They Fly at Ciron

RUINS

LIGHTNING cracked a whip on the dark, scarring it with light.

Clikit ran for the opening, ducked, fell, and landed in dust. Outside, rain began with heavy drops, fast and full. He shook his head, kneeled back, and brushed pale hair from his forehead. Taut, poised, he tried to sense odors and breezes the way, he fancied, an animal might.

There was the smell of wet dirt.

The air was hot and still.

Blinking, he rubbed rough hands over his cheeks, pulling them away when the pain in his upper jaw above that cracked back tooth shot through his head. A faint light came around corners. Clikit kneaded one ragged shoulder. Dimly he could see a broken column and smashed plaster.

Behind him, the summer torrent roared.

He stood, trying to shake off fear, and walked forward. Over the roar came a clap like breaking stone. He crouched, tendons pulling at the backs of his knees. Stone kept crumbling. Beneath the ball of his foot he could feel sand and tiny pebbles — he had lost one sandal hours ago. He stepped again and felt the flooring beneath his bare foot become tile. The strap on his other sandal was almost worn through. He knew he would not have it long — unless he stopped to break the leather at the weak spot and retie it. Clikit reached the wall and peered around cautiously for light.

In a broken frame above, a blue window let in Tyrian radiance. The luminous panes were held with strips of lead that outlined a screaming crow.

Clikit tensed. But over the fear he smiled. So, he had taken refuge in one of the ruined temples of Kirke, eastern god of Myetra. Well, at least he was traveling in the right direction. It was Myetra he had set out for, uncountable days, if not weeks, ago.

In a corner the ceiling had fallen. Water filmed the wall, with lime streaks at the edge. A puddle spread the tile, building up, spilling a hand’s breadth, building again, inching through blue light. As he looked down at the expanding reflection of the ruined ceiling, he pondered the light’s origin, for — save the lightning — it was black outside.

He walked to the wall’s broken end and looked behind for the source — and sucked in his breath.

Centered on white sand a bronze brazier burned with unflickering flame. Heaped about its ornate feet were rubies, gold chains, damascened blades set with emeralds, silver proof, crowns clotted with sapphires and amethysts. Every muscle in Clikit’s body began to shake. Each atom of his feral soul quivered against its neighbor. He would have run forward, scooped up handfuls of the gems, and fled into the wild wet night, but he saw the figure in the far door.

It was a woman.

Through white veils he could see the ruby points of her breasts, then the lift of her hip as she walked out onto the sand, leaving fine footprints.

Her hair was black. Her eyes were blue. “Who are you, stranger?” And her face…

“I’m Clikit …and I’m a thief, Lady! Yes, I steal for a living. I admit it! But I’m not a very good thief. I mean a very bad one…Something in the expression that hugged her high cheekbones, that balanced over her lightly cleft chin made him want to tell her everything about himself “But you don’t have to be afraid of me, Lady. No, really! Who are — ?”

“I am a priestess of Kirke. What do you wish here, Clikit?”

“I was…” Dusty and ragged, Clikit drew himself up to his full four feet eleven inches. “I was admiring your jewels there.”

She laughed. And the laugh made Clikit marvel at how a mouth could shape itself to such a delicate sound. A smile broke on his own stubbled face, that was all wonder and confusion and unknowing imitation. She said: “Those jewels are nothing to the real treasure of this temple.” She gestured toward them with a slim hand, the nails so carefully filed and polished they made Clikit want to hide his own broad, blunt fingers back under his filthy cloak.

Clikit’s eyes darted about between the fortune piled before him (and beside him! and behind him!) and the woman who spoke so slightingly of it. Her `ebon hair, though the light from the brazier was steady, danced with inner blues.

“Where are you from?” she asked. “Where are you going? And would you like to see the real treasure of the temple?”

