The Limbreth Gate

TWELVE

'Ican go no farther.' Hollyika abruptly dropped down on the road. She settled on her haunches, her massive head drooping onto her bent knees. Ki halted in surprise, for the Brurjan-Human mule had shown no signs of weariness before this. Their pace had been steady, the lights drawing them on as smoothly as line run over a pulley.

'Do you need water?' Ki asked. She sloshed the jug she was carrying. In tacit consent they had been drinking sparingly, for they knew they had a dry way to go. But Hollyika shook her head slowly.

'It would help,' she admitted. 'It would ease me. But it would be an easing only, not a cure. I am weak. It is my own foul nature that dooms me, that makes me unfit to tread this road and drives me to my knees. I have tried, Ki. Since I drank of these waters and my mind was cleared, I have taken no creature that breathes to be my food. Water only have I drunk, no rich warm blood. Grass I have eaten, to be as innocent as the horse I once enslaved, though it caught between my teeth and strangled me as it went longways down my throat. My body betrays me; it was never designed for this life, but for a life of baseness on the far side of the Gate. My strength came from my evil ways and now that I have forsaken them, my body will not carry me to the Limbreth. The better path is denied me.'

A terrible sympathy welled up in Ki. She wanted to comfort her, but had no words, for the truth could not be compromised. Slowly she sank down beside her. 'Drink then, and be eased.'

Hollyika reached for the jug, then slowly put her hands back on her knees. 'No. You will need it to reach the Limbreth. If I drink now, we shall both be lost. I am going to die here, Ki, on this road, and I will never see the Jewels of the Limbreth. The doing of any great deed is denied me, but I am left the chance of not doing a foul one. I will not drink and by not drinking, I shall be sending you on the Limbreth. Whatever peace you gain when you reach the Limbreth, think of me.'

'I shall.' Ki did not try to sway her. The longer she was in this land, the more often she drank its water, the clearer her path became. Old patterns of thought and behavior were sloughing from her like outgrown skins and in their stead she was finding wisdom that welled up in her as effortlessly as the silver waters welled up from the land. Decisions no longer troubled her, she did not seesaw at crossroads, nor torment herself with wondering. The better way, the right way, was clear before her like a shining silver thread to be followed. Hollyika was doing the right thing in denying herself that Ki might go on. In any other place and time, Ki would have tried her best to dissuade her, would have felt by friendship bound to do so. But her new wisdom taught her better. Hollyika was not designed to live in this land, and for Ki to force her to strive on would be a cruelty, a giving of false hope. Both of them had grown beyond that.

'I will stay with you,' she said softly, 'for a while, that your candle will not burn out alone. Then I shall go on to the Limbreth and the Jewels, and in their peace I shall hold your memory.'

Hollyika looked up at her with great brown eyes full of wisdom and sorrow. She knew, in the same way Ki did, that her decision was correct. She nodded slowly. 'I shall not keep you long,' she promised. 'My strength was ebbing before I met you by the river. Since then I have traveled on the reserves of my flesh, burning what the Brurjans call the oil of the last lantern. My body follows most closely the way of that folk; to be strong and to strive, until the very last moments when there is no strength left. Death, now, is not far off.' She lowered her head slowly until her broad forehead rested again on her knees. Ki sat beside her in the midst of the strange land they had traveled together. The air was keen, but the chill no longer troubled her body. The water had seen to that.

The wide lustrous fields of the farmers had been left behind as the road climbed straight and true, and now it threaded hilly country, ungrazed by any save wild flocks. Small yellow and white flowers shone out in the grasses like stars come to earth; and even the bare bones of this place, where the rocks thrust suddenly from the verdant hillside, seemed to scintillate coldly with a light of their own. Hollyika alone was a dark and huddled thing, a lightless lump in a place of glowing life. To be so strange and alien in this comforting place was lonesome enough; but Hollyika was dying in a world where living was peace. Ki reached over and took her hand, holding it loosely and companionably in her own. She stroked the downy fur on the back of the hand and looked down on the clean black nails that thickened like claws.

'Ki?' Her voice was muffled. 'For all the Romni, will you forgive me?'

'I will.' Ki gave no thought to the words, for the decision was plain. 'For all the Romni, I forgive you.' It was so simple, with the water running cool within her and the black road running straight before her; it was all so very simple and easy and good. The pale far lights of the Limbreth blinked at her, letting her stay for now, but waiting for her.

