Chronicles of the Last Days Chapter 18

Chapter 17

M

ist gathered in patches along the street and in the alleys, making dense clouds here and there. The ground did not move perceptibly under Myril’s feet, but she didn’t trust it to stay where it was. There were plenty of people on the streets, but there was an eerie quiet as they spoke in whispers, if at all. The loudest sounds she heard were water bubbling, air blowing, and the distant bubble of lava at the place in the harbor where Anara’s tower had stood.

To judge by the smell of the air, any fires that Anara had lit that morning had been put out, and the damp would suppress any but the worst of them. A gentle, ordinary winter rain began to fall, and Myril hurried the rest of the way despite her reluctance to go back to the temple. The silence of the streets felt ominous.

The Grandmother was not in her chair at the side house. Instead, she was standing, leaning on her cane. She pointed it at Myril. “You there! Hurry!”

“Where to?” Myril asked. If someone had died, she would have to go to the sanctuary, though her first thought was for Darna stitched up like a broken bag in the fragile shelter of Iola’s quarters.

“The infirmary, you dolt.” The Grandmother sat back down in her chair with a thud and a cloud of dust.

“Of course,” Myril said, hoping that she sounded as confused as she felt. The Aralel was already dead, wasn’t she? If not, why would they have rung the bells? She changed into the only dry robes she could find in the upper room and hurried back out, keeping to the covered walkways as the rain intensified.

The elders’ courtyard was nearly deserted. She could hear some of the elders and refugee priestesses in the sanctuary, not praying yet but only conferring in whispers.

“She can’t go; she hadn’t named a successor.”

“Most of the old ambassadresses are older than Nalani was, and they’re all in the hills except –”

“It’ll need a young woman.”

“There’s no one who can replace her!”

“They’re all in the hills, hermits.”

Myril blocked out the chatter as well as she could and paused to train her attention on the ambassadress’s quarters. It was quiet there except for a whispered exchange between familiar-sounding voices, probably Rania and Sunna, Darna’s shallow but steady breath, and the sound of slippered feet, pacing. They didn’t need her there, not right away.

At the infirmary, she found Geta waiting for her. “How’s Darna?” Myril asked.

“Sleeping, no fever yet,” Geta reported. She looked even older than usual.

“You should rest,” Myril said to her.

“No need for rest at my age,” Geta grumbled. “We shouldn’t have let her go.” Geta led Myril on into the infirmary before she could ask who Geta was talking about. “I don’t know if she’ll live,” Geta was saying.

“The Aralel?”

Geta shook her head. “Gone already. You heard the bells. Come see for yourself.”

A crowd stood around one cot at the corner. If Myril hadn’t overheard some of the whispers, she would never have recognized the young priestess from Getedun, the one who’d barely survived when Calar’s Cerean followers had raped her and left her for dead.

“She was only beginning to be better, to want to live again,” Geta said. “She wanted to see Anara up close. The Aralel, someone has to take poor Nalani’s place, but now…”

Myril turned away, another question worrying her. “Will they say that the ambassadress died?” she whispered.

Geta shook her head. “Iola has to live. She might have to become the Aralel.”

A cold shiver ran over Myril’s arms and shoulders. “Not Iola. Surely there must be someone else, someone who knows something of the human world.”

“The others have all left the temple, this temple at least. There can’t be much more than a dozen of them. Now mind this girl and I’ll go find Sunna to see about taking poor old Nalani to the hills.”

Thorat must have been closer to the flames, but the young woman before her was smaller, thinner, and half of her skin was gone, not only on her back. “I can’t.” Myril whispered it to herself, but they all turned to listen. “I can’t do anything for her. I’m sorry. Even if I’d come earlier, I don’t think I could have.”

“If only she’d been stronger, if we’d been stronger and told her not to go,” someone said quietly.

“There are worse deaths,” Myril said, as if it made any difference. “She could have gone not knowing if any of it was real, abandoned in Getedun.”

Geta hadn’t left yet. She made a noise which sounded like the beginning of a chuckle but turned quickly into a wracking cough.

“Sit,” Myril said. “You need rest. I’ll help you back to your room.”

