"And if a man is at the till of a ship, be it Northern or Southern, and it is being pursued by pirates
or vessels of war, and a child falls overboard, and he sees this clearly, but raises no cry because to stop is to lose the lives of the rest of his pa.s.sengers-although there is no guarantee that the ship will escape, regardless-that man is less your friend. And that accident becomes a choice.
"And that choice..." The woman in midnight blue lowered her face a moment. "I have made that choice. And I have come to you to ask you to make a choice as well."
"What choice?"
"I will not tell you, Ashaf; you will know it soon enough."
The older woman snorted. "Speak plainly."
"Very well. I would come to you in dream, but your dreams are so distant and so troubled that the path has brought me here, instead, where words are harder and much more solid.
"Ashaf kep"Valente, if you choose to leave your home, you will journey to a place that defines darkness, and you will see, in the time remaining to you, things that will make the days of your youth seem easy by comparison."
Ashaf waited in silence, knowing that such an obvious choice was not that: obvious. How could it be, and be called a choice at all? She was patient now.
"And if you choose to leave your home, you will be a warrior, but you will be unsung, and the war that you fight will have no reward for you. Make no mistake; you will die before the battle is fully joined. You will never see its end, and you will never know whether or not your life and your effort made any difference at all. No one will find your body; no one will say the rites by which the Lady"s blessing is conferred. Your story ends here, in this village; there will be no one to tell it, to carry it on, to bring it to light."
It was the stranger who paled as she spoke, her eyes darkening, her gaze falling; Ashaf kep"Valente thought that this Evayne would feel more at ease speaking of her own death. She waited, still, feeling detached.
"But if," the stranger said, and Ashaf thought, ah, now it comes, "you choose this task-and it must be willingly chosen-then you will begin the battle, and you will define some of the rules by which it is fought. You will step into a war that started before the birth of man-before the birth of the Firstborn-and your presence will count for much. With or without you, the battle is coming, and with it, the darkness that clan Leonne fought so long and so hard against."
The clan Leonne. The clan that, by right of battle and bloodshed, now ruled the Dominion of Annagar from beside the waters of the Tor Leonne. Clan wars were clan wars, and they happened; Ashaf had seen two in her life. The lot of a seraf changed little, except when the raiding and reprisals were fierce-in which case, the serafs died. When the war was over, they had either the old master, or a new one, and they toiled, as ever.
But Leonne was made by no petty clan infighting. Ashaf knew the old stories, although she was simple seraf. That the founder, Leonne, had been given the Sun Sword by the Lord himself; that he had fought to preserve the Lady"s domain, in the name of the Lord. And that, of course, he faced the priests of the so-called Lord of Night to do so. Children"s stories. True stories. So often, they were the same, if you know how to understand what lay beneath the words. "I don"t understand."
"Don"t you?"
"You"re telling me if I choose to go on Lady knows what journey, that I will be forgotten and unmourned."
"No, Ashaf-you will never be forgotten and unmourned."
"And I"m to do this to save the-the world?" The old woman laughed. "I am not a warrior, Evayne a"Nolan. Even in my youth, I could not wield a clansman"s sword. You ask me to fight? Then the darkness of the night had befuddled you."
"Has it? There are territories over which battles are fought in this world in which no sword is raised."
Ah, yes. How could she have forgotten, who had fought-and lost-so many? And why was it that to win was to prepare for another battle, but to lose was to lose all? Oh, she was tired, was Ashaf kep"Valente. It was only when she was weary that the dead were so strong.
"You wish me to make this journey."
"I wish you to know and understand that the price of it will be, in the end, your death." There was no softness at all in the words.
"And if I don"t?"
"I do not know. Perhaps another woman will be asked to make the choice that I ask of you." The stranger was silent a long time. And then her face softened; she lifted a hand a moment, as if to touch the older woman"s face. She stopped, lowering the hand, letting the gesture linger only in her expression. "I can promise you this: You will never have to bury her."
And then, before Ashaf"s eyes could sting at the words and the memories they invoked, the stranger took a step into the room"s shadows-and silver light, pale and luminescent, swallowed her, returning her, perhaps, to the Lady"s Moon.
She missed the dawn, but met the day when the shadows cast were still long and slender. The fields were full of moving bodies; women toiled with their scythes in their personal plots in the common before being called to serve upon the Lord"s lands at the sides of their husbands. This Tor"agar granted them that much. His father had not. Small children gathered tied stalks; older children knotted and bundled them. During this month, this, the only time of year when the Lady"s hand was felt during the daylight hours, there were no idle hands.
