The Burning Stone

  “Now we descend,” she said.

  “Will we cross the sea flat again?” he asked, shuddering. This time they might not be so lucky. This time the tide might come in while they walked, vulnerable, over the sands, and sweep them away.

  She smiled enigmatically and indicated the water, as if suggesting he, too, bathe his face in preparation for the ordeal ahead. “The cosmos is like wood much eaten by insects. It is riddled with holes and passages through which people can travel. Some holes are natural. Some are built with magic in long-ago times. That is why we come to churendo, the palace of coils. Here the three worlds meet. Here we can descend the spiral path and the gate will open to that place where now he is hidden.”

  “Your son,” murmured Zacharias. She didn’t look old enough to have an adult son, and yet she didn’t look young either. She said nothing, only waited, and at last he crawled forward cautiously and dipped fingers in the pool of water. It was cool and, when he splashed it on his face, it stung, a little briny. But it seemed harmless enough.

  He had saved out water for the horse, and he let it take the precious liquid out of his cupped hands as Kansi-a-lari readied her pack and pouch, straightened her skin skirt, and hoisted her spear. It was a cool morning, without the bite of winter. Fog bound them on all sides; he couldn’t see the distant shore nor could he see the sea at the base of the island, although he heard it as a steady sigh and murmur.

  “Is it really spring?” he asked. “Could we have traveled so far in one night?”

  She examined him in silence, then untied one of the ribbons fastened just below the obsidian point of her spear and trailed it like a snake across the surface of the brackish pool. “We are the—what do you call them? To move the boat, what you use to pull at the waves?”

  “Oars?”

  “We are the oars. We stir the waves of the deep pool, like so.” She drew the ribbon along the surface in a circle that crossed its starting point, became another circle, and wound back to the beginning. “We have far to travel on the coils of air and earth.” The ribbon dripped as she lifted it from the water. “In the palace of coils you can leave behind where you are doubting in your heart.” She let the ribbon fall back into the pool and it lay there on the surface, twining slowly to an unseen current. She tapped her breastbone. “Throw where you are doubting into the pool. Then it will stay here while you descend.”

  He had so many doubts, but none of them were things he could hold in his hand. And yet hadn’t his grandmother always said that a wildflower was a good enough sacrifice to the old gods as long as it was given with a true heart? He had seen strange things. Maybe it was time to throw his doubts away.

  He reached for the leather thong inside his robe and pulled out the wooden Circle of Unity which his father had carved for him long ago. Pulling it off, he held it out. “I have seen many things I never knew existed. I will walk the path of truth, not blind tradition. I will keep my eyes open.”

  He dropped the Circle into the pool. It vanished with a plop, and as the waters closed over it, it dragged down the ribbon with it until both disappeared. The pool lay smooth and still, but he could see nothing below the surface.

  “Come,” she said.

  He took the horse’s reins and walked after her through the corbeled archway. The stone lionesses seemed to curl down to sniff at him, their massive shadows as heavy on his back as if they pushed at him with furled claws, but surely that was only his imagination. The path cut sharply to the right and they began to descend deocil.

  After three steps he felt dizzy; he doubted. They had ascended deocil. The path had cut right to enter the plaza, hadn’t it? How could they descend in like manner? It was as if the path were leading them forward, not backward, as if they were walking toward a place that didn’t yet exist, rather than returning to the place where they had started.

  He began to shake. His skin felt like a thousand spiders were crawling on it, and he was so tense he could scarcely get one foot in front of the next. Only the steady plod of the horse dragged him along, only the taut line of Kansi-a-lari’s back moving before him drew him in her wake. It was hard to focus, but there was light burning ahead so blinding in its blue-white radiance that he struggled to reach it even when her hand stayed him, even when her sharp whisper hissed out a curse—or a prayer.

  “Grandmother,” he cried, staggering forward toward the light.

  The Aoi woman cried out. She jerked him back just as the gate flared and bright wings of light unfolded, so pitiless in their brightness that his face burned as though fire scorched him. A fulgurant arm reached for him as if to drag him through the blinding gate, or haul itself out. He cried out and flung himself sideways, and Kansi-a-lari caught him and yanked him to safety.

