The Darkangel (6 page)

"Underground, daughter, underground. Here is life."

Aeriel swallowed the last quince seed, smiled a little, timidly, said nothing.

"Come," the duarough said, pocketing the last of the scraps, "are you rested? I want to show you the caves."

"Now this," The duarough said, rising from beside the little fire where he and Aeriel had just had their repast. He dusted off the backside of his robe, then his hands. "This used to be the great treasure room. It's quite empty, of course, now—they took it all with them when the queen and her people removed across the Sea-of-Dust to Esternesse. All, that is, except the blade adamantine, which was lost in these caverns long ago. He still comes down here looking for it sometimes."

"Who?" said Aeriel, rising with him now from the hard lime floor.

"The vampyre, of course," the duarough replied. "Surely you know the prophecy—no?

By the Wardens-of-the-World! where have you lived all your life, child? That only by the hoof of the starhorse and the edge adamant may he be undone, and his six brethren with him. They are invulnerable to blades of mortals, but the blade adamantine was not forged in this world by mortals, but by the Ancestors, the Ancients, the Heaven-born of Oceanus."

He eyed Aeriel closely then, and she gazed back at him with a frown of puzzlement.

"Child, you've never heard of the Heaven-born?"

Aeriel shook her head. "Only in whispers, and oaths," she answered. "And prayers." She remembered her own desperate petition to the Unknown-Nameless Ones as she had ascended the steeps long ago that dawn, and blushed now to think of her presumption.

She did not even know so much about them as their names.

"Not heard of the Heaven-born?" the duarough snorted. "Why, it was they who grafted life onto the land. This planet was a dead world before they came. They unlocked the water from the ground, created the atmosphere and bound it lest it bleed off into the heavens. They found the old seeds lying dormant and revived them, then bred their own herbs with them to create new plants for this world."

He gestured about him as if to take in the whole planet. Aeriel stared at him in wonder.

"They brought the animals," he said, "newly created for this world and us—even us they made, daughter, to farm the land and mine the caves." He folded his arms then, shook his head. "They themselves lived in domed cities in the desert, for the air was too thin for them to breathe long and live." He sighed. "They were our creators and our guides, for they were very wise. But they are all gone now. Great wars on their homeland destroyed them—or perhaps it was only their ships they lost, and so could no longer plunge across deep heaven from their far world of blue water and cloud."

Aeriel gazed at him and felt weak, marveling at his knowledge. He shrugged a little and smiled ever so slightly.

"Perhaps we shall yet live to see them come again." He sighed. "But enough of this. The caves. Come with me."

He bent to lift a piece of burning driftwood from the fire and led her out of the great storehouse through the hidden door he had taken to fetch the food. Aeriel followed him through a long series of lesser chambers that had been, the duarough said, storehouses of the greatest treasures: rooms unknown to any but the king and queen of the castle and their treasurer. And always from their left as they walked came the sound of running water.

"If ever you get lost in these caves," her guide informed her, "just follow the water and you'll find your way out."

Presently the tunnel of rooms bore right a little, and Aeriel could hear the water ahead of them as well as from the left. They came to the last room, which seemed to end with no door to a chamber beyond. But the duarough walked on without pause to the far corner, though it was no smooth, straight joining of planes, for all the rooms were rounded and irregular in shape, and slipped through a little door that Aeriel could not see until she was almost upon it.

They emerged onto the sandy bank of the river, upstream from where they had been.

Aeriel turned and started down along the bank for the stairs up to the garden, the last step of which she could just make out around the far bend, but the duarough turned upstream.

"Come along," he said. "There is a way out closer than that."

Aeriel turned around and followed him. "May I come down to these caves sometimes?"

she inquired. "They are very beautiful—far more beautiful than the icarus' castle___"

"I should say," the duarough replied, "and by much. Here there is life, and that cold tour up there holds only death and death. And as for the coming down sometimes, of a certain you may— you will have to, if you want to eat. And I shall welcome you. I haven't had someone to talk to for ages." They waded back across the stream. "The other one, the one before you," the duarough continued, "she stopped talking after a while. Those loathsome wraiths did it to her, I'm sure. Poor dear, she went quite mad as they in the end. Ah, here we are."