Without warning Hollyika fell over on her side and lay slightly curled in the road. With each softly expelled breath, she made a 'kah' sound. She looked terrible, with dry crusts forming around her eyes and her breath foul with dying. Ki set her hand down gently against her breast and stroked the dry fur, once sleek, that covered ribs beneath scanty flesh. If she had seen Hollyika as a Brurjan, she would have known from her first sight of her that she was starved to the edge of death. But Ki had imputed her lack of bulk to her Human side.

Ki rose stretching. As she did so, she looked down at her own body and was amazed at how ribby she herself had become. She could not remember when she had last eaten, but no pangs of hunger stirred in her. She unstoppered the jug and took a tiny swallow of water. Even that small sip spread coolness and comfort through her, and she was able to see Hollyika's death in a calm, clear light. The poor creature had tried to set aside her martial ways and become a seeker of peace, but her body could not adapt. Her death was not upon Ki's head, and she basked in the comfort of that knowledge - and then realized how foreign it was to her former way of thinking. Even as she startled at it, she realized it was the Limbreth reaching into her mind and bringing order out of the chaos that years of unguided living had created. The Limbreth were to guide her now. She sat down upon the road again, hugging her knees, letting their wisdom flow through her.

Dimly she became aware of a sound: hoof thuds and the creaking rumble of a wagon. Whoever was driving was in a hurry; only a fool would drive so rapidly in the dark. But he was yet a long ways off; she seemed to feel the sounds through the road rather than hear them with her ears.

Slowly she moved to the side of the road. She thought about Hollyika lying where she would be trampled, but the Limbreth wisdom touched her, and she saw it did not matter if she died of starvation or was trampled to death, for death was her goal. Ki should give her no grief, nor any further thought. Hollyika had been her guide, and in following that vocation she had risen as high as was possible for her. Her death would be a peaceful one, no matter how it came, for in her own heart she knew these things. Her honor had been to prepare Ki for the path that lay before her. And now Ki must come, for she was ready. Come.

The sound of the wagon and team distracted her. They were still far away, but the sound came to her clearly, and it stirred something in her. Come now, a voice within her cried, and she received animpression of terrible danger. She rose to her feet, feeling for an instant woozy and unsteady; then the night snapped into clarity. In the new Limbreth darkness, she saw with a clarity her eyes had never enjoyed in the harsh brightness of sunlight. The subtlety of shades of colors came to her and new insights flooded her. She was able to see how the leaves held up the branches of the trees; she understood for the first time that a mountain was a place where the substance of the sky had withdrawn and the earth had risen to fill it. All the immense things that made up the world, the mountains, the rivers, the forests, were actually very tiny things bound together in a common purpose, just as her life was a very small and finite thing, a tiny being coming into a place where a tiny bit of non-being had withdrawn. She was made not merely of flesh, but of moments of time, and of a greater purpose she did not know, any more than an individual leaf knew its tree. Anything she ever wanted to do, she must do now and at the risk of failure, for the length of her life was not revealed to her: she might be called at any time to surrender her life spark. All she could be sure of accomplishing were the things she had already done.

That last thought galvanized her. She had not yet attained the Limbreth. At any moment, all chance she had of reaching them might be snatched away from her by her own mortality. Unlike Hollyika, she did not have even a minor goal attained that would let her die in honor, and by her own slothfulness she would have sullied Hollyika's attainment of guiding her. It all rested on her now.

Ki began to tremble. She raised the jug of water and drank hastily, hoping to quell her sudden terror, but her desperate purposefulness was only increased by it. She stoppered the jug and hugged it tightly under her arm, and ran. No time to waste in saying farewell to a dead thing on the road; Hollyika would not want goodbyes that wasted precious time. She must go to the Limbreth.

As she ran, her body became lighter. The water within her now did not slosh in her belly like ordinary water. It rippled through her limbs like a stream dashing down a hill, lending her the swiftness of running water. The road unfurled before her and her bare feet poured over it. She felt a dew of sweat damp her skin, oiling her muscles, letting her run as smoothly as fish sliding through silver water. There was no effort to this motion, and it took no time at all. Time was stilled, breathless in an eternal night, as Ki ran to the Jewels of the Limbreth.

Only twice in that long uphill run did she fall. Even as she lay motionless with her face against the road's hard surface, she could feel the Limbreth flowing in her, urging her closer. Each time she fell she drank more water, and the second time she finished it and cast aside the jug. After she drank, she could rise again, renewed, to run on. The glimmering lights were closer, and still closer. The soft air bore her up and the smooth moss of the road was warm underfoot. When she finally halted to breathe after the long final rise, she felt she teetered on the brim of the valley below her. Awe washed over her.

