“So she went to the cave that served as a protective cell for Gwydion with a birthing cloth, and knelt before him, aged as she was. He was ranting, spitting in pain and fury when she first came in, but she asked the guards to leave in spite of the danger. And then she smiled at him, which gave him pause in his ravings, and began to sing.”
Achmed exhaled.
“She sang his namesong, over and over, weaving calming and clarity into it, until he finally grew quiet and his eyes cleared of the madness. She took out his gag, and untied his arms, and rather than striking or biting at her, he smiled back. For a few moments, she had found the lost soul within the overwhelming agony.
“And when she had found him, she asked him if he could possibly bring himself to love her just for a moment, long enough to bring a child into the world with her.”
Achmed clenched his teeth until he could taste the blood in his mouth.
“He stared at her. Then he smiled again. And he uttered the first coherent word he had pronounced since that night at the House of Remembrance—yes—and let his hand come to rest on her heart.”
Meridion stopped. A thin trail of blood had spilled from the corner of the Bolg king’s mouth.
“Shall I finish?” he asked, uncertain.
Achmed nodded curtly.
Meridion took a deep breath that rattled against his lungs. “She sang the incantation of conjuring, during which Gwydion remained calm. And, when she felt ready, she rose with the cloth, lifted her arms aloft, and the baby appeared in it from the air itself.”
He was now struggling with tears that were choking his words.
“Me, Uncle—that was me. I was the unnatural child born of an unnatural act—the child she knew would kill her to bring into the world. I was not born of blood and love, but of ancient lore and Naming science. I was her second son—the one without flesh or substance, the same state that Graal is condemned to now. He was her firstborn on the first Time-strand—her child of blood, of love—and yours.
“She—she had just enough time to—to kiss me, to whisper my name and that she loved me—before Death took her, and took her violently, grotesquely, in agony, splitting her from her throat—”
“Stop,” Achmed said tonelessly. The word had all the gravitas of a Namer’s command, filling the corridor with heavy silence.
Meridion waited for his tears to stanch, for Achmed’s breath to return.
“That is her legacy to Graal as well—she did exactly the same thing in her remaining moments, in his first ones of existence,” he said finally. “At least her death this time was not painful—because of a boon she had asked of the Lord Rowan long ago.
“And you, Achmed, you granted her last wish, her last boon—you gave her Graal, when my father wouldn’t. She could not deny his namesong—the tone, she called it, of a child that was waiting to come forth into the world. Perhaps Ashe knew that he wasn’t meant to be this child’s father. But you were willing to do as she asked.”
Achmed let all of his breath out slowly.
“You make it sound so altruistic,” he said darkly. “In fact, my participation was utterly selfish. It was my desire to give him to her, to help bring him forth—to make a child with her.
“And, in doing so, I killed her.”
30
For a long moment, no sound was heard but the whine of the wind in the cavern.
Meridion looked across the chasm where the Heath was now impossible to discern from the darkness.
“A funny thing about Time,” he mused. “As far as I know, it has only been altered once, at least in the world that we see.
“You didn’t kill her, Achmed. You gave her what she wanted, what she asked of you. And you have given the world this child, again, for what purpose, who knows, but the air around him indicates that it is an important one. I cannot tell you how to feel, what to believe, nor would I deign to do so, but at least to me, there are some things that are foreordained, that happen no matter what goes on with the threads of Time.”
He looked at the Bolg king, who was now staring at his son—Meridion’s half-brother.
“Gwydion fell back into madness, as everyone knew he would,” he continued. “I don’t know what became of my father after that—there is nothing reflected on the burnt strands of Time that I have seen. But at least for a moment, he saw sanity again, and in that moment, chose to father a child with an extraordinary woman, a child who had a role to play in undoing how Time had originally run—a scenario that allowed for the F’dor to escape the Vault, and wake the Wyrm—leaving the world dying in flames. So whatever the cost to him, or to me—to you and to Graal—at least the potential exists now for that to be made right.”
Achmed looked up. Until he did, Meridion was not certain he even was listening.
“And how precisely do you know that?” he asked quietly, with a nasty undertone. “For all you know, all will result in the same outcome anyway.”
Meridion turned away from the ashes being taken in plumes by the wind and came over to where the Bolg king sat in the tunnel, the baby in his arms. He crouched down in front of them.
“May I see him?” he asked.
Achmed glared at him with his mismatched eyes for a moment, an expression that over time had caused a great number of men to lose their water, pissing themselves in fear. But Meridion maintained a pleasant expression in return, and so the Bolg king relented finally and turned the baby toward him.
The motion caused Graal to open his eyes, his father’s eyes, free of the dragonesque pupils that all of Rhapsody’s other children had inherited. The baby looked at him curiously, his mouth puckering in interest.
“Hello, little brother,” Meridion said softly, cautiously extending a fingertip in as nonthreatening a manner as he could manage and caressing the back of the little boy’s curled fist. “Welcome to the world.”
The baby’s hand opened at the caress, and Meridion moved his finger under the child’s palm, so that his tiny fingers would encircle it.