Not even, she thought ruefully, her own. Her back was strong, her arms stronger; she would be missed. And she did not care to offer excuses, either of the two that she had, for her absence. She scurried with haste to the edge of the Lord"s field, knowing her own part of the common serafs" plot would be tended by the younger women in the village. Age granted her that unspoken right, but she hated to take advantage of it now when in her dotage she might truly require it. Unselfconscious in her movements, she rolled up her sleeves, inviting the sun"s touch as she ran.
"Ashaf!"
"Na"Carre," she said, smiling broadly at a slender, too tall youth.
He blushed, almost ducking under the hand that ran through the sun-bleached tuft of his curly hair. He was a young man now, and no child, to be so called. When had he grown so? Last year, and he had blushed and smiled, joining her a moment to brag about his new exploits, his ability to trap small game in the forests outside of the Lord"s fields and the serafs" common. He brought her an almost recognizable pelt, a gift of sorts, proof of the truth of his words.
She stopped a moment to look at him, and his mother, Valla kep"Valente, thwacked him soundly on the shoulder for being what he was: a youth yearning impatiently for the imagined grace of manhood.
She had been just such a youth except, of course, she had desired to be woman and wife.
"Ashaf," Valla said, falling into step beside the older woman. "Are you well? It"s not like you to sleep so late." Not, Ashaf thought, during harvest. "I slept poorly," she told the younger woman, wondering if she had ever walked with such unself-conscious, easy grace. "Yesterday was the start of the harvest season; I rose too early."
"Ah," Valla said, her own face taking the shadows a moment. Every seraf had her dead, be they mother or sister or child. Or father. Or brother. Or husband. "We said our rites. My youngest-Tia -she wouldn"t mind me. Crawled all over the graves as if they were hillocks made for child"s play."
"The Lady," Ashaf said wryly and sadly both, "is the mother. She understands; the joy of children is no disrespect to either her or those who now rest in her keeping. Believe that, Valla."
The younger woman smiled and nodded, just as Ashaf knew she would. Ashaf, having lost so much, had done what she could to fill her life; she was old enough now to be considered wise-at least by the women. They came to her, when they could not or would not go to their own mothers, and she let them come, taking a pain and a pleasure from their youthful company. The what-ifs of her own family.
Her arms ached, but the smile across her lips, habit and more, was pleasant and warm enough. "Now come. We"ve no time for talk; as it is, we"ll be under the headman"s eyes. Look at the sun."
She loved the harvest season, and as she watched it unfold, she wondered what the cooler weather would bring. Rain; probably too much of it. Averda was the Lady"s land; there was no doubt about it. And those who called the Lady the weaker of the two were fools who deserved to live in the harsh, wind-blasted desert plains. If the sand made men, she thought, it scoured them so clean only their swords and their will remained. And swords and will were a poor home and a poor haven for life.
Here, with green and gold and red all about, she thought she could be happy. No, she did not think it; she felt it, a deep and even peace that came from working with life, for it. There were drummers on the fields" edge, and a man who played the pipes as if the pipes were a sweet, youthful voice. She did not recognize him, and that was odd; she recognized all of the village serafs on sight. "He"s pretty, isn"t he?" Valla said, catching the black strands of hair that had worked free of her confining knot and tying them up again. "Do you know him?"
"I? No." The younger woman laughed. "But I would if Arrego weren"t so jealous!"
"Valla!"
"He"s Voyani," she replied, as if that explained anything. Or everything. It explained much.
In the Dominion, there were the clansmen, and there were the serafs. The clansmen were free, and where they had power and the will to protect their holdings, they gathered serafs, branding and naming them. If they were powerful enough, they chose to merely name; the name was enough. Ashaf kep"Valente bore no scar, no brand. She understood that she was owned by a powerful clan, and perhaps she was even blessed by the ownership; today, under this sky, with the smell of the earth in her nostrils, the soil beneath her nails, the harvest beside her bent back, she felt so. And she knew it as the Lord"s will, and the Lady"s. Some served. Some ruled.
But the Voyani were as old as the land. They traveled, many upon the horses of the open plains, and many not; they moved in groups, and they defended each other as fiercely as blood-born clansmen. But they took no serafs. They owned no land. They carried no war with them.
