Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

Adica crawled after them. The rock closed over her head, and, very quickly, darkness blinded her. It was slow going because of her hesitancy, but she heard the movements of the two men ahead of her and Laoina behind and in general the going was fairly smooth. The tunnel forked to the right, and suddenly she heard whistling and moaning: narrow shafts thrust skyward, a pipe for the wind. The tunnel dipped, hit an incline, and at the base opened out. By now it was pitch-black. She groped, found Alain’s body, and held on to him as Laoina came up behind her. Night had never bothered her, nor her visits into the tomb of the ancient queens under the tumulus, but this place, narrow and clammy, had a presence that weighed uncomfortably, as though the earth itself had consciousness.

“Come,” said Two Fingers, as Laoina translated. “Hold one onto the next, and follow me. There is a trap we must work around.”

“You don’t think they’ve laid in others since the attack?” asked Laoina.

“It may be. But I have certain charms upon me that will warn me.”

So it proved. Three times he stopped them. Once, she heard a hissed conversation, words exchanged, and they were allowed to pass through a bottleneck so narrow that she had to squeeze sideways to get through. A hand brushed her head, checking for the telltale topknot worn by the Cursed Ones, and let her by without further molesting her. It was a good place for an ambush. She was blind as a mole; she could not even see her own hands in front of her face. How the others moved with any sense of confidence she couldn’t imagine, and yet wasn’t all their work as the Hallowed Ones, learning the secrets of the great weaving, itself like groping forward in darkness?

None among humankind knew the extent of the Cursed Ones’ magic. They could call fire from stone and earth from water; they could cause wind to arise from flame and water to leach out of the air. They knew the power of transformation, and they could coax elementals from their hiding places among the ordinary places of the Earth. For this power they paid a price, and they paid it not just with their own blood but with the blood of their enemies.

So humankind had perforce learned other magic, those manipulable by the hands: smithing and pottery; plaiting and weaving; words and melody and dance. In such forms, human magic flourished, and in this way the ancient mothers and fathers had observed the turning wheel of the heavens and the way in which the shuttles, known as the wandering stars, moved an invisible weft through those stars which never changed position in reference to each other. Adica had listened at the knee of her teacher for years and been initiated into the greater mysteries, and into the secrets of the great working: That the stars in the heavens above were woven as though in a vast loom, and the power of those threads could be drawn down to Earth and woven into power made manifest here, on Earth.

All this had gone into the building of the stone looms that now waited in readiness across the land, set such great distances apart that she knew if she tried to travel between them on foot she could probably never reach them all in her own lifetime. But each loom, when woven with the living threads of the stars, made a gateway that linked it to all of the other looms, a gateway that might lead east and south on one night, depending on the configuration of the stars, and north and west another.

Yet the Holy One said there was a greater hand that worked the loom of the heavens, one that made changes unseeable by human eyes, since the span of any individual human life on earth was brief. This was the greatest mystery of all.

Out of the darkness bloomed light, stunningly bright, although it was only a small torch of bundled reeds, dried and coated with pitch. Two Fingers held it aloft as they negotiated a narrow plank bridge set across a chasm. By its light Adica saw ancient forms painted on the walls: the imprint of hands, outlined in red, heavy-set horses speckled by black dots, four-legged beasts shaggy with long hair that drooped down their flanks, a horn marked with thirteen stripes.

She smelled other humans before she heard them. Two Fingers doused the torch, and in darkness she followed Two Fingers and Alain through another narrow passage, had to actually shimmy forward on her stomach for a short stretch, pushing her staff before her and with her pack hooked around her ankle to drag it after.

This hole opened out suddenly. She felt the presence of others, not all of them, perhaps, still among the living. She felt the touch of ancient ghosts and guardians and heard the whispering of people yet alive. A torch flared into life, but even before Adica could register the figures huddled on the floor of the cavern, she was hurled into a vision:

A herd of cattlelike beasts, horned and shaggy, thunders past. Birds explode up from their grassy hideaways, flooding the sky, and in the distance a huge beast with an impossibly long, sinuous nose and horns thrusting out on either side of its great mouth lumbers past, leading more of its kind toward an unknown destination. She sees people walking along the edge of a pine forest. They look very like the people she knows, but they are clad in skins and they carry tools of stone and bone. They have no metal and no pots she can see. Elaborately woven baskets and beads of ivory, shell, or stone adorn their clothing. Deer swarm by, a powerful herd coursing across the landscape

and she stood once again in the cavern, in the middle world, staring in amazement at the paintings that covered the ceiling of the cavern.

She stood alone: Alain had already followed Two Fingers to the center of the crowd where an outcropping of rock metamorphosed into two shaggy beasts, one carved higher up on the rock. She stepped carefully along the shadowed ground in their trail, examining the people who waited around her.

