Wings of Fire, page 20
Fiana knelt gracefully at her side, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “I told you, you could not have known,” she said gently. “You are caught in the wheel. You did not do anything wrong…”
Jack looked at them, huddled together on the edge of a lake which had been made of the tears of two other sisters, long ago, so long ago.
This time, he would not waste the chance. This time, he would do it right.
“They need you,” Jack said, Taunui, the warrior child of an aged Maori chief of long ago. “They need the hand of the Healer.” He turned to Paul. “And the Hunter. The protector. They need you out there. You are the seed from which the rebirth will come. They will learn, but they need time. Go out among them, and give them that time…this is the gift, this is why the part of the angel who had the wisdom chose you, loved you, brought you here…”
Paul scowled, just a little, at the mention of the angel who had chosen and loved the woman his own choice had settled on. But Jack ignored him, reached down to raise Sabrina with one hand, laid her hand in Paul’s.
“Show them how it’s done,” he said.
“What will happen to you now?” Sabrina asked. Paul’s hand had tightened on hers, and she had returned the pressure. There were things between them that were certain now, locked. She could look out, see others, care about other things.
“I will stay here,” Jack said. “It is – ”
“ – ‘my lake’, yes, I know,” Sabrina said with a smile. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes,” said Fiana gently. “We both will.”
Paul lifted his head, scenting the air like a stag. “The wind has changed,” he said.
“Yes, Hunter,” said Jack, smiling. “I will take you across now, to the human side. You make your own way from there. But come and see us sometime. We will be here.”
“What happens now?” Sabrina asked, echoing her own question of a moment ago.
“I don’t know,” said Fiana softly, looking up to where the innocent blue sky overhead made it almost impossible to believe in the existence of what they had glimpsed beyond it. But they had all seen it, they all knew it existed, that somewhere up there a battle still raged. Would always rage. “That is for Heaven to decide.”
Afterword
I sat across a kitchen table from my best friend Maggie Forest in the early hours of one morning, many years ago now, after we had returned from a concert which we’d gone to together, both of us nursing cups of coffee we should probably never have had at 3 AM but still too high from the concert to contemplate going to bed. I remember she sat there, smiling at me, her chin pillowed in the palm of her left hand, and suddenly saying dreamily, “We should write a story together.”
It was three in the morning, I was still in a different reality, and the coffee was starting to work. “Yes,” I agreed enthusiastically, “we should.”
“Good,” she said. “You start.”
That was the beginning of the story we both knew as “the Sabrina novel”. In theory we shared out the characters, but I got carried away as usual and I kept on creating more and more of them. Sabrina herself was all mine, but so were Uncle Bob/Gregor and Marco/Igor (and, well, Lucifer, by extension), and Shura, and Fiana. I’m not sure which of us claimed Paul, or if he was a real collaboration. But Jack, the taniwha of Lake Manapouri, was all hers. She crafted him carefully and lovingly. And then I moved away and the story languished on the vine for a little while… until I rediscovered it, and asked Maggie if she would mind if I picked it up and reworked it and published the result. She generously released Jack for that purpose. I am here to attest that without Maggie and without Jack this story could not exist, and to give all the credit where it is due, for that.
We wrote the story, and it was a bit of a mixed bag, a quilt – the setting, of course, was real, and we had both been to the underground dam at Manapouri so parking the story there was a pretty cool thing to do (and I WAS sorry to wreak such havoc on it, in the end, but what can you do when the story needs a catastrophe?...) – but of course we had to take massive liberties with. We certainly make no claims that the dam on Lake Manapouri was built for any but the most legitimate of purposes. As far as the dam is concerned, we have “inside knowledge”, as it were, of only the outer layers – we invented the security system, the “service shafts”, and certainly invented the “identity” of the lower cavern and the possibility of escaping the dam in the way our people do.
Any other errors we made were entirely our own - and mine, if I created them anew when I rewrote this thing – and for this I ask pardon in advance. This was a story knitted together, at the last count, from at least three different mythologies, a hierarchy of legendary archetypes, and some of the more controversial trappings of one major world religion. It was knitted together from real history and imagined events. It would in fact be surprising if we never missed a stitch. I can only claim, on both Maggie’s behalf and my own, the ultimate amendment to any literary constitution, poetic licence - and if we either of us erred we did not mean to cause irritation or offence.
Any similarities to persons living or dead are, of course, utterly coincidental. This is fiction. More than that, it is fantasy. But I do confess to feeling a little annoyed that a man like Marco never really existed…
This story had a soundtrack – thanks are due to Michael Flatley and the “Lord of the Dance” CD which was spinning constantly with what became themes linked to individual places or people in the story. For instance, the “lake of broken glass” in the first chapter is painted very evocatively by track 3, “Celtic dream”. The chase into the woods to rescue Jack and Fiana from the rusalka is almost precisely echoed by track 14, appropriately entitled “Nightmare” – you can even hear the thuds of the axe in the music. The night at Uncle Bob’s house, there in the substation, during which so many things are revealed is encapsulated in track 10, “Lament”. And Sabrina herself can be glimpsed in track 5, “Gypsy”.
