Ancestors Of Avalon - Ancestors of Avalon Part 19
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Ancestors of Avalon Part 19

"So the prince did not take his throne, and the land was lost," the queen replied. "We have a similar story that the people sometimes tell. Still, the blood of kings is always worth something. A pity the man has sired no child. Our shaman, Droshrad, says you outlanders came with the wind and will soon go, but I am not so sure." She paused, considering, and Elara raised an eyebrow at this hint of conflict between the shamans and the women of the tribe.

Cleta was frowning. "I had heard that Droshrad opposed your decision to welcome us," she said guardedly, "but I thought he had come to appreciate the knowledge we bringa"at least there has been no difficulty in recent moons."

"Fear the wolf that prowls, not the one that howls," the queen answered. "That old man goes into the woods to lay plots and mutter spells. It would be better if your people made blood-bond with our tribe. Perhaps out-breeding will improve Prince Micail's fertility, as it does among the herds. Yes," Khayan-e-Durr chuckled softly, "we shall have to find your unripe lord a wife of good family, from a royal clan."

Elara schooled her face to hide her shock, both at the content and the calculation in those words. Almost equally appalling was the flare of possessive fury that heated her cheeks. The queen had a pointa"it would be a pity to lose Micail's bloodline. But his seed belonged to the sacred lineage of the Temple. If a mate who was unrelated must be found, there were others who qualified: Cleta, ora"her pulse quickened unexpectedlya"she herself could certainly bear him a child.

But she controlled her reaction and looked at the queen with a sigh. "My lord still mourns his wife, who was lost in the escape," the acolyte said solemnly. "I do not think he is ready to think of such things."

But I am, she could not help thinking, and not with Lanath! She cast another swift glance at Cleta and realized that she, too, was watching Micail as he finally disappeared in a crowd of Ai-Zir. It was strange. Elara had always thought of Micail as the husband of the high priestess. It was strange to view him suddenly as . . . a man, and an available one, at that.

"Well, there is no urgency yet," the queen said comfortably, as she set her spindle turning, "but the alliance between our peoples would be strengthened by a marriage."

Elara had been in Azan-Ylir long enough to understand that according to tradition, almost all matings were arranged by the matriarchs of the clan. She eyed the queen again, uncertainly. In the warm sunlight she had taken off her royal cape of finely tanned doeskin painted with the symbols of her rank and tribe. The elbow-length sleeves and hem of her upper garment of pale grey-green wool was edged in a patterned braid sewn with discs of bone, straining a little over an ample bosom on which lay necklaces of amber and jet. A voluminous skirt with interwoven woolen stripes of different colors fell in folds about her feet. Khayan-e-Durr's brown hair, bundled into a net of twisted cord, was threaded with grey, but the queen had a majesty about her that did not depend on fine attire.

Over the preceding months it had become clear that the Women's Side held a very real, if different, kind of power. According to custom, the queen was not Khattar's wife, but his elder sister, and at times seemed to view him as hardly grown. It was her son Khensu, not his, who would be Khattar's heir; moreover, she and the clan mothers had the right of final decision to go to war.

They recorded the matings of the beasts as well as men, and before the men could make war, the women must agree they had the resources to do so. In the priestly caste of Atlantis, certain powers were inherited by the men or the women, but nevertheless, in Temple or palace, gender was no barrier to leadership. The soul, after all, changed sex from one lifetime to another. But one did not expect to find that knowledge among unschooled primitives.

"The king has a daughter called Anet," Khayan was saying now. "She is ripe for the marriage bed. She has been at the sanctuary of the Goddess at Carn Ava with her mother, but she will return before winter. We will see how she likes him. Yes . . . that mating might well serve . . ."

Cleta bent her head to whisper, "But will Micail like her? And what will Tjalan say?"

Khayan was clearly concerned with the welfare of her people, but did she support the king's dream of making his tribe supreme? During the past months she had made something of a pet of Elara, and Tj alan, on his most recent visit to Azan, had urged her to gain the queen's confidence . . . yet Elara felt she was no closer than ever to learning Khayan's true mind.

"And you young ones," the queen said suddenly, "you too must think of your husbands to be."

"Oh, Cleta has a betrothed who is still in Belsairath. And I am betrothed to Lanath," Elara said, a trifle bitterly.

"You said that you were not married."

Elara shrugged. "There isa"much to do first. We must complete our studiesa""

"Huh!" The queen grinned. "Maidens think to be young forever. But it is true, the priestess-born are different." There was a brief pause, but before anyone else could speak, Khayan resumed. "Your Lady Timul is far away, but you are here. Maybe I should send you to Ayo."

