Stargate (13 page)

Tagar leaned on his low stone wall and looked out over the lush peace of the valley to the mountains beyond. He was uneasy. He had gone about his small duties in the morning, taken his midday meal, walked onto the slopes to see to his flocks, still wrapped in the same mood of grim waiting that had not gone away. The night before he had commanded a dream of water, and he remembered that he had lain on his bed and in his sleep listened contentedly to the drowsy patter of rain on his roof. His dream had taken him outside, where he had found a river flowing around his house, and he had knelt on its mossy bank and trailed both hands in it, reaching for the smooth multicolored stones on the bottom.

But then the dream had changed. He had risen to survey the valley but had found himself looking at a weird forest of trees with black, twisted trunks covered with some kind of fungus, which assumed shapes of such marvelous complexity that they took his breath away. Fog shrouded the roof of this forest and ribboned toward him, white and cold. Suddenly he was afraid. He had never known fear before, but there it was, sliding to fit the interior contours of his mind as though it had been made to find them. He turned. Beyond the forest, where it thinned to become pale grass as tall as a man, there was a house. He told himself it must be a house, for he had no other word to describe it to himself. It was neither farming cottage nor caved peak but was made of spires that glittered green even in that dim place, and its windows were closed eyes. The fear intensified. There was something in that magical building, something or someone in agony, but before he could will his dream-feet to move, he had opened his eyes to find himself on his bed in darkness, the room full of the coolness of the coming dawn. The dream had fled, and with it the fear. Only the foreboding remained.

But that had been last night. Now he considered the tallest peak, where his sun-lord lived. A cloying breathlessness seemed to flow from it and spread toward him, and he wondered if there was to be a storm. I should call the sheep, he thought, but he did not move. The air was sluggish, and the arms of the mountains seemed to reach out to squeeze the valley. They are like arms, he said to himself. Today they feel greedy. A lizard darted along the wall, stumbled over his hands, and disappeared. Tagar jumped and then laughed, but the laugh died in his throat, for he sensed some dark presence. A shadow fell across his back, tall and menacing, and he whirled, his heart in his mouth. But it was only his lord. He bowed clumsily, his heart still throbbing, and Ghakazian came closer to him in a rustle of folding wings.

“You startled me,” he said awkwardly, and Ghakazian chuckled.

“Were you far away, Tagar? I saw you leaning on the wall, dreaming. Very small you look, from up there.” His arm swept the sky. “I have a serious matter to discuss with you.”

“I am ready to hear.” Tagar had regained his composure.

“Good!” Ghakazian made as if to sit on the wall but then changed his mind and began to pace before Tagar, up and down, his hands by his sides. “Tagar, you are the oldest of my wingless ones, and the wisest. You know the earth of Ghaka as Mirak knows the sky. You have my respect as well as my love. If I told you that between the going down of the sun yesterday and its rising this morning the world had changed, what would you say?”

The dream came back to Tagar, exotic and frightening. “I would want to know the nature of the change, and how it came about.”

Ghakazian stopped pacing for a moment and looked at him. “You and I understand one another,” he said brusquely. “For hundreds of years we have explored Ghaka and each other, shared dreams and talked through many happy days. There is a closeness between us. Listen to me as a friend.” He ended his scrutiny and began walking again. Tagar, waiting for an explanation, watched him uneasily, for his protestations of friendship rang suddenly hollow.

“The Worldmaker no longer behaves according to his nature,” Ghakazian went on, avoiding Tagar's startled glance. “He stopped making and began destroying many eons ago. Suns and worlds have fallen to him one by one, and most of the universe is in agony. It need not concern you why this happened. The important thing for you to remember is that until now there was only defense. But a means of attack has come into my hands.” He came to a halt in a flourish of feathers and a flash of necklet. “I know I can defeat him, but not without your help. If I asked it of you, Tagar, would you kill a man for me?”

“I can only barely imagine what it would be like to take life from a man,” he answered softly, “and it is horrible, a tear in the wholeness of my essence. Greater, perhaps, than the sorrow that must be crying out in the universe if what you have told me is true.”

“You cannot believe? I have seen it, Tagar. I have stood at the Gate of Fallan when it was closed against the Unmaker, I have been present at countless council meetings when Janthis seeks an answer and sits and looks at his empty hands. I have trod the stinking wet soil of Ixel in pursuit of a word from Ixelion, and I saw him defeated.”

