The Wraeththu Chronicles (58 page)

"I love you!" I cried. His body was cold and unyielding. "I do! I do! I swear it! I will never betray you!"

1 felt his hands on my back, flexing from paws to hands to paws. I felt his leafy sigh

through my hair.

"Mine," my hostling whispered. "Mine . . . Mine!"

Another dream:

A voice says to me, "It is nothing. Outside is the real Hell. This is nothing."

I must have been crying. My head is on my knees. When I look up, there arc two eyes in front of me. I cannot see the face, I say, "Oh, I will never go outside!" and even in the dream, I know that this isn't true. I put up my hands. I shout, "I don't know you! I don't know you!" but I want to look into those eyes forever.

That is the way of dreams; they are never logical.

Straw in the Wind

Straw in the wind Blowing in my dreams. A birth in the Spring Sinking into pillows.

So for some of us, Festival was to be devoid of merriment that year. Admittedly, the house was full of hara blissfully ignorant of the dreadful stirrings in Forever's heart, and food and drink were in plentiful supply, everyone was smiling, but there was still Cobweb's gaunt and haunted silence to face every day. Terzian chose to ignore it. For various reasons, mostly, I like to think, because of loyalty to my hostling, I decided to stop speaking to Cal. Predictably, this only made him laugh. "Close ranks, Swift," he said. "The wicked seducer is loosed among you!" He knew, as we all did, that it had been Cobweb who had freed him from his fear of aruna.

At dinner, in the evening, I found that I was sitting next to Leef. He made several brave attempts at conversation and then commented drily on my sullen silence. I didn't want him to think I no longer liked him, but I was powerless to speak. I wanted to look at him helplessly, so that he might ask me what the matter was, but I could only stare at my plate. I couldn't understand myself, why I was locked in such a strange depression, and I wished desperately someone would notice it and say the right words that would release me, but Leef only sighed and turned to speak to someone sitting on his other side.

The new year had started with everyone in a sour temper, and that was a bad omen. The atmosphere did not improve when my father announced that he expected Gahrazel to accompany him to the south when the spring weather allowed it. I knew how Gahrazel felt about the approaching campaign. It wasn't that he was torn between loyalty to his tribe and loyalty to his beliefs; he just craved peace, an easy life, more than anything. He was angered by cruelty and killing appalled him. He knew Terzian was seeking to change all that about him. My father also sent Peter to work for Ithiel and we all knew that Ithiel and his staff would be remaining in Galhea when the Varrs set off to confront the Gelaming.

I had come to hate movement and rarely left the house. My sleep was often disturbed at that time by troubling dreams, whose main feature seemed to be the enigmatic eyes I had seen before. In a short time, I would celebrate my birthday. In a short time, I could expect to come of age. It was a prospect I anticipated with dread. Since Festival, I spent more and more time alone. My love was knowledge, not flesh. Swithe gave me books to read, and I virtually devoured their pages with my eyes, so eager was I to scour them for information, for answers. I learned a great deal about the world

and about the past, but little about my own condition. Wraeththu had not been in existence long enough for anyone to have had the time to write serious books about our singular, wondrous estate. When I grew older, perhaps I could be one of the first to begin the analysis. That was when I started to keep notes, to write down my impressions of what was happening to us. The foundations of my life had become unsteady, the sacrosanct haven of my home soiled. Cobweb had become an icy and tragic figure, haunting the upper parts of the house or scrawling horrific, black pictures with splintered charcoal in his room. The faces he drew came into my dreams, the aftertaste of their anguish flavored my days. Even Gahrazel had become a bitter, fevered thing. The intrigues of Forever no longer seemed to interest him and he had learned how to kill. He gave Peter a Wraeththu name, Purah. They were together always, for their days together were numbered.

