21

 

The Lord
of
Light

 

I

 

Wendy tucked in Peter and Lemuel; then she made sure Peter had plenty of bullets for his gun, reloading his weapons out of the cartridges she had found in Peter’s shirt pockets; she folded the shirt and put it on the chair and was only just beginning to tell Peter about her father and the wonderful things Raven could do when she heard Raven’s voice shouting. The sound came through the south windows.

Wendy ran on rapid feet through the room that had all the maps on the walls, globes of the Earth and Mars, Venus and Midgard. The central pillar here was shaped like a tall, naked man, his face in pain, holding the ceiling on his shoulders, his arms flung out along the roofbeam. There was a small door hidden in the wall between maps of Pluto and Mt. Purgatory.

Even though Peter shouted at her not to, Wendy unbarred the door, opened it a crack, looked out.

Thin tendrils of smoke drifted chest high through the corridor, and the firelight leaping and dancing through the stained glass windows made the peris, angels, and lios-alfar figured in the glass seem to sway and bow.

At the far corner of the corridor, a knight in silver armor, a perfectly normal-looking man, had his face in his hands and was weeping softly. When he heard Raven’s shouts coming from around the corner, however, he put up his shield, which bore the emblem of a face swollen with smallpox, and drew his sword, which dripped black blood and flakes of pus.

Two men in purple robes came running around the corner. One was Raven, and he was carrying a sack over his shoulder; in his other hand was a pistol. His robe was short, and Wendy saw, when Raven turned his back, that it had split along the spinal seam, because of the broadness of Raven’s shoulders. The other man Wendy had never seen before. He was a blond, muscular, square-jawed man, and he was carrying a spear and a shield, both slightly dusty as if they had been ripped off some wall. The shield bore the emblem of a winged horse rearing over crossed keys.

Behind the men, from around the corner, came a roar of jeering calls, barking, laughter, and a snatch of angry songs.

Raven fired his pistol with a loud report. From around the corner came an answering explosion, then came barking shouts and the sound of many feet running, growing louder.

The blond man shouted. “Russkie! We got trouble up ahead!”

Wendy screamed, “Raven!”

The silver knight called out in a sad voice, “Life is but pain, and all wisdom is sorrow. Face me! Oblivion awaits!”

Raven tucked his pistol into his belt and picked up a small table standing in the corridor, letting the vase that had been sitting on it drop and shatter. He said, “Max, can we rush him?”

The blond man said, “Let’s go, Russkie. He can’t get both of us. How good can he be with that toad sticker?”

A dozen seal-men in white sailor suits and caps, waving cutlasses and belaying pins, came around the corner at a dead run. At their head was a fat, white, seal-faced man in a red coat, smoking flintlock in one hand. He took a stand and raised his other hand, which also held a flintlock. The seal-men parted like a wave to either side of him.

Raven and the blond man rushed the knight, screaming. The blond man stabbed with his spear, Raven swung the table by one hand like an oversized bludgeon. With the kind of easy motion that comes of long practice, the knight deflected the table with his shield, parried the spearhead, stepping inside the blond man’s guard, and reposted, burying his swordpoint in the center of the blond man’s chest.

The knight yanked the blade free and swung at Raven. Raven raised the table like a shield, but it shattered under the sword blow, and Raven fell, his arm broken, cut and bloody. Wendy heard the snap of Raven’s arm breaking. At the same moment, the seal-man captain fired his pistol, aiming for the back of Raven’s head. As Raven was falling, the pistol ball struck the knight in the head.

The knight was knocked backward by the impact of the pistol ball, and his neck lay at an impossible angle. The seal-captain had disappeared behind a cloud of black-powder smoke, and the knight was disappearing behind the surprising amount of blood fountaining up from the ghastly remains of his face.

The seal-sailors, who had paused to let their leader shoot, now ran forward.

Raven threw the bag to Wendy, grabbed the arm of the fallen blond man, and began running forward at an awkward lope, broken arm dangling, his face slick with sweat, his eyes bright with anger and determination.