Was this all that was left of Horn’s tribe? There were not more than twenty, half of them children. Many had wounds, and some were unable even to sit. At the center of this pathetic group rested a pallet woven out of sticks. On it lay a figure so heavily draped in copper ornament that Adica could barely make out that she had hair and features beneath a headdress of beaten copper, a broad pectoral, armbands, bracelets and a wide waistband worked into the shape of two axheads crossing. Fine-boned hands rested on the pectoral, curved around a small, gold cup. As Adica moved closer, she smelled the powerful scent of a potion sharp with aniseed. Red ocher smeared closed eyelids, and a pattern of crescent moons marked the old woman’s face.

Horn had been named for the shape of her disfigured face. To look at her from one side was to see a woman of advanced years, wrinkled but keen. To look at her from the other side was to see a face all slack and drooping, lifeless, and a hideously vacant eye that, Adica supposed, saw such sights as mortal vision could not comprehend.

She knelt beside the old woman as a girl moved aside to make room for her. “Is she alive?” she asked, then saw the feather laid across the old woman’s lips stir, brushed by the respiration of the spirit still housed within that frail body.

mankind had perforce learned other magic, those manipulable by the hands: smithing and pottery; plaiting and weaving; words and melody and dance. In such forms, human magic flourished, and in this way the ancient mothers and fathers had observed the turning wheel of the heavens and the way in which the shuttles, known as the wandering stars, moved an invisible weft through those stars which never changed position in reference to each other. Adica had listened at the knee of her teacher for years and been initiated into the greater mysteries, and into the secrets of the great working: That the stars in the heavens above were woven as though in a vast loom, and the power of those threads could be drawn down to Earth and woven into power made manifest here, on Earth.

All this had gone into the building of the stone looms that now waited in readiness across the land, set such great distances apart that she knew if she tried to travel between them on foot she could probably never reach them all in her own lifetime. But each loom, when woven with the living threads of the stars, made a gateway that linked it to all of the other looms, a gateway that might lead east and south on one night, depending on the configuration of the stars, and north and west another.

Yet the Holy One said there was a greater hand that worked the loom of the heavens, one that made changes unseeable by human eyes, since the span of any individual human life on earth was brief. This was the greatest mystery of all.

Out of the darkness bloomed light, stunningly bright, although it was only a small torch of bundled reeds, dried and coated with pitch. Two Fingers held it aloft as they negotiated a narrow plank bridge set across a chasm. By its light Adica saw ancient forms painted on the walls: the imprint of hands, outlined in red, heavy-set horses speckled by black dots, four-legged beasts shaggy with long hair that drooped down their flanks, a horn marked with thirteen stripes.

She smelled other humans before she heard them. Two Fingers doused the torch, and in darkness she followed Two Fingers and Alain through another narrow passage, had to actually shimmy forward on her stomach for a short stretch, pushing her staff before her and with her pack hooked around her ankle to drag it after.

This hole opened out suddenly. She felt the presence of others, not all of them, perhaps, still among the living. She felt the touch of ancient ghosts and guardians and heard the whispering of people yet alive. A torch flared into life, but even before Adica could register the figures huddled on the floor of the cavern, she was hurled into a vision:

A herd of cattlelike beasts, horned and shaggy, thunders past. Birds explode up from their grassy hideaways, flooding the sky, and in the distance a huge beast with an impossibly long, sinuous nose and horns thrusting out on either side of its great mouth lumbers past, leading more of its kind toward an unknown destination. She sees people walking along the edge of a pine forest. They look very like the people she knows, but they are clad in skins and they carry tools of stone and bone. They have no metal and no pots she can see. Elaborately woven baskets and beads of ivory, shell, or stone adorn their clothing. Deer swarm by, a powerful herd coursing across the landscape

and she stood once again in the cavern, in the middle world, staring in amazement at the paintings that covered the ceiling of the cavern.

She stood alone: Alain had already followed Two Fingers to the center of the crowd where an outcropping of rock metamorphosed into two shaggy beasts, one carved higher up on the rock. She stepped carefully along the shadowed ground in their trail, examining the people who waited around her.

Was this all that was left of Horn’s tribe? There were not more than twenty, half of them children. Many had wounds, and some were unable even to sit. At the center of this pathetic group rested a pallet woven out of sticks. On it lay a figure so heavily draped in copper ornament that Adica could barely make out that she had hair and features beneath a headdress of beaten copper, a broad pectoral, armbands, bracelets and a wide waistband worked into the shape of two axheads crossing. Fine-boned hands rested on the pectoral, curved around a small, gold cup. As Adica moved closer, she smelled the powerful scent of a potion sharp with aniseed. Red ocher smeared closed eyelids, and a pattern of crescent moons marked the old woman’s face.

Horn had been named for the shape of her disfigured face. To look at her from one side was to see a woman of advanced years, wrinkled but keen. To look at her from the other side was to see a face all slack and drooping, lifeless, and a hideously vacant eye that, Adica supposed, saw such sights as mortal vision could not comprehend.

She knelt beside the old woman as a girl moved aside to make room for her. “Is she alive?” she asked, then saw the feather laid across the old woman’s lips stir, brushed by the respiration of the spirit still housed within that frail body.