Woman Who Loved the Moon (7 page)

But it was more substantial than that; it was a house, a rough-hewn cabin, and at the side of the house was a rain barrel, and there was a yellow curtain at the window. Marveling a little, Jael went up to the curtain and put her eye to the gap where it flapped.

She saw a small room, with a neat pallet on the floor, a table, a chair near the hearth, a candle on the table. From the low rafters, like bats, hung bunches and strings of herbs, roots, leaves, a witch woman’s stock. A woman sat on the chair, bending forward, poking at the fire with a long forked stick.

Jael understood. This was a woman who had chosen, as was her right, to live alone; to take no man and bear no children; to be, instead, wise-woman, healer, barren yet powerful in her choice, for did not the Goddess honor those who chose to be lonely in Her service? She watched. The woman rose. She went to a chest beside the bed, took out a sheepskin cape, and began to pick the burrs from it.

Suddenly she turned toward the window. Jael drew back instinctively, and then caught herself and used the bracelets to blur the air around her, so that she could stand still and not be seen. Gray eyes seemed to look right into hers; gray eyes like smoke, framed by the smoke of long dark hair.

Then the dark head bowed and was covered by the cloak’s hood. She walked to the door. Jael blurred herself wholly to human eyes and waited as the witchwoman opened the door and closed it behind her. She wondered (even She) where, on the Lady’s mountain, even a witch would dare to go.

She walked along the path that followed the stream bed. Jael followed behind her, hidden and silent. At the pool by the waterfall, she knelt. Jael smiled. This was one of Her places; it was not so long ago that She had showed Herself, under the glare of a harvest moon, to an awed crowd. Now the stream bed was clogged with fallen leaves, but it was still a holy place. The waterfall was a small but steady drip over the lip of rock to the clear dark pool below.

The witchwoman knelt on the flat stones that ringed the pool’s edge, staring into the fecund depth of water. Her face was grave and still. At last she rose, and made her way to the path. Her silent homage made Jael hesitate. But she decided not to follow the witchwoman to her cabin. Instead, she returned to her cave. Stalking to the lumenings, she lit them with a wave of her hand, and then, irresolute, stood thinking what to say.

She decided.

EXPLAIN NEED FOR EMPIRE AT THIS TIME.

The lights pulsed and went dim. She waited. No answer appeared. Oh well—they might answer another time. The question would surprise them. Jael remembered years of famine, of drought, of blight. Once She had sent a plague. It had hurt, watching the inexorable processes of disease and death sweep over Her people. She had not asked reasons for that.

War is different, she thought.

But how can I know that? I have never seen a war. Perhaps it is just like a plague. But plague is natural, she thought. War is made by men.

What’s this? she asked herself. That plague was not “natural,”
you
made it, with your training and your machines. What makes this different? Woman of Reorth, she said sternly, naming herself in her own mind, as she rarely did, how are
you
different from a war?

* * *

The next day brought no answer from the lumenings, nor did the one after that, nor the one after that.

Autumn began the steep slide into winter. Round the Lady’s mountain it rained and rained, gullying the fields, now stripped of grain, and washing the last leaves from the thin trees. The waterfall sang strongly for a time.

Then one morning the ground was white and cold and hard, and ice spears tipped the trees and fences, and hung from the eaves. Village children drove their herds into barns, whooping and shouting, snapping willow switches from the dead branches of the willow trees. Men gathered wood; women counted over the apples and dried ears of corn that filled the storerooms, and prayed to the Goddess for a gentle winter. Mountain goats watched the stooping wood gatherers with disdainful eyes, their coats grown shaggy and long, for in winter the hunting stopped. In Rys and allied Hechlos the mining ceased. Only in the smithies the men worked, forging swords and knives and shields and spear and arrowheads. In the smithies it stayed warm.

Sometime during the winter procession of ice, snow, and thaw, Reorth answered. The lumenings lit, held a pattern for a few moments, and then went dark.