As she took the elder’s arm, the young priestess breathed her last, rattling breath. A sonorous chant rose up to ease her soul’s passing as Myril and Geta left the infirmary. The sound of the chant filled the temple, filled all the space it could in the world.

The chanting went on through the rest of the day, both for the young priestess and for the Aralel. It went on through the washing, the mending, and all the funeral preparations. The elders gathered to wrap the Aralel’s body in a shroud, chant prayers, and stand guard, then everyone went down to the sanctuary at dusk.

So many vigils

, Myril thought,

and so few to keep them

. The young priestess from Getedun was wrapped in her shroud and lay beside the Aralel. Priestesses took turns dozing on mats at the back of the sanctuary as they took turns keeping the songs and chants and prayers in the air.

Myril wondered how many others knew about the secret hiding box in the Aralel’s chamber, and if it would still be safe. She would have to tell the new Aralel about it, if there was a new Aralel.

Toward dawn, she slipped away to see Iola and Darna. Both were sleeping, with Vigda keeping watch and insisting, like Geta, that she didn’t need to sleep. Raina was in the baths, washing out some linens.

“Do you think she’s going to live?” Sunna asked as she came in from the garden.

Myril checked Darna’s pulse. It was steady. “If she doesn’t take a bad fever, she should be all right,” she said eventually.

“Well, we’ll have to make sure she doesn’t,” Vigda said.

“Where’s Gallia?” Myril asked.

“Gone back to Tiadun,” Vigda said. “I hope she stops to kill Calar on the way. If she doesn’t, the pleasure will be mine, but I’d rather not go down into those lowlands again.”

“This is the lowest of lowlands, though, isn’t it?” Sunna said.

“And getting lower,” Myril agreed.

Vigda sighed and patted Darna’s hand. “I’ll go back to the hills with the Aralel. You two, keep this one safe.”

“We will,” Myril promised. “As much as anyone can.” She took Vigda’s place at Darna’s bedside for a little while, leaned against the wall, and slept.

#

Eppie was barely awake when Myril staggered back home the next morning. She’d dozed on and off through the night, waking from time to time to see that Thorat was still breathing, then sleeping again. Outside, the street grew quiet apart from occasional cries from some injured person who’d been prodded too hard by a healer. Eppie stayed wrapped up in blankets, waiting but only barely listening. When she did listen, she heard fire and the eruption of Anara’s island. The image of the dragon exploding out of the tower, breaking her land, filled her vision every time she closed her eyes.

Myril checked Thorat briefly and fell onto the other bed, dismissing Eppie with a brief message for the Enatel, relaying what had happened at the temple. “Come back later if you can,” she said. The Enatel had said that she and Thorat should go to look in on the dragons’ gates in Coradun and Lemirun. There was no way that Thorat would be able to go, not any time soon, so she would have to go to both places. She wondered if the Enatel would even still be at the training hall, or if she would have gone to the hills already.

Mist rolled down the streets like smoke and ashes from the volcano fell down like snowflakes. Everything was still except for the sound of waves rolling up the harbor shore, up into the city streets, and gulls crying as they circled over the mist. Someone chimed a bell at a street-corner shrine. The ground felt uneasy beneath Eppie’s feet, but unlike the morning before, she couldn’t detect any movement in it.

Most buildings still stood as they had been, but one she passed on a corner at the top of the hill leaned precariously out into the square, its boards shaking loose in the chilly wind.

She hurried through the passage into the hidden courtyard. As she emerged on the other side, she felt relief washing over her like a warm bath. The passage held. She didn’t realize that she’d been worried about it until she got through it. That must be a sign of hope. Anara hadn’t destroyed the Defenders, not yet. She ran up the stairs and into the not-quite-silent hall.

The familiar smell of old sweat hung about the place, underlying the cold smell of too much incense from the vigil two nights before. A smaller, fresh handful of incense burned on top of its pile of ashes. Sovara knelt in front of the altar with her eyes closed and hands folded on her lap.

“Where have you been?” she asked Eppie.

“Tending Thorat.”

Sovara nodded slightly. “Garren saw him out there and thought that he’d died. You brought him in to the shore?”

Eppie nodded. “I didn’t know what to do, so I took him to Myril’s place.”

