A winged shadow crossed the deck and Chedan’s gaze followed it, lifting until he saw the bird flash white against the azure sky.
“I do not dispute what you have seen.” He turned back to Iriel. “Although I have traveled more widely than most, even I cannot be absolutely certain of our exact position. But you are drawing your conclusion before all the evidence has come in. Do not fall into the error of those who see change only as decline and say that in the end there will be darkness. In the end, too, is light—light that will show us at last the cosmos and our true place in it, the purpose of our hopes and our losses, our loves, our dreams—”
“Yes, Master, we do not doubt that our spirits will survive.” Kalaran’s handsome face was contorted in a sneer. “But if we are so important, why do the gods leave us suspended on the edge of the world?”
“Kalaran, Kalaran.” Chedan shut his eyes and shook his head. “You come through fire and destruction almost unscathed, and now you complain about a little suspense? No wonder the gods so rarely intervene! By their mercy we have been granted a path out of the devastation, but that is not enough? We must face rough conditions!” Chedan waggled his fingers, mock-horrified. “All is surely lost.” He waited as a little ripple of nervous laughter passed around the circle.
“Children of bygone Atlantis,” he went on, more softly, “we have lost all save one another, but when I say we should be thankful for our troubles I am not merely repeating worn-out philosophies. We would not have those troubles if we had not survived! Surely you do not think it is a mistake to survive, merely because things are changed.”
“But we are lost!” Kalaran objected, and a muttered agreement echoed him.
“It is worse than that,” young Selast exclaimed from her place at Damisa’s side, her slight frame quivering with nervous energy. “The sailors say we have sailed right off the world!”
“In my experience,” Chedan answered, glancing back down the ship, “sailors will say a great many outrageous things to the young and innocent. I would advise you not to believe everything that you hear.
“But let us consider for a moment that these rumors are true, and we have sailed off the world. How do you know that we will not just as easily sail back onto it? The sea is vast and wild, but it is finite. We will find land, and sooner rather than later. But let me warn you in advance, my dear young friends, when we come again to the shore, we will probably not find warm halls or servants waiting with fine foods and tasty drinks.”
And just at that moment, as if the priest’s words had been nothing less than prophecy, there came a squawk and then a shout from the sharp-sighted man Reidel had sent up to the masthead.
“Land! My captain, that be no cloud on the horizon! ’Tis land I see for sure!”
In the euphoria of discovery, they forgot that to catch sight of land was not the same as reaching it. As they drew closer, those who were far-sighted described high cliffs of brownish stone, sculpted by wind and water into columns and towers. At their feet waves frothed in a vicious swirl.
“I think it is the Casseritides, the Isle of Tin, whose southern horn the traders call Beleri’in,” breathed Chedan. “These must be the cliffs at the tip of the peninsula. On the southwestern shore, there is a bay with an island where the traders put in.”
Reidel leaned into the tiller, and the sailors did their best, but the wind was from the east, and the most they could do without the midsail was to set the Crimson Serpent wallowing broadside toward the toothed cliffs. Swearing in defeat, Reidel turned his ship toward the relative safety of the open sea once more.
“Are there other harbors on the northern shore?” Tiriki asked softly, unable to tear her eyes from the dim coast until it had almost vanished in the evening fog.
“There are many ports here,” Chedan assured her. “It is quite a big island. Many years ago our ships used to put in at a harbor farther up the coast. It was at the mouth of a stream they called Naradek after a river in the Ancient Land. There was a knoll like a pyramid, where they had built a Temple to the sun. But when the Ancient Land sank, contact was lost. I doubt there would be anything left now.”
Reidel managed a smile. “At least we know where we are. Tomorrow, surely, we will come to shore.”
But the wind, it seemed, did not want them to do so. For three days more they fought their way along the craggy coast, battling hostile currents and contrary weather, and every day were less able to feed themselves with only the few fish they could snatch from the waves.