It was the outline of a machine, sketched in light. For weeks Jael could not think what it might mean. She had decided to dismiss it as a misdirected transmission, meant for someone, when one night she dreamed. It was a dream of Reorth, of home. She woke, weeping for a world she had not seen in three hundred years, and, in the darkness of her cave, heard herself say aloud the name of the machine.

It was a chronoscope, one of the great machines that scanned the timelines. She had not seen one in—in—she could not remember how long. Rage filled her. Was she a child, to be answered with pictures? The contemptuousness of the response brought her in haste to the screen, fingers crooked, ready to scorch the sky with lightning.

But she caught her hands back in mid-reach. The folk who had sent her here would not be impressed with her anger. The answer was plain, as they had meant it. The need is there, seen in the timelines. You know your job. Do as you are told.

Do not impede.

* * *

The year moved on. The waterfall over the pool froze into fantastic sculpted shapes, thawed, fell, froze again. The pool did not freeze. Only its color changed, deepening under stormy skies to black. The villagers did not visit it, but the witchwoman, Akys, did, coming to kneel on the icy, slippery stones once or twice each week.

The witchwoman’s cabin by the streambed was as far up the Lady’s mountain as the villagers would venture. They carne reluctantly, drawn by need: a sick child, a sick cow, an ax wound. The women came first, and then the men. This was as it should be, for men had no place on Her mountain.

More rarely, the witchwoman went to the villagers, down the steep pathway from her home to the rutted village streets. How the knowledge came she was never sure, save that it did come, like a tugging within her head, a warning that something was amiss in wood-or village. Once it was a girl who had slipped gathering kindling and wedged her legs between two rocks. Akys had gone down to the village to fetch the villagers and bring them to the child. Once a fire started in a storeroom; they never discovered how. Had Akys smelled the smoke? She could not tell, but with knowledge beating like the blood in her temples against her brain, she came scrambling down the path to call the villagers out from sleep, and helped them beat the flames out in the icy, knife-edged wind.

In the thick of the winter, trying to gather twigs on the stony slope, the witchwoman would find firewood outside her door, or apples, cider, even small jugs of wine, to warm her when the ashes gave no warmth, and the wind thrust its many-fingered hands through her cabin’s myriad chinks. After the fire they left her a haunch of venison. She was grateful for it, for the hares and sparrows grew trapwise, and her snares often sat empty.

To pass the shut-in days in the lonely hut, the witchwoman cut a flute from a tree near the Lady’s pool, and made music. It floated down the hillside, and the village children stopped their foraging to listen to the running melodies.

Jael heard them, too. They drew her. The quavering pure tones seemed to her to be the voice of winter, singing in the ice storms. Sometimes, on dark nights, she would throw on her cloak of green cloth—a cloak made on Reorth—and go past the pool, up to the shuttered window of the witch’s house, to listen.

The music made her lonely.

On impulse one night, she shifted the lumenings to local and called across the islands to Yron. She called and called. Then she called Reorth.

YRON DOES NOT ACKNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION

The reply came at once.

YRON RECALLED 20 YEARS AGO, LOCAL TIME.

NEW ASSIGNMENT ACCEPTED. COORDINATES FOLLOW.

There was a pause. Then a set of planetary coordinates flashed across the screen.

Jael shrugged. The transmission continued.

YOUR RECALL UNDER CONSIDERATION.

WOULD YOU ACCEPT REASSIGNMENT?

TAKE YOUR TIME.

* * *

Akys did not know when she first began to sense the presence of a stranger near her home. It came out of nowhere, like the gift of warning in her head. Especially it came at night, when clouds hid the moon and stars. At first she thought it was the wild things of the mountain, drawn by her music. But beasts leave signs that eyes can read. This presence left no sign—save, once, what might have been the print of a booted foot in snow.

