Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 02] Read online

  THE CRYSTAL SWORD

  ADRIENNE MARTINE-BARNES

  AVON

  PUBLISHERS OF BARD, CAMELOT, DISCUS AND FLARE BOOKS

  ORPHIANA AND THE SMITH

  In the time before time, when earth abided, yet man and God had not yet come to their terms of mutual entanglement, she who girdled the world with her sinuous and unending body, that ineffable elemental whom some call Orphiana, the Earth Seipent, had a lover who rejoiced in the making of objects. He was cunning, this early artificier, proud of his long, strong hands and sharp mind. And, as the gods began to arise from the bosom of the Creative, he conceived the notion of an object which seemed a perfect mirror of his own inner perfection, a great sword to echo that which hung between his limbs. Too, he had become envious of Orphiana’s power; that she had no hands and was content, that she made nothing and yet ruled everything. And he saw that if he sharpened the edges of the thing he had in mind, it would cut through flesh and bone, even that of his mistress.

  Long he labored over his forges, whispering words and making incantations over white-hot metal as his hammer fell, for he had learned much of his lady; sweating and struggling until at last he brought forward that which he had but glimpsed in his mind’s eye. It was long and straight, beautiful with the spells he had woven into the % very metal of it, filled with the power of the very fire he had forged it in. He stroked it, loving it as a man loves a woman, adoring the product of his mind as a man adores a god, and he brought it to his mistress, eager to gather her praises of his efforts. Grphiana looked at the sword, shifted her great body so that a small island chain in a yet unnamed ocean exploded and sank under the waves, and scorned the thing for what it was: a poor, pitiful imitation of the life a man could give. He was wroth that she should abuse his great effort, and he swung the blade about his head and cut off her huge head so the skull flew through the air, and for a moment the whole earth stilled, so no bird sang, no insect hummed, no river ran. Then the skin of her long body sloughed away and rose up, wrapping itself around the bloody blade as her head returned to its accustomed place. The sword lay powerless in the smith’s great hands and she said, “No man shall wield that thing without my leave,” and returned to her task, so a new set of islands emerged from the green sea, the birds sang more loudly, the insects raced about their many errands, and the rivers rushed in their courses. Thus the Fire Sword came into the world of things.

  Chagrined at his failure to overcome or even cow his mistress, the smith returned to his forges to ponder if the shape of the sword was to blame, and after a time he made another, not long and straight, but short and broad and flat as a great leaf. He bound it with spells of strength and brought it again to Grphiana. She glanced contemptuously at it with her glittering eyes and said nothing, until the silence reached into the void and even the stars paused in their endless song a moment. The smith clove the serpent’s head in two with a single blow and her great body writhed. Mountains which almost touched the heavens vanished forever and cold seas boiled and bubbled. The varicolored skin of Grphiana fluttered in the still air and swallowed the leaf-shaped sword, and the broken skull was whole again. “Fool,” she said. “You cannot slay me with myself, and you may not wield that without my will.” And so the Crystal Sword passed into the world of being.

  For eons the smith pondered these words, filled now with no desire but to have mastery over his mistress, unlit he bethought to fashion a sword of light itself, shapeless, edgeless, and yet powerful. Long he labored over it, and this sword he did not present to Orphiana for her inspection, but crept up, while she meditated upon the patterns of the cosmos, and severed head from body, grasping the flat skull in one hand so it could not rejoin the rest. Winds rose and scoured the land, making deserts where none had been before. The head twisted in his hand and the great fangs sank into his wrist. The soft, pink mouth swallowed the unseen sword, until he found himself empty-handed, with Orphiana restored to herself entire, and the blade he had made now visible, a shimmery, wavy-edged object, like heat rising across the sands of a desert. And she said no words but swallowed the sword again, so it emerged wrapped in her gaudy hide halfway across the yet unpeopled globe. All the colors of the rainbow danced in its blade and across the great yellow diamond in its hilt.

