Tiriki lay wakeful upon her narrow bed, but sleep would not come. She could hear the drumming from the fire circle like the throbbing pulse of a man and woman in the throes of love. Her lips twitched with wry amusement. There had been gasps and laughter from among the bushes as she carried Domara back to bed, and she had been grateful the child was not awake to ask her what was making the noise. Weddings were celebrated at times propitious for matings, so it was no wonder if others found themselves stirred by the same energies.
Unfortunately she could feel that yearning as well as anyone else, and she was alone. She could imagine herself in Micail’s arms, but the stimulation of memory was no substitute for the exchange of magnetism that took place with a physical partner.
Oh my beloved . . . it is not only my body that longs for yours . . . when our spirits touched, we remade the world.
From beyond the curtain Tiriki could hear Domara’s regular breathing, and an occasional snore from Metia, who still served as the child’s nursemaid. Moving softly so as not to wake them, Tiriki got up and pulled a shawl over the shift in which she slept.
She would go and see if Taret, who customarily kept late hours, was also wakeful. The older woman’s wisdom had supported her through many crises—perhaps Taret could teach her how to survive the endless loneliness of the coming years.
“Will it be permitted . . . do you think they will they let us marry?”
Damisa came back to full awareness with a start as she realized that Reidel was talking to her. He had been speaking for quite some time, actually, words of love which she had ignored as she tried to understand just what had happened between them and why.
“Marriage?” She looked at him in surprise. Reidel had always seemed so self-contained. Who would have suspected he had so much passion dammed up inside?
“Did you think I would have dared to touch you if my intent had been dishonorable?” He sat up, shocked.
Do you think that if mine had been honorable I would have let you? Damisa bit back the bitter words, remembering that she had wanted this as much as he, if for different reasons. She sat up in turn, reaching for her gown.
“The matings of acolytes are ordained by the stars . . .”
“But I am of the priesthood now, so surely—”
“Nothing is sure!” snapped Damisa, driven beyond patience suddenly. “Least of all me! Do you consider what we just did a commitment? I descend from the princes of Alkonath and may not mingle my blood with any lesser breed!”
“But you lay with me . . .” he repeated, uncomprehending.
“Yes. I did. I have needs, just like you—”
“Not like me . . .” Reidel drew a long, shuddering breath. She felt a twinge of compunction as she realized he understood her at last. “I love you.”
“Well . . .” she said when the silence had gone on too long. “I am sorry.”
Reidel grabbed his tunic and belt and got to his feet, slinging them over his shoulder as if disdaining to hide his nakedness. “Sorry! I could find a cruder word.” But he did not say it, and by that she understood that what he felt for her was indeed love. For a moment she saw the graceful line of muscled shoulder and tapering hips stark against the stars, then he turned and strode down the path, leaving her alone.
I spoke truth, she told herself. I don’t love him! So why, she wondered, was her last sight of that departing figure suddenly blurred by tears?
Sixteen
The evening is cold and the wind plucks at hair and garments like a mischievous child, but Chedan’s travel cloak keeps him warm. His body is young again, responding to every command of his will. Grinning, he lurches through rough-leafed high hedges, following a deer path downhill.
The sudden cry of a bird of prey rips through the silence—“Skiriiiiii!” —the falcon is at once behind him and above him. Instinctively Chedan ducks, but there is no attack.
After a moment, he moves forward toward the glowing ring of standing stones. Five great trilithons loom through the mist, and in their shaping he recognizes the touch of Atlantis. But the statue of a dragon stands between him and the stones. He pauses, listening, as a voice thinned by pain but oddly familiar keens, “Tiriki, Tiriki.”
“Are you there?” Chedan sings. “Micail? Is it you?”
But the dragon has become a falcon with Micail’s face, beating against the grey mist with shining dark wings.
“Osinarmen? You would disguise yourself? Here?”
“Skiriiiii!” The same savage cry is his only answer.
“Wait!” Chedan calls, but Micail’s spirit has flown into a darker dreamland, and though Chedan is mage, and great in power, he dares not follow.
“This is why you have failed to find him.”
Chedan turns but sees only the glowing ring of stones.
“He will not recognize you. Though he needs your counsel as never before, you can no longer guide him. Least of all here! He believes you are dead. He fears you bear a message that he does not wish to receive. But it does not matter—the test is for Micail. By his own deeds, he must endure or fall. You cannot prevent him from fulfilling his fate.”
“Who are you?” Chedan sings, commanding. “Reveal thy truth!”
“Alas, I cannot be revealed to one who will not see. When you can see,” the voice murmurs, “you shall. But men are never so entangled in the past as when they glimpse the future . . .” The voice becomes a hurricane, hurling him head over heels away from the ring of stones.
“Go back, Chedan,” the voice commands. “When the time comes for you to pass on your legacy, the way will open. You will not wonder who or when or why—you will know. But until then—go back. Complete the work that you must do.”
Chedan woke sweating in his rough blankets, his mind still reeling from images of standing stones dancing wildly, whirling away in the mist.
Micail! his spirit cried. Where are you?