Tagar flinched. Ixel. He had never been curious about the other worlds, but at the mention of Ixel he knew that he had been there last night in his sleep. He heard his spirit begin to weep, long echoing sobs of desolation and loss, and he was certain that from this moment on he would never be the same again. His sun-lord had betrayed him.

“It is not that I doubt you,” he said amicably, though he wanted to go into his house and shut the door and never come out again. “I have loved you, but not even for you would I risk such a wrenching within myself.”

Ghakazian came closer. “We have a chance to return the All to what it once was,” he said quietly, but under the gentle tones was a new thing, the faintest hint of a threat. “I am not truly immortal as you are, Tagar, and this you know well. When Ghaka's sun burns out and its life is ended, then I also will be annihilated, as though I had never been. This is the Law of the sun-lords, under which I and my kin live. But for you it is different. Your essence goes on and on in a changed body, on a new world. But not here.” He sidled up to Tagar, and his breath was as cold as ice. “Not on Ghaka, not on the earth you have felt beneath your feet for five hundred years. Yet can any mortal truly desire eternity in a realm about which he knows nothing, where the beloved things he has grown up with all his life may not even exist? I offer you instead a small reprieve, on a world where, as I have told you before, there are houses, beasts, green growing things. I offer you more mortal time, a longer life, on Shol.”

“As what, sun-lord? As a prisoner of the knowledge that I killed? And what would I be on Shol, wrongly changed? Of what use is a mortal's essence without flesh?”

“You may be wise,” Ghakazian snarled, “but you do not have the wisdom of the sun-people. I will give you a body on Shol, and you will fight. Afterward you may enjoy the fruits of your obedience by staying on Shol, or perhaps I shall return you to Ghaka. I do not know. I shall not—.” He stopped abruptly and bit his lip, and then Tagar stepped back and turned away.

“You shall not what, sun-lord? You shall not care anymore? What has happened to you? Oh, can you not see that whatever sickness ails the universe is now beating through your own golden blood? Bring Janthis to Ghaka! Let him tell me that I may murder and destroy other men, and then perhaps I will obey you!”

Ghakazian shrugged, and his wings unfurled, a dark cloud of warning. “Think about it,” he said. “You have influence with my wingless ones, your words to them would carry great weight. But make no mistake, Tagar. With you or without you I will take an army to Shol, and if it is to be without you, then beware!”

Tagar shuddered, but Ghakazian pressed him no further. He lifted lightly from the ground and drifted with a deliberate impudence over Tagar's head; then with a crack like the breaking of a dry branch he was gone. Tagar felt something settle on his shoulder and reached up. It was a feather, and in the muted sunlight it gleamed gold, deep green, and rich amber, a thing of perfection, of strong, matchless beauty. He laid it against his cheek, and it rested there, warm and soft. Presently he slipped it into the pocket of his thick shirt, and opening his gate and passing through it, he set off down the valley.

The sun was sinking, peaceable and calm. Birds twittered spasmodically as they gathered to return to their nests for the night. Deepening scarlet light lay like the folds of some royal garment over the fields, but with each step he took an anxiety grew in Tagar until his feet quickened and began to run and his breath came short and painful. He turned aside onto the white path that wound beside the stream and under the willows, then curved along the base of the green slope that became barren rock rising to cliff. Every now and then he glanced at the cliff face, already drowned in shadow, but he saw nothing of the winged ones. The path began to dip, and there below him lay a farm. Lights gleamed in the windows, and Tagar could hear the sudden delighted laughter of one of his many descendants ring out, clear and full of mirth. He slowed his step, came to the gate, and leaned on it for a while to get his breath. Then he went through and hurried to the door, his hand reaching out to knock before he came up. The door swung back, and his grandson smiled and waved him inside. He stepped into the little whitewashed room and heard the door close behind him with a relief that set his knees shaking. He leaned against the wall, and the younger man touched his elbow.

“Tagar, what is it? Come and sit. Have you set a date for your death?”

Tagar did not acknowledge the joke. The matter of his death was no longer a thing of jest. He opened his eyes. Natil's wife sat smiling a greeting at him, and the child came up to him and touched him reverently on the leg. Briefly he rested his hand on the blond head, but Tagin pulled away.

“Tagar, your hand is cold,” he complained. Tagar knew it. He was cold all over. He drew Natil away from the family, back toward the door.

