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Between. Uncertain who had built itmen or elves. It was long before the old man's time, at least, and before the empire in the east. There was magic in its making& so they used to say. Now there was only the old man and the dormouse and a sleepy hedgehog, and a bird or two or three, which came for the grain at the windows. That was his real talent, the wild things, the gentle things. A real magician now would not be making tea himself, in the kitchen, and wasting his breath on stairs. A real magician would have been more awesome. Kept some state. Inspired some fear.
He stopped at the halfway turning. Pushed his sliding spectacles up his nose and balanced tray, tea, cakes and dormouse against the window-ledge. The land was black in the east. Black all about the tower.
Burned. On some days he could see the glitter of arms in the distance where men fought. He could see the flutter of banners on the horizon as they rode. Could hear the sound of the horses and the horns.
Now the dust and soot of a group of riders showed against the darkening east. He waited there, not to have the weary stairs againwaited while the dormouse nibbled a cake, and in his pocket the hedgehog squirmed about, comfortable in the stillness.
The riders came. The princeit was hesent the herald forward to ring at the gate. "Open in the king's name," the herald cried, and spying him in the window: "Old manopen your gates. Surrender the tower. No more warnings."
"Tell him no," the old man said. "Just tell himno."
"Tomorrow," the herald said, "we come with siege."
The old man pushed his spectacles up again. Blinked sadly, his old heart beating hard. "Why?" He asked.
"What importance, to have so much bother?"
"Old meddler." The prince himself rode forward, curvetted his black horse under the window. "Old fraud.
Come down and live. Give us the tower intactto use& and live. Tomorrow morningwe come with fire and iron. And the stones fallold man."
The old man said nothing. The men rode away.
The old man climbed the stairs, the teasel clattering in his palsied hands. His heart hurt. When he looked out on the land, his heart hurt him terribly. The elves no longer came. The birds and the beasts had all fled the burning. There was only the mouse and the hedgehog and the few doves who had lived all their lives in the loft. And the few sparrows who came. Only them now.
He set the tray down, absent-mindedly took the hedgehog from his pocket and set it by the dormouse on the tray, took a cake and crumbled it on the window-ledge for the birds. A tear ran down into his beard.
Old fraud. He was. He had only little magics, forest magics. But they'd burned all his forest and scattered the elves, and he failed even these last few creatures. They would overthrow the tower. They would spread over all the land, and there would be no more magic in the world. He should have done something long agobut he had never done a great magic. He should have raised whirlwinds and elementalsbut he could not so much as summon the legged teapot up the stairs. And his heart hurt, and his courage failed. The birds failed to comeforeknowing, perhaps. The hedgehog and the dormouse looked at him with eyes small and solemn in the firelight, last of all.
No. He stirred himself, hastened to the musty bookshis master's books, dusty and a thousand times failed. You've not the heart, his master would say. You've not the desire for the great magics. You'll call nothing because you want nothing.
Now he tried. He drew his symbols on the floor scattered his powders, blinking through the ever- shifting spectacles, panting with his exertions. He would do it this timewould hold the tower on the edge of faery, between the Empire of Man and the kingdom of the elves. He believed, this time. He conjured powers. He called on the great ones. The winds sighed and roared inside the tower.
And died.
His arms fell. He wept, great tears sliding down into his beard. He picked up the dormouse and the hedgehog and held them to his breast, having no more hope.
Then she came. The light grew, white and pure. The scent of lilies filled the airand she was there naked, and white, hands emptybeautiful.
"I've come," she said.
His heart hurt him all the more. "Forgive me," he said. "I was trying for somethingfiercer."
"Oh," she said, dark eyes sad.
"I make onlysmall magics," he said. "I was trying fora dragon, maybe. A basilisk. An elemental. To stop the king. But I do flowers best. And smokes and maybe a little fireworks. And it's not enough.