  He screamed, and then he was running and panting and, finally, falling. He knelt there with grit on his knees while the horse nosed his back. He smelled scorched cloth and felt the sting of a burn along his back and on his cheeks.

  “Come,” she said, and he heard fear in her voice although she had never seemed afraid before. “The veils are thinning. We must go on.”

  It wasn’t easy to flounder after her, and yet although the burning gate was lost along the curve of the wall, he was afraid to stay behind. What if they had followed him? What if they touched him again and he was burned to ash? She walked with a stride that never faltered, never doubted; she had thrown it all into the pool and truly left it behind. Had he?

  “Pale Hunter,” he breathed, steadying himself with a hand on the horse’s reins. It plodded stolidly along beside him, flicking one of its ears impatiently. “Give me strength. In the name of my grandmother, lend me some of your power now.” Was that the wind, or the breath of the Moon? Was it night now, or day? A cooling wind breathed across his neck, and his aches lessened. The path sloped steadily downward.

  She had gotten so far ahead of him that she was already leaving the malachite gate when he first caught sight of it around the opening bend in the path. Had she paused there? Had she spoken again to the voice that had called her “cousin?” He was bolder, now. Hadn’t he, too, cast away his doubts? Either the old gods would protect him, or they would not, and she had never warned him against this gate whose multicolored bands of green made him think of meadows cut by the spring fields sown by his people, in the land of his birth.

  He paused to catch his breath before the malachite gateway, and pressed a hand against the cool, gleaming stone.

  There is a silver-gold ribbon running through the heavens, twisting and turning through the spheres until he cannot tell one side of the ribbon from the other, or if it even has two sides at all but only one infinite gleaming surface without end, ever-dying and ever-living. The cosmos streams around him, great billowing clouds of black dust, bright flocks of blue-white stars so brilliant that they can only be the birthing ground of angels, vast expanses of void so intense that he feels an abyss yawning at his feet, a huge spiral wheel of stars spinning in an awesome silence that might be the future or the past or merely the prayer of the gods. Yet the planets and the Moon and the Sun still chart their interminable course, he hears the chiming sweet melody of the wheeling heavens, and he reaches out to touch it because it is so beautiful. But his hand cannot pass through the gate. The green stone dims and fades, and he sees on the silver-gold pathway winding through the heavens the shape of an island whose size he cannot comprehend; it could be as small as his hand or as large as Earth because the universe has no boundaries he can make sense of, he can neither measure nor span its girth.

  Seeing the island far, he sees it as suddenly near, as though he were briefly an angel, set free to wing his way through the churning heavens. It is a dry land, green fading to brown fading to dust. There is no rain. The animals are dying. The corn no longer sprouts.

  There are no children.

  The horse nudged him, hard, and he lost his balance and stumbled to one side, hand slipping off the stone. The vision was gone. He stood alone on the dusty path with
marble walls rising high on each side. He had never felt more alone in his life and yet with solitude came a kind of freedom. He had given away his past freely, tossed it into the deep tidal pool of mortality where all things are lost in time. He could stand here forever, if he chose, and himself turn to dust to be walked on some day by another pair of feet. But the palace of coils touched all three worlds, the world beneath, the world above, and the world between, and so he, too, had touched them. He had thrown away his doubts. He could walk on without fear.

  “Come, friend,” he said to the horse, giving a tug to the reins. It followed him as he set off, down, himself following Kansi-a-lari although he had long since lost sight of her.

  When he came to the fifth gate with its luminescent and faintly perilous glow of palest violet, he did not falter; he walked past without trying to look beyond it. She had warned him before, he had been attacked when he’d ignored her, and he wasn’t fool enough to ignore her warning a second time.

  Although he walked steadily, and his back no longer hurt, he did not see her when he came to the fourth gate. The lustrous amber surface called to him as though it had a voice of its own. He could not resist it, could not help but stroke its burnished surface, almost oily under his palm. He saw.

