Year of Miracles, page 10
part #1 of Collected Stories of the Old Races Series
"When have I not been?"
The old woman smiled. "Then I'll wake you when you're most—influential. It won't be when your sister is born," she warned. "Not for decades, centuries past that. I can't even promise you'll ever know her. But there is a world waiting, Little Patch. There is a world waiting for you and for your kind, your family of spirit. It's a long, long journey to reach it, and there are so many things that could go wrong between now and then. But we all must act as though it is inevitable, mustn't we? That's what you've done all these long years, and without you, without those like you, we never would reach it. I'll do what you wanted to," she added with a sparkle in her clear brown eyes. "I'll find those humans who will help, and set them to helping."
"How will you trust them?"
Another smile, more wicked than the first, crossed the woman's lips. "Your magic is only human, Little Patch, but mine is so much older than that. Now say good night to your mother, child. She'll check on you often, and you'll sleep safely here in the cold between." She moved away as Denali clung to Rekka's side, silent with tears and hope; it was Rekka who, in time, brushed Denali's hair aside and placed a kiss on her forehead, then helped her to settle into the tundra, with a promise of watching over her, and eternal love.
The old woman returned, drawing springy earth up over Denali as if it was a blanket, and smiling as forget-me-nots rose and bloomed. In moments Denali's breathing steadied, her eyes drooping closed. As Rekka had done, the old woman bent to kiss her forehead, and to murmur, "I'll come to wake you, my dear, after the apocalypse."
LONGEST NIGHT
Children were rare; for all the Old Races, they were rare, always had been, and were precious for it. Amongst the gargoyles they were perhaps not quite so rare as they were for some of the others; the dragons had not hatched an egg in four centuries, and the last before that, some twelve hundred years or more gone. Selkies had been driven to mate with humans to breed, and in diluting their blood had lost their way; no one knew how many were left, only that they had faded into the seas, and were mourned by the Old Races who both remembered and survived. Siryns, yeti, sea serpents; no one had even seen a serpent in centuries, save in human stories of oceanic monsters, but humans and their tales were hardly to be trusted. The djinn, perhaps; they were deliberately insular, not unlike the gargoyles in that way, and they might yet bear children in their roving desert camps. But not the harpies, not the cold-loving yeti; all the lost races, and no one had ever seen a vampire's child anyway. So children were to be celebrated, perhaps especially by a people who spent half their hours as stone.
This one had come into the world at the longest day, or near enough, and had been born pale even among the gargoyles. In the half-year since then he had acquired a little ash-white hair and a shout that echoed against the mountains until rocks trembled with it; Biali muttered and winced with each bellow, while his mate Hajnal laughed, asking, "What did you expect of an infant, my love? Has it been so long since one has graced us, that even a gargoyle can't remember how noisy they are?"
He said, "Yes," with a scowl that got another laugh from her; Hajnal laughed easily, and made decisions quickly, for their kind, which was much of what he loved in her. She leaned toward adventure, eager to travel; that was how she had come to their cold Germanic mountains at all, when she had been born to a range farther south, where the stone ran darker and shone with veins of obsidian that had influenced her coloring. Biali himself was nearly as pale as the infant, with unrelentingly white hair and stone-blue eyes, but Hajnal's hair grew dark and thick and her skin tinted toward deep gold, whether in human form or her natural gargoyle shape. She had crossed half the world in her travels, from her Italian mountains south into the depths of Africa, exploring the world a night at a time, and after centuries of collecting memories, had returned to her native Europe, and come, in time, to find the small northern tribe Biali was a part of.