It was said that they were not averse to robbing the clansmen they found who were poor and unable to defend themselves properly, and Ashaf knew it for truth. Yet they were suffered to survive, and survive they did, trading and bartering and carrying information from one Terrean to the next. They even moved out of the Dominion from time to time, seeking the merchants in the Northern Empire. It was said that some, one or two, settled there, like so many of the poor, free clansmen who could make no mark for themselves in the Dominion. The North took the weak ones, and accepted them; the Lord let them go. The Lord had no use for weakness.
It was also said, although she did not know if it were true, that serafs who escaped their clan could travel with the Voyani and find both home and freedom in Essalieyan. She and her husband had spoken of it in whispers when their first child was born. Perhaps the Lady had heard them. Perhaps the Lady had been angered by it. Perhaps the Lady had chosen to keep the children within her reach.
Too much darkness. During the Sun"s dance. She shook herself. "Why are the Voyani here?"
Valla shrugged.
"Which family?"
"Hers. Yollana"s."
Ashaf felt a little chill in the sun"s heat. She raised a hand, adjusted her hat, feeling the edge of the wide brim as if its presence were a comfort. "Has she come to trade?"
"I think it"s too early for that. We"re just starting our harvest."
"Then what?"
"Yollana," Valla replied, lowering her voice, "is moon-touched. She goes where she goes. You know that. I"ve even heard that the Tor-"
"Enough," Ashaf said, raising a hand and touching the moving lips of a careless young woman. The gesture brought the silence that she hoped for-and demanded. Whether it was true or no, it was never safe to speculate, beneath the day"s open sky, about the habits and the secrets of powerful men. The wind carried careless words farther than arrows and spears.
Yes, she knew Yollana well. What girl, with a heart full of foolish dreams in these, the richest lands of Annagar, did not? What girl, with such a heart, could resist the trek over fields and hill, before night had fully set, to offer the mysterious Voyani woman what little food or item she could find in order to procure both a blessing and a hint of the future?
She had already faced Yollana once, in the year before her first marriage to the man of her desire. She could remember, clearly, the icy night of Yollana"s face, the darkness of unblinking eyes, as Yollana had promised her that she would have her heart"s desire. The first intimation that her heart was a thing to be feared. She would have others, but like so many things, the first was a scar that time did not diminish.
That year, she had discovered that nightmare and dream come from the same place. And it was nightmare that returned her to it, time and again, stripping her of the strength of wisdom and experience, paring her down to a girl"s fear and helplessness.
Her arms ached, and her back, as the minutes dwindled into a stream of time; hours pa.s.sing.
Things happened, when they happened, in threes. Three visitors: Isladar of no clan, Evayne of Nolan, and now Yollana of the Havalla Voyani.
I am too old, she thought. 1 haven"t the strength. But she wiped her dirt-crusted hands on the thick cotton drape of her long skirts and shielded her eyes against the sun"s fall. She could see the Voyani wagons at the crest of the gently sloped hill beyond which her house lay. She knew that she would go around them.
And that it would make no difference.
Dusk was the time of shadows.
Night, and the Lady"s moon was brilliant against the speckled backdrop of cool, dark blue. Day, and the Lord"s face turned a merciless, necessary heat upon the greens and the golds, the reds and the browns, the earth"s colors.
But at dusk, with neither Lord nor Lady in ascendance, the light and the darkness intertwined and every possible path was a step into the unknown.
She could not sleep.
And sleepless, she left the sanct.i.ty of her single-room dwelling to stand a moment in the wash of a sky that was caught, in crimson, between two shades of blue. Beneath that sky, crossing the footpaths that had been worn by time and the steady movement of st.u.r.dy heels, was a lone figure, illuminated from behind by the lamp that hung across her left shoulder by the shaft of a long pole. The figure"s face was in shadow, but she did not need to see it to feel the apprehension of recognition.
Fate.
Ashaf waited numbly as the figure came closer.
Yollana, the wisewoman of the Havalla Voyani.
But here, she felt a strange thing: not fear, as she had expected, and not even resignation, although its touch was heavy upon her unbent shoulders. No, she felt kinship; the kinship of those weary with the burdens of the responsibilities they have chosen-and wearier still with the loss of them.
