Woman Who Loved the Moon (30 page)

Aloud she panted, “Sedi, I will kill you.” The white-haired woman’s face did not change, but the speed of her attack increased. She is strong, Kai Talvela thought, but I am stronger. Her palms grew slippery with sweat. Her lungs ached. Still she did not weaken. It was Sedi who slowed, tiring. Kai Talvela shouted with triumph. She swept Sedi’s blade to one side and thrust in.

Song’s
sharp tip came to rest a finger’s breadth from Sedi’s naked throat. Kai Talvela said, “Now, sister-killer, I have you.”

Across the shining sword, Sedi smiled. Kai waited for her to beg for life. She said nothing, only smiled like flickering moonlight. Her hair shone like pearl, and her eyes seemed depthless as the sea. Kai’s hands trembled. She let her sword fall. “You are too beautiful, O Sedi.”

With cool, white fingers Sedi took
Song
from Kai’s hands. She brought her to the fire, and gave her water to drink in her cupped palms. She stroked Kai’s black hair and laid her cool lips on Kai’s flushed cheek. Then she took Kai’s hand in her own, and pointed at the hillside. The skin of the earth shivered, like a horse shaking off a fly. A great rent appeared in the hill. Straight as a shaft of moonlight, a path cut through earth to the water’s smooth edge. Sedi said, “Come with me.”

And so Kai Talvela followed the Moon to her cave beneath the ocean. Time is different there than it is beneath the light of the sun, and it seemed to her that no time passed at all. She slept by day, and rose at night to ride with the Moon across the dark sky’s face, to race the wolves across the plains and watch the dolphins playing in the burnished sea. She drank cool water from beneath the earth. She did not seem to need to eat. Whenever she grew sad or thoughtful Sedi would laugh and shake her long bright hair, and say, “O my love, why so somber?” And the touch of her fingers drove all complaint from Kai’s mind and lips.

But one sleep she dreamed of an old woman standing by a window, calling her name. There was something familiar and beloved in the crone’s wrinkled face. Three times she dreamed that dream. The old voice woke in her a longing to see sunlight and shadow, green grass and the flowers on the trees. The longing grew strong. She thought, Something has happened to me.

Returning to the cave at dawn, she said to Sedi, “O my friend and lover, let us sit awhile on land. I would watch the sunrise.” Sedi consented. They sat at the foot of an immense willow beside a broad stream. A bird sang in the willow. Kai watched the grass color with the sunrise, turning from gray to rose, and from rose to green. And her memories awoke.

She said, “O my love, dear to me is the time I have spent with you beneath the sea. Yet I yearn for the country of my birth, for the sound of familiar voices, for the taste of wine and the smell of bread and meat. Sedi, let me go to my place.”

Sedi rose from the grass. She stretched out both hands. “Truly, do you wish to leave me?” she said. There were tears in her gray eyes. Kai trembled. She almost stepped forward to take the white-haired woman in her arms and kiss the tears away.

“I do.”

The form of Sedi shuddered, and changed. It grew until it towered in silver majesty above Kai’s head, terrible, draped in light, eyes dark as night, a blazing giantess. Soft and awful as death, the Moon said, “Dare you say so, child of earth?”

Kai swallowed. Her voice remained steady. “I do.”

The giantess dissolved into the form of Sedi. She regarded Kai. Her eyes were both sad and amused. “I cannot keep you. For in compelling you to love me I have learned to love you. I can no more coerce you than I can myself. But you must know, Kai Talvela, that much human time has passed since you entered the cave of the Moon. Roko Talvela is dead. Your cousin, Edan, is chief of the Talvelai. Your mother is alive but very old. The very steed that brought you here has long since turned to dust.”

“I will walk home,” said Kai. And she knew that the old woman of her dream had been her mother, the sorcerer Lia.

Sedi sighed. “You do not have to do that. I love you so well that I will even help you leave me. Clothes I will give you, and armor, and a sword.” She gestured. Silk and steel rose up from the earth and wrapped themselves about Kai’s waist. The weight of a sword dragged at her belt. A horse trotted to her. It was black, and its eyes were pale, “This steed will bring you to Issho in less than a day.”

