A Gathering Of Stones

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I put him, Maksim said, where his god can’t reach him. If I kill him, child, there’ll only be another taking his place, another and another, no end to it. He’ll sleep and sleep and sleep… Maksim turned his head and smiled at her… until you and only you, young Kori, until you come and touch him awake. He is in the Cave of Chains. If you can get yourself there, Kori, all you have to do is touch the crystal enclosing him. It will melt and the boy will wake. No one else can do this. No one, god or man. Only you.

She scratched at her nose. All over the place, she thought. I did better concentration my first year. “Tit,” she said, “give us a look, will you?”

Nothing. Obviously he was busy with other things, things more important than a long gone sister. She moved her body impatiently. He’d been looking over her shoulder for years, studying what she studied, maybe even nudging her when he wanted something she wasn’t dealing with at the moment. She’d been driven, those first years. She’d thought it was because she wanted to get away as soon as she could and free her brother. She had to learn, to grow accustomed to working hot and fast, she had to find a way to outwit the Shahntien so she could escape her claws. To outwit Maksim who made a habit of sending his eidolon to chat with her. Maybe it was more than that, maybe it was Trago pushing her. One thing she did know, he was watching and studying a long time before he started talking to her. She worked her mouth. It hurt, thinking that way, but the most important thing she’d learned (besides control, of course) was never lie to yourself. No matter what extravagances you practice on other people, it’s fatal to lie to yourself. She had the Shahntien to show her the truth of that, she had Maksim. Odd, the way he treated her. She could swear he never lied to her, never even shaded the truth. It was hard to take at times, but in the end she was grateful to his habit, in the end she saw this as the starkest compliment he ever paid her. In the end it was why Shahntien Shere stopped hating her. And life at the school got to be a lot easier.

The sun slid down its western arc; shadow crossed the stream and crept around her, cold and silent. Depressing. She was tired and hungry and she hadn’t managed more than a moment or two of real meditation the whole futile day. Her stomach cramped repeatedly through that interminable afternoon, at times she could think of nothing but food. She dreamed of roast chicken with brown-gold gravy pooling round it. She thought of shrimp fried in a batter so light it might have floated off at a breath of wind, succulent pink shrimp. Peaches, peeled and golden, dripping with a rich fragrant nectar. Strawberries. plump tartsweet, floating in whipped cream. She wrenched her mind away and contemplated a blade of grass she pulled from a clump beside the blanket. She considered the greenness of it, greenness as an abstract idea, greenness as it was expressed in this particular physical object, mottled with lines of darker color, with pinpoints and patches of black and tan; she considered the edge where the blade left off and the air began, the finely toothed edge that was not so much green as an extraction from the colors combined into green, a pale anemic yellow fading to white, to no-color.

The sky put out its sunset flags and the wind rose, chill enough to knife through Korimenei’s coat and pullover, stir the hairs on her arms and along her spine. Gentle Geidranay came walking along the mountain peaks. He squatted among them with his head against the sun, his fingers grubbing among the pines, absurdly like the shadow of the Old Man in his garden, grotesquely enlarged and cast against the drop of the darkening sky. The Groomer of Mountains came closer, his fingers swept across the small meadow, brushed against Korimenei and passed out without noticing her. The fingers were like semisolid light, translucent, melting through the air without agitating it, dreamlike and disturbing, a beautiful nightmare, if such could exist. Korimenei shivered and shut her eyes.

A dozen heartbeats later she cracked a lid; the god was gone. She sighed and broke posture. Her head was swimming, but the diriiness faded when she had moved about some more. She went to the stream, refilled her cup and stood watching the water darken to black glass as the last color faded from the sky. She carried the cup to the dead trunk, sat down beside her rucksack and took sip after slow sip until the cup was empty. The largest bulge in the sack was a heavy, knitted laprobe. She thought a moment, then with some reluctance took the laprobe out and dropped it on the blanket; dying of pneumonia was not a desirable outcome of this minor ordeal. She plucked a handful of dry grass and went deeper into the trees to void her bladder; when she was finished she washed her hands at the stream, using sand for soap.

She settled onto the blanket, folded her legs properly and pulled the laprobe about her shoulders.

