Castle War

Sixteen The Mountains of Marnass

He lifted his hand from the rippling water and watched his image waver in it. The faces of Jeremy and Isis were gone. He watched the surface of the melt pond until it grew still again. His image confronted him with a questioning stare.Who is real, you or me?

“Don’t really know, my friend.”

He went to his horse, which he had tethered to an evergreen bush. The animal had cooled off enough for him to allow it to take water. He led it to the rock-rimmed pond and let it drink of melted snows.

A bracing wind blew across the peaks and down, whistling through stands of pine and fir. The scenery reminded him of the Rocky Mountains, western Colorado specifically. The hellwind had blown him across half a continent and deposited him on these slopes. It had been a strange sensation watching the ground drop away and feeling the horse beat its hooves against nothing but air. But beat it did, as on some invisible highway in the sky. The storm had lashed around him, lightning forking perilously close.

Too forking close for comfort, he thought.

Riding a hellwind took a lot out of you. His mount was completely worn out. He needed to stop and rest, but time was short. What he really needed was a fresh mount. He had no idea where he could get one.

He led his horse downward. Clouds bunched at the peak above. The cry of a mountain bird came to his ears as the trail wound through trees and boulders.

After an hour’s descent he stopped, standing on a flat boulder and surveying the slope ahead. There was something unusual below. A huge bronze statue reclined on a base of stone set into the hillside. The figure was winged, and from the back looked very unusual. Leading his tired mount once more, he went down to get a better look. On the way a possible plan of action occurred to him.

He stood before a stone altar and looked up at the thing. It was a creature with the head and bust of a woman, great feathered wings, and a powerful leonine body. The bronze was tinted with the blue-green of verdigris. The statue was probably ages old.

“Hello, there,” he said to it. “Now, aren’t you a riddle.”

The woman’s face was broad-browed and severely beautiful, the breasts full and out-thrusting. Long hair fell over the shoulders. The eyes looked out across the valley below, staring into the mists of the peaks beyond. There was character in the face; a spirit somehow radiated from the cold bronze. Such had been the skill of the artificer. The great wings were lifted as if the creature were poised on the brink of flight.

“Must be cold and lonely on this mountainside,” he mused. “Maybe we can work something out.”

He went back to the trail and searched among the shards of stone along its edge. He found what he needed and came back to the flagstone platform in front of the statue. He knelt and began to draw, his stylus a bit of limestone.

A complex figure took shape under his hand. It was partly geometrical, partly free-form. Intricate tracery flowered to one side, a column of arcane symbols running opposite.

When he was done he looked it over and nodded. He tossed the stone aside and stood in the center of the device. He held out his arms and began a chant.

The words were of some sibilant tongue, the phrases long and involuted. In the sky above, dark clouds gathered and hid the sun. A flash exploded out of their midst and a crack of thunder sounded. Another.

The chant went on. Dust whipped up from the trail, and the tops of the pines bent in the sudden winds. A spattering of rain fell. Thunder and lightning continued for several minutes.

At last the chant ended. The clouds slowly moved off, the sun peeking out from the dispersing haze. The wind stopped. He let his arms fall and opened his eyes.

The eyes of the statue were regarding him curiously.

“What are you?” the thing said, its voice deep yet still sounding like a woman’s voice.

“I am a man,” he answered. “How do you feel?”

The wings moved up and down, then lowered and folded.

“Strange,” the creature said. Its eyes moved across the length of its body. “I do not know what I am, yet my form seems familiar to me.”

“It’s a fine form. You are you. You must be used to being you after all this time.”

The human eyes narrowed. “Yes, I seem to remember the past. Many of your kind have been here. They sent up offerings.”

“Yes, they did. Did such doings please you?”

“It was neither pleasing nor displeasing to me. Are you going to offer me something?”

“Yes, the chance for freedom. You have wings, but have you ever flown?”

“I do not remember.”