“I am only a poor thief, Lady. But I haven’t stolen anything for days, I haven’t! I live out of the pockets of the rich who stroll the markets of Voydrir, or from what I can find not tied down on the docks of Lehryard, or from what is left out in the gardens of the affluent suburbs in Jawahlo. But recently, though, I’ve heard of the wealth of Myetra. I only thought I would journey to see for myself…”

“You are very near Myetra, little thief.” Absently she raised one hand, thumb and forefinger just touching, as if she held something as fine as the translucent stuffs that clothed her.

And dirty Clikit thought: It is my life she holds, my happiness, my future — all I ever wanted or all I could ever want.

“You must be tired,” she went on, dropping her hand. “You have come a long way. I will give you food, rest; moreover, I shall display for you our real treasure. Would you like that?”

Clikit’s back teeth almost always pained him, and he had noticed just that morning that another of his front ones (next to the space left from the one that had fallen out by itself a month ago) was loose enough to move with his tongue. He set his jaw hard, swallowed, and opened his mouth again. “That’s…kind of you,” he said, laying two fingers against his knotted jaw muscle, eyes tearing with the pain. “I hope I have the talents to appreciate it.”

“Then follow…” She turned away with a smile he desperately wanted to see again — to see whether it was a taunting one at him, or a glorious one for him. What he remembered of it, as he trotted after her, had lain in the maddeningly ambiguous between.

Then he glanced down at her footprints. Fear shivered in him. Alabaster toe and pink heel had peeked at him from under her shift. But the prints on the white sand were not of a fleshed foot. He stared at the drawn lines — was it some great bird’s claw? No, it was bone! A skeleton’s print!

Stooping over the clawlike impression, Clikit thought quickly and futilely. If he went to search along the walls for pebbles and stones and fallen chunks of plaster, she would surely see. At once he swept up one, another, and a third handful of sand into his cloak; then he stood, gathering the edges together, twisting the cloak into a club — which he thrust behind him. At another arch the woman turned, motioning him to follow: he was shaking so much he didn’t see if she smiled or not. Clikit hurried forward, hands at his back, clutching the sandy weight.

As he crossed the high threshold, he wondered what good such a bludgeon would do if she were really a ghost or a witch.

Another brazier lit the hall they entered with blue flame. He went on quickly; deciding that at least he must try. But as he reached her, without stopping she looked over her shoulder. “The real treasure of this temple is not its jewels. They are as worthless as the sands that strew the tile. Before the true prize hidden in these halls, you will hardly think of them…” Her expression had no smile in it at all. Rather, it was intense entreaty. The blue light made her eyes luminous. “Tell me, Clikit — tell me, little thief — what would you like more than all the jewels in the world?” At a turn in the passage, the light took on a reddish cast. “What would you like more than money, good food, fine clothes, a castle with slaves…?”

Clikit managed a gappy grin. “There’s very little I prefer over good food, Lady!”—one of his most frequent prevarications. There were few foods he could chew without commencing minutes of agony, and it had been that way so long that the whole notion of eating was, for him, now irritating, inevitable, and awful.

A hint of that smile: “Are you really so hungry, Clikit?”

True. With the coming of his fear, his appetite, always unwelcome, had gone. “I’m hungry enough to eat a bear,” he lied, clutching the sand-filled cloak. She looked away…

He was about to swing — but she turned through another arch, looking back.

Clikit stumbled after. His knees felt as though the joints had come strangely loose. In this odd yellow light her face looked older. The lines of character were more like lines of age.

“The treasure — the real treasure — of this temple is something eternal, deadly and deathless, something that many have sought, that few have ever found.”

“Eh… what is it?”

“Love,” she said, and the smile, a moment before he could decide its motivation, crumbled on her face into laughter. Again she turned from him. Again he remembered he ought to bring his bundle of sand up over his own balding head and down on the back of hers — but she was descending narrow steps. “Follow me down.”

And she was, again, just too far ahead.…

Tripods on the landings flared green, then red, then white — all with that unmoving glow. The descent, long and turning and long again, was hypnotic.

She moved out into an amber-lit hall. “This way.…”

“What do you mean — love?” Clikit thought to call after her.

