Echoes of the Goddess. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ the time had come for him to go to the Bright Lady. This could not be blasphemy, he told himself. It could be no violation of the law. He would not summon her, as any village conjurer summons a spirit out of a tainted well. No, he would go where he had seen her last, and wait. Perhaps he would perish in the waiting, but he would wait all the same, so strong was the compulsion within him.

      So he drove the goats home on the evening of the second day, and sat with his parents on the doorstep after supper, in the cool breeze. At first the talk was slow and faltering, as all were reluctant to mention Zadain, but then words came quickly and easily. Ain and his parents spoke of everyday things. Thain and Patek were pleased to see their son behaving sensibly once more. Ain was tense, but he dared not reveal it. He was about to go away, as Zadain had gone, but much farther, and perhaps he too would never return. He wished his brother could be with him.

      It was nearly midnight when they retired. He lay above his parents in a loft which seemed vast and empty, now that Zadain was gone. But for all the unhappiness it might bring, he knew what he had to do. He put his ear to the boards beneath him and listened to his mother’s gentle breathing and his father’s snoring for a long time. Then he sat up, tied on his shoes, wrapped a cloak around himself, and climbed carefully down out of the loft. He paused in the darkness over his sleeping parents. He wanted to lean over and kiss his mother goodbye, but dared not, so he merely slipped away, into the kitchen, where he gathered some bread and cheese and dried meat into a bag, and slung a water skin over his shoulder. With tense, breathless stealth, he lifted his lyre down from the peg. Then he was gone. The night received him.

      In darkness he walked toward the hills. The moon was just up and the sky very clear, so he could see the slopes before him, but the light did not reach into the lowlands yet. Each tree and boulder stood in black outline like some silent sentry in the land of the dead. But he knew the way intimately, having wandered over this ground since he was old enough to walk. Before long he came to the bank of the Endless River. This he followed until he came to where the land sloped upward. He followed the path he had taken on that first night.

      He looked up at the cave mouth and saw a light. Fear shot through him. Bandits? Then he saw how foolish his fear had been. The light was a steady glow, not the flickering of firelight, and in it, lesser lights drifted up and down. As he neared it, he could make out upright figures moving. Some of them he recognized.

      The Bright Lady was waiting for him. He stood before her, all terrors forgotten.

      “I am pleased that you have come again,” she said. “When the other came…it was not you.”

      This was the first time that he had heard her voice. She spoke the words in human fashion, but there was something else, like an after-echo, just beyond the range of hearing, a quality of sound not of Earth at all.

      He did not ask if she wanted him to play again. He merely did, and at once the four-armed musicians joined him on the tambang, the zootibar, the kabukkuk, and others for which the languages of men have no names. Once more the Lady danced, whirling the auroras around her, and a great force came over Ain, something as elemental as any which moves the Earth or causes the seasons to change. He could not comprehend the vastness of it, but he felt it in his music, and played on.

      The Lady began to move away. The white-robed man with the staff approached Ain, becoming like a cloud, drifting over and around him. Then the boy felt himself rise up. He was caught in the spell of the music, and even that part of his mind which was still conscious knew better than to hesitate for even the tiniest instant; but still he perceived that he was being borne aloft on a litter by some of the winged musicians, who held long, curling horns in their free hands. The knights with the flower-tipped lances were his honor guard. The Lady circled him like a bright planet in its course. For a time he seemed to be high in the air. The Moon was very close, but then the horizons whirled. The stars spun like beads in a top. The ocean rose up to meet him, but there was no coldness, no splash. He had been translated into some other form of being, not wholly material. Still he played his song, as the company passed down through the earth.

      At last he came to a place few men have seen even in visions, where all solid things, all soil and stone melted away and only light remained, not blinding, but bright beyond seeing, bright on a whole new scale of perception. Brilliant against brilliance, there were shapes and forms, and gradually Ain discerned an overall pattern as he approached the center of the realm of light: a huge, burning rose unfolded before him, swallowed him up, filled the core of the world. This was the home of the Bright Powers.

      * * * *

      It seemed that he sang forever, without stopping, and that he had stopped, as if he were separated into two Ain Harads. There was no sense of time. He could dimly make out the Powers as they gathered around him, as he drifted suspended in light. Sometimes a shape would flash intensely blue or red or green, then fade away, like an afterimage in his eyes.

      * * * *

      Once he drifted through a long, wide place lined with many pillars. Fountains spewed gold. He sang. The Bright Lady sat on a throne before him, flanked by her knights. The musicians hovered above, high among the pillars like bright moths.

      An image came to him: a tiny fish in a glass bowl, being passed from hand to hand among the splendidly garbed lords and ladies of the court. They talked and laughed and made intrigues, and the fish in the bowl, only faintly aware of them, understood nothing. He was that fish.

      * * * *

      Beautiful? he said to himself. There were no words, no sounds, no sights, no memories, but something beyond all senses, which could not be encompassed by eye or ear or mind.

      * * * *

      He sat by the Lady’s side in a small boat, motionless on a mirrored lake, his lyre in his hand, the strings strangely solid to his touch, more substantial than anything else. He ran his fingers over them gently, then paused. Of their own accord, they made music.

      The Lady wore something around her neck. She leaned forward, holding it up for him to see. It was a sphere of blue glass. Inside, a tiny boat lay on a mirrored lake. A boy sat beside a lady, playing softly on the lyre. He could hear the music, coming out of the glass sphere. The lady sitting inside it, beside the other boy, held up something, and within that yet another lady and boy sat, and the lady held up a gleaming sphere, and the scene was repeated endlessly, as if in a procession of mirrors; and somehow his eyes were made able to see all that tiny detail, into infinity, and his ears could hear the vast harmony of the music made by endless fingers.

      * * * *

      Once he awoke and was astonished to feel the chill night air and a lumpy mattress beneath him, and to hear straw rustle as he sat up in the loft in his parents’ house. Eagerly he opened the trapdoor. More than anything else he wanted to behold his parents sleeping down there, to know that they were real and solid and not some kind of dream—

      He set foot on the top rung of the ladder—

      —and the light—

      —the burning rose, slowly unfolding—

      —he awoke into the light, and the Lady spoke inside his mind:

      “Ain Harad of Randelcainé, son of Thain, surely you have known since you arrived here that all your ideas about this place are…to use an example from your world…like the efforts of a worm to describe the running deer. You are someone special. Your music alone, of all the productions of your race, has attracted the notice of the Bright Kind. Do not ask how this has come to be. It is from within you. You may never be able to comprehend the source, but the miracle and the mystery are within you. You thought to move me and СКАЧАТЬ