The Ages of Chaos Read online

  The silence in the room was so extreme that Aliciane could hear the smallest of sounds: some small insect clicking in the woodwork of the paneling, the frightened breathing of the women, the far-off crackle of thunder. It seems, she thought, that all through this summer we have had thunder, more than I can remember in any year before… What nonsense to have in my thoughts now, when I stand before a woman who might have meant my death, had she attended my childbed.. ..

  Mikhail glanced at her, where she stood trembling and propping herself upright by the arm of a chair. Then he said to the leronis, “Attend the lady Aliciane, help her to sit, or to lie down on her bed if she feels better so…” and Aliciane felt Margali’s strong hands supporting her, easing her into the chair. She shook with anger, hating the physical weakness she could not control.

  This child saps my strength as never Donal did… Why am I so weakened? Is it that woman’s evil will, wicked spells … ? Margali laid her hands on Aliciane’s forehead and she felt soothing calm radiating out from them. She tried to relax under them, to breathe evenly, to calm the frantic restlessness she could sense in the movements of her child within her body. Poor little one… she is afraid, too, and no wonder….

  “You—” Lord Aldaran’s voice commanded, “Mayra, tell me why you bear me ill will, or would seek to harm the lady Aliciane or her child!”

  “Tell you!”

  “You will, you know,” Mikhail of Aldaran said. “You will tell us more than you ever believed you would say, whether you do so of your free will and painlessly, or whether it is dragged from you shrieking! I have no love for torturing womenfolk, Mayra, but I will not harbor a scorpion-ant within my chamber, either! Save us this struggle.” But Mayra faced hun, silent and defiant, and Mikhail shrugged faintly, a tautness Aliciane knew—and would not have dared defy— settling down over his face. He said, “On your own head, Mayra. Margali, bring your starstone—no. Better still, send for kirizani.”

  Aliciane trembled, though Mikhail was showing mercy in his own way. Kirizani was one of half a dozen drugs distilled from the plant resins of kireseth flowers, whose pollen brought madness when the Ghost-wind blew in the hills; kirizani was that part of the resin which lowered the barriers against telepathic contact, laying the mind bare to anyone who would probe within it. It was better than torture, and yet… She quailed, looking at the raging purpose on Mikhail’s face, at the smiling defiance of the woman Mayra. They all stood silent while the kirizani was brought, a pale liquid in a vial of transparent crystal.

  Mikhail uncapped it and said quietly, “Will you take it without protest, Mayra, or shall the women hold you and pour it down your throat like a horse being dosed?”

  Mayra’s face flushed; she spit at him. “You think you can make me speak with your sorcery and drugs, Lord Mikhail? Ha—I defy you! You need no evil will of mine—enough lurks already in your house and in the womb of your bitch-mistress there! A day will come when you pray you had died childless—and there will be no other! You will take no other to your bed, no more than you have done while the bitch of Rockraven grew heavy with her witch-daughter! My work is done, vai dom!” She flung the respectful term at him like a taunt. “I need no more time! From this day you will father neither daughter nor son—your loins will be empty as a winter-killed tree! And you will cry out and pray—”

  “Silence that evil banshee!” Mikhail said, and Margali, starting upright from the fainting Aliciane, raised her jeweled matrix, but the woman spit again, laughed hysterically, gasped, and crumpled to the floor. In the stunned silence Margali went to her, laid a perfunctory hand to her breast.

  “Lord Aldaran, she is dead! She must have been spelled to die on questioning.”

  The man stared in dismay at the lifeless body of the woman, unanswered questions unspoken on his lips. He said, “Now we shall never know what she has done, or how, or who was the enemy who sent her here to us. I would take my oath Deonara knows nothing of it.” But the words held a question, and Margali laid her hand on the blue jewel and said quietly, “On my life, Lord Aldaran, the Lady Deonara has no ill will to Lady Aliciane’s child; this she has told me often, that she is glad for you and for Aliciane, and I know when I am hearing truth.”

