PROLOGUE (79 page)

They rested here, rinsing the salt out of their clothing and hair in a nearby stream.

Adica pulled Alain aside into the shelter of a copse of low trees. She was greedy for him. It was a curse to want someone so badly that you would make demands on him even when he was injured, but his sweetness was a healing nectar. He kissed her eagerly—he always did, like someone who has been denied water for too long.

It was a little awkward, with him favoring his one arm, but wasn't it true that lovemaking was exactly the thing to take one's mind off pain and anxiety? So it had proved for her.

She dozed a little, after. Walking the looms made her so tired. Fighting the constant urge to worry and be afraid and angry at fate made her so tired. Live now, each moment, each kiss.

She woke to Laoina's call. The dogs swarmed over them, licking Alain's face, sniffing at his swollen hand. He laughed and shoved them away. For the first time, he could close his bitten hand halfway, and that made him kiss her so passionately that finally Laoina had to come and, with a laugh and a gentle prod of her spear, remind them that it was time to move on.

Their clothes had dried, stretched along a fallen log to catch the sunlight. It was a hot day, quickly felt as they walked.

They hiked a trail obviously used for part of the year, grown over but distinct, a pleasant path with heights and falls. The landscape of oak wood and pine opened frequently into bright clearings. Ivy twined up the oaks and the shrub layer grew in some places as tall as she was. The dogs often ran off to lose themselves in the leaves. She would hear them barking and rattling branches, never losing track of Alain but often out of his sight. Madder grew across the path, and butcher's broom spread in dense shrubs. It was very different than the forest she was most familiar with.

That night they sheltered in another campsite, made pleasant by the addition of several lean-tos, branches bowed and covered with thatch to provide shelter. The clouds had blown off, and the night was unusually warm and balmy, not one for hiding in a shelter.

"This is a winter camp," explained Two Fingers as he and Adica made note of the position of the stars. The Hare leaped higher here in the south.

"Look at the Sisters and the Bull," she said, as Laoina translated.” Can it be true that summer is here? We left my village at the spring equinox."

Yet what could she do? That was the curse of the looms, that they ate one's life like a hungry wolf eating you up in bites. All she could do was live in the day given her. It would have to be enough.

In the morning Laoina skinned and roasted three rabbits that had been trapped overnight in srares while Adica spread a poultice of

bramble leaves and comfrey on Alain's hand to draw out the swelling. When they had done, they set the campsite in order, buried their leavings, and set out. Laoina hung the scraped rabbit skins over her back so that she seemed to be wearing withered wings as she walked. She knew these lands well enough to comment on familiar landmarks. She had sojourned here for many seasons when she had come to learn the language of Horn's people, and she knew the names and uses of many of the plants, and recognized birdsong. Not even Two Fingers had her knowledge of the land. He had, so he said, lived with Horn's people when he was a boy, to study with her—Horn had been a woman already when he was a boy—but he had been so taken up with the arts of the ancient ones and the caverns in which the secrets of her ancestors lay concealed that he had often gone for days without seeing the light of the sun.

"To the place of caves I will take you now, to see if there is truth to the words of the Walking One from whom you heard this grievous news."

The path grew steeper, clambering up goatlike along the side of a ravine, and brought them to a plateau where oak wood gave way to brush. Three goats fled into the forest at the approach of the dogs. Two Fingers moved forward cautiously into range of a watch post, somewhat the worse for weathering: its plank roof had fallen in. A cistern lay beside it. He sipped at its waters, declared them good, and they refilled their waterskins while Alain clambered up to the topmost part of the wall, finding that he could, with care, use his injured hand to grip. When he found a safe vantage place and beckoned, they climbed up beside him.

Stumps of trees littered the hillside, giving way downslope to an extensive grove of olive trees and, farther down, irrigated fields woven together with an elaborate pattern of canals. The town itself lay on a rise. Massively fortified with earth walls and^ wooden palisade, it looked impregnable to Adica's eyes, yet the «*ures that walked its ramparts wore the crested helmets and anifhal masks that marked the soldiers of the Cursed Ones. Some of the houses in the village lay in ruins, burned or torn down, and a few human figures labored at the tannery and in the fields, stooped with misery and despair. Fresh scars marked the earth just outside the rampart. Adica shuddered: she knew that the Cursed Ones had a habit of throwing the dead bodies of their slain enemies in pits, like offal, thus condemning their souls to haunt the living for eternity since the souls of the dead could not pass on to the Other Side without the proper ceremonies and preparation. She caught sight of a flock of hummocks, like sheep, to the north. There, almost out of sight, lay the tombs common to the tribe. They, at least, did not look disturbed. But in their midst she saw the uprights of a stone loom, and tiny figures standing guard. The Cursed Ones held the path in and out of Horn's country.

"Horn and her people will have taken refuge in the caves of her ancestors." Two Fingers made no other comment on the devastation.

They negotiated the broken walls of the watch post and fell back to the safety of the oak wood. Both Two Fingers and Laoina knew this trail well, although it was cunningly hidden and disguised by a series of dead ends, deadfalls, switchbacks, and false turnings. They came finally to a limestone outcropping where a cave mouth gaped, but Two Fingers led them past this inviting opening and down over the rocky slope, until with his spear he swept aside the heavily weighted branches of a flowering clematis. A small opening cleft the hillside, barely large enough for an adult. Two Fingers got down on hands and knees and clambered in without hesitation. Laoina waited, indicating that the others should go first. After commanding the dogs to wait, Alain followed the old man into the hill, more confident now that he had regained some feeling in his hand.