Wendy threw the bag behind her, through the door into the other room where Peter lay. She pointed the ivory wand at the statue holding up the ceiling. “By theWhite Hart’s Horn, I command you to wake! Save my husband!”

Raven fell in through the door, still dragging the blond man, the seal- sailors half a step behind him raising their cutlasses and laughing, when the tall statue stirred to life, and, with a slow, huge shrug, began to pull the cracking roofbeam free of its fittings, the groaning ceiling out of its frame.

The seal-sailors paused in a moment of horror, looking upward. Wendy darted forward and grabbed Raven’s robe and tried to tug him to his feet. Raven lurched to his feet, pulled on the blond man’s arm, stumbled forward and fell in through the door to the bedroom.

Raven gave a cry of anguish and horror when he saw he was carrying no more than the rotting fragment of an arm and hand, blackened, swollen, and stinking with hideous disease. A spasm of disgust made him fling it away.

The seal-men hesitated, all staring upward at the groaning ceiling, mesmerized with fear. One seal-sailor, eyes transfixed, said in a toneless voice, “Okay, mates, I have a plan. . .”

The statue pulled the ceiling down and toppled it onto the crowd of seal-sailors. The map room disappeared in an avalanche of brick and rubble, and chairs and divans from the room above fell down in clouds of dust. The doorway was filled with fallen beams and brick, and bricks spilled out into the bedroom in a wash of dust.

Raven staggered to his feet, face wild. “Wendy! Wendy! Great God in heaven!”

“Calm down, pal,” said Peter. “She’s right beside you. Hey! Don’t!”

They flung themselves into each other’s arms, then jumped apart when Raven keeled over, screaming, clutching his broken arm.

Peter barked out: “Wendy! Help get him over here where we can take a look at that arm. I think those guys’ blades are poisoned.”

Wendy said, “But Raven’s inoculated against smallpox.”

“Who knows? Might have saved his a,. . . his life. Get out Doctor Lancelot’s kit again.” And then, a moment later: “Damn. It’s a fracture, all right. Clean break, though. I’m going give you some morphine to dull the pain when I yank to straighten the bone. It may make you drowsy, but you can’t go to sleep. Wendy, get that stuff ready so we can splint his arm up after. Hang on to the bedpost there. Okay. Ready?”

Raven arched his back in agony, his face white, the cords in his neck standing out beneath his beard, but he did not scream.

Wendy had such nausea in her stomach that she could not speak or move. Watching her husband in pain was as terrible a thing as had ever happened to her.

Peter said, “You get the stuff ?”

Raven nodded toward the bag. It had spilled open. There were framed banknotes, the front and reverse of singles, twos, tens, twenties, and so on, and a rack of coins. Some of the glass had shattered. On top of the heap was a garland crown of laurel leaves, wound with gold ribbon, miraculously intact.

Peter gestured. “Wendy, get that garland and put it on my dad’s head. And—hey, who was that guy, Raven?”

“Max. Don’t know his last name. I took him prisoner, and he agreed to help me instead. I did not know him more than five minutes. He was good friend, and he had a funny sense of humor and a smile. Good friend . . .”

At that moment, there came a loud shout at the main door, “Have at it, lads! With a will! Heave ho!” and a crash, then another. But the heavy doors did not even tremble in their hinges.

Peter put the wreath on his father’s head, held up his hands with his index and ring fingers curled in toward his palms, chanted the poem in praise of Daphne.

He called out the last line three times over: “Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day! Moon’s madness you tame, night’s dragons you slay!”

And then he whispered: “Please wake up, father. Damn it, old man, wake up! I don’t know what to do!”

There came another crash at the door, then screams, screams, screams.

Mysterious red light, the color of the newly risen dawn, appeared in the crack along the bottom of the door, and there came a thunderous fanfare of harps and trumpets.

Then music poured into the air like glory. And with each glissade of the harp strings, another, deeper string was plucked and added its stronger note to the march of music. And each time this deeper humming note sang out, the selkie voices screamed as if they were being shot with arrows.