The glowing lights of the Limbreth, viewed for so long from far off, were more than brilliant here. They clustered as if on the brows of stony giants. There could not have been more than a dozen in all, but their very massiveness made them seem legion. The road flowed down from her feet and spread around them in a massive puddle of smooth blackness. A ridge buckled up from the center of this dark plain, and on this ridge they were rooted. Immense steep-sided pillars they were, featureless as black water, until her eyes touched their crowns. The lights glimmered upon them, and Ki felt them as eyes, though she could not believe they saw her. Beings such as those must spend their sight upon less finite things than a mere Human. She envisioned them gazing eternally up into the shrouded skies of this place, seeing through the perpetual overcast to the stars that lurked beyond. Her skin shivered all over her flesh. She was moved in a way too deep for a Human to tolerate. Joyous tears stung her eyes, but she wished to scream in terror.

'There is ... too much of them.' She could barely bring the words out of her mouth. It was beyond her to wonder how she knew of their vast sentience. Enough that their age and wisdom filled the valley before her like wine fills a goblet. Her breath came and went in a constricted throat. Her first step was hesitant, but then her feet flew. She was coming home, her heart told her, home! She laughed aloud. Even as she looked on the Limbreths, they changed before her marveling eyes, so that they were ever new and wondrous. They, and then, no, it, she realized, they were one and many at the same time, but it was their unity that had called to her. With every step she took toward them, she was bedazzled with revelations, until she felt her skin sparkling with new knowledge. She bubbled with their effervescent miracles. Her feet lifted and fell tirelessly on the road and peace flowed through her.

'Come!' called a sudden voice, a voice like nothing Ki had ever heard; if metal had been given a tongue, so it might sound. But her wisdom told her it was the voice of the Jewels that crowned the Limbreth. She ran to them, down the last bit of hill and across the dark plain.

The Limbreth loomed before her, and she approached it eagerly, awed but urged on by the inner knowledge that she was now fit to confront it. When she had entered the Gate, she had begun a time of preparation; the many layers of her false world were stripped away from her like a dry husk from a ripe seed. It humbled her that the Limbreths had seen fit to so purify her. Without them, she would never have come to this awakening of self.

Understanding burned her like a fever. For all the time she had been coming to the Limbreth, it had been beside and around her; she had only to open her eyes and see. The hard smooth road beneath her feet was a part of the Limbreth, as was the cooling water that flowed for her. The path of purification and the waters of awareness, others had called them. This the Limbreth let her know, for they were kin now, and it could speak in her mind.

At the base of the Limbreth, Ki sank down to rest in blessed peace. The sheer sides of the Limbreth rose in a pillar too large for even four Humans to circle with joined hands; its surface was hard and smooth as the road, but unseen beneath it seethed and bubbled the same silvery waters as flowed in the river. Its lofty crown of the flickering, glowing Jewels pulsed gently with the emanations of the Limbreth's thoughts, shining into Ki's mind as they dappled her flesh with glowing colors.

'I am here!' she told it, rejoicing.

'And I am here, as I always have been.' In the Limbreth's simple reply, Ki felt its years; it had always been and it remembered all. It would remember her always, also. Whatever else might happen to her, this moment gave her immortality in the Limbreth's memory. She felt a touch on her mind and that touch took up her sentience and gave it back to her, reordered and refreshed. 'Rest now and think,' the Limbreth instructed her. 'Go again through your life. Ask me what you will and I will answer you. Know yourself as well as I know you. You will be able to see how your own choices have always destined you for me.'

Ki let her mind drift lazily on the current of her thoughts, marveling at all she had known without knowing. The Limbreth had charted all her moments and correlated all her knowledge in those brief moments, flowing through her consciousness, leaving its shining trail through all her memories. She looked back over her years and felt the Limbreth at her shoulder as she did so; the Limbreth explained the feelings that had baffled her and cataloged the needs that had gnawed endlessly at her, and gaps in what she knew about herself were filled.

Even her most private moments and thoughts had been gently handled and brought to order. Ki looked back over a life that was suddenly a harmonious whole, no longer a string of events that varied from dull to shattering. She saw how they all fit together, and how unknowingly she had shaped the most devastating of her tragedies. Saw, but no longer flinched from seeing. Memories too painful to recall were given back to her, their poison drawn. Then one fine spring morning rose into her mind, and it was like seeing the keystone of the arch. The weather had been mild and the small campfire long cold on the morning she had arisen and toddled from her blankets. She had wandered away from the caravan encampment, drawn by sweet singing, and followed the blue-gowned stranger.

