"Winter Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (M M M, L L L, Lee Tanith, Murphy C. E.)

5 Winter

Clirando was cold. Winter—it was winter and she lay outdoors. Where was she? Thestus lay by her, she could hear his deep sleeper’s breathing. But she had slept as heavily, and now her skin seemed rimed with frost—

Clirando flung herself off the bed, panic-stricken, feral.

This was not Thestus. She was not on campaign. It was summer, not winter.

She did not sleep.

Night’s darkness was done with. A pallid, livid dawn was beginning over the village, and Clirando could make out how the sky was somberly whitened, for she had left the shutters open. But this white sky was far too white. The roofs around were also far too white.

She went to the window. A blast of freezing air met her naked body like pain.

Small wonder. Heavy snow had fallen in the night. It covered everything—trees, buildings, and on the narrow alley below, undisturbed, it made a flawless marble paving.

Not a sound rose from the village, either. Not a trickle of smoke from any hastily stoked hearth. No bird flew. No human thing was visible. Under the deadly blossom of the snow and ice, only an intermittent conifer showed any growing covering. The rest of the trees were bare as bones, and on a nearby wall, an Eastern rose-briar snaggled, skeletal black and white. Last night it had been smothered in red flowers.

She heard Zemetrios erupt from the bed behind her.

“In the name of all—”

They wrapped themselves in the formerly redundant furs, and both stood in the window.

“The village is empty,” he said. “Deserted.”

“The village is ruinous,” Clirando added.

It was true. The more she peered at the icy vista, the more she noticed the holes in the plaster, fallen stones, and gaps where roofs had given way, not the previous night, but long ago. The snowy trees had not all been cultivated in gardens and yards, but had rooted in the houses, and out of streets and alleyways.

Even in this room—that crack along the wall, the broken stool she had not seen yesterday. The balding furs were musty with age.

Looking across the room, she dismally noted the old carven door was half off its hinges.

“The snow,” he said with irony, “must have fallen down from the moon, if the moon’s covered in snow as the man said.”

“Perhaps it did. This place is a demonic trap. It’s accursed, as we are.”

He drew her around to face him.

“No longer. You and I are no more one alone to face the dangers and dirt of this world. Two together. Yes, Clirando?”

It did not go easy with her, even now, emotionally to bond with him so quickly. If a summer morning had woken them, very likely she would have felt otherwise. But now once more she was not sure she could trust Zemetrios, her beautiful and mesmerizing lover, the one she had “waited” for, her equal and her beloved.

Nevertheless, she nodded. And saw in his eyes he knew she put him off that way. For a moment his mouth thinned. Turning from her brusquely, he gathered up his gear and began to dress.

No longer twined, their two swords lay among the quilts, separate.

Around and below, the inn was as void as suspected. In the long main room, under a now partly broken staircase, bushes clawed from the floor and icicles hung where the onions and green herbs once had. The smoke chimney had fallen into the cooking hearth—a hundred years ago from the look of it.

They exchanged very few words. Brief comments on the wreck, warnings about treacherous places in the floor, and in the snowy hollows of the streets and alleys outside, when once they got there.

The village was desolate, and desolating.

She—and he, she had believed—had been happy here, nearly carefree. The good food, the well-mannered crowds, and the music, magic, friendship, the potent law-breaking of the four magicians in the square—all of it lies. Hallucinations.

Traps.

Nothing to do with life or enjoyment had gone on in this winter village for ten decades or more, nothing but loneliness and decay. Not even any animal laired here.

And the snow. The snow. Could it had fallen from the snow-covered midsummer moon? Was that likely—of course not. But then, neither was all the rest.

We were lovers. This demonstrates we were fools after all. Or I was a fool. And he, trustless, one more chancer and traitor.

For once a kinder inner voice, perhaps more rational—or less guilt-ridden, less involved—murmured within her: Do you react too harshly? What, after all, has he done that you should call him by such names?

