Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (8 page)

The women’s chanting swelled and faded, swelled and faded, and Indigo thought they were forming now into a procession that filed before the stone chair, each individual, from the youngest to the oldest, pausing to bow reverently to her in passing. She saw Shalune’s heavy features and long, swinging plaits. She saw an ancient woman who mumbled and could barely clasp her arthritic hands together. She saw a solemn girl who looked like Uluye but was twenty years too young. She saw a toddler, crowing and kicking chubby legs as she dangled from her mother’s arms. Dark faces in the gloom, eyes glowing like lamps in the firelight, the shuffle of bare feet, the incessant chanting:
speak, speak, speak
!

“Grimya!” Her mind was floundering and she called the wolf’s name aloud, groping for a spar of coherence in the heaving sea that her consciousness had become.

Grimya’s mental voice seemed to come from a vast distance.
I can’t reach you! They are holding me back! Indigo—

But suddenly the wolf’s call and the chanting and the flickering, feverish scene were cut off as though a solid wall had crashed down between Indigo and her senses. A jolt shot through her body, a moment of excruciating pain gripped her; then clarity returned and she seemed to be hovering, disembodied, amid calm and dark and silence. And someone was addressing her.

She didn’t hear the words, but she felt them, and felt behind them the presence that pervaded the darkness around her. Cool, quiet, secret ... and deeply powerful. There was something menacing about it, yet Indigo didn’t feel afraid. It was as if she knew—or
almost
knew—the nature of this power, as if she had encountered it at some time in the past, though the memory now eluded her. As the presence spoke, she knew too that her unconscious mind was absorbing its message and yet that on a conscious level, she was unaware of the message’s content or meaning. But it didn’t seem to matter. She was calm; she felt at peace. She was content to let this hiatus continue for as long as the presence willed it.

She didn’t know how much time had passed—if time was relevant in this dreamlike state—before she became aware that the insistent, toneless murmuring had ceased. The presence began to withdraw, and suddenly Indigo felt a sense of cold as bitter as a polar winter rush through her. She tried to open her mouth to cry out a protest, but she had no body, no physical presence, no means by which to express her shock. She felt herself being pulled away, swept from the darkness’s quiet heart toward a clashing outer world of light and noise, and though she wanted to struggle against the pull, she was helpless. The dark was receding faster, fester— Then, just before she was thrown back into the physical world, Indigo saw two eyes staring at her from the vacuum that she had left behind. The eyes were human, but filled with terrible knowledge that transcended human limitations. They burned black, like dark stars, and around each iris was a glimmering corona of silver.

The dark world ejected Indigo, and she shouted in pain and shock as her mind and her body fused into one again and she found herself rigid in the sandstone chair under a thunderous sky alive with lightning. Dark figures were surging toward her; she tried to rise but had lost control of her limbs, and she would have fallen from the chair were it not for the hands that reached out to catch and hold her. Something was hissing in the distance like snakes; she heard Grimya barking but couldn’t see her. Then a thunderbolt crashed blindingly overhead, and the background hissing swelled suddenly to a roar as the heavens opened and the deluge began.

Indigo gasped and staggered under the downpour’s bombardment. Her foot slid on the wet stone and she slipped, grazing one leg painfully on the chair as her knees buckled under her. Shrill voices rang in her ears; as the women tried to help her upright, she gagged and a thin stream of fluid choked up from her throat to spill on the stone floor. Suddenly she couldn’t fight anymore. She felt too ill and too weak to resist the hands—there seemed to be
hundreds
of hands—that touched and pulled and guided. She didn’t care anymore. Let them do what they liked. She wanted only to get away.

She let out a soft, sighing breath and went limp in their arms.

The women carried her back down the stairs, treacherously slippery now with the rain pelting down on them, and took her to her cave quarters. Grimya, who had been forcibly restrained by two of the strongest priestesses all the way down the flight, finally broke free, ran at Shalune and bit her as she crouched down to spread a blanket over Indigo’s weakly stirring form. Shalune cursed roundly but wouldn’t permit the priestesses to hit Grimya in retaliation. Instead, with astonishing strength, she held the furious wolf by the scruff of her neck until Grimya calmed enough to understand that no one was trying to harm Indigo, then released her and peremptorily ordered the other women out of the cave.

