The Snow Queen

7

“Input—”

An ocean of air… an ocean of stone. She was flying. Moon gaped with a stranger’s eyes at the vaulting walls of striated rock that funneled her out into the canyon lands an immeasurable vastness of eroded stone like scrimshaw lace, stained violet, green, crim son, gray. She was trapped in the maw of a transparent bird, an airship in flight; dials and push buttons and strange symbols blinked and clicked on the panel before her. But she was held in stasis by her trance, and she could not reach them, as the ridge of purple stone rose like a wall into her headlong flight.

The ship banked steeply on its own, clearing the ridge and plunging into a deeper chasm, leaving her giddy. Something on the panel flashed red, bleeping critically as her altitude stabilized once more. Where she had come from, where she was bound, where this lithified sea existed, were mysteries she would never be able to answer; along with who, and how, and why… Overhead the sky was a cloudless indigo, blackening toward the zenith, lit by only one tiny, silvery sun. She could not see water anywhere…

“Input—”

An ocean of sand. An infinity of beach, a shoreless dune-sea whose tides flowed endlessly under the eternal wind… Her ship moved over the sand in rippling undulation, and she was not certain from where she sat, helmeted against the furnace of light, high on its armored back, whether it was truly alive or not…

“Input—”

An ocean of humanity. The crowds surged around her on the corner of two streets, pushing and dragging at her like treacherous undertow. Machines roared and clattered past her, clogging the roadways, filling her nose with their bitter reek and battering her ears… A dark-faced stranger dressed all in brown, peaked hat, shining boots, caught at her arm; raised his voice in an unknown language, questioning. She saw his face change abruptly, and he let her go…

“Input—”

An ocean of night. An utter absence of light, and life… a sense of macrocosmic age… an awareness of microcosmic activity… the knowledge that she would never penetrate its secret heart, no matter how often she came back and came back to this midnight void of nothing, nothing at all…

“…No further analysis!” She heard the word echoing, felt her head drop forward in release, caught her breath as the end of another trance wrenched her back into her own world. She sat back on her knees, relaxing the muscles of her body consciously, in a rising wave… breathing deeply and aware of each tingling response.

She opened her eyes at last, to the reassuring presence of Danaquil Lu smiling at her from the rough wooden chair on the other side of the chamber. She controlled her own body now during the Transfer; they no longer had to hold her down, tying her to the real world. She smiled back at him with weary pride, shifted to sit cross legged on the woven mat.

Clavally ducked in at the doorway, momentarily blotting out the puddle of sunlight that warmed Moon’s back. Moon twisted to watch her enter the second pool of light below the battered window frame; Clavally dropped her hand absently to smooth Danaquil Lu’s always-rumpled brown hair. Danaquil Lu was a quiet, almost a shy man, but he laughed easily at Clavally’s constant whimsies. He struck Moon as being somehow ill at ease or out of place here on this island, in these rooms chipped from a wall of porous rock. Where he did belong she couldn’t guess; but sometimes she saw a longing for it in his eyes. Sometimes she caught him looking at her, too, with an expression on his face that she couldn’t name — as though he had seen her somewhere before. There were ugly scars on his neck and the side of his face, as though some beast had clawed him.

“What did you see?” Clavally asked the question that was almost a ritual in itself. To help her learn to control the Transfer, to master the rituals of body and mind that guided a sibyl, they asked her questions with predictable answers — questions they had been asked themselves as a part of their own training. Moon had learned that she never knew what words she would speak in response to a seeker’s questions. Instead she was swept away into a vision: into a pit of blackness as vast as death… into a vibrant dream world somewhere in the middle of another reality. A mystical strand bound each question to a separate dream, and so Clavally or Danaquil Lu could guide her Transfer experience, lessen the terrifying alien ness with predictions of what she would see.

“I went to the Nothing Place again.” Moon shook her head, throwing off the maddening echoes of the dream, shaking out the shadows that still rattled in her memory. The first things they had taught her after her initiation were the mental blocks and disciplined concentration that would keep her sane, that would keep her from overhearing all the thousand hidden thoughts of the Lady’s all-seeing mind, or being swept away into the Lady’s rapture every time anyone around her spoke a question. “Why is it that we go there more than anywhere else? It’s like drowning.”

“I don’t know,” Clavally said. “Maybe we are drowning — they say that those who drown have visions, too.”

Moon moved uneasily. “I hope not.”