  A boy on the cusp of manhood lies asleep in a cave full of treasure, attended by six sleeping companions. But there is something swelling and shifting in the darkness of the cave, like a malignant beast coming awake.

  He hurried on, unwilling to see more. The horse dragged him along, eager to go forward—or else it had smelled fresh water. The walls curved away before them and, in an infinity of time that lasted no more than an instant, he saw her on the path before him where the azure gate rested, set into the high, pale walls.

  She had paused, hesitated, a hand raised but held cautiously no more than a finger’s breadth beyond the ice-pale blue stone. He came up beside her, although she said nothing nor even appeared to notice that he was there. Beyond the gate, the sea boiled and lashed under a cloudy sky, torn by storm. Foam sprayed the rock walls, and he could not see the shore because of the white spray and the low clouds and the surging sea.

  “Who is there?” she asked, and as she laid her palm against the pale blue stone, he pressed his against the gate next to hers.

  Banners fly outside a fine wood hall. Ranks of young men wait restlessly, talking among themselves, handling their spears as grooms walk among the horses tightening the girths of saddles and making a last examination of hooves. A few wagons are still being loaded with royal treasure: mantles and rich vestments; thin bars of gold and silver wrapped in linen; small iron chests full of minted coins; gold and silver plate and utensils worthy of a king; tents sewn out of a heavy imperial cloth more deeply purple than violets. A chest heavy with royal regalia and crowns. As the sun rises, the full moon sets. The grass grows high beyond the hall, and the trees are dense with leaves.

  The doors of the hall are flung open and the king strides out, escorting a pretty young woman half his age who has the bearing of a queen. He laughs delightedly at something she says. His courtiers swirl around them like the tidal currents, some in, some out. A servant lifts a mantle woven of a plain gray weave and swings it open over her shoulders, but his attention is caught by the Eagle badge at her shoulder. It is his sister, and as the cape swirls and settles around her torso, he is spun by that motion

  into the gray surge and slap of waves against the hull of a lean, long ship. He swims in the salty seawater and heads bob around him but they have faces so inhuman that he shudders, stroking away. They have eels for hair and no true noses, only slits for breathing and their teeth glitter with menace. But as he turns and dives, tail slapping the surface, he realizes he is one of them, coursing alongside the ships toward some unknowable destination. The sky is dark without even stars to mark their course. A light flares from the stem of the foremost ship, a signal echoed on a distant, unseen shore

  that he watches as a rider escorted by three men bearing torches dismounts outside a large pavilion of white cloth. The torches spit and hiss in the drizzle. Rain wets the ground, and grass squelches under the messenger’s feet as he pulls off his hat, loose fitting and curled to a point at the top, before stepping out of the rain and into the shelter of a striped awning that makes a sheltered entranceway for the pavilion. A tall bronze tripod stands under the awning. A bowl of thick glass sits on the tripod, and a candle burns inside the bowl with a muted, cloudy light. After a moment, a burly man staggers out of the pavilion, tying up the strings of baggy trousers.

  The messenger kneels. “My lord prince. A large host under Prince Bulkezu has attacked the garrison at Matthiaburg and won a victory. There was much slaughter. Lord Rodulf of Varingia and his companions fell or were taken prisoner. Rederii scouts reported that at least ten of their headless corpses were seen stuck on pikes outside the Quman camp.”

  “How know they these are the corpses of Rodulf and his companions?” demands the prince. He gestures to one of his servingmen, who brings him a cup of wine.

  “By their arms and armor, my lord prince.”

  He sips at his wine consideringly. He has well muscled shoulders and a bit of a paunch around the middle. The curtain leading into the interior of the pavilion stirs, and a small, black-haired woman looks out. She is dressed in nothing more than a gorgeously embroidered blanket which she has wrapped around herself.

  “What news?” she asks.

  “The Quman are on the move.” He spits suddenly, a faint purplish stain flowering on the carpet. “Again we must retreat. Them we cannot engage with the troops we have now. We must have reinforcements from your father!”