They had known each other at once, of course; gargoyles did, spending so much of their time in their great gestalt, where not only their memories, but the collected memories of the Old Races, were kept safe. Even so, he hadn't expected her—enthusiasm; gargoyles tended by nature to be a reserved lot, and Biali was no different from the many, in that. But curiosity drove Hajnal, sent her searching the world and finding amusement in it, and if she had settled long ago with Biali, it had not changed her inherent fondness for the new and interesting. Once she had drawn him north, out of the mountains they called home. For over a century, they had traveled to places where in winter the sun barely rose at all; there, they had met others of their kind who traded away a summer's sleep for a winter's wakefulness, though the danger of sleeping for months on end sent Biali's skin to crawling. Hajnal laughed at that, too, at the image of stone shuddering against itself in revulsion. Earthquakes were like that, she said, and Biali was satisfied to be an earthquake.
"It has been a long time," she said now, under the light of stars and a rising moon. "The last who were born here were born long before I came."
"I was one of them," Biali agreed, for he was less than half Hajnal's age, although he had seen some eight hundred years. "I don't remember my own shouting."
"You're choosing not to," Hajnal said with a smile. "It's in the memories."
"If we have a child," Biali said dryly, "I'll go into them and remind myself."
"If only we could, as easily as that." It wasn't a regret; stone mostly had little use for regrets, but there were few enough amongst the Old Races who didn't wish, at least sometimes, to become parents. For some it was a personal yearning; for others, an almost-unacknowledged admission that humanity was outpacing them, that they were all a dying people, and without children they would simply fade away from a world that already barely remembered they were there. Biali fell among the latter, though for Hajnal he would want anything.
"If we could," he said, not unkindly, "we would be human," and Hajnal laughed.
"What a trade, my love. Barren eternity or a brief span of years littered with children."
"And illness, and a paltry physical strength, and—"
"Enough! Enough, you convince me that the trade is a bad one." Hajnal shook her wings, then settled beside him, looking down into a hollow in the mountainside. It would fill with moonlight soon, glowing blue and purple in the soft brilliance, and then the child would be brought by his parents, while the rest of the tribe came to crouch around the hollow's rim, as Hajnal and Biali already did. A few others had gathered already, too, waiting for the rituals of the longest night, the halfway mark of a gargoyle's year. Humans counted it otherwise, Biali knew, but for a people consigned to night, the year began at the summer solstice, waxing through the autumn equinox and reaching its height in the long dark nights of winter, when they were free to breathe and move and live unfettered by the strange shaping of their lives. No others amongst the Old Races were so constrained, but then, no others were the living memory of so many peoples, either; to be bound by stone in daylight hours was the price of safekeeping that history, and that was as it was.
The children were not born into the overmind, into the memories shared by all the adult gargoyles. That would be too much for them, too overwhelming; the solstice rituals began the carving of the paths in malleable minds that would permit them the ability to access the memories as they aged. The first memories would be of the child himself, shared by his parents, then by the tribe, to solidify his place within it, so that he would always know his home and his family and his friends. It was done solemnly, bringing the infant into the pool of moonlight—auspicious, the elders said; to have moonlight fall on the hollow meant the child would see clearly throughout his life, although Biali had never heard of anyone saying a child brought into the memories on a foggy night would stagger blindly through life, and when he muttered as much to Hajnal, she knocked his ribs with a jutting elbow, and told him he had no poetry in his soul. Nor did he, but her castigation was enough to make him smile.
Solemn consecration or not, the child himself had no interest in sitting quietly while memories were built around him, softened to lead him into the first low hills that were the gargoyle overmind. No: he rolled over, he squirmed on his belly, he put effort into and succeeded in crawling away, until his mother's patient hands fetched him and put him back in the circle of light. The game began again, until Biali was exasperated and Hajnal amused. "I'm sure you sat patiently through it all," she murmured, and he snorted. So those were the memories they offered, in the first gentle moments of his presence in the gestalt: fond delight from Hajnal and modestly tempered irritation from Biali. Well, no one was universally liked: better the child should learn that now.
A spark of certainty, of self-awareness and confidence, lit up in the mental space they all shared, and into it, the child announced himself, sure of the name his parents had given him: Alban.
