Orion Shall Rise Read online

  He stopped, hoarsened, and now Vanna suspected he most wanted a drink from the canteen at his hip, which surely did not hold water.

  But am I mad? she wailed to herself. Japing about a thing as terrible as this! She willed ease into her muscles, drew several long breaths, silently voiced a mantra while calling up, before her mind’s eye, a mandala. After a few seconds she could reply steadily:

  ‘I understand, Noyon, and with my whole being wish I could help. If that cancer on Gaea recurs, the Life Force may be driven to a more radical cure than another Death Time. But I fear I have no information.’

  ‘You may. Somewhere, buried in that mass of material you keep, somewhere may be a lead to some of those sites.’

  ‘I doubt that. Naturally, I’ll start my staff investigating on a priority basis, but after all the centuries that it’s been maintained, the ancient collection is well catalogued and indexed. And newer acquisitions will be of no use, will they?’

  They might. Who knows? Mention, maybe, of something curious that a trapper noticed, far off in the woods. And you, reverend lady. You get a good many people here, wanting to find out about this or that. You must supervise them, especially if they borrow old books.’

  True.’ Vanna frowned, harking back, until she sighed and spread her hands. ‘No. I’m sorry, but I’m sure no one has done research that might have been aimed in that direction. If you think about the matter, Noyon, you may agree it’s implausible anyone would. Why leave precisely the sort of clue for you that you’ve mentioned?’

  Instead, she thought, the searchers will have traveled inconspicuously through the forests and along the lakes, always alert, ready to ask certain innocent-seeming questions of every local person they met. You might try to find such persons, Noyon, but to me it looks hopeless. Among isolated, naive backwoods folk, the searchers can have passed themselves off as practically anything, anybody, they chose.

  Twenty years of purpose, did you estimate, Noyon? We may well already be too late. She could not repress a shudder.

  2

  Abruptly, while visiting a holding of his Clan in the Vosges, Talence Donal Ferlay gasped, caught at his chest, and fell dead.

  It was totally unexpected. Though he had entered his seventy-first year, he continued hale, without need of other artifice than reading glasses, and Ferlay men often survived thus into their nineties. Unspoken but unquestioned had been the assumption that the Clan Seniors would soon elect him Captain, when aged Toma Sark passed away.

  Many looked forward to that, not wishing their head of state any ill but feeling the need of a stronger hand on the Domain. These were years of menace as well as of hope. Outland visitors and goods, outland ideas above all, were breaking old certitudes apart. More and more, groundlings chafed at the suzerainty of Skyholm, while the young in the Aerogens wondered if they were not right to do so. Gaeanity found ever more converts, and the implications of its doctrine were revolutionary – which implied a split with those who kept by traditional beliefs, even a chance of eventual civil war and breakup of the Domain. Behind the Prynys, the Zheneral of Espayn licked his wounds after Italya, built his strength, and waited for opportunities. Some of the tribes beyond the Rhin, emerging from backwardness, were forming a confederation that would be powerful, and buying arms from abroad. A new Isolation Era was improbable; the economy had become too dependent on outside trade, and therefore on the whims of events around the planet. And of late, intelligence officers had received a sinister word from their Maurai counterparts.…

  And suddenly Talence Donal Ferlay was dead.

  The Clans honored him in every way they were able. With military escort, shrouded in the Tricolor of his remote ancestors, his body was brought aloft to Skyholm. Each Senior who could possibly come was on hand to receive it; but pride of place went to his immediate household. Rosenn, his wife, and Catan, the mother of his son, stood side by side and offered prayers, the first in Francey, the second in Brezhoneg, and both in Angley. Iern led the pallbearers down the corridors, bearing horizontally the staff of a furled flag; after them marched the guard, plumed helmets bent low, drums slowly athutter. In the Funeral Chamber there was music more soft, a few brief eulogies were given, and Captain Toma read the Farewell. Then the coffin slid past a steel door whereon stood engraved the Twenty-third Psalm; laser energy poured white; a hatch, bearing words to recall the anim, flew open; and the ashes of Talence Donal Ferlay drifted forth upon the winds of upper heaven.