He had reached a narrow stair, which, instead of carving a tunnel into the rock as the garden stair had done, was cut into the side of the rock face, and ascended the wall in a slippery, uneven row of steps. The duarough motioned her up the stair ahead of him. The white torchlight wavered and danced behind her now as she ascended into the shadows where the light of the river barely reached.

"Where does this lead?" she asked the duarough.

"Up to the castle," he said. "It opens into the corridor by the servants' quarters. There are some nice little rooms about. You might like to choose one of them as your own—it is away from the noise of the gargoyles and the wraiths when they decide to start moaning___Oh, I almost forgot."

Aeriel paused on the stair and half-turned, for her torchbearer had stopped and was now rummaging in the many folds of his full grey robe.

"Ah," he said, and drew from his pocket a little object of gold—not the white zinc-gold or pale electrum her people usually called gold—but true fallow gold, more tawny than anything Aeriel had ever seen before. "You'll need this if you intend to spin for the wraiths," said the duarough and handed it to her. "Your spindle."

It was indeed a spindle—tiny enough to cup in the hand, but weighty as lead. Aeriel held it in her hands and wondered at the delicacy of its make.

"One of the few trinkets the queen left behind," he informed her.

"But," said Aeriel at last, "how shall I use it? I have found nothing as yet to spin."

"Nor will you," the duarough said, "if you mean to search in the garden or the castle for flaxsilk or fiber: there is none. No, what you spin must be of yourself...."

"I have not hair enough on all my head to make even one kirtle...," stammered Aeriel, and at this the duarough laughed—a surprisingly hearty, deep-throated laugh for such a little man.

"I can see that you are not acquainted with the singular properties of this golden spindle,"

he said after a moment, regaining himself. "This spindle spins from the heart, child—joy, sorrow, anger, hate. Whatever you feel in your heart this spindle will spin. The last one, the one before you, she spun on it pity and loathing—that was all she could manage in the company of those dreadful wraiths, and I can little blame her. But such garments fall to pieces in only scant time, and they are too heavy for the wraiths to bear. No, I think you must find something else to spin on this spindle, daughter." He gestured up the stairs. "Go along now, girl. The door to the castle is only a few steps up."

"But what am I to spin if not pity and loathing?" said Aeriel, astonished. "What else can one feel for such poor creatures?" Then, almost to herself, "And how am I to make thread of my heart's feeling—any feeling—at all?" But the duarough had already turned and started down the steps. "Oh, I've no idea, child," he called over one shoulder. "We duaroughs are miners and scholars, not spinners. You must learn in your own way and in your own time how to use it, as well as what to spin."

And Aeriel was left standing, quite bewildered, with the golden spindle in one hand, until she realized she had best turn and find the door into the castle quickly, before the duarough and his light receded too far down the steps.

Learning to use the spindle proved long and difficult. Aeriel spent hours in her chamber—she had found a small, bare room in the servants' quarters to serve as hers—

sitting with the spindle, going through the motions of back-spinning a few threads of nonexistent fiber, securing them with a half-hitch, then giving the spindle a twist to set it spinning and letting it drop, just as she had done with her spindle of ram's horn at home.

Nothing availed. Instead of producing thread on which to hang and twist, the golden spindle inevitably dropped to the floor with a clear, heavy clink and sat there turning like a top until it fell over. Try as she might, Aeriel could not master its mechanism. The day-months passed. The wraiths, of course, were no help. She went to visit them often, as promised, but they were so horribly thin and dreary, and complained so bitterly at the weight of their coarse, drab garments, that she could bear them for not longer than an hour at a time.