He grew quickly, as even the children of Old Races do, hurrying through childhood toward the strength and stability of an adult form, and when he did grow, it was all at once, from one sunset to another, as if the hours spent encased in stone were to be thrown off to reveal him at greater height and breadth than he had gone to sleep as. He grew tall, until he bore teasing about sharing height with the mountains themselves, and when he proved gangly and awkward with his height, Biali, who had himself been burdened by size as a youth, took pity on him and taught him, step by step, how to control a body outpacing its mind's ability to control it comfortably. They were an odd pair; Biali knew it even if Alban did not, for Biali was squat to Alban's ever-increasing height, but there was still satisfaction in teaching a boy who was all elbows and knees how to become graceful, and he was the first one to see the youth take wing, on a night where a bad tumble sent Alban into a ravine someone his age shouldn't risk.
Biali launched himself after the boy, torn between alarm and laughter; the laughter won, when Alban's oversized wings snapped open, easily able to carry youthful weight, and he almost didn't crash-land, which for a first flight was high praise indeed. Half a somersault landed him on his back along a stream-and-stone-littered crevasse, and he stared into the sky, watching Biali come to a tidy landing beside him. In as close to sullen a voice as he possessed, Alban muttered, "It's hard to believe you were clumsy once too."
"I wasn't," Biali said unrepentantly. "Not like you. I was too strong." Muscle flexed in his arms and thighs as he spoke, physical recollection of his own youth. "It seemed like I broke everything I touched. Trees. Occasionally mountains." Alban gave him a quick look and a smile pulled at Biali's face. "Not entire mountains, but pieces off them. There's a—I'll show you, when you're better at flying. At landing. A ridge, a ways from here. The gestalt will show you how it used to look, before I ran into it. It took a long time to learn to control it. I'm still strong, even for one of us."
"How did you learn? You couldn't have—" Alban stretched an arm out, then brought a fingertip back to touch his nose, a gesture that took more time and concentration than it ought to; if he hurried he was inclined to poke himself in the eye, or the cheek, simply from not quite knowing where he was.
"No, but I had to slow down, too. I went into the memories." Biali sat on his haunches, gaze fixed on distant stars. "I found stories about humans, there. Some of them were strong for their kind, too. Wild and angry, feeding on their strength in battle until it burned out, and that suited me, save for the fact that I would have to go fight human battles to get any use out of it. We don't fight among ourselves." He shrugged. "So I looked farther, until I found stories that showed me how to control the strength, use it when I wanted instead of accidentally. Finesse instead of force. Slowing down. I don't break things anymore, and you won't either, in time."
"You learned all that from humans?"
"From memories of them in the overmind, yes. I had to. There weren't stories of our own kind being beleaguered with too much strength, not as children."
"You can't be the only one." Alban rolled off his back, shaking his wings before folding them down. "Any more than I can be the only one who's too tall and clumsy."
"No, but their lives may have been different. More conflict with humans, or pursuits that let them use their strength or size in a way that taught them to control it without ever realizing that's what they were doing. It can be difficult to find something like that in the memories, when the result is the consequence of an unnoticed action." Biali curled his lip. "Humans are simpler. Can you fly back out of here?"
Alban's wings stirred. "I don't know. I've never tried taking off from a low point before. But I can climb the walls if I can't fly out."
"There's no updraft, this deep. You'll have to jump to get the height to fly. Aim for the wall," Biali said with a brief grin. "That way if you don't fly at least you'll have a head start on your climb."
Alban pulled a face. Biali's grin broadened and he sprang upward, wings beating rapidly to catch air, and moments later he landed on the ravine's edge, watching Alban crouch to leap. He could tell from the instant the youth left the ground that he wouldn't make it: he lacked the necessary height. But his aim was true enough, and he caught the wall, scrambling up with more ease than Biali would have had; those long arms and legs were good for something. His expression was sour as he pulled himself over the edge, and Biali cuffed his head, still grinning. "Nobody makes the first try."
"You would think we would, though. That we'd learn from the memories."