  The smith retreated, unbelieving yet that she could not be conquered by his art, for he had that fatal pride which afflicts all who make yet do not truly create, and set again to work. This blade was lightly curved like the bow on the newly-bom moon upon the halcyon sea, and he filled it with the e"bb and flow of the waters of the world. Its hilt he made of a great white stone snatched from the bosom of the oceans as they reflected the bright moon in her yet unsullied glory. Of all the objects he had made, this was the most beautiful, and he sang over it, drawing the light of the moon into it until her fair face was scarred and dark from his thievings.

  Orphiana waited, watching the arising of the great and petty godlings who would claim her works for their own, touching a mountain here, a seacoast there, as an artist touches the almost completed canvas with light strokes, breathing at last the moment of life into still pigments. Soon those half-wild creatures called men would set their unshod feet upon her breast and time would begin. Like the smith, they would be tool makers, and they would hack her body with plows and spill their red blood into her with devices made in imitation of their forms. Like the smith, she regarded their activities as a source of amusement, something the Creative had made to while away the boredom of her task. She had awaited their coming and the beginning of time with the detachment of her kind, knowing that even as they destroyed her, so would they restore her again, and that until time ceased again, some would always raise their voices to praise the wonder of earth.

  The smith came, cloaked in night, in that moment when Orphiana rested and drank from the mingled waters of the world, and he lifted the bright, curved blade and cut her in half. An ocean floor far across the globe plummeted down, down, down, sending startled fishes into inky darkness. The serpent turned her head slowly, gracefully, the sweet waters of her spring falling from her triangular head like drops of molten argent, and seemed to smile. The sword turned in his hands, arced, and descended upon his upturned face, splitting him in two. The mouth of his mistress gaped and swallowed him, then brought him forth as twins, one dark, one fair. The two faced each other, rivals, hating one another yet longing again to be one.

  The spirit of the smith was not in either of his two halves who glared so sullenly at each other. It hovered in the sweet air of earth, fretting and gibbering, until even the endless patience of the Great Serpent was tried beyond endurance. Her huge eyes glittered and her tongue flickered in and out.

  “So, you would have a sword still, my love,” she crooned. She breathed and her lover’s spirit was made flesh once more, unhumbled by his defeats. He sulked. “Let us see if we can forge that thing you are so proud of into something more substantial,” she said calmly, and he watched in horror as unseen hammers struck his body, battering him into smoothness, warming his sinews in Orphiana’s fire, smashing the new mind and body into a great sword. The smith screamed when at last the work was done, for now a great sword of wood hung between his limbs, the hilt standing out from his back, so he was impaled on his own vision.

  Orphiana was not yet done in her work, for she had loved the smith with all her heart, and she had known betrayal at his hands. She sent him far to the north, where chill winds howled and the ice lay thick upon the ground from season to unnamed season. There, out of her great heart, grew a tree, an ash some say, with roots that reached to the core of the world. She hung the smith by his hair and drove the shaft o
f his ambition into the grey-green wood of the world tree, and left him there, between heaven and earth, to contemplate his deeds as his twin selves began their never-ending chase and rivalry.

  Time began, and the smith finally saw the folly of his makings. He could not master himself and was condemned to always be the serpent’s child, ever in her dominion, to pursue himself from pole to pole, until the end of all things.

  I

  Aenor hurried blindly along the twisted corridors, her sandaled toes stubbing themselves on small pebbles or smashing into unseen cavem walls. It was cool in the winding tunnels, but her body was warm from both her fear and her haste. Moisture covered her high brow and she could feel fine tendrils of her pale hair curling across it. She brushed a long, embroidered sleeve across her face and felt the metal in it make fine scratches on her skin.

