Winter Moon (23 page)

In space they met. The collision was instantaneous and had no impact, only a brilliant lightning that coursed through her, cold then hot, then warm.

Landing in a warrior's practiced crouch, Clirando knew herself for one moment to be a dappled lynx-lion, tail lashing, claws ready, eyes of fire. And then the beast sank back into her spirit, accustomed as a fine knife in a sheath of velvet.

The male lion also had been—was—hers. It was a part of her. She had no need to dread it, only to know and guide it—and permit it, at the correct times, to guide her.

A joy beyond all joys filled Clirando. She ran about the moon plain, jumped high, whirled through the air, light as a feather, playing.

Never had she known such liberation. But even as she experienced it, intuitively she recognized it could not and must not last. Mortals had their duties in the world. Only before and after death could such freedom deservedly be theirs.

She sat thinking this for a while, there on the surface of the moon, quite calm. Until something altered in her mind, and suddenly she began to see instead
her ridiculous predicament. For she knew no route back. If a psychic gate had been opened for her, where was it now? She did not think the ghost of Araitha could conduct her home into the world.

The surreal euphoria had left her. Perplexed, Clirando stood and looked away to all the white horizons.

Vaguely then, she heard a distant shouting. It was no longer any nightmare of her own.

“Zemetrios…?”

Had he too been pulled through to this other place, to contend with his past?

At this thought Clirando became fully herself, or reckoned she did. In the heat of battle you could not always carefully plan.

 

It took her some hours to walk across the long curving of the moon's back, and the fish-bone spikes of the mountains were much nearer when she halted in astonishment.

Before her lay a fine house, that would have fitted well in the upper streets of Amnos. It was surrounded by a grove of trees, winter bare and thick with icicles. The house seemed to think an ordinary earthly night had fallen, for lamplight burned in the visible windows and over the gate of the courtyard. The gate itself was ajar, as if to invite Clirando in.

She hesitated. But then the strident shouting came again. She had heard it many times as she traveled; it had guided her here.

She pushed wide the gate and crossed the yard, between ranks of frozen urns and shrubs.

The door of the house too was open.

Clirando entered, sword in hand, and reached the threshold of a graciously furnished room now rather spoilt. A chair had gone over. Broken pitchers lay on the floor. Two men were there also, one of them stumbling, shouting. It was this awful voice she had heard before. Then, in the moment before the shouting stumbler fell, the other man caught him back. “Yazon, listen to me. This would have been your twenty-ninth day without drunkenness. Think what you had achieved.”

“And lost,” the other grated. “I have ruined it. Besides, what do I care? Give it me back, the wine—” But Yazon's voice dropped away into sobs. He sank down on a couch. And Zemetrios seated himself beside him. “No, my friend. No wine. You'll have to kill me first.”

Zemetrios. His face was weary as that of a man who had been entirely sleepless for months, yet also hard and resolute. Yazon—he could be no one else—was speaking now of horrible secrets of drunkenness. But his eyes at last were growing sane and sad.

As if some god had told her—Sattu, perhaps, the little god of domestic things—Clirando seemed to know it all.

This naturally was not what had taken place in the world, at Rhoia. Instead, the house of Zemetrios's father had been magically rebuilt here on the slopes of the moon, by some spirit or spell. And now, in this new reality, Zemetrios—having given up his post in the king's legions and sent all his servants, women
and men both, away to safety—cared for Yazon, striving to cure him, to make him whole.

That then must have been in Zemetrios's hidden mind. Not that he had killed Yazon in rage—but that he had not devoted his life, however briefly or lengthily, to helping Yazon. Not with money or shelter, but with the comradeship and dedication they had each shown the other in war. Now Zemetrios wished to atone.

It was very plain that Zemetrios believed utterly this situation truly existed.

Clirando did not know if she could, or should, have any part in such a scenario. But the previous bliss of her own liberation now filled her with the desire to assist in whatever way was possible. To assist, that was, Zemetrios.

She spoke his name. Could he hear her?

Yes. He looked across at her instantly. His face, which had seemed older than its twenty-four years, was suddenly as she recalled. A smile lit his mouth and eyes.

“And here is my beautiful wife, Clirando.”

The other man—ghost—illusion—whatever he might be—also looked up at her. And he too gave her a smile. It was not corrupt, only distant. Some half-forgotten good-manners from an earlier time when he had been himself. And she wondered then if perhaps really this was Yazon, come back from death to undo this knot of pain and anger, as needful for his phantasmal life as it was for Zemetrios's mortal one.

“And I warn you, Yazon,” said Zemetrios, with
amused lightness, “try nothing stupid with her. She'll kill you and have your skin sewn up as a sunshade.”

His
wife.

In his fantasy, this dream of righting wrongs and making all good, I am his wife…

Zemetrios got up, came to her and kissed her gently on the lips. “Things will be better now you're here.”

 

Only Clirando marked accurately the passing of the last three nights of full moon. Though perhaps she did not do it as accurately as she meant to, because she had to get her bearings from the rise and fall of the blue-green earth-world above.

In the house, apparently, months went by.

She herself was not conscious of these. Her time frame functioned very differently, and the scenes that were enacted, and in which she sometimes took a small part, were fragments of some vaster drama, played clearly for Zemetrios alone.

She went along with everything, knowing he did what he must. His penance and self-examination were longer than hers, deeper and darker though less savage.