In the distance an owl hooted. She thought about the Old Man, wondered vaguely who and what he was. Some odd manifestation of the Earthsoul, thrust from the soil as stones are ejected by a combination of earth and thaw? Or a creature as ancient as old Tungjii, perhaps even a kind of kin to himmer? Older than the gods themselves, older than the earth she sat on? Or was he the face of the Mountain itself? Was her blanket spread across his flesh? She moved uneasily, that was an uncomfortable thought. She considered the Old Man and the Mountain and Geidranay, Tungjii and her brother, Maksim and his assorted peculiarities, whether he’d managed to rise above his prejudices, sexual and social, and take her as an apprentice. She wanted that rather desperately; she knew by study and experience now what she’d guessed the first time she saw him: there was no one like him. If he taught her… if he taught her, maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid of what she sometimes saw in herself, what she scurried from like a scared mouse whenever she caught a glimpse of it.

The laprobe trapped warmth around her; sleep tugged at her as she grew more comfortable, threatened to overwhelm her as the night turned darker. A fat, mutilated crescent, the Wounded Moon was already high when the sun went down; its diminished light fell gently on the quiet meadow, cool and pale, drawing color out of grass and trees, turning Korimenei and her blankets into a delicately sketched black and white drawing. Moon moths flew arabesques above the stream, singing their high thin songs. Fireflies zipped here and there, lines of pale gold light, the only color in the scene. A white doe came from under the trees on the far side of the stream. For a long moment the beast gazed at Korimenei, her eyes deep as earthheart and dangerous, Korimenei felt herself begin to drown in them. The doe turned her head, broke contact; as silently as she came, she vanished into the inky shadow under the pines.

A fragment of old song drifted into Korimenei’s mind, one of Harra Hazani’s songs which had been passed with another gift from daughter to daughter down the long years since she came to Owlyn Vale. Korimenei was born with that gift, Harra’s ear for pitch and tone and her sense of rhythm; she’d long suspected it was a major part of her Talent, when she thought of Maksim’s extraordinary voice she was sure of it. “I am the white hind,” she breathed into the night; the darkness seemed to accept and encourage her, so she sang the song aloud. Not all of it, it had hundreds of lines and three voices, the white hind, the gold hart and the fawn; the hind spoke, the hart answered, the fawn questioned both. Korimenei lifted her voice and sang:

/ am the White Hind

Blind and fleet

My feet read the night My flight is silence

My silence summons to me Free and bold

The Gold Hart.

I am the Gold Hart Artful and fierce I pierce the night My flight is wildfire Desire consumes me She looms beside me Fleet and unconfined The White Hind.

Korimenei let the song fade as the doe had faded into the darkness. Why? she thought. What does it mean? Does it mean anything? She closed her eyes and banished memory and idea, accepting only the sounds of the stream. Fragmented images prodded at her but she pushed them away. Hear the stream sing, she told herself, separate the sounds. First the coarse chords. She heard these, named them: the shhhh of the sliding water, the steady pop of bubbles, the brush-brush tinkle against intruding stones and boulder, the clack-tunk of bits of wood floating downstream, bumping into those boulders, swinging into each other. She listened for the single notes of the song, teased them from the liquid languorous melliflow, concentrated on one, then another and another, recognized them, greeted them. Concentrate, she told herself. It’s gone, it’s gone. Narrow your focus, woman. You know how, you’ve done it a thousand times before. It’s gone. Get it back. Concentrate, separate, appreciate, she chanted. Symmetry, limitry, backbone, marrow, she chanted, the phrasemaker in her head plundering her wordstore. Separation, isolation, disseverance, disruption, rent, split and rift, cleavage and abruption, she chanted, the words drowning the water wounds.

The Wounded Moon slipped down his western arc, crossing the spray of stars with a ponderous dignity that dragged at Korimenei’s nerves, setting her to wonder if this interminable night would ever end, if she could possibly get through two more nights like it.

Sometime after moonset, she felt a presence come into the meadow. It was a small meadow with young pines clustering tightly around it. She sat in the center like a rat in a pit. Owl eyes looked at her, immense golden eyes. Owl flew round and round the pinepit meadow, his wings stretched wider than the grass did, but somehow Owl flew there round and round Korimenei. Feathers touched her, wings brushed her head, her shoulder, she smelled him. She trembled, her bones turned to ice. She heard Owl cry something, voices spoke inside her head, there was something they were saying to her, she could not quite understand them.

