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XII


They reached level sward and passed beneath a tower. Raven remembered it was the one he had climbed before. A child stood in the uppermost window, battering herself against the grille and uttering no sound.

Raven went through a colonnade. Just beyond, at the edge of the forum, some fifty Instar people were gathered, mostly men. Their clothes were torn, and even in the moonlight, across meters of distance, Raven could see unshaven chins.

Miguel Tolteca confronted them. “But Llyrdin killed that little girl!” the Namerican shouted. “He killed her with his hands and ran away wiping his mouth. And the robots took the body away. And you do nothing but stare!”

Beodag the forester trod forth. Awe blazed on his face. “Under She,” he called, his voice rising and falling, with something of the remote quality of a voice heard through fever. “And She is the cold reflector of Ynis, and Ynis Burning Bush, though we taste the river. If the river gives light, O look how my shadow dances!”

“As Gonban danced for his mother,” said the one next to him. “Which is joy, since man comes from darkness when he is born.”

“Night Faces are Day Faces are God!”

“Dance, God!”

“Howl for God, Vwi burns!”

An old man turned to a young girl, knelt before her and said, “Give me your blessing, Mother.” She touched his head with an infinite tenderness.

“But have you gone crazy?” wailed Tolteca.

It snarled in the crowd of them. Those who had begun to dance stopped. A man with tangled graying hair advanced on Tolteca, who made a whimpering sound and retreated. Raven recognized Dawyd.

“What do you mean?” asked Dawyd. His tone was metal.

“I mean . . . I want to say . . . I don’t understand—”

“No,” said Dawyd. “What do you mean? What is your significance? Why are you here?”

“T-t-to help—”

They began circling about, closing off Tolteca’s retreat. He fumbled after his sidearm, but blindly, as if knowing how few he could shoot before they dragged him down.

“You wear the worst of the Night Faces,” Dawyd groaned. “For it is no face at all. It is Chaos. Emptiness. Meaninglessness.”

“Hollow,” whispered the crowd. “Hollow, hollow, hollow.”

Raven squared his shoulders. “Stick close and keep your mouth shut,” he ordered Kors. He stepped from the colonnade shadows, into open moonlight, and approached the mob.

Someone on its fringe was first to see him: a big man, who turned with a bear’s growl and shambled to meet the newcomers. Raven halted and let the Gwydiona walk into him. A crook-fingered hand swiped at his eyes. He evaded it, gave a judo twist, and sent the man spinning across the forum.

“He dances!” cried Raven from full lungs. “Dance with him!” He snatched a woman and whirled her away. She spun top fashion, trying to keep her balance. “Dance on the bridge from Yin to Yang!”

They didn’t—quite. They stood quieter than it seemed possible men could stand. Tolteca’s mouth fell open. His face was a moonlit lake of sweat. “Raven,” he choked, “oa, ylem, Raven—”

“Shut up,” muttered the Lochlanna. He edged next to the Namerican. “Stick by me. No sudden movements, and not a word.”

Dawyd cringed. “I know you,” he said. “You are my soul. And eaten with forever darkness and ever and no, no, no.”

Raven raked his memory. He had heard so many myths, there must be one he could use . . . Yes, maybe. . . . His tones rolled out to fill the space within the labyrinth.

“Hearken to me. There was a time when the Sunsmith ran in the shape of a harbuck with silver horns. A hunter saw him and pursued him. They fled up a mountainside which was all begrown with crisflower, and wherever the harbuck’s hoofs touched earth the crisflower bloomed, but wherever the hunter ran it withered. And at last they came to the top of the mountain, whence a river of fire flowed down a sheer cliff. The chasm beyond was cold, and so misty that the hunter could not see if it had another side. But the harbuck sprang out over the abyss, and sparks showered where his hoofs struck—”

He held himself as still as they, but his eyes flickered back and forth, and he saw in the moonlight how they began to ease. The tiniest thawing stirred within him. He was not sure he had grasped the complex symbolism of the myth he retold in any degree. Certainly he understood its meaning only vaguely. But it was the right story. It could be interpreted to fit this situation, and thus turn his escape into a dance, which would lead men back into those rites that had evolved out of uncounted man-slayings.

