Saraband of lost time, p.29
Saraband of Lost Time, page 29
Very slowly Illandra withdrew her hand from her son’s face. She heard voices around her, Alisha’s and Cundiff’s and Wode’s, and then—most distantly of all—her own, saying, “It will be all right. He will be fine. We must go.”
She looked up into the shadowed face of the Warmaster for confirmation or solace. She found instead the mystery of private grief. His eyes were weary but held hers without blinking, as his arms held Thraus without trembling.
* * * *
What can be said of that haunted flight? The air around them, the blackened ether on which they rode, seemed a creation of the great engines that throbbed beneath the Warmaster’s hand.
Thraus lay unconscious in a narrow wooden bunk. More blood than his body could possibly have contained welled from his chest to soak the blankets, cover Alisha’s hands, and drip in viscous droplets to the gray steel deck.
There had been no room for tears in the compressed space of panic through which Illandra had moved with her son. Now, in the diode-lit cabin of the airclipper, breathing the fumes of oil and incontinence, she was afraid to cry—afraid that the sound would wake Thraus, or enter his mind while he slept, weakening him further by adding her own suffering to his. She sat huddled within herself, masking even her breath, seeing only the lids of his eyes and the occasional flutter of the unquiet orbs beneath. The Warmaster’s flask of brandy was forgotten in her hand, shiny with cold sweat.
She would wonder, later, who else had ridden in that magical craft.
Wode stepped quietly from the imperial bedchamber and closed the door.
“It is over, your Squeamishness,” he reported.
“Over?” cried the Emperor. “No, that cannot be! They were the finest surgeons in all the Empire! I will behead every one of them before daybreak.”
“No, no. I mean, the operation is over. Thraus will live—though your chief bonesmith proposes to keep him strapped to a board for a number of weeks. We may want a second opinion there.”
“Ah.” Scaeigh’s countenance brightened and he lifted his head. “I knew it. I knew everything would be all right.”
He took a step down the hallway and nearly pitched forward on uncontrollable knees. Wode caught him by the elbow and held him upright.
“Perhaps you should sit down, your Perdurability. This must have been quite a strain on you.”
The Emperor fanned himself with the broad sleeve of his nightgown. “A strain? I should say it has been. My dear young friend Thraus, after all.”
Wode helped him past a crowd of Guardsmen, who seemed irritated at being awake at such an hour, and into an adjacent audience room. There he seated the Emperor on an overstuffed loveseat beneath an atrocious fantasy of nymphs in a garden, rendered in oil. Scaeigh began to unbutton his robe.
“I think you should remain dressed, your Overweaning Modesty. At least for the time being.”
“You do?”
“Yes. There is someone I think you should see. She has become quite overwrought during this ordeal, tending to Thraus and going without sleep.”
“But what can I do? What Lady Illandra needs is a soft bed and a few hours’ sleep. I will see that she is given the quietest bedchamber in the city. Deosil!”
Wode clutched the Emperor’s arm. “I do not refer to Lady Illandra, your Misapprehension. She is holding up marvelously.”
Turning to the door, which opened grudgingly, he said, “Never mind, captain.”
Scaeigh regarded his former page with trepidation.
“I am speaking,” Wode whispered, staring intently into the small eyes of his ruler, “of Mistress Alisha.”
Trepidation became abject dread. “Why…Alisha…surely you don’t…that is to say, I am certain there is nothing I can do to help. What she needs is rest. I will give her the quietest bedchamber in the city. Deosil!”
“Never mind, captain! Damn you, your Sublime Obstinacy, she has been desperate with loneliness since you left St. Boto.” Scaeigh sniffed. “Well, she might have written to say so.”
“She has written.”
“Yes. And I gave strict instructions that her letters were to be intercepted and burned.”
“But she is in love with you. She has virtually told me so outright every evening for the past month.”
“You have seen her every evening for the past month?”