Cleta frowned, trying to understand. "Ayo? The king's wife?"

"But also the Sacred Sister, who dwells at the Sanctuary," Khayan nodded, smiling. "The women of the tribes share information that sometimes the men do not know. One has come to us from your village by the shore. She says that the Blue Robe priestesses who build the Mother's Temple there know something of our Mysteries. And thisa"this is no business for the shamans. Yes, I think the sisterhood will wish to speak with you."

I must tell Ardrala"Elara stared at the queen, her mind whirling. Or should I? Khayan was only an Ai-Zir, maybe, but she was right. These were women's mysteries, not to be shared with any man. Somehow she would have to get a message to Timul . . .

She found her voice at last. "I would be most interested in meeting them."

Micail took a long, deep breath of the fair wind that caressed the plain. He had walked out to the site where the henge of stones would be built early that morning, when the rising sun had just begun to promise a blazing day. Now, at its closing, the scent of ripe grass was like incensea"an incense of the earth, flavored with the warmer odors of the cattle who ate the grass. In the middle distance one of the small herds kept on the plain for milking in summer was following the lead cow homeward, their brown hides glowing like copper in the slanting twilight.

Slowly he was coming to understand their importance to the people here. An ordinary Atlantean meal had consisted of fruit, vegetables, and boiled grains, with perhaps a few small fish for flavoring.

In Azan, cattle were the life of the nation, their health and numbers the gauge of a tribe's power, their leather and their bones worn as clothing and decoration, or used for myriad other purposes. Grains were eaten as porridge or flatbread, and wild greens in season, but at every season of the year, the people fed by preference upon the meat and milk of their cows.

At first, most of the Atlanteans had found it difficult to digest the high-protein diet, and even when they grew accustomed, found it even harder to metabolize efficiently. All of us, he thought ruefully as he patted his middle, have become more substantial . . . except for Ardral. The old guardian appeared to survive on air and native beer, though he continually pronounced the latter a poor substitute for proper liquors. Still, whatever Ardral was or wasn't eating, it gave him plenty of energy. He never seemed to cease moving from one part of the work site to another, observing, ordering, correcting, his robes flapping around him like the wings of one of the great cranes that stalked the river and the ruins.

Outside the line of sticks that had been stuck in the ground to mark the circle, men were shaping two great sarsen blocks with round mauls of the same hard stone. The song of the singers had succeeded in cracking the great slabs free from larger pieces of rock that lay scattered everywhere across the plain, but the fine shaping had to be done by human hands. The pounding of the mauls made a dull music in the cooling air.

"Come here, will you?" Ardral's call roused Micail from his abstraction. "Bring Lanath. I need a second check on this alignment."

Micail looked around and saw his acolyte standing next to one of the holes left by an uprooted bluestone, gazing across the plain toward the slow fading of the light.

"Lanath, we're wanted," he said softly. "Come, lad, there's nothing out there to see."

"Only the Heralding Stars," Lanath responded dully. "But anything could be creeping unseen in the darkness. This whole countryside is ghost-riddena"" and he motioned toward the rounded humps of barrows on the plain. "When night falls it all belongs to them. Maybe that's what Kanar's telling me."

"Kanar!" exclaimed Micail. "Your former master? Is this another of your dreams?"

"He talks to me," Lanath replied in that same strange small voice.

"Ghosts are notoriously untrustworthy messengers, especially when you don't know the right questions to ask," Micail replied more roughly than he intended. "Let's have no more about it now; the shamans' tales have made the men nervous enough without adding to their fancies! We need their labor, lada"we cannot do all the work with song!" He grasped Lanath's shoulder and hauled him back to the center of the circle, where Ardral was gazing at the wooden poles that were set to mark the rising and setting of the midsummer sun.

"Look therea"" he commanded, pointing westward. "There is the light!"

Clouds were blowing in from the distant sea, touched now to flame by the descending sun. As he watched, a long beam flared across the sky, tracing a path of gold across the darkling plain. Ardral muttered some words and swiftly incised a string of hieroglyphs onto his wax tablet.

Micail closed his eyes against the glare and felt as if the sunlight was becoming a current of energya"as if he stood in a flowing stream, or at the crux of many streams. There was one that flowed from the west, where the sun set at equinox, and another whose origin was farther south. The new ring of stones would center on a northeast to southwest alignment, so as to catch the midsummer sunrise, amplifying the flow of energy.

"You have not been out here at end of day before, have you?" he heard Ardral say to him. "When the sun is rising or setting you can feel the currents quite strongly. It is why the sensitives directed us here. If we angle the stones correctly, this place will be an enormous focus of power."

