Woman Who Loved the Moon (6 page)

A small sailboat came scudding round the rocks from the harbor. It was
Windcatcher,
sleek and trim. Rhune caught the rocking ship and steadied it.

Sealord and Firelord matched gazes in silence.

At last, Seramir turned away. “Ryoka has again defeated me,” he said. “O Shea, you have grown strong. But you will bear my marks on your body for as long as you wear it, and, when you sleep, your nightmares will be of fire.”

* * *

Under the turning stars, pushed by an enchanted wind,
Windcatcher
rode steadily and surely westward.

Shea sat in the stern. Rhune lay in the bow. His head felt light with exhaustion, and his belly with hunger. Over him the winter stars played their patterns against the night. Three months I have been captive in Seramir’s halls, he thought. Damn all wizards!

Querulously he said, “How long will it take us to reach land?”

Shea answered, “Current and wind will have us home within ten hours.”

Rhune scowled.

“Is that so slow?” said Shea.

“No.”

“Then tell me what it is that makes you look so discontent.”

Rhune raised his eyes to the Sealord’s face. “I have no home,” he said.

Shea said, “I will give you one.”

Rhune said, between his teeth, “I will take nothing from you.”

Shea pursed his lips. That look, part sadness, part relief, brushed over his face. He said, very gently, “Rhune—tell me, if you can and will—what did Osher offer you to tempt you to turn traitor, beside wealth, lands, fleet?”

Rhune said, “Don’t you think those are sufficient?”

Shea said, “Was there something else?”

Rhune sighed. “He told me he would teach me magic.” A hope he had thought was gone quivered inside him. He lifted on an elbow.

Shea said, “Ah.” The soft syllable sighed like the sea-wind. “He lied to you, Rhune. He could no more do that than he could call the sea. The power cannot be taught, and it is not in you.”

The hope died. Rhune bowed his head, staring at the planks of the sailboat. Finally he said, “I am not your fleetmaster now, nor am I traitor, or ocean—what am I, Shea? What is left of me?”

Shea said, “You are what you have always been. You still have the strength to break a man’s neck between your hands. You have the guile to fool a sorcerer face to face. You spent a year as an ocean, and rose from it stronger. You have the courage and love to reach through fire to save a friend.” He smiled. “And when we reach shore I will show you another thing.”

They came into the bay before noon. Leaving
Windcatcher
to make her own magical way to her anchorage, they waded to shore. They were just south of the house. Rhune shaded his eyes from the bright glare of the daylight. “I’m not used to this,” he muttered.

Shea strode a few steps up the tight-packed sand of the beach, and then halted. “Here,” he said.

“Here what?” Rhune said.

Shea tugged his shirt up over his head. Red scars stood out clearly on his chest. “Take your shirt off.” Puzzled, Rhune took his shirt off. The sun felt delicious on his bare skin. “Now, fight me, Rhune.”

Rhune stared at the wizard. “You’re mad,” he said. “We’re both weak and tired—and anyhow, you’ll lose.” He whirled and began to walk in the direction of the house.

A wet hand pulled him down. The surf tumbled him in its froth and washed him up, choking, at Shea’s feet.

He sprang up, enraged.

“You will,” said Shea. “Or we shall see what more the ocean can do to you.”

The threat was totally infuriating. Rhune rushed at the Sealord, but light as the sea breeze Shea moved and was not there. Rhune whirled to face him, hands outstretched to grip.

Shea smiled. The gray-green eyes gleamed sardonically. “Keep your temper, my friend. You’ll never win that way.”

“You asked for this,” Rhune growled. He clamped his rage still and moved forward. They circled, feinted, and struck: had Rhune been truly able to grip and hold he would have won ten times over, but each time he came close Shea’s speed spun him just out of reach.

But Shea was tiring. His reflexes, almost imperceptibly, were slowing. Rhune slowed, too. At last Shea’s block to a kick was just a tiny bit too low and too wide.

