forward, her spine rounded at the top, as if, hunched over him, she might hide from the death that was waiting, waiting, in the winter's depths. She placed her lips against his forehead, and tasted salt.

She was crying.

He was screaming, but she knew how to comfort terror by now. Her arms tightened and she began to rock him, gently, back and forth, whispering his name, her son's name, as if they were the same.

It happened suddenly: His arms jerked and trembled as he tried to lift them. She did not know how long he had lain in that cot, inactive, but his hands were so weak they were like butterfly wings against her neck.

“The dragon,” he whispered, his voice a rasp, a creak. “The dragon will eat us.”

“No,” she told him firmly. “The dragon can't land. He can only fly, making night wherever he goes. He can roar. He can scream. But he can't land.”

“He hates us.”

“Aye,” she replied. She had never lied to her children; she felt no need to lie to this one. “He hates all living things. All
happy
things.” And as she said those words, she felt the truth of them, although she had never thought to speak them before. The boy's hands touched her cheeks. “You were scared,” he whispered.

“No.”

“But you were. You have tears on your face.”

She could not dry them; both of her hands were occupied with his scant weight. But she turned to the priest who was watching in utter silence.

“You can breathe now,” she said.

The priest's eyes were wide. “Herald,” he said again, and this time she did not correct him, “can you reach the others?”

“I—”

She frowned. It was Darius' voice.
:Darius—why?:

:Before
who
finds me?:

Darius was silent.

She drew the boy up in her arms, into a hug; her arms were as gentle as she could make them in a grip so tight. She felt his bony chin in the hollow between her neck and her shoulder, and the weight of it, resting there, was everything she desired for that moment.

But this is how she had quieted her sorrow; she had filled it with life, small life, the immediacy of children.

“Where are his parents?” She asked the Priest.

“He has no parents. I am sorry. They passed away a year and a half ago in the summer crippling plague.”