Goodbye. Please go. Please do go. Whichever you are. You're the wrong kind. You're beautiful. And he's going to come tomorrowthe kingand the armies& it's not a place for a gentle spirit. Onlycould you take them& please? Mouse and Hedgehog they'd not be so much. I'd not like to bother you. But could you? And then you can go."
"Of course," she said. It was the whisper of wind, her voice. The moving of snow crystals on frozen crust. She took them to her breast. Kissed them in turn, and jewels clothed them in white. "Old man," she said, and on his brow too planted a kiss, and jewels followed, frosty white. White dusted all the room, all the books and the clutter and the cobwebs. She walked down the stairs and out the gate, and jeweled it all in her wake. She walked the land, and the snow fell, and fell, and the winds blewtill only the banners were left, here and there, stiffened with ice, above drifts and humps of snow which marked the tents. The land was all white, horizon to horizon. Nothing stirredbut the wolves that hunted the deer, and the birds that hunted the last summer's berries.
Death drifted back to the tower, and settled there, in the frost and the lasting snows, where the old man and magic slept their lasting sleep.
She breathed kisses on him, on the little ones, and kept watchfaithful to her calling, while the snows deepened, and even the wolves slept, their fur white and sparkling with the frost.
VI
We share the lounge with passengers now. A young couple holds hands under a table over to the corner.
Some things never change.
There is crisis aboard. One of the passengers has locked himself in his cabin and the steward and a doctor have been back and forth down the hall trying to get the door open. Jump and transit does this to some people.
I don't think he ever went near a window. He would always sit with his back to them. He talked through all the status advisories.
"You wonder why some people come out here," you say.
"I suppose he has to. Business, maybe."
There is a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing, up and down the halls. Some passengers delight in the drama. And sip their drinks and hug their own superiority in their boredom.
"It's a terrible thing for that man," I say. "Perceptions again. The first time you know you're not anywhere near where you were, not anywhere near where your whole world isthen you have to know that you're somewhere else. That man has just learned something. His safe world is shattered."
"Look at the rest of these people. They don't lock themselves in their rooms. And I don't think they ever think about the universe. They just have their drinks. And their canned music. And when they look out the windows they don't see the stars. They just see lights."
"That's the tragedy of the man in his room, isn't it? He can almost see the universe. He's so much closer to the truth than he ever was in all his life." I sip my own drink. "And he's locked his door."
"Couldn't they open it from the main board?"
"They could. Or just use the master key. They will if they have to."
More to-ing and fro-ing.
"Perceptions," you say.
"Perceptions. Taste, scent, touch, hearing, sense of balance, sightof course, sight. And the systems we make and the systems others make for us. The orders and the logic. It's so easy to take what others give us. Gifts are so hard to say no to."
"We want so much to believe we know. That's the trouble."
"Even to believe we can't know is a system. Maybe we can know the universe. Maybe there is an answer.
It's dangerous to assume there isn't."
"There. I thought you'd gotten sane."
"It's dangerous to assume anything and stop looking."
"You can't guarantee it isn't dangerous to look, either."
"No," I say. "I can't." We have gotten to that stage of renewed honesty. The potential for friendship, it may be. And we know nothing at all of each other.
It is so hard even to know ourselves.
The Brothers
I
The wind came from the west out of the rocky throat of the Sianail, even while the morning sun was shining in the glen, and there was something singing on it. Perhaps unGifted men could not hear it yet that faint, far wail, but it echoed clearly off the mountain walls of Gleann Gleatharan, down to Dun Gorm, and it gave the king no peace.
There was storm in that wind as it came, scouring hills the stones of which were old and dread, hills which remembered darker things than storms and hid things at their heartsthe bones of warriors and kings, and even, men said, spirits older than the gods.
High within the hills was also bright green, even on this murky, misty day, grass green as life and peace; but whenever this mood came on the mountains that hove up northward, souls keened on the gray wind and black crows flew on it, and it was well to think of shelter.
