Among the Powers (4 page)

Bredon had rarely seen trees except at a
distance. Few trees grew on the grasslands around the village, and
he, like all his people, almost never ventured away from the open
plain. The plain was big enough for anyone. Besides, other lands
belonged to other tribes, or to the Powers, and one did not intrude
uninvited.

At least, not without a good reason. Bredon
was very aware that he was intruding uninvited.

The presence of not one, or two, but four or
five hundred trees in a single place was almost overwhelmingly
alien. He had seen the forests cloaking the distant mountainsides,
but to be
among
the trees, close enough to touch them, to
smell them, to see the individual leaves, was very different.
Despite his bold intentions, Bredon had entered the Forbidden Grove
very slowly and cautiously, moving as silently as he could and
staring up uneasily at the strange, towering plants on every
side.

Something felt wrong almost immediately; he
paused to try and identify it.

When he had stopped moving, when his feet no
longer rasped against the underbrush and his clothes no longer
rustled as they slid across his body, he realized what it was. The
woods sounded wrong.

Every hour of his life, every wake, every
sleep, every light and dark, ever since his birth, whenever he had
been outside solid walls, he had heard the wind in the grass. In
the spring the wind hissed through the green young shoots. In
summer the grass was tall and whispered in the wind. In autumn the
brown stalks rubbed and chattered, until at last came the winter,
coating the grass in ice, knocking the blades to the ground and
sometimes burying them in snow, but not quieting them as they
tinkled together or crunched underfoot. The sound had been faint
when the wind was gentle, a harsh howling when the winter winds
ripped down from the mountains, but always present. The air on the
plain was never still, and the grass was never still. When a man
walked anywhere beyond the village, he walked through rustling
grass.

Here in the Forbidden Grove the grass did
not grow and the wind could not reach. Overhead leaves rustled, but
that was a different sound, an alien sound, a
wrong
sound.
His feet moved silently, moving aside nothing but air, and the air
around him was calm—not dead, because it still stirred faintly, but
calm and quiet.

A bird chirped, loud in the closed-in
stillness.

He was hungry, he decided. After all, he had
not intended to make so long a journey, and had come away with
nothing but a pocket full of corn chips. He had reached the grove,
he had entered it; now it was time to go home and get something
solid to eat.

He was actually starting to turn when he
caught himself.

He was not Mardon, he thought scornfully, to
be terrified by anything that was at all out of the ordinary. There
was nothing unnatural in the grove’s stillness. He had experienced
similar quiet in his parents’ house, he told himself.

That was not strictly true, he immediately
corrected himself. Houses did not have leaves that rustled
overhead. Houses were built, not grown. Houses had distinct walls
and small rooms, not great ill-defined spaces that seemed to wind
on forever. Houses were lit by lamps or straight-edged windows, not
by dapples of sunlight that spilled randomly through a myriad of
leaves, all shifting in the breeze.

Still, he was no child to be frightened by
something simply because it was strange. He forced himself to march
on into the grove.

It occurred to him that, here among the
trees, he was walking between the stems of plants as an insect
walked between blades of grass, similarly sheltered, and that he
was in no more danger from the trees than an ant was from grass.
However, the analogy did not really comfort him, but instead made
him feel insignificant.

As he moved on in the still air beneath the
rustling leaves, he quickly noticed something else about the grove;
it was cool. The sun was almost straight overhead, yet he was not
at all uncomfortable. Out in the open he knew that he would have
been sweating heavily. Summer was dying, but not yet dead, and the
autumn cooling would not arrive for another few tensleeps.

With that, with the realization that he was
not sweating and hot, his opinion of the grove began to change. He
began to see the beauty, as well as the strangeness, in the
scattered light, the soaring trunks and reaching branches, the open
ground. Looking up, he began to distinguish between the different
varieties of tree.

His pace had shifted from a tentative creep
when he first passed under the shade of the trees to a confident
stride when he conquered his fear. Now it shifted again, from a
stride to an amble, as he began to take in the details of his
surroundings, not as potential dangers but as potential
delights.

Best of all was when he rounded a huge old
oak and found himself on the bank of a stream. The water gurgled
around tree roots and polished stones, and the sunlight shattered
into dancing glitter on its surface. He almost thought he heard a
distant music, as of children singing or someone playing lightly on
a fidlin.

The streams he was familiar with, out in the
grasslands, were little more than meandering ditches. They did not
sing and sparkle.

It was no wonder, he told himself, that
people thought a place as weird and wonderful as this must be
linked to the Powers. He saw no sign of any Lady Sunlight, but only
the sunlight on the leaves and water.

He looked out across the stream and saw an
open meadow, a few hectares of wildflowers and short grass
surrounded by trees. That, he told himself, was surely The Meadows,
but he saw no Lady Sunlight, and certainly no great palace. For an
instant he thought he saw something tall and glittering in the
center of the meadow, but when he could not find it again he
dismissed it as a trick of the light, something caused by emerging
from the dimness of the trees to the meadow’s brightness.

Weird and wonderful, he told himself as he
sat down to rest by the stream, but nothing of the Powers about
it.

He did not see the glittering column flicker
again. He did not know enough to realize that, even when planted
with trees, the plain would not naturally have babbling brooks full
of water-rounded stones. As the life of the grove went on around
him, he could not distinguish the artificial insects and flowers
from the natural ones. He was unaware of the hidden machines that
scanned him, analyzed him, and decided he was harmless.

He sat quietly by the stream until the
wake’s second sunset and dozed off there, convinced that he sat
among wonders of nature, and only of nature.

The sun was well up the sky, and firstlight
well advanced, when he awoke again. He was in the habit of waking
at dawn, but he was not accustomed to the cool shade of the
grove.