“My lord, there is no time for this banter. The poor girl is at the point of collapse. I know it was painful for you to be rejected that way, but—”
Scaeigh opened his mouth to object, but Wode raised a hand for silence.
“She had no way of knowing you would give up so easily.”
“I have never been so humiliated in my life. Making a fool of myself over the daughter of a…what does her father do, anyway?”
“He is a great lord in the West. A leader of men.”
“Oh?” (This seemed to console Scaeigh somewhat.)
Wode stood up. “I am going to show her in, your Unrequitedness. I’m sure you will both feel better for it.”
Through the silent, padded corridors of the imperial apartments Lady Illandra moved like someone walking in her sleep. The blue light of dawn stood at the wide casements, waiting to be admitted, but Illandra felt she could prolong this twilit dream for as long as she cared. Just now she would have delayed the dawn forever.
For a narrow space of hours, even as she feared that she would lose him forever, her son had been restored to her. She had known his every breath, every heartbeat, as though they stirred in her own breast. It was a way of living she had almost forgotten—the intimate intertwining of consciousness with a child who had sprung from her womb. For a few hours it had returned; from the black threshold of Cheeve Arbor to the great canopied bed at the summit of the Empire, she had lived and almost died in the precious body of another.
The separation had been immediate—so marked and so abrupt that she had not understood when suddenly she found herself cold and crying at the side of the Emperor’s bed. Thraus had moved sluggishly, straining for awareness through the heavy waves of anesthesia. Illandra knew, as she watched those limbs twist beneath the sheet, that the body was no longer her own, that she had no connection with it but the uncritical attachment of love, which had always seemed enough.
Now she knew love was a pale copy of that deeper bond. It was a lesson she would not have chosen to learn. Obsessed by these thoughts and exhausted, Illandra wandered empty corridors during the hour before dawn, turning right and left in blind alternation, until an oddly familiar noise gave halt to her tortured self-absorption.
It was a cough. Such a humble noise was entirely out of place in the surreal opulence of those chambers. Moreover, it was the kind of sound made by someone fully awake, alert, not overwrought and drugged by sleeplessness. Illandra cast her eyes over the chamber.
Enough light entered the tall windows to fill a room of normal size. But in this yawning chamber the light seemed to shrink from the task of illumination, gathering in a yellow puddle on the carpet near a hulking statue or machine. Unidentifiable furniture stood everywhere, like dancers frozen in a silent ballroom. Illandra stepped carefully between them until the pressure of someone’s presence made her shudder, then turned to stare into the gaunt face of the Warmaster.
The darkness, the look in his eyes, swept her back for an instant to the threshold of Cheeve Arbor. She reached out unthinkingly, groping through time for support. A strong hand took hers, led her to something low and soft. A voice she scarcely recognized said:
“You must be terribly tired. Too tired to sleep, perhaps. I will bring you some wine.”
Illandra saw only shadows. Her fingers traced the embroidered contours of old fabric; she breathed its incense of mothballs and lavender.
“Illandra.”
She returned from a shallow absence like that of sleep, but it had not been sleep because she remembered listening to the morning song of goldfinches. The Warmaster stood beside her, holding a goblet from which rose the warm smell of cinnamon.
“What is this place?” she pointlessly asked.
The wine crept down her throat like honey, like the promise of warmth from a distant fireplace, like something she remembered, from her youth.
The Warmaster was saying, “You’ll be able to see it when the sun comes up. Really, it’s magnificent. People come from all parts of the Empire just to stand below and watch. Of course, the view from here is incomparably better. I am seldom admitted to these apartments anymore.”
Illandra let the goblet slip from her hand. It rolled, empty, onto the carpet. The two of them watched it in surprise, and the Warmaster sat down beside her.
“It was my fault,” he said. “At one point, during the night, I wanted to tell you that I wished I could die in his place. That would have been a lie. But it felt true.”
“I don’t need to hear this.”