In terms of acknowledgements, debts are owed to a great many people, ranging from my friend Bill the electrical engineer who said, rather nonplussed, that certain things are possible (but why on earth would be want them to happen?…) to the lady who explained the workings of the station to us on-site. Later on, there were people like Deck Deckert (my husband, and always my first editor), Phyllis Irene Radford (who beta read the final revised MS) and Marissa Doyle (who went above and beyond the call of duty in rooting out all the tiny errors which creep into every manuscript when the author isn’t looking). And there are always the unsung legions of people in whose published works we found all the information that we required – the Maori legends, the Russian mythology, and the idea that selkies are actually fallen angels…
Alma Alexander
July 2017
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Read on for the first chapter of EMPRESS.
Chapter One of EMPRESS
They called it the City of Gold, and under the heavy dark-gold light of a westering sun it was easy to see why. The light gilded the weathered limestone walls of the great Hippodrome into glowing golden ramparts, and played with the colours on the four enormous banners snapping above the track in the brisk breeze blowing into the harbour from the sea.
Beyond, behind high palace walls, a cascade of domed and tiled roofs and open terraces gleamed between the thick foliage of lush gardens and spilled down towards the shore. Smaller palaces clung to the side of the hillside further in along the Narrows that guided ships inwards towards the Great Harbour and the Inner Sea; on the far side of the Narrows, rows upon rows of houses crowded together on steep streets leading down to small wharfs teeming with fishing boats and ferries, and then yet more houses, built out over the water on stilts.
It was in this light that Simonis first saw the place – Visant, the queen city, the jewel of the Empire. She did not recognise the shape of the Sacred Palace. Hippodrome-bred, though, she saw the flags on top of the curved golden wall and, although it was far bigger than she could ever have imagined one could be, knew it for another Hippodrome, the one for which she and her family were bound. But she wasn’t given a lot of time to look – by the time that the small cargo ship on which Simonis and her family had taken passage swept into the Narrows the shadows were already long. The city was rapidly swallowed by them; the small lamp that had been lit and hung from the curved prow of the ship, where Simonis had taken up her perch when the ship came close to the city, was no match against the encroaching night. It was full dark when the ship finally turned in towards a waiting wharf lit by pitch torches and a few oil-burning lamps, all red half-light and dancing shadows, where men waited on the wharf, ready to help haul the ship in and tie her up.
Behind Simonis, on a ship’s deck piled high with packages and baskets and bales, a commotion of movement and raised voices told of a flurry of activity as the ship sidled in to the side of the quay.
“It’ll be too late to unload her tonight, we’d better look to a guard on the quayside until first light.”
“Hoy! Hoy there! Watch that oar!”
“Throw us the stern rope! Get a move on there!”
And, almost lost in the deeper men’s voices, a woman’s call, her mother’s.
“Simonis? Simonis! Where are you? Come here this instant! Simonis!”
Simonis scrambled down from her perch on the prow, where she had been conveniently out of sight behind several mammoth bales, and came sliding down to a thumping halt at her mother’s feet. She was too heavy, at five, to be quite lifted off her feet by the scruff of her neck like an errant kitten, but it came close enough to that as her mother’s hand closed around the back of Simonis’s shift. And then the hand in question straightened out to fall flat on the child’s back, between her shoulder blades, and propel her forward.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to stray?” said Apphia, Simonis’s mother, sounding tired and exasperated. “I have Danelis to watch, she’s only three, and there’s the baby – but you ought to know better than to get lost like this. Now come on, we don’t have much time. We have to gather up our things, as soon as they’re tied up we have to be off the boat…”
“But they said they would wait until morning,” Simonis said.
“Wait for what?”
“To unload the ship,” Simonis said, trying to get her feet under her as her mother, practically dragged her back to the family’s bivouac spot on the deck.
“Unload the cargo,” Apphia said, with a trace of impatience. “We aren’t cargo. We’re getting off tonight.”
In a fold of cloth against Apphia’s breast, her month-old infant stirred and whimpered and Apphia instinctively let go of her older daughter to cradle the baby with both hands.
“Now he’s awake. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t scream all the way to the Hippodrome,” Apphia said, trying to rock the child back into sleep. “Your bag is ready, Simonis, your father has it, go run ahead . Watch out for Danelis, and don’t stray from us when we get off the ship. This isn’t Cyrenais, where everyone knows you. You don’t want to get lost in the city.”
There were only a handful of passengers on the small vessel – there was no room for many people on a ship whose business was ferrying cargo to the ever-hungry wharves of the City of Gold. Aside from Simonis’s family, there were only two more passengers who stepped ashore once the unsteady gangplank was laid across the narrow ribbon of water between the ship and the wharf’s edge. One of them had been silent and taciturn throughout the voyage, and had been on the ship already when the family had joined it in the small town of Cyrenais on Kypra, one of the islands of the Middle Sea; they had never even learned his name, and he slipped off without a word.
The other passenger had been more gregarious, and he lingered with the small family as they hesitated on the wharf, unsure of what to do next.
