Haze and the Hammer of Darkness (60 page)

 

xxxiv

Rathe?

Should he re-create her? The odds are good that he can duplicate her essence.

Are they?

He twirls the beaker that contains the last of the second bottle of Springfire he has consumed since he began the debate with himself.

Would she be Rathe? Even if I caught everything? Remembered it all?

He looks from his chair on the porch up the hillside. The topmost quince is dying, he can tell.

Why don't you rejuve the quince? Re-create it?

Plants don't rejuve.

Then re-create it.

It wouldn't be the same quince. Might as well plant another.

He sips what should be the next-to-last sip from the beaker. Through two bottles the questions have not changed. Neither have the answers.

And Rathe? Would your creation be the same? Could you bear not to make changes? Even if you didn't, would she be the same?

He does not answer the questions. Instead, his sip becomes a gulp as he downs the last drops of the Springfire from the jasolite beaker.

“Flame! Flame! Flame!”

Even as he stands and gathers the darkness to him, even as he hurls the beaker into the flooring with enough force to shatter it and embed the crystal shards into the wood, he knows the answer.

Rathe is dead.

Dead is dead.

No miraculous re-creation will restore the woman who loved him.

All you'll have is a duplicate doomed to repeat the mistakes of the real Rathe. A pale copy without the fire of the original. A living doll without the soul of the only Rathe who lived.

“A pale copy? Sure. Just a pale copy! And what are you, Martel? A pale protoplasmic copy of distant ancestors who screwed around!”

Say what you will … dead is dead.

“Easy enough to say. Easy enough to think. But you're alive.”

Exactly.

“You can throw your thunderbolts. You can summon the eternal darkness. You can heal the sick. You can walk on air and on water. So why can't you create a new Rathe?”

You can. You just can't bring back the old.

“So why don't you?”

The darkness freezes with the question, and even outside the cottage the breeze stills and the dorles quiet.

Because she's not strong enough. Because you'd destroy her again.

“Me? You wonderful subconscious, tell me again I destroyed her.”

Didn't you force her to leave and not protect her?

Martel does not answer himself in the quiet and dark that wait for his decision.

Do you want to spend every moment guarding her from Apollo? Can you make her a goddess? And if you could, would she be Rathe?

“Flame!”

His breath comes out in a long hiss, and the silence is broken. Outside, the two dorles in the nearest quince chitter. The low waves in the bay across the hill swish once more, and the breeze ruffles his short hair. The darkness ebbs beneath the moment.

At last, he looks down and wills away the crystal shards in and on the floor. The polished wood returns to an unblemished state as the scratches erase themselves.

Although there is another bottle of Springfire in the cooler, he will not need it. Not today, not tonight, though they are one and the same on Aurore.

Even gods, even you, have limits, Martel.

He would cry, but cannot, as he looks to the hillcrest and the twilight that will be centuries in coming. Instead, he stares at the dying quince.

 

xxxv

Time, like a loose-flowing river, does not, will not, flow the same for all individuals, neither mortals nor immortals.

That thought flits through his mind as he takes quick step upon quick step along the narrow pathway that leads toward a white villa.

Technically, the answer is simple. Technically, the answer is not an answer, but chance. Chance alone seems to determine who lives and who dies. Some mortals become gods, and no scientist can determine why. An increasing number of mortals, even within the Empire, do not age, or age far less quickly than others.

“Miracles?” he mutters as the path begins to rise. Any demigod on Aurore can return youth to a mortal, at least in body. But whether the youth remains so for more than a few years depends again on the individual.

“My individual?” he asks the trail, both recalling and trying to forget the lady upon whom he had bestowed the gift, recalling also how he had hoped she would remain beautiful in her own way beyond her time.

Beyond her time? That time was so short.

Had he only made the effort … had he made the effort he had not, for the reasons he can understand but not accept.

Will you ever accept them? Will you ever fight the gods for one individual?

You can't fight them all.

Won't you have to, sooner or later?

Perhaps. But not for one individual.

Then for what? For what, for whom, will you fight, Martel?

He turns himself away from the question, lets the day enfold him, lets himself be one with the trees, the golden grass, the scrub thistles, and the meadow flowers … with the dorles, with the white birds that dip their beaks into the clear brooks beyond his sight.

The key is mind over matter, but not the mind of thought. Rather the mind of the mind.

He frowns. Is he rationalizing, once again, his feeling of desertion toward Rathe?

Mind over matter, indeed.

He concentrates on his pace. Quick step, quick step, and the trail unrolls before him, stretching into the low hills, beckoning him away from Sybernal.

Most of the pines, wide-trunked and long-needled, whisper in the afternoon day, murmur in the perpetual breeze that cools these hills to the north of Sybernal, and hint at the power that naps in the scattered villas that nestle on the few cleared hillsides.

Martel wipes his forehead on his short black sleeve, halts where the path forks, and casts his thoughts down both hard-packed trails.

Why are they hard-packed? No sign anyone uses them.

The right-hand path dips down toward a brook, perhaps a hundred meters beyond what he can see directly with his eyes, and leads another kilo before ending in a small parklike clearing. Although his perceptions relay no structure to him, the impression is of a small freehold left to the elements, but tidied occasionally by a passing demigod.

He casts his thoughts out along the left path, resuming his rapid pace before evaluating what he perceives.

Others may be monitoring him. That he assumes from the feather-light tendrils of power that flicker in and out of his awareness, particularly when the breeze dies to a mere ghost.

Not that you mind, Martel.

He stops and studies the hillside to his left, the abrupt clearing that slants down the slope the length of three tall pines before the old trees close in.