Rhune moved in fast. He punched Shea’s belly, caught the wizard’s right arm as he staggered, and snapped it up high behind his back. Shea’s knees buckled. Still he fought to pull away. Rhune dug his knuckles into the nerves of Shea’s wrist, until the arm muscles leaped in involuntary spasm.

Then anger, long held in, flooded Rhune’s mind. The man he held down seemed to him to be not a man he knew, but an enemy, someone to break. He ground his knee into the other’s spine and, with his powerful right hand, probed rigid fingers into the pain center of the collarbone. The stranger’s back muscles roiled inside his skin. Rhune marveled at his endurance, wondering that no sound, no plea, came from the stranger’s lips, forced from them by the dreadful pain.

Something slipped into—or out of—his head. The body beneath his hands was no enemy’s. Rhune stopped breathing. Then, setting his teeth, he lifted his fingers. He looked at the ocean, wondering why it had not risen from its bed and torn him into half a hundred pieces. Very gently, he took the twisted arm and straightened it. He stretched Shea out on the sand, head toward the sea, and carefully, without pressure, stroked the muscles of his shoulders and spine until the deep-down muscle tremors ceased.

Shea rolled over. His face was very white, but he was smiling.

“Now that you have beaten me,” he said, “will you take the fleet? I have no wish to become, like Seramir, an aging tyrant, desiring only wealth or possessions, or power over other human lives.
Windcatcher
alone I reserve as mine; she will take me where I want to go. There are lands and shores our ships have never seen, but I have seen them. It is time for me to visit them again.”

Rhune swallowed. “I will,” he said.

“It will be yours, Rhune—to keep, and hold, and lose if you are cruel or careless!”

“I won’t lose it.”

Shea stood up. “I believe you,” he said. He stretched his arms to the sun. “Get up, my friend. We have much to do. And you cannot be half as weary now as I am!”

* * *

It took through the end of winter, past spring, past summer, before all that they had to do was done. But on a clear, cool autumn morning Shea and Rhune walked to the beach; to where
Windcatcher
waited. The breeze stiffened her sail in the sunlight. Shea called her; like a sentient thing she came and hovered in the shadows.

Shea fastened the gray cloak around his shoulders. “Look for me when the storms rise,” he said. “If I come back it will be on a hurricane. And if ever you have need of me, come to this place and speak your need aloud, and the winds will bring your words to me, wherever I am.”

Rhune nodded. “I will. And if ever you need a companion in your travels, Shea, get word to me by any means you can, and I will come to you.”

They embraced. The bay reached in, and a wave wrapped Shea in a gray-green fist. He rode it to the little ship, and boarded her, and turned her outward. The current took them. The sail winked in the sunlight once and then grew small: a white wing skimming a green sea.

“Farewell. Sail well,” called Rhune. The wind caught his words and tossed them into the brilliant air. For a while he lingered on the beach, till he could no longer see the ship. Then he turned, and, without looking back, walked across the beach to the house of Kameni Bay.

The Gods of Reorth

This story is the second story I finished. It too was written in Chicago. I started submitting it to markets in the summer of 1972, and it came right back to me with encouraging little notes saying that although the editors didn’t want that story, she/he/they liked the quality of my writing. Vonda Mclntyre and Susan Janice Anderson wanted to buy it for
Aurora: Beyond Equality,
except, they said unhappily, it didn’t really fit their theme. A few editors, all but one male, returned it to me with snarly comments about wanting to kill men. I thought they’d missed the point...

* * *

This is the story of a goddess Who had once been a woman named Jael, and what She did.

She lived in a cave on an island. Around Her island of Mykneresta lay others: Kovos and Nysineria, Hechlos, Dechlas, and larger, longer, fish-shaped Rys, where the Fire God lived within his fuming, cone-shaped house. She was the Goddess. From Her cave sprang the vines and grains that women and men reaped from the fertile ground; from the springs of Her mountain welled the clear water that made the ground fertile, and gave life. Her mountain towered over the land. When She grew angry the lightning tore from the skies over Her cave, and the goats went mad on the mountainsides.
“Hard as frost, indolent as summer rain, spare us, spare us. O Lady of the Lightning,”
Her poets sang. Sometimes the music appeased Her, and then She smiled, and the skies smiled clear and purple-blue, as some said Her eyes must be. But they were not: they were dark and smoky-green, like the color in the heart of a sunlit pool, touched to movement by a summer shower.