Micail opened his eyes and realized that the masons had fallen silent.

"If the Omphalos Stone had been saved, Tjalan would have installed it here," Ardral added. "Perhaps it is just as well thata"" Whatever else he might have been about to say was lost as someone cried out in terror.

Lanath stood staring at the barrows again. The workmen were watching him.

"Look, something has come out of the barrow!" Their mutterings became louder. "The young priest sees it! The old priest is angered because we moved the stones! Droshrad was right! We should not be here!"

Micail squinted into the shadowy middle distance, and seeing a large horned head, began to laugh. "Are you children, to let an old cow frighten you?" There ensued a moment of tense silence, broken by a mournful moo.

"She could take the shape of a cow," someone whispered, but then everyone was laughing.

"And if there were a demon herea"" Ardral's voice commanded their attention. "Do you think I could not protect you?" In the dimming light, all could see the shimmer of radiance that swirled about him.

It was only a magician's trick, Micail knew, and the kind of display that the initiates and adepts who had taught him had considered beneath them . . . but not beyond them. Taking a deep breath, Micail allowed his own awareness to shift, transferring energy to his aura until he also glowed.

Can Droshrad do that? he wondered, with a flare of pride which as swiftly turned to shame as the workmen backed away, making protective signs. The prophecy had said that by his efforts he would found the new Temple, but was this structure they were building a place to serve the powers of Light, or for some more earthly ambition?

Winter was when the Atlanteans longed most deeply for their lost home. After almost three years, Micail's bones still ached when the north winds brought snow. God of Winter, he would often swear, in this cold, Four-Faced Banur Himself would put more logs on the fire! But for the moment, the roaring fire in the center of the royal roundhouse and the sheer body heat of the people gathered in it for the midwinter feast had made the temperature rise high enough so that Micail was almost willing to remove his sheepskin cape.

To Khattar's left sat Droshrad and the shamans of the other tribes, and to his right the Atlantean priests, in an uneasy symmetry. On the other side of the fire, the chieftains of the five tribes had shed their capes and round hats long ago and lounged on their benches in tunics of patterned wool. Droshrad was still swathed in his deerhide vestments, painted and sewn with many clattering bits of bone.

Micail wondered if he should have sent Jiritaren and Naranshada and the acolytes back to Belsairath for the winter along with Ardral and the others, but the social life of Tjalan's new capital seemed to him a harder exile than this life among savages. Last fall, staying here had proved wise enough. He and Lanath had been able to fine-tune the calibrations used in placing the stones. But this year, Droshrad seemed to be eyeing them with more than his usual disturbing disdain.

"Not much like the formal celebration of the Passing of the Stewardship of Nar-Inabia"is it?" Jiritaren asked, in the language of the Temple of Light. The formal words sounded oddly incongruous as Jiri cracked open a roasted rack of rib bones. Among the tribes, acorn-fattened pig was the favored food for feasts held in winter; the fatty meat staved off the chill. So did the beer. Micail lifted his beaker and took another swallow.

Naranshada frowned and, scratching his beard, said in a less refined form of the temple language, "I must admit I am not charmed. I look forward to the day when this work will be done and we no longer have to live here. But I have just heard that we will not have a labor force for the other stones until after sowing is done in the spring."

"What?" said Jiritaren. "Is this true, Micail?"

"Soa"you like our feast?" interrupted King Khattar in badly accented but quite serviceable standard Atlantean.

He learns fast, thought Micail, with a reflexive smile. A good reminder that even though we may use the most arcane Temple dialects, we must be more careful what we say.

"The meat is fat and the beer is strong, Great King," Naranshada answered politely. Micail echoed him, observing that the carved circles and lozenges on the houseposts were already beginning to twist and blur. Perhaps he had better go easy on the drink for a while.

"It has been a good harvest!" The king's glare dared anyone to disagree. "The Old Ones are pleased. Soon they have their new Temple!"

"We are fortunate that the ancestors have the patience of eternity. But the work progresses well." Not for the first time, Micail wondered how well Khattar actually understood their explanations of the purpose to be served by the alignment of stones.

And what, he asked himself, do the stones mean to me? The first step in creating the Temple I was destined to build, or simply a reason to live another day?

"Good," the king approved. "How long?"

"The sarsens for the trilithons in the inner court have been transported to the site," said Naranshada, ticking them off on his fingers. "That's fifteen stones. Most of them have yet to be shaped, but one crew can work on that until more stones arrive. Just over ten sarsens have been cut for the outer ringa"that leaves another forty uprights to finda"we could make do with less, I suppose, but we underestimated before and we may have to reject some of the new ones too. I'd rather err on the inclusive side. And of course that doesn't include the lintels to conjoin them."