Old trees … not many young ones, nor any dead ones … and what does that tell you, Martel?

How old are the pines? Or the few deciduous trees that mingle with them?

Martel shakes his head, once, quickly.

The faint scent of the pines and the swish of their boughs as the breeze picks up are saying something, trying to tell him something important. What, he cannot decide.

He kicks a rock, scarcely more than a pebble. He watches as it skids down the trail before bouncing sideways and disappearing into the golden grass that he thinks of as native. This high in the hills the emerald grass of Sybernal has not penetrated, except within some estates. Yet the trees are Arthtype.

Another tendril of power, stronger, flickers over him, dismisses him, and moves on.

Martel leaves his shields fully in place and smiles as the thin probe withdraws. The prober lies a long way from the path upon which he stands and does not recognize that Martel's shields conceal his darkness. But then, sentry duty is boring for most sentries in most times and places.

Martel gives the clearing beside the trail a last look before he continues onward. The scene is not quite idyllic. From between the golden grasses peer crimson flowers, while a few scattered scrub thistles ring the far edge just inside the pines.

Order … very definitely ordered, Martel.

The pines are all healthy. Massive. Tall. Mature, but not old, though their size lends that impression. No gnarled branches or fallen or rotten trunks detract from the evidence of strength.

He cannot recall any such evidence of decay during his entire hike from the outskirts of Sybernal.

“The trees militant,” he says with a low laugh, and picks up his pace as the trail narrows and begins to turn back on itself. He cannot explain, but in their own way the pines remind him of soldiers.

The chitter of a lone dorle rises over the swish of the pine branches. Otherwise the trail is silent, as it has been all along.

“Wild chase, after something that…” He does not finish the sentence, for his perceptions catch the power somehow trapped on the far side of the particular hill his trail circles.

Power … always power … nowhere on Aurore it doesn't show up, sooner or later.

No … you draw power like a lightning rod.

Is the thought his?

It does not matter, and he proceeds along the trail until it straightens at the other side of the hill.

A stone wall, the first thing he has seen that shows lack of attention, appears on the right-hand side of the trail, which has widened into a grass-covered path.

The path meanders along the flat between two low hills. On the left continues the hill Martel has been circling, pine-covered and silent.

On the right is what he seeks. While he cannot see directly beyond the stone wall, even though several stones have toppled out of the top row and down next to the wall, he knows that behind the remaining stones are tree gardens. Behind the gardens are emerald-green lawns that rise to formal gardens and to a white villa.

Both the grounds and the villa broadcast an air of desertion, and emptiness that stretches impossibly far back in time. Since Martel has visited that villa, he knows the impression is false, strong as it is, overpowering as it threatens to become with each step he takes toward the shambling graystone wall.

To the sense of desertion, underneath it, nearly lost in the mental patina of age that the wall and the estate behind it radiate, clings a sense of danger, and of power.

Tend to be synonymous on Aurore … danger and power do.

Martel ignores the estate, for he has found it, found it deserted. He is not disappointed.

Rather … relieved.

And why might that be?

“I don't have to answer that,” he mumbles to himself.

The clear path beckons, and with it his apprehensions.

Brushing them aside, he marches down the grassy trail that soon becomes a wider lane next to the tumbled stone wall. With each step the unseen tension tightens, although he sees nothing in front of him. His vision is limited because both lane and wall curve gently to the right.

After another quarter-stan, three separate chitters form a dorle on the far side of the wall, and after another two kilos, he sees the fountain.

As he nears the circular basin the feeling of danger mounts. Strangely, the fountain operates, for all the desertion, for all the apparent lack of life. The water does not spray from the single stone figure on the square pedestal in the middle of the deep basin, but from jets around the young man, lending the statue a curtain of mist. Likewise, all the mist falls within the basin, whose black depths stretch toward the center of Aurore.

Though the statue is that of a young man, handsome, in a simple tunic and trousers, much like Martel's, his face is contorted in agony.

Martel stands at the edge of the fountain, understanding all too well both the agony and the danger.

He probes, lets his thoughts enfold the statue, and draws from the darkness that he knows will always be near him.

Raising his left hand, he gestures. For an instant, a shadow passes over the statue. When it has fled, the curtain of mist remains, but the figure is gone.

Martel nods.

While he hopes the other will be wise enough not to return, or not to repeat his folly in another way, the irony is all too striking.

Saved him from what might have happened to you … right, Martel?

He takes a last look at the fountain, at the jets of mist and water concealing nothing, then at the wall, and finally behind the stones at the unkempt emerald grass, the straggling gardens, and at the empty rooms and columns.

He stares at his feet.

After a time, he turns to retrace his steps back toward Sybernal, back along a trail he has already trod once without understanding why.

This time, occasionally, he whistles.

 

xxxvi

Should be evening. Or twilight.

Beneath his feet the golden sands stretch down to the waters of the circular bay. The golden green of the water touches the sand with a gentle swish-swash, swish-swash.

It is always twilight beneath the waters, Martel.
The answering thought is faint but clear.

He looks around the bay, but no one else is present. When he first moved into the cottage, picnickers and others from Sybernal often swam in the clear waters. Over the years, its popularity has declined, and now no one comes. No one comes, except Martel, although the waters are as clear as ever, and the sands are as warm and golden as always.

With a shrug, he walks into the waters, which part around him, flowing, encircling, but not touching him.

Thetis joins him as he reaches the underwater shelf where the depths begin. The green gown flows around her like water, like liquid flame, and she bears no trident. Not this time. Her hands are open and empty.