Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (118 page)

It was Theophanu's turn to look startled. "So I do, Father," she said obediently.

"Well," he said, reading reluctance in her otherwise placid expression, "now is not the time. Still, there remains the matter of Sanglant. Both Villam and Judith have ridden east to rally their marchlanders against the Quman threat. If there is war in the east and war coming in Aosta, then certainly we must hope to convince Sanglant to return to court." This comment scarcely caused a ripple, given the swells that had passed through the crowd before. Henry turned to regard Rosvita with his most compelling gaze. "But I can make no decision without consulting the best of my counselors. What do you advise, Sister? How am I to respond to Adelheid's proposal?"

Curiously, it was Hathui, standing behind the king's chair, lifted her chin to show support, or suggest an answer. The hall lay as silent as any hall could be with fully three or four hundred people crammed inside, all sweating and struggling to get close enough to hear what would come next.

In that silence of coughs and shifting feet, a distantly shouted question floating in from outdoors, and the whine of some poor dog crushed in the crowd, Rosvita remembered Theophanu's words at the convent of St. Ekatarina, the ones the princess had spoken when she thought Rosvita was still asleep:
"What good is my high birth if our lord father marries again and sires younger children whom he loves more and sets above me? Why should I serve them, when I came before them ? Is that not why the angels rebelled?"

Rosvita was fond of Theophanu, truly. She had sympathy for the difficult position that Theophanu had, all these years, handled with dignity and calm. She even admired Theophanu's cool loyalty to her elder brother, Sanglant, and the constant, uncomplaining service she had given her father.

But Rosvita was Henry's loyal servant first and foremost— after God, of course. Henry would always come first in her heart, and as his trusted counselor she had also to take into account what would benefit the kingdom as well the man himself. She stepped forward to offer him the ivory comb.

"You are still young, Your Majesty." She needed to say nothing more. Like her, he was not more than forty-three years old.

He smiled brilliantly, and indeed he looked five years younger in that moment, as if Adelheid had brought in her train a spell of youth which she now spun over him. He brought the comb to his lips and kissed it gently, then turned over Adelheid's hand and placed the comb in it, folding her fingers over it and sealing her grasp with his own hand, cupped over hers. She sat back with a sharp, satisfied, and vehement smile.

"Send ahead to Angenheim," said Henry to his stewards and to every soul waiting in the hall. "Tell them to make ready for a wedding feast fitting for the marriage of a queen to a king!"

ZACHARIAS woke at sunrise. He ached all over from sleeping all night. Kansi-a-lari sat cross-legged in the shallow pit, arms raised to greet the sun. She was singing in her own language, and when she had finished, she bent to bathe her face in the pool of still water that had collected in the shallow pit over the night. With beads of water slipping down her chin, she swung to look at him.

"Now we descend," she said.

"Will we cross the sea flat again?" he asked, shuddering. This time they might not be so lucky. This time the tide might come in while they walked, vulnerable, over the sands, and sweep them away.

She smiled enigmatically and indicated the water, as if suggesting he, too, bathe his face in preparation for the ordeal ahead. "The cosmos is like wood much eaten by insects. It is riddled with holes and passages through which people can travel. Some holes are natural. Some are built with magic in long-ago times. That is why we come to churendo, the palace of coils. Here the three worlds meet. Here we can descend the spiral path and the gate will open to that place where now he is hidden."

"Your son," murmured Zacharias. She didn't look old enough to have an adult son, and yet she didn't look young either. She said nothing, only waited, and at last he crawled forward cautiously and dipped fingers in the pool of water. It was cool and, when he splashed it on his face, it stung, a little briny. But it seemed harmless enough.

He had saved out water for the horse, and he let it take the precious liquid out of his cupped hands as Kansi-a-lari readied her pack and pouch, straightened her skin skirt, and hoisted her spear. It was a cool morning, without the bite of winter. Fog bound them on all sides; he couldn't see the distant shore nor could he see the sea at the base of the island, although he heard it as a steady sigh and murmur.

"Is it really spring?" he asked. "Could we have traveled so far in one night?"

She examined him in silence, then untied one of the ribbons fastened just below the obsidian point of her spear and trailed it like a snake across the surface of the brackish pool. "We are the—what do you call them? To move he boat, what you use to pull at the waves?" "Oars?"

"We are the oars. We stir the waves of the deep pool, like so." She drew the ribbon along the surface in a circle that crossed its starting point, became another circle, and wound back to the beginning. "We have far to travel on the coils of air and earth." The ribbon dripped as she lifted it from the water. "In the palace of coils you can leave behind where you are doubting in your heart." She let the ribbon fall back into the pool and it lay there on the surface, twining slowly to an unseen current. She tapped her breastbone. "Throw where you are doubting into the pool. Then it will stay here while you descend."

He had so many doubts, but none of them were things he Cou d Vio d in Yiis Viand. And yet hadn't his grandmother always said that a wildflower was a good enough sacrifice to the old gods as long as it was given with a true heart? He had seen strange things. Maybe it was time to throw his doubts away.

He reached for the leather thong inside his robe and pulled out the wooden Circle of Unity which his father had carved for him long ago. Pulling it off, he held it out. "I have seen many things I never knew existed. I will walk the path of truth, not blind tradition. I will keep my eyes open."

He dropped the Circle into the pool. It vanished with a plop, and as the waters closed over it, it dragged down the ribbon with it until both disappeared. The pool lay smooth and still, but he could see nothing below the surface. "Come," she said.

He took the horse's reins and walked after her through the corbeled archway. The stone lionesses seemed to curl down to sniff at him, their massive shadows as heavy on his back as if they pushed at him with furled claws, but surely that was only his imagination. The path cut sharply to the right and they began to descend deocil.

