Stargate (27 page)

She bathed and dressed, ate a little, and then took her cloak from its hook by the door and let herself out into the thin light of predawn. She lifted her head as she walked and inhaled the morning. The wind still tugged at the city, ringing the thousands of bells, but Rilla was so accustomed to them that she hardly heard them. Occasionally she passed someone going to work early and greeted him with a smile. But most of the streets that ran to meet her own were deserted. The perfume of winter filled the air, dry, delicate, and faint, the odor of resting trees mingling with gusts of sweetness from clumps of white winter flowers. She climbed steadily, and once above the city, she set out past the Towers of Peace and across the plain. The suns were up now, shimmering new and red on the horizon. She strode rapidly along the well-worn path, head down, hands folded under her billowing green cloak. Up here above Shaban the wind blew with a steady, keening whine, pulling at her neatly tied hair and bringing a flush of red to her sallow cheeks, coaxing her blood to run faster and tingling in her ears. On any other morning she would have hummed as she went, matching a tune to the working of her long brown legs, and taken time to watch the steadily lifting suns rise above the city and splash the face of the rock-held palace, but now her mind was full of an odd sadness that made her wish she had stayed in bed or got up only to sit before the wide window in her workroom and think nothing. A flock of birds wheeled by overhead, circling the plateau and screeching to one another, and she flinched and hurried on.

Reaching the long, gleaming terrace of the palace she climbed the steps hurriedly and passed under the lofty arches of the entrance with relief. In a matter of moments she was knocking on Melfidor's door.

He opened, greeted her gaily, and kissed her, and she followed him into the room. Sunlight hung everywhere, blushing the walls, entangling in the rigging of the huge ship model resting along one wall, lying across his desk, and picking sparks from his pens.

“I would have come to your house in another hour,” he said, “but Veltim is busy with Sholia, and I had to wait.”

“I don't want to sail today in any case,” she replied, moving to the desk. “I think the wind is too strong for little boats, and besides, I have work to do.” Green leaves, she thought. I don't want to embroider any more green leaves.
I
feel ill just remembering how long it took me to do half of one last night.

“Will Yarne come?” he enquired.

She turned, troubled, unseeing eyes upon him, her hands passing absently and clumsily over the litter beneath them. “Perhaps. You can stop at the house on your way down to the bay and ask him.”

He moved to her and ran a finger along her jaw very gently. “Why did you come up here to see me?” he said. “Has Baltor's death left a wound?”

Impatiently, almost savagely, she drew away from him, jerking her chin from his hand.

“No, why should it? I don't know why I came, Melfidor. I didn't really think about it. I just … came.”

“I won't go out in the boat today if you want me to stay with you. We can take food into the plain and go and talk to the nomads for a while. They will be camped out beyond the edge of the mountain until this wind drops.”

“No.” There was almost panic in the sharp word. “There are birds. Birds out above the plain.”

“Rilla.” He moved to touch her again, but she flung around to face the desk.'

Pulling out his chair, he sat down. “Would you like to see the plan for my new trade ship?” he asked presently. “It's finished, and if Sholia likes it, I can take it down to Depor, and he will begin to build.”

She smiled, an effort of agreeability. It was as though he were a stranger, and she were seeing him as such, with a critical, judging accusation. You are not perfect after all, she thought. Why did I imagine that you and I might share our lives? I am Rilla of Baltor, my father was the greatest Sholan who has ever lived, but your ancestors did nothing but design ships, and neither do you. Only a sun-lord is worthy of me. I was born to rule as my father did. “If you like,” she said offhandedly.

He leaned forward and slid a paper out from under her hand. “Here it is. I have done the cross sections on other papers, but this is how she will look from the outside.”

Rilla took the plan and looked at it, and then peered more closely. “Melfidor, why did you do that?” she snapped, her voice high and breathless as she pushed the paper toward him, one finger on the curving stern. “Wings do not belong on a Sholan vessel!”

He took it slowly. “I don't remember doing that,” he said, bewildered. “I have used Sholia as a figurehead. I must have thought I would lace her hair about the stern, but it was foolish. It does look like wings, and they must come off. They will catch the wind and slow the ship down.”