“She’s a good healer. I was worried that he’d died too, but I didn’t sense his absence, so I had hope.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t send word earlier.” Eppie’s stomach had grumbled at the mention of Garren, and she wished she’d gone by his place first.

“Garren should be here soon,” Sovara said, as if reading her thoughts. “You young ones will be hungry.” She took a deep breath, bowed her head toward the altar, then cracked her neck and rose to her feet. Resting her hands on her hips, she looked at Eppie.

“Come,” she said. “Let’s go outside and see what we can of the city before I go to see Nalani off.”

Sovara led the way out onto the balcony, but instead of going down, she turned around and hoisted herself up onto the roof, muttering about being too old for climbing as she scaled the tiles.

Eppie had climbed many roofs in her scrappling days, but it had never occurred to her to climb this one, not even with the railing so close to the edge. She wondered that Sovara tried it at all, old and frail as she looked, but she was almost at the ridge already before Eppie scrambled up after her.

“A few years before you came along, we had to come up here and replace some tiles,” Sovara said casually. She surveyed her old handiwork. “They seem to have held. Ink Pounders is sinking.”

She pointed down to the bank of the East Canal, which had gotten considerably wider since Midwinter Eve.

“It shouldn’t even be near high tide now,” Eppie said as she looked down. The walls of the tavern showed a high-water mark higher than the windowsills. The taproom must be completely flooded. The thatch roof was burned at one corner, revealing part of the low-lying tavern’s upper story, its bright tapestries now dulled by smoke and fire. Someone was there, cutting down the drapes and bundling them, looking furtively over his shoulder. The building was said to have been there from the time of the first settlers in Anamat, and followed the older style.

Next, they looked toward the palace, another place they couldn’t see from the stair landing. Its gate lay askew on its hinges, but other than that, it seemed to have escaped the crossing time unscathed. “I wonder what foreign charms kept them safe,” Sovara mused.

Finally, they both looked down toward the harbor. Where Anara’s Island had been, a cone of lava grew. It was still smoking, still growing, still on fire.

Far away at the borders of the valley, some of the mountains were on fire too. The winter fields around the villages were half-flooded, and it looked as if people were erecting makeshift boat frames in their gardens.

Sovara looked at it all with a wry expression, then she smiled. “The dragons won’t go quietly,” she said. “They won’t go quietly at all.”

#

Iola told her, later, that Darna had woken up just long enough to say goodbye to her bandit mother before the Aralel’s funeral procession set out for Na’s Eye. They left Raina keeping watch, and Iola went up to the tower in a futile and foolish search for Anara, while Myril went to change Thorat’s bandages. Sunna told them all about her walk around the rest of Theranis, how in the waning year, things had seemed not too different from before except for the rising waters along the coast in the northern provinces and the hostility of the villages.

For most of the moon-round, Myril trudged back and forth between the temple and her room, tending Thorat’s wounds and Darna’s. She scarcely had time to visit her old guild hall, and no more messengers came from it. The waters did not breach the temple walls except to fill the baths beneath the gardens, not to mention the laundries and half of the treasuries. No one knew what had happened to the mysterious launderers. They’d disappeared, as if they’d risen with the smoke, leaving nothing behind except for a few baskets floating on the tide and a vat of soap by the temple gates, as if to tell the priestesses to wash their own linens, which they did but not very well. Whether the launderers went to the hills or took to the sea, Myril never knew.

The harbor was quiet. It usually was, just after Midwinter. It took the fleets some time to reach Anamat from foreign shores, especially when the weather was as unpredictable as it was that year. They might have hung back, too, wary of the rising smoke. Still, some boats went out. Fishing boats made for a single day’s sail went over the horizon, bound to the four quarters of the sea and all the ends of the earth.

There was a semblance of normal life on the streets of Anamat, but people were leaving when they would normally have been arriving to prepare for the trading season. People had left the city before, of course, even priestesses, who went to the hills. Those included some of the old ambassadresses, who were being summoned back for the choosing of the new Aralel.

Thorat lay on his front for most of a quarter-moon, and by the half-moon, he was ready to go back to his training hall, though not well enough to travel. He came back to Myril’s place every day for a fresh slathering of salve. His back still looked red, but he could move and he was regaining his strength.