Indigo was aware of the fracas but felt too exhausted to even open her eyes and see what was afoot. She heard the women withdraw, then heard voices that she thought were those of Shalune and Uluye arguing near the cave’s mouth. After some sharp exchange, Uluye left, but before the argument ended, the word for
fever
, which Indigo knew well, came several times to her ears. Had her fever come back? She feared so, for she felt hot and cold together, and she couldn’t shake off the illusion that she was floating in midair and that her fingers had swollen to five times their proper size.

Someone at some time had taken away the heavy headdress. She was glad to be rid of it, glad that she wasn’t still sitting in the stone chair, the flesh of her face eaten away and her hair falling out in clumps, and ... no, she mustn’t let her thoughts go down that road. She wasn’t the dead oracle; she was ... someone else. Someone else.

Soft footfalls impinged on her wandering mind, and a square, hard hand, wet with rain, was placed firmly on her forehead. Shalune grunted as though some private opinion had been vindicated, then looked hard at Grimya, who crouched defensively beside Indigo on the cave floor.

“Stay here,” she said firmly. Her manner told Grimya that she had no doubt the wolf would understand her. “Indigo needs to rest. Guard her.”

Against what? Grimya wondered, but she couldn’t ask and Shalune didn’t elaborate. The noise of the storm was muted in the cave, though an occasional flash of lightning lit the interior starkly. Shalune prodded the hearth fire into some semblance of life, checked the clay lamps to ensure they didn’t need refilling, then walked to the curtained doorway. Looking back, she said something else, in which Grimya caught the words “sleep,” “fever” and “in the morning,” then pushed the curtain aside and ducked out into the teeming rain.

Grimya stared at the curtain for a long time after Shalune had gone; then at last she rose and padded to the cave’s entrance. The storm was cooling the night a little, but the increased humidity brought by the rain made the world oppressive. A dark, earthy smell from the sodden forest far below mingled with the electric scent of ozone. Lightning flickered again, but it was far away now and the following thunder no more than a faint grumble in the distance. Grimya looked up, staring at the steps that led up the bluff’s face to the summit. No smell of incense, no sign of smoke or reflected glow from the brazier fire. The women had gone to their quarters; the night was undisturbed.

She withdrew her head and crept back across the cave to lie down at Indigo’s side. Indigo seemed to be asleep, which was a blessing. Grimya prayed she wouldn’t wake for a good many hours. She didn’t want to have to face her and try to answer the questions that her friend must inevitably ask, for she didn’t know how she was going to explain what she had seen and heard on the cliff top when Indigo had taken her place on the stone chair.

She thought the word for what had happened was “trance,” but she couldn’t be sure. All she
did
know was that something strange and frightening had happened to Indigo up there on the summit tonight, and that Indigo was as yet unaware of it. Something, and Grimya didn’t know what it was or what it might portend, had taken her friend’s place in that chair, and for a few horrifying minutes, Indigo had not been herself, but someone else. Someone who carried the reek of death like an aura.

Uluye and her cohorts had cast down their old oracle tonight and placed a new one in its stead. Indigo believed that they had made a terrible mistake. After tonight’s events, though, Grimya was beginning to wonder if it was Indigo, and not the priestesses, who was mistaken.

On Shalune’s strict orders, Indigo was made to rest for three nights and the two days between. It seemed the fever had returned, though mildly, and Shalune clearly felt that her patient should not have been subjected to the rigors of the cliff-top ceremony so soon after her arrival. She and Uluye had further sharp words on that subject. To Grimya, who witnessed the scene, their discussion seemed to end in a grudging stalemate, but Shalune had her way and Indigo was left to recuperate undisturbed.

