The Second Ardath Mayhar Page 5

  The incense powder from the overturned urn blew on the wind, round and round in purple drifts, sweet and intense and somehow filled with power. The voice of the demigoddess rose amid the tumult in a chant of beckoning.

  Again Tairos came to stand at her left. Ilysis stood staunchly at her back, and Kyrsos at her right, allowing their mistress to call upon their strengths and their wills, as she summoned the gods whose servants they all were.

  A booming cry came from beyond the door they faced. Those from the mountains were no primitives, armed only with physical weapons, and they demanded entry into the shrine, though their words were in a language Tairos did not understand. But the North had come to Tiri’s call, and no merely human power could warm that frozen breath.

  Blows from some tremendous power began to batter the damaged stone, and bits of stuff fell from the groin of the roof. Cracks appeared in the sealed place that had been the doorway.

  Tiri called more loudly. The cats began to purr, great tearing roars of throbbing power joining her voice as she called to those who ruled this world.

  And they came.

  Not in body, for they possessed none. Not in spirit, for their spirits roamed the many worlds that existed. Yet in that part of them that cared about this single minor world they came, and the shrine was filled with potency without form.

  Tiri-na-oth seemed to grow larger, stronger, more beautiful as she faced the enemy. Tairos felt his body becoming great, his spirit stretching within him, his tail lashing with unleashed power. His siblings, he knew, must feel the same, and he faced the threat now with assurance.

  But those beyond the wall knew when the gods came. They had not dreamed that their spell would fail and the demigoddess awaken to call them, and now they drew back and back, leaving their task unfinished.

  With sudden understanding, Tairos knew that they would come again, when they felt the time was right. They might, in time, join with those in the west, those in the south, against the defenders of the shrine, but for now they were defeated.

  He turned his green eyes up to meet those of his mistress. Tiri-na-oth was smiling, as the potencies filling the chamber set things aright, after so long a time. The urn tilted upright again, the powder reassembling itself and draining into the jar.

  The eastern wall smoothed, and the outlines of the door began to appear, first as lines, then as the edges of a wide door to match those others facing outward. Bits of amorphous stuff drifted through the cold air from wall and floor, from mortar and door panel, moving together before the portal.

  Tairos felt a surge of excitement begin to build in his faithful heart. A gray shape, furred and graceful, was forming there at its ancient post.

  Grana stood again at the portal facing east. Now she was large, strong, filled with the powers that the returned gods had left there for those who did their work in this rebellious world.

  Tiri-na-oth loosed the paws to left and right. The three cats, guardians and defenders, moved to greet their sister, now returned from death to her rightful place among her kindred.

  A last breeze drifted through the shrine. The remnants of the pearl sphere shivered into nothingness, and the north wind died away. No sound came from south or north, from east or west, as the demigoddess stood among her cats, listening to the silence.

  All about the Navel of the World, the orderly patterns resumed their play. Those who would disturb the balances of the powers were left to nurse their long ambitions in frustration. For the demigoddess had waked, and her cats were, all four, on guard about the shrine of Tiri-na-oth.

  ARPEGGIA’S DEATHSONG

  How lovely it would be to create a world to your own tastes! I have done it many times, on paper, and this is how it feels.

  She had never thought about how death would come, though she never dreaded its arrival. Now, with her breath drawn with greater effort, her heart thudding laboriously under her rib cage, she had only one regret. All her painfully acquired knowledge, forged into wisdom by the fires of a long and demanding life, would be lost with her last breath.

  Such a pity!

  A hand touched her forehead, dripped water between her lips, and she knew that her daughter watched beside her. What could be taught she had conveyed to Astaria, but the distilled essence of thought and study and years could not be passed from hand to hand.

  Only a like existence, lived in the same manner, could reinvent the unique creature that Arpeggia had been.

  She drew a shuddering breath, knowing it to be the last. Her eyes dimmed, and chill enveloped her body.

  * * * *

  Chill wind sang about her, its icy blades bringing her back to consciousness.

  Although she knew she was surrounded by fields of snow and that what passed for her body sat upon some frozen surface, Arpeggia required some time to orient herself. Once she managed to call vision into being, she was frozen, in her turn, by sheer wonder.

  She sat upon a pinnacle of ice rising so high into the air that the world below was only a shimmer of white and silver. Although she knew that about her was the final chill of death, she now had no body to feel it, only a field of thought and memory assembled on this height for some unguessable purpose.

  How long she mused upon the problem was irrelevant, for time no longer existed. Her ruminations took as long as they required, and when she came to a conclusion, she leaned over the edge of her exalted seat and stared down at the swirl of pale mist and snowy nothingness lying beneath her, extending to the horizon on all sides.

  If she had possessed breath, she would have laughed. “I have been given a new world, untouched and unspoiled. Why, I cannot guess, unless it is to use as a canvas upon which to paint the things I know,” she told herself. She felt excitement build inside whatever kind of body was forming to meet her need.

  A world—or a universe? The thought roused something like warmth in her non-body and brought all her sentience sharply into focus.