All I can say of Cal is that I could only look at him with painful anger. He would look back with smiling, knowing eyes. I heard him whistling in the corridor outside my room on those nights when he would go to my father. His presence burned me, and I tried to avoid him. It was clear he felt no remorse for the pain he had brought into the house, nor that he had lost me as a friend. I could not believe that he returned my father's feeling as strongly. It was all a game to him, to pass the time, to eliminate boredom. Time and again, I told myself to hate him.

As a fitting punishment for our ignorant behavior, Cobweb and I were the last to hear of the momentous news when it came. It happened only a few weeks after Festival and it was Bryony who told us. Cal was to host a son for Terzian; Phlaar had confirmed it. Just hearing about it made me see them together, in my father's bed, in that room. I was glad in a way, because I knew Cal would hate it. He was not made to be a hostling, no matter what my father thought.

Cobweb did not scream or rage as I expected. He took the news quite calmly, and I did not ask bewildered questions. We were quite, quite dignified, like something out of the history books. I remembered Cal once likening Cobweb to a queen and that was how I saw us now. The imprisoned queen and her son hearing news of the king's new wife; out of favor, out of mind. Cobweb and I drew closer together. I was wrapped in his ophidian hair, his inky eyes, and we caressed each other's black hearts with pungent fires and dark, whispered words. We nurtured our powers and found satisfaction in occult promises. "We too shall host a pearl," my hostling said, "the blackest pearl of regret!" It was a promise that was never realized.

When the first shoots found their way up into the light and the garden stirred and stretched into the spring, we watched them leave. Black, shining horses and the finest of Varrish hara. Terzian leaned down from his horse and embraced Cal for the last time, looking up to glance at Cobweb's expressionless face as he stood on the steps of Forever. My father called to me and offered his hand, which I took. "I shall bring you home a beautiful Gelaming slave," he said with a smile.

I grinned back weakly. "Good luck," I said.

Terzian raised his hand and they turned their horses toward the gate. Cal stood near to me but I did not look at him. Terzian turned in the saddle once and waved to us, before quickening the pace to a canter. It was an impressive sight. The main body of his army would be waiting for him in the town.

Afterwards, I paused on the steps of Forever and gazed up at its worn, white walls. It seems my story has ended already, I thought wistfully. All the happiness has gone from this house. Now it is forbidding and its secrets are cruel. Now, as long ago, a woman, a daughter of man, holds the keys to its rooms. Perhaps there was only Bryony left really to care about the place. To Cobweb, Forever had taken on the ghost semblance of a ruin of stark, poking rafters; a charred remnant of a home. His touch had palpably withdrawn from the rooms. Now he claimed only the darkest corners of the garden and his own suite on the second floor.

The previous evening, I had sat in Gahrazel's room and watched him pack away his belongings, as if he would never return to Forever. He is truly adult now, I thought. His enthusiasm is contained, his fire quenched. I watched him cut off his hair and

burn it. There were few times we could reach each other now. After all, I was still just a child. Perhaps I bored this new, sophiscated Gahrazel. The Varrs, the state of being Varr, had come between us.

Not long after my father and his army had gone south, Cobweb and I celebrated my birthday together. Yarrow baked a big ginger cake, but no-one came to eat it with us. We sat in my room, drank sheh, and Cobweb cut my arm with a knife to take some of my blood. He made spells for my protection and put his hand on my face and said, "Some day soon, the animal sleeping inside you will wake up."

I remember I made an angry, bitter noise. "And what will happen then?" I demanded. "What will happen when my body takes over and there is no-one to take hold of it?"

Cobweb took me in his arms. "I would keep you as a child forever if I could," he said.

At night, lying awake, I would think of my father and of Gahrazel, wondering what they were doing and if they thought of home. Then I would drift off to sleep and the dream presence would visit me, the wondrous eyes, the hint of alien breath. In the morning I would wake afraid, but at night, in the dark, I felt comforted.

Sleeping late one morning, I was woken up by a female scream, coming from the Hall. Bryony's white face looked up at me when I leaned over the bannister, half dressed. "Swift, come quickly!" she cried.

