Starfire Saga, page 38
“You climb the Ladder as well and as far as Lord Jemeret,” Shantiah said at once, not in the least apologetic for having interrupted me, but not at all hostile, either. “We’ve watched you. The lord never had the time to help us perfect our work on the Ladder. Will you?” She seemed to hold her breath after the question.
“Of course I will,” I said instantly, and one of the other women quickly stifled the cheer she was about to give. “In fact, if you’d let me, I believe we can even speed the process along.”
The woman to Shantiah’s right, a rangy blonde with an almost masculine athleticism, asked, “What do you mean, if we’ll let you?”
She was by far the tallest of us, so I had to look up at her to meet her gaze. “If I sting you as I do an exercise or take a position, you’ll be able to feel instantly if you’re in the right stance, with your energy directed correctly. You won’t have to watch me or guess.”
Eyes brightened all around as they understood. “How many of us can you sting at the same time?” Shantiah asked eagerly.
That brought me up short. I’d never stung more than one person at a time, though I projected widely, and thus weakly, when I used the sympathetic strings, playing the nomidar. But it seemed to me that Jemeret could sting a great many minds at once, for short periods of time, and something in me said that if he could do it, I could do it.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Let’s start with one and add another until I’m pulling too much energy from my reserves.”
Shantiah stepped up beside me. I fell into the first form of Climb 1 and touched her with the sting. “I see,” she said with real wonder in her voice, her body automatically duplicating mine. The blonde took her place beside Shantiah, and I found I could bifurcate the sting and extend it onward. Simultaneous, rather than sequential stinging, as pinpoint sharp as an electron beam, rather than the dissipation of a blanket. I was delighted.
The splitting only worked one more time before I could feel I would need to gather too strongly. I signaled the others to wait and led my three students up the Ladder. It took the rest of the afternoon to accomplish Climb 1, and we made arrangements to repeat the work the next day, with another three women linked to me and the first three working alongside us to cement the learning into their beings. They were all very excited; I was nearly triumphant.
As I walked home, Tynnanna bounding along beside me, I realized that for the very first time in my life—barring, of course, the time I still could not remember—I was a teacher, rather than a student. I was giving back, not taking. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching, saw no one, and skipped a little, next to my klawit.
The Day of the Song
Except for the days of my camenia and the times when he was gone from Stronghome, Jemeret and I made love every night, and every time we did, the experience was as engulfing as being swallowed by the starfire. I wish I could say now that I was able to make any connections between my life by day and by night, but I didn’t then. I only knew that Jemeret had been correct in saying that living taught one things that academic study could not. I let him teach me the variations on our theme, and I taught the warrior women—especially Shantiah, who worked with me longest and most often, striving for perfection—what I knew about Class C combat. In short, I lived, and I enjoyed it.
And then it was time for Midwinter Song.
The last Severance Storm of the uphill winter had blown through in only three days, leaving the air scoured clean and deep breaths tingling the lungs. The weather held. Venacrona told me it always dawned clear at least on the Day of the Song itself, but this year the peculiar clarity of ice and sunlight stretched on until it magnified the approaching ritual into a natural as well as spiritual grandeur.
All but entirely necessary jobs were suspended for the day before, the day after, and the Day of the Song itself. And since Venacrona and Mardalita were in charge of the ritual, Jemeret had a rare lightening of his responsibilities.
The day before Midwinter Song, he didn’t rise before dawn to get dressed when almost everyone else was still asleep. We’d awakened together during the storms, but this was the first morning I opened my eyes and saw him watching me, smiling, his face illuminated by the sunshine that poured in the window of our bedroom.
When we awakened together, we generally touched each other with our stings at once. Not only was it a way of greeting each other that we knew to be unique to us, but if he wanted to make love again, I would know it instantly and respond to it instantly. The morning before Midwinter Song, there was no passion in his touch, only a wealth of love, and something I barely fathomed until the next day—gratitude, not to me, but strongly present all the same.
He gathered me into his arms and held me for a few moments, his mind stroking mine with the familiarity of months of constant contact. “We’re going across the valley today,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you before tomorrow.”
I looked at him curiously. His smile widened. I didn’t ask him what was going on, for it was clear from his manner that I was going to find out soon enough.
He swung out of bed, dressed quickly, and by the time I was ready for morning shilfnin and porridge, he had already eaten. “I have to go see Veen this morning at the temple. I’ll meet you at the tivong pens,” he said, and was gone before I could ask any questions.
By the time I got to the tivong pens, something had changed in him, though he was making every effort to disguise it. I wondered about it, but I didn’t ask, and I wouldn’t just probe. We mounted Vrand and Rocky and rode over a shoulder of Kulith, at the farthest northwest corner of the valley. Then we entered a small canyon between Zuglith and Kerlith that narrowed so quickly that we tied the tivongs and continued on foot, climbing from shelf to shelf as we worked our way toward the head of the eroded cut. Behind a wall of boulders jammed into the passageway by a giant force—probably spring runoff from snows at a higher level on the titanic peak—we came to what appeared to be a shadow, but was actually the slit entrance to a cave.