The Yollana of her youth was gone in that instant; her perfect midnight hair bleached everywhere by the touch of harsh sun and time. Her pale skin was lined now, although not furrowed; it was no longer translucence defined. But if she did not have the slenderness of youth, she had the muscled, st.u.r.dy appearance of one who has been tried and tested without breaking.
As if she had expected no less, Yollana looked up from the ground"s even slope as she at last approached the house, nodding at the younger woman who waited. Her eyes were the eyes that Ashaf remembered.
"Well met," the Voyani wisewoman said, bowing low enough that the folds of her voluminous shirt obscured the wide, red sash across her midriff.
"And you," Ashaf said softly. She waited a long moment, and then looked away. "I have no water to offer."
"I do," Yollana replied, and she lifted the skin from the folds of her wide skirts. Those skirts could hide many a thing: water, gold. A dagger. "Will you drink with me?"
It was formal; an offer of sorts. But of what, and for what, Ashaf could not guess. She nodded quietly. "Night is coming," she said. "I should sleep soon." But she turned quietly and opened the door to her home, inviting by gesture this third visitor for whom she felt such ambivalence.
The lamp was bright enough to illuminate the four walls of her life; to cast a shadow around the sagging cotton mats upon which she lay night by night; to show the marks and stains and scratches in the wood of the small table before which she knelt to eat. To pray.
She crossed the room and knelt there now, taking from a small shelf beside the table the delicate clay bowls that had been a gift from her husband and placing them upon the worn wooden surface. After a moment, Yollana joined her, unhooking the lamp and placing it on the floor by her bent knees. They stared at each other a moment in uneasy silence; it was the Voyani woman who spoke first.
Yollana"s smile was crooked. "You"ve aged," she said. She took the skin from her belt, uncapped it, and poured. She was skilled, and it was clear from the way that she watched each drop that she had traveled in the Lord"s heartlands.
"And you," Ashaf replied. "But more gracefully."
"Voyani blood." Carefully lifting a bowl, she offered the sweet water to Ashaf.
Ashaf took it and lifted it to her lips, accepting the visitor"s gift as if there was nothing unusual about such a visit. "All blood is red," she said softly. Then she stopped; the water that touched her tongue was sweet and cool-it was almost as if she drank water"s ideal, and not the water itself.
At that, Yollana smiled broadly. "All blood, yes. I give you my word under the Lady"s moon that I will spill none of yours this eve."
Ashaf laughed bitterly. "And that is meant to comfort? Oh, no, Yollana. I know the Havalla Voyani well. You are subtle when you exact your price."
History stood between them; history and the piercing clarity of the memory of a young girl long gone.
"We have all met our heart"s desire," Yollana replied at last, speaking to a past that had never, and would never, fully die. "And most of us have survived it. If I had warned you then, what would you have done, you a seraf of the clan Valente?" She lifted a hand. "Don"t answer.
We both know that you would not have chosen to believe me. You were sixteen, Ashaf kep"Valente." Her smile was oddly crooked. "I was sixteen once. I know the age."
The younger woman"s face twisted a moment, and then relaxed. "I survived," she said softly. "And for a time, I flourished. It is gone now."
"Yes. You have lost two lives."
She started, as if in pain, and then said, "I have lost more than that."
"You have mourned and buried more," Yollana replied, as cool this night as she had been almost thirty years past. "But the two that I speak of are yours." Yollana"s words were carried by a cold, sharp wind; they pierced the skin and more.
I have lost two lives, Ashaf thought, feeling the strange truth of the words as they echoed, unspoken, between them.
Things were done in three. She exhaled slowly, feeling the dread of the moment give way to weariness.
"Why have you come, Yollana? It is not the way of the Voyani to seek out the serafs-or the clansmen, for that matter. You hide in your tents and your wagons, in your stalls and beneath the masks you wear upon your stages. If you want gold, I have none to give you. If you want food, there are richer women than I.
"And if you wish to tell a fortune, you must find someone who is fool enough to ask you. I have already been bled. I will not hold my hand beneath your dagger again."
"This night I cannot see the answer to the question of your future written so clearly across your face. You were beautiful in your youth, Ashaf; you were known for it two villages in any direction. It did not take the mystical skills of the Voyani ancestors to know what that beauty presaged."
"I will not speak about my past," Ashaf said. "And I have not asked you about my future." She spoke calmly now, and clearly, meeting eyes that had once been dark and icy and yes, mysterious.