After three steps he felt dizzy; he doubted. They had ascended deocil. The path had cut right to enter the plaza, hadn't it? How could they descend in like manner? It was as if the path were leading them forward, not backward, as if they were walking toward a place that didn't yet exist, rather than returning to the place where they had started.

He began to shake. His skin felt like a thousand spiders were crawling on it, and he was so tense he could scarcely get one foot in front of the next. Only the steady plod of the horse dragged him along, only the taut line of Kansi-a-lari's back moving before him drew him in her wake. It was hard to focus, but there was light burning ahead so blinding in its blue-white radiance that he struggled to reach it even when her hand stayed him, even when her sharp whisper hissed out a curse—or a prayer.

"Grandmother," he cried, staggering forward toward the light. The Aoi woman cried out. She jerked him back just as the gate flared and bright wings of light unfolded, so pitiless in their brightness that his face burned as though fire scorched him. A faVgwaTA arm reacted for him as if to drag him through the blinding, gate, or haul itself out. He cried out and ft mg YumseVf sideways, and Kansi-a-lari caught him and yanked him to safety. He screamed, and then he was running and panting and, finally, falling. He knelt there with grit on his knees while the horse nosed his back. He smelled scorched cloth and felt the sting of a burn along his back and on his cheeks.

"Come," she said, and he heard fear in her voice although she had never seemed afraid before. "The veils are thinning. We must go on."

It wasn't easy to flounder after her, and yet although the burning gate was lost along the curve of the wall, he was afraid to stay behind. What if they had followed him? What if they touched him again and he was burned to ash? She walked with a stride that never faltered, never doubted; she had thrown it all into the pool and truly left it behind. Had he?

"Pale Hunter," he breathed, steadying himself with a hand on the horse's reins. It plodded stolidly along beside him, flicking one of its ears impatiently. "Give me strength. In the name of my grandmother, lend me some of your power now." Was that the wind, or the breath of the Moon? Was it night now, or day? A cooling wind breathed across his neck, and his aches lessened. The path sloped steadily downward.

She had gotten so far ahead of him that she was already leaving the malachite gate when he first caught sight of it around the opening bend in the path. Had she paused there? Had she spoken again to the voice that had called her "cousin?" He was bolder, now. Hadn't he, too, cast away his doubts? Either the old gods would protect him, or they would not, and she had never warned him against this gate whose multicolored bands of green made him think of meadows cut by the spring fields sown by his people, in the land of his birth.

He paused to catch his breath before the malachite gateway, and pressed a hand against the cool, gleaming stone.

There is a silver-gold ribbon running through the heavens, twisting and turning through the spheres until he cannot tell one side of the ribbon from the other, or if it even has two sides at all but only one infinite gleaming surface without end, ever-dying and ever-living. The cosmos streams around him, great billowing clouds of black dust, bright flocks of blue-white stars so brilliant that they can only be the birthing ground of angels, vast expanses of void so intense that he feels an abyss yawning at his feet, a huge spiral wheel of stars spinning in an awesome silence that might be the future or the past or merely the prayer of the gods. Yet the planets and the Moon and the Sun still chart their interminable course, he hears the chiming sweet melody of the wheeling heavens, and he reaches out to touch it because it is so beautiful. But his hand cannot pass through the gate. The green stone dims and fades, and he sees on the silver-gold pathway winding through the heavens the shape of an island whose size he cannot comprehend; it could be as small as his hand or as large as Earth because the universe has no boundaries he can make sense of, he can neither measure nor span its girth.

Seeing the island far, he sees it as suddenly near, as though he were briefly an angel, set free to wing his way through the churning heavens. It is a dry land, green fading to brown fading to dust. There is no rain. The animals are dying. The corn no longer sprouts.

There are no children.

The horse nudged him, hard, and he lost his balance and stumbled to one side, hand slipping off the stone. The vision was gone. He stood alone on the dusty path with marble walls rising high on each side. He had never felt more alone in his life and yet with solitude came a kind of freedom. He had given away his past freely, tossed it into the deep tidal pool of mortality where all thirigs are lost in time. He could stand here forever, if he chose, and himself turn to dust to be walked on some day by another pair of feet. But the palace of coils touched all three worlds, the world beneath, the world above, and the world between, and so he too had touched them. He had thrown away his doubts. He could walk on without fear.

"Come, friend," he said to the horse, giving a tug to the reins. It followed him as he set off, down, himself following Kansi-a-lari although he had long since lost sight of her.

When he came to the fifth gate with its luminescent and faintly perilous glow of palest violet, he did not falter; he walked past without trying to look beyond it. She had warned him before, he had been attacked when he'd ignored her, and he wasn't fool enough to ignore her warning a second time.

Although he walked steadily, and his back no longer hurt, he did not see her when he came to the fourth gate. The lustrous amber surface called to him as though it had a voice of its own. He could not resist it, could not help but stroke its burnished surface, almost oily under his palm. He saw.

A boy on the cusp of manhood lies asleep in a cave full of treasure, attended by six sleeping companions. But there is something swelling and shifting in the darkness of the cave, like a malignant beast coming awake.

He hurried on, unwilling to see more. The horse dragged him along, eager to go forward—or else it had smelled fresh water. The walls curved away before them and, in an infinity of time that lasted no more than an instant, he saw her on the path before him where the azure gate rested, set into the high, pale walls.

She had paused, hesitated, a hand raised but held cautiously no more than a finger's breadth beyond the ice-pale blue stone. He came up beside her, although she said nothing nor even appeared to notice that he was there. Beyond the gate, the sea boiled and lashed under a cloudy sky, torn by storm. Foam sprayed the rock walls, and he could not see the shore because of the white spray and the low clouds and the surging sea.