Faced with creatures who were everywhere, who were not human, whose thoughts could be neither predicted nor manipulated? Some men, certainly, would try to get control of them, as they did women.
Was that why they"d kept silent about their power all these years?
For a very long time she sat, gazing out at the last daylight fading above the gold-stained waters of the lake.
The light was gone from the sky and she was sitting in the dark when Jethan scratched softly at the archway that led to the stairs. "Are you awake?" he asked. "The king wants to see you." He was clean and smelled of soap, and was dressed in the crimson tunic, the golden armor of the palace guard. Under one arm he carried his plumed helmet; over the other, the clean white robe of a citadel novice, which he crossed the room to lay on the low table beside the bed. He looked as collected and businesslike as ever.
Only, when he pa.s.sed her, and she put out her hand to touch his arm, he bent and very gently brushed her lips with his.
She thought then, It wasn"t a dream.
And a long shiver went through her, as she saw the new road that opened before her feet. Change she had not expected, something else-within herself, this time-that could be neither predicted nor manipulated. Her feelings terrified her, made her want to flee. To go back to a time when, no matter how harsh her life had been, her heart had been undisturbed.
No wonder people wanted to kill that which they did not understand. Shaldis had a quick scrub with water that silent-footed servants brought to the red-tiled bath chamber, changed into the white robe, and braided up her hair. Jethan walked with her to the Peac.o.c.k Pavilion-the king"s official favorite residence-where all the lamps were kindled, blazing like a giant lamp itself in the twilight. As they approached it, Jethan"s stride checked. He looked around sharply and in the same instant Shaldis smelled it, too: the musky pong of teyn and, almost worn away by sand and the pa.s.sage of days, the wry echo of indigo.
For a moment she saw them, crouched in a great tangle of sand-choked jasmine that the wind had torn down from its arbor-three jenny teyn. Two were domestics, one of them white with age and the other big with child. To her astonishment she recognized Five Cakes from her grandfather"s household, the faded rags of her tunic still stained with indigo dye. The third was a wilding, small and black and very young. The younger two were watching the Peac.o.c.k Pavilion and the paths leading to it, but the blue eyes of the old one-it had to be Eleven Gra.s.shoppers-met Shaldis"s.
Those are my sisters, thought Shaldis. Members of the circle like myself. But before she could speak, the three watchers faded away into the shadows of the tangled vines.
Shaldis had half expected to see the other Raven sisters at the king"s pavilion, and the Sun Mages as well. But the only ones in its latticed lower chamber were the king, Summerchild, and Soth the librarian. Shaldis paused a yard from the threshold, glanced up at Jethan, aware that he had no place in the conference but torn by the unaccustomed sensation of not wanting to send him away.
He didn"t smile, but his hand was warm, for an instant, on her back, and he said, "I"ll be near."
The king got to his feet as she came through the door. He"d clearly spent part of the afternoon in the baths and looked much more himself. To Shaldis"s utter shock, he knelt before her and took her hands to kiss.
She drew them back, as confused by this as she had been by her sudden fear of hurting Jethan"s feelings. "Wrong hands, Your Majesty," she said.
The king looked up at her: hair newly curled, earrings and necklaces that matched his rings, like a giant blossom of color and perfume, with the eyes of a man who"s waded into a pool of crocodiles without the hope that any magic was there to protect him.
The eyes of a man who"s put himself completely in the hands of the G.o.ds.
"Oh, please don"t tell me that, my dear child," he said, rising rather stiffly and bending to kiss her hand anyway. "In spite of everything you"d told me, when I came up out of the pool and saw you I dared to hope that somehow you"d put together some kind of spell. It was the only thing that got me through the serpents and the maze. Don"t tell me the G.o.ds really care that much who"s king?"
"They care," said Shaldis softly. "But they send messengers dressed in clothing we don"t expect. You"re not going to like this, Your Majesty-you"re not going to like what it"s going to mean for the realm. You were saved by the teyn."
King Oryn looked at her blankly, for a moment literally not understanding. "But the teyn don"t . . ." he began. And then, his eyes changing, "Are you sure?"
Shaldis nodded.
He drew in his breath, let it out, and said, "Oh, dear."
And in his silence Shaldis saw every slave compound and field gang that kept the mines, the farms, the economy of the realm running. Saw the digging gangs of the aqueduct and the sweepers of every courtyard in the city. "Dear G.o.ds," sighed the king at last, "and I thought we"d had trouble with women coming to power."
