Stargate (39 page)

Danarion walked on. The valley began to narrow, and the dark, fuzzed blur of a forest loomed. He left the fields and struck into the trees, following a faint but distinct track. Danarion was conscious of the body's extreme weariness. It had been under much stress since morning and needed rest to face the perpendicular horror of the mountain. Reluctantly he turned off the little path and curled into a nest of moss and last year's leaves. He closed Chilka's eyes. For a while his thoughts were wandering and chaotic, with no purpose. He remembered the feel of Lallin's lips against his own. Then there was nothing to remember or forget.

He came to himself with a start. Where have I been? he thought anxiously. I was on Danar with Storn, but that was eons ago, for Storn has long since gone with a Messenger. Is that sleep? Are Chilka's cells absorbing me and conquering? With a shudder he sat up to see the first indifferent light of dawn bathing the mist around him and a man kneeling beside him. He exclaimed, still in a strange, foreign fog of sluggish thought and heaviness, and saw that the man was Nenan.

“I've been watching you for two hours,” Nenan said huskily. “You babble strange things in your sleep, Father. Why did you run away?” His voice was strained, and Danarion saw Nenan choke in the effort to control himself.

“How did you know I had run away?”

“Sadal and I had been to see Candar in his house and were walking back when I heard the bells. They rang as you passed them. Sadal did not hear, but I know the note. I followed you, not believing. Where are you going? What did you say to Mother?”

Tears were not far away, Danarion could see that. Oh, let me go! he thought suddenly. I am tormented in this body, I only want to do the task set to me and then spend a thousand years sheltering and healing in my sun. Wearily he stood, brushing leaves from his clothes and hair.

“I am going to Ishban,” he said curtly. “Don't worry about your mother. I put her to sleep, and when she wakes, she will be at peace. I am not your father, Nenan.”

The young man hissed, a sigh of speculation but not surprise. “So Candar was right,” he said loudly. “I know the story. He told me. He and Sadal argued for most of the night about you, and then Sadal said that Mother would know and we only had to wait until morning. I was ashamed of Candar, and angry with him also. Now I don't know what to do. I should try and kill you, I suppose …” His voice trailed off, thick with tears, and he turned his head away.

“You could not kill me, Nenan, even if you tried,” Danarion said more gently. “You could pierce this body, your father's body, but I would knit it together again and go on. Do not do it more hurt, I beg you. I need it. It has become a home to me, and your father's memories are my friends.”

“You're a two-mind!” Nenan's head was still averted.

“No,” Danarion said patiently. “I come from the stars. I am on Shol to perform a task. I could not travel through space in my own body, so when I arrived, I was put into your father's.”

“The two-minds talk that way when the madness is on them,” Nenan retorted grimly. “They believe they've fallen from the stars and don't belong on Shol. I remember your telling Lallin so, the first time you escaped. Prove to me that you are not one of them!”

Danarion thought, Why should I? It would serve no purpose. If he will not believe my words even though he sees and hears that I am not Chilka, then he will not believe anything that I show him. His acceptance or rejection is nothing to me, and I am wasting time. But something of the love he had felt for Nenan when he had first seen him came back to him. My son.

“I have little power away from my sun,” he said slowly. “I cannot ask Shol's sun to rise more quickly for you. But perhaps I can show you myself in your father's flesh.”

“You had better not be less than a god,” Nenan choked, tears flooding his eyes, making them even larger and more luminous than they already were. “Only a god will do. If you fail to appease me, then I shall back my … my father into such tiny pieces that they will never knit again, and bury them all!”

Danarion was not tempted to laugh at this mortal's impudent defiance. He was learning a respect for them, these complex, prideful beings. “Then I should have to find another body, and you would have done your father a grave insult,” he said. “Watch, Nenan.”