  Mikhail nodded, but Aliciane saw the lines around his mouth deepen. If Deonara, jealous of Lord Aldaran’s favor, had wished Aliciane some harm, that at least would have been understandable. But who, she wondered, knowing little of the feuds and power struggles of Aldaran, could wish evil to a man so good as Mikhail? Who could hate him so much as to plant a spy among his wife’s waiting-women, to do evil to the child of a barragana, to cast, perhaps, laran-powered curses on his manhood?

  “Take her away,” Aldaran said at last, his voice not entirely steady. “Hang her body from the castle heights for kyorebni to pick; she has earned no faithful servant’s burial rites.” He waited, impassive, while tall guardsmen came and bore away Mayra’s dead body, to be stripped and hanged for the great birds of prey to peck asunder. Aliciane heard thunder crackling in the distance, then nearer and nearer, and Aldaran came toward her, his voice now softened to tenderness.

  “Have no more fear, my treasure; she is gone and her evil will with her. We will live to laugh at her curses, my darling.” He sank into a chair nearby, taking her hand in gentle fingers, but she sensed, through the touch, that he, too, was distressed and even frightened. And she was not strong enough to reassure him; she felt as if she were fainting again. Mayra’s curses rang in her ears, like the reverberating echoes in the canyons around Rockraven when as a child she had shouted into them for the amusement of hearing her own voice come back to her multiplied a thousandfold from all quarters of the wind.

  You will father neither daughter nor son… . Your loins will be empty as a winter-killed tree… A day will come when you pray you had died childless… The reverberating remembered sound swelled, overwhelmed her; she lay back in the chair, near to losing consciousness.

  “Aliciane, Aliciane—” She felt his strong arms around her, raising her, carrying her to her bed. He laid her down on the pillows, sat beside her, gently stroking her face.

  “You must not be frightened of shadows, Aliciane.”

  She said, trembling, the first thing that came into her head. “She cursed your manhood, my lord.”

  “I feel not much endangered,” he said with a smile.

  “Yet—I myself have seen and wondered… you have taken no other to your bed in these days when I am so heavy, as would have been your custom.”

  A faint shadow passed over his face, and at this moment their minds were so close that Aliciane regretted her words; she should not have touched on his own fear. But he said, firmly putting away fear in cheerfulness, “Why, as for that, Aliciane, I am not so young a man that I cannot live womanless for a few moons. Deonara is not sorry to be free of me, I think; my embraces have never meant more to her than duty, and dying children. And in these days, it seems, except for you, women are not so beautiful as they were when I was young. It has been no hardship to me, to forbear asking what is no pleasure to you to give; but when our child is born and you are well again, you shall see if that fool woman’s words have any evil effect on my manhood. You may yet give me a son, Aliciane, or, if not, at least we shall spend many joyous hours together.”

  She said, shaking, “May the Lord of Light grant it, indeed.” He bent and kissed her tenderly, but the touch of his lips again brought them close, with shared fear and, abruptly, shared pain, tearing at her.

  He straightened as if shocked, calling to her women. “Attend my lady!”

  She clung to his hands. “Mikhail, I am frightened,” she whispered, and picked up his thought, Indeed this is no good omen, that she should go into labor with the sound of that witch’s curses still in her ears… She felt, too, the strong discipline with which he curbed and controlled even the thought, that fear might not spiral, heightened by each mind through which it passed. He said, with gentle command, “You must try to think of our chi
ld only, Aliciane, and lend her strength; think of our child only—and of my love.”

  It was nearing sunset. Clouds massed on the heights beyond Castle Aldaran, tall stormclouds piling higher and higher, but where Donal soared the sky was blue and cloudless. His slight body lay stretched along a wooden framework of light woods, between wide wings of thinnest leather built out on a narrow frame. Borne up by the currents of air, he soared, dipping a hand to either side to balance on the strong gusts to left or to right. The air bore him aloft, and the small matrix-jewel fastened along the crosspiece. He had made the levitation glider himself, with only a little help from the stablemen. Several of the boys in the household had such toys, as soon as their training in the use of the starstones was such as to maintain their levitation skills without undue danger. But most of the lads in the household were at their lessons; Donal had slipped away to the castle heights and soared away alone, even though he knew that the penalty would be to forbid him the use of the glider, perhaps for days. He could feel the stresses, the fear, everywhere in the castle.