  – When the memorial feast was over, the Seniors held a meeting. Despite his being a mere twenty-six years of age, they elected Iern to their ranks. It was not a gesture of respect for his father. The power – to vote on Domain matters, to serve as a mediator and court of appeal – was never bestowed that lightly: for no Clan could have more than one Senior per hundred adults. The thought was that Talence Iern Ferlay was a strong young man, intelligent if not profound, perhaps a little frivolous but basically responsible, a dramatic figure well liked not only by the Aerogens but by pysans from Brezh to Dordoyn and onward. He should be an asset in Council. He might prove the best choice for Captain.

  3

  The castle at Valdor had always been isolated. Near the southern frontier of the Domain, it had been raised on its crag as a base for militia who were to keep raiders from descending out of the Prynys onto the farms and towns below. Gradually such barbarians were pacified and civilized, until Eskual-Herria Nord was organized as a state. However, the highlands could support little but a shepherd folk, thinly spread, more in touch with their fellows across the border in Iberya than with the Gascons north of them. As the Espaynians recovered likewise, commerce did, but it generally preferred the sea lanes to the mountain passes. Save in time of war, Valdor seldom got visitors, and most castlekeepers of this Talence possession spent the bare annual minimum of weeks there. Few troubled to learn the native tongue – admittedly difficult, unrelated to any other in Uropa. Rather, they employed interpreters whenever they dealt with a person who commanded no Angley or Francey.

  Jovain Aurillac was exceptional in both respects. Moreover, he took a genuine interest in the welfare not only of his estate’s servants and tenants, but of the nearby villagers and surrounding rancher families. They liked him for that, and looked to him for leadership. Such ties strengthened when he spent an entire year in residence, which it seemed he might continue indefinitely. People were vaguely aware that this was because of some unspecified trouble he had gotten into, but any resentment was on his behalf. And if he no longer went to Ileduciel and Tournev to speak for them, who would? Government of their land was parceled out among local magnates, all of them fiercely parochial; the king was ornamental.

  Ileduciel itself seemed nearly as unreal, for it stood beneath these horizons unless you climbed onto a peak. What had it done for the Eskualdunak – muttered many a pysan – but get them into wars against their brethren in Iberya? The spread of Gaean belief among them whetted their suspicion of the Aerogens; so did tales of outlanders bringing outlandish ways into Franceterr. The Clans in their haughtiness would do well to remember that every male Eskualdun above the age of twelve kept weapons and knew how to use them!

  Before he went to his meeting with the officer from Espayn, Talence Jovain Aurillac stood for a while in a tower room by an open window. It was a frightening thing that he had finally brought himself to do – or had Faylis? – and he hoped Gaea would first give him of Her infinite inner peace.

  The summer of the High Prynys was waning. A breeze that blew in had crossed snow on the crown of a mountain opposite him and sipped of its chill. Grass farther down had gone tawny, and leaves on scattered oaks were turning bronze. The valley beneath remained half green, in paddocks and orchards, but grain rustled pale, ready for harvest, and the river had taken on a sheen like steel. From here he could see a couple of houses, hunched low under their sod roofs; smoke whipped in tatters from the chimneys. Closer, on the slope below the castle, a flock of sheep grazed, startlingly white in bleak sunl
ight. The girl in charge was playing a wooden flute; he caught her minor-key notes. Otherwise he sensed only a whisper of wind and the tension that he must will out of his body.

  I do what is right, because it is what best serves the Life Force, he declared. Yes, it serves my desires as well, but they are honorable, they are evolutionary. To rescue the woman I love from her misery, be again with her, get children upon her. To rescue the Domain from its present insanity, guide it into paths of wisdom and the knowledge of Gaea, make Skyholm a beacon of truth for all mankind.

  His fingers twisted together. Do I absolutely believe that? I have never had a real Insight. My conversion was intellectual, when I strove to make sense out of the horrors I had partaken of. Bibulous, gluttonous, lecherous old Ucheny Mattas, he has direct experience of the Oneness ofLife, over and over. In him it is an ecstasy; in others whom I have known it appears to be a total serenity; but always the seer transcends self Meanwhile, those like Faylis and me stand wistfully inside the prison of ego. Sometimes my telescope almost releases me (the Orion Nebula, where new suns and worlds are coming to birth even as I watch!) but never quite.