  “No word from Margrave Judith?” she asks. “The Quman will be in her territory soon.”

  “No word,” he says softly. “But north we must ride along the Oder River. There hope we to meet up with her forces. Then we can to attack.”

  The woman steps out into the soft lamplight. The blanket she holds so tightly glitters, gold thread tracing antelopes and bounding lions no bigger than her hands. She, too, has well-muscled shoulders, compellingly white, and the prince rests a hand caressingly on one of them. A wind sighs along the cloth face of the pavilion. Bells sewn to the fringe of the awning chime in a hundred light and ever-changing voices.

  Bells chimed, and Zacharias started back, flailing a little as he got his balance.

  “The tide comes in,” she said. She shook her spear a second time, an incantation of bells that echoed along the narrow path. The high stone walls seemed to sing back in answer to their song, but as the sound faded, she merely began walking again, downward as the spiral steepened and small stair-steps became evident in the path.

  He shook himself out of inaction and followed her, but she seemed already so far below him, a thousand leagues away through a substance as murky as the glass bowl that had sheltered the single burning candle. Mist cloaked the sky, and he only knew the sun’s position by a whitening glare of haze above.

  The next gate shone with a pale iron gleam not unlike the mist that lay dense along the top of the stone walls. Beyond the gate lay a cover of fog so thick that it might have been a host of sheep gathered together, blotting out the earth and sea beneath. Oddly, he could see a few stars overhead and a quarter moon sliding in and out of wispy clouds.

  He was so tired suddenly, and very thirsty. He leaned into the wall, bracing himself, unwilling to see any more visions, but his fingers slid anyway along the slick wall and he touched the iron gate and saw beyond it.

  A woman sits in a chair carved with guivres. She wears the gold torque of royal kinship at her throat and a coronet on her brow. Her hair runs to silver, and her face is lined with old angers and frustrations. A girlish young woman with hair the color of wheat kneels before her, trembling. She wears only an undershirt, the linen cloth woven so fine that he can see the shape of her body beneath. She is very thin.

  “Constance has gone on progress through her duchy,” says the seated
woman with a tone no less iron than the gleaming gate. “You could have ridden with her, but you chose to remain here.”

  “She promised me—” sobs the kneeling woman.

  “I made no promises to you. I have my allies, and they have their price. You threw away one husband, Tallia. Now you will do as I bid you. Let that be the end of it.” She rises from her chair. “Gerhard,” she calls to one of the guards. “I will walk in the garden now. Let our guest enter.”

  The guards standing at the door move aside to admit a man. He walks into the room with the kind of effortless force of a thunderhead. He isn’t particularly tall but his broad shoulders and his somewhat bow-legged swagger suggest a man who has fought in many battles and ridden a long way to get here.

  “Duke Conrad,” says the silver-haired woman, greeting him with a nod. “I have met the terms of our agreement.” She gestures toward the sobbing young woman, who has clasped her hands in prayer. “I’ve cleaned her up a bit, although I can’t imagine why any man would find her appetizing.” Without waiting for an answer, perhaps even finding the entire transaction distasteful, she walks out of the chamber.

  The young woman walks on her knees until she can rest her clasped hands on the ornate altar set against one wall. “I pray you, Cousin.” Her thin body heaves as she moans. “I have sworn myself to God’s service as a pure vessel, a bride to the blessed Daisan, the Redeemer, who sits enthroned in Heaven beside his Mother, She who is God and Mercy and Judgment, She who gave breath to the Holy Word. I beg you, do not pollute me here on Earth for mere earthly gain.”

  As she speaks, he walks around her in a slow circle in the way of a thirsty man eyeing a particularly noxious pool of slime he must decide whether or not to drink from. “Have you done?” he asks when she falls silent, staring at him with huge eyes more hollow than bright.

  She flings herself facedown on the floor. “I am at your mercy,” she cries, face pressed to the carpets. “Do you mean to defile what has been made holy by God’s touch?”