“But I need to say something. This or something else, I don’t think it matters. Do you remember the day of the hunt?
After the boar was killed, when you stood over me, waiting to see if 1 was going to live: I remember the look in your eyes when I began to move, tried to stand up/’
“I don’t.”
“No. You would not.” Illandra listened with a curious sort of indifference: not indifference toward the Warmaster so much as toward herself, these plush apartments, the approaching dawn, the world of events. Nothing seemed quite real or certain in that world, and nothing seemed able to reach her through the fragrant veil of wine. She heard again the intaglioed twitter of goldfinches, screeching to wake the sun.
She said, “Do you really have no name? Are you really called…just that?”
All possible emotions danced in his melancholy smile. He said, “I suppose you should have this. I am no longer certain what I wanted it to mean, or what I felt when I wrote it. Words are too precise, really, for this sort of thing. They miss the essense of the thing altogether—the mystery.”
Alone, Illandra stared for some time at the wrinkled page before its stark characters came to resemble ordinary letters. She read:
The sudden warmth surprised me. Oh, but then the leaves were likely green all over. I had thought it might be something special when the prickling chill of autumn, brisk and dry, gave way to deliquescent spring. Its odd lubricious verdure burst upon me while
I lay, unknowing, on its brooding sod; the earth precessed with unsuspected guile.
What lusty season is this, frapping vines, to bind my hopes to wild unreason, blossoming in secret colors, plunging roots between the lines of trammeled talk? A fragile burgeoning of life around the edges of my dreams is all it is. But how much more it seems!
At the window the blue dawn had turned to gold, but it was a dull gold, filtered by more than glass. The unnatural paucity of light drew Illandra across the wide chamber to throw back the gauzy veiling.
The thousand-throated song of goldfinches, which had been there all the while, became deafening. Ulandra stared across a vast aviary, an impossible rotunda two hundred yards wide, floored with evergreens five stories below and walled in bright mosaics. She strained her eyes toward the roof, but its myriad panes were obscured by a swirling cloud of birds, a single organism with ten thousand wings. Across the sun the charm of goldfinches wove its ever-changing fabric, as ceaseless and incommensurable as the ancient city stirring to life around it, too dense and too random ever to know.
29, Storming the Threshold
The Secret Garden: few who had heard of the place had ever seen it, and of the inhabitants of the Realm the greater number would not even have recognized the name.
It was a matter of legend among the younger adepts that the Secret Garden was hidden not in space, where innocent feet could chance upon its paths of shining sand, but in time, in a purer and nobler age. (Like young people everywhere, these adepts considered that they lived in a time of compromise and corruption.) As they grew older, and began to see through the paradoxes involved, these adepts were initiated into the Mystery and thenceforth held their silence when the subject was raised. Thus the legend survived, irreducible and vague.
Lord Inbote was taken to the Secret Garden on the second day of his mysterious sleep. This was deemed prudent, for the young disciples were becoming frantic with anxiety, and rumors were openly spreading.
Wicca heard some of the more interesting of these rumors one morning while stretching her limbs along the Path of Knowledge. The place attracted her because, as she explained to
Falspur, she met more crazy people there than she had ever seen in her life.
It was, for Seastaithe, a characteristic winter day: not cold, but chilly and damp. The Sea stood like a vast gray waste, scarcely distinguishable from the clouds that cluttered the sky. Here and there a fishingboat rode the swells, heading out to drag the canyon just past the bar. Farther out, a small flotilla of boats was making the return journey, crossing the bar toward Seastaithe. Their catch must have been modest, for they bobbed high in the water. Wicca inhaled the clammy air. She did not mind the weather here; at its worst, it reminded her of Meek’s Gaff, and at its best it was quite pleasant.
“Do you know,” said a tall, drooping woman (glancing down at Wicca’s crutches with palpable distaste), “the Seer has gone into a coma and is not expected to live?”