  The floor beneath her feet dipped downward, and she paused and frowned. She wanted to go up, up and out, into the warm light of day. Into the sun. She rolled the word in her mind for several seconds, savoring it, because it had cost her months to remember it, years perhaps. There was no time here in the caverns of the White Folk, just endless song and fair jewels that emerged from the cave walls, and the constant tinkle of tiny crystal bells which hung around their throats or lay upon their chests on baldrics. There was light, of a sort, where the Queen sang, a strange colored light that flickered from the walls and beamed from huge crystal lanterns hung from the ceiling, a strange pinkish light unlike the sun or even that other, silver light whose name she could not quite recall.

  Aenor felt a hard knot of fury blossom in her bosom at her inability to remember. She balled her hand into a fist for a moment, then raised it to the huge jewel that hung

  around her throat. They had stolen her memories, made her helpless as a newborn, robbed her of speech for many years, but they had not been able to remove the gem from her neck. Several had perished trying. She felt a certain savage satisfaction in that. They had simply shriveled up and turned almost to dust.

  Although she could not see it in the darkness, Aenor knew the smooth faces of the stone as well as the planes of her own visage. It was green as the eye of a salamander, green as the nameless things that grew beneath the golden sun of her memory. Her mind scrabbled vainly for words which seemed to hover just out of reach, and she kicked a wall in frustration, then bit back a howl of pain that would have brought discovery. They would find her eventually— they always did—but for the moment she preferred her blindness to the terrible light of their faces under the rosy gleam of crystal lamps. This corridor did not lead to escape, but she noticed an interesting smell, a spicy scent that meant one of the Rock Folk, the salamanders, had passed by not long before, and something else she could not identify. She liked the salamanders, particularly Fejool the Fool, who often crept into her bedchamber and thrust his soft nose against her hand. For a long time she had thought him a dumb brute, but now she heard his mind when she touched him. It was a curious mind, full of memory of the ways of rock, of long gone, terrible White Folk, famous spell singers and great web weavers, of strange wars in the endless dark or the pale light of the Queen’s court, the ruddy forge-lit glow of the King’s court. Fejool was her friend, her only friend in this miserable place, unless she counted the misshapen dwarf Letis who hung her gowns and smoothed her long hair. But Letis spoke only a sort of brutish gabble and lived in terror of the White Folk, while Fejool made strange jokes and played with words like bright baubles.

  She began to follow the salamander scent and the other smell down the tunnel, groping carefully with outstretched hands and taking small steps lest she tumble into some invisible chasm. The jewel around her throat seemed to throb with heat and she paused to touch its usually cool surface. Surely it was warm, warmer than her skin.

  The corridor ended in a smooth wall and she could smell the tantalizing unknown odor almost seeping from the rock. Aenor ran her fingers across the stone, seeking an opening, and finally found a faint crack, a straight line no wider than her smallest finger. She followed it up as far as she could reach, then found another crack descending two arm lengths across the rock.

  Aenor traced the shape with her fingers and tried to think what it reminded her of. It was something almost familiar, like so much in her mind, and clouded by the chanting of the White Folk. Her mind seemed to be endless dark corridors with the song of her captors at every turn. If only she could find the right words! If only she could sing a clear tone and command the rock to open, like Margold Amethyst Singer.

  Aenor almost laughed at the thought. Of all the White Folk, the spell singers were the greatest, greater even than the forge masters of the King’s dark court, and she was nothing like them, a poor captive nobody who barely recalled the glowing orb of the sun and could not even name the wonderous green things which grew beneath it. Somehow she was not even sure such a light existed. It might be only a phantom of her dreams, like the fair but sad-faced lady garbed in green who often seemed about to speak but never did, or the big, dark man with hair around his mouth and one hand like silver.

  She pressed her body against the smooth rock, her arms outstretched, and breathed the strange smell. It was tempting, like some delicious food, like those funny brown steaming lumps she sometimes dreamt of, rocky crust on the outside, grainy soft within. She could almost remember the flavor, and her mouth watered. The White Folk ate nothing like it.