Khatar frowned. "It will take many men to move so many."

"Yes," agreed Jiritaren, "but if everything goes according to plan, we should be able to raise the trilithonsa"" He looked to Naranshada.

"Oh, certainly by next year," Ansha smiled, a little tipsily. "But when does anything ever go according to plan?"

"That is why farmers belong in fields, not pulling stones." Droshrad's guttural speech issued from somewhere behind the king. "Gods hold back grain harvest when they are not enough served. I warn you before, King Khattara"people mutter too loud."

Micail glanced toward the king's nephew Khensu, who sat with the young warriors on the northern side of the hall and saw a similar calculation in the eyes that leaped to meet his own. As in the Sea Kingdoms, a prince was the soul of his land. Micail's father chose to endure torture rather than betray that sacred trust. But here, Micail was beginning to realize, the relationship between king and country was even more basic. The queen served the nameless goddess of the land, who was eternal, but the god who made her fertile was represented by the king. If the crops failed too often, a more virile man must be chosen, and the old king must die.

Ignoring the shaman, Khattar held up one hand, fingers splayed. "You make five big stones for the five mother-tribes, and the outside circle for the clans."

"Well, that's not exactlya"" Naranshada began, but Jiritaren poked him hard.

Droshrad's scowl deepened.

"You bring sun-power into the circlea"" Khattar began, but the rest of his speech was drowned out by cheers, and the first staccato bursts of drumming were heard.

At the beginning of the feast, the bonfire had been so hot that a wide space had been left around it. But as the hours passed, the logs had burned down to a gentle glow, their residual heat enough to maintain a comfortable warmth in the hall. Now the drummers were convening around the fire, some still angling their drums toward the heat to tighten the skins, while the others began to build the soft rhythmic patterings that compelled attention. All conversations stilled as the drumming commenced.

The king's nephew stood up, beckoning to his friends, and those who were sober enough joined him beside the fire. With their hands on one anothers' shoulders, they danced around it, bending and leaping in perfect rhythm. As they picked up the pace, they added more and more complex kicks, until first one and then another stumbled, and ducked out of the line laughing. Micail was not surprised to see that the last man to remain dancing was Khensu. He moved with more power than grace, but his energy was impressive. With curling brown hair and a muscular frame, he suggested what King Khattar must have looked like in youth. Either of them would be formidable in a fight, Micail thought, and wondered why a dance should remind him of war. Then Khensu, too, halted, lifting his hands to accept the people's acclaim as the king watched with an expression that suggested he might have preferred his successor to be received a little less enthusiastically.

"You raise stones quicka"mine first," Khattar muttered. "Then ancestors give me power." He held out his beaker to be refilled.

Micail sighed and said nothing, hoping the interrogation would end there. It came down to a question of power, but for what purpose and for whom? Khattar wanted the stones in order to make himself preeminent among the local tribes. Tjalan wanted them as a focal point around which he might restore the Sea Kingdoms, or even the empire. Naranshada and Ocathrel and most of the other priests wanted them, if at all, as an opportunity to demonstrate their skills, proof that there had been some purpose in their survival . . . I felt that way at first, thought Micail, and maybe I still do. What did Ardral say the other day? It's like sculptors making a statue of a goda"just to see if it can be done.

And what do I want the new Temple for? It was a question he had never thought to ask himself until very recently, and now it had become a constant itch in his awareness.

"Ah!" Khattar breathed hoarsely, laying his fat-smeared, beer-sticky hand on Micail's shoulder. "This, you will like! Watch!"

There were rustlings and murmurs from the Women's Side as several of its benches emptied. The young men began whistling as a line of girls moved into the firelight, shawled and skirted in wool and leather with long fringes that swung as their bodies swayed. Necklaces of carved wood and bone, of jet and of amber, shifted gently upon young breasts. With downcast eyes and linked hands they circled, feet treading a pattern as complex as the beat of the drums, while a bone flute twittered and sang. Their slender bodies curved and straightened like young birches at the edge of the forest, like willows beside a rippling stream. Even Micail could not help smiling.

"You like our girls, yes!" The king wiped beer from his mustache and grinned.

"They are as beautiful as young heifers in a green field," Micail replied, and the king shook with deep laughter.

"We make a bull of you yet, outland man!"