Rilla, close to tears, was about to reply when her eye was caught by dozens of other papers on the desk, all scrawled over with something that made her suddenly go cold. There were feathers, long and short, curved thin and fluffed out, and there were wings, tall and folded, flung wide, wings bare of covering, like those of a bat, wings of every description, all seeming to flutter with a captive menace under her gaze. “Melfidor!” she whispered terrified, wanting to scream and scream, to fill the palace with the sound of this nameless, causeless horror surging through her. “What is happening on Shol? To me? To you? Telami …”

He jumped up and began to shuffle the papers together, thrusting them out of sight behind the desk. “Well, I thought … that is … I want to build a ship that will sail through the air, Rilla, and I sat down last night and drew the wings. I must catch birds and study them, take off their feathers, look at their bones …” Cautiously he raised his eyes to find her standing straight, all signs of panic gone. Her gaze met his coldly and with a level command.

“I was not sure,” she said, and her voice was deeper. “The Sholan faces tell me nothing yet, and I must be careful. Who are you?”

Melfidor slumped to the floor in relief. “It is I, Mirak,” he said. “Is it time to fight?”

“Get up!” Ghakazian ordered. “Don't grovel before me. Where is Tagar?”

Mirak scrambled to his feet and faced the red-clad, graceful figure with its delicate oval face and its bundle of black hair piled high on the small head. It was not Rilla's steady, friendly glance that met his own but the blazing power of his master.

“I don't know,” he answered. “I haven't found him. But Natil and Rintar are here, all of us spread out among the people of the city and the plains.”

“Good. Then all has come to fruition, and now we must wait. This Melfidor, what is his station?”

“He is a planner of ships, an overseer of the docks, a very important man,” Mirak answered proudly. “He spends much time with the sun-lord.”

The thought of Sholia brought a shiver of sickness to Ghakazian. He passed a tongue over dry lips and felt her close, a short walk away. He was netted in her power, an unsuspecting victim. No, he corrected himself swiftly. The All is the victim. I must remember that. “Good!” he said again briskly. “I will go to her and ask if I may work here in the palace. Yarne, my brother, is not one of us, and I don't want to stay with him any longer. Although”—and the lip curled—“he is far too busy being cheerful to ponder any changes in his sister. Get rid of those wings, Mirak. A flying ship!”

“I long for my wings,” Mirak said timidly. “I am chained to the soil of Shol. We have sacrificed much for you.”

“And for yourselves,” Ghakazian retorted. “Which would you rather lose, your wings or your freedom as mortals? Stop sniveling. I also have left my wings before the Gate of Ghaka. I cannot return. The Gate is closed.”

Mirak stood staring at him, appalled. “Closed? Why? How can I go back there now? Sun-lord, tell Janthis the truth. He must open it again!”

“He may do so as a reward to you when the Unmaker is no longer a threat,” Ghakazian answered mildly, lying easily, but Mirak was not comforted.

“Did you bring the Book?” he asked diffidently.

Ghakazian snorted in derision. “How could I do that without hands to hold it? Go back behind Melfidor's essence, Mirak. I will call you when I need you.”

Mirak sighed, bowed, and put out a hand to touch the necklet that was no longer there. Melfidor laid a light arm across Rilla's shoulders. “I am a designer,” he said kindly. “My head is full of ideas, some good, some coming from the world of dreams and not practical at all. But I consider each one because that is my life.”

Some of the stiffness went out of her, and she laid her cheek against his arm. “I'm sorry, Melfidor. It's not my business to understand your work. But I wish you would throw away the wings. Somehow the whole of Shol seems swept by the desire for flight, but it is not a gay thing, not a new game. It frightens me.”

“Me, also,” he said, drawing her close. The picture of Telami perched high and dangerously in the darkness filled her mind, but neither one spoke, and at last she kissed him and walked back to her house, oblivious to the bright day or the busy streets.

Hanging up her cloak with a forced deliberateness, she tried to settle to her work but found herself more often brooding, the needle idle in her fingers, her eyes fixed on the tossing branches visible through her window. “I am lonely,” she said for the first time in her life, feeling the meaning of the new word, not trying to define it. I do not want to live here anymore with Yarne gone from dawn until night, listening to the silence as I try to work. My father was a great man. Surely Sholia will grant me a room in the palace where people come and go and I am under her direct protection. I will let Yarne have this house.