Still talking, he backed off, step by infinitesimal step, as if survival possessed its own calculus. Kors drifted beside him, screening Tolteca’s shivers from their eyes.

But they followed. And others began to come from the buildings, and from the towers after they had passed through the colonnade again. When Raven put his feet on the first upward tier, a thousand faces must have been turned to him. None said a word, but he could hear them breathing, a sound like the sea beyond Instar’s dike.

And now the myth was ended. He climbed another step, and another, always meeting their upturned eyes. It seemed to him that She had grown more full since he descended into this vale. But it couldn’t have taken that long. Could it?

Tolteca grasped his hand. The Namerican’s fingers were like ice. Kors’ voice would have been inaudible a meter away. “Can we keep on retreating, sir, or d’you think those geeks will rush us?”

“I wish I knew,” Raven answered. Even then, he was angered at the word Kors used.

Dawyd spread his arms. “Dance the Sunsmith home!” he shouted.

The knowledge of victory went through Raven like a knife. Nothing but discipline kept him erect in his relief. He saw the crowd swirl outward, forming a series of interlocked rings, and he hissed to Kors, “We’ve made it, if we’re careful. But we mustn’t do anything to break their mood. We have to continue backing up, slowly, waiting a while between every step, as they dance. If we disappear into the woods during the last measure, I think they’ll be satisfied.”

“What’s happening?” The words grated in Tolteca’s throat.

“Quiet, I told you!” Raven felt the man stagger against him. Well, he thought, it had been a vicious shock, especially for someone with no real training in death. Talk might keep Tolteca from collapse, and the dancers below—absorbed as children in the stately figure they were treading—wouldn’t be aware that the symbols above them whispered together.

“All right.” Raven felt the rhythm of the dance indicate a backward step for him. He guided Tolteca with a hand to the elbow. “You came here with some idiotic notion of protecting Elfavy. What then?”

“I, I, I went down to . . . the plaza . . . They were—mumbling. It didn’t make sense, it was ghastly—”

“Not so loud!”

“I saw Dawyd. Tried to talk to him. They all, all got more and more excited. Llyrdin’s little daughter yelled and ran from me. He chased her and killed her. The cleaning robots s-s-simply carried off the body. They began . . . closing in on me—”

“I see. Now, steady. Another backward step. Halt.” Raven froze in his tracks, for many heads turned his way. At this distance under the moon, they lacked faces. When their attention had drifted back to the dance, Raven breathed.

“It must be a mutation,” he said. “Mutation and genetic drift, acting on a small initial population. Maybe, even if it sounds like a myth, that story of theirs is true, that they’re descended from one man and two women. Anyhow, their metabolism changed. They’re violently allergic to tobacco, for instance. This other change probably isn’t much greater than that, in glandular terms. They may well still be interfertile with us, biologically speaking. Though culturally . . . no, I don’t believe they are the same species. Not any more.”

“Baleflower?” asked Tolteca. His tone was thin and shaky, like a hurt child’s.

“Yes. You told me it emits an indole when it blooms. Not one that particularly affects the normal human biochemistry; but theirs isn’t normal, and the stuff is chemically related to the substances associated with schizophrenia. They are susceptible. Every Gwydiona springtime, they go insane.”

The soundless dance below jarred into a quicker staccato beat. Raven used the chance to climb several tiers in a hurry.

“It’s a wonder they survived the first few generations,” he said when he must stop again. “Somehow, they did, and began the slow painful adaptation. Naturally, they don’t remember the insane episodes. They don’t dare. Would you? That’s the underlying reason why they’ve never made a scientific investigation of Bale, or taken the preventive measures that look so obvious to us. Instead, they built a religion and a way of life around it. But only in the first flush of the season, when they still have rationality but feel the exuberance of madness in their blood—only then are they even able to admit to themselves that they don’t consciously know what happens. The rest of the time, they cover the truth with meaningless words about an ultimate reality.