“That’s not what I heard,” said her companion, a frail-looking man with a crooked, nervous smile.
The two heads moved closer together, and Wicca gave her barmaid’s yawn, expressive of the most supreme indifference.
“He is dreaming,” the man confided, “of the future. And everything he dreams will come to pass. Besides that, he is secretly directing his hordes of followers by sending them instructions in their sleep. We may be receiving his instructions ourselves and not remember it. The Elders are worried, because they can’t read his dreams and don’t know what he’s planning.” The woman was respectfully wide-eyed. This, as Wicca had learned, was merely a way of letting someone know you appreciated the trenchant nature of his delusions.
The man lowered his voice. “And he’s creating tulpas to do his bidding.”
“What?”
“You know—dream beings. They are his messengers, preparing the way for the great deeds to come.”
“What deeds? You mean the rebellion in the South?”
The man had not heard of the rebellion. “I do not concern myself with politics;” he sniffed.
“Well you should. There’s somebody down there raising a force against the Elders.”
The man turned his head and squinted as a sign of disbelief. In so doing he noticed Wicca, three paces behind them, listening attentively.
“If such a thing is going on,” he said, taking the woman’s arm and leading her away, “it is undoubtedly the work of the Seer.”
The woman pulled her arm free. “Your Seer is going to die,” she said curtly. “That’s what I heard.”
Wicca was placing the crutches so that they were ready to move with her weight when she noticed the young woman in her path. Her eyes, directed down at the uneven planking, caught the girl at thigh-level, low enough to guess her age by the shapely unveined legs, downy with pale hair. Wicca supposed this was one of those simpering youths, oozing unwanted sympathy, whom she encountered from time to time. She raised her head, ready to be gruff.
The girl’s face arrested her. The skin around the eyes was a peculiar olive-tan that had not come from sunshine, and the eyes themselves were almost golden. Wicca stared, and the girl stared back with equal frankness.
“What do you want?” said Wicca.
“Nothing,” the girl said quickly, as though surprised that Wicca could speak. “I thought for a moment I knew you. Do you come from the East?”
Wicca relaxed; it was a normal enough mistake. “The North,” she said. “A little town called Meek’s Gaff.”
The girl displayed absolutely no reaction to this, and Wicca grew tired of the encounter. She said, “Listen, I’ve got to go.”
The girl held up her hand. (The palm was tiny and soft, the fingers unblemished by work or time.)
“You must come with me,” she said softly. “I can restore to you the one you love.”
Wicca had been threatened with death before, but never by such a feeble adversary. Her crutch caught the girl behind the knees and toppled her backwards to the ground. Wicca hobbled energetically away.
“Wait!” the girl cried. She was holding something in her hands, something large and heavy, familiar-looking somehow…
“It’s his belt,” the girl explained, and indeed it was: that ridiculously heavy piece of metal he had worn, as far as Wicca knew, every day of his life.
Wicca was upon the girl like a plague. “I know you’re lying,” she breathed, “but I want to hear it anyway. Where did the belt come from?”
The girl had regained her composure, though she lay still on her back.
“You will have to speak to the Seer,” she said. “You must come with me to the Secret Garden.”
Just inside the lip of the harbor, the small flotilla of fishingboats hauled into a row of tiny piers, where an abandoned boathouse stood against the spray. This would have seemed odd to anyone looking out over the water—though no one was, now that Wicca had left with the girl—for these piers were used in warmer seasons by pleasure craft, and were some distance down the bight from the larger wharf reserved for the offloading of fish.
From the quarterdeck of the largest vessel a burly man leapt to the pier. He staggered somewhat under the weight of the rucksack on his shoulder, or it may have been that he was disoriented by having his feet back on solid timbers. The crew seemed to shrink from his presence, following meekly as he charged up the pier to the boathouse. At the door he fussed with the handle, grew impatient, and cocked his leg like a pistol. The wet breeze carried the sound of snapping lumber.