Nenan stood stiffly rebellious and looked at Chilka. Six years had put more lines around the mouth and the dark eyes than he had remembered, he thought with an ache, and the skin was coarser. The black beard was new, and the length of the hair. Chilka was thinner, more used up, somehow, battered and old. A protective love flooded Nenan. He wanted to take this deranged being, his father, and lead him home by the hand like a blind man and tell him that all would be well. He had opened his mouth to speak when Chilka seemed to loosen. A peace like death stole over him. Nenan found himself looking into mild golden eyes set in a face more beautiful than any he had ever seen. The hair that framed it was a deeper gold, alive and lifting with some unseen, hot wind. The body was straight, the limbs youthful and vigorous. Under the skin a white light pulsed, filling the morning coolness of the forest with heat and a delirious, heady odor that made Nenan want to laugh aloud and dance about. A necklet of gold and blue went around the dazzling throat. Nenan, blinded and yet seeing more clearly than ever before in his life, fell to his knees. “Are you the essence of a two-mind?” he faltered, the old doubt and fear still hovering.

The voice that spoke to him was deep and strong. “The two-minds have two essences, and one of those essences has wings. Am I winged, mortal?”

“No.” Nenan covered his eyes. Instantly the fire and light died, and his father's voice said kindly, “I am here to harm no one. You have a choice now, Nenan. You can go home to your mother and tell her what you have seen, or you can come with me.”

Nenan looked up, and Chilka's dark eyes smiled into his own. “A god,” he whispered. “So the legends are true.”

“They are—that is, they contain much of the truth. I am not a god, Nenan. I am made, as you are. But I live forever, until my sun burns out, and my gifts are the gifts of a sun. Yours are the gifts of the earth, from which you are made. I have to go to Ishban.” He rose and extended a hand to Nenan. “I must go by way of the Mountain of Mourning because there is something in your father's memories I must see for myself. You know the way. You can show me those parts of the climb that your father refuses to remember.”

Nenan shivered. “They would take me for a slave,” he said, troubled, “like … like Chilka. He
is
really dead, isn't he?”

“Yes, he is. Will you come? I will let nothing harm you in Ishban.”

“If, as you say, my mother will suffer no grief, then I will come.” Nenan took his hand and rose. “I know the way. It is very terrible. But with you I will be safe, I think.”

Danarion was suddenly glad of the inexplicable urge that had prompted him to ask for Nenan's company. “You will be safe. I would like to be on the plains by sunset, so we must move on. The forest is waiting.”

By noon they had come to the edge of the forest and out under a hot sun, where they began to pick their way toward the waterfall that they had heard long before they saw it, a ceaseless rumble that trembled in the ground under their feet. They stood on its brink, and Nenan pointed. “We go down there!” he shouted over the noise of the water, “and hope we do not meet soldiers coming up! Will you pick me up and fly with me?”

Danarion laughed. “No. We must climb.” He scanned the almost vertical drop to the river below and saw a slim, winding track zigzagging along the side of the cliff. “The two-minds have no fear of heights,” Nenan shouted again, “particularly at night.”

Danarion nodded. “I will go first,” he shouted back and stepped gingerly over the edge, bracing himself with hands and taut calves. Nenan followed with less confidence. Once on the slope Danarion found it to be less steep than it had appeared. The danger lay in the wetness of the rock, the drenching spray, and the unvarying noise of the waterfall, a tremor under the feet and a threat to balance. But within the hour he and Nenan stood beside the swirling white water, grinning at each other.

“That was easy,” Nenan said. “The hard part is only beginning. I have never been farther than this and only I know the way, but you have been along the whole route.” He flushed and bit his lip, and Danarion shook his head.

“Your father blotted it out,” he said. “There are no memories.”

Nenan made no response. He turned abruptly. There was a crude wooden bridge, logs rolled together and a rope for hands, through which the water sloshed up to wet the feet of the travelers.

“Why have you never broken this bridge?” Danarion asked curiously. Nenan replied without turning around, “Because we do not want them to find another route into the valleys. This one is the quickest and most dangerous, even for them. We can kill many this way.”

Danarion joined him on the farther bank. There, hardly visible in the black shadow of a crease in the rock, was an opening. Nenan hesitated, and Danarion caught a gleam of challenge in his eyes. “The tunnel is not long, or so the older men say, but it is very rough and completely dark. I have no light. You are a sun-god. Can you give us light?”

Belief was fading under fresh doubts. Danarion sighed inwardly. “I think so. My own light will be sufficient.” He walked in under the overhang and paused, and a dull yellow light began to trickle from Chilka's outstretched hands. Nenan said nothing more.