Jemeret nodded to me to slip into the opening, then turned sideways and slid his broad frame through the narrow space. “Iris your eyes out,” he said, as if I hadn’t already begun to do that.
After the tightness of the entrance, the passageway in which I stood, though small, seemed almost luxurious. It curved gently to the right and slightly downward. With what I knew about caves, I figured the irising would do no good at all within fifty feet of the entrance.
“Let me past,” Jemeret said. “Part of this is in total darkness, but you won’t hit your head or crash into anything.”
“Maybe I should hit my head,” I said half seriously as I gave him my hand. “Nothing else has worked to bring my memory back.”
He sounded annoyed. “Everything else is working,” he said firmly. “You just want it all now.”
“What’s the matter with now?”
He’d been leading me down the tunnel, but he stopped and turned toward me as if we could see each other. “Those of us with power can control many things, but we cannot control time. You will remember when it’s time for you to remember. Now come.”
We moved on down the tunnel, and he seemed so certain that I would remember that I was willing to let the questions go. Even then I did not see the patterns, the careful intentions, his guidance in everything I was becoming. I would feel entirely foolish now if it were not that a little knowledge wasn’t enough to see the entire mountain, just as we could not see Zuglith from this hole in its side.
In another few steps I began to notice shapes. The roughness of the tunnel wall grew increasingly visible, if indistinct, and Jemeret’s shoulders bulked dark ahead of me in his fur-lined cloak.
“What’s causing the light?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
And, shortly, I did.
The tunnel opened into a chamber, roughly oval and about the size of the practice field in the village. The floor was uneven, but relatively flat, and the ceiling was an upside-down forest of stone projections—thin fingers of rock that reminded me of the starfire’s tendrils in the bowl of Convalee on the Day of the Fire. They sparkled, glistening with a faint light that illuminated the cave the way the starlight illuminated a moonless night.
“This is where the metal comes from.” Jemeret’s voice spoke very close to my ear. “With the refined mineral from this ore, we make the bowls the starfire appears in.”
I reached up wonderingly and, standing on tiptoe, touched the very end of the longest stalactite near me. “You mean the starfire is in here?”
“I suspect the starfire is everywhere,” he said so softly that I had to augment to hear him. The cave seemed to drink some of the resonances of the sound, while at the same time, unnervingly, magnifying others. “But it only comes to us through the medium of something else. This.”
He let me look my fill, catching the elusive, dancing light at the edges of awareness. Then I looked at him, seeing the planes of his face as I had so often in the nights at Convalee and after. “Why did you bring me here, Jemeret?”
He took a long, slow breath. “There are certain things to be said before tomorrow, and they have to be said here.”
I waited, tensing slightly. He had not wanted to say this in the temple. I wondered why. I touched his mind as gently as I could, but he was shielded against me. He was silent for a long time, and finally I asked, “I’m not the one who’s supposed to do the talking, am I?”
“A little of it.” His next words cleaved into me. “There never was a High Lady of the Boru—until now.”
“What?” My voice sounded three octaves higher than normal to me, and the stalactites made it echo, which nothing else spoken in the cave had done so far.
He knew he didn’t have to repeat the revelation. “My na-sire’s sire, and Venacrona, who was then a very young man, created the legend of the High Lady to try and stop the wars among our people by making everyone believe we had once lived in harmony—and thus could certainly do it again if the circumstances repeated themselves. Venacrona is the only Sammod still alive who remembers the time before the legend. It was just before the legend was created that the people of the tribes began to recognize that we had powers different from the others. They wanted us not to fight among ourselves when we were so few, compared to the numbers of those who became Honish. So you are not a candidate for the Fulfillment, Ronica, so much as you could be the first of the rulers of a united Samothen.”
I was trying to deal with it in a logical manner. “How could they get away with it? Creating a legend like that?”
“It was built upon a story that was deep in the consciousness of the culture—all of it, the powerless as well as those with power. That was the story of a long meteor shower that damaged the surface of the world and had to be appeased. It was easy to say that was when power had begun to develop in the people. It was easy to say that was when the starfire came.” His voice was steady, emotionless. “Veen and Jandelin—that was his name, my double na-sire—put the elements together and decided that the men of the family groups, which became the basis for our tribes, would never be able to accede to the rule of only one of them. Our men were too used to competing with one another. There were too many fights.
“So the two chose the idea of a woman who would rule, and to make it more palatable, they added the belief that it had happened already, that the woman had brought the power down to the world from the stars. I’ve known all this since I became Chief of the Boru. I always thought they were very clever about it, until this morning.”
“What happened this morning?”
He looked away from me, up into the forest of stone tendrils. “Venacrona told me that it wasn’t entirely their idea. The starfire told them to say it.”
I had to remember to breathe. “The starfire spoke to them? Both of them? In comprehensible words?”
