WIDSITH STEPPED to one side and looked between the columns. Kern tried to see over the moon-disks, but bumped his head against the low roof.
Beyond the ranks and rows, on the far side of the chamber, stood a female figure of middle size, dressed in a cloak patterned in thin silver, like the shining skeleton of a decayed leaf—or the framework of a drake’s wings.
“She doth wear her wings!” Kaiholo said. “All is indeed tumbled and new.”
At her gesture and invitation, they walked between the columns toward a dais on which were set several stools and a basic wooden throne. Reynard saw that this figure’s skin was like tarnished silver, and she looked upon them with the large, golden-brown eyes of a roe, flecked with gold like nuggets in a stream.
She removed her cloak and set it aside on nothing visible, where it took on a limp but cared-for drape. She wore a long dress like the bell of a flower, also made of drake’s wings, and a vest that tightened at her waist but loosely wrapped her shoulders.
She spoke again, in soft tones, using words Reynard did not understand. Kaiholo drew himself tall and full of dignity. He motioned Reynard forward. “She asketh for thee first,” he said. Widsith seemed to question this decision, this request, but when he tried to stand in front of Reynard, Kern stopped him and shook his head in warning.
“Come, young Fox,” Guldreth now said. “I would have advice from thee, if thou art th’one who can deliver it to me. I believe thou hast met curious beings—yes?”
The companions who had accompanied Reynard into this strange place seemed to fade both in memory and vision. The tarnished silver woman glided, her long bell-shaped gown rustling, leading him down the ranks of disks, hundreds of disks or more . . . the rows dividing like tree branches farther and farther back into her apartments, which seemed many, with doors and arches opening to yet longer hallways leading deeper and deeper into darkness, seeming to shrink until he was afraid he was already lost and would never find his way back.
And wherever she went, there were the disks, each bearing an image of some impossible place, or creatures that did not exist, or faces of beings not entirely human, until he felt dizzy and filled with their dreams, their delusions.
“I would myself speak to these figures!” Reynard said. “I would ask who you are, and why you have need of me.” Reynard’s eyes grew heavy-lidded, his look desperate.
“The dead or the great answer through the living and the lesser, but only when they desire. You say you were taught by your grandmother. How long since her passage?”
“I was a child,” Reynard said.
“Then she doth not roam in shadows to seek her favorites, and none can summon her shade without knowing many secrets, many languages not bestowed on the living—even those just beneath the sky.”
“She is here?” Until now, he had thought Guldreth was asking about his two visitors, the man with the white shadow—the man with the feathered hat.
“A grand Traveler. I believe she hath protected thee for some time. Dost thou feel her, Fox?”
“I do not feel or see her.”
“No surprise,” Guldreth said. “And yet, thou’rt here, and this is the first time a grand Traveler of her stature hath visited this fortress, dead or alive. I wonder if the dead can still convey a Traveler’s boon?”
Reynard shook his head, ashamed at his ignorance, and of the fear that now froze him to his bones. Actually being in the presence of the dead was true necromancy, sure to condemn one to Hell—or the infernal regions, rather. “What boon is that?”
“Words, Fox. Words new and words old, words that have shaped lands and peoples, and given power to formless ones who had none before. I would almost wish to be a Traveler, just to know such power!” She waved her silvery hand at the disks in this side hall, in the back chambers, all glowing faintly like moons behind clouds. “All these sketches the Crafters have made began with such words, words given to them by your kind—by Travelers. Travelers gave them purpose and power, and out of all that . . . we arise and struggle. Our lives begin, we work and do battle, and our lives end. The power of words!”
Guldreth’s voice seemed regretful. He reacted to that instinctively, as if he were some sort of strange gentleman hoping to provide comfort or solace.
“A phrase echoes in my thoughts,” Reynard said. “The words are not strange, but their meaning is.”
“May I hear them?”
“ ‘The first mother is the first word,’ ” he said.
“Ah! You do know the secret of Hel’s islands,” Guldreth said. Her dark silvery smile was extraordinary, her lips like the petals of a blue rose, had he ever seen such—he had not—and the teeth behind them were small and perfect, their color between ivory and polished silver coin.
“I know nothing! I have heard those words before, and now I believe, I think, I might hear my grandmother’s voice speaking them to me . . . yet she is silent!”
“Powers such as your grandmother have ways of leaving messages. Since arriving, thou hast received the memories of an Eater, true?”
“Yes. Some of them.”
“Valdis?”
“Yes.”