From the divan where she lay, Summerchild said, "Tell us about it, darling. How did you learn this? And when did this power come to them? When it came to us? To the women? Is it only the jennies or the males as well?"
"I think only the jennies, and I don"t know how many of them. I should have suspected last spring, when the mad wizard Aktis was killing Raven sisters to raise power. He killed a jenny teyn, you remember. But-"
Summerchild"s head turned. At the same instant Shaldis smelled the unmistakable animal scent of teyn and, turning herself, saw framed in the archway the three jennies she"d glimpsed in the garden: Eleven Gra.s.shoppers, Five Cakes, and the little black wilding. They waited, silently, between the darkness and the lamplight, their slit-pupiled blue eyes reflecting the glow like beasts".
Then the king crossed the room to them and knelt, as he had knelt to Raeshaldis, and kissed Eleven Gra.s.shoppers"s hands.
The little jenny looked down at him solemnly, put her knotted hands around his face, and brushed his forehead with her nose and lips.
The wilding jenny made a clicking sound with her lips. From the scented garden bed a snake crawled, a little brown fruit asp, one of the deadliest. The king got hastily to his feet and stepped back, and Shaldis could have sworn Eleven Gra.s.shoppers almost smiled. But the old teyn only made a small movement with her finger, and the asp coiled itself into a neat circle and hid its head.
Then Eleven Gra.s.shoppers met the king"s eyes again, as if saying, You see?
He replied, "Yes. I see. And I thank you, more than words can ever say. And I apologize, for my people, from the bottom of my heart."
There was silence, in which Shaldis heard the scrunch of boot leather on gravel and then Jethan"s voice. "You can"t-"
"Oh, get away from me, boy. I have every right to learn who saved my nephew"s skin and what he plans to do with the power it"s brought him."
Steel hissed as Jethan drew his sword. The king"s eyes went to those of Eleven Gra.s.shoppers. The old teyn nodded, obviously without the slightest qualm about meeting her master, and as Oryn called out, "Let him pa.s.s, Jethan," she plucked a lamp from the nearest niche and blew out its flame. So much for the old tale that teyn are afraid of fire, thought Shaldis. As Mohrvine stepped through the door, Eleven Gra.s.shoppers set the lamp on the floor close to the asp. She looked at the king, then looked at the lamp.
Flame rekindled on the wick.
Summerchild said, "You will have to free them. All of them."
The king said, "I know."
Transfixed, Mohrvine whispered, "Dear G.o.ds."
The teyn regarded him in silence. Shaldis found herself wondering what kind of information they pa.s.sed among themselves-and by what means-about the lords who for over a thousand years had enslaved them in the Valley of the Lakes. They had quite clearly known who to save and when.
The king made no reply.
Mohrvine"s voice was hoa.r.s.e. "You dare not!"
The king held out his hand in silence. Eleven Gra.s.shoppers picked up the asp and placed it in his palm. The little snake, whose bite killed in minutes, wrapped its brown tail around the plump bejeweled wrist and laid its head, tongue flicking contentedly, on the king"s hand.
"I dare not not dare," replied Oryn softly. He moved to hand the snake to his uncle-Mohrvine backed quickly away.
"I came to ask you, Nephew-now that you are favored by the G.o.ds-what you plan to do about the increasing escapes of the teyn. And I must say I was ready for almost anything-except this." And he gestured at the teyn in shocked disgust. "And I can promise you that magic or not-and they do seem to have power of a sort-if you attempt to free them, if you so much as touch the property of myself or any of your landchiefs, no matter what opinions about you the G.o.ds expressed this morning, the carnage that swept through the Bazaar District last night will be nothing to the rioting that will break out."
Mohrvine turned in a great swirl of white cloak, as if to make an exit, but the king"s voice stopped him. "That is why I need your help, Uncle. Your help, your example, and your wisdom."
Mohrvine looked back at him, no expression in his turquoise eyes.
"I have seen and fought the teyn in the desert, Uncle, and they fought like a trained army. We have no idea how they communicate or what they know. And if, after today, you think we can keep the teyn enslaved in spite of the debt that I personally owe them-and in spite of what they now must all know about their own power-all I have to say is that the attempt had better work the first time and keep on working infallibly. For if we now attempt to keep them as they have been, we will not have a second chance to win their trust or their aid."