  “Do I know enough to shape a universe?” she asked herself. The reply had to be that she did not, if she intended to form one as complex as that she had left behind. But another kind of universe, simpler and kinder, that surely was a possibility.

  “First must come the space in which it exists,” she mused, and to her amazement her tenuous hand held a wide brush dripping with midnight blue. Without worrying about the effect, she moved it in great swirls across the silver sky above her icy throne.

  Everything turned blue, reflecting that sky, even the ice and the mist repeating it faithfully below her height.

  When the color was even and satisfying, she turned her gaze upward. “Now the stars,” she whispered, and her brush was laden with gold and silver, blue-white and reddish drops, which she flung with abandon across the midnight sky. When there were just enough, yet not too many to attend to properly, she recalled all she had learned about the properties of those distant suns. Some she painted as red giants, some as intensely blue and hot, giving each much thought before committing herself to its nature.

  When the suns were blazing, she gave thought to worlds that might revolve about them. Planetary mechanics had been a fascination for much of her life, and she took great pains to make each of those she designed appropriate to the nature of its star, its distance from the sun, and its own makeup.

  Sea worlds sparkling with reflections of many moons were provided with vast tides that created interwoven patterns under the pull of the satellites. Some were like Earth, mottled with green forests, rich brown soil, rippled blue oceans. Some were made of metal, gleaming in the light of their suns. A few were dark and mysterious, in the process of finding their own development. The effect was intoxicating.

  There was still this place awaiting completion. She shut away her vision for a moment, intuiting what she might need to make the land below a place of surpassing beauty. To see that, she must have a day-blue sky, and in reply to her will it a
ssumed the tender hue of a robin’s egg.

  Her brush swept rosy mauve across the lowlands, purple-gray shadow, golden-ochre highlights where the sunlight fell. Rocky cliffs rose, touched with brilliant iris blue and streaks of copper and deep rose. She thought of grass, and green meadows studded the lands; forests rose in multi-hued splendor. Opalescent mists rose from below, and she knew her work to be fine and good.

  Never in all her intensely creative life had Arpeggia felt such joy. The arts and sciences she had embraced, only to move on to new interests when she had conquered the old ones, could offer nothing to equal this. No earthly palette held colors that could match the ones that appeared on her vast brush.

  “It’s like being a god,” she said to the vast firmament just completed by her will. “I will create only beauty, no cruelty or pain.”

  As the words came to her, a smudge of darkness appeared at the edge of her brilliant sky, dimming it with a dirty cast. She had considered creating cloud and storm, as those were necessary to a healthy world, but this was a foul, forbidding color, which, as it grew in intensity, began to diminish the loveliness of her creation.

  “This has the feel of an evil thing,” Arpeggia said to herself. She huddled on her icy peak, considering how to battle it. Her memory, filled to overflowing with many disciplines, produced a wealth of material that might work against embodied ugliness.

  “Music,” she cried. Though she had no voice with which to sing, she now had the ability to produce what she needed with a thought. From her long years of study and devotion rose the sparkling strains of Mozart, the intricacies of Telemann and Vivaldi, the staccato brilliance of Bach.

  Her music rose as a cloud of color, though it was not one the eyes of her kind had ever seen, and it had no name. As it grew in height and breadth its brightness increased, filling the sky, the land, pushing back the threatening darkness at the edge of the world.

  This was not the effortless impulse that had formed her universe but a draining labor, and as the music battled the encroaching evil Arpeggia found her energies dwindling.

  She curled upon herself, unable to draw warmth where there was no body, but concentrating her will and whatever physical power remained to her into a small shape filled with determination. Like a rock, she sat on the peak of ice and willed her worlds to live.

  As she had not yet created time, there was no measuring how long it took for her efforts to work against that invasion. When at last the pressure of that darkness decreased, retreated, then disappeared, she felt herself to be reduced to the faintest of stains upon her icy spire.

  “Wind!” she breathed. “I need a new wind on my world!”

  A breeze drifted over the spire, becoming stronger until a gust lifted Arpeggia onto her shadow-feet. She spread herself upon it like a silken veil, feeling something that was almost physical now. Her edges fluttered, her intangible feet lifted from the ice, and she was borne upward, upward, spiraling into the sky she had made and cleansed.

  Then she knew she must have her planned cloud, must have storm, though not the devastating sort she had known in life.

  “Cloud!” she shouted, and her voice rolled like thunder, her brightness glinted like lightning.

  Her being, now drained of all her knowledge, her wisdom, her love, which she had transmuted into a small universe suited to her needs, crystallized into a million glittering flakes. Six-pointed, infinitely varied, each snowflake glinted magically in the swirling wind and the refracted light of her new sun.

  Carried by the storm of her creation, Arpeggia fell upon her world as snow, enriching the seeds her thought had planted there. In time, those would sprout into a richness of life that would perhaps support others who searched for wisdom.

  THE PLACE OF THE ANCIENTS

  I love to speculate about alien worlds and lost civilizations. This was a sort of daydream....