When she looked back, Clikit wondered: Was it this light, or did her skin simply keep its yellowish hue from the light they had passed through above?

“I mean something that few signify by the word, though it hides behind all that men seek when they pursue it. I mean a state that is eternal, unchangeable, imperturbable even by death …” Her last word did not really end. Its suspiration, rather, became one with the sound of rain hissing through a broken roof in some upper corridor.

Now! thought Clikit. Now! Or I shall never find my way out! But she turned through another arch, and again his resolve fled. She was near him. She was away from him. She was facing him. She faced away. Clikit stumbled through a narrow tunnel low of ceiling and almost lightless. Then there was green, somewhere…

A flood of green light…

Again she turned. “What would you do with such a treasure? Think of it, all around you, within you, without you, like a touch that at first seemed so painful you thought it would sear the flesh from your bones but that soon, you realized, after years and years of it, was the first you had ever known of an existence without pain.…”

The green light made her look… older, much older. The smile had become a caricature. Where, before, her lips had parted faintly, now they shriveled from her teeth.

“Imagine,” and her voice made him think of sand ground in old cloth, “a union with a woman so all-knowing she can make your mind sink towards perfect fulfillment, perfect peace. Imagine drifting together down the halls of night, toward the shadowy heart of time, where pure fire will cradle you in its dark arms, where life is a memory of evil at once not even a memory…” She turned away, her hair over her gaunt shoulders like black threads over stone. “She will lead you down halls of sorrow, where there is no human hunger, no human hurt, only the endless desolation of a single cry, without source or cessation. She will be your beginning and your end; and you will share an intimacy more perfect than the mind or body can endure…”

Clikit remembered the burden clutched behind him. Was it lighter? He felt lighter. His brain floated in his skull, now and again bumping against the portals of perception at eye or ear. And they were turning. She was turning.

“…leading toward perfect comprehension in the heart of chaos, a woman so old she need never consider pain, or concision, or life…”

The word pierced him like a mouse fang.

Clikit pulled his cloak from behind him and swung it up over his shoulder with cramped forearms. But at that instant she turned to face him. Face?… No face! In blue light black sockets gaped from bald bone. Tattered veils dropped from empty ribs. She reached for him, gently taking an edge of his rags between small bone and bone. Empty?

His waving cloak was empty! The sand had all trickled through some hole in the cloth.

Struggling to the surface of his senses, Clikit whirled, pulled away, and fled along the hall. Laughter skittered after him, glancing from the damp rock about him.

“Come back, my little thief. You will never escape. I have almost wrapped my fingers around your heart. You have come too far …too far into the center — ” Turning a corner, Clikit staggered into a tripod that overturned, clattering. The steady light began to flicker. “You will come back to me…” He threw himself against the wall, and because for some reason his legs would not move the way he wanted, he pulled himself along the rocks with his hands. And there was rain or laughter. And the flickering dimmed.

A tall old woman found him huddled beside her shack door next day at dawn.

Wet and shivering, he sat, clutching his bare toes with thick, grubby fingers, now and again muttering about his sandal strap — it had broken somewhere along a stone corridor. From under a dirty, thinning tangle like corn silk, his grey gaze moved slowly to the tall woman.

First, she told him to go away, sharply, several times. Then she bit her lower lip and just looked down at him awhile. Finally, she went back into the shack — and came out, minutes later, with a red crock bowl of broth. After he drank it, his talk grew more coherent. Once, when he stopped suddenly, after a whole dozen sentences that had actually made a sort of sense to her, she ventured:

“The ruins of Kirke’s temple are an evil place. There are stories of lascivious priestesses walled up within the basement catacombs as punishment for their lusts. But that was hundreds of years ago. Nothing’s there now but mice and spiders.”

Clikit gazed down into the bowl between his thumbs.

“The old temple has been in ruin for over a century,” the woman went on. “This far out of the city, there’s no one to keep it up. Really, we tell the children to stay away from there. But every year or so some youngster falls through some unseen hole or weak spot into some crypt, to break an arm or leg.” Then she asked: “If you really wandered so far in, how did you find your way out?”