The room enclosed her with uneasiness, as though it held a tragic memory that it was trying to communicate to her. In the end she left it and fled the house, spending the rest of the day visiting markets down on the flat, crowded land before the docks. When the suns went down, she returned but did no more than open her door. The shadows of the hall rushed to her greedily, ready to draw her inside, and no light shone from the hearth room. “Yarne, are you home?” she called, and when she received no reply, she shut the door and made her way up to the palace, running into its constant warmth as though she were being pursued.

Sholia found her standing in the entrance hall, running a hand over the ships bobbing endlessly across the sapphire ocean on the wall and frowning to herself. Rilla, feeling her come, lifted her head and looked up into the dazzle of the ageless face. She took her hand away from the wall and ran her fingers lightly over the smooth. golden head, allowing them to drift down into the warmth of the heavy tresses in a curiously proprietary gesture.

Sholia reached up and imprisoned the wandering hand. “Did you come to see me, or are you seeking Melfidor?” she asked. “Do you need me, Rilla?”

A spark of something odd flared in Rilla's eyes, but she smiled and it was gone. “I came to you,” Rilla replied. “I can no longer work at home. I ask if you will grant me a place here.”

“Why is it that you cannot work at home?”

Rilla hesitated. “Because of … because I saw Telami in a tree and a woman …” She would have continued, somehow organizing her thoughts into the coherence that the presence of Sholia always called up, but she heard something in her mind whisper sharply, “No!” and found that her thoughts had been cut off and she could not remember what it was that had sent her running from her own front door. “Baltor is gone,” she finished lamely. “I want to take his place.”

Sholia studied her. There was something different about Rilla, the tip of a mystery. Quietly Sholia probed her mind and found there a fear of the house, a confusion of images of wings and birds, and overshadowing these, a loneliness no mortal ought to have felt. Puzzled, Sholia pushed deeper, past the whirl of conscious thought intertwined with emotion to the steady, unchanged flow of essence, and found herself turned back with a jolt of firm denial. Again she quested. Again a shock of resistance met her. Yet Rilla's eyes did not evade hers with the telltale shame of a mortal caught in the first stages of a fall. Sholia had seen such fleeing eyes many times on worlds now forgotten. What, then? she thought. What power has come to Rilla's essence to turn me back? What power on Shol is greater than mine? With a nagging familiarity her own fears returned, and with an adroitness born of long practice she dismissed them. I will allow her to come here, she thought, and I will watch her as I do the others, loving and guarding but in these times watching more than either. “If you take Baltor's place, you will have little time for your embroidery,” she pointed out gently.

“I do not want to embroider anymore,” Rilla said slowly, repressing a shudder. “I ask only to serve you as Baltor did. If I begin to understand you in the next hundred years, I will be content.” It will not take me a hundred years, a scornful, emphatic voice inside her said. I have known you from the beginning. Rilla had not come to the palace to say these things, and her own words to Sholia bewildered her. Now, her eyes fixed on the sun-lord's brilliantly lit, unlined face, she wondered why she had ever spent so much time with her needle and thread when all she really wanted was to be with Sholia.

The sun-lord inclined her head. “I may not forbid you to carry on the work of your ancestors,” she said. “This is part of the Law pertaining to your kind, Rilla. You may come. Melfidor will be pleased.”

Rilla shrugged and smiled. “I suppose so. May I go now?”

Sholia stood and watched the straight, red-draped back glide out of sight, and then she went slowly to her own long hall, walking it and turning to sit in her chair under the flag of Shol, which hung limp in the stillness, its blue field and cloth of gold suns hidden. She had gone to the agonizing council meeting on Danar, she had seen Ghakazian impudently close his Gate as though it did not matter at all, and when she returned, Shol was different. It was in the air, a sense of expectancy as solid as the chair she sat in. It was in the faces of the mortals she believed she knew better than they knew themselves, a strange new sense of strain. It was in their movements, no longer light and free but fluid and unconscious like a nation of dream-walkers. Something was wrong, yet no one had come to her with a warning. She had gone to the suns, but the suns poured their undiminished energy into her with no hint of diminution, and she knew that she and they were clean. What brooded over Shol? I must go to Danar and ask permission to search the people more deeply, she thought. Are they beginning to undergo a change planned for them by the Worldmaker? I remember no such plan mentioned when he came to Shol and talked with me, he and I alone but for the suns and the mountain and the ocean. Or has his power begun to seep in somehow?