Weight of Worlds, page 12
Somehow I slipped from his grasping arms, whimpering, half-blinded with terror and with tears, and ran for the safety of my room – but it was an illusion, for we had doors that did not lock and even if they did his weight would tear the flimsy door from its hinges if he chose to lean on it hard enough. But I skittered into the darkness of my room, slammed the door closed behind me, stood with my back against it for a breathless moment, and then heard his heavy steps following me down the corridor. I left the door, backed into the far corner, coming up against the wall when there was no further room for retreat, slid down it until I sat curled in a pathetic ball of fear and helplessness, arms wrapped tightly around knees drawn up against my chin, eyes huge and dark and fixed on the doorway through which he would inevitably come...
And what escaped from my mouth was a hiss, a cat's hiss, a feral noise of challenge and defiance.
My sight had changed, shifted. The room was still there, still familiar, but everything was larger now, looming, and I was no longer a cowering kid, I was a small brindled cat tucked into the corner of the room, back arched, teeth bared, eyes burning with rebellion. I was armed now, tooth and claw. Whatever came, I could take it.
But other things had changed, too. What did come was not my father, not the man I knew, anyway. What came into that room, seeking me with a hot and urgent need, was a demon of darkness with eyes as burning as my own, burning with a black fire of madness and evil.
This was the true thing that I had risen against. Not the man who sired me, whose blood ran in my own veins. We had both changed, turned into something different, something deadlier, something greater than ourselves.
I could have fled. As the cat, I was small enough, agile enough, and the window was open – one leap, and I might have been safe. But this was a shadow I knew for an enemy – and it was an enemy for others, not just for myself. Any victory here would be a victory for other innocent souls which it had devoured, souls which had lain defenseless in its path.
Unlike me.
I stood my ground. The shadow flowed into the room, over my empty bed, spasmed, shivered, growled, turned; its claws were none the less deadly for that they were not totally of this world, because they were more than that, because their wounds would go deeper than flesh, would scar the soul. And yet – and yet – they had to be faced, because this was an old battle, and if they were not faced down they merely grew stronger.
We came together, the shadow and the cat, in the middle of the room. The pain was unbearable, incandescent; I howled my agony, recoiling, twisting, fighting, biting, scratching. But I too made my mark because where my claws raked the thing shredded and faded, and light came through the cracks – and that helped. A little. By the time we broke apart, the shadow to retreat through the closed door, the small cat with scoured flanks and a deep claw-cut beading blood above one eye, out of the window... and running as fast as it could, limping on one wounded paw, towards the cottage at the end of the street.
This is a safe house.
At last, I understood.
She was waiting for me, the silver-haired woman, compassion in her eyes. She had ointment ready, and clean cloth soaked in warm water to bathe my wounds – and I was a girl again, in this house, my human body bearing the scars of my battle that night, but fading slowly under her ministrations.
"The first time," she murmured, dabbing at the cut above my eye. "The first time is always the very worst. You have no idea what to expect. And then it exceeds every expectation you could not possibly have had. It hurts. Ah, it hurts. I know. I bear my own scars."
"The other cats," I said slowly.
She nodded. "Like you, in a way," she said. "They come here already wounded, creatures seeking sanctuary. And I help, I am here for all of them. They are all called here before the worst happens, so that I can meet them, know them, give them the cookies... with the secret ingredient in it, the one that makes it possible for them to escape if they need to, to run like a cat can, clear-eyed in the dark, and find their way back here to be healed. But you are not one of those. You are different. You fought the darkness."
"Who are you?" I whispered, staring at her.
"I'm the Protector," she said simply, sitting back in her chair. "This is what I do, I take in the wounded of this world and this house, this garden, can make them whole again. This is a safe house, safe from darkness, safe from harm. Summer lives in this garden, and sweet dreams under my roof. I am here to give to all strength and sustenance, and the will to go on... and, when the time comes, the will to fight what I fight – to one, and one alone. So – it is to be you, I think. The Protector who comes after me. You know. You understand. You stood up to fight the darkness, all alone, on your own. You have the mark of the Protector on you. With me... it was later, and the pain already had a foothold in me, the damage was already done. With you, it might have come just in time – the true poison has been taken from you, although you were close enough to smell it, to understand what it truly means."
"But I don't," I said. "I don't understand any of this."
"You felt fear, but you were not conquered by it," she said. "That is a Protector's strength. We understand what lies underneath, we have to before we can rise to fight it. But it cannot destroy us."
"What do you mean?"
"You, my child, are what comes after me. There are only a handful of us in this world at any one time – the healers, the ones who make a safe haven and who guard it, sometimes by a word or an invitation inside for a cup of tea, sometimes with our own blood and tears. This is not your safe house, it is mine – but some day you will make your own haven. It is coming."
I should have known long before now, but it was only in this moment that I really made the connection in my mind.
"You are the tabby cat," I said in sudden understanding.
"Sometimes," she said, smiling. "And yes, although you don't think you remember that now, you've seen me here at least once in the aftermath of a battle with some demon out of shadow. Human stupidity, or arrogance, or greed – something that comes out of the dark and has the power to hurt the innocents in its way. I Protect."