“The sand…” Clikit turned the crock, searching among the bits of barley and kale still on its bottom. “As I was stumbling through those corridors, I saw the trail of sand that had dribbled through my cloak. I made my way along the sandy line — sometimes I fell, sometimes I thought I had lost it — until I staggered into the room where I had first seen the…” His pale eyes lifted…the jewels!”

For the first time the old woman actually laughed. “Well, it’s too bad you didn’t stop and pick up some of that `worthless treasure’ on your way. But I suppose you were too happy just to have reached open air.”

“But I did!” The little man tugged his ragged cloak around into his lap, pulling and prodding at the knots in it. “I did gather some…” One knot came loose. “See…!” He pulled loose another.

“See what?” The tall woman bent closer as Clikit poked in the folds.

In the creases was much fine sand. “But I — ” Clikit pulled the cloth apart over his lap. More sand broke out and crumbled away as he ran his fingers over it. “I stopped long enough to put a handful of the smaller stones in. Of course, I could take nothing large. Nothing large at all. But there were diamonds, sapphires, and four or five gold lockets set with pearls. One of them had a great black one, right in…” He looked up again. “…the middle…”

“No, it’s not a good place, those ruins.” Frowning, the woman bent closer. “Not a good place at all. I’d never go there, not by myself on a stormy summer night.”

“But I did have them,” Clikit repeated. “How did they — ? Where did they — ?”

“Perhaps — ” The woman started to stand but stopped, because of a twinge along her back; she grimaced — “your jewels trickled through the same hole by which you lost your sand.”

The man suddenly grasped her wrist with short, thick fingers. “Please, take me into your house, Lady! You’ve given me food. If you could just give me a place to sleep for awhile as well? I’m wet. And dirty. Let me stay with you long enough to dry. Let me sleep a bit, by your stove. Maybe some more soup? Perhaps you — or one of your neighbors — has an old cloak. One without so many holes? Please, Lady, let me come inside — ”

“No.” The woman pulled her hand away smartly, stood slowly. “No. I’ve given you what I can. It’s time for you to be off.”

Inside the tall old woman’s shack, on a clean cloth over a hardwood table, lay sharp, small knives for cutting away inflamed gums, picks for cracking away the deposits that built up on teeth around the roots, and tiny files — some flat, some circular — for cleaning out the rotten spots that sometimes pitted the enamel, for the woman’s position in that hamlet was akin to a dentist’s, an art at which, given the primitive times, she was very skilled. But her knives and picks and files were valuable, and she had already decided this strange little man was probably a wandering thief fallen on hard times — if not an outright bandit.

A kind woman, she was, yes; but not a fool. “You go on, now,” she said. “I don’t want you to come in. Just go.”

“If you let me stay with you a bit, I could go back. To the temple. I’d get the jewels. And I’d give you some. Lots of them. I would!”

“I’ve given you something to eat.” She folded her arms. “Now go on, I said. Did you hear me?”

Clikit pushed himself to his feet and started away — not like someone who’d been refused a request, the woman noted, but like someone who’d never made one.

She watched the barefooted little man hobble unsteadily over a stretch of path made mud by rain. As a girl, the old woman had been teased unmercifully by the other children for her height, and she wondered now if anyone had ever teased him for his shortness. A wretch like that, a bandit? she thought. Him? “You’ll be in Myetra in half a day if you stay on the main road,” she called. “And keep away from those ruins. They’re not a good place at all…” She started to call something else. But then, if only from his smile and the smell, when she’d bent over his cloak, those teeth, she knew, were beyond even her art.

She watched him a minute longer. He did not turn back. In the trees behind her shack a crow cawed three times; then flapped up and off through the branches. She picked up the red bowl, overturned on the wet grass, and stepped across the sand, drying in the sun, to go back inside and wait for whichever of the townsfolk would be the first of the day’s clients.