“Apparently I was both motherless and fatherless upon my appearance in the world, so Faedryth took me under his wing, with the help of the other members of the council, and taught me all the lore of the Earth he knew, and much of the engineering and mechanics as well. Eventually, he helped me to build a laboratory, a glass dome of a sort suspended above the Earth, with a viewing window below, where I could see the planet burning. I imagine my ‘childhood’ was a rather rapid one; since the whole point of my conception had been to make use of me to offset the coming devastation, I suppose that I grew to a manhood of a sort very quickly, ‘born free of the bonds of Time.’
“Faedryth and I built a machine called the Time Editor—its name explains its purpose. I was a little concerned when I discovered this part of the history on the Weaver’s tapestry while I was awaiting my mother’s arrival at the Gate of Life, but it may actually be an evolution of something I’ve been working on in this iteration of Time.”
He removed his finger gently from Graal’s tiny hand and drew forth the Black Ivory box again, opened it and took out the burnt strands of time-thread that Faedryth’s miners had discovered deep within the Distant Mountains of the Nain, and held them up before the Bolg king’s eyes.
“If you hold these to the light, you can hear the last conversation—just an exchange of a few words, really—that Faedryth and I had before I was sent up into the laboratory to do what I could to rewrite Time.”
Achmed stared at the Time-strands. They looked like clear parchment, though it was filmy and inconstant, yellowed with age, seemingly made of part translucent gem, part gossamer, changing moment by moment before his eyes.
“On the second strand, in the current, remade version of Time, these were found in the deepest reaches of the Nain crystal mines, where the diamond-like formations were believed to have been brought to the Earth from the stars in the form of meteorites. They lay beneath tons of age-old granite for tens of thousands of years before the Nain finally broached the mi
ne, survived the pressure and the cold of the crystal bed—truly a miracle.”
He smiled as his young half-brother stretched and yawned in his sleep, then handed the timefilm to the Bolg king.
Reluctantly, Achmed looked at the strand.
It was as if he was himself standing in the place where the image had been captured, a dark hall that could have been within the mountainous caverns of Ylorc, though he knew immediately that it was not. Gauging by the thinness and striations of the stone, he guessed it was in some mountain peak in another range, most likely similar or even adjoining of this one.
At the end of the hall was an opening, past which there appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, within a large, clear sphere suspended in the open darkness of the sky. Uniform lines of light were set into panels that encircled the transparent room.
Beyond the clear walls of the sphere he could see the world down below, burning at the horizon, as fire crept over the edges, spreading among the continents he recognized from the maps of the Earth.
Hovering in the air before him was a being, a man of sorts, with characteristics of several different races, and all the aspects of youth, except for his eyes, blue eyes, deep as the sea, scored with vertical pupils, resonating wisdom.
He glanced up at Meridion, and into those exact eyes, except solid, corporeal, unchanging, then back at the Time-strands once more.
The man’s skin was translucent, like that of the child in his arms, motile, altering with each current of air that passed by or through it. The man actually glowed, especially his hair, curls of brilliant gold that almost seemed afire, like Graal’s hair more than Meridion’s. It was a slightly altered picture of the young man he had known in Meridion’s youth, a young man for whom he had been asked to be the guardian.
And despite the young man’s obvious wisdom, the image of his clenched jaw betrayed a quiver of nervousness.
His lips moved. Achmed did not hear what words the young man formed in his own ears, but they resonated in his mind nonetheless.
Will I die?
Another voice, immediately and annoyingly recognizable to the Bolg king as that of Faedryth, Lord of the Nain of the Deep Kingdom, answered.
Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.
The translucent young man nodded and turned away.
Achmed shook his head to clear his eyes of the image, but as he did, he heard the young Meridion’s voice in his head again, but with the ring of maturity, as if he had been somewhat older at the time of the utterance.
Forgive me. In my place, I think you would have done the same. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.
“I suspect at the time I said it, I was speaking to you,” Meridion said as the Time-strand returned to its changing state. “I don’t know why.”
“You don’t know anything,” Achmed said in a low, deadly voice. “You have no idea what I would have wanted. Even I do not know that.”
“I suppose,” Meridion said, putting the Time-strand back in the Black Ivory box. “But either way, this is how my mother was meant to die. The way I look at it, she would have died in horrifying agony, but producing the child that went back to rewrite history, which allowed the world to survive at least a bit longer. That new course of history gave her a love that lasted a thousand years and produced many great descendants that the first Time-strand did not, as well as allowing her to still know and love a strange, irascible man who fathered her child in both iterations of Time, and who lives to watch that child grow up. In any case, as the Lirin say, Ryle hira—Life is what it is.
“That is the end of my tale, with illustrations, my song, a symphony of Ages spanning from before the Seren War in the Third Age to the end of this one, the Sixth Age, which in what little I can see of the Future will be known as Twilight. The paradox is complete. You deserved to be the one to hear the lore, Uncle, to be made aware of how Time had been altered, what you gained by it—and what you lost in it. It is the Weaver’s Lament—when the threads of Time are undone, the song of the Past is resung with new words and new music. It becomes a matter of opinion which iteration is better for the world—nothing more, at least in the eyes of Time.”
