IV
“You are to stand guard outside; if I need you, I shall call for you.”
“But, Your Majesty,” said the bigger of the two guards, bowing his head as he did, “His Majesty the King ordered that we keep an eye on you at all times.”
“Very well, then; if you insist on disobeying my orders, I shall tell His Majesty that you left me alone for hours to wander in the wolf-infested woods.”
“We humbly beg Your Majesty’s pardon; we shan’t follow you inside.”
“But if Her Majesty finds herself in any danger, we’ve sworn to come to – ”
But Queen Firalda had already turned her back to them and entered without the least trepidation the fabulous and feared Cave of the Seers.
For the past six days, Queen Firalda had woken in the dead of night, drenched in sweat, her heart hammering and her mind overflowing with awful, vivid dreams in which Fantyr, her beloved son, was murdered in the most hideous ways: stabbed in the mouth with a sword, burned alive, and even, once, most horribly, roasted on a spit like a pig, while a fat, vile man tore off chunks of his poor flesh and ate them.
Fearing thus a seventh night spent in similar agony, – for something inside her told her that this final nightmare would come true – she stayed up till the rising of the first moon, and then called for her maids, asking that they dress her in travel attire, alert a couple of guards for an escort and fetch three tame horses from the stables – for there were many reasons why she wished her departure to go unnoticed, the most important of which was the fact that (although she would never openly admit it, lest she be taken for a fool) the Queen was a deeply devout woman.
Because, prior to her thirteenth birthday, on which occasion she had captivated the attention of the King during a ball, Firalda had been the only daughter of a Spirit Servant, raised to venerate these supreme, life-giving beings, to fear their wrath and to know when she had erred or sinned and must supplicate for their forgiveness.
Yet, as luck would have it (and despite her good fortune, for which she never forgot to be grateful, expressing it in frequent prayer), the crass man she had married was no more faithful to the Spirits than he was to her. And so Firalda had placed her hopes on the children she would have, and whom she would raise – secretly, if need be – to be righteous and thankful and pious. However, for all her lifelong and passionate adoration of them, the Spirits hadn’t granted her a fruitful womb: after Fantyr, her precious, was born, her insides had dried up like an old well, so that she had to resign herself to her barrenness, while Fazen lavished his potent seed on his odious mistresses, filling the Palace and the Castle with filthy little bastards whom Firalda, along with their mothers, was forced to exile to the Minelands – or, sometimes, if they became too greedy and contrary, even dispatch through her loyal henchman –, adding to the weight of her remorse and her fear of the Spirits’ reckoning.
Her piousness seemed to bring her nothing but misfortune – because by raising Fantyr as the daughter that fate had denied her, obsessing over his manners and his least misconduct, she might have unwillingly deprived him of the rough, sinful masculinity she so despised in his father but which was expected in most men. Thus she had created an abomination, a man who lay with other men (and plenty of them, the evil tongues said) as if he were a Scavenger harlot forever hungry for male flesh. Of course at first, after days of unceasing prayer and fasting and repentance that left her knees raw and her head swimming, she had tried to blame the Prince’s aberrant behaviour on the King – for she recalled, from when she was little, a man who often visited her father, seeking absolution for his crime: the unnatural yet overpowering lust he felt for his youngest son. Could it be that, on one – or, the Spirits forbid, more than one – occasion, while staggering through the Palace in the small hours, drunk and desirous of whatever female lay at hand, Fazen had, mistakenly or not, fornicated with his own son?
Though Queen Firalda didn’t need any more sorrows than those she’d already been afflicted with – for one day Fazen, oblivious to her initial pleading and then to her growing anger (in a moment of madness she’d even threatened to slit his throat while he slept), decided that he had had enough with Fantyr’s atrocities (your cocksucking, gown-wearing puppet, he had called their child, though the Spirits knew how hard Firalda had tried to eradicate her son’s love of crossdressing), and cast him out of the Palace and the Castle, sending him to live at the very border of inhabitable Feerien, at the mouth of Waste Valley, where only destitutes and Scavengers trod. And even though the Queen had covertly – and heavily – bribed a soldier, swearing him to send word of the Prince’s health every other day through a cart-driver, the thought of Fantyr’s bright blue eyes and flaxen hair and of his exile to that desolate place wrenched her heart.