On the fourth day, the wind died. Dawn showed them a half circle of mountains that sheltered a broad estuary where earth and water mingled in countless streams. Small tree-clad islands ranged the marshes like the coils of a titanic serpent, winding inward toward a land whose contours the mists still veiled.
One by one, the refugees gathered on deck to gaze upon the unknown land, almost unable to believe that they had actually reached a destination. Tiriki stood alone in the prow of the ship, fighting tears as she realized that somehow she had expected Micail to be awaiting her when the journey was done.
They were still some leagues west of the trading station on the Naradek that Chedan had told them of. A trackless wilderness was not the landfall any of them had hoped for. But the tide was relentlessly pulling them landward, and their ship was too battered to tempt the sea again. With a sigh of half relief and half resignation, Reidel brought the tiller around and headed into the estuary.
“Here at last is the new land—” The voice was Chedan’s, but unusually loud. A little startled, Tiriki turned to watch as he addressed the crowd. “From now on, there will be no more time for mourning,” he was saying, “for we will need all our energy to survive. Therefore let us now bid farewell to Ahtarrath the beautiful, and to Alkonath the mighty. Alas for the Bright Empire that was, and is no more.”
And then, with even greater poignancy, their grief for the Ten Kingdoms of Atlantis, whose mighty ships had ranged the world, subsided into silence. Their memories of all that they had lost were for a moment too clear; too vivid again was the vision of the Star Mountain as it exploded in fire and thunder and the last bastion of invincible Atlantis surrendered proudly to the sea.
102 Diana L. Paxson
Six
“O beautiful upon the horizon of the East,
Lift up thy light unto day, O Eastern Star,
Day Star, awaken, arise!
Lord and giver of Life, awake—
Joy and giver of Light, arise—
O beautiful upon the horizon of the East,
Day Star, awaken, arise!”
Micail drifted toward consciousness upon the rise and fall of the verses that had begun his days for as long as he could remember. The voices had the purity of youth; was it the acolytes who were singing? He could not quite recall why they were with him, but their presence, and the life-affirming cadences of the song, were protection against the nightmares he had already begun to forget.
He tried to open his eyes, but cool grey cloth covered them. Have I been ill? There was an ache in his chest and behind his eyes . . . He would have lifted his hand and removed the damp cloth, but his arms felt weak and hot.
“Tiriki . . .” He had enough strength to whisper. “Tiriki?” he tried again.
“Don’t try to talk.” A deft hand smoothed the cloth back from his brow, then lifted his head. “Here’s something for you to drink. Easy now—” The hard rim of a cup touched his lips. Automatically he swallowed and the liquid, a tart gruel almost leavened by the taste of honey, went down. Something in his chest eased, but the headache remained.
“There you are,” came the voice again, as the strong hands gently lowered Micail’s head back to his pillow. “That ought to calm you . . .”
He tried to focus on the speaker, but his eyes didn’t want to stay open. The voice was tantalizingly familiar, with the accent of his own childhood home, but too low to be Tiriki’s. Why is she not here, if I am so ill? He tried to summon the strength to call f
or her again, but whatever had been in the liquid was dragging him back down into warm darkness. He frowned, breathing in the fresh scent of rain and grassy earth as his confused awareness of the present was overwhelmed by memory.
“The balance is broken!”
“The darkness rises! Dyaus is set free!”
“It is the Cataclysm! Save us, Micail!”
“Save us!”
“Micail—can you hear me? Wake up, lad. You’ve lazed here too long!”
Sinewy hands with the dry skin of age grasped his, and the jolt of energy that passed through them shocked him to full consciousness. His eyes flicked open. The man bending over him was tall, with an expressive face and greying hair that fell like unruly feathers across his high brow.
“Ardral!” What came out was a croak, but Micail was too surprised to care. “My lord Ardravanant,” he corrected himself, preferring the more correct form in addressing the Seventh Vested Guardian of the Temple of Light at Ahtarrath . . . In theory he and Micail were of equal rank, but the old adept had been a legend since Micail was a child, and to use the nickname seemed presumptuous.