Achmed continued to watch his sleeping son, deep in thought. Finally he did not look up, but he spoke.
“Your mother’s pyre is probably still warm. Do you wish to sing her dirge?”
Meridion closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment, then shook his head.
“It appears to have already been sung,” he said.
At last the Bolg king looked up. “I assure you it was not, or at least not done properly,” he said. “No one was here other than your mother, your brother, and me. She was dead at the time, he is an infant and very quiet.”
“Did you sing?”
The Bolg king went back to looking at his son.
Meridion smiled sadly. “The wind is satisfied. Thank you, as I said before, for attending to her. I will make my own remembrance in other places, at other times. I appreciate you hearing me out.”
He caressed the baby’s head, then rose from the tunnel floor.
Achmed looked up again. “Where is your father’s sword?”
“It rests on the altar stone beyond the Water Basilica in Avonderre, the place dedicated to MacQuieth Monodiere Nagall. My mother instructed me to attempt to pick it up, which I did, but I was refused. It was my parents’ intent to surrender it to whomever the weapon chose.”
Achmed nodded wordlessly.
“Goodbye, then, Uncle,” Meridion said as he put away the Black Ivory box and straightened his belt and his gear. “I wish you consolation, and hope one day I will see you again.”
“Wait. Here.” Achmed rose as well and went down the hall to the opening of the tunnel where the remains of the ash bed were still taking to the wind. He crouched down and touched the cinders with his thumb, then pressed them onto the baby’s chest above his heart.
“You are only the second person I have ever said these words to, Graal—my—son,” he whispered in the Bolgish tongue. “It would be easier for me to wring the blood from my own throat than to say them to anyone else; I could barely bring myself to say them to your mother. But I do love you. Odd and fragmentary as that love might be, it is indeed yours. I hope whatever magic you have inherited from Rhapsody allows you to know, even though it is unlikely you will ever see me again, that you have my love, and that of your mother, for all of Time, cursed entity that Time may be.”
He pressed his lips to Graal’s forehead, receiving a series of soft sounds in return.
Then he returned to where Meridion was still standing.
“Take your mother’s sword and come with me,” he said.
THE CAULDRON, AT THE LIGHTCATCHER
The Bolg king led Meridion to the Cauldron, the center of most of the royal activity from the very founding of Canrif in this place almost three millennia before, and had the Child of Time follow him through the great hall of thrones to the chamber beyond it, where the glass funicular and the tower staircase stood.
He brought him, past whole cohorts of soldiers who were still wandering aimlessly, into Gurgus Peak where the Lightcatcher was churning, spending the memory of light that had been stored in its diamond power source.
Achmed stunned Meridion by striding into the center of the instrumentality where the altar-like table stood and, after kissing his head, put Graal down on the table.
He turned to Rhapsody’s horrified eldest son.
“This is the seventh of your mother’s children, the New Beginning. I think you should utilize the Lightcatcher’s violet spectrum of the same name to bless him with whatever the powers are of being so named.”
Meridion exhaled slowly. Then a small smile came over his face.
“At your will, Your Majesty.”
Achmed slipped his sensitive, vein-scored fingertip into his son’s grasp. The baby seized it and kicked wildly. br />
“If you wish to make up for your father’s debt, care for this child as your mother would have,” he continued. “Ask Analise o Serendair if you need her help; she will know what a magical child needs. You may not have been summoned into existence as he was on this strand of Time, but you were a magical infant with special powers and needs nonetheless. Analise was invaluable in taking care of you in Rhapsody’s absence during the War of the Known World.”
“Absence?”
The Bolg king nodded distantly.
“Your mother decided, once a coterie of assassins from the Raven’s Guild in Yarim and the Spider’s Clutch in Golgarn infiltrated these mountains, that you were no longer safe here, so she took you to the Distant Mountains of the Deep Kingdom and begged Faedryth to give you sanctuary, as you undoubtedly know,” he said. “She did that because she felt the world you had been born into was not safe for you—and she was certainly correct about that. She knew it was her duty, her honor, to try and rectify that situation, mostly for you, but also for the rest of the world. The sacrifices she made to do it, on top of the separation, which tore her heart out, were numerous and terrible, but in the end, the world prevailed.”
He looked back down at Graal and smiled at him.
“The world today is no different. Your father managed to keep a reliable peace and most often order, but there are ancient threats that have not been eradicated that still threaten your mother’s children—and mine. It’s my duty, and my honor, to try and rectify those situations as well.”
“It would be my honor to take care of Graal until you return,” Meridion said, watching Achmed and his son communicate silently. “And appropriate—I have reason to believe that he would have done the same for me by the old Time-strand.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, as I told you, when Graal made his passage in Gwylliam’s exodus, he sailed with the Second Fleet, and made the decision to stay on the Island of Gaematria, nearby to where the fleet sundered. He became the greatest of all the Sea Mages, and I know it was my mother’s wish that I be allowed to study with them should things have worked out. So it is the least I can do to assist in his care.”