Grimya and Shalune had meanwhile reached a tacit and cautious understanding, based if not on trust, then at least on mutual respect. Seeing Shalune appear with a bandaged wrist on the morning following the ceremony, Grimya had felt thoroughly ashamed of her own behavior, but Shalune bore no grudge and, indeed, seemed to admire the staunch loyalty that had made Grimya attack when she thought Indigo might be in danger. She brought the wolf a special dish of unspiced meat, which Grimya suspected was a peace offering, and from then on, a wary rapport existed between them.

In fact, much to her surprise, Grimya found that she held an honored place in the citadel. Even Uluye, though reluctant to unbend from her air of rigid authority, treated her with courtesy, and the attitude of some of the lower-ranking women bordered on reverence. Grimya had complete freedom to roam at will through the settlement, and wherever she went, she found people greeting her, bringing her small gifts of food or bowls of water, even gently touching her fur as though they believed she would bring them good fortune. Grimya rapidly realized that as Indigo’s chosen companion, she was looked upon almost as an avatar of Indigo herself, and until Indigo recovered from her relapse and could come among them again, Grimya would be her proxy in these women’s eyes.

Under other circumstances, Grimya would have thoroughly enjoyed the attention being paid to her, but her pleasure was negated by dark and troubling thoughts. From their behavior, and from the offerings that were heaped outside the cave’s entrance each day, it was obvious that Indigo was deeply revered by the priestesses, so much so that her status in the citadel seemed only one step removed from that of a goddess.

Yet beneath the surface, there was an undercurrent of something the wolf could sense but not pinpoint, like a scent on a changeable wind. She couldn’t forget what had happened at the climax of the ceremony on the cliff top, and she couldn’t forget the rapt and avid look on the priestesses’ faces—and particularly on the face of Uluye—when the eerie thing had occurred. Although the knowledge had been submerged during the last few days by more immediate events, Grimya hadn’t forgotten that the lodestone had led them here to find a demon. But what manner of demon might it be?

Worried by her speculations, she resolved to put her freedom to move about the settlement to good use. Aided by her telepathic abilities, which sometimes enabled her to glean the gist of unspoken intentions from unguarded minds, she first applied herself to learning more of the Dark Isle’s tongue. She followed groups of women when they gathered to wash clothes in the lake and listened to their talk, committing as many unfamiliar words as she could to memory. She played with the children, whose constant repetition of favorite games made them excellent, if unwitting, teachers. She sat in the high cave while Shalune tended Indigo and fed her with a strong-smelling broth, and listened to the ritual healing chants the woman murmured as she worked. And by listening, watching, memorizing, Grimya quickly learned a great deal about her new surroundings.

She discovered early on that the inhabitants of the citadel within the cliff were indeed exclusively female. Men—of any age—were forbidden to enter the citadel, and the taboo, it appeared, was strictly adhered to by the local population. Like the trading family at the
kemb
, the people of the villages and settlements hereabouts held the priestesses in awe. They were not only the undisputed guardians and interpreters of all spiritual matters, but also lawmakers, judges, healers and advisers. Supplicants came frequently to the citadel, and as word of the new oracle’s presence spread, their numbers rapidly grew.

On her first morning, Grimya saw several parties and individuals arrive at the lakeside, including a procession of some eight or nine nervous-looking people pushing a handcart laden with provisions. The convoy halted beside a tree whose lower branches were hung about with scarves and wooden fetishes, and there they waited until two robed priestesses walked haughtily from the bluff to meet them. The contents of the cart were inspected and, presumably, found acceptable; two more women came to carry the offerings away, and the visitors sat down by the lake’s edge to parley with the priestesses. They talked for a little over an hour; then the now-empty cart was returned and the villagers departed with the priestesses’ blessings and a bag of herbal medicines. As they came back to the citadel, the two women passed Grimya where she sat on a flat rock on the sandy arena between the bluff and the lake; they smiled at her, made a sign of greeting and walked on. And listening to their conversation as they moved away, Grimya heard the name of the Ancestral Lady for the first time.

The words haunted her. Who or what the Ancestral Lady was, she didn’t know, but she suspected that there was a connection with whatever power or deity these women worshiped. She heard the name several more times during the morning, and her inability to understand its significance frustrated her. There was a link between the Ancestral Lady and Indigo, she was sure of it. But what was it?