Biali pursed his lips. "You'd think. But it's not the same. Come on. There's a mountain to climb, or we won't make it home before dawn."
"I won't. You could."
"The entire tribe would take turns chiseling bits off me if I left you out here on your own." Biali hopped upward, using wings and strength to scale the rocky peak far more rapidly than any human might, with Alban moving almost as quickly behind him. Night after night they went out, Alban's size turning slowly to grace, his speed to measured thoughtfulness, and before he had seen twoscore years he had grown not only to his height, but a breadth bettered only by Biali, who looked all the more squat beside him. In their natural forms Alban towered over him by nearly two feet, and in their rarely-used mortal forms, the difference wasn't much less. Hajnal, who was small to begin with, looked ridiculous beside Alban, save for the way he would sit at her feet, enraptured, to listen to the tales of she told of the world she'd seen. He vowed often to see it one day himself, an ambition Biali could not, in any serious way, appreciate: he had traveled because Hajnal wanted to, and was content to leave humanity to itself, and gargoyles to their remote mountaintops.
Stranger still than wanting to visit the human world was Alban's fascination with words: they were what the young gargoyle valued, not the shared experiences the gestalt could offer, but the stories Hajnal told, memories filtered through the words she chose, rather than the clarity of being there, as the overmind meant memory to be shared. Humans, not gargoyles, shared memories that way, but gradually Biali came to understand that was the point, for Alban. Humans—stories of them, at least—engrossed him, and he had hardly seen his first score of years when on a longest night he said, "We won't survive this way," with a deep certainty better suited to an elder than a youth. It had silenced the gathering for a moment, everyone from his parents to the oldest of all looking askance at the young gargoyle. Only Hajnal had smiled, though she said nothing. In the end, none of them did, either because it was a truth too hard to bear, or a lie they could find no way to refute.
The comment refused to fade in Biali's memory. It seemed to define what Alban became: thoughtful and reserved, not that gargoyles were prone to great shows of emotion. But Alban watched his own people from a distance, recording them not in the gestalt, but in ordinary, mortal memory. He left their tribe for the first time when he had seen barely half a century: went to human villages in the mountain, learned their language, returned to tell stories that no one save Hajnal wanted to hear. She sat curled on a rock, or nestled into a hollow of stone, listening to tales of human children climbing Alban as if he were a tree, and laughing so hard they cried with delight when he would suddenly rise or run or toss them into the air, making the most of his size and strength; of the adults being more cautious of the stranger in their midst, but warming to him as he struggled to learn their language and laughed at his own mistakes. He traveled in winter, of course, so the long nights offered him more time to spend among the mortals, and often he found that when he emerged at sunset there was some task or trouble that needed his size and strength to finish. It had come on him slowly that a village woman had taken a liking to him; that, he confessed, was what had driven him home again. Learning about humans was one thing, but explaining himself to them was—
"Against our laws," Biali, who had come to listen after all, rumbled, and Alban spread a big hand in agreement.
"Their lives are as encapsulated by the sun as ours are," he said. "They draw closed with the sunset, with only a few hours, at most, of time stolen beside their fires and with their candles. I had to tell a story of living deep in the mountains, working on my own, to excuse the hours I kept, and then protest that I needed no help to clear land or chop wood."
"No doubt once they saw you chop wood they accepted that was true," Hajnal replied, amused. "How quickly could you reduce a tree to cuttings, Alban?"
"Faster than any of them, once I learned how. They have so many tools we don't use. We live lazy lives, compared to many of them, don't we? We eat almost nothing—"
"Why would stone need to eat?" Biali grumbled, earning smiles from Hajnal and Alban both.
"But that's it," Alban said. "Unless we spend our hours in mortal form, we survive as living stone, with no great need for sustenance, no time wasted in hunting, no energy expelled in staying warm. We ought to be great artists, or thinkers, or inventors, and instead we spend so much of our time hidden in the memories, looking back instead of forward."