Darna was getting better too, though not as quickly. Her Midwinter had been a long night of labor and she had bled a great deal. She fell into fever at the new moon, but after a few days, the fever broke, leaving her only slightly weaker. She was restless, but she was still too tired to walk farther than the bounds of the ambassadress’s garden. Sometimes, she stood in the middle of the chamber for a long while, staring at the egg in its corner. It was smooth, cold, and hard like marble. Only Darna dared to touch it, but it remained inert. On other days, she avoided looking at it at all, as if she could wish its existence away. No one really considered moving it elsewhere.

A full moon-round after Midwinter, a message came from the Chronicler, telling Myril to go record what happened at the choosing of the new Aralel. She didn’t want to go, but she had to look in on Darna and Iola and the streets weren’t much worse. They were undeniably wetter, though.

If anything, the closed-in feeling of the temple had grown worse. They’d barred the gates to petitioners because there was no Aralel, and the priestesses’ pent-up energy threatened to explode in an imitation of Anara’s tower, spewing forth frightened, desperate women instead of lava. Myril went to the ambassadress’s quarters first, where she found Iola sitting in her sleeping nook, jabbing a needle into a piece of embroidery and staring sullenly at the egg, which was as big as a tea urn. Darna was sleeping. She’d had another fever but a mild one that had passed quickly. Her forehead was cool again and Myril didn’t want to disturb her.

“Shouldn’t you be at the sanctuary?” Myril asked Iola. “I have to go for the Chroniclers, to record what’s said.”

“I don’t have to go,” Iola said.

“All of the old ambassadresses must be there; you told me that yourself only yesterday. The rest of them have come in from the hills and the provinces.”

“I’m not an ambassadress anymore. I’ve ended it. I didn’t do what I needed to do. Being the ambassadress means nothing now, is nothing. I’m nothing.”

“You’ve been under the earth more times than any of them, and more recently. They’ve walked days to get here. You only need to walk across the peresi’s courtyard. You don’t even have to leave the temple,” Myril said. She didn’t want to go either, and it should not have been her task to persuade Iola, who was not being reasonable. No one should have had to tell Iola that she needed to go.

“I’d go, if I were strong enough,” Darna said from her sickbed. “You go for me. Tell me what happens.”

To Myril’s surprise, Iola relented. “All right, then,” she said. “But only if you help me to look my station.”

“The Most Blessed One?” Darna said, getting up with a groan.

Iola jutted her chin out, making her neck look even longer than usual. She looked strong and supple, as if she still had some of the dragons’ powers. “No,” she said. “I’m just an ordinary priestess.”

There was nothing ordinary about her, Myril thought, but surely Iola knew that.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Darna said.

A little while later, Myril led Iola out of her quarters for the first time in over half a year. She was dressed in plain fashion, for the ambassadress, but there was no making her look like an ordinary priestess, much less an ordinary woman. She was still on fire with the beauty of the winged ones. It was as if she shared her pulse with the fire that was threatening to consume the city. Myril didn’t touch her for fear of being burned.

Myril took Iola around the long way so that she could see the changes in the front courtyard. The water had come all the way up the processional way at the last high tide, leaving a line of washed-up seaweed just outside the gates. Two palace guardsmen stood outside the locked gates, looking bored.

Neither of the guards was Thorat. Myril wondered if he would go back to work at the palace or just stay in his sword hall, convalescing. He was healed enough to wear a loose tunic over his still-bandaged back and to walk a short distance without reopening his wounds, but not yet well enough to wield a sword.

“Where’s Thorat?” Iola asked. “I thought he would come see me.”

“You’re not taking petitioners again, are you?”

Iola shuddered. “No, never again, only as a – as a friend.”

“Or as a lover?” Myril said.

“I don’t know,” Iola said. “I don’t know if I can.” She looked out through the gates. “I’ll have to leave the temple.”

“You don’t have to go today,” Myril assured her.

Outside the gates, a man with a handcart was shouting at a scrappling running just fast enough to evade pursuit. Myril couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl scrappling, not with the temple air like wads of wool in her ears.