“I have no time to sit,” he said quickly. “And neither have you. Listen to me, Natil, and ask no questions. You must take Rintar and the child and go through the Gate immediately to Roita. Something terrible is happening to Ghakazian. No!” he snapped emphatically as Natil, astounded, opened his mouth. “Let me talk! Waste no time, and do not stop to gather any belongings. If you meet friends on the way, urge them to do the same. If you do not, you all may die.”

“Die? Tagar, that is impossible. What has happened to you?”

Tagar gripped him by both arms. “If I can, I will come to Roita and explain,” he said, “but now I must go and warn as many wingless ones as I can. Do you trust me?”

“Always,” Natil said, bewilderment in his face.

“Then hide from the winged ones. Leave the path to the Gate if you see any circling above. Oh, do this, Natil!” He shook Natil's captive arms. “Ghaka faces destruction!” A sudden thought burst upon him, and his eyes blazed at Natil. “Traders … have you seen any Traders?”

Natil frowned. “One came a little while ago and took a pile of Rintar's weaving. I think he is still on Ghaka, somewhere.”

Somewhere. Ah, Maker, I cannot walk all the roads of Ghaka, it would take another fifty years. But I must try. “Did he say where he was going?”

“Yes. He wanted wool from Inak.”

“Then I will go to Inak and call at all the farms on the way. Hurry, Natil! Go now!”

He opened the door and was gone, and Natil walked dazedly back into the room. Two faces were turned to him, two motionless figures waited on his word. He blinked, and then something of Tagar's own fierce urgency was born in him. “Put on your jackets, both of you,” he said quietly. “Pick up a loaf of bread, Rintar, and I will carry blankets. We are going to Roita.”

Half the night had gone, and by now Tagar had walked many miles through a darkness which lay thick and blinding around him. Stars blazed high above, but they lit only the tips of the mountains. Tagar kept his eyes fixed on the gray road that unwound beneath him. He had visited six families, twenty-five people who had left their homes out of respect for him and even now trudged toward the Gate, but he had not found the Trader. The Trader had taken wool from Inak. He had stopped at the farm of Pandil the carver to deliver a small piece of haeli wood from Danar, but he had not tarried.

Tagar stopped for a moment to rest, squatting on the road, breathing deeply. I am far from my home now, he thought. If I turned back, I would still not reach it before the dawn. For a few more seconds he gathered his strength, and then he rose and walked on. He saw no lights. There was only the solid black bulk of the mountain's thigh on his left and the descending sweep of an opening valley drowned in darkness on his right. Before him the road vanished, diving to find the lowland, and he knew that around the next bend the friendly lights of a farm would twinkle up at him. He came to the corner, paused, then firmly walked on.

Ahead of him was the Trader, a wavering, formless sliver of pale transparency that glided swiftly and noiselessly over the rock-strewn ground. After a moment of weak relief that buckled his knees, Tagar broke into a run, calling frantically, but the Trader did not slacken his pace. He was humming. Tagar, his own breath ragged in his throat, the blood singing in his ears, could still hear the undulating, tuneless whine. “Trader!” he screamed. “I have words for you to carry!” The Trader did not hear him. He skimmed forward, his scarf a flutter of colorless froth in the night. With a sudden despair Tagar knew that he could not reach him before he vanished out of sight. He spurted forward, a last cry gathering in his lungs, but it never rose to flay his tongue. There was a rustling of wings above him, the keening of wind in outflung feathers, and Ghakazian landed on the road in front of him.

Restlessness had sent Ghakazian swinging out under the motionless stars. He had cruised the mountaintops and flailed above the scanty forest that straggled between cliff and valley sides, and finally he had dropped down to where the rough road wound between the farms. He had followed it slowly, not knowing quite why. He would rather have been streaming high in the night sky, his dark gold skin turned to silver by the stars which flickered like the tails of quiet fish in a dark pond, but he had kept to the road, a tiny ribbon below him. Mirak, already webbed tight in the spell of the Book, did not concern him. It was Tagar who troubled the sun-lord's thoughts, Tagar who had dared to say no. I will scorch him, Ghakazian thought grimly. I will cause the sun to wrap him in its fiery arms, and then we shall see who dares to refuse aid to his lord. One lick from the sun's long tongue and Tagar will lead his people under my command. So he smoldered, his mind turning slowly around his coming victory on Shol, the road reeling out under him.