Stargate (15 page)

“Natil, why are you lying in the wet grass?” one of them shouted down to him. “Do you think you are a sheep?” They laughed and though Natil strained to detect hostility or mockery in the merry voices, he could find none. The laughter was open and kind. He opened his eyes and struggled to his feet wonderingly, standing to watch them hurtle toward the Gate. I am not the Natil who met Tagar at my door, he thought, but you, my brothers, have not changed. Why? Ghakazian sent the essence from Tagar by force, and all my kin on the road were changed. Don't you know? At the thought of Ghakazian he shivered, and regaining the road, he walked on.

The morning had dawned fair. Sunlight glittered on the moist ground, slicing bright and new between the peaks and flashing over the valleys. The sky was cloudless and very blue. But Natil, turning at last onto the path that meandered to his own gate, heard no birds or lilt of human voice.

He closed his door quietly behind him, walked along the dim, narrow hall, and turned in to the fire room. The hearth was black-scorched and empty of new wood, and night still lingered in the corners where the sun did not probe. His wife sat on a stool, her loom a wooden skeleton against the wall beside her, her hands loose in her lap. She glanced up at him as he came to her, but she did not rise. Natil lowered himself to the floor, where a draught blew down the chimney to chill him, and brushed the sweat from his face with both palms of his blood-stained, grimy hands. Rintar looked away.

“My father,” she said. “Did he come from Linla with his family? Did my grandmother build the loom for me and teach me how to weave? Tell me, Natil, is there a world called Linla at all? Where did we come from? There is nothing behind us that I can see, and ahead there is a darkness. You and I are here in this small, cold room, in a house set down between the feet of mountains, and though I know somehow that I have been here forever, yet it is all strange to me. Tagin and I came home and slept, and though I tried to command a dream, I did not dream at all.”

“Hush!” he said, more sharply than he had intended. “I think that the times of dreaming are over, Rintar. A spell has been broken, and we must try to forget the peace and wonder of the dreams. Where is Tagin?”

“Still asleep.” Her head was averted, and for a moment Natil studied her anxiously. A lethargy was on her. With her shoulders hunched under the green shawl and her spine bowed she looked suddenly old and tired, a woman hanging in the years between maturity and age, her true age impossible to guess. His hands found his own face once more. Hesitantly his fingers traced its delineations, and he was not reassured. So there is to be this also, he thought. In the dream, time moved with us. Now it roars behind us, herding us quickly to an end that can no longer be predicted. He wanted to reach out for Rintar, to hold tightly to himself the only security he had left, but his hands came away from his cheeks and he looked at them.

“I did not know what to do with Tagar,” he whispered, and at that name Rintar cowered further.

“I do not want to think about him,” she said harshly. “Who was he, anyway? An old man. Just an old man ready to die!”

Natil came to himself and stood, gripping her arms and drawing her unwillingly to her feet. “Then think about Ghakazian!” he said roughly. “There is not much time left, Rintar. I do not know why, but I feel hunted. Something hangs over the valley waiting for a word, a fullness of moment, oh, I don't know! We must make a plan. We cannot stay in the house.”

“Nor can we go to Roita, if there really is such a place. Ghakazian forbade us to go to the Gate.”

Natil remembered. He was astonished that he had ever forgotten. Ghakazian the Disposer, Ghakazian the Unhuman, the being who was appointed to order their lives, had told them to go home. Now he knew where the four winged ones had been going. So there was a Gate. That much was real. Now it would be guarded against them, because Ghakazian wanted it so. He looked into Rintar's brown eyes, not seeing them, frowning, holding back the terror that had no meaning so that he could think.

“There are two alternatives,” he said at length. “We can leave the house tonight and try to slip through the Gate, or we can go in the opposite direction to the caves that lead under the mountains far in the north, and hide. I wonder what the others will do?”

“I don't care!” Rintar shouted, pushing him away. “I want to stay here with the sheep and my garden and the fish in the river. I will obey the sun-lord, and he will leave me in peace. Whatever he asks me to do, I will do it. You are not yourself, Natil, and neither was Tagar. We belong to Ghakazian. He is our good.”

Natil swung to the window and, placing both hands on the sill, spoke to Rintar quietly. “What was he in the dream, Rintar, this Ghakazian, this sun-lord? Think carefully.”