  A traitor executed, dying before touched, a death-spell on her. She had cursed Lord Aldaran’s manhood…

  Gossip had run around Castle Aldaran like wildfire, fueled by the few women who had actually been in Aliciane’s chamber and seen anything; they had seen too much to keep silent, too little to give a true account.

  She had flung curses at the little barragana and Aliciane of Rockraven had fallen down in labor. She had cursed Lord Aldaran’s manhood—and it was true that he had taken no other to his bed, he who had always before taken a new woman with every change of the moons in the sky. A new, ominous question in the gossiping made Donal shiver: Was it the Lady of Rockraven who had spelled his manhood so he would desire no other, that she might keep her place in his arms and in his heart?

  One of the men, a coarse man-at-arms, had laughed, a deep, suggestive laugh, and said, “That one needs no spells; if Lady Aliciane cast her pretty eyes on me, I would gladly pawn my manhood,” but the arms-master said firmly, “Be still, Radan, Such talk is unseemly among young lads, and look, you—see who stands among them? Go to your work; do not stand here and gossip and tell dirty tales.” When the man had gone, the arms-master said kindly, “Such talk is unseemly, but it is only jesting, Donal; he is distressed because he has no woman of his own, and would speak so of any fair woman. He means no disrespect to your mother, Donal. Indeed, there will be great rejoicing at Aldaran if Aliciane of Rockraven gives him an heir. You must not be angry at unthinking speech; if you listen to every dog that barks, you will have no leisure to learn wisdom. Go to your lessons, Donal, and do not waste time resenting what ignorant men say of their betters.”

  Donal had gone, but not to his lessons; he had taken his glider to the castle heights and soared out on the air currents, and now rode them, distressing thoughts left behind, memory in abeyance, wholly caught up in the intoxication of soaring, bird-fashion, now swooping to the north, now turning back west to where the great crimson sun hung low on the peaks.

  A hawk must feel like this, hovering… Under his sensitive fingertips, the wood-and-leather wing tilted downward faintly, and he focused on the current, letting it bear him down the draft. His mind sunk into the hyperawareness of the jewel, seeing the sky not as blue emptiness but as a great net of fields and currents which were his to ride, now floating down, down until it seemed he would strike on a great crag and be dashed asunder, then at the last minute letting a sharp updraft snatch him away, hovering down the wind… He floated, mindless, soaring, wrapped in ecstasy.

  The green moon, Idriel, hung low, a gibbous semi-shape in the reddening sky; the silver crescent of Mormallor was the palest of shadows; and violent Liriel, the largest of the moons, near to full, was just beginning to float up slowly from the eastern horizon. A low crackle of thunder from the massy clouds hanging behind the castle roused memory and apprehension in Donal. He might not be chastised for slipping away from lessons at a time like this, but if he remained out after sunset he would certainly be punished. Strong winds sprang up at sunset, and about a year ago, one of the pageboys at the castle had smashed his glider and broken an elbow on one of the rocks below. He had been lucky, they knew, not to kill himself. Donal cast a wary eye back at the walls of the castle, seeking for an updraft that would carry him to the heights—otherwise he must drift down to the slopes below the castle and carry his glider, which was light but hugely awkward, all the way up again. Feeling the faintest of air pressures, magnified through the awareness of the matrix, he caught an updraft which, if he rode it carefully, would carry him above and behind the castle, and he could float down to the roofs.

  Riding up it, he could see, with a shiver, the swollen naked figure of the woman who hung there, her face already torn by the kyorebni who hovered and swooped there. Already she was unrecognizable, and Donal shuddered. Mayra had been kind to him in her own way. Had she truly cursed his mother? He shuddered with his first real awareness of death.

  People die. They really die and are pecked to bits by birds of prey. My mother could die in childbirth, too… His body twitched in sudden terror and he felt the fragile wings of the glider, released from control of his mind and body, flutter and slip downward, falling… Swiftly he mastered it, brought it up, levitating his body until he caught a current again. But now he could feel the faint tension and shock in the air, the building static.