On a day when the sun at noon was a copper coin seen through cloud, she heard a knock at her door. She thought, Someone in trouble? Her gift had given her no warning. She stood, laying the flute aside, moving slowly with weariness and hunger, for her snares had shown empty for three days. She went to the door and opened it.

A woman stood under the icicled eaves. She wore a long green cloak, trimmed with rich dark fur. From her fingers dangled two partridges.

“Favor and grace to you,” she said. Her voice was low and gentle. “My name is Jael. We are neighbors on the mountain. I have heard your music in the evenings; it gives me much delight. I wished to bring you a gift.” She held out the birds. Her hair, escaping from its hood, was the bright auburn of a harvest moon.

Akys stepped back. “Will you come inside? It’s cold on the doorstep.”

“Gladly,” said the stranger. She dropped her hood back, and stepped into the small, smoky house.

Taking the birds from the slim hands, Akys said, “I didn’t know I had any neighbors.”

Her quick eyes caught the tint of gold as the cape shifted. Who was this woman, dressed so richly and strangely, who called her “neighbor” and brought her food?

“My name is Jael,” said Jael again. “I am new come to this place. I lived before in”—she seemed to hesitate—”Cythera, west of here. Now I live near the Lady’s well.”

“I do not know that place, Cythera,” said the witchwoman. She began to strip the feathers from the birds. “Are you alone?” she murmured.

Jael nodded. “I have no man,” she said.

“Then will you eat with me tonight?” said Akys. “It is hard to come to a new home alone, especially in winter. And they are your birds, after all.”

Jael came to the hearth, where Akys sat cleaning the birds. Kneeling, she stretched out her hands to the warmth. Her fingers were slender, unscarred by work. On her wrists wire bracelets shone gold in the firelight. The flame seemed to leap toward them.

She glanced up, into Akys’ gray eyes. “Forgive my silence,” she said. “I may not speak of my past. But I mean you no harm.”

“I can see that,” said Akys. “I accept your gift and your silence.” She has a vow, she thought. Perhaps she has left wealth and family behind, to serve the Lady. That is noble in one so beautiful and young.

She picked up the bellows and blew the fire up, and dropped the cleaned partridge in the pot. “I am alone, too,” she said matter-of-factly.

“So I see,” said Jael, looking around at the one room with its narrow pallet, and single chair. “You’ve not much space.”

Akys shrugged. “It’s all I need. Though I never thought to have visitors. I might get another chair.”

Jael tucked her feet beneath her and settled beside the fire. “Another chair,” she agreed quietly, “for visitors—or a friend.”

Through the rest of the short, severe winter the two women shared food: birds, coneys, dried fruits, nuts, and clear water. In the thaws, when the snow melted and the streams swelled, they made hooks and lines to catch fish. They hunted the squirrels’ stores from the ground, and gathered wood for the hearth. Jael’s hands and cheeks grew brown, chapped by wind and water.

“Akys!” she would call from the house, flinging wide the door.

And Akys, kneeling by the stream, water bucket in hand, felt her heart lift at that clear, lovely call. “Yes!”

“Can I stuff quail with nuts?”

“Have we enough?”

“I think so.”

“Slice them thin.” She brought the bucket to the house. Jael was chopping chestnuts into bits. She watched warily over Jael’s shoulder, wondering as she watched how the younger woman had managed, alone. She did not know the simplest things. “Be careful with that knife.”

“If I dull it,” Jael said, “you’ll have to get the smith to sharpen it for you again.”

“I don’t want you to cut yourself,” said Akys.

Jael smiled. “I never do,” she said, “do I?”

“No.”

Jael set the knife down and pushed the sliced nuts into the cavity. She trussed the bird with cord, held it, hefted it. “It’s a big one. I’m glad you got that new pot from the village.”

“I hate asking for things,” said Akys.

Jael said, “I know. But you can’t build an iron pot the way you can a chair.” Crossing the room, she dumped the bird into the cauldron. “And tomorrow I want to fish. I’ll bring some metal hooks with me when I return in the morning.”