Chains of Gold (17 page)

His words, the inexorable tone of his voice, chilled me.

“And if I say you nay?” I flared, striving to hide my fear. “You think you will take me perforce, then?”

“I will force you, yes. Bed you by the king's right. Take you as is my due—”

“Not while I have strength to defend her,” said a quiet voice, a strong voice of this world. Arlen came in at the door, knelt by my chair, and put his arms around me, and I laid my head gratefully against his shoulder.

THIRTEEN

It took us some few days to decide what to do about Lonn, and during that time Arlen stayed with me constantly, to spare me Lonn's importunities and give me comfort. Grotesque as was our plight, it eased me greatly to have Arlen by me, my ally. As was his nature, he first took care to heal what lay wrong between us.

“I thought you were turning against the child,” he admitted, eyes downcast. “I thought—it is foolish, I know, but I saw how babes were treated on the Sacred Isle, and I never wanted such things to happen to mine.… I came back to spy on you.”

“And I am glad you did,” I told him.

“But—I should have known better.”

“What were you to believe, you who have never known a loving mother? The truth is harder to believe than the other. I wake up most mornings not believing it myself.… No, do not ask my forgiveness.” I forestalled him. “There is no need of it.” I was so heartened to feel his love, it was not hard to be noble.

We would have made love, I think, were it not for the weird presence of Lonn in the cradle. He was asleep, but he had a way of awakening quickly and looking at us knowingly with his violet eyes, those all too corporeal eyes. He awoke and looked at us in that way even as I thought of it.

“Hands off what is rightfully mine,” he said.

“Rae is no man's property.” Arlen did not move except to embrace me more tightly. “You gave me the gift of life, and love followed.…” Arlen shook his head, some part of him still caught up in painful denial. “Lonn, I do not see how you can have changed so badly, even in death.”

“You ass.” Words full of petty triumph. “Bribed by gold. You named this body, and now it is mine.”

“Do not talk with him,” I told Arlen. “It is useless. He grows ever stronger as he talks.”

“Kill me,” Lonn taunted.

He was already dead. Kill the body of our own infant son, he meant, and we could not do that. There was the thought in us—we could not help that, but it anguished us, and Lonn knew it, and used our sorrow to feed his spite. Arlen stared at him, too sickened for anger.

“Do not upset Rae,” he said finally, “or she will lose her milk.” It was not a threat, for Arlen was not of the sort to threaten, but it was a level warning of a consequence, and Lonn knew it. We had tried him on cow's milk, to spare me the nursing, and it had made him painfully ill with colic; he knew that, too. He fell silent.

“The only thing for us to do,” Arlen said to me softly, “is change the baby's name.”

“Can we do that? And will it work? Lonn seems quite fully in possession.”

“By ourselves, we might not be able to do it. The name was sanctified at the shrine. But if it were changed with proper authority.…”

So it was that, in the brown and dreary days of late autumn, we set off on a journey to the oracle. We took some of our gold from one of our hiding places in the rocks, left the rest to the care of the logans, and departed with scarcely a glance at the home we left behind.

Back to the Sacred Catena, where Arlen had sworn he would never return. The Island of Passages, where the oracle gave the names, lay next below the cenotaph.… Rank has its privileges, or buys them, so I had never been there, but for the most part every youth and maiden of an age to make children or bear them had to journey there for the spring quarter day, the festival of names, make the last part of that pilgrimage alone, and spend the night on the island to undergo a secret ordeal. Then was received a true name from the oracle. His name was Ophid, I knew, Ophid the Seer or Ophid Dremided; he was also the oracle who gave the names to the sacred brides when they joined the Gwyneda. I felt sure he would have heard of us, of Arlen and me, and I was not at all certain whether he might not be inclined to betray us to the Gwyneda on their Sacred Isle, which lay only a day's journey away from his own. It could none of it be helped, and it was of no use to wonder what lay ahead. We had to take Lonn to the oracle.