  Well, if I can prepare the way for my children–

  A footfall dropped into his consciousness and made him turn around. His wife had entered. She halted at the middle of the floor. They exchanged stares.

  She seemed phantomlike to him, white-gowned, her hair hidden by a scarf that was also white, the fair skin of her family – Ayson in Clan Lundgard – turned bloodless, eyes enormous in the pinched countenance. ‘I was looking for you,’ she said at last, so low that he had trouble following.’ Can you spare me a few minutes?’

  ‘Well, I have an appointment very soon,’ he answered. ‘Can’t the matter wait?’

  ‘No.’ Irmali sighed. ‘Most matters between us can wait, because they must, but this concerns that same appointment.’

  Unease touched him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I watch people closely,’ she said. ‘I’ve had to. That man who’s come to confer with you – about a trade agreement with his company, you’ve announced – he isn’t a plain Espaynian merchant. No, he walks like a career soldier.’

  ‘Um-m … I’ve heard he, um, he used to be. What of it?’

  She started to draw nearer but stopped, as if afraid to touch her husband. Perhaps she was. Plainly, she had had to nerve herself up to this talk. Her fists clenched at her sides. ‘Jovain,’ she said, ‘the fact that I can’t swallow your Gaeanity doesn’t mean I’m a fool. I watch, and think, and fit things together. For the past year or more, you’ve been involved in correspondences you don’t speak about; but I’ve paid heed to where the letters come from. Messengers have gone back and forth, and I’ve known – by accent, dress, a thousand clues – where they were from. Radio’s easier and cheaper, but you’ve used the radio for nothing but routine communications. You must have something else to discuss that you don’t want overheard. Besides, Jovain, I know you. However far apart we’ve strayed, I know you.’

  ‘What do you imagine I’m doing?’ he snapped.

  ‘I can’t tell for certain, of course,’ said her dogged diffidence, ‘but I’m afraid it’s a political plot – and you’ve called in a foreign agent – Oh Jovain, don’t!’

  The wind blew in more stiffly, stirring his hair, seeking under his robe, the living wind of Gaea. He drank the strength he needed, and challenged her: ‘Yes, I do have confidential negotiations underway, but I swear to you they are not to the harm of the Domain. I am not a traitor. If you think I am, your duty is to denounce me to Skyholm.’

  She shrank back. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ she breathed. ‘I love you. But I fear for you, our children –’

  Now he could stride to her, take both her hands in his (how cold they were), smile down into her face (she was wearing the rose perfume that he had especially liked when they were first married), and assure her: ‘Irmali, dear, this is a large business indeed, and I won’t deny that it involves righting a terrible wrong done us. I can’t say more than that, not yet. But stand true, Irmali, and you’ll have your reward.’ He bestowed a brief kiss and tasted salt. ‘I’m sorry, I must go. Stand true.’

  He left her there, knowing that she would stay until she had gotten her weeping done in private. Zhesu-Crett! growled within him. If only she didn’t cling so! The winding way downstairs seemed to weave his mood back together. No, I’m being unfair. She has her courage, as witness the way she’s stood up for her faith against mine, year after year. I wish I could be honest with her.

  A smile passed over him. ‘Hypocrisy is the axle grease of society,’ Mattas remarked once, and accompanied this bit of advice with a thunderous belch. I wonder if an ucheny more solemn, less earthy, yes, less rascally could have won me to the Gaean philosophy. For I am a man of action as well as an idealist …, Ha, had I but succeeded in killing Iern Ferlay, when we dueled in our sunwings! My failure has cost Faylis another year with him. It will cost her more, poor beautiful darling. But I have her liberation in train. This day we should move a long way toward our reunion, Faylis, Faylis.

  I wonder if I will ever be able to tell you that he spoke truth about the affair. Probably not. I love you too much to give you an unnecessary shock like that.

  And love belongs to the Life Force.

  The stairway gave on a corridor lined with tapestries and trophies. Household staff whom Jovain met bent the knee to him; he remembered to give back a nod and a smile. At the intersection of a second passage he encountered Mattas Olvera.