The red became golden, until it seemed as if daylight were shining in through the cracks in the door. The music swelled to a rippling fanfare, then fell silent.

There was no sound of selkie, no movement behind the door, but warm, clear streams of light radiated from the lock, lintel, and threshold. The light banished all shadows from the room.

A beautiful, deep, masculine voice called out, “Gallus! You are my herald. Announce my coming!”

And a cock crowed.

Raven said, “What is going on? Why is rooster crowing?”

Peter’s eyes were riveted to the door.

Wendy clapped her hands for joy. “I think something good is happenⁱⁿg^!”

The bar flew up out of its staples, and the doors slammed open. Light poured in, rich, warm, and golden, and the room was lit with daylight.

A golden figure of a youth, taller than any mortal and handsome beyond all description, stooped and came in through the doors. He was too tall for the houses of men; he knelt in the door, holding his golden bow horizontally across his knee. His crown of rays was too bright to look upon. Across his back, on a purple strap, hung a lyre.

There were bloodstains on the corridor floor beyond and golden arrows piercing walls and floor, but no sign of the selkie.

He knelt in the doorway, and majestic music radiated from his person, rising and falling as he spoke, solemn and sorrowful by turns, according to his words.

“You have called and I have come. Your father lies in darkness, swallowed by the ocean stream, beyond my eyesight, beyond my reach, for no ray of sun has ever touched the bottom of the deepest sea. I cannot perform what I have promised, and I am thus forsworn to Everness. These amends I make:

“First, your father comes ever nearer to my reach, for Acheron is rising, the hateful city. When sunlight can find his soul again, I will go myself to his salvation, sending my son Aesclepious first, to repair and make whole any hurt to his body’s house; requiring my daughter Urania to drive off any lingering madness with the true light of reason. Yet this is no more than to perform as I have promised.

“Second, my uncle Hades stands within the sea outside your walls, with his grandmother Moira. They have trespassed to my domain. It lies within my power to drive back Death and Fate from these the shores of Daylight’s world, yet with this price; that the stones who have risen up to defend the house must sleep again, for constellations hide when the mighty Sun appears.

“Third, I can heal you of the wounds you have received while fighting for the honor of Everness. Older wounds than that I cannot touch without the leave of my brother Ares. Yet there is this price: that all those of Everness will be healed, for good or ill. For your ancestor lies bleeding on the bosom of my uncle Poseidon’s waves, and I cannot heal you without he also is allowed to rise again, for the same sun shines on all alike, foul and fair.

“Thus I will withhold or grant these boons according to your desire, one or all. Speak now. What say you?”

And he smiled down at Wendy as he spoke. She smiled back, but moved to stand behind Raven.

 

II

 

Peter tore his gaze away from the shining supernatural figure to look out at the terrible silent silhouettes looming from the sea. “It’s no choice. Either way, we lose. We can’t take on the two dark gods out there, even with the statues. But without the statues, how can we hold the ground against the gunmen, the giants, and the selkie?”

Raven had his good hand before his eyes but kept staring, blinking, at the unearthly face shining beneath the crown of rays.

Wendy, who, for some reason, could stare unblinking at the godlike figure, spoke out of the side of her mouth at Peter, “Use the talismans, like I’ve been saying! The Wand of Moly reveals the selkie; the rod of Mollner smites the giants; the Bow of Belphanes drives away the kelpie; the Ring . . . I’m not sure what the Ring does . . .”

Raven said to Peter, “If you could remember the last defense of Everness, maybe that could stop the gunmen. Talismans drive off magic beasts, see?”

Wendy said, “He said that what comes for the eighth and final sea-bell is beyond our strength.” She pointed out the window.

“Who said so?”

“Galen.”

Peter sighed. “And what about Galen?” And he thought: is it right to cure ourselves if it means curing Azrael? Would Galen be willing to give up his life to make sure Azrael is destroyed? Am I willing?