Bucca was in fine fettle after a summer's good feeding. Well provisioned, we traveled rapidly, the more so because we knew exactly where we were going and took the shortest ways. Through the meadows where the aurochs and wisent roamed, through the Forever Forest, dark and boggy even though the mighty trees stood bare. Back to the moors and eskers, the northern fringes of the Secular Lands.

We did not turn aside from our path even to see Briony, though I urged that we should, to learn what we could of Ophid before we consulted him. But Arlen was in a fever to get us to the Naga before winter set in hard and cold. And, I suppose, to get us to the oracle, to put an end to our ordeal.

We rode late and long. I carried the baby in my arms, nestled within my mantle, close to my body for warmth and for feeding at the breast. It should have been a tender love's labor to carry him so, a sweet memory in the making, but it was quite otherwise, for Lonn's violet eyes were greedy on me, and his small hands ever more clever at the breast, and though he spoke little I knew what it was that I held. Hatred of him shook me and made me miserable.

Snow was falling when we came to the Naga, the white flakes melting into the black water.

“There it is,” Arlen murmured.

The island lay long, low, and narrow, like a backbone in the rippling Naga, the upstream end of it swollen and thick with hazel. The river ran deep and fast by its flanks, and there was no way for us to get across: no bridge, no ford, no ferryman. I guessed there might be swan boats awaiting the initiates in the spring, but none awaited us. We had to risk the crossing in what way we could. Bucca sprang in and swam. The water swirled around the saddle, around our legs, icy cold, and I clung fast to Arlen and my babe, and he clung to Bucca, guiding him upstream against the current, chirruping to him, encouraging him onward, and the water washed about our waists, about Bucca's neck, the white mane lying like froth on the surface of the water. The strong Naga swept us down, down alongside the island, we could see the red ridgy nuts on the hazels that overhung the bank, we would soon pass the point and be gone down the serpentine—

“Bucca!” Arlen shouted.

The horse's churning hooves touched gravel, caught, found us purchase. Bucca took us onto the Island of Passages and stood with his head hanging nearly to the ground, panting as the water streamed off him and dripped from our clothing.

“By the holy whites,” came a soft, sibilant voice, “what have we here?”

A person stood amidst the hazel twigs, leaning forward slightly as if to hearken at us or catch our scent, a slight, slim person in a robe the nameless color of tree trunks in winter, and that wintery voice like breath of wind hailed us. More we could not tell, for hands and feet were hidden in the folds of the robe, face completely covered by the hood so that the soft-spoken one, whoever it was, walked blind. Motioning me to stay where I was, Arlen slid down from Bucca and took three steps toward the one in the dark robe, and though he stood a head taller than the other, there could be no question but that he was the supplicant.

“Are you the oracle?” he asked. “Ophid Dremided?”

“Only the oracle lives on this island.” The voice came out pale and muffled from under the dark robe. It is the way of seers to be riddlesome. Arlen pursued his query without anger.

“And do you live on this island?”

“Where the oracle lives, the oracle abides, and no one other—Arlen of the Sacred Isle!”

Startled, Arlen went to one knee before him, as if before his lord.

“And—Rae.” The oracle turned toward me, questing with hidden senses. “And a babe who is no babe. My children, you have chosen the strangest of times to come here. Do you not know it is the eve of the festival of the winterking, your year-day?”

Arlen jumped up and stared at me, then past me, across the water, and with an odd prickling sensation I turned to look behind me. On the shore, a strong stone's throw away, my father and his retinue were riding by, bound upstream to the ceremonials.

“Be still,” Arlen whispered.

“Do not fear.” The oracle's soft voice sounded no longer vague, but serenely gentle. “They will not see you where they do not expect you. Most men are like that, not knowing the ways of seeing.… And least of all will they expect you here, so close, this day of all days. You could almost attend the feast with impunity.”

“No, thank you,” I murmured.

“Come here,” he told me. “Let me look at that babe.”

My father and his men had passed, leaving me shaken; the very sight of Rahv had set me aquiver with wrath and terror. Arlen came and helped me down from Bucca, as I was awkward, carrying Lonn. I held the baby out toward the oracle, and he leaned forward and bent toward the child for all the world as if he were somehow peering through the dark fabric of his swaddling hood.