Laughter. Clavally crouched down beside Danaquil Lu, rubbing his shoulders with absentminded tenderness; his necklace of shell beads rattled musically. The damp cold at night in these stone rooms left him stiff and aching, but he never complained. Maybe this is why… Moon’s hands tightened over her knees as she watched them together.

“Your control is fine, Moon.” Danaquil Lu smiled, half at her, half at Clavally’s hands. “You improve with every Transfer — you have a very strong will.”

Moon pushed herself to her feet, “I guess I need some air,” her voice suddenly sounding feeble and thin even to her. She went quickly out the doorway, knowing air wasn’t really what she needed.

She half ran down the path that led toward the inlet where their boats were; took the branching track that rose along the blue-green, windy headland above the blue-green sea. Breathing hard, she threw herself down in the long, matted salt grass, pulling her feet in as she looked back toward the south-facing cliff where she had lived like a bird in an aerie the past months. She gazed out over the sea again, seeing in the blue-clouded distance the ragged spine of the Choosing Island , whose small sister this was… remembering with all the vividness of a Transfer dream the moment of the Lady’s decision that had torn her life and Sparks ’s apart. I’m not sorry! Her fist struck hard on the damp grass; opened, strengthless.

She lifted her arm to look at the thin white line along her wrist where Clavally had cut it, as she had cut her own, with a metal crescent long months ago. Danaquil Lu had pressed their wrists together as their blood mingled and dripped down, while he sang a hymn to the Sea Mother here on this very spot. Here, overlooking the Sea, she had been consecrated as they hung the barbed trefoil around her neck; welcomed into a new life as they all sipped in turn from a cup of brine; inita ted with that bond of blood into this holy fellowship. Shaking with fear, she had grown suddenly hot and cold and dizzy as she felt the Lady’s presence come over her… collapsed in a faint between them, waking the next day still weak and feverish, filled with awe. She had become one of the chosen few: From the scars on their wrists, it was clear that Clavally and Danaquil Lu had initiated only half a dozen others before her. She cupped the trefoil in her hand, remembering Sparks holding his own symbol of the distance between them; cupping hers warily, for its barbed points. Death to love a sibyl… to be a sibyl…

But not to love, and be, a sibyl: She looked back at the cliffs jealousy, imagined Clavally and Danaquil Lu sharing love in her absence. Sparks ’s bitter words at parting were only a thin white line on the surface of her mind now, like the white line along her wrist. Time and the memories of a lifetime had swept away her hurt like a wave sweeping footprints from the sand, leaving a bright mirror, a reflection of love and need. She had always loved him, she would always need him. She could never give him up.

Clavally and Danaquil Lu were pledged, and the knowledge was like a small demon trapped inside her chest. To islanders sex was a thing as natural as growing up, but they were private about their private lives; so she had spent many hours in dutiful, solitary meditation, that too easily bled into daydreams of envious longing. And one of the things she had learned about sibyls was that they were not more than human: Sorrow and anger and all the petty frustrations of life still grew from the seeds of her dedication, wrong still came out of the best intentions. She still laughed, and cried, and ached for the touch of him…

“Moon?”

She twisted guiltily at Clavally’s voice behind her.

“Are you all right?” Clavally settled beside her on the grass, putting a hand on her arm.

Moon felt a sudden surge of emotion, beyond the surge of energy any question set free in her mind now — misery craving company. She controlled it, barely. “Yes,” gulping, “but sometimes I… miss Sparks.”

“Sparks? Your cousin.” Clavally nodded. “Now I remember. I saw you together. You said you wanted to be together forever. But he didn’t come with you?”

“He did! But the Lady — turned him away. All our lives we planned to do this together… and then She turned him away.”

“But you still came here.”

“I had to. I’ve waited half my life to be a sibyl. To matter in the world.” Moon shifted, hugging her knees, as a cloud abruptly darkened the sun. Below them the sea turned sullen gray in its shadow. “And he couldn’t understand that. He said stupid things, hateful things. He — went away, to Carbuncle! He went away angry. I don’t know if he’ll ever come back.” She looked up, meeting Clavally’s eyes, seeing the sympathy and understanding that she had hidden from for so long, and realizing that she had been wrong to hide — to carry the burden alone. “Why didn’t the Lady choose us both? We’ve always been together! Doesn’t She know that we’re the same?”

Clavally shook her head. “She knows that you’re not, Moon. That was why She chose only you. There was something inside Sparks that isn’t in you — or the other way around — so that when She struck your hearts there in the cave She heard a false note from his.”