And then the Shy Death struck, a plague Firalda was convinced, like thousands of Feeres, was the work of the Spirits, the price that the Sphere of Toil must pay for the wickedness of its dwellers – their lewdness and profanity, their incurable avarice and unrestrained adultery: all that the Disaster ought to have taught them to refrain from, and that they’d persisted in doing, as if oblivious to the Spirits’ all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful presence. The blow was even harder for the Queen, for the rapidly growing scarcity of food meant that most horses (at least those that escaped being eaten by the famished multitudes) were engaged in carrying provisions to the Castle, so that the messages from the barracks became first weekly, then monthly, and then dwindled to a silence she was too terrified to ponder, because to even fleetingly think of her beloved Fantyr lingering out there, gaunt and hollow-eyed, while those revolting Scavengers were said to be building an army, was so painful she wanted to die.
And for once her faith couldn’t console her, at least not without the guidance of a virtuous Spirit Servant – a man like Beriton, the late Head Servant of the Spirit Home whom Firalda sorely missed, for, despite the old man’s grim, unforgiving glare and icy speechlessness, confessing to him and receiving his sage advice always gave her a feeling of great calm and security. His successor, on the other hand, was a repugnant creature, and though she couldn’t prove it, Firalda was certain he had something to do with old Beriton’s allegedly curious demise. The few times she had requested Veig Treth’s counsel, she could see through his display of piety, and pick up, like an actual stench, his complete and utter faithlessness. That a vermin like Treth was telling people how to pray and atone for their misdeeds was proof of the Spirits’ justness in visiting a Second Disaster upon Feerien.
Thus, having nothing and no one else to turn to, Queen Firalda had decided, after much deliberation, to seek the advice – and hopefully the help – of the Seers.
Although their ephemeral existence had been known for centuries, no one quite knew exactly what these most peculiar beings were; the commonest belief was that they were Spirits who had somehow fallen to the earth – and that was why their appearance was so startling and their sojourn in the human world so very brief; this was also the reason why so many Feeres worshipped them, considering their inexplicable, unpredictable manifestations a sign of their Spiritness, and why the cave where they always materialized had over time become a sacred place, visited by hundreds of people even though most of the time it was empty, and suggestive of the Seers’ passing only by the desiccated flowers, rancid food, long-extinguished molten candles and numerous votive objects and valuables left there by previous believers - offerings which (or so the stories went) remained entirely untouched by the Seers, as though they were afraid of sullying their heavenly essence with the taint of all things human.
However, amongst the Spirit Servants there were many who refused to accept that the glorious creators of the world would ever deign to show themselves, especially in the depth of a filthy cave, like overwintering beasts. This faction believed – and often vocally promoted their belief, hoping to stifle the iniquity of Seer-worship – that the pale, weak, naked men and women were in fact common mortals,
most likely Miners (for the cave was situated near the border of the Minelands), who had spent so many years underground, burrowed in the bottom of dark shafts, that they had gradually lost their humanity – the color of their skin and hair, their sight and speech – and reverted to animals, living in caves and feeding on the scraps the foolish pilgrims left. As to why they never let themselves be fed or touched, and why they vanished so suddenly, well, so would moles or bats if their lairs were invaded by crowds of idiots.
And yet there were other Servants who, based on the tenet that both the nature and the doings of the Spirits were incomprehensible to man, neither denounced nor embraced the Seers, preferring to regard their mystery as something that should, like faith, be privately and carefully considered. Their dispassionate approach was further supported by certain Scribes who had actually been to the cave and spoken to the Seers, and who, despite the arrogance inherent to most Scribes, claimed that these creatures were indeed extraordinary, and possessed powers beyond the human scope – the most amazing of which was their ability to read one’s mind and respond directly to the questions therein without parting their lips (and this claim was also substantiated by many common pilgrims, who said they had felt as though the Seers knew everything about them at first sight, despite the blind-looking milkiness of their eyes).
Finally there was a third group of Feeres – in which Queen Firalda belonged at the moment, deameaning though it was – who, especially since the outbreak of the Shy Death, were so desperate for anything that might afford them release from fear and the littlest peace of mind, they clung to the Seers with fervour, angry and disillusioned with the Spirit Servants who had so thoroughly failed them.