  They nearly collided, in fact. The older man was well into his regular afternoon drunkenness. His swag-bellied form wrapped in a robe stained with food and rancid with sweat, he waved a wine bottle while he lurched and hiccoughed and muttered snatches of bawdy song. The fat face glistened, the broken-veined nose was a lamp. Tumbling halfway down his chest, an unkempt grizzled beard hid the jade Earth-sign that proclaimed him a seer – prorók – as well as ucheny – teacher of truth. But then he had always insisted, since the day when he came stumping dustily up the road from Iberya as a mendicant preacher, that Gaea required no formality. She was not a god; She was, and her Oneness was for humans to find by whatever means were individually best for them.

  ‘Oh, ho, ho!’ he roared, and flung an arm around the castlekeeper’s neck. ‘Well met, my friend, eh, what? You on your way to your little conspiracy and I on my way to my little maidservant. Enjoy yourself!’ After all the years he had lived here, his Francey remained atrocious.

  Jovain stiffened and drew back. ‘I beg your pardon, sabio,’ he said, choosing the honorific with care. ‘I have a conference, yes. A conference, on certain questions of trade.’

  It was a reminder about discretion. Mattas had been involved from the start, as Jovain’s lead to the network of adepts in Iberya (and across the Ocean to Merique, bypassing and overleaping governments, nations, races, in the service of Gaea). The apostle cheerfully admitted that otherwise he was useless; his calling was not practical politics, but explaining that Life was One and helping those who heeded him to enter into the ineffable communion. Aside from that, he said, life was there to be lived. Jovain envied him.

  For a moment, the ucheny’s small eyes were aimed rifle-straight, his grin fell away, his voice sank, and Jovain wondered how drunk he really was. ‘Castlekeeper,’ he said, ‘geology and history both show that moments occur when evolution takes a new turn, for better or worse. It may be that this is such an hour. If so, may it be for the Onwardness.’

  Thereafter he laughed, ripped out a fart, swigged from his bottle, wished the Clansman well, and rolled off toward his newest doxy.

  Jovain proceeded.

  Yago Dyas Garsaya waited in the agreed-on room. He was a short man, spade-bearded, clad in the linen blouse and striped trousers of a well-to-do burgher from central Espayn; but as Irmali had observed, he bore himself like the soldier that he actually was. He rose when Jovain appeared, and stood as if at attention. After all, he might well be confronting the
next Captain of the Domain.

  ‘Good day, sir,’ he greeted. His Francey was impeccable, with a Gascoynais intonation.

  ‘Greeting. Please be seated. May I offer you –?’ Jovain fussed about with cognac and cigarettes, though he himself did not smoke. It was more than the courtesy due from a host to a guest. He was a member of Clan Talence, but Dyas Garsaya was a spokesman for the Zheneral of Espayn.

  He was also disconcertingly direct. Within minutes he was asking: ‘How serious are you about this proposed coup?’

  Jovain mustered courage to reply with equal bluntness: ‘One hundred percent. I’ve done my best to explain the issues, but let me recast them briefly for you. Then, if you find my position reasonable, we can go on to practicalities.’

  He let a sip of brandy burn its comforting way down his gullet before he itemized:

  ‘I belong to the Domain of Skyholm. That’s where my loyalties lie, please understand. I’ve fought for it, taken wounds, risked my life – all the while unsure why it was your country whose men I traded shots with. Afterward – well, your people are largely Gaean by now, and I began to imagine a whole new cycle of world civilization – But we needn’t repeat slogans.

  ‘The fact is’ – anger grabbed him; his fist slammed down on the arm of his chair – ‘Talence Donal Ferlay has died. He was the obvious heir to the Captaincy when Toma dodders off, and would have been bad enough. But the Clans immediately raised his son Iern to Senior status, and talk is that that jackanapes, that technolater, may well be chosen –’ He gulped. ‘Precisely because I’m his personal enemy, I feel I’m in a position to make a move for Gaea. Hatred can be an energy of the Life Force, can’t it?’

  Dyas Garsaya nodded. ‘I suppose so,’ he replied. ‘I’m no adept, you realize. I’m an officer in the service of my Zheneral. We’d naturally like to see the next government of the Domain friendlier to legitimate Espaynian goals than past ones have been. If, in addition, it should be a Gaean government … why, there is indeed the nucleus of the next civilization!’