“No!” Moon looked out across the water toward the Choosing Island . The sky was massing with clouds for another rain squall. “I mean — there’s nothing wrong with Sparks . Is it because his father wasn’t a Summer? Because he likes technology? Maybe the Lady thought he wasn’t a true believer. She doesn’t take Winters to be sibyls.” Moon fingered the lank grass, searching the tangled strands for an explanation.

“Yes, She does.”

“She does?”

“Danaquil Lu is a Winter.”

“He is?” Moon’s head came up. “But — how? Why? I always heard… everybody says that they don’t believe. And that they’re not… like us,” she finished lamely.

“The Lady works in strange ways. There is a kind of well at the heart of Carbuncle, that opens down to the sea from the Queen’s palace. On his first visit to court, Danaquil Lu crossed over the bridge that spans the well — and the Sea Mother called up to him, and told him that he must become a sibyl.”

Clavally smiled sorrowfully. “People are sweet and sour fruit together, wherever you find them. The Lady picks the ones that best suit Her tastes, and She doesn’t seem to care whether they worship Her, or anyone.” Her eyes turned distant; she glanced up at the rooms in the cliff face. “But few Winters even try to become sibyls, because they’re taught that it’s madness, or superstitious fakery. They rarely even see sibyls, sibyls are forbidden to enter Carbuncle.

The off worlders hate them for some reason; and whatever the off worlders hate, the Winters hate too. But they believe in the power of the Lady’s retribution.” Lines deepened in her face. “They have a pole, that ends in a collar of spikes, so that no one is ‘contaminated’ by a sibyl’s blood…”

Moon thought of Daft Nairy… and of Danaquil Lu. Her hand touched the trefoil tattoo at the base of her neck, beneath the ivory wool of her sweater. “Danaquil Lu—”

“—was punished, driven out of Carbuncle. He can never go back; at least while the Snow Queen rules. I met him during one of my circuits through the islands. I think, since we’ve been together, he’s been happy… or at least content. And I’ve learned many things from him.” She glanced down — suddenly, unexpectedly, looking like a girl. “I know it’s probably wrong of me, but I’m glad they sent him into exile.”

“Then you know how I feel.” Clavally nodded, smiling down. She pushed back her parka sleeve, exposing the long-healed scars on her wrist. “I don’t know why we were chosen… but we weren’t chosen because we’re perfect.”

“I know.” Moon’s mouth twitched. “But if it’s not because he’s interested in technology, how could Sparks be less perfect than I am—”

“—when you think there couldn’t be anything more perfect than the lover you remember?”

A sheepish nod.

“When I first saw you together, I had a feeling — after a while you do — that if you came here you would be chosen. You felt right to me. But Sparks… there was an unsettled ness

“I don’t understand.”

“You said that he left angry. You think he left as much for the wrong reasons as for the right ones — that he did it to hurt you? That he blamed you for your success, and his failure.”

“But I would have felt all those things too, if he’d been chosen instead—”

“Would you?” Clavally looked at her. “Maybe any of us would all the good will in the world can’t keep us from swallowing the fishhook baited with envy. But Sparks blamed you for what happened. You would only have blamed yourself.”

Moon blinked, frowned; remembered their childhood, and how rarely he had tried to disagree with her. But when they did argue, he would run away and leave her alone. He would hold his anger for hours, even days. And in the lonely space he left behind, she would turn her own anger in on herself. She would go to him every time, and apologize, even when she knew he was wrong. “I guess I would have. Even though it’s nobody’s fault. But that’s wrong, too.”

“Yes… except that it hurts no one but you. And I think that’s the difference.”

Two sudden drops of rain pelted Moon’s uncovered head; she looked up, confused and startled. She pulled up her hood as Clavally got to her feet and gestured toward shelter.

They ducked under a stand of young tree-ferns. The rain smothered all other sound for a space of minutes. They stood silently, blinded by a field of molten gray, until the rain squall moved off across the sea on the back of the wind. Moon stirred away from the fern’s dark, pithy trunk; watched the pattern of droplets stranded like pearls in the fragile lacework of its canopy, watched them fall. She put out a hand. “It’s stopped already.” Her anger at Sparks had passed as swiftly as the rain, and had as little effect on the greater pattern of her life. But when they met again, so much would be different between them… “I know people have to change. But I wonder if they know when to stop.”

Clavally shook her head; they began to walk back together along the path, sidestepping the sudden stream that it had become. “Not even the Lady can answer that. I hope you’ll find that Sparks has answered it for himself, when you see him again.”

Moon turned in the track, walking a few strides backwards as she looked out across the restless sea toward home.