Cal had collapsed, halfway through eating his breakfast. When I saw him, my heart missed a beat. Could he be dead? Could we be free once more?
 
But he moved in our arms as we carried him up the stairs to his room. When we laid him on the bed, he moaned and threshed, curling and uncurling as if poisoned. Cobweb? I wondered. Someone had sent for Phlaar and I was left alone with Cal, while everyone raced around the house as if the end of the world had come. (Already he was Forever's heart.) He opened his eyes and saw me standing there. I stared back haughtily into his twisted face. We know each other now, I thought.

"Do you know what's happening to me?" he croaked.

"No," I answered, "but whatever it is you deserve it!" I was uncomfortable, thinking how not long ago, I would have been soothing him or stroking his face, craving his attention. It would have felt natural to go and do that now, but I controlled myself. "How things change," I remarked cooly, walking over to the window, so that he could not affect me. I could hear him groaning softly. When I could resist no longer and turned to look at him, he was clutching his stomach. His face was damp.

"Swift.. . don't hate me . .. please, not now." I began to speak, but he rolled around and shouted, "I need you! I need you! Swift!"

Even as I went to him, I was thinking, Surely you're strong enough to resist this?

His face was hot and wet between my hands; he was weeping. "You are witness to a miracle," he said, and laid his head in my lap. I put my hand on his arm where it lay across his stomach.

"What is it?" I asked. "Life, I think," he said.

Cal was in torment for two days while his body sought to expel the pearl that would become Terzian's son. Phlaar did not seem unduly concerned about Cal's condition, and I shuddered to think that this agony was normal.

Only Cobweb had no interest in this momentous birth. Everyone else in the house was fascinated. Someone had to sit with Cal all the time as he struggled feverishly with his body. Phlaar would not risk leaving him alone, because sometimes he got violent and Phlaar was afraid he would try to damage himself. Bryony was particularly intrigued by Wraeththu birth, for the bearing of life had previously been a female prerogative to her. Near the time, when everyone was sitting up all night waiting for news, Bryony took me to the kitchens. We curled up in the darkness next to the stove,

drinking strong, sweet coffee and talking of the mysteries of life. How intrigued she was (without actually saying so) about the secrets of Wraeththu physiology. I evaded her subtle questions for it was something I preferred not to think too deeply about. Not so Bryony. She explained with great candor a lot about woman kind and how their bodies worked.

Then I learned about human procreation, so similar in some ways to our own, yet so different in others.

"The whole rotten business has been drastically improved in Wraeththu," she said. "I can see that, and it takes so little time. It's so unnoticeable. Women do not have it so easy. Oh no! We have to lumber around for months, growing and growing. It's something I've never cared for . . ."

Human reproduction did seem messy to me, and how inconvenient to have to look after such a helpless creature for so long. (No teeth, no hair!) Like little rats, I thought. I had seen Mareta's kittens take milk, but it seemed inconceivable that intelligent beings could be brought up the same way. What if they were separated from their mothers? How would they survive? Did many babies die?

During those strange gray hours before the dawn it was my turn to sit with Cal. "It will be soon," he said to himself and clenched his fists along his sides.

"Cobweb will hate me for this," I said, hoping to make him smile.

Cal barely recognized me and kept calling me Pell. "I've always lied to you!" he said. "You don't even know me, not really, but in spite of all that I've done ... I do love you, Pell."

I sat beside him. He looked weak and helpless. His body was merciless; the personality was irrelevant at this time. His mind, set free, wandered at random. "Cal, you're a wicked, wicked person, but enchanting all the same!"

He did not hear me. "Pell, do you remember. .. that time ... when was it? When I found you. Oh, there's something I've always longed to tell you . . . about the first lie, and it's so important... I must tell you!"

I put my hands on his face. "Hush, I'm not Pell. Be quiet." He tried to shake free of me.

"You must hear this, you must!" he whined pettishly. "It's important, because I mustn't lie to you any more. I want you to know everything . . . about Zack ..."