Rintar exclaimed in mingled exasperation and impatience but stood thinking as he had told her, and gradually the lines of pique in her face smoothed out. Desire for what had been, sorrow at the loss that she had been desperate not to confront, gentled in her eyes and her lips. She began to cry. “I want to understand,” she said brokenly. “I want to dream again.”

“Never again,” he replied shortly, still with his face turned to the sky outside. “Do you remember Ghakazian in the days before he hovered above us and flung my ancestor to his death at my feet?”

She made as if to cover her ears, then straightened and answered levelly. “He was … well … he just
was,
Natil. The sun did his bidding and he loved the sun. He made rain come. When he was not on Ghaka, the soul somehow went out of all of us, and when he returned, the world was whole again.” She fell silent, and at last he dropped his arms and folded them, turning into the room, leaning against the window.

“That is all?”

“He owned Ghaka …” she concluded lamely, and Natil raised an eyebrow bitterly.

“Owned? What word is that? He was Ghaka's good, but he did not own Ghaka. Ghaka belongs to us, to you and me, the winged and wingless, the people of this earth.” He stamped his foot. “These mountains. We were born here. Where was he born? Where did he come from? What is he? Is he a child of the sun?”

“He is immortal.” She struggled with the words. “He was here on Ghaka before any of us. The W—” Her mouth fought to catch the memory before it passed through her mind and was lost forever. “The Worldmaker made him and the sun together.”

“How do you know that?”

“The ancestors …”

“Have you seen the Worldmaker? Where is the long memory that let you see him talking to the ancestors? Rintar!” He was in haste to make her see, and his urgency made him cruel. “Wherever he is from, whatever he used to be, we can no longer walk in dreams where he was good and beautiful. There may or may not be a Worldmaker. That is not our affair. But there is a being on Ghaka who wishes us evil, who will use us, who is very powerful, who is not one of us. We call Ghakazian ‘he' and ‘him' because we have no word to describe what he really is, but one thing I know. He is out to destroy us. Perhaps he was once the soul of Ghaka and demanded nothing of us but that we should exist, but now, today, he is our herdsman, our slaughterer.”

“Why do you talk this way?” Rintar was beside herself with fear. “You do not know these things any more than you know why we have lost our true memories. Yes, Natil! Lost them! I do not believe the past was a dream. I believe in yesterday as it really was!”

“I believe nothing,” he ended, with such ferocity that she lost all desire to argue and slumped back onto the stool. “All I know is that we must run.”

“There is a Gate,” she went on slowly. “There must be, for Ghakazian spoke of it. If we must leave our home, then let us try to pass through the Gate. It does not matter whether Roita exists or not. Better to go through a Gate into the unknown than to stay on Ghaka. If Ghakazian is as you say he is, then to stand against him is futile. I wish,” she finished bitterly, “that I had never been born.”

Silence followed her words. The room seemed to grow colder and gradually, as their eyes roamed it, to be smaller, uglier, than ever before. Across the tiny hall they heard Tagin cry out, but Rintar did not stir. Presently he came to them, hair tousled, feet bare. He saw his father and rushed to him, and like a stiff, unwilling tree branch Natil was forced to bend and lift him up.

“In my sleep Tagar came to me,” the child murmured, “with gray hair and skin as pale as a Trader's. I do not like him anymore.”

Rintar rose at once, with purpose. “Set a fire, Natil,” she said. “We will eat hot food and drink a little, and then we will go. Night will cover our path to the Gate.” She did not look at him. She went into the hall, and Natil, about to set his son beside the hearth, glanced out the window. Winged ones were circling the valley, thirty, forty of them, wheeling silently and ominously over the fields. He withdrew quickly, knowing he and his family could do nothing until the sun went away and darkness came to hide them from the eyes as keen as a winter wind. When he ventured another look, the sky was empty, but he thought he saw a swiftly moving cloud angle in the direction of the sun-lord's crag.