They smoked now. Above Her cave lightning reached webbed fingers to the stars. “The Lady is angry,” whispered the villagers. Inside the vast cavern that was Her home She stood staring at a pulsing screen. It burned and leaped with pinpoints of light. She read the message from the screen as easily as a scribe reads writing, and Her fingers sent a rapid reply out to the waiting stars.

WHY DO THE MEN OF RYS ARM FOR WAR?

MYKNERESTA IS A PEACEFUL AND FRUITFUL PLACE.

A moment passed, and the patterns answered, scrolling lines of amber fire on the dark, metallic screen.

PROBABILITIES PROJECT RYS AN EMPIRE.

THIS IS DESIRABLE. DO NOT IMPEDE.

Jael stared at the fading pattern, and swept a fierce hand across the board. The message vanished; above the cave’s roof, fireballs rolled and then disappeared down the sides of the mountain.

This is desirable.
In her mind, the silent screens retained a voice, a cool, sardonic, male voice. War! She scowled across the room. An ugly, evil thing she knew it was—though she had never seen a war. She did not desire war on Mykneresta. Yet it was “desirable” that Rys become an empire. Were the worshippers of the Fire God to rule, eventually, all of the planet Methys? She snorted. The Fire God had once been only a man, named Yron. Long ago, when they had been much younger, they had used the lumenings, the lightscreens, to talk with one another across the planet. But that had been an age ago, it seemed. She did not want to talk to Yron now.

Are you jealous, she asked herself, because his children will rule a world, and yours will not? She caught herself thinking it, and laughed. What nonsense to be feeling, that she, who had seen five worlds, and governed four, should care who or what ruled on a little planet round a little sun, whirling on an arm of a vast galaxy, a galaxy ruled by Reorth. Yet—Methys was important. Long-term assignments to undeveloped planets were not made unless they were important. Somewhere on a probability-line Methys was a key, a focus of power. Somewhere on Reorth, in the great block-like towers that held their machines, a technician had seen this world matched to a time within a nexus of possibilities, and had decided that, changed thus and so, moved in this or that direction, Methys could matter.
Do not impede.
Reorth wants a war.

Jael stepped away from the cavern which held the lumenings, the spyeyes, and all the other machines that made her Goddess. She walked along passageways, grown with fungus that glowed as she passed it, and ducked through a door cut into the rock. Now she was outside. Above her the night sky gleamed, thick with stars. Wind whipped round the granite crags with words hidden in its howls. She rubbed her arms with her hands, suddenly cold. It was autumn, drawing close to winter. I wonder how Yron likes living in his volcano, she thought, all smoke. That made her smile. With the bracelets on her slim wrists she drew a cloak of warmth around herself, and sent ahead of her, along the hard ground, a beam of yellow light. Slowly she walked down the mountainside, listening, smelling, tasting the life that roamed in the darkness. Once a cougar leaped to pace beside her, great head proud. She reached to stroke it. It sprang away, regarding her with widened eyes. She could compel it back—but even as she thought it, she rejected the thought. It was part of the night, with the wind and the starlight. Let it run free.

She came at last to the path which led to the villages—a worn and hidden path it was, and even she could not remember when it first was made. One bright star shone through the tree trunks. She stared at its flickering yellow light. It was not a star, but flame. Curious, she dimmed the light from her bracelets and walked toward it. Who would dare to come so far up the mountainside? It was almost a sacrilege. Perhaps it was a poet; they did strange things sometimes. Perhaps some traveler, lost and tired and unable to go on, had dared to build a small fire almost at Her door, praying Her to spare him in his hour of need.