Still Mohrvine said nothing, but faced his nephew-faced the beautiful Summerchild and the watching teyn enigmatic as animals-in the angry silence of a man who has no reply.
"We thought last spring that the world had changed," the king went on. "We did not know how right we were. The power that protected us is gone. Threats that it had kept at bay for so long we"ve forgotten their existence are now free to rove the earth, of which the lake monsters, bless their simple hearts, and the Eater of Dreams may have been only the first. We cannot now afford to think that anything is const.i.tuted the way it once was."
"I perish with antic.i.p.ation," said Mohrvine through gritted teeth, "to learn what other changes have taken place that we do not yet know about."
"Don"t fight me, Uncle," said Oryn softly. "I"m begging you. I need your help."
Mohrvine said nothing, but swept back his cloak and executed a profound bow to the three teyn standing silent in the garden arch. Then he turned and stalked from the room.
FIFTY-THREE.
It has all changed." Raeshaldis perched on the top of the knee-high wall of black stone that circled the little group of healing houses and looked out over the beach to the sea. It had rained just before sunset, and in the final fading of the twilight, the jungle gave back the perfume of water and wet plants. Though the night was warm, clouds moved like a silent army across the sky.
The moon was waxing toward full.
She would wake soon, in her chamber off the Citadel"s Court of Novices where she had fallen asleep, but lingered within the green enchanted circle of her dream.
"Things that used to keep us safe don"t protect us anymore. Even with the jennies-the females of the Little People-to help, we still don"t know if we"ll be able to bring the rains in the spring. And without the teyn to help, farming"s at a standstill, and the situation"s only going to get worse. Everyone wants things to go back to the way they were, and n.o.body wants to hear that that"s impossible."
She sighed and made a helpless gesture with her hands. Oryn"s story, one Mohrvine was backing up, was that the G.o.ds had decreed the teyn be liberated: a source of endless trouble but not nearly as dangerous, to the teyn themselves, as the truth would be. "The thing I want to know-the thing all the mages want to know-is what caused it? Why is this happening? Why did the world change? Do you know?"
She turned to look down at Puahale, who sat at the foot of the little wall, with the spell diagrams they had worked on that afternoon still spread around her in the tree-sheltered sand. She had taught Puahale to scry, and they had spent some time memorizing words of each other"s languages. The thought that the nature of magic, the nature of the universe, might further shift to make it impossible for her to return in dream to this place filled Raeshaldis with grief, but at least, she thought, they could be prepared to establish other means to communicate.
And the Sigil of Sisterhood, the circle of those who called down their power from the moon, would bind their souls and their magic forever. That much she knew in her bones.
"Why did magic change?" she asked softly. "Why did it go into women and leave men? Why can the females of the Little People now do it, as well as women of our race? One of the lords of my country says that magic changed because the G.o.ds are angry with us, even though the king pa.s.sed through the tests that are supposed to say the G.o.ds approve of what he does. Another lord says that there"s some ma.s.sively evil superwizard somewhere, who"s placed a curse on every mage in the world."
That was Lord Sarn. And presumably, thought Shaldis, when his lordship managed to find that superwizard he"d try to hire him.
"Do your wizards, your teachers, know? Or know anything about it?"
"We asked the djinni that," replied Puahale, after some moments spent in thought.
"Are they still around?" Shaldis spoke in surprise, though she had her suspicions about where other djinni had gone to, besides the mad spirit hiding in the idol in the deserted Temple of Nebekht.
Pontifer Pig, she was almost certain, was a djinn, who had taken his shape from the form within Pomegranate"s genial hallucinations.
And sometimes she thought she glimpsed a shimmering intelligence looking out at her from the eyes of some of the palace cats.
"Well," said Puahale, "they had to become something else, too. The way we used to be little girls before we became women, and the way my father turned from an angry warrior into a gentle old man.
"My teacher Wika had a dream, ten years ago, when the djinni disappeared and our wise men could no longer bring the big schools of fish into the lagoons. She and I took a canoe far out into the ocean, where the whales swim. Do you know whales?"
Shaldis shook her head, the image coming to her mind of hugeness and water. Perhaps like the lake monsters Soth had described?