The four winged ones whom Ghakazian had sent to guard the Gate against those who might try to leave had cheerfully done as they were asked for only Mirak knew his lord's mind. Mirak himself went home to his cave, pondered what he had read in the Book, and brooded, but Ghakazian left his peak and flapped uneasily to and fro over his peaceful-seeming land. The Trader was still on Ghaka. He could do nothing until the Trader left, for no word of his plans must reach the council, and all that day he wheeled slowly up and down, back and forth, his shadow streaming with him over the sheep-dotted hills and silver-specked streams. Tagar clouded his immortal mind, Tagar who had refused him, Tagar whose essence waited somewhere in the cold damp crannies of rock near the Gate. Tagar had diminished him somehow, but his murder had been necessary. So much that he did not like would be necessary in order to save Shol from certain destruction. The sun beamed down, flowing over him, diffusing through his floating hair, heating his light body, but there was no longer any room for sunlight in his mind.

In the evening he descended his rock flue, dropped to his arched doorway, and walked his dark hall, wings towering above him, chin outflung, fingers absently stroking his hair. All of them, he thought. I must not miss one. I must send winged ones to cover the whole of Ghaka, and even the caves in the north must be searched. I will speak to them and they will understand.

The Trader moved through the deepening twilight, his purchases slung over one narrow shoulder, his eyes contentedly watching the slow passage of rock and hedge that seemed to glide past. Avenues for trade were shrinking in the universe, he reflected, but on Ghaka it was still good to wander from farm to farm exchanging goods and news without anxiety. Steadily, negligently, he watched the mountain loom, thinking of the hot sun of Danar that awaited it, and its imagination was still entangled in the blue shadows of the haeli forests when it came to the foot of the stairs and saw Tagar. For a moment he simply stood and looked, but then he went up to the body and spoke.

“Are you sleeping, mortal?”

There was no answer. Wind stirred the gray-brown hair that curtained the invisible face and fluttered on the still, red-clad breast. After another moment of observation the Trader bent.

“Are you tranced?” he enquired politely, but puzzlement was growing under the reluctance to disturb. He put out one delicate hand, drawing back the thick hair. He could not comprehend what he saw, but a chill sent his body shaking, milky and tremulous, against the rock. Withdrawing his hand, he tightened his scarf, whistled as he turned to scan the twilight, then swiftly squatted, feeling under the hair for the chin. Tagar's head lolled suddenly back. The hair fell away from the face, and the Trader cried out as he recognized Tagar, but he did not take his fingers away. He looked for a long time at the crushed nose splayed against the cheek, the vacant, sightless eyes, the dry, black blood crusted over the bruises.

“On Ghaka?” he whispered to himself, his thoughts racing. He knew what form of horror he was seeing, and bringing his other hand to rest on the back of the head, he lowered it carefully to lie once more against the chest. “What did you do, Tagar?” he muttered, standing irresolute, while around him night deepened. “Ghakazian must be told of this.” But even as he turned back along the road a shadow came between himself and the strengthening brightness of the stars, moving lazily yet filling the Trader with such foreboding that he stopped and remained still until the sky was clear again. “I must consider,” he told himself, standing in the middle of the deserted road like a thin shaft of moonlight.

Gradually certain things came together in his mind; the emptiness and silence of the countryside throughout the day, the feeling of oppression which had caused him to avoid conversation with the few wingless ones he had seen scurrying north beneath the shade of the sparse trees, and most of all, the sudden need he had felt to blend with grass and stone when he had heard the steady beat of wings disturbing the hot afternoon. A group of winged ones had rushed by him overhead, and he had felt weak. Why? He had decided that it was because he had suffered Ghaka's uncurtained sun and overrich air for long enough and needed the balance of a drift through deep space, but now he knew better. Ghaka had begun its long, inevitable plunge to the waiting feet of the Unmaker. The Trader shivered. “Unmaker, Unmaker,” he hissed, thinking of the things he had seen on his journeys between the worlds, and then he turned and ran to the Gate stair, veering past Tagar's indifferent remains.

He began to climb, thinning his body so that he almost floated from step to step, counting them to himself as he went so that he would not think of how Janthis's face would look when he stood before him to give him his news. Ghakazian does not know that Tagar lies at the foot of the mountain, he thought suddenly. If he knew he would not let me go. He paused and looked out and down. Nothing could be seen of Tagar's body. The earth below was lapped in darkness. The Trader began to run lightly to the last spur of rock and the entrance to the Gate. With relief he at last breasted the short tunnel cave, bracing himself against the constant wind that blew through the opening where the winged ones alighted to approach the Gate. The Gate loomed ahead, a thin arch whose sides were two vast wings sweeping upward to meet over the keystone, and beyond, the Trader could see black space and the steady pricks of white stars.