Kai fingered the hilt of the sword, feeling there the faceted lump of a gem. She pulled it upward to look at it and saw a ruby embedded within it. She lifted off her helmet. A red plume nodded in the wind. She lifted her hands to the smooth skin of her face.

“You have not aged,” said Sedi. “Do you wish to see?” A silver mirror appeared in her hands. Kai stared at the image of the warrior woman. She looked the same as the day she left Issho.

She looked at the Moon, feeling within her heart for the compulsion that had made her follow Sedi under the sea. She could not feel it. She held out her hands. “Sedi, I love you,” she said. They embraced. Kai felt the Moon’s cold tears on her cheek.

Sedi pressed the mirror into Kai’s hands. “Take this. And on the nights when the Moon is full, do this.” She whispered in Kai’s ears.

Kai put the mirror between her breasts and mounted the black horse. “Farewell,” she called. Sedi waved. The black horse bugled, and shook its ebony mane, and leaped. When Kai looked back she could not see the willow. She bowed her head. Her hair whipped her face. Beneath the silent hooves of Night the earth unrolled like a great brown mat. Kai sighed, remembering the laughter and the loving, and the nightly rides. Never would she race the wolves across the plains, or watch the dolphins playing in the moonlit sea.

The black horse traveled so fast that Kai had no chance to observe the ways in which the world beneath her had changed. But when it halted she stared in puzzlement at the place it had brought her. Surely this was not her home The trees were different. The house was too big. Yet the token of the Talvelai family gleamed on the tall front gate.

Seeing this lone warrior, the Talvelai guards came from the gatehouse. “Who are you?” they demanded. “What is your business here?”

“I am Kai Talvela,” she said.

They scowled at her. “That is impossible. Kai Talvela disappeared fifty years ago!” And they barred her way to the house.

But she laughed at them; she who had fought and loved the Moon. She ripped her sword from its sheath, and it sang in the air with a deadly note. “I am Kai Talvela, and I want to see my mother. I would not suggest that any of you try to stop me.” She dismounted. Patting the horse, she said, “Thank you, O swift one. Now return to Sedi.” The horse blew in her ear and vanished like smoke. The soldiers of the Talvelai froze in fear.

Kai Talvela found her mother in her bedroom, sitting by the window. She was ancient, tiny, a white-haired wrinkled worn: r dressed in lavender silk. Kai crossed the room and knelt by her mother’s chair. “Mother,” she said.

An elderly man. standing at the foot of the bed. opened his mouth to gape. He held a polished wooden flute. “Lady!”

Lia Talvela caressed her daughter’s unaged cheek. “I have missed you,” she said. “I called and called. Strong was the spell that held you. Where have you been?”

“In the cave of the Moon,” Kai Talvela said. She put oft her helmet, sword, and mail. Curled like a child against her mother’s knee, she told the sorcerer everything. The old player started to leave the room. A gesture of Lia Talvela’s stopped him. When she finished, Kai Talvela lifted her mother’s hands to her lips. “I will never leave Issho again,” she said.

Lia Talvela stroked her child’s hair and said no more. Her hands stilled. When Kai looked up, her mother’s eves had closed. She was dead.

It took a long time before the Talvelai believed that this strange woman was truly Kai Talvela, returned from her journey, no older than the day she left Issho. Edan Talvela was especially loath to believe it. Truthfully, he was somewhat nervous of this fierce young woman. He could not understand why she would not tell them all where she had been tor fifty years. “Who is to say she is not enchanted?” he said. But the flute master, who had been the sisters’ page, recognized her, and said so steadfastly. Edan Talvela grew less nervous when Kai told him that she had no quarrel with his lordship of the Talvelai. She wished merely to live at peace on the Issho estate. He had a house built for her behind the orchard, near the place of her sisters’ and her mother’s graves. During the day she sewed and spun, and walked through the orchard. It gave her great pleasure to be able to walk beneath the sun and smell the growing things of earth. In the evening she sat beside her doorway, watching night descend. Sometimes the old musician came to visit with her. He alone knew where she had been for fifty years. His knowledge did not trouble her, for she knew that her mother had trusted him. He played the songs that once she had asked him to play; “The Riddle Song” and other songs of childhood. He had grown to be both courtly and wise, and she liked to talk with him. She grew to be quite fond of him, and she blessed her mother’s wisdom.