"The djinni live inside them now," said Puahale. "The whales themselves don"t mind, they said. But the djinni can no longer live as once they lived. Some of them are angry about it, and some of them went mad. But the one we called Red-Haired Woman, one of the djinni most friendly to us, told my teacher why this happened. And it didn"t make any sense."
She shrugged, dismissing the matter, as if it were of little moment.
Shaldis sprang down from the wall, suddenly angry with this big, easygoing woman who had never had to worry about the rains, who had never had to struggle to learn spells that men grudged to teach her, nor to twist with pain inside wondering if a day would come when she must choose between her power and Jethan"s arms.
"How can you say that?" she demanded. "How can you just let it go with that? Didn"t you ask what the djinn meant? Or seek in other legends, other tales, for the meaning of what it said?"
Puahale raised her eyebrows, surprised by this outburst. "What good would it have done?"
"We might be able to find a way to . . ." Shaldis hesitated.
To what? Give magic back to men, if it meant that women would lose it again, and go back to what they had been?
Send the teyn back into the bondage of people who killed them as casually as they slaughtered stray dogs?
Would that bring back the rains?
Helpless, she was silent for a time. Then, "What did she say? Red-Haired Woman, I mean."
Her friend looked relieved, that the quick, frustrated rage had vanished from her voice and her eyes. She frowned for a moment, looking out to sea, as if to call back the djinn"s exact words to her mind. Except, of course, Shaldis realized, the djinni did not speak in human words, but rather in this precise dream language that she used with Puahale, of thoughts and images transferred mind to mind. And like the crashing of the sea before she had seen its waves break on the sh.o.r.e, that which could not be recognized was meaningless.
"Red-Haired Woman said," recited Puahale, closing her eyes and holding up one finger, "that the world, the sun, and all the stars had fallen through a giant hole into another part of Everything, so that all the little pieces of-of sand-of something, that make up Everything, have all started to vibrate at a different speed than they used to. This changed the way the sun shines and the way this-this magic water that is in people"s bodies-works, and so our brains work differently."
Shaldis said, "What?"
Puahale opened her eyes. "I told you it didn"t make any sense."
Shaldis tried to imagine offering that explanation to Lord Sarn, with the added remark that it came from something a giant fish had told a woman she"d met in her dreams.
A malign superwizard casting a spell on the world was a far more believable tale. And keeping Lord Sarn looking for him would distract that powerful landchief from making trouble over the emanc.i.p.ation of the teyn.
The information that the djinni had taken refuge in giant water creatures, she thought, she would also keep to herself, at least until she could pay a call on Hokiros.
But even an explanation that made sense, reflected Shaldis as she walked with her friend down to the sea, might well have been useless, if there was nothing that could be done to change matters.
After a time she asked, "Is that how magic really works?"
And Puahale shrugged again. "Maybe the djinni don"t know any more than we do."
It was a disconcerting thought. The waves crashed on the beach, sent their warm sheets of water rushing up to curl around the two women"s ankles, the touch of it a whisper of power. The great wise ones, Puahale had said, could source power from the strength and movement of the sea, and Raeshaldis felt that power like a glow in her heart.
"No one really knew how magic worked before it changed, did they?" Shaldis asked. "Much less afterward."
Puahale shook her head. "Any more than we know-or ever knew-what life is, or why we love and need to be loved. All we can do is live as well as we can, use our magic for the highest good of the world, and love, ourselves as well as others, with the whole of our hearts."
"Is that possible?" asked Shaldis softly. "To love someone, and still keep your heart strong to do magic?" She still ached inside with the confusion and grief at her grandfather"s death, with the way Tulik was stepping in already to command the family, as if their father was simply another child. He"d pushed and maneuvered their father into the proctorship within a few days of Chirak Shaldeth"s death, and neither he, nor any of the other family members whom Shaldis had rescued, recalled much about the incident, though in all other respects they were well.
The previous week, Tulik had hired Ahure as an adviser. Some things, at least, didn"t change.
And she still felt a tangled confusion of emotions about Jethan, worrying when he was silent, aching with pa.s.sion when he took her in his arms, her mind returning to him again and again when they were apart. Wondering what he was doing and thinking, praying that no act of hers would somehow destroy the delight of his love. How can I be a Crafty woman, a Raven sister, when the mere touch of a man"s hand makes me melt like this inside?
It can"t last, and then what will I do?