“So their culture wasn’t planned. It was worked out blindly, by trial and error, through centuries. And at last it reached a point where they do little damage to themselves in their lunacy.

“Remember, their psychology isn’t truly human. You and I are mixtures, good, bad, and indifferent qualities; our conflicts we always have with us. But the Gwydiona seem to concentrate all their personal troubles into these few days. That’s why there used to be so much destruction, before they stumbled into a routine that can cope with this phenomenon. That, I think, is why they’re so utterly sane, so good, for most of the year. That’s why they’ve never colonized the rest of the planet. They don’t know the reason—population control is a transparent rationalization—but I know why: no baleflower. They’re so well adapted that they can’t do without it. I wonder what would happen to a Gwydiona deprived of his periodic dementia. I suspect it would be rather horrible.

“Their material organization protects them: strong buildings, no isolated homes, no firearms, no atomic energy, everything that might be harmed or harmful locked away for the duration of hell. This Holy City, and I suppose every one on the planet, is built like a warren, full of places to run and dodge and hide and lock yourself away when someone runs amok. The walls are padded, the ground is soft, it’s hard to hurt yourself.

“But of course, the main bulwark is psychological. Myths, symbols, rites, so much a part of their lives that even in their madness they remember. Probably they remember more than in their sanity: things they dare not recall when conscious, the wild and tragic symbols, the Night Faces that aren’t talked about. Slowly, over the generations and centuries, they’ve groped their way to a system which keeps their world somewhat orderly, somewhat meaningful, while the baleflower blooms. Which actually channels the mania, so that very few people get hurt any more; so they act out their hates and fears, dance them out, living their own myths . . . instead of clawing each other in the physical flesh.”

The dance was losing pattern. It wouldn’t end after all, Raven thought, but merely dissolve into aimlessness. Well, that would serve, if he could vanish and be forgotten.

He said to Tolteca, “You had to come bursting into their dream universe and unbalance it. You killed that little girl.”

“Oa, name of mercy.” The engineer covered his face.

Raven sighed. “Forget it. Partly my fault. I should have told you at once what I surmised.”

They were halfway up the terraces when someone broke through the dancers and came bounding toward them. Two, Raven saw, his heart gone hollow. The moonlight cascaded over their blonde hair, turning it to frost.

“Stop,” called Elfavy, low and with laughter. “Stop, Ragan.”

He wondered what sort of destiny the accidental likeness of his name to that of a myth would prove to be.

She paused a few steps below him. Byord clutched her hand, looking about from bright soulless eyes. Elfavy brushed a lock off her forehead, a gesture Raven remembered. “Here is the River Child, Ragan,” she called. “And you are the rain. And I am the Mother, and darkness is in me.”

Beyond her shoulder, he saw that others had heard. They were ceasing to dance, one by one, and staring up.

“Welcome, then,” said Raven. “Go back to your home in the meadows, River Child. Take him home, Bird Maiden.”

Byord’s small face opened. He screamed.

Don’t eat me, mother!

Elfavy bent down and embraced him. “No,” she crooned, “oh, no, no, no. You shall come to me. Don’t you recall it? I was in the ground, and rain fell on me and it was dark where I was. Come with me, River Child.”

Byord shrieked and tried to break free. She dragged him on toward Raven. From the crowd below, a deep voice lifted, “And the earth drank the rain, and the rain was the earth, and the Mother was the Child and carried Ynis in her arms.”

“Jingleballs!” muttered Kors. His scarecrow form slouched forward, to stand between his Commandant and those below. “That tears it.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Raven.

Dawyd sprang onto the lowest tier. His tone rang like a trumpet: “They came from the sky and violated the Mother! Can you hear the leaves weep?”

“Now what?” Tolteca glared at them, where they surged shadowed on the moon-gray turf. “What do they mean? It’s a nightmare, it doesn’t make sense!”