He nodded, the motion barely discernible, looking back at me again. “According to Veen—and I have no reason to doubt him, he was there—the starfire told him and Jandelin to find a woman who would fit the role it wanted them to create. It told them the predictions to make that she would fulfill to prove herself, and what she was to look like. All of it. And then it told them that it, the starfire itself, would be a judge of whether or not the woman they chose was worthy of the task. They obeyed it.”
I was gathering to remain logical, but underneath I was churning in fresh revelation. “How did the starfire speak to the two of them?”
Jemeret gave a small laugh, as if he really didn’t believe what Venacrona had told him a few hours ago. When he answered, I wasn’t sure I believed it, either. “Through a klawit.”
My breath sighed out of me. “Tynnanna.” Then I was swept with the absurdity. “But he hasn’t said a word to me so far!” Jemeret crossed his arms. I saw the motion and realized that tension from him was blossoming beyond his shields—and then I knew that he had lowered them. “Ronica, what do you believe I feel for you?”
The question seemed to spring at me unexpectedly, but I knew I had to answer quickly. I remembered as clearly as seeing it again the shaft of brilliant sunlight cutting through the ocean of his mind. “I believe you love me.”
His tension did not lessen. “What do you believe you feel for me?”
I searched inside myself, all except the part I still could not reach, and then it was surprisingly easy to answer. “I believe I do love you, Jemeret. Did you doubt it?”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, “but I needed to know that you didn’t doubt it either.” He seemed to be studying me, hard, but he was not using the sting. “It is not impossible that you could believe I was manipulating you and using you. You know I want the unification of the tribes as much as I want to live, and you know I want children. You also know I see you as a key to both those ambitions. Because of that—” He overrode me quickly as I started to speak. “—because of that, I want to give you a choice.”
“Between what?” I was now openly astonished.
“As part of the ritual, we are going to ask the starfire to confirm you as High Lady. If it chooses to do so, it will give you, yourself, no choice in the matter. It will lay on you all the responsibilities that title holds in our minds, and in whatever it uses for a mind as well. But we don’t have to ask it to confirm you.”
I knew what it cost him to tell me that. He was letting me feel it from him, and its depth was monumental. I thought about our time together, and I understood that much of what I was learning to love about being in Stronghome could end. I laid a hand on his face. “Ask,” I said. “I know what it means to you. And I was raised for responsibility. Perhaps I was supposed to be a ruler, one way or another. Just promise me you’ll be with me, whatever comes.”
Somehow he was ever so slightly shaken by that, and it was a reaction I had not in any way expected. “Whatever comes,” he said. For a moment the tension swelled beyond its already high level, and then I felt it wash out of him as if he had rejected it at last. He opened his arms to me.
I moved in against him. “How do you know the starfire will confirm me tomorrow?”
“Veen wouldn’t have told me about the starfire’s part in creating the High Lady legend if he had any doubts left, and he knows the starfire better than anyone else.”
My entire body trembled once, and he held me tightly. “I promise you,” he said clearly against my hair. “I will be with you.”
Previous Midwinter Songs had been held in the temple assembly room, but this year Venacrona had wanted it outside, under the sky. Everyone in the tribe was aware that this year it would include the request for the starfire to let us know if I was truly the High Lady, and excitement was running strongly through Stronghome.
The priest had had a stage built just at the edge of the village, beyond which the ground sloped upward to the foothills of Harrilith in a much smaller imitation of the bowl at Convalee.
Tynnanna had not returned the afternoon before. Of course, I was more than eager to see him and try to speak with him—even though I kept recognizing the inherent silliness of sitting down with the cat and seeing if he could hold a conversation. Jemeret had not seemed either surprised or disappointed by the klawit’s absence, but was only waiting now, passing the last hours until the culmination of something he had dreamed of all his life.
I dozed a little that night as he lay awake, cradling me in his arms, stroking my hair. Every time I awoke, uncertain of how long I’d slept, he murmured to me and held me a little closer, but his gaze was distant, fixed on something beyond our bedroom. I wondered if he was envisioning a future for which he’d hoped and worked, and I smiled against the hard muscles of his chest. Seeing into the future was not part of Class A talent, and at the moment I was still having trouble seeing into the past. Once, when I was nearly asleep for the twentieth time, I heard him whisper, “I don’t want to lose you,” and I murmured nearly incoherently, confidently, “You can’t lose me.” He held me momentarily much more tightly, and I drifted back into my half sleep, forcing my adrenal glands to slow their function. As soon as I lost the volitional control over them, they would begin to revive, and I would swim back up to awareness again, several minutes later.
When the Day of the Song dawned just as spectacularly clear as the days before it, I felt calm. I had decided that, whatever happened, few real surprises could possibly await me now. Whatever had caused the Com to expel me, I had not been permanently damaged by it, for now I was a Class A again. I had Coney here with me, and there was a joy in that, even though it was tempered by what I perceived as a troubling reticence in him. I attributed it to his reluctance to talk about what he’d done to be sent here, and I thought it was likely to pass after he’d been here long enough. Ironically, I thought he would be more comfortable if he forgot what was troubling him, at exactly the same time as I thought I would be more comfortable if I remembered.