The servants circulated through the crowd with baskets of nuts and dried berries, the last of the autumn's bounty, and many hard rounds of cheese. Micail wiped his greasy hands on his tunic and took a handful of nuts, and then several berries, ruefully remembering the countless filigreed bowls filled with scented waters that would, at home, have been circulating for guests to cleanse their fingers. He also missed the exquisite glasses brimming with the most fragrant of wines. Instead, he would obviously have to drink still more of the native beer that was already making him feel off balance. But that seemed to be the custom herea"the men on the outer benches were plainly drunk alreadya"and when the next serving girl came to fill his beaker, Micail did not object.

The dancing maidens undulated back to their sector of the hall, but the drums did not cease their throbbing beat. The crowd, instead of relaxing into the banter that would signal an end to a formal ceremony, sat up even straighter on their benches and waited in excited silence.

Finally the drumming did stop and the broad doorway opened, its creaking terribly audible in the stillness, and someone entered. No one noticed the doorway closing as a slim figure moved forward into the firelighta"a girl wrapped in a bearskin cloak, her dun-colored hair knotted high on her head, with the ends falling down her back in a glossy tail.

The king stepped forward and gazed at her with an unreadable expression.

"My father, I salute you." The girl's slim arm, braceleted in amber, emerged from the folds of fur to touch her brow, lips, and breast.

"My daughter, I welcome you," the king replied. "Do you bring your mother's blessing to our festival?"

"I doa"and that of the Mother!" she answered, stepping forward with a centered grace that Micail recognized with some surprise as the mark of a spiritual discipline. This must be Anet, the royal daughter of whom Elara had told him, then, whose mother was high priestess here.

King Khattar sat back. "Then bestow it," he said softly.

The girl smiled again, and turning to the drummers, loosed her grip on the glossy fur of her cloak and let it fall. Micail's eyes widened, for beneath it the girl wore only a quantity of jet and amber jewelry, and a brief skirt of twisted strands of wool bound at top and bottom with woven bands. But the whisper that swept the hall was one of satisfaction. Obviously this was expected, a part of the ceremony; and why should that surprise Micail, who had seen the saji girls of the Ancient Land dance clad only in their saffron veils?

The tightest drums spoke sharply, once, twice, and again, as Anet moved into the clear space before the fire, her shapely arms raised high. Then the other drums broke in with their own exclamations, a wordless interplay of question and answer that set Micail's pulse beating a hot response in his veinsa"and still the dancer had not even moved. Only when the figure of polished amber that lay between her young breasts flared with light did he realize that every inch of her flesh wasa"shimmering, in controlled tremors that swept from knee to breast and back again.

"She channels power," said Naranshada in a low, awed voice, and Jiritaren nodded drunkenly.

"If this is what they teach them at the sanctuary at Carn Ava, we should send our girls there!" replied Jiritaren.

Micail heard them, but could not speak. It was too hard to breathe, and his skin tingled. He was aware of every hair at the back of his necka"the very air seemed to crackle with tension. This girl was nothing like his beloved, and yet there was a focus, a grace in her poise, that reminded him oddly of Tiriki at prayer.

Almost imperceptibly she had begun to bend her knees, arms gradually coiling down, around, up again, a continuing sinuous motion that carried her forward to spiral around the tall posts holding up the roofs. The firelight brightened her brown hair so that it became the same patchy gold as the dry grass on the hills when touched by the sun. To Micail's eyes it was as if she glowed with the very radiance of Manoah, and he thought, She is dancing Light back into the world . . .

Four times around she passed, weaving in and out among the circle of houseposts. Each time she paused, faced a different direction, sank to her knees and arched backward, then straightened both legs and arms, as her back bent like a bow, until with a sudden twist she came upright, arms raised, to begin again. With a twirling, sidewise step, she then made one final circle, scooped up her bearskin cloak and flung it about her. It was as if the light had vanished from the room. She stood unmoving, smiling faintly as her audience let out its breath in a collective sigh, then she turned and swept through the crowd toward the open door.

Briefly, as she passed, her gaze met Micail's. She had green eyes.

"What an astonishing girl!" said Jiritaren, a little too fervently.

"Aye. Like her mother when she was young, and I first ran off with her." The king grinned reminiscently, bad teeth showing through his grizzled beard. "Got to find Anet a good husband before some hotblood with more balls than sense decides to copy me!" His shrewd gaze caught Micail's. "Khayan-e-Durr says I should marry her to you, outland holy man. What do you say?"

Micail stared up at him in shock. But I am married to Tiriki, he thought, and at the same time, realized that he did not dare to answer at all. It was Naranshada who rescued him.

"Great King, we appreciate the honor you do us, but I beg you to remember, my Lord Micail is royal among our peoplea"and can make no alliance witha"without consulting with Prince Tjalan," Ansha finished, almost as smoothly as if he had known what he was going to say.