The Limbreth numbered for her the days among the Windsingers. She saw them through her baby eyes as immensely tall and gracious beings that cared for her and dressed her in a little white robe. Then her mother had come, wearing Ki's own adult face, to steal her back. Ki remembered her joy at the reunion, and then knew terror again as her mother and a scarlet Harpy fought over her to their mutual deaths. Then Aethan came for her, to take her home to the wagon.

It was only one memory, buried under the callus of years, but it gave order to all others. Had she not gone to that sweet call, the Windsingers would not have known her. They would not have sent the Harpies to kill Sven and her babies nor would she have had to face a blue Harpy in the Pass of the Sisters; Vandien would never have scarred his face taking its claws in her stead. Dresh would not have used her as a pawn against the Windsingers. Nor would the Windsingers finally have disposed of her by putting her through a Gate - if only she had not followed the singing. But all those things were as they had to have been, in order to lead her to this moment before the Limbreth.

The Limbreth was silent, but Ki felt the quiet as a probing question. She puzzled, waiting for her emotions to rise. She thought of the callous ways in which the Windsingers had twisted her life. She should resent them for separating her from her husband, children, and friend, and finally setting her adrift from her own world. They had sent her here as a gift to the Limbreth, as if she were a cow or a sack of beans. She should be full of plans for vengeance.

Nothing. The peace of the Limbreth flowed through her. All of that was past. No action of hers could alter the past; but she could shape her future, take her exile by the Windsingers and turn it into a thing of beauty and wonder, and her life would have a meaning.

'That is good,' the Limbreth told her. 'You are ready.'

'I am ready,' Ki assented.

'You know yourself. Now I must teach you the world.'

Another touch upon her mind, this one soft as melting butter. Ki saw all as the Limbreth knew it, and the Limbreth was old and unchanged since the Gatherers had first brought it here. Its own far world had gone into rosy darkness and then deep cold, and the Gatherers had brought it here that the Limbreth need not perish. The Gatherers, free of time and space, took from every world a few of each kind of being, and brought them to these linked worlds, putting each with kinds similar enough to share a world, and bidding them only to keep their species intact. To the simpler races they did not make themselves known, but to the old beings, such as the Limbreth, the unchanging ones who knew something of the scope of time, they occasionally came and spoke. The others lived out the days of their lives in their own ways, unaware of the miracle of their continuance. Ki saw that now, and her concept of the world was enlarged and renewed just as her memories of her life had been. She knew herself, and she saw again her niche in the order of things and the insignificance of her brief life. To the Limbreth she was a moth newly hatched, and doomed to die before the night ended. The knowledge freed her. What were wagons and cargoes, coins and friendships, when set in such a framework? Like the tailings of an earthworm, in a moment they crumbled back to common dirt and could not be distinguished from it. Nothing so brief could hold any obligations; but she might freely choose to pay her debt to the Limbreth, to the extent thather small being was capable of.

The bridge she had crossed to come here had been the work of one from beyond a Gate, called by the Limbreth to a higher goal. Wrought from the very stuff of the Limbreth itself, it was as eternal as they were, a monument of that fluttering moth to the black night of time. The essence of a mortal being had been poured into that structure and physically immortalized by it.

'What will you do?' the Limbreth asked her gently. The night held its breath as she sought for her answer.

'I would like.' She stopped.

'Yes?' prodded the Limbreth.

'I would make a garden. A garden of life, not merely a garden that lives. A garden that grows from the seeds of wisdom you have given me. One would pass through it on the way to the bridge. That is what my soul would do, but ...'

The Limbreth shone gently upon her. 'Do not be daunted. I am neither stone nor water, as you perceive me. The vision shall be yours and the working of it. But the skill will come from me, as will the material to bring it to life. I am the fertile sod, the rains, and the wind that spreads the pollen. Go, now, and begin.'

Ki started to step away and then felt a glow of warmth from the Limbreth upon her back. She waited.

'You have given me a new story, one that pleases me greatly. I am old, and the older I get, the more every new thing is savored. I shall not forget an instant of your life, Ki. You have been but an instant, but you have filled it full. Your garden will reflect it.'

Ki turned eyes onto the road that went back up the hill. She had not rested, and her journey had been long. And now she had as far to go again, to return to her chosen spot. She felt the amusement of the Limbreth. Was not this its world? Did not the road do as it was bid? Let Ki follow a new path, one that would take her back swiftly to her destination, avoiding all distractions.

The new road unrolled before her feet like a flung carpet. Moss carpeted it for her as swiftly. It flowed like a shining stream, an effortless straight path to follow. Weariness fell from her and a desire to reach her chosen spot and begin blazed up in her. She would pour herself into it. She sprang away as lightly as a hart, racing down the road as she had never run before.