“I like it better the way you said it the first time,” advised the Seventh Guardian. “Lately I don’t feel at all like a ‘Knower of the Brightest.’ Besides, it begs the question, don’t you think? It is bad enough in ceremonies. No, stick with Ardral. Do I go around calling you Osinarmen?”
“That is a point. But—” Micail shook his head and coughed. “What are you doing here? For that matter”—he paused again, but didn’t cough—“where are we?”
Ardral’s grey eyes narrowed. “You don’t remember?”
I don’t remember anything, Micail thought; but in the next moment, he did. “We were in the library,” he gasped. “You were trying to get a great wooden trunk down the stairs. My friend Jiri and I helped you, but then you ran back inside and—” His mind was overwhelmed by multiple images: the arguing priests, collapsing pillars, crumbling walls, scrolls scattering like windblown leaves, and the perpetual groaning of the earth, vibrating through stone and bone alike. . . .
“You saved my life,” said the adept softly, and again his hands tightened upon Micail’s, “although as I recall, at the time I wasn’t very thankful.”
“You practically broke my nose.”
“Yes . . . I’m sorry about that. I don’t know what came over me. Didn’t I make a lot of very fine speeches about accepting the inevitable? So naturally I was the one who couldn’t resist the temptation to try and save one more thing—even if flying chunks of lava were setting the city afire! Well, I’m glad you could see it was time to get out.”
“How did we ever get to the harbor?” Micail whispered, his chest tightening. “I remember the towers falling—blocking the way—” His memory overflowed with distorted pictures: people staggering as Darokha Plaza pitched, the ageless tiled stones suddenly rippling in a horrible wave—and an old woman falling, trampled by the mob, left lying in the middle of the street like a broken doll.
Micail’s fists clenched helplessly as he saw again the red gleam on the roiling waters of the coastline, heard the clattering armor of the elite soldiers Prince Tjalan had sent to find him; and though he struggled not to, he could not keep from seeing, with unbearable clarity, the chaos of shattered cliffs where the harbor should have been—and where the Crimson Serpent had been moored.
And all the while the ash had been falling, coating land and sea with a foul grey powder, as if all life was dead and he no more than a ghost haunting a broken tomb, the tomb of . . .
“Tiriki!” His voice cracked and he fought for breath. “Where is she?” Coughs tore painfully at his lungs, but he arched upward, flailing. “I must find her, before—”
But then he felt again the surprising strength in Ardral’s hands as the adept murmured a Word of Power that sent Micail spiraling down into sodden dreams once more.
As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he was aware that a series of different hands tended him. Sometimes even the softest touch was intolerable. At other times his friend Jiritaren was with him, or someone else, talking rather urgently about some crisis, lung fever . . . Gradually Micail began to understand that he was in danger, but it did not matter. Tiriki was all that mattered. Micail could not remember how he had lost her, but her absence was a wound through which his life was draining away.
And then there came a moment when he felt her arms around him. I am dying, he thought, and Tiriki has come to bear me home. But she was swearing at him, yelling about a task he had left undone. He felt himself drowning in a mighty tide . . .
He woke to the drumbeat of a drenching rain. That seemed strange; the storm season was past. He took a deep breath and noted that though there was some congestion in his lungs, they no longer pained him.
The bed was unfamiliar, softer than he preferred. Raising his head from the downy pillow, he looked about at a warmly lit room with whitewashed walls and a narrow window. His heart pulsed as he saw a woman standing beside it, looking out at the sea and the storm, but it was not Tiriki. This woman had dark curls, edged with copper where they caught the light.
“Deoris?” he whispered, and as she turned, he saw her golden skin, her huge dark eyes, the adolescent blemish on her nose. . . . Of course it was not Deoris; this was her younger child, Tiriki’s half sister. “Galara,” he said, more loudly. “At least you’re alive!”