"How...?"
"It will come to you, " she said gently. "It is given to all of us to find the one who will succeed us eventually – and I can see that someday you will take my place. Not here, but somewhere else, in a safe house of your own, in some other corner of the world where there is a need for healing magic and a healer to wield it." She paused, hesitated slightly as though she were weighing something in her mind, and then came to a decision and reached to lift a slender silver chain over her head. It bore a pendant, a single round stone, golden except for a dark vertical streak in the middle, looking like a lion's eye. Before I had a chance to protest, to refuse, the chain had slipped over my own head, the pendant coming to rest over my heart. "This will tell you when it is time," she said. "I only have a little time left – and when I am gone you will make a safe house, and it will grow old roses in the garden, and call to the sick and the wounded and the ones who need protection. And in that stone lies the spirit and the wisdom that I myself inherited once from all the ones who came before me. I have learned all it needs to teach me – it's yours now. You are the Protector. This house remains a safe haven for as long as I stay here – but the shadows come for us all, it is what a Protector knows from the very beginning. Make another safe house, for all the hurt ones in this, your corner of the world. It will take as long as it must... but don't let it take too long" She leaned over and actually kissed me on the forehead, as though in benediction. "Go, now. And remember."
My mother died when I was sixteen years old. The authorities came for me and for my brother, and took us from our father's house – they separated us, and I don't know where he went, in the end. I never saw him again after that last tearful goodbye, when they tore us apart from one another and he was put in one car and I in another and we were driven off in opposite directions. I was placed with several foster families, but nothing ever seemed to work out – not least because I was given to bringing in stray cats from the neighborhood, and speaking to them in a quiet gentle voice, and holding the feral animals until they stilled in my arms and looked at me out of glowing eyes that were blue or bright green or tawny orange-gold – and we had an understanding, that I would heal, and protect and care.
And then, before I turned seventeen, my hair turned silver-gray overnight.
I had not worn the cat's-eye pendant which the witch from the cottage had given me; I had kept it safe, but I taken it off from around my neck as soon as I was able to after she had placed it there that night. But on the day that my hair turned the color that hers had been, I took the pendant out of its safe place and hung it openly around my neck. And I walked out of the house in which they had placed me, taking nothing with me except that pendant – and I found an abandoned house at the end of a once-genteel street, and walked inside, and closed the door behind me. It was empty when I fell asleep curled up on the bare floor against a wall whose wallpaper was peeling in rotting streamers – but when I woke, the cottage had dreamed itself into being around me. There was a fireplace, and a lamp which shed warm golden light, and an oddly familiar black cat walked in from the back garden and yawned and took possession of the window-seat in the bay window.
I was home. And I knew what I had to do.
The shadows knew me, and came for me when I patrolled the neighborhood streets in the night, when the house lights were down and other people were sleeping. And I knew them, and faced them. And this, she didn't tell me, the witch – this I found out the hard way, myself – every battle is like the first battle, and every victory is like the first victory, because you are always fighting on two fronts – as the Protector, standing between innocents and harm, and as yourself, fighting your own fears and terrors and the shadows in your own soul, things you can never allow to win, because the moment you bow your head before them all the battles of the future are already lost.
I don't remember exactly the first time I fed a crying child the special cookies that allowed it to come running to me in the guise of a kitten when it was hurt or scared. But somehow, very quickly, the rest of my life disappeared somewhere into a dream – and this was all that I had ever done, all that I had ever been, and I could smell the old roses which had always been there in the garden of a cottage at the end of a suburban street.
And then came the day I saw a wary, rangy teenager poised ready to flee on my doorstep, staring at me with huge, wounded dark eyes, so much like mine had once been, full of a world of hurt – and yet defiant, ready to take on a world which seemed to be gathered against her. And I understood, and smiled.
She was who I had once been. And one day she would become what I was now. This was a new Protector, still young, still a chrysalis, but she would understand.
"Come in," I said softly, beckoning with one hand while the other closed around the eye of the cat on my breast. "This is a safe house."
BONUS STORIES
- or, How I Met Aris the Gleeman
I WAS BORN INTO A CULTURE of myth and legend, of story - and my childhood was full of these ancient and wonderful tales and fables, things that fired the imagination and were probably instrumental in shaping me into the writer I am today. In time, the origins of individual stories faded and blended and only ghosts of them remained, memories of something within them that clung to me while all else fell away into the white light of ancestral memory.
One of those stories involved a cantrip which never left me - the story of a treasure. If a man walked into a secret valley beneath a triple mountain peak at a particular moonrise, and built a fire on the spot where the shadows of the three peaks became one under the light of that moon, and then spent the night there. In the morning there would be tracks in the cold ashes of that fire - and the creature that left those tracks had to be hunted down and slain. And on the spot where it was killed, the hunter should dig down into the ground and a great treasure waited to be found there.
That was the original story. The writer in me, of course, extrapolated - and the "what if" question became, what would happen if the only creature who crossed the fire was yourself..? This became the genesis of the story "Shadowsword", which introduced the character of Aris the Gleeman.