  One of the dark places of her mind was suddenly bright. She saw a wide open space all covered in square-cut stones. In the center was a rounded structure beneath small overlapping scaly things. A fat woman in a long brown dress padded across the space holding a flat object against one broad hip. She touched a bit of metal on one side of the structure and it swung outward. A cloud of steam billowed out as the woman wrapped a white cloth around her hand and reached within. She pulled out a rounded lump and put it on the flat tray. A thin wisp of vapor coiled up from it.

  Words crowded into Aenor’s mind, meaningless noises like Letis’ babble. She clutched at the smooth rock and tried desperately to sort the sounds into sense. It was like grasping air. She moaned and muttered aloud.

  “Bread, yard, oven, door. Door. Door!”

  Aenor’s breath was short and ragged as she repeated the word. She drew back from the rock and found that she could see just a little. The jewel around her throat cast a dim glow, and she could just make out the narrow cracks that ran from the floor to a point well above her head then down again. She peered at it, seeking a thing to open this door with.

  A curious gem was set into the rock, flat against the smooth surface. She touched it lightly and a tingle ran up her arm. Within her mind she could “hear” the song which locked the door, an ancient song like one of the old lays the White Folk sometimes chanted to recall long-gone heroes or great singers of their past. It was a strong spell, and not as fair as most, as if it had a different purpose than others she had heard. Six notes—no, seven—chimed within her.

  Aenor felt her jewel throb, as if it too heard the spell, and she found her hands were wet with moisture, her brow dripping. She wiped her face hastily and rubbed her palms against suddenly trembling thighs. She swallowed because her mouth was dry, and licked her lips uneasily.

  In all her wanderings she had never found another door within the realm of the White Folk, and she knew that no fragrant bread-filled oven lay behind this one. Perhaps it held some fearsome monster. The chants spoke of several such: the dreadful worm which now roamed the broken paths of the abandoned Crystal City; the fire beast which had consumed King Alfgar the Witch, the only male spell singer in their history; and the monstrous stone bear that had ravished Queen Koriel and gotten upon her a fearsome brood. The White Folk bore no offspring from couplings with their own kind, yet mated fertilely with other races, or so they said. At least they claimed her as distant kin from some ancient lord who lay with a mortal woman. The salamander Fejool claimed it was the very same Alfgar who was eaten by the fire beast, but he had tol
d her so many things she could hardly believe, that she was not sure if it was true.

  Her gem seemed to hum, to press against her throat as if to compell her to voice the spell which held the smooth door closed. She wondered if the door might lead to the dreamed of world of sun or the courtyard where the bread was baked, where she might remember that other name she had once been called and walk upon the soft, green stuff that grew between the stones. A longing filled her, so her heart seemed to ache in her chest, and she croaked a single note from a dry throat, then shook her head.

  For an instant she “saw” the spell like lines of gold in the darkness. They swam before her eyes, then plunged into the great green jewel around her throat and into the very flesh of her body. The ancient song rang in her bones, her blood; coursed along her muscles like a sudden fever. Aenor rolled the notes out of her mouth as if she had chanted them a thousand times before, like a dream made manifest.

  The door swung open soundlessly, and she was both surprised and calm, as if she had simply relearned some long-forgotten skill. The curious smell which had so tantalized her swirled up into her nostrils, not bread or anything like it, but a cold, dead smell which carried memory with it. She saw a boy, an awkward, rawboned fellow with reddish hair and too much nose. He carried a long metal thing in his two hands and he swung it back and forth as he moved across a sunlit yard. Someone shouted, a deepvoiced man, and then he strode into view. He was big and square, fair haired and greying, scarred and rough.

  “Arthur, you damn fool! That is no fairy wand you hold. It’s a sword! Your sister could have killed you half a dozen times. I do not care if it is a practice weapon— behave as if it is real and your life depended on it.” The big man bellowed the words and the boy grimaced as if he had heard it all before.

  Aenor knew he had, and as the vision faded she looked around into the dimness and saw piles of swords and strange helms, battered shields and worn scabbards. The smell of rusting iron and rotting leather wafted past her as a red-eyed rat skittered across the fading emblazon of some long dead warrior.