“She obeys, then. She was appointed by me, through the Afrique, to tend to thee as well as he doth attend the Pilgrim—or better. Not to give more time, but key memories—or a key to memories!—to shape thy purpose. Remember now, when did thy grandmother teach thee?”
Reynard stumbled back through his earliest memories and came across feelings of warmth and calm, of deep reddish light and pushing and kicking against a yielding barrier . . . living in warm darkness, hearing his grandmother’s voice in comfort and ease, but distant, as if from far away, along with a softly beating drum and pulsing pressure.
He looked up and around at the residence and the room behind Guldreth, at the rows of disks, as if they contained those very memories—but then his eyes were drawn back to the silvery face.
Reynard had caught only a glimpse, through eyes not yet opened, of where he had been when his grandmother had told her tales.
“I was in my mother’s womb,” he said.
“Ah!” Guldreth said with a flush of delight, as if seeing a marvel fulfilled. Reynard could not imagine her polished skin could take on such an inner glow. “And so it is still thine. I see her appear on thy face, like a fine mask!”
“Now that I hear those tales again, how do I find them in an infant’s memory, all grown over by later life?”
“Are they, now? Thou hast done well enough so far,” Guldreth said. “Thou art here.”
“Not by my own doing,” Reynard said.
“All will be found, if being found is what thy grandmother’s messages need and want. So tell me. Did she foresee that thou wouldst meet a man with a white shadow? A man who doth make roads hither and yon through widths and lengths we neither see nor feel?”
Again, a shock. She saw through his skin, down to his every moment! “I do not remember any such warning, though I do remember such a man.”
“Ah, ’tis hard to ask a babe to carry gems to his future self! But if thou knowest such a man, then he must have tasked thee even beyond thy grandmother’s whispers. And that is treasure I would spend elsewhere, were I you.
“Soon I depart and will not return. I carry mine one work with me—the great old Queen’s cloak, of which what I wear is merely a test, a pattern—and will instruct my servants to shatter these toys and baubles, which Crafters have discarded and which no longer move me, and if humans found them, would vex them to madness. But I am still strangely sad to do so. What thinkest thou of these ancient dreams? Go thou back and walk among them. See more. Some are quite beautiful—and some not even I can comprehend. But thy fellows wait to lead thee on.”
She glided off and led him back between disks from which he averted his eyes, already overfull with creations that had never been born or finished, through halls and doors and arches to the low-ceilinged courtyard. Her gown draped and flowing behind her like the plumes of a peacock. At her commanding gesture, he followed a step behind, avoiding the gown, afraid it might shift like a ghost and catch up his feet, so silvery and elusive it seemed.
Guldreth paused before a disk that had been pushed aside from a row. She said, “This one is a puzzle and favorite.” The pale plate was covered in blue flowers, of no sort he recognized. Some of the flowers had captured insects in a kind of cage of their petals, and as he looked closer, he saw that the insects were playing a game very like chess, while waiting, he assumed, for their inevitable doom.
“Noble patience and courage!” Guldreth said, turning around to another disk. “And now, this one . . . I have studied this one over and over, and wonder what thou thinkest?”
This plate, like many of the others, was twilight dark and showed gaunt men and women walking in endless lines around a fortress that spread over many hills, with walls that rose to touch a gossamer curtain in the sky. In the upper part of the disk, the curtain had parted to show something indistinct peering through, not a face, nothing he could understand, but watching, and not through eyes, of which it possessed none.
“I have never seen a Crafter,” Guldreth said. “That may be the most they have revealed of themselves to any between earth and sky.”
“Be they more powerful than you, milady?” Reynard asked.
“No. More creative, however. None hath seen their like since Hel lured them here. If she did lure them here. Few of my kind are in agreement on that.”
Reynard removed himself from between the rows and stood near her, vexed enough himself by floating lands and lizards the size of houses—and faceless ones the very demigods could not decide upon.
Guldreth returned to her dais and gathered her train around it. “Valdis will take ye to meet the Travelers. I am told by Calybo that they will escort ye to the krater lands, and beyond—to the eastern shores, if needs be. To the extent that Travelers are warriors, they will protect . . . but I would rely on your fellows first.”
“Must I meet Crafters?”
Guldreth laughed a bell-like laugh. “I would not wish it on anyone, Fox. But for thee, it must be. The young Eater Valdis—and believe me, boy, she hath still a sort of youth—will guide all of ye through the troubles, and not just Kaiholo, handsome as he is, nor Widsith with all his wiles and secrets.”
She held up her hands and seemed to shield her face against the glow of the disks.
