Waiting among the skrolin took hours or days; he had entirely lost track of time. Pale-skin brought a whole bucket carved out of stone and filled with water as well as a dozen loaves of clavas. Many times he had to relieve himself by leaving the amphitheater and walking out into the pillars for privacy. He drank that entire bucket and a second one and ate all the clavas before a dozen skrolin returned bearing three massive scrolls forged out of metal-pewter, maybe, since it seemed too hard to be silver. They set these on the ground in front of him, unrolled them, and without further ceremony stepped back. The sheets were as long as his arm span, as wide as the length of his shin, and yet as thin as a leaf. How they could lay flat when they had just been so tightly rolled up he could not imagine.
One by one, the eleven skrolin who bore an armband came forward to press their talismans into a square etched into the center of each scroll. After a pause in which every creature there seemed ready for nothing to happen, yet something to happen, the skrolin would remove the armband and step back.
When they had finished, they all looked expectantly at him.
He saw the pattern, but he didn’t know what it meant. He crouched beside the unrolled sheet, slipped his armband off, and pressed it onto the sheet.
Light flashed. The armband glowed red hot, and he yelped and released it, but it did not roll away; it was stuck to the metal. Light undulated down the length of the sheet in waves, a stark white light followed by successive ripples of gold, pale yellow, silver, and a last dark surge which drove furrows into the surface, gashes and gouges too thin to measure yet he knew what they were.
He recognized writing when he saw it, although these marks were alien to him.
No sound issued from the skrolin.
They stood, like stone, without speaking or moving, stunned or shocked or ignorant.
But he knew. He understood. The miracle had happened. All that had separated them from their ancestors was their access to the knowledge that their kind had accumulated in the ancient days. These scrolls held their memories, closed to them for untold years and centuries. In this same way the pain had choked off his own life from him, glimpsed in snatches as transitory as the tales the skrolin had told themselves over and over since that day when the great weaving had destroyed them.
How long they stood in silence he could not measure. In the depths of the earth, he possessed no gauge by which to quantify time.
They stood in silence for as long as they needed to absorb what he had wrought. They stood in silence while he unrolled the other two sheets, pressed his armband to the centers, and watched as these, too, revealed their secrets.
At length, Gold-skin turned to him.
“A life for a life. A payment. An obligation. You do not belong here, you consume too much fuel. We will trade. One among us will lead you to the Blinding so you can return to your own kind. That is your life, in exchange for the talisman.”
My own kind.
He no longer knew who his own kind were. He could only remember the wheel, and the garden of clavas growing among the rotting flesh of the dead.
“What of your kinfolk?” he asked. “The ones who are trapped? What of them? Can you rescue them now? I can help you. I made a promise to them.”
They gave him no more speech. Pale-skin clasped him tightly, pinning his arms to his side, and hoisted him with awkward strength.
“What of them?” he called, desperate for an answer, but none came.
For hours or days Pale-skin carried him through the labyrinth that is utter night, stopping three times to give him water and clavas, and depositing him at long last, and unceremoniously, on a shelf of rock where grains of soil slipped beneath his fingers although he still could not see.
“Climb up,” said Pale-skin. “Climb up. You have done us great wrong. You have done us great good. We will not forget.”
It rattled away, and he was left alone in the pit. But he probed and touched and sought for handholds, however useless it seemed, because he did not want to die in the pit. So he climbed up and up and up and just when he thought he had been abandoned at the base of the Abyss and must climb for an eternity without ever reaching the top, he discovered a certain alteration in the darkness revealing contours across the rock. He saw a crack of light far above.
He climbed, although he had to rest frequently and more than once slipped and almost fell. When he squeezed out through a narrow cleft, scouring his back against the rough rock, he spilled down a short escarpment, scraped through a bramble bush, yelping and cursing, and came to rest in the shade of a tree on a layer of decayed leaf litter. A bird shrieked a warning and fluttered off through the branches. The light hurt his eyes, but it gentled and mellowed as he caught his breath, dizzy, gasping for air. It was hot and muggy, but there was ease in it and the savor of freedom.
He eased up onto his forearms. He lay on a hillside overlooking a valley a quarter cleared and the rest wooded. A half dozen unseen hearths spun fingers of smoke into the darkening sky. In one clearing a pond faded to a pewter gleam. It was hard to see more detail than this because the sun was setting, the far horizon bathed in an orange-red glow so beautiful that he wept.
4
FOR three days they trudged overland along an old Dariyan road still used by the locals for market traffic, of which they saw little. This was the driest country Hanna had ever seen. Nothing that was truly green grew, only prickly juniper, the ubiquitous olive trees, and so many varieties of thorny shrub or broom that she wondered what they had to protect themselves against besides goats. She and the others soon became coated with a film of dust. Her mouth was always parched. Her lips cracked, and the sun was merciless.
They changed direction, turning east at dawn on the fourth day so that they marched into the rising sun, and for the next three days followed a trickle of water running over rocks which Sergeant Bysantius persisted in calling a river. Every chance she got, she sluiced its waters over her head, neck, hands, and red, swollen, blistered feet until she was streaked with sweat and dirt never completely washed away by the water. Yet for moments at a stretch that cool touch relieved her skin and the headache that continually plagued her.
Where a hole in the ground swallowed the stream, they turned up a defile with jagged, steep-sided hills rising to either side. After two arduous days on a rocky trail, making poor time and less distance, the wagons were left on the path with a guard while Sergeant Bysantius pointed the rest at an impossibly steep trail that led straight up the side of the hill. His soldiers rolled a dozen barrels out of the wagons and with great difficulty lashed them to stout poles and lugged them up. Two other men carried Mother Obligatia on her stretcher up that twisting trail which switched back and forward and back while the rest of them strung out behind, falling farther and farther back. It took hours, or years, before their footsore and exhausted party reached a row of buildings perched on a ledge cut into the cliff face.
“I almost feel that I am home again,” gasped Sister Hilaria with as much of a smile as she could muster. Her lips were bleeding, as were Hanna’s.
Certainly the monastery resembled St. Ekatarina’s in its inaccessibility, high up along the cliff face with a forbidding rock ridge above and only the trail leading up to it. An army might besiege this small settlement to no avail since it possessed, as they discovered, a spring within the walls.
“Quite at home,” added Hilaria, who smelled water when they passed a stairwell cutting down into the rock. “I only need a pair of buckets and a shoulder harness, and I’ll be ready to set to work hauling up water.”