“I doubt that you have. How does the prospect of doing such a thing strike you?”

“It occurs to me that flying must be part of my nature.”

“Undoubtedly. Uh, I’ll lay it on the line. I need a lift. I must travel quickly and you can help. I wish you to carry me to my destination. How does that strike you?”

The creature considered the matter. Then it said, “I find it odd that I have no objection to this thing. Why is it that I do not?”

“I must confess that I stacked the deck a little. You were brought to life with the desire to repay the kindness bestowed on you.”

“What kindness?”

“That of bringing you to awareness and setting you free. You were getting a little tired of standing up here in the wind, weren’t you?”

“I am glad that it will no longer be necessary. I will repay you for this boon.”

“Good. Wait one second.”

He took the saddle off his horse and put it on the statue’s base. He boosted himself up, picked up the saddle, and placed it on the creature’s back. The girth didn’t reach around the belly, but he positioned the saddle as squarely as he could. A little magical concentration would be needed anyway to hang on, secure saddle or none.

He mounted the creature and seated himself.

“Anytime you’re ready,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“To the valley of the Mizzerites. Do you know where it lies?”

“No.”

“No matter. I will direct you.”

The wings unfolded and began to move up and down. Soon they were two great pinions beating the air.

The creature left its base and took to the air. The slope dropped away. Beast and rider soared on the cool winds between the peaks, banking one way, then the other, riding the shifting pressures and rising vapors. The rider hung on, his legs tight around the creature’s middle.

“You have not yet told me what I am,” she said.

He suddenly had taken to thinking of the creature as a “she.”

“What do you feel you are?”

“I feel … that I am partly what you are. Partly a man. But not quite. I am …”

“The word is ‘woman.’”

“Yes, I feel that I am a woman. Yet I am more than that. Or less, perhaps.”

“You feel in some way inferior?”

“I cannot say. I am different from anything else in this world. I am alone. I have always been alone.”

“Each of us is inevitably alone in this world. Or any world.”

“I feel that may be true. But some are more alone than others. You say you brought me to life?”

“I did. Do you regret it already?”

“I feel a great emptiness inside. There is a longing, a yearning.”

“That is the woman in you.”

“Indeed? It is a peculiar sensation.”

“So I’ve been told.”

The peaks across the valley drew near. Being higher, these were tipped with snow.

“We need to get over these mountains. Can you do it?”

“I can.”

The huge wings beat faster as she climbed in a spiral. Foothills fell away, and rocky slopes approached. At the top of the spiral she banked, turned, and glided. The snows lay below, very near as the craggy peak passed beneath.

The winds shifted abruptly, and she compensated, subtly changing the angle of attack on the leading surface of her wings. They began the long descent.

“Have you ever hang-glided? Just joking.”

“What is joking?”

“Never mind. Do you feel good about yourself?”

“I still feel very strange. I have been thinking. After we reach your destination, is it your intention to leave me free to my own devices?”

He was long in answering. “I seem unable to lie to you. I have given you life, but it cannot be permanent. Your existence will be brief. But is it not better to exist for even a short time than never to rise to awareness at all?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I do not know the answer yet. Life itself seems unutterably strange. There seems to be no sense in it. All I know is that I hunger for something.”

“Hunger is part of life.”

“I thirst,” she said. “I need.”

“Those things as well.”

“Is that what life is? Unfulfilled needs?”

“Partly. Part of it is the attempt, the struggle to fulfill those needs. When the needs are satisfied, stagnation sometimes sets in.”

“I do not know what that could be. But to continue my thoughts — if I am soon to cease existing, why should I not throw you from my back and fly unburdened? For the short time I have allotted to me, it seems constraining that I should be under obligation.”

“I can understand. But I don’t think you will throw me off.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “I feel a bond with you.”

“Perhaps you feel indebted.”

“That, too. But something else. It relates to my hunger.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. But I have not the words to express it. Tell me. Why did you create me only to exist for so short a time?”