It had taken a full moon-round to bring all of the old ambassadresses back to Anamat, but they were all there, a dozen of them, mostly old and clad in moth-eaten furs. They were an incongruous sight in the middle of the temple sanctuary with its polished floors and golden lamps, its silken tapestries and its perfect proportions. They looked as if they belonged more to Na’s peaks more than to the silk-draped opulence of the ambassadress’s chamber.

At the threshold of the sanctuary, Iola paused to take in the scene before her. She reached out to squeeze Myril’s hand, her grasp too quick to evade. It burned Myril only a little.

“Thank you,” Iola said. “I do need to be here.” She set out to join the others at their round council table on the dais at the far end of the hall. A path opened up before her as she went across the crowded sanctuary, everyone spellbound by the grace of her movements. The last journey had aged her, but now, a year later, she looked like a younger woman again – at least, younger than the other old ambassadresses.

Their fellow priestesses, young and old, stared at Iola and whispered to one another.

“How did she survive?”

“She looks well.”

“I heard that she didn’t fly.”

“No, that’s impossible.”

“She must have.”

Myril tried to block out the sounds of speculation. Even in the temple, it seemed that most priestesses didn’t know that Iola had stayed on the surface through the waning year.

She didn’t know most of the women at the council table, but one of them was the Grandmother from the side house. She also recognized two elders who had visited from temples around the valley, and Jasela, who had been ambassadress before Iola. Jasela had left the temple looking like an old woman, but she’d been young enough to recover from her journeys. The rest of the white-and gray-haired old ambassadresses were strangers to her.

She shivered at the thought of any of them taking Nalani’s place as Aralel, but the temple could not go on much longer without a leader. Since Anara’s island had exploded, the ever-present tension between the peresi and the treasurers had built up to a fever pitch, cold glares turning into theft and accusations of worse. It was far more than the disorganized elders could diffuse. Iola wouldn’t be much use at soothing those nerves, either. Understanding other women, even if they were priestesses, had never been her strength, and she was not very persuasive except with the dragons and with those who yearned to touch her flesh.

Myril shook away that thought. There was nothing there for her, she told herself sternly. Beyond the circular council table, Taira the temple librarian sat at a long table before a supply of ink, parchment, and sharpened styluses. She waved Myril over to sit beside her. There was no need to explain herself or to stand among the visitors milling quietly around, waiting for the whispered council to begin.

Iola approached the table, facing the combined gazes of those who had gone before her into the living heart of the earth, the heart which was now breaking open.

The Grandmother, who was one of the eldest among them, greeted her with an order.

“As you are the last to have journeyed beyond our realm, you will begin the invocation.”

The cords of Iola’s neck stood out for a moment as she gasped anxiously, looking for a moment like a hare caught in the path of a fox. Then the moment passed and she nodded. Iola did know how to chant an invocation. She stood shoulder to shoulder with the only people in the world who could hope to understand her, facing her fellow priestesses. For the first time, Myril wished that she had flown to the dragons’ realm, but, like having Iola for a lover again, that was not a fate she could choose, even if it might have been possible once.

“Open yourselves, o winged ones. Open your hearts and your eyes to our council. Come, Anara, with your wings of crimson and gold, come, Galara and Getera, come, Tiada –” Her voice caught there, but she carried on. “Tiada, hear us if you can, and Kirala and Helana and Salara, wherever you may be. Come, Narama, Seigana, Tegana and Onara, Corala and Lemira and the great one of the hills, Na, who sends us fire. Hear us and guide our council.”

She bowed her head. All of the women at the table hummed together, a tune Myril was sure she’d never heard before. Only the ambassadresses knew it. Every breath in the rest of the room stilled to listen. It was a song of the dragons, a song for this occasion only. It would never be sung again, not like this.

As the last note floated free, riding on the wind to whatever ears the dragons had for them, the former ambassadresses looked at one another, assessing, waiting for someone to speak. Again, the Grandmother took the lead.

“After I came back to the surface of the earth, I stayed a little while in a provincial temple, where no one knew me. Then I went to the hills until last year, when Nalani called me back to watch at the side house. I know little of the city.”

Each of them spoke in turn, most telling a story that was much the same at the beginning, a journey to a provincial temple, then into hermitage in the hills. Some had left their hermitages and lived a time as farm wives. None had borne children.