  Thunder crackled above him; a bolt of lightning flashed to the heights of Castle Aldaran, leaving a smell of ozone and a faint burned smell in Donal’s nostrils. Behind the deafening roar, Donal saw without hearing the flare and play of lightning in the massed clouds above the castle. In sudden fright, he thought, I must get down, out of here; it is not safe to fly in an oncoming storm. … He had been told again and again to scan the sky for lightning in the clouds before letting his glider take off.

  A sudden violent downdraft caught him, sent the fragile wood-and-leather apparatus plummeting down; Donal, really frightened, clung hard to the handholds, with sense enough not to try to fight it too soon. It felt as if it would smash him down on the rocks, but he forced himself to lie limp along the struts, his mind searching ahead for the crosscurrent. At just the right moment he tensed his body, focusing into the matrix awareness, felt levitation and the crosscurrent carry him up again.

  Now. Quickly, and carefully. I must get up to the level of the castle, catch the first current that glides down. There is no time to waste, … But now the air felt heavy and thick and Donal could not read it for currents. In growing dread, he sent his awareness out in all directions, but he sensed only the strong magnetic charges of the growing storm.

  This storm is wrong, too! It’s like the one the other day. It’s not a real storm at all, it’s something else. Mother! Oh, my mother! It seemed to the frightened child, clinging to the struts of the glider, that he could hear Aliciane crying out in terror, “Oh, Donal, what will become of my boy,” and he felt his body convulse in terror, the glider slipping from his control, falling… falling… If it had been less light, less broad-winged, it would have smashed onto the rocks, but the air currents, even though Donal could not read them, bore him along. After a few moments his fall stopped, and he began to drift sideways again. Now, using laran—the levitational strength given body and mind by the matrix jewel— and his trained awareness searching for the traces of currents through the magnetic storm, Donal began to fight for his life. He forced away the voice he could almost hear, his mother’s voice crying out in terror and pain. He forced away the fear which let him see his own body lying broken into bits on the crags below. He forced himself to submerge wholly into his own heightened laran, making the wood-and-leather wings extensions of his own outstretched arms, feeling the currents that blew and battered at them as if they buffeted his own hands, his own legs.

  Now… ride it upward… just so far … try to gain a few lengths toward the west… He forced himself to go limp as another smashing bolt of lightning leaped from a
cloud, feeling it burst beyond him. No control… it isn’t going anywhere… it has no awareness… and the maxims of the kindly leronis who had taught him what little he knew: The trained mind can always master any force of nature… Ritually, Donal reminded himself of that.

  I need not fear wind or storm or lightning, the trained mind can master… But Donal was only ten years old, and resentfully he wondered if Margali had ever flown a glider in a thunderstorm.

  A deafening crash socked him momentarily mindless; he felt the sudden drench of rain along his chilled body, and fought to stop the trembling which sought to wrest control of the fluttering wings from his mind.

  Now. Firmly. Down, and down, along this current…right to the ground, along the slope … no time to play with another updraft. Down here I will be safe from the lightning…

  His feet had almost touched the ground when another harsh upcurrent seized the wide wings and flung him upward again, away from the safety of the slopes. Sobbing, fighting the mechanism, he fought to force it down again, throwing himself over the edge and hanging vertically, grasping the struts over his head, letting the wide wings slow his fluttering fall. He sensed, through his skin, the lightning bolt and all his strength went out to divert it, to thrust it elsewhere. His hands clung frantically to the struts above his head as he heard the lightning and the deafening blast, saw with dazed eyes one of the great standing rocks on the slope split asunder with a great crashing roar. His feet touched ground; he fell hard, rolling over and over, feeling the glider’s struts smash and break to splinters. Pain cannoned through his shoulder as he fell, but he had enough strength and awareness left to go limp, as he had been taught to do in arms-practice, to fall without the muscular resistance which could break bones. Alive, bruised, sobbing, he lay stunned on the rocky slope, feeling the currents of lightning darting, aimlessly, around him, thunder rolling from peak to peak.