Since coming to the Tor he had dreamed of Micail often. At times they were back in Ahtarrath or even in the Ancient Land. They would be walking together or sitting over a carafe of Hellenic wine, indulging in the kind of far-ranging conversations both men loved. Chedan was half aware that the talks were a kind of teaching, as if in sleep he was trying to pass on all the wisdom he had not been given time to impart in the waking world.
Where, he wondered, was all that information going? He knew that Tiriki, in her secret heart, believed her beloved was still alive somewhere in this world. But Chedan knew that it was equally possible he had been meeting with Micail in his dreams to prepare Micail’s spirit for rebirth in this new land . . . Yet this last vision, if that was what it had been, was different. He felt the same sense of release that always followed trance. And though Micail had fled from him, Chedan had been able to contact him.
But I was young again. The memory of that vigor still filled his awareness—and yet with every moment, his body reminded him more painfully that it had served his soul for more than seventy years. And the five years that had passed since they arrived at the Tor had been hard ones. He would not be sorry to lay down this aching flesh and fare to the Halls of Karma, even though it meant he must face judgment.
He shook his head ruefully. “Complete the work that you must do,” the voice had said. At this moment Chedan would be doing well to get out of bed. Perhaps it was a promise, he thought hopefully.
A brisk wind stroked across the plain, flattening the new grass beneath the stalks bleached by winter, then letting the blades spring back one by one—green, silver, and green again.
The afternoon sun had warmed the air, but the day was fading, and the hope that had lifted Micail’s heart contracted like some winter-chilled bloom. A memory of the dream that work had driven from his head returned—he had been a dragon, or a hawk—some creature fierce and wild—struggling wildly to escape the stones. And once more, Chedan had been there.
Micail eyed the men working before him ruefully. Tjalan’s dream was, he now realized, simply to create something tha
t would outlast them all; but there were times when the five great trilithons seemed to project an arrogance beyond even the imaginings of a prince . . .
The unfinished sarsen ring was less daunting, at least to Micail, perhaps because it was incomplete. Twenty-four uprights had been raised around the trilithons, including one shorter stone that allowed even casual users to sight down the Avenue to the point of the midsummer sunrise . . . The six missing stones would be hauled in next summer, by levies which would probably be drawn from the Blue Bull tribe.
Six more lintels had already been brought in, and two of them raised to better suggest the final effect—a Sun Wheel a hundred feet across. Finding and transporting the remaining twenty-four stones to complete the pattern might take another year of labor.
Thanks largely to the efforts of Timul and Elara, the king had survived the wound’s fever, but the javelin blow had permanently ruined his shoulder. Khattar would never again wield any battle-ax, of bronze or of orichalcum. There was talk, mostly from the younger warriors, that he ought to abdicate as high king and allow Khensu to take his place. But only the matriarchs could make that decision, and the Women’s Side had conspicuously refused to decide.
Did they too fear Prince Tjalan’s spearmen? There were times when Micail himself felt uneasy with the continual display of Alkonan potency, yet he had to admit that Tjalan’s show of strength might be necessary. Until Khattar’s ability to rule was proven, the Red Bull tribe had declared they would provide no further assistance. So far the other tribes had not joined the rebellion, but Micail knew that they could not rely on their full support.
They think we have only a hundred swords to defend ourselves, and it is true—for now. Luckily for us, the tribes want to see the henge completed too. When the last stone is set in place, they will make their move—but it will be the worst time for them to do so! They cannot begin to imagine what powers we will be able to draw on once the circuit of force is closed.
“Lord Prince, dark is coming,” said the old man who acted as foreman for the White Bull work gang. “We go back to our fires?”
“Yes, it is time,” Micail nodded.
He sat down against one of the half-polished stones and watched the men walk away one by one toward their camp by the river. He would not have had to go far, either, to find food and shelter and the company of his own kind, but he found himself reluctant to move. Too much speech—that was the problem—the petty bickering, the constant maneuvering for status, was driving him mad.
He continued to sit, half watching the cryptic play of twilight and clouds, thinking that if he came in late enough, he might persuade Cleta or Elara to bring him some food in his hut, away from the others. It occurred to him that he rarely felt any need to be on his guard against the acolytes—not even after Elara had told him that if the king became too insistent that he take a mate, she herself was willing to bear him a child. But she had not pressed him, and now as he sat alone in the sunset he found himself beginning to actually consider her offer, if only because it distracted him from the disturbing memory of how Anet had felt in his arms.
Just thinking about her lithe dancer’s body lit a fire in his flesh. He frowned, the half-illicit visions washed away by the sudden memory of a native legend that he had recently heard, in which the stones in some of the older circles were said to wake with the darkness, and even dance at the times of the great festivals. The stones here were already moving toward awareness, the whispers ran.
The original ring of stones had obviously been part of a simple cremation cemetery, like the earthwork that had so frightened the acolytes on their journey here. Most of the other circles had apparently been built for that purpose as well. Yet it could not be denied that nightfall always made this place seem a little more distant, and at the same time a bit larger, turning it into a looming presence that made it difficult to think about other things. Sighing, Micail got to his feet and, trying not to think at all, began the long walk back across the plain.