“There will be someone to inspect your papers,” he told Batzas, Simonis’s father. “They let in those who have family in the city, or some legitimate business to pursue; you have to have a reason to come here. But you’re fine, you have the letters from the City’s White Jewel people… although, really, they ought to have sent someone to meet you. It’s criminal, letting a provincial loose on the city on their own, especially one with small children in tow. No offence.”
“None taken,” Batzas said. “There may be someone, beyond the barricade, on the city side. I can’t see from here. Thank you, friend. If there is nobody, then I shall make my way to the Hippodrome…”
“If I were you, I would wait until morning before I’d present myself at the Hippodrome,” said the other man. “The people you need to see do not reside at the Hippodrome itself, and their offices would be closed by now, and you have no idea where to seek them at their lodgings – and even if you were lucky enough to find them there, if indeed they have sent nobody to greet you at the wharf they may be none too pleased to be accosted by you at their home after their working hours. I would find a hostelry somewhere for the night, you and your babies, get yourselves a good night’s rest and then go to the Hippodrome fresh in the morning.”
“Where would I look for a hostelry?” Batzas asked.
“There are signs. You will know. Just avoid the really loud ones with women lingering by the doorways.” An eloquent glance at Apphia more than explained the reasoning behind that piece of advice, and Batzas took its meaning immediately.
“I thank you,” he said politely, and the other man gave him a wide smile.
“Eh, you can pay me back,” he said. “Let me know who I can bet on when the races start again in the spring. It’s always good to have a friend inside the Hippodrome. Good luck to you.”
He shouldered his bag and strode off into the shadows towards the back of the wharf. Batzas, staring after him, could not help a small sigh.
“At least he’s coming home,” Batzas said. “I wish I had his confidence. He’s right, we’d better have the papers ready for inspection.”
He led the way forward, fumbling in his satchel for the letters of appointment he carried from the city’s White Jewel faction, one of the two major players in the Hippodrome games, always bickering for top billing with their sworn rival, the Golden Crown. Both factions had secondary groups, the Scarlet Banner for the Jewel faction and the Obsidian Knife for the Crown – but it was only the two main groupings which maintained their own menageries within the Visant Hippodrome, and could employ keepers and trainers for their animals. It was for this purpose that Batzas had been brought from Cyrenais.
Simonis followed her father, keeping close behind and almost treading on his heels, clutching her own bag with one hand and clinging to three-year-old Danelis’s hand with the other, dragging her forward at a pace that had the younger girl whimpering quietly to herself. Apphia, cradling the baby against her breast with one hand and steadying a large bundle of belongings on her shoulder with the other, brought up the rear, crooning to the infant quietly to keep him quiet.
“Hold. You seek to enter the city?”
“I have a letter of introduction,” Batzas said, thrusting forward the rolled-up scroll which bore his appointment. “I am expected, I am an animal trainer – I have been sent to the city Hippodrome from my own – there, see the seal of the White Jewel…”
The challenge had been peremptory, brusque; Batzas had come to a sudden halt, with Simonis blundering into him from behind. Now she looked up diffidently, biting her lip, to inspect the man who had halted them. He wore the kilt and sculpted breastplate of a soldier, with a round metal helmet, gleaming in torchlight, on his head. His features were angular, and his mouth was a thin arrogant line as he pored over the letters that Batzas handed over with a hand he could not quite prevent from shaking. But the soldier finally rolled the scroll back up untidily and handed it back with a small sharp motion.
“New assistant bear keeper, eh,” he said. “Well, welcome to Visant, bear keeper. It’ll be a while before the Hippodrome opens its doors again, though.”
“Gives me a few months… to settle in,” Batzas said carefully, unsure of whether it was better to make small talk or simply to mutter thanks and press on.
“Indeed,” the guard said. He peered down to where the two small girls crowded behind Batzas’s knees, and reached out to tilt up the chin of Simonis, who was closest. She flinched, just a little, but then she lifted her eyes and met his, squarely. He chuckled, letting go of her and straightening up. “Your girl has spirit,” he said, and there was a tinge of approval in his voice. “Pass. All is well.”
Batzas hesitated, and then decided to try and trade on the man’s apparent goodwill.
“Please,” he said, “we were advised to seek a hostelry for tonight… would you know where…?”
But the soldier’s face had settled back to its harsh lines; his moment of warmth was done, he was a guard once again, on duty at the city’s borders.
“Ask as you pass into the street,” he said. “I know nothing of hostelries.”
“Thank you,” Batzas said, with a small sigh, and motioned his family forward. Simonis needed no urging, scurrying forward with her head back down and her eyes on the paving stones at her feet.
“We don’t have much coin,” Apphia murmured from the rear of the column.
“I know,” Batzas replied in a low voice. “I will see what I can find for us. Tomorrow… will be better. Tonight will be hard.”
“I wish they had sent someone to meet us,” Apphia said in a small voice.
“I am not a charioteer,” Batzas said, “or a prize horse. They probably barely know I am coming. There, ahead – that’s a light. It might be a place to sleep. Stay close. Watch the children.”