In the autumn after her return the old musician caught a cold, and died. The night after his funeral Kai Talvela wept into her pillow. She loved Issho. But now there was no one to talk to, no one who knew her. The other Talvelai avoided her, and their children scurried from her path as if she were a ghost. Her proper life had been taken away.

For the first time she thought,
I should not have come home. I should have stayed with Sedi.
The full Moon shining through her window seemed to mock her pain.

Suddenly she recalled Sedi’s hands cupped around a mirror, and her whispered instructions. Kai ran to her chest and dug beneath the silks. The mirror was still there. Holding it carefully, she took it to the window and positioned it till the moonlight filled its silver face. She said the words Sedi had told her to say. The mirror grew. The moon swelled within it. It grew till it was tall as Kai. Then it trembled, like still water when a pebble strikes it. Out from the ripples of light stepped Sedi. The Moon smiled, and held out her arms. “Have you missed me?” she said. They embraced.

That night Kai’s bed was warm. But at dawn Sedi left. “Will you come back?” Kai said.

“I will come when you call me,” promised the elemental. Every month on the night of the full Moon Kai held the mirror to the light, and said the words. And every month Sedi returned.

But elementals are fickle, and they are not human, though they may take human shape. One night Sedi did not come. Kai Talvela waited long hours by the window. Years had passed since her return to Issho. She was no longer the woman of twenty who had emerged like a butterfly from the Moon’s cave. Yet she was still beautiful, and her spirit was strong as it had ever been. When at last the sunlight came, she rose from her chair. Picking up the mirror from its place, she broke it over her knee.

It seemed to the Talvelai then that she grew old swiftly, aging a year in the space of a day. But her back did not bend, nor did her hair whiten. It remained as black as it had been in her youth. The storytellers say that she never spoke to anyone of her journey. But she must have broken silence one time, or else we would not know this story. Perhaps she spoke as she lay dying. She died on the night of the full Moon, in spring. At dawn some of her vigor returned, and she insisted that her attendants carry her to the window, and dress her in red silk, and lay her sword across her lap. She wore around her neck a piece of broken mirror on a silver chain. And the tale goes on to say that as she died her face brightened to near youthful beauty, and she lifted her arms to the light and cried, “Sedi!”

They buried Kai Talvela beside her mother and her sisters, and then forgot her. Fickleness is also a human trait. But some years later there was war in Issho county. The soldiers of the Talvelai were outnumbered. Doggedly they struggled, as the orchards burned around them. Their enemies backed them as far as the manor gate. It was dusk. They were losing. Suddenly a horn blew, and a woman in bright armor rode from out of nowhere, her mount a black stallion. She swung a shining sword in one fist. “Talvela soldiers, follow me!” she called. At her indomitable manner, the enemy was struck with terror. They dropped their swords and fled into the night. Those soldiers who were closest to the apparition swore that the woman was tall and raven-haired, as the women of the Talvelai are still. They swore also that the sword, as it cut the air, hummed a note so pure that you could almost say it sang.

That was the first appearance of Kai Talvela’s shade. Sometimes she comes unarmored, dressed in red silk, gliding through the halls of the Issho estate. When she comes in this guise, she wears a pendant: a broken mirror on a silver chain. When she appears she brings courage to the Talvelai, and fear to their enemies. In the farms and the cities they call her the Mirror Ghost, because of the mirror pendant and because of her brilliant armor. But the folks of the estate know her by name. She is Kai Talvela, the warrior woman of Issho, who loved and fought the Moon, and was loved by her in return.

The daughters of the Talvelai never tire of the story. They ask for it again and again.