“And so are you!” she exclaimed, leaning over him excitedly. “And you are yourself again, aren’t you? Thank the Maker! I’d better tell the prince, he’ll want to know—”
Micail began to make sense of his memories. If Prince Tjalan was here, when they found the way to the main harbor blocked he must have taken Micail aboard the Royal Emerald, still safe in the cove, and brought him here . . . wherever here might be. He was about to ask, but could not get the words out before Galara had run from the room. He attempted to sit up, but the effort was too much, and he lay back on the soft bedding, trying a deeper breath.
The door banged against the wall as Prince Tjalan himself strode in. There were a few more strands of silver at his temples than Micail remembered, and a deep line or two around his eyes that had not been there before, but his green linen kilt was as finely pressed as ever, and seeing Micail, his face filled with delight.
“You are awake!” Tjalan threw off his woolen short-cape and sat down upon the stool by the bed, clasping Micail’s hands briefly in his own.
“Yes . . . and glad I am to see you. I gather it was you who got me here in one piece?” Micail found it hard to feel thankful, but he had always had warm feelings for Tjalan, and that at least had not changed.
“I am commissioning myself a medal!” Tjalan chuckled. “First I had to wrestle you onto the ship—no one else would dare! Then when we were about halfway out of the harbor you thought you saw Tiriki—” He stopped himself. “You jumped overboard, and of course you went straight into a floating spar and got smacked on the head! Lucky you didn’t drown, and your rescuer with you! That was me too, by the way. But they hauled us both back in somehow. Since then—between concussion from the head wound and lung fever from the foul water you swallowed, you have been a complete bore, unconscious or raving the entire time. But it was worth a little aggravation to keep you breathing.”
“Where is this place?” Micail asked.
“The Hesperides—the Isle of Tin—just as you and I intended.” Tjalan grinned again. “We have made landfall here in Beleri’in to restock our larders and shake out the kinks, but as soon as you feel fit to travel again, we’ll continue up the coast to Belsairath. It’s nothing grand, just an old Alkonan trading station from my great-grandfather’s time, but with all these refugees, it’ll soon be a thriving town!”
“Refugees . . .” Micail shivered, despite the blankets and furs. “So other ships have come in?”
“Oh yes. Not only from Ahtarrath, but there are some from the other islands as well. We saved more of your priesthood than I dared hop
e for in those last moments when the whole world seemed about to explode. When the road to the harbor was blocked, several of your acolytes made it to the cove. The Royal Emerald was packed full, but she’s a good ship, and once we got out of the harbor we weathered the voyage well.”
“But there was no word—” He fought for breath.
“Calm yourself,” the prince urged, “my dear friend! We’ve had no news of Tiriki, no. But ships are still arriving, and some have even sailed past us, no doubt headed to Belsairath as well. She may yet join us. But what good will that be, if you have torn yourself in pieces?”
In the days that followed, Micail began to fill in more gaps in his memory. The house in Beleri’in where they lodged him was one of several belonging to a native merchant who had grown rich on the tin trade. As his strength returned Micail walked in the spacious gardens, breathing in the clean wind that scoured the green foggy hills half visible beyond the garden wall. The sky looked immense, whether it showed itself as a tapestry of shapeless clouds or an expanse of radiant blue.
So this is the new world, he realized, and for a moment his grim mood almost lifted. There is much beauty here . . . but it is cold, very cold. Father Sun, we sing your praises as we have always done. Why will you not warm the earth here? Even the sea wind bears me nothing of you. Must I build your new Temple just to feel a moment’s warmth?
He watched constantly for ships, but not until they were leaving to go to Belsairath did he appreciate the beauty of the sea. The harbor was the same clear blue as the sky. In its midst was a small island that separated a cluster of wingbird ships that bobbed in the tide. The largest was Tjalan’s ship, the Royal Emerald, her green sails like bright leaves against the darker green of the island.