Aris quickly established himself as the more important "treasure" of this story, a recurring character with a backstory, a past, and a possible future. He was a travelling troubadour who had the same relationship with magic as a cat-hater has with any cat - he hates and even fears it but the more he runs from it the more it pursues him. "Shadowsword" was the first Aris story I wrote, but it was not the first chronological story of his life – how he became what he was is hinted at in "Skyring". It was the third Aris story I wrote, "Hourglass", that got picked up for publication first, though - and although a fine story it was only a part of the whole, a fragment of the greater Aris story much of which still remains to be seen. If you want to read the stories in the strict chronological order of Aris's own lifeline they should go "Skyring" >> "Hourglass" “Shadowsword” but they can be read as standalones, too. And there will probably be more Aris stories to come.
SKYRING
The glimmer of artificial light which caught Aris’s eye in the gathering twilight proved to be a disappointment. He had been hoping for a larger settlement, a place where he would be more likely to find a replacement for the snapped wire on his harp; a village as small as the one emerging in front of him was rapidly showing itself to be would have no hope of boasting a craftsman capable of doing work that delicate. Still, he would have to find a way to sing for his supper. The motley cloak on his back proclaimed that as his trade.
There did not appear to be an inn or an alehouse in the cluster of houses to which he came, at least not one that proclaimed its identity. Sighing, Aris knocked on the door of the nearest house which had light showing.
It was opened a crack, to present Aris with a being whose face was so seamed with age that it was hard to tell whether he was looking at a man or a woman.
“Good evening,” he said, diplomatically omitting any form of gender-based address at all, but making up for it with a gleeman’s bow every bit as dramatic as he knew how to make it. “I am a traveller, seeking shelter for the night. My means are few, but I would be happy to share a gleeman’s tale or two for a bit of supper and a place by your hearth.”
The aged eyes peered at him suspiciously from the doorway.
“Arrrr...” The sound was indeterminate, part-way between a growl and an exclamation of delight. The voice was neither male nor female in timbre, merely aged and cracked to the point of sounding inhuman – the voice of a tree, perhaps, or a granite cliff. Aris was on the point of giving up when the door was opened a crack wider, giving him a glimpse of the whole figure – a largely shapeless form swathed in a mismatched assortment of clothes. Its front may have just looked like it possessed a bosom, being beswaddled into oblivion as it was, but Aris took a chance.
“My good lady...” he began, with another bow.
“Arrrr,” it said, motioning him inside.
It – she? – hadn’t objected to being addressed as a woman, so Aris kept to that. “I thank you, my lady,” he said with fulsome gleeman courtesy.
“Arrrrr...” she said again, and this time there was a genuine pleasure in the sound. Being addressed as a lady was obviously uncommon enough to flatter the crone immensely.
Within, the house proved to be no more than one large room with a beaten-earth floor, and an attempt at privacy being made by curtaining off areas with coarse, home-woven cloth; a half-finished piece of similar material, in fact, still clung to a standing loom leaning against a wall. A large hearth which doubled as a cooking range took up almost an entire wall of the room, and in front of this, on an assortment of homemade furniture, sat the rest of the household, looking up expectantly as Aris stepped inside and instinctively paused by the door, surveying his surroundings with some dismay.
His training kicked in almost immediately, though, and he swept off his hat with another courtly bow. “I am Aris the gleeman,” he said, “at your service.”
“Lena of Skoura, at yours.”
The voice, low and smoky, belonged to a young woman who rose from her seat by the hearth and turned to face him as he entered. Aris had to consciously close his mouth before he could reply to her, and he did not think to do this for a few long moments – she was startlingly unexpected in a place like this, with hair like spun gold and eyes that were the colour of a harvest-born sky. She was of a height with Aris himself, perhaps even a hair taller, and no amount of shapeless clothes could disguise the full bloom of the body they swathed. It was a professional habit for Aris to inspect the hands of the people he met on his travels, since his own were so important for his trade, and Lena’s looked like she could play his harp without conscious effort, strong and shapely with long fingers and clean, neatly trimmed nails.
“My lady,” he managed at last, and Lena laughed lightly.
“Sir,” she said, “your courtesy is greatly appreciated but it has no place here. We are simple folk in this house. But you are a welcome guest, indeed. It is seldom we have company. Will you share our supper?” She indicated the seat she herself had but lately quitted.
Aris demurred at taking her place, but was quickly persuaded; she turned to ladle a thick broth from a simmering cauldron hung over the fire in the hearth, while another young girl, barely more than thirteen or so, took it upon herself to introduce him to the rest of the family.
Lena, it seemed, was the oldest granddaughter of the crone who had opened the door to Aris. Lena’s mother, Maira, and a sister named Claine were like enough to each other to be twins; between them they appeared to have bred a clan of daughters – Lena, then Mys, the girl who was making the introductions, and then, decreasing in age, another six girls the youngest of whom sat in Claine’s lap silently watching Aris with eyes as blue as Lena’s and her thumb very firmly in her mouth.