These clashing thoughts preyed on the Queen’s mind as she slowly made her way along the cave’s uneven floor. A part of her that still unthinkingly conformed to old Beriton’s admonitions (who wouldn’t hear of the Seers, nor speak a word concerning them), told her that she was adding impiousness to her sins; This cave is as empty as your head, it said. You might as well be seeking help from its rocks. Yet another part kept lit the flame of hope; Scribes were gifted, intelligent people, and though she had never quite grasped the point of their endeavours, some amongst them were said to be able to read, write and speak a language – Divine, they called it – which was purportedly that of the Spirits Themselves, and whose words had created the world. They’re far from foolish, these Scribes are; they wouldn’t waste their time on something worthless. Moreover, a few months back she had eavesdropped on her maids while pretending to sleep, and had overheard one of them (Gendya, a kind, bright girl) say that her mother had gone to the Cave after her little boy was bitten by a snake, and that the Seers had given her some sort of magical potion, a few drops of which had cured Gendya’s brother overnight.
And beneath this fog of hopefulness and hopelessness throbbed the vein of a mother’s mad longing for her son: Fantyr, Fantyr, Fantyr, her heart and breath and all, for whose safe return Firalda wouldn’t hesitate to offer up her own life, plunge a knife in her heart even though the Spirits punished those who took the life They alone could give or take away more harshly than any other sinner.
Suddenly the Queen realized that the light from outside had waned to next to nothing, and that if she took the turn that led further into the cave she’d have to proceed in pitch-black darkness. Curse her feeble mind! In her haste she’d forgotten to bring along a torch or a lantern. She’d have to go out and tell the guards to build a fire using sticks, which would take forever seeing as it had rained all night. But just as she made to turn around, her eyes, somewhat accustomed to the darkness, picked up a faint source of light issuing from the depths of the cave – no more than a pale flicker on the dark stone walls but enough to venture ahead by.
Yet though at first she’d thought the glimmer must be coming from some candle that hadn’t yet burnt out, after a couple of yards she noticed something that made her go suddenly cold: the colour of the light wasn’t yellow but blue, a blue that grew brighter and deeper with every step she took. Instantly, her composure was gone. What would she do if she found herself face to face with a pair of Seers, their bodies emitting this eerie glow as if fashioned by such stuff as moons are made of? Never had she felt so heady a mixture of fascination and dread; her years of praying before the altar of the Spirit Home couldn’t begin to compare with what now set her heart aflutter.
Without a second thought Queen Firalda sank to her knees, then prostrated herself on the cold hard stone, and then, like the most abject of supplicants crawled towards the strong blue light until she felt it pierce her shut lids like fire.
She slowly, shakily got to her feet – but instead of the wondrous creatures she’d been expecting, she saw that the glow came from a stone that lay at her feet. She picked it up and held it in her palm; the stone was smooth and flat, no bigger than a chestnut, and yet it cast the Queen’s heart and mind in fresh bewilderment. In her years as wife to Feerien’s sovereign, hundreds of precious stones had passed through her hands, gems of all shapes and hues, some of them even believed to originate from the Kingdoms that vanished in the Disaster; but nothing came close to the marvel of this luminous stone. It was clearly a thing not of this world, and thus touched by the Spirits.
So Firalda kneeled once again, set the glowing stone exactly where it lay before, and then she produced from her cloak the ingredients required for the ritual: a sprig of nightshade and a dried daffodil, the two of them bound together with twine soaked in a virgin’s first woman blood. These she gently placed upon the stone as if on a tiny altar, and then she crossed her hands, closed her eyes, and whispered the words of the prayer:
O Spirits wise and knowing
Of what is and shall be,
Extend Thy love, I beg Thee,
To those most dear to me.
When she opened her eyes, the stone seemed to have grown even brighter, its blue light making the wall of the cave shimmer like a rippling pond of fresh water.
And then an actual drop shone briefly before rolling down the rock, followed by another, and another, forming a steady trickle that gathered in a small pool behind the Spirit stone. Her hand trembling, Firalda dipped a finger into the pale bluish liquid and brought it to her lips. It took her a while to place the mild sweetness, but when she did, it left her breathless with awe.
It was a miracle. The rock was shedding milk.