That night, sleep was slow in coming. But in the still hour before the dawn his troubled dreams yielded to a vision of far green hills and a golden pathway whereon he saw Tiriki approaching, robed in blue light.
Spring was always a time of hope in the marshlands, when the earth grew green and the sky clamored with the cries of migrating birds. Whenever the waterfowl settled on the pools, their muted calling turned even more musical, as if the wind gods themselves were singing hymns for the earth. It was a time to gather eggs and tender new leaves, and the increased food supply renewed the confidence and the energy of those who lived around the lake. It was a time of fair weather and improved circumstances, but it was also a time to get back to work on the spiral maze, which after the wedding feast for Kalaran and Selast they had started to cut into the Tor.
Tiriki straightened, digging the knuckles of her left hand into the small of her back to ease its aching, while she rested the antler points that tipped her hoe on the ground. The priests’ caste was never bred for such labor, she thought ruefully, surveying her segment of the new pathway of the spiral maze that they were making around the hill. The shadow she cast was, she observed, quite slender, and what flesh she had, she knew, was mostly muscle. It occurred to her that she was probably healthier than she had ever been.
The same was true of the rest of them. Ahead and behind her she glimpsed other diggers, bending and rising as their hoes dug into the soft ground. She and Chedan and a few of the others had sung to the earth along the track and loosened it a little, but she doubted that even an experienced stand of singers could have shifted so many particles at once . . . though they certainly could have moved that boulder by the foot of the path much more easily.
Just ahead of her, Domara stabbed her digging stick into the ground and laughed. She had turned five the preceding winter, and a recent growth spurt had stolen away the plump sweetness of babyhood forever. Now Tiriki could glimpse the child she was becoming. Not the woman—thank the gods, that was still far in the future—but the slim, leggy youngster with the mop of red curls. She is going to be like Micail, thought Tiriki, tall and strong.
The adults might complain about the seemingly unending regimen of strenuous labor, but the children were in their element, happy to dig until they were muddy from head to heels. If only the youngsters could have been depended upon to stick to the work, the elders could have left the job to them, thought Tiriki as the divots flew. But even Domara, who was so insistent on helping in every grown-up task that they called her “little priestess,” could be distracted by a butterfly.
As Tiriki hacked into the earth again she felt something give. The bindings that held the antler tine to the stock were loose again. She sighed. “Domara, my love, will you take this back down to Heron and ask if he can fix it?”
When the child had started down the hill, Tiriki picked up a bone shoulder blade and knelt on the path to smooth the earth and shift the displaced dirt to the downhill side. Soon it would be time to stop. She had cleared a full length this morning, and had almost reached the point where Kalaran’s section began. Except for Liala and Alyssa, who were sick, and Selast, who was pregnant, everyone in the community was working on the maze, even the Lake folk, although they found this kind of exercise as foreign to their normal lifestyle as did any Atlantean priest or priestess.
Chedan had been forbidden to work. Of course he had protested, saying that inaction would only make him feel worse, but she knew how his bones pained him. He had done his part and more, she had told him, when he had taken the image of the pathway through the hill from Tiriki’s memory and translated it into the pattern of an oval maze that wound back and forth along the slopes of the Tor. Starting as if it meant to go straight up the spine of the hill, the way led sunwise around the middle slope and then dipped and turned back. It circled widdershins almost to the beginning before dropping again and skirting the base of the hill, only to turn and start upward again, a little above the initial path. From there it wound back and for
th to nearly touch the summit, but instead doubled back in another curve that brought it at last to the stone circle at the crest.
It had taken a year’s effort to dig out the full three-foot width of pathway for the initial circuit alone. Now they were working down and around on the first return course. The rest of the way was carefully marked out by sticks thrust into the soil, but already it had been trodden often enough to wear a narrow footpath, scarcely wider than a deer trail, into the ground.
Tiriki swayed with a faint sense of vertigo as she visualized the maze—even Chedan’s first sketches had dizzied her, reminding her of a symbol or inscription she was certain she had seen before, though she could not remember where or when. The mage had assured her that its shape was unlike any character or hieroglyph that he was familiar with, and Dannetrasa, who was even more widely read, echoed his conclusion, yet the notion continued to haunt her.
Ancient or new, the pattern worked. She and Chedan had walked it more than once, and each time felt the proximity of another world and touched the inner spirit of the land. This was not the Temple that the prophecies had described, but its power was profound and manifest. When the path was completed, anyone, she was sure, would be able to follow it, and they would find a blessing.
Tiriki scraped the bone blade across the soil again, breathing deeply as the rich scent filled the air. Here, beneath the trees that clothed the base of the Tor, the earth was rich with the humus of many centuries of fallen leaves. The digging would be more difficult on the grassy upper slopes, where the rocky substrate was barely covered with topsoil. She rooted her fingers in the earth and felt its strength flow up into her, as if she were herself part of the complex of life on the Tor, growing from wind and rain, sun and soil—
“Drink deep . . . reach high . . . we will survive the storm . . .”
Startled, she lifted her hands and the eerie voice silenced.