“Can you truly see that way?” I asked.

“I can see most truly of all this way. More truly than most who use their eyes.” He straightened. “But now that I have seen, I will look,” he added, and he rolled up the front of his hood from neck to forehead.

A thin, sharp-featured face looked out at us, skin and hair very light of color, eyes sapphire blue, no beard, but on his lip a wispy blond mustache. Though he was beardless he did not appear young. He did not seem to mind that we were staring at him, for he was staring equally at us.

“Drenched, the pair of you, but the babe is warm and dry. You have not yet ceased to love him.”

“Our own baby!” I protested.

“Yes, of course. Well, come within, before you take cold, you and your revenant.” He led off without a backward look, as if it were nothing that he should know us and our secret grief, and we followed him meekly.

“Call me Ophid,” he added, his voice a soft exhalation nearly lost in the winter wind.

It was a cave, of course, where he lived, a cave extending downward like a chasm into the rocky ridge of the island as well as backward under an overhang. A crude place, but warmed by a fire. There was no stabling for Bucca. We fastened blankets around him, hoping they would ward off the chill from his wet skin, and left him in the lee of a hazel grove, then went within. Ophid had taken off his mantle, revealing flaxen hair that floated untidily around his head, reaching and clinging like cobweb. He wore a slate-gray robe, and centered on his chest lay a blue pendant such as only seers and the great bards could wear, for it was made of glain, the holy sea egg of the glycon. I stood by his fire, not much comforted by the warmth, for I was afraid to sit down. All the farther corners and crevices of the cave writhed with snakes, knotted serpents as yellow as Ophid's yellow hair, the chain markings of the goddess brown on their yellow backs. Only around the fire itself was the place clear of them.

“Sit,” Ophid told me, not as an order but as a reassurance. “They are not very active at this time of year, and they would not harm you in any event; they have no fangs. The ordeal of those who take passage here is nothing more than this: to spend the night with me and my snakes.” He grinned mischievously. “And I have not lost a youngster yet. So sit down.”

I sat, resigned; I was to undergo my initiation late, it seemed. My fear turned to puzzlement. “How is it,” I asked him, “that you know my name? Rae, I mean.” Since I had taken it myself, or Arlen had given it to me.

“Why, it is your true name, that is all. The doe of the mountaintops, the dear, the beloved one. You have given yourself the name that would have come from me.”

He fed us grain and honey and hazelnuts, and for the span of that meal we did not speak of the trouble that had driven us to him.

“So,” said Ophid when we were finished and dusk was coming on, “Tell me about this revenant.”

We told him, eagerly and at length, setting forth the tale in counterpoint to each other, quite sure, and rightly so, that he would understand all that we said without shock or demur. And indeed his thin, taut face never changed; he simply nodded at every frightful detail we told him, and his blue eyes scarcely blinked. Lonn kept silence. He had learned, over the course of the journey, that his distressing me would indeed cause me to lose my milk, and that conversely my tenderness toward him increased if he did not speak, if he were less like his violet-eyed self and more like my lost babe whose body he had stolen. In the presence of the oracle he kept silence, to show us wrong in what we said of him. But Ophid knew him well enough; he had known him before we had ever spoken of him: Lonn, the dead hero who haunted us.

“Can you help us?” Arlen appealed when we were done.

Ophid stirred for the first time, looking vaguely out into the darkness beyond the fire. “Death is the greatest and most difficult of passages,” he said to neither of us. “The spirit faced with death undergoes an ordeal as of those being initiated into the greatest of Mysteries. There are wanderings full of fear and hatred and every sort of terror and pain. But after that there are the wonderful lights and fountains and the halls and meadows where the crowned join in song and in the circle dance of the blessed.”

Arlen and I looked at each other in dismay. During our days spent with Ophid we were to learn that he was the most gracious of hosts and a true friend, unless he was pressed in a professional way, when he would turn obscure and riddling to a maddening degree. To this day I cannot place finger on any one thing truly useful he ever told us—and yet his presence gave us a strong sense of comfort.