“I see thee, Pilgrim, back there in the shadows! My heart doth leap to know of thy return. I hope thou hast made peace with thy wife, and regret that thou shalt fail in finding her more years. Together, Fox, all these fine human creatures and the half-human Anakim—blessings upon the woman who gave him birth!—will escort thee to where thy message, thy grandmother’s words, will be even more welcome. Even more important. But there is no going back to Zodiako, young man. Tell them that path is no longer open, that the Ravine is dangerous, and thou shouldst leave by the caves beneath this fortress. Valdis can bring ye horses.” She looked up as if listening to music. “Is it not lovely? But here, for all those just beneath the sky, our time comes to an end.”
Embarrassed, Reynard looked away from Guldreth’s gold-flecked eyes and gleaming face, away from her robe of drake’s wings, afraid of what he had heard, of all he had forgotten and must remember again to be of any use to this extraordinary being. Widsith and Kern stood back beyond the disks, between two of the shell pillars, and Kaiholo between them. Kern was so stooped over he might as well have been on his knees. Their faces showed dismay, and Reynard wondered why . . .
But then he turned back.
Guldreth was gone.
Lost to knowing what to do next, Reynard crossed the open space under the lowering roof to rejoin them.
“How could one love a creature like that?” Kern asked.
Widsith sighed. “Practice and patience and a quiet tongue.”
“And how could Maeve put up with such a rival?”
“The same,” Widsith said. “And we had not long together to find the challenge in it. We did not hear all she said to thee, Fox. Canst thou recall and tell us now?”
“I carry a message from my grandmother,” Reynard said. “And Guldreth saith the Ravine is no longer open to us. It is too dangerous.”
Kaiholo nodded. “The northern caves will lead us out to where we can meet Travelers.”
“Did Guldreth hear thy message or find it in thine eyes?” Kern asked.
“I do not know all of it myself,” Reynard said. “She said you—I mean, Valdis—must deliver me to Travelers who will escort us to the Crafters in the krater lands. She told me to trust the young Eater.”
Widsith said, “Hardly young to thee, boy!”
Reynard set his face in a stubborn mask. “Yes. That one.”
“Thou sound’st most eager to see her again, Fox,” Kaiholo said.
“She shared memories.”
“But is she still here?” Widsith asked. “Be there any Eaters left in the Ravine?”
“I passed her as I came to meet ye,” Kern said.
“Did she speak?” Widsith asked.
Kern shook his head. “The rest of the Eaters have departed. I searched.”
Kaiholo confirmed this.
“Calybo may lead them off the island,” Widsith said. “We will learn soon enough. Come, boy.” He put his arm around Reynard’s shoulders and urged him away from the court where Guldreth had kept her collections.
As they descended the steps under that great half dome, Kern first and Kaiholo last, with Reynard and Widsith between, the giant asked the Pilgrim, “On thy long voyages out in the finished lands, didst thou ever find God?”
Widsith chuckled. “I would think a giant would know God the better for rising closer to His house.”
“I have never reached just beneath the sky,” Kern said. “Too much of the human in me. Didst thou?”
“I met many who knew Him well,” Widsith said. “Spanish sailors. Wives in Manchu land and in the Philippines and the islands called Malayo. I spake with those who knew God as Allah, and as pagan golden idols such as Jagrenat, which is carried on a great wagon of wood and iron, pulled by a hundred men on many wheels that crush and deliver his worshippers like beetles direct to a pagan heaven. Those who call God Allah lust after the gems and wealth given to Jagrenat, but have so far failed to secure them. I knew those who look much as you, Kaiholo, and sail great canoes across the wide Pacific. They worship severe, frowning wooden statues raised in forests of their kind, like markers in a graveyard. And I know this well—that all the Gods they worship have been shaped and planted by Crafters, to make the world more interesting.”
“I believe that can be said of us as well,” Kern said. “Doth that make their Gods any less real?”
Widsith chuckled again. “No, nor any weaker,” he said.
“What of the Christian God?” Reynard asked, feeling more and more lost and discouraged.
“Which Christian God?” Widsith asked. “The God of Philip and the Pope, or the God of Elizabeth and Henry? Mother of God, Mary, or Son of Mary and God Himself, Jesus?”
Reynard had tears in his eyes from all he had experienced, afraid of what he might believe himself in a few more days.
Then he felt his heart grow cold, as if the Eaters’ snow had filled his chest.
The first word is the first mother.
That is your God now.
From the chamber above came a cacophony of crashing and shattering. Reynard looked up, startled.
Widsith shook his head sadly.
Kaiholo said, “Were I brave enough, I would have studied them longer.”