The tunnel was indeed not long, but the weight of stone and thick darkness held feebly at bay and the uneven, chip-strewn floor made it seem much longer. When they emerged, Danarion stood on a narrow lip of rock that reminded him suddenly and forcefully of Ghakazian's great rock Gate and was momentarily stunned. The Mountain of Mourning was so close on his right that it could almost be touched, a huge, rearing bulk of barrenness that permanently shut out the sun. Strange gray thistles grew haphazardly on its steep sandy slope. Over it all lay a palpable, frowning hostility.

Nenan shuddered. “I do not fear the dead,” he said in a high voice. “It is the other, the presence, the unknown thing that haunts the Mountain. The two-minds cannot bear it either, but their need of slaves overcomes their fear.”

Danarion took a closer look at the Mountain, trying to ignore the clamor of retreat, pain, and dread that swirled in Chilka's mind as the memories woke. The visible cliffs were not unbroken. Buttresses, slanting ledges, smooth slides that slowed to flat places became clearer the longer he looked. It was difficult to make out any detail without direct sunlight, but it seemed to Danarion that irregularities in the rock were in fact patches of faint white or jumbles of gray sticks. Mutely he enquired of Chilka, and past the drumming of fear and the birth of courage the answer came. The dead—brought to the Mountain, wrapped in white linen, and carried by those who afterward ate a small farewell meal beside the bier and then crept away, leaving the body on the slopes for the few wild animals that might prey upon the rotting flesh. It was a pitiful, crude parody of a Sholan death, Danarion reflected. The white garment, the Hall of Waiting filled with happy well-wishers, the Messenger waiting beyond the Gate reduced to this unthinkable deforming. Why here? he wondered. Why here? And Chilka's heart beat faster.

“Chilka was taken by that route,” Danarion said to Nenan, pointing down the slope. “It comes out at the foot of the plain opposite the city. But I want to end up farther to the south. We must go over the Mountain.”

Nenan shook his head and backed away. “No
one
climbs the Mountain,” he whispered. “Funerals come up from the other side, or so I believe, early in the morning so that they may be off the Mountain by dark. We would still be there when sunset comes! I will not go!”

“Very well,” Danarion said gently. “Go home if you must. The dead cannot hurt you and would not wish to even if they could, and if there is something else up there other than fear itself, Nenan, it cannot hurt me. Don't you understand? Nothing on Shol can destroy me, and if you are with me, you are safe.”

Nenan hesitated, torn between fear and pride. “My father would have been afraid, but he would have gone with you, I know, if he were here,” he said finally. “Very well. I have nothing in this whole world to lose.” Danarion touched him briefly on the arm, a gesture of approval and support, but Nenan shrugged away. They stepped from the shelter of the tunnel mouth onto the cold sand and turned their faces to the Mountain.

By early afternoon they were struggling up the barren slopes. By sunset they were standing on the summit, a flat, slightly rolling height bare of all but black and gray rock and an evening wind with a night chill in it. Ahead lay the plain, green and tree-dotted, and beyond that the ocean, lying pink and blue-gray at the horizon. To the left was the city of Ishban, hidden by evening haze and the miles between.

Nenan shivered. “It's cold up here,” he said, “and I am hungry and very thirsty. I came after you with nothing.”

“I have no food or water either.” Danarion drew him down into a little dip in the rock. “Tomorrow I will find us something on the plain.”

“The plain is full of two-minds who tend fruit trees and vines. They say it is warmer down there by night, and cooler by day.”

Danarion knew that Nenan's calm voice hid a terror that was growing as the sun hovered, a half-disc on the ocean, and he settled closer to the young man. “Would you like me to put you to sleep like Lallin?” he asked gently.

Nenan thought, then shook his head with weak defiance. “I will not run, not now. Tell me about where you come from. Fill the legends for me.”

So as night fell and the stars appeared, so close in the black are above them that Danarion felt he could reach out and caress them, he told Nenan of Danar, the palace of the immortals, the mighty Gate. He spoke of Shol in the days when it was new and unsullied, of Sholia, of Shaban with its steep streets, its dreamweavers, its many bells. Nenan listened, entranced, now and then breathing, “I do not believe! I cannot!” in a voice thick with thrall. Once he asked, “Do you mean that all the worlds had Gates? That Shol had a Gate through which the people could go to the stars?”