But winter had shown her, with its unseasonal cruelty, that she must not soften. She had trusted before. Now she must raise her shield if not her blade. She must be forearmed.

They emerged from the village at another gate. In fact out of a hole in the wall.

Looking back, Clirando saw the remains of the slender tower, leaning like a smashed tooth on the sky.

Beyond the “gateway” was only a waste of white, in which groups of dead orchard trees huddled like black cages draped with ice.

The mountains rose ahead. They were solid now in snow, and the white land ran up to them. Pine forest still grew thickly at their bases.

“Moon’s Stair,” Zemetrios said. His voice was bleak.

Clirando scanned the middle peak.

It was not so high as she had thought, only a frigid hump. Who would want to go up there?

“Everything was deception,” she said. “The merchant lied, too. How can there be some supernatural doorway on that mountain that allows men to pass through, and walk on the moon’s globe—if a globe it truly even is. The moon is a lamp, that’s all, like the stars. The gods made them simply to give light.”

“In Rhoia,” he said, “we call the moon most often she. She’s frozen. She’s cold. Unjust. A bringer of regret.”

Clirando flung about. Before she could make some hard rejoinder, she thought confusedly, He spoke of the moon. He was not Thestus taunting me.

A wind woke suddenly from the island’s edges, where, invisible, the sea still coiled, its rim perhaps now layered with ice.

“What’s that sound?” he said.

“The wind blowing.”

“No.”

He pointed.

Along the snow, out of the nearest bundle of pine trees, something came striding with huge steps. On all the white it was night-dark. And it was giant-tall but narrow, a black banner blowing like a black flame from its top.

“The woman on stilts,” Clirando exclaimed.

“So it is.”

They waited.

Such was her speed, the striding stilt-walker reached them in less than a minute.

Last night she had lit torches in a ruin that had looked whole and living.

Now, passing them, the apparition bent her head to regard them.

“Moon’s Stair,” said the black woman in a remote tone. “That’s your path.”

“Why?” Zemetrios shouted up at her.

“Why else?” the woman nonsensically said.

She grinned. Her teeth were white as winter. On she strode, around the crumbled village wall. She vanished from sight.

“A sign,” he said. “Guidance.”

“Only if you’re insane enough to think it so. I’m making back the other way toward the coast. My band of women was abducted by pirates, that’s what I must suppose. At Amnos, to be a female warrior is to be a priestess, too. I owe them more than mere comradeship—they were in my charge. So damn the Isle and the Seven Nights. I’ll build a beacon of my own and hail some ship. I must find them.”

“Clirando,” he said, “don’t you see, you and I—we must go up the mountain.”

“Why should I see something so absurd.”

“Our penance. Didn’t your temple speak to you of a sacrifice?”

Clirando stared at nothingness. “Yes. They said too that there was less danger for my girls than for me.”

“I’d swear your band is safe. They’re valiant and strong. You’ve trained and led them. So you must trust them, even if you can never trust me. As for this—don’t you feel the tug of that place—whatever it is—up there?”

She licked her lips. The chill wind was biting through her clothing and the molting furs in which she, as he, had wrapped herself.

Unwillingly she accepted that it was true enough, the mountain pulled at her. It was not so high. It would be no awful task for either of them to scale it.

Instantly on the wind then, she heard a many-voiced and horrible jeering wail. As her head jerked up in remembering fear and distaste, she saw Zemetrios too was glaring along the snows, his eyes searching. Their demons had returned.

There had been a sip of happiness for them at the phantom inn. Now they were due to pay.

“Then, let’s go,” he said. “What choice?”

“None.”

He broke into the fast steady lope before she did, running toward the skirt of pines.

It would not matter, she thought, despite any prior notion or hope, whether they went together or apart. Both of them must face the individual punishment the Isle had in store.

Yet she too jogged forward. Increasing her speed, she caught him up. They advanced again shoulder to shoulder, up the rising slope.