She was suddenly on Owl’s back, spiraling up and up until she was high above the meadow. She looked down and saw her body sprawled across the dreampattern blanket, the laprobe bunched beside her hip. She was at once frightened and exhilarated. Owl circled higher yet until she saw points of light sprayed out beneath his belly; stars, she thought, we fly above the stars.

Owl tilted suddenly. She slid off his back. She fell. Down and down and down she fell. She was terrified. She was screaming. Her throat was raw from screaming.

Then she was inside her body looking up into the face of Geidranay, a Geidranay made small, his golden flesh like sunlight given form.

The Groomer of Mountains touched her pullover and it fell open, baring her breasts. He plunged his left hand into the earth and brought it up again; he held an amethyst, a single crystal glowing violet and blue. He set it on her chest above her heart and watched it slip inside her, melting through her flesh. He thrust his right hand into the earth and brought it up again; this time he held a moonstone the size of her fist. He touched the closure of her trousers and they fell open, baring her navel. He set the moonstone on her navel and watched it slip inside her. He touched her forehead. His fingers were cool as the stones. He said nothing, but she knew she must not move. He took up the tin cup she used for drinking and drew a golden forefinger about its rim and it turned transparent, gleaming in the starlight like polished crystal. He reached into the air, closed his hand into a fist; when he opened his fingers, diamonds cascaded into the cup. He knelt, dipped the cup into the stream and brought it back to her, the diamonds like ice floating in the water. He cupped his hand behind her head and lifted her gently, tenderly; he put the cup to her lips and she drank. The water was delicately sweet and smelled of spring orchids. The diamonds melted into the water. She drank them also.

When she looked up, Geidranay was gone. The cup was tin again, ancient, battered, as familiar as her:hand.

Feathers brushed across her and her clothing vanished utterly, the laprobe was gone, the dreampattern blanket was gone. She lay on earth and grass. Great wings brushed across her and were gone. Owl walked toward her. It was the Old Man. He stood at her feet and looked down at her. She was ashamed at first because she was naked before him, but she was not afraid. He sank into the earth, slowly slowly. She wanted to laugh when she saw his round stupid face resting on her great toes, then the face slid down and vanished into the earth.

He was reborn from the earth, rising from it as slowly, silently, easily as he went into it. He was covered with red dust, otherwise he was naked and young and beautiful. He put his left foot on her right foot; gently, delicately he moved her leg aside. He put his right foot on her left foot; gently, delicately he moved this leg aside. He knelt between her legs and put his hands on her thighs. She shivered as she felt fire slide into her flesh. He looked at her, smiled. She cried^-out with pleasure, as if that smile were hands touching her. He bent over her, his hands moving along her body; they left streams of red dust on her skin.

His hands moved over her, stroking, rubbing, even pinching where the small sharp pains intensified her pleasure. When he finally pushed into her, the pain was briefly terrible, he burned her, wrenched her open, then she was on fire with a pleasure almost too intense to endure. It went on and on until she was exhausted, too weary to feel anything more.

He rose from her. She cried out, desolate. He stood beside her, his broad tender smile warmed her once more. As Geidranay had reached into the air for diamonds, the Old Man Reborn Young reached up and plucked a square of fine linen from the shadowy air. He came back to her and pressed the cloth between her legs, catching the blood that came from the breaking of her_. hymen. He sat on his heels and folded the cloth into a small packet, the bloodstains hidden inside. He leaned over her, touched her left hand, laid the packet on her palm. Again he said nothing, but she knew it was very very important that she keep the cloth safe and hidden, that she should never speak of it, not to Shahntien Shere or to Maksim, not even to her brother.

He set his right hand flat on the ground beside her thigh. The dreampattern blanket was under her again. He stepped over her leg and squatted beside her, drew the fingers of his left hand from. her ankles to her waist, drew the fingers of his right hand from her waist to her shoulders and she was dressed again. He snapped the fingers of his left hand, spread his hands; the laprobe hung between them. He laid it over her and smiled a last time, touched her cheek in a tender valediction. And was gone.

She slept. When she woke it was midmorning. The first day and the first night was done.