The gargoyles, too, she took to visiting, though she was careful never to approach close enough to be scratched or bitten. She brought them fish and mushrooms that she had gathered in the caves— they looked so starved and their eyes were filled with such pain that she could scarcely help but feel pity for them. After she had come to them several times, they began to look for her—to yap and yelp the moment they heard her step on the tower stairs. Gradually, as the day-months passed, they grew less bony, even sleek. Their eyes lost their wild glaze, and they ceased to howl and shriek so terribly on the long fortnights.

And then suddenly Aeriel discovered- the working of the spindle. She had been practicing, striving with it, trying for hours to cajole it into producing a thread. This it had stubbornly refused to do. And slowly, as she went through the motions of spinning, without thread, she fell into a kind of daydream, remembering her first spinning lesson at the age of four, in the spinning room among the other women—spinning their white wool with absentminded ease.

Bomba had put the ram's-horn spindle into her hands, shown her how to draw and twist back the wether's wool into the beginnings of a thread, how to wrap it around the base and secure it at the topnotch in the shaft, then let the spindle fall and turn while she drew the wool in thin tufts through her fingers and let them twist away as the spool of ram's horn dropped down, slowly down—it seemed an eternity—until it touched the ground with a click and fell over.

But the sound Aeriel heard now, as she stood in her room in the vampyre's castle, was not the soft click of old bone on hard-packed earth, but the bright clink of gold on stone. She looked down, and there at her feet lay the spindle, still turning idly, with a coarse white thread twisting up from the shaft. Quickly, before she could lose the knack, Aeriel snatched up the spindle, wound the thread, and let the golden spool drop. The thread did not break, continued to form, though it was thick and ragged as a gasp.

"It must be amazement," thought Aeriel, "that I am spinning, for I am amazed to be spinning at all."

After that, she took the spindle with her when she visited the wraiths, and spun there. At first she could find only pity to spin for them—a coarse, dull thread like the garments they wore. And when, after a few hours in the wraiths' company, she could stand them no more, sometimes the thread turned to woolly loathing, sticky and stinging as a bruised nettle stem. Then she would leave them and go down to the caves to bathe in the warm river or talk to the duarough. And after a while, she would go back to the wraiths and take up the spindle again, twisting a thick thread of coarse, dull pity out of the air. The day-months passed.

And then one day it all changed. The wraiths had become familiar to her now. Though their bodies were even thinner than when she first had seen them, their pitifully dull wits actually seemed to have improved slightly as she spent time with them, talked to them.

Glimmerings of memory came to them now, though when Aeriel pressed them, none were often able to distinguish between glimpses of their own past lives and snatches recounted by a sister wraith. Aeriel still could not determine which of them was Eoduin, indeed, was not entirely sure she could have borne the knowing.

Gradually, though, she was coming to tolerate, then even take with good humor, the whining whispers of her charges (despite the vampyre's words, they were not really mistresses), their nagging insistence that the thread she was spinning was too heavy and coarse. She had run out of loathing, and though they were painfully eager for attention, she tried not to pity them. And one day while she sat spinning, she found the thread passing through her fingers was growing thinner, and finer; then the coarseness went out of it completely of a sudden, and she realized she was spinning patience now—and love followed fast behind.

Whereas an ounce of pity had spun only a skein of thread, and loathing even less, a drop of charity made a thread so fine and long that she had not yet reached the end of it. And whereas the spinning of pity and loathing exhausted her after only a few hours' work, charity and patience was the easiest spinning she had ever done. Soon she was weaving kirtles for the wraiths on an old hand loom she had found abandoned in one corner of the cellar: the work was light and taxed her not at all.

Once, after several day-months had passed (three or four; she did not count them), she saw through a window the darkangel standing on the ramparts of a balcony that jutted from the castle overlooking the garden. She stopped to look at him. It was the first time she had seen him in a long turn of stars, perhaps even since the last day-month. The icarus stood gazing out over the plain. His wings sloped down from his shoulders like a thick cape of black velvet that swallowed the light of Solstar and gave none of it back in a sheen. His face was fair as limestone, perfectly immobile—as though chiseled of stone—