Finally, they came to Jasela. She looked much better than she had eight years before, when Anara had spat her up from the other realm, wrinkled and emaciated, drained almost to nothing. There were gray strands in her hair and she had circles under her eyes, but her skin was mostly smooth and her wrists looked strong as she worried her fingers together. “I flew to the dragon’s realm only twice, before the last and greatest of the Most Blessed Ones lay on that altar.”

Iola stiffened but she did not interrupt.

“Eight years have passed since then, and though I have not lived as long in the outer world as many of you, I have seen more of it. I went first to Naramun, where I served as an elder in a small temple by the sea. From there, a seafaring man persuaded me to go with him, and since then, I have seen the city of Calandria, Ganat, and the wild lands to the north, where sacred bears roam. I am no longer a creature of the dragons.”

Iola shook her head. “You –” she began, but the Grandmother gave her a warning look.

They all turned to Iola expectantly. “I have flown with the dragons seven times,” Iola said, “but this last time, I did not fly. I am no longer ambassadress. There is none and will never be again. I have walked from the ambassadress’s quarters to this sanctuary, and gone out to the harbor island. I have not ventured beyond that except for a few council meetings at the palace, which the Aralel made me attend.” She looked down at her hands. She wore the expression of a young girl embarrassed by her own ignorance.

There was a long silence again, so long that some of the younger priestesses began to whisper among themselves. Myril and Taira scratched their notes as quickly as they could, recording the histories of the former ambassadresses.

“Who among us will take Nalani’s place?” the Grandmother said at last.

All of them seemed to lean back from the table, but some of the old fur-clad hermit priestesses turned to look at Iola and Jasela. After a while, they spoke.

“I know nothing of the world beyond these walls,” Iola said.

“And I know nothing of the temple, or of the dragons,” Jasela said.

“That’s not true.” Iola said.

“Neither is what you said,” Jasela countered.

“I only know what petitioners tell me, and that’s worse than useless most of the time,” Iola said. No one disagreed with that.

“You both have the strength of body to lead us,” said one of the older former ambassadresses. “None of the rest of us do.”

“Neither of them has the wisdom,” said another.

“Good, then you take the Aralel’s robes,” said one of the more ragged hermits.

“I will not. I am old and dislike my fellow priestesses.”

Another silence. They all looked at each other. It seemed that none of them liked their fellow priestesses.

“You must at least have some sympathy for them,” Jasela protested. “I can have sympathy for the veiled women of Calandria, and the hidden ones of Cerea who are like cattle to their men. You must be able to at least understand our sisters’ fears.”

The Grandmother stood. She looked around the circle, as if silently questioning each of them in turn. Each of them nodded.

“Jasela,” she said, speaking with a voice that belonged to all of them. “We name you Aralel, heir of Ara, who will lead the priestesses of Theranis in these dying days.”

“But –” Jasela said.

“You will lead the prayer and we will all join in.”

“I don’t think I remember it,” Jasela said quietly.

“Of course you do,” Iola whispered to her. She squeezed Jasela’s hand, and Jasela nodded.

Her voice was not as strong as Nalani’s had been, nor was it as clear as Iola’s, but she had seen the world, and that outer world meant more to the priestesses now than the dragons ever would again. If anyone could lead them beyond Theranis’s doomed shores, she would be the one.

Iola looked as relieved as Myril felt. The priestesses of the temple, young and old, seemed to exhale together. Perhaps they would survive as individuals, if not as a community. If anyone could help them, it would be this one of their own who had gone beyond, who had crossed the night-dark seas. Wherever her travels had taken her, she was a priestess first, a priestess always. Weren’t they all?

The temple gates remained closed that night as priestesses conferred with the new Aralel, but they would open again at dawn. After a time, each of them slept, retreating into the private world of dreams, or at least some of them did. Myril never slept well in the temple, and especially not in the ambassadress’s quarters, where she went to stay with Darna while the former ambassadresses kept vigil in the sanctuary.

At dawn, they sounded the gong to announce that the new Aralel had been chosen. The treasurers opened the front gates to petitioners for the first time since Midwinter morning, and a messenger ran to the palace to carry the news to the governor. Myril escaped the temple, longing for the comfort of her own room.

#