  We came to Selene to be farmers and craftsmen, to rear families and build a society that might, eventually, take part in the vast trading empire Earth had created over a thousand years of travel between worlds and systems. Those who sent us prepared well, scouting out the land, making certain that no dangerous disease or native species lurked there to endanger our nascent colony.

  Our supplies included short-term necessities, as well as the viral supplies for creating those over the long term. Though nurtured in the teeming cities of Earth, we were trained to survive in situations we had never experienced or dreamed of.

  So we came to Selene, the world of the great red Moon, thinking ourselves prepared for any surprise it might offer. For five years we worked together, creating a small but energetic society that promised to become profitable to those who funded our venture. As happens with most societies, we found ourselves, at last, with time to explore the areas beyond our limited boundaries.

  And that was when we brought about the terrible fate we now face.

  * * * *

  The air had cooled with fall, and again I blessed this world that had an axial tilt. Otherwise we would face the punishing heat of midsummer all the year around. Josiah and I had finished our work in the plant sheds, and now we had some free time. I splashed him with the sprayer with which I had been wetting down cuttings, feeling a wicked smile shape my lips.

  He looked up at me, grinning, with mischief in his hazel eyes. It was time for play. “Thanks be we’re not run on military lines,” he said, putting away his trowel and taking off his coverall. “As long as our work is done, we can do what we like, Maris. I pity the colonists who chose to go to the other kind of outfit. Marcus and the other leaders are almost too easy on us, which suits me fine.”

  Washing perlite and moss from our hands, we caught up our jackets and headed for our unit in the married quarters. “We could go camping,” I told my husband. “We haven’t seen much of this continent as yet, but there are maps at headquarters. Let’s get some lunch and choose a direction.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been wanting to go up into those mountains. We’ll camp and maybe do some climbing.”

  We set out toward the east, where the mountains were forested and runnels of water ran down from the snows above. It seemed, from a distance, like one of the miniature re-creations of the primitive Earth that we had seen in museums, as children.

  We had no hesitation, for the preliminary scans assured us there was nothing to fear here, or indeed anywhere on this world. Except for small animals and insects, a few birds, and creatures living beneath the soil and the water, we were here alone. It was exciting to know that no other thinking species had ever set foot where we walked, and no words but ours had ever troubled the air of this world.

  * * * *

  We reached the mountains before evening. Once camped in a grove beside the biggest stream, we rested for the night before tackling the climb. High above, in the sunset light, we had seen shadowed niches that might well be the mouths of caves. Unusual creatures often lived in such dark places.

  We woke early, despite a bit of playful love-making in the night, and washed in chilly water. Before the sky was bright we made our way to the foot of the easiest looking slope.

  “Go slowly,” Jo cautioned me. “I told Tam when I looked at the map that we’d be gone last night, today, and possibly tonight. If you fall and knock me off the wall, they won’t begin to worry about us for entirely too long.” I smiled down at him and began to make my slow way upward. We took no chances, for though we feared nothing alive, a fall would kill us just as surely as a predator might.

  There were thick clumps of bushes thrusting out of crevices in the rock, giving us firm handholds. Occasionally, fair-sized trees leaned out from roots sunk deep into some rock fault, allowing even more secure climbing. Our toes found weathered creases too, and we moved upward more quickly than we had expected.

  The dark openings were soon very near. “Caves, and no doubt about it,” Jo called up to me.

 
; I’d already reached that conclusion and found the chance to explore unknown caverns extremely intriguing. I went higher and could see, to my surprise, that each opening along the face of the cliff was approached by a stone ledge, much worn by weather but obviously adequate for foot traffic. As I stepped up onto the crumbling pathway, I realized that there were chisel marks cut into the back edge, where some worker had taken out extra stone to flatten the walkway.

  As Jo joined me on the ledge, he, too, recognized those telltale marks. We stared at each other, wide-eyed. “Were there tool-using beings here, long ago?” I asked.

  Feeling my way cautiously, I edged around the curve of the cliff toward the dark splotch that was the first opening. In front of the cave mouth there lay a much wider apron of stone, in the middle of which a worn depression seemed to indicate the long-ago presence of a fire-pit or perhaps the site of some other primitive activity.

  Jo touched my shoulder before he ducked into the low opening. I followed, finding the space inside high enough to stand in and the cave narrow but very long, extending into darkness. Our earliest ancestors, we had been taught, had lived in such places. Did such primitives have a beginning here, only to dwindle into extinction? My mouth was dry with excitement as we moved deeper into the cave. From time to time, Jo reached back to take my hand and squeeze it or to pat my shoulder, and I knew he was as enthralled as I.

  As the light thinned, Jo took his Kindler from his knapsack and thumbed the button. Its brilliant beam reflected from a million points of brightness where damp or minerals marked the walls, and the shadows it formed outlined a sunken track worn into the stone floor by the passing of feet or paws.

  Jo reduced the Kindler’s intensity to a bearable level, and we followed the light into the depths, to a point at which a knee of stone jutted sharply into the way. It narrowed there as well, and we had to move around the obstacle one at a time. Crawling through a cranny filled with dust and grit, I straightened at last to find Jo staring about, stunned, at the place in which we found ourselves.