The traveler never did. He came down from the rocky heights, taking chances with stones turned slick with mist. He went gray-cloaked in wool, his feet in scarred brown leather that had seen many a league and many a fording and many a soaking before the one that threatened. He had hanging about his neck did this gray traveler, a flat stone that a stream had worn through in its center; if a man looked through this opening, then he would see things as they were and glamors had no power on him. But the traveler had limited faith in this magic, putting more trust in the iron of his plain sword, which he had gotten on Skean Eirran off a dead man, on that narrow spit of sand, when they raided up by Skye. This he carried and no other weapon but a dagger for his meat; and no armor but his gray oiled-wool cloak to keep the cold mist from his skin. His name he did not have. He had not been using that since he passed into the southland; and perhaps they were hunting him by now; perhaps they had sent men ahead of him so there would be men to meet him when he came. When he looked over his shoulder he saw nothing but bare old stones and lawless gorse besides the mist-damp green, but now and again from hillsides he heard dogs baying that might be shepherds' dogs disturbed by his passage or might not; they might be pursuit from his enemies and they might not, in this fey, foul day that wrapped itself in storm.
Then with the passing of a hill he found all of a broad glen dropping away at his feet, himself in storm- shadow and the most of the glen still in sunlight that speared down through gray-bottomed cloud and turned the dark green to dazzling emerald. It was a land of neat hedgerows and careful fields and pasturages well cared-for. The very hills surrounding this valley had a tamer look, as if here kinder powers blessed the hedges and fenced out the hazards of the wild hills.
Amid it all, surely the reason and center of this tranquilitya Dun sat on a hill above a pleasant stream in the face of low hills where its cottages clung as faint dots against the green.
He knew where he had come. It was no great dun. It was built of the wreckage time had made of its hill so that one melded with the otherDun Gorm it was, the Blue Keep, and it took its name from those stones as well, that deep gray stone that mimicked the sky and turned strange colors, one thing in storm and another when the sun was shining as it did now in spears across the glen, between the clouds, while the mist on the hills sent freshets down.
It held peace, and luck, this land where he had come. He had known neither in his life, and seeing this before him, he went to it.
There was a window of Dun Gorm that looked out above the stableyard fences, up toward the hills, and dread brought the king to it constantly this day. Cinnfhail was this king's name; and he was feyer than all his line, all of whom had been on speaking terms with the Sidhe, the Fair Folk who had known and held this valley before men came.
There had been a time that men and Fair Folk had lived closer than they did now: the Sidhe, the dwellers under bough and the dwellers under stone, had lived close beside the hewers of both, at peace. From most places in the world nowadays the Sidhe had indeed gone, leaving the hills and the glens to man. But in Gleann Gleatharan the Sidhe still pursued their own furtive business in the hills and woods while men built of stone and wood in the valley. And so long as a man took his wood and stone from the lonely heights of Gleann Gleatharan northward and far from the forest at the south of the valley he got on with the Sidhe well enoughif he were born to Dun Gorm, whose first king had been their friend.
Sometimes even in these days, Cinnfhail had heard their singing, oftenest in the evenings, fair as dream and haunting his mind for days; or sometimes in his riding he had heard a whisper which gave him good advice, and he came back from his riding wiser than he had gone out to it. Cinnfhail King had always cherished such encounters and longed for more meetings than he had had in his long life.
But todaytoday he heard a song he did not wish to hear. It was the bain sidhe wailing, not the singing of the fair glas sidhe; it was the White Singer, the harbinger of death. She sang along the heights thus far that sawtoothed, gorse-grown ridge that walled them from the world; or from down the glen where the brook vanished into woods the Sidhe-folk still owned.
Stay away, he wished her. Come no nearer to my land.
But the singing kept on, rising and falling on the wind.
"It will be a storm tonight," his wife said, queen Samhadh, finding king Cinnfhail watching there alone.
He held her close a while and murmured agreement, glad that Samhadh was deaf to any worse things.