Adica crawled after them. The rock closed over her head, and, very quickly, darkness blinded her. It was slow going because of her hesitancy, but she heard the movements of the two men ahead of her and Laoina behind and in general the going was fairly smooth. The tunnel forked to the right, and suddenly she heard whistling and moaning: narrow shafts thrust skyward, a pipe for the wind. The tunnel dipped, hit an incline, and at the base opened out. By now it was pitch-black. She groped, found Alain's body, and held on to him as Laoina came up behind her. Night had never bothered her, nor her visits into the tomb of the ancient queens under the tumulus, but this place, narrow and clammy, had a presence that weighed uncomfortably, as though the earth itself had consciousness.

"Come," said Two Fingers, as Laoina translated.” Hold one onto the next, and follow me. There is a trap we must work around."

"You don't think they've laid in others since the attack?" asked Laoina.

"It may be. But I have certain charms upon me that will warn me."

So it proved. Three times he stopped them. Once, she heard a hissed conversation, words exchanged, and they were allowed to pass through a bottleneck so narrow that she had to squeeze sideways to get through. A hand brushed her head, checking for the telltale topknot worn by the Cursed Ones, and let her by without further molesting her. It was a good place for an ambush. She was blind as a mole; she could not even see her own hands in front of her face. How the others moved with any sense of confidence she couldn't imagine, and yet wasn't all their work as the Hallowed Ones, learning the secrets of the great weaving, itself like groping forward in darkness?

None among humankind knew the extent of the Cursed Ones' magic. They could call fire from stone and earth from water; they could cause wind to arise from flame and water to leach out of the air. They knew the power of transformation, and they could coax elementals from their hiding places among the ordinary places of the Earth. For this power they paid a price, and they paid it not just with their own blood but with the blood of their enemies.

So humankind had perforce learned other magic, those manipulable by the hands: smithing and pottery; plaiting and weaving; words and melody and dance. In such forms, human magic flourished, and in this way the ancient mothers and fathers had observed the turning wheel of the heavens and the way in which the shuttles, known as the wandering stars, moved an invisible weft through those stars which never changed position in reference to each other. Adica had listened at the knee of her teacher for years and been initiated into the greater mysteries, and into the secrets of the great working: That the stars in the heavens aH^ve were woven as though in a vast loom, and the power of trios*Threads could be drawn down to Earth and woven into power made manifest here, on Earth.

All this had gone into the building of the stone looms that now waited in readiness across the land, set such great distances apart that she knew if she tried to travel between them on foot she could probably never reach them all in her own lifetime. But each loom, when woven with the living threads of the stars, made a gateway that linked it to all of the other looms, a gateway that might lead east and south on one night, depending on the configuration of the stars, and north and west another.

Yet the Holy One said there was a greater hand that worked the loom of the heavens, one that made changes unseeable by human eyes, since the span of any individual human life on earth was brief. This was the greatest mystery of all.

Out of the darkness bloomed light, stunningly bright, although it was only a small torch of bundled reeds, dried and coated with pitch. Two Fingers held it aloft as they negotiated a narrow plank bridge set across a chasm. By its light Adica saw ancient forms painted on the walls: the imprint of hands, outlined in red, heavy-set horses speckled by black dots, four-legged beasts shaggy with long hair that drooped down their flanks, a horn marked with thirteen stripes.

She smelled other humans before she heard them. Two Fingers doused the torch, and in darkness she followed Two Fingers and Alain through another narrow passage, had to actually shimmy forward on her stomach for a short stretch, pushing her staff before her and with her pack hooked around her ankle to drag it after.

This hole opened out suddenly. She felt the presence of others not all of them, perhaps, still among the living. She felt the touch of ancient ghosts and guardians and heard the whispering of people yet alive. A torch flared into life, but even before Adica could register the figures huddled on the floor of the cavern, she was hurled into a vision:
A herd of cattlelike beasts, homed and shaggy, thunders past. Birds explode up from their grassy hideaways, flooding the sky, and in the distance a huge beast with an impossibly long, sinuous nose and horns thrusting out on either side of its great mouth lumbers past, leading more of its kind toward an unknown destination. She sees people, walking along the edge of a pine forest. They look very like the people she knows, but they are clad in skins and they carry tools of stone and bone. They have no metal and no pots she can see. Elaborately woven baskets and beads of ivory, shell, or

stone adorn their clothing. Deer swarm by, a powerful herd coursing across the landscape
and she stood once again in the cavern, in the middle world, staring in amazement at the paintings that covered the ceiling of the cavern.

She stood alone: Alain had already followed Two Fingers to the center of the crowd where an outcropping of rock metamorphosed into two shaggy beasts, one carved higher up on the rock. She stepped carefully along the shadowed ground in their trail, examining the people who waited around her.

Was this all that was left of Horn's tribe? There were not more than twenty, half of them children. Many had wounds, and some were unable even to sit. At the center of this pathetic group rested a pallet woven out of sticks. On it lay a figure so heavily draped in copper ornament that Adica could barely make out that she had hair and features beneath a headdress of beaten copper, a broad pectoral, armbands, bracelets and a wide waistband worked into the shape of two axheads crossing. Fine-boned hands rested on the pectoral, curved around a small, gold cup. As Adica moved closer, she smelled the powerful scent of a potion sharp with aniseed. Red ocher smeared closed eyelids, and a pattern of crescent moons marked the old woman's face.

Horn had been named for the shape of her disfigured face. To look at her from one side was to see a woman of advanced years, wrinkled but keen. To look at her from the other side was to see a face all slack and drooping, lifeless, and a hideously vacant eye that, Adica supposed, saw such sights as mortal vision could not comprehend.

She knelt beside the old woman as a girl moved aside to make room for her.” Is she alive?" she asked, then saw the feather laid across the old woman's lips stir, brushed by the respiration of the spirit still.housed within that frail body.