In the segments of events that Clirando witnessed, Zemetrios hauled Yazon back to sober health. Zemetrios was by turns dominant and consoling, as appropriate. He never gave up, and gradually the physical ghost-image of Yazon responded. Then Clirando would find the two of them at friendly, noisy practice with swords or bows, or wrestling, eating, talking. They played Lybirican chess. They would
discuss the army days, and reminisced away the nights that somehow came and went inside the outer time which she alone observed. They would look up at the blue orb in the sky, and call it the moon.

Of course, Zemetrios never separately sought her. It seemed she was tucked away somewhere in his illusory life in the house. Mainly, she was peripheral to his task. Sometimes he did not even see or hear her as she entered a room only a few paces from him. He only ever fully saw Yazon, the one in fact who probably was not there.

She began to think Yazon was not a ghost, working out the dilemma of its life. No, he was solely a conjuring of Zemetrios's mind. And of Moon Isle.

She came to believe all this would end at the finish of the moon's Seventh Night. Till then she could do nothing but be present, offering her slight participation—a touch, a cup filled from the well in the courtyard. Every illusory thing seemed real, as in the village. Therefore, how would this saga be resolved?

She pondered too with the winter snow in her heart, if Zemetrios would have been driven mad by the finish of it.

The ultimate problem was their return to the world, which still she had not solved. Maybe they must stay here, despite all expiation. And maybe too they would be segregated here from each other.

Do I love him?

Even in that extremity and strangeness, this question was paramount, and unanswered.

Sometimes she sat alone in the winter yard of the
simulated Rhoian house, gazing up at the multicolored stars. Indoors the men talked rationally, remembering old campaigns.

The food and drink she had found in the kitchens had nourished her, and them. Even the rug bed she had made herself was comfortable. She could sleep now. Anywhere therefore would have been comfortable.

Perhaps madness has taken all of us.

But the lion lashed its tail in her spirit, and she herself quieted it.
Be patient.

When next the blue orb rose, that would be the Seventh Night, as far as she knew. She could do nothing but wait.

 

In sleep, she heard Zemetrios speaking to her very softly. “It's done, Cliro. He has gone.”

Instantly she was fully awake.

“Where?”

“Away. Away where he must.”

He spoke of Yazon. Who, it seemed, had gone back to the lands beyond death.

Zemetrios said, “This has been a dream.” She thought,
Thank all gods, he knows.
“But it was a dream I needed to be dreaming. Oh, Clirando, I should have given him that, no matter how he was. I should have tried so much harder to save him, in the true world, while he lived. Not dragged him into my house and shunned and treated him like a sinful baby, despised and left him always to himself, busy with my own affairs. I should not either have gone out, and left my servants at his mercy—afraid
of him, afraid to offend
me
. I've done what I should have done, but here. It's—freed me. But I shall never cease to be sorry.” He leaned close to her, resting his forehead on hers. “How long has all this gone on? It seemed a year—But he was my friend, my brother—oh, Cliro—if only I'd done this
then
, as I should.”

She held him. They lay wrapped among the rugs, like two children in the dark. “Hush, my love,” she said. “If only any of us had done what we should. We see it clearly when it has passed by. Yet we must try to see, and try to do. That's all the gods ask. That we try.”

And she thought,
And is he my love, then
?

And she thought,
Yes, he is my love.

They curled together. Beyond the narrow window the blue disk gemmed the sky.

He had survived the test, and was not deranged. Each of them had paid their debt to themselves. They slept exhausted in each other's arms.

 

The next time they woke, it was together, and they lay on the bare plains of the moon. The house with all its lamps and groves, its rooms and well and yard, was gone. Only those mountains like spines scratched along the horizon.

The earth hung above, and all the stars.

“There was a way that led us here, beyond the rocks,” he said. “But how do we find it?”

Clirando stared into her mind. There were visions there still, things which came from the magic not only of this place, but from the sorcery of the Isle.

Slowly she said, “There's home,” nodding at the disk above.

“But the
way
to it?”

Clirando's brain showed her the magicians in the square who had called the stars.

Instinctively she raised her arms.

Up in the inky black, the exquisite jewelry shivered. One by one, stars—
stars
—detached from their moorings. They began to float down, not a swarm now, a snowfall—

If it was a dream, you might do anything. And if not, still you might attempt it.

The stars wove around one another in slow, sparkling tidal surges. She thought of the old woman weaving on the headland, the old man who made snakes at the forest's end, and of the stilt-walker lighting torches.

High in air, a bridge began to form in a wide, swooping arc. It was laid with coruscating stella stones—emeralds, rubies, amethysts—it curved down toward the surface where they stood, making a hill-road for them to climb. While the rest of the arc soared away like the curve of a bow. Infinities up in the air, the earth disk had received the far point of this incredible bridge, without the tiniest ripple.

They neither debated nor held back. Both he and she ran at the bridge of stars, this extraordinary path that led toward the ordinary, and the mortal.

Simultaneously they leaped, landed. Clirando felt the faceted paving under her feet. Ethereal colors
washed them like high waters, now copper, now bronzy, now golden.

Not to sleep so long—it had been worth it, to know a dream like this one.

Both of them laughed. Children laughed like that, innocent, and prepared to credit that dreams came true.

As so often on the Isle, shoulder to shoulder, Clirando and Zemetrios broke into their companionable, well-trained, mile-eating lope. Over the night, over the heavens, running home through the spatial outer dark which, for them, was full of a rich sweet air, mild breezes, summery scents, branches of static stars, rainbows and light, wild music, half-seen winged beings.