“Every nightmare makes sense,” Raven answered. “The homicidal urge is awake and looking for something to destroy. And it has just figured out what, too.”

“The ship, huh?” Kors hefted his gun.

“Yes,” said Raven. “Rainfall is a fertilization symbol. So what kind of symbol do you think a spaceship landing on your home soil and discharging its crew is? What would you do to a man who attacked your mother?”

“I hate to shoot those poor unarmed bastards,” said Kors, “but—”

Raven snarled like an animal: “If you do, I’ll kill you myself!”

He regained control and drew out his miniradio. “I told Utiel to lift ship thirty hours after I’d gone, but that won’t be soon enough. I’ll warn him now. There mustn’t be any vessel there for them to assault. Then we’ll see if we can save our own hides.”

Elfavy reached him. She flung Byord at his feet, where the boy sobbed in his terror, not having sufficient mythic training to give pattern to that which stirred within him. Elfavy fixed her gaze wide upon Raven. “I know you,” she gasped. “You sat on my grave once, and I couldn’t sleep.”

He thumbed the radio switch and put the box to his lips. Her fingernails gashed his hand, which opened in sheer reflex. She snatched the box and flung it from her, further than he would have believed a woman could throw. “No!” she shrilled. “Don’t leave the darkness in me, Ragan! You woke me once!”

Kors started forward. “I’ll get it,” he said. Elfavy pulled his knife from its sheath as he passed and thrust it between his ribs. He sank on all fours, astonished in the moonlight.

Down below, a berserk howl broke loose as they saw what had happened. Dawyd shuffled to the radio, picked it up, gaped at it, tossed it back into the mob. They swallowed it as a whirlpool might.

Raven stooped down by Kors, cradling the helmeted head in his arms. The soldier bubbled blood. “Get started, Commandant. I’ll hold ’em.” He reached for his gun and took an unsteady aim.

“No.” Raven snatched it from him. “We came to them.”

“Horse apples,” said Kors, and died.

Raven straightened. He handed Tolteca the gun and the dagger withdrawn from the body. A moment he hesitated, then added his own weapons. “On your way,” he said. “You have to reach the ship before they do.”

“You go!” Tolteca screamed. “I’ll stay—”

“I’m trained in unarmed combat,” said Raven. “I can hold them a good deal longer than you, clerk.”

He stood thinking. Elfavy knelt beside him. She clasped his hand. Byord trembled at her feet.

“You might bear in mind next time,” said Raven, “that a Lochlanna has obligations.”

He gave Tolteca a shove. The Namerican drew a breath and ran.

“O the harbuck at the cliff’s edge!” called Dawyd joyously. “The arrows of the sun are in him!” He went after Tolteca like a streak. Raven pulled loose from Elfavy, intercepted her father, and stiff-armed him. Dawyd rolled down the green steps, into the band of men that yelped. They tore him apart.

Raven went back to Elfavy. She still knelt, holding her son. He had never seen anything so gentle as her smile. “We’re next,” he said. “But you’ve time to get away. Run. Lock yourself in a tower room.”

Her hair swirled about her shoulders with the gesture of negation. “Sing me the rest.”

“You can save Byord too,” he begged.

“It’s such a beautiful song,” said Elfavy.

Raven watched the people of Instar feasting. He hadn’t much voice left, but he did his lame best.


“—’Tis down in yonder garden green,

Love, where we used to walk,

The fairest flower that e’er was seen

Is withered to a stalk.


“‘The stalk is withered dry, my love;

So will our hearts decay.

So make yourself content, my love,

Till God calls you away.’”


“Thank you, Ragan,” said Elfavy.

“Will you go now?” he asked.

“I?” she said. “How could I? We are the Three.”

He sat down beside her, and she leaned against him. His free hand stroked the boy’s damp hair.

Presently the crowd uncoiled itself and lumbered up the steps. Raven arose. He moved away from Elfavy, who remained where she was. If he could hold their attention for half an hour or so—and with luck, he should be able to last that long—they might well forget about her. Then she would survive the night.

And not remember.







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