He rose and stretched, then knelt and
splashed a little water on his face. The stream was clear and clean
and cool. He bent down and drank.

His stomach growled, ruining the mood.
Something chittered overhead, and he looked up in time to see
leaves closing behind some small scampering creature. A dislodged
vine slithered across a branch.

He had not brought any weapons, and besides,
he had no idea how to hunt among trees. He reached in his pocket
for the last of the corn chips, and stuffed all but the smallest
fragments into his mouth.

When he had taken the edge off his hunger by
chewing the corn chips to liquid, he sat down at the base of a
great tree and looked around, admiring the scenery. In the rising
light it took on a different aspect than it had had when he first
arrived. The meadow across the stream was somehow more colorful, he
thought; the air itself seemed to glisten, and the impression of
distant singing in the sound of the brook was stronger than
ever.

This, he thought, would be a wonderful place
to bring a woman. There was a serenity to the place that he judged
would appeal to most of the girls or women he knew. He was sure
Kittisha would like it. The mossy bank of the stream would be a
very pleasant place to lie together.

He let himself imagine that for a moment as
he gazed across at the meadow.

Then he saw that the air really
was
glittering. He stared, realizing that it was no illusion, or at
least none he had ever encountered before.

He asked himself if it could be some
peculiar sort of diurnal firefly, and was on the verge of
convincing himself that that was exactly what he saw when a woman
stepped out of the glittering air onto the meadow grass,
accompanied by strange music that was definitely neither singing
nor the sound of water.

She was tall and slender, her long, flowing
hair the golden yellow of sunlight on wildflowers. She wore a filmy
pale something that seemed to shift both color and shape every time
she moved, and which hung drifting in the air despite a complete
lack of any breeze to account for such motion. Small fluttering
things, like tiny glowing butterflies, flashed a thousand colors in
a halo about her, and furry things moved through the grass at her
feet.

Bredon stared, and felt something stir
within him.

The woman paid no attention to him. She gave
no sign that she had noticed his presence at all. She stood in the
meadow and took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the morning
air. The flutterers swirled away for a moment, then returned, and
the sourceless music rose into a brief crescendo.

Bredon watched hungrily. This woman was,
beyond any doubt, Lady Sunlight of the Meadows.

She was also the most beautiful thing Bredon
had ever seen.

He was, he realized, looking at another
Power. This was what he had come here for, to see another Power and
see if he could recover some of what he had lost in his meeting
with Geste. Looking at Lady Sunlight as she stretched lazily, he
knew exactly what he wanted, what would more than make up for the
lost mare and his lost self-esteem.

He wanted Lady Sunlight. He wanted her with
a raw and simple lust stronger than any he had felt in years.

His breeches had grown uncomfortably tight
as his body reacted to the sight of that sleek and inhumanly
beautiful female form; he shifted his legs, trying to accommodate
himself, then got awkwardly to his feet.

“Hello!” he called.

Startled, the woman dropped her arms from
above her head to cover her breasts, and whirled to face him. The
flutterers abruptly vanished, the music stopped, and the animals at
her feet disappeared into the grass. She whispered something; he
could see her lips moving, but even without the music Bredon heard
nothing over the rustle of leaves and the splashing of the
brook.

There was no one else in sight save she and
himself. Bredon wondered who she was talking to—the invisible
musicians, perhaps?

Then there was someone else in sight, or at
least some
thing
else. It was shaped more or less like a man,
but was obviously not a man, not even a man in a costume. It was
eight feet tall, covered in gleaming silver metal, its face a dark
nothingness. It stepped across the brook in a single stride and
stood towering over him.

“Sir,” it said in a polite and completely
human masculine voice, “you are trespassing on private property. I
must ask you to leave at once.”

The thing was blocking his view; he tried to
peer around it, to see what Lady Sunlight was doing. “I just...” he
began.

“Sir, I must ask you to leave
at
once
. There can be no discussion.”

“But...”

He felt himself being picked up, but the
thing’s arms still hung motionless at its sides, a meter or two
away. Before he could figure this out he was being whisked back
through the grove at an incredible speed, though he had not felt
anything throw him. Trees flashed by on either side, and for an
instant he was terrified by the thought of striking one; at the
speed he was travelling he knew such an impact would break his
skull or his spine.

Then he slowed, and tumbled to the ground on
the open grassland at a speed no greater than if he had stumbled
over his own feet.

Driven by lust and his native stubbornness,
he immediately untangled himself, jumped up, and started back into
the grove.

His face smacked into something invisible,
and he fell back, his hand flying immediately to his nose.

He felt the damaged area carefully. It was
not broken, not even bleeding, but he thought it would develop a
nice purple bruise in another few hours.

He advanced again, more cautiously this
time, his left hand held out before him.

His hand pressed up against something he
could not see. The invisible barrier was still there. He shoved at
it.

It did not yield. It felt like a solid wall,
yet he could see nothing, not even the odd glitter that he had seen
above the meadow.

He stepped back and considered, then circled
around a dozen paces to the left. There he advanced into the grove
again.

Once again, he encountered the invisible
barrier just past the first ring of trees.

This, obviously, was magic. This was power.
This was what made the Powers respected and feared throughout the
world.

He leaned on the barrier with both hands,
digging his heels into the soft earth, but could make no
impression. He pushed until he could feel the muscles in his thighs
and upper arms knotting with the strain.

The dirt beneath his heels gave way; his
feet went out from under him and he fell ignominiously face-first
onto a patch of moss.

Fuming, he pushed himself up onto his knees
and spat out moss and dirt. He glared at the grove, serene and
beautiful behind the barrier, looking just as it had when he first
awoke. The only difference was that now he was outside and could
not get back in.