But what he said was: “Right or wrong, I think taking the boons is the best thing to do right now, and we got no time to debate.” Squinting, he turned to the kneeling golden figure and shouted, “Do it!”

The shining figure turned his head toward Wendy. Wendy said, “Go ahead! What are you waiting for?”

 

III

 

Before either Peter or Raven could move or flinch, the Shining One, still kneeling, raised his bow and shot them both.

The arrows turned to streams of light midflight and struck them both with a warm and rosy glow. Raven’s arm no longer ached, and the fuzzy numbness of the morphine fell away, leaving a crisp, clear sense of vitality, clear-mindedness, and calm strength.

The bandages fell from Peter’s shoulder, and a lump of flattened lead was squeezed up, out of his wound, which flowed shut behind it, leaving a small scar.

Raven raised both hands overhead, twisting and flexing his arms with a look of wonder and surprise on his face.

The Shining One gracefully crossed the floor, shifting the weight from his right foot to his right knee, and bringing his left knee forward. He shot three arrows out the windows, and there was sunlight all around and everywhere.

Raven ran to the window. A rosy glow, like dusk, was slowly fading over the area. The dark gods were sinking away into the sea, swallowed up into whirlpools, fading like dreams.

Raven threw himself on his knees: “Bright angel!” He cried out, “There is so much I do not understand! You must tell me! It is not so often gods come down to earth!”

“Kneel not to me but only to the Most High; for we both are fellow servants of the Good, you not less than I.”

“Then you are a god?”

“The poet puts his soul into his work; the Demiurge can do no less. If holy power created all things, then all things are holy. You have godliness in you no less than I, though mixed, in you, with baser elements, passion, wrath and shame, which you must study to make pure.”

“Wait. . .!”

“Time is older than the gods, and he will not lift up his fallen sands again, not even for us, his children. Even now the gentle Hours have harnessed my impatient steeds, and rosy-fingered Dawn, my heraldess, has unlocked the gates of day. Ask a final question, but do not ask me to prophesy for you.”

Raven opened his mouth, but a terrible feeling came over him, that no matter what he asked, he would think of a much better question he should have asked, a few minutes, or a few years, or decades after the god had walked away.

“What should I ask?” said Raven to the shining god.

 

IV

 

The golden voice answered, ringing: “Ask if there is life beyond this life.”

“Is there?”

“There is. Here, you live in the country of ignorance and are not told life’s purposes, causes, or results. This country of darkness is meant to teach you courage.

“Hereafter, you will abide in a country of dreams, the elf-land, where all things are possible upon the mere wish, and fools there call it paradise. That country is meant to teach prudence, or moderation.

“After that, there is a country of glory, where you will be given worlds of your own making and children of your own to raise. This is my country. This country is to teach temperance (which at times, I fear my father may never learn, as the circumstances of my birth suggest).

“After that, you will pass on to a country of justice, where all harms will be healed.

“Once the virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, and justice are broken to the saddle, they will pull the chariot of your soul back to your home, of which this world and the three lesser heavens above this are but shallow and false reflections, and the reason for your long exile will be made clear then.

“Pain, here, is your tutor’s whip, but highest law forbids the tutor strike any property that truly is your own; your will, your judgment, your consent. Pain can only touch those things lent to you, the texts and materials of instruction; your body, your property, your reputation, your offices, your children, your wife. These things are given back to your instructors at the end of term, and you may not take them with you when you go. Love them not overmuch but in moderation, according to their nature, which is mortal, subject to destruction. Love virtue with full zeal, according to its nature, which is immortal and indestructible.

“Do you understand what I have told you, young spirit, who calls himself in this life, Raven, son of Raven?”

“No! I don’t understand anything!” Raven said.

“Then heed this: those whom you imagine to be your foes are trespassers from the country of dreams, which is the country of magicians. You will learn how to overcome them when you learn the lesson of your world, not theirs.

“And heed this also: despite that there is life after death, the crime of murder is not excused.”

And then the great doors closed about the Shining One, and his light could no longer be seen.