“I must confess I was thinking mostly of my own needs at the moment. I needed you for a specific purpose, an urgent one. I did not fully consider all the consequences. I see that I should have given them some thought.”

“Perhaps you should have. But I exist now, and there is no going back. You have told me the reason why I exist. That is enough. I fulfill an urgent need. I am useful.”

“That you are.”

“But it is not easy to exist.”

“No, it is not.”

“There is pain.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“I now know what this hunger is. It is love.”

“Yes,” he said.

“How can I feel this thing for a being who is not very much like me?”

He answered, “But I am like you in some ways. We share a certain mode of being. A humanness.”

“I also feel that we share this, somehow. It is very strange.”

“Such things always are.”

She asked, “Can you reciprocate my feelings in any way?”

“I can greatly admire you. You are a magnificent creature.”

“But you seem to be saying that you cannot love me.”

“Again, I am sorry. What are you feeling now?”

“Sorrow,” she said.

“Aye.”

“And an unnamable feeling, dark and turbulent.”

“Anger.”

“Yes. Thank you. Again I am thinking that it would be better if I threw you off. It would be interesting to watch what happens to a creature such as you who falls from a great height.”

“Is your anger that consuming?”

An interval passed. The wind shrieked as they dove. She leveled off and began beating her wings again, slowly, steadily, maintaining altitude. The land below had become parched, cut with canyons and winding rivers.

“My anger has passed. I no longer want you to die. I still feel love for you, lifegiver. And I must suffer for it.”

“There is an old saying that applies,” he said, “but I can’t bring myself to mouth it. I am sorry to have caused you sorrow, but it appears to have been a necessary part of the scheme of things. If you did not love me, you never would have served me. You, my creation, must cease to exist, and I must live with regret. Such is the lot of creators.”

The terrain had changed again. A wide river crawled below, flanked by grain fields in a patchwork quilt. The fields were crosshatched with canals and irrigation ditches. Huge monuments populated the arid land beyond the fertile fringe of the river.

“Set me down here,” he instructed.

She descended, gliding toward the sprawling grid of a temple complex. Swooping in, wings making a sound like the beating of an excited heart, she landed in a plaza between two ruined buildings.

He dismounted and looked around. Truncated columns, crumbling walls, tumbled obelisks. He did not know Mizzer very well, having only taken a cursory tour many years before. A lover of antiquities, he had always wanted to undertake a serious archeological expedition. Now he wished he had done so. Simply finding the Temple of the Universes would be half the task. It was legendary, and might not even exist anymore, if it ever had. The modern-day inhabitants — most of them not descended from the ancient Mizzerites — were primitive and superstitious, and he could not depend on native help.

But he might have no choice. Lacking an authoritative map or other ancient document, he might have to hire a native guide if only to familiarize himself with the local folklore.

He would need money. Luckily he had a little gold, and the saddle would fetch a good price. He hoped.

But first he had a disagreeable task.

She was looking at him.

“Have I served you well?” she asked.

“Yes. Thank you. I must leave you now.”

“How long will I continue to live?”

“Not long, I fear. You may do what you wish in the time remaining.”

“There is nothing I wish to do. I have tasted the cold skies, viewed the world from a great height. I have seen enough. And I have loved. But before you go, will you do something for me?”

“Yes?”

“Let me kiss you.”

He regarded her for a moment. “All right.”

She crouched and he went to her and stood on her outstretched paws. The human part of her was not too oversize; moreover, she was beautiful. Her full breasts heaved.

He brought his face close to hers. Her eyes were dark and filled with longing.

He kissed her, and a shudder went through her massive body.

Then her lips grew cold and hard. He stepped back. He had just kissed a bronze statue.

She looked at home crouching in the plaza, as if she had been intended for the site. In her eyes now was the cold stare of infinity.

He looked at her for a long time. The sun moved in the sky and temple columns moved their shadows to suit it.

Then he left the plaza to make his way to the river.