All the day, coming and going from that window, Cinnfhail could not help thinking on dangers to those he loved. He considered his son Raghallach, a youth handsome enough to break the heart of any maid in Eirran, him the bravest and fairest of all the youth of Gleann Gleatharan. The love Cinnfhail had for his fair-haired son, the pride he took in Raghallach, was such that he could never tell it, especially to Raghallachbut he went to Raghallach and tried, this day, and that attempt set a glow in Raghallach's eyes, and afterward, set a wondering in Raghallach's heart, just what strange mood was on his father.
In the same way Cinnfhail King looked on Deirdre his daughter, who was not yet fourteen: so small, so high-hearted, the very image of what his Samhadh had been in the glory of her youth, as if time turned back again and laughed through the halls in Deirdre's steps. He had so much in his family; in all this land; he had wife and children and faithful friends and he thought the Sidhe might be jealous of such luck as he had: there were Sidhe reputed for such spite. So while he listened to that singing on the wind he contrived excuses that would keep all he loved indoors.
"Lord," said Conn his shieldman, coming on him at this window-vigil, together with Tuathal his Harper "some worry is on you."
"Nothing," Cinnhfail King said to Conn, and searched Conn's eyes too for any signs of ill-luck and death this man so long his friend: his shieldman, who had stood with him in his youth and drunk with him at his board. There were no more wars for them. They had settled Gleann Gleatharan at peace, and now they grew old together, breeding fine horses and red cattle and laughing over their children's antics. His shieldman was clad farmer-wise, like any crofter that held the heights. Of treasures he held dear, this man was one of the chiefest, in his loyalty and courage; and hardly less, Tuathal the harper, the teacher of his children in riddlery and wit. "It's nothing," Cinnfhail said. "A little melancholy. Perhaps I'm growing old."
"Never, lord," Conn said.
"Not by my will, at least. But an old wound aches, that's all."
"Cursed weather," Conn said.
One should never curse the Sidhe. The impiety chilled the king. But Conn was deaf to what he cursed.
"Go," Cinnfhail said, "have cook put on something to warm the bones; there'll be cold men coming from the fields early today; and have the fire lit in hall; and have the lads give the horses extra and one of them to sleep there in the stable tonight. Athas will be kicking the stall down again."
"Aye, lord," said Conn, and went.
"Lord," said the harper Tuathal then, lingering after Conn had gone, "there's something in this wind."
Of course his harper heard it. A harper would, and Tuathal was a good one, whose songs sometimes echoed Sidhe dreams that Cinnfhail King had had. Tuathal had indeed heard. There was worry in the harper's gray eyes.
"It comes no nearer," said Cinnfhail. "Perhaps it will not." He was suddenly wishing the bain sidhe to go along the ridge, among his people, to any other house in the glen, and he felt a stinging guilt for this moment's selfishness. So he was not altogether virtuous as a king, not selfless. He knew this in himself. It was his weakness, that he desired a little peace in his fading years; and time, time, the one thing his life had less and less of.
Is it myself it sings for? He wondered. O gods.
Cinnfhail was by the window again as the clouds came down, as the last few rays of westering sun walked the green of his valley within its mountain walls. The sun touched a moment on the heights and for a while the song seemed fainter, overwhelmed by this last green brilliance.
In the fields nearby the horses raced, tails lifting, as horses will who play tag with ghosts before such storms; the boys had the gate open and the horses knew where they should go, but horses and young folk both loving to make chaos of any scheme, it was all being done with as much disorder as either side could muster. Sheep were tending home on their own like small rainclouds across the earth: their fleeces would be wet and scattering the mist in waterdrops the old ewe was wise as a sheep was ever likely to be, selfishly thinking of her own comfort, and she brought the others by example, her bell ringing across the meadows. From their own pastures came the cattle, not hurrying unseemly, but not lingering either home for byre and straw, needing no herdboy to tell them. This was the way of the beasts in Gleann Gleatharan, that they would not stray (excepting the horses, and them not far) ; it was the nature of the crops that few weeds would grow in them and of the folk that they grew up straight and tall and laughing much. And Cinnfhail King had a moment's ease thinking on his luck; but the clouds took back the sky then, and the mist came down.
