Wintermoon Read online

  Others fell into the hands of the magicians, who began, carelessly, to juggle with them. Arcs and fire-bursts dazzled as these tinier orbs dashed from hand to hand.

  The show went on, hypnotically, until a far-off note sounded from above, musical as any lyra.

  “She calls them back!” the crowd bellowed. “The moon wants her children home again.”

  And the mages let go the spangled stars, which swirled together, while others swooped from the trees to join them. A vortex of white fire spun above the square, then flew upward.

  The great light faded. Each star must be fitting itself back into its place. Clirando thought she saw several do this, settling in unseen sockets in the velvet dark.

  The four mages stepped forward, brushing off their palms—as if the stars had left a slight stella pollen on them.

  What now?

  Clirando realized he and she stood so close their shoulders and arms were in continual contact. His right arm—sworn arm. Her left. She had not noticed before, as if this were quite natural.

  The magicians were reaching out now toward the grove of sacred trees. Also as if this were natural, they were drawing down the boughs, drawing them outward and over. Like tall cloaks of thick black-green fur, the trees unraveled, bringing their baubles and decorative masks with them, and wrapped all four figures round.

  The men vanished into the mantle of the trees. Then the trees smoked. The whole square of people breathed as the mass of men and conifers coiled and spiraled up into the sky—up to where the stars had gone, and the white mask of the moon.

  But where men and trees had been—

  A creamy lion prowled the center of the square beside a patterned lynx with emerald eyes, an antlered deer black as ebony, a tusked elephantus from the East, heavy with long grey hair—which, providing its own fanfare, trumpeted.

  The crowd shrieked, applauded, scrambled to its feet in a mixture of fright and pleasure.

  “Illusions,” Clirando murmured.

  “Dreams,” said Zemetrios.

  But the animals too sprang upward now. Like the rest, they surged away into the air.

  Smaller and smaller they became. At the last moment four flashes like miniature lightnings occurred. Each creature became one last star, just visible against the brilliance of the moon.

  “I’ve heard all men,” Zemetrios said, “have a spirit animal that lives inside their soul. Perhaps…”

  Perhaps.

  Zemetrios escorted Clirando up the inn stair to the allotted room. It lay deep in the house, behind winding corridors and countless other chambers, from most of which eddied quiet voices, and now and then unstifled cries of delight.

  The whole village had become flagrantly amorous. Returning from the display in the square, they passed through laughing, kissing groups, couples dancing with linked hands to the music of flutes, their eyes fixed only on each other. By shadowy walls, under courtyard trees, embraces. Arms about each other, mouths fused, lost only in the world of love—two becoming one.

  A sadness had stirred in Clirando. She shook it from her. She would not become one of those who grudged other women the joy of lovemaking. After all, Oani and Seleti among her girls had both had lovers.

  There had been no sign of the band anywhere. Surely they would have come to see the magicians, as almost all the village had seemed to. She believed she had not taken enough notice of their absence as she should.

  If they were not here, then— Then tomorrow she must search.

  Let me fret about that, not give in to pointless jealousy.

  She kept her mind on the problem as she and Zemetrios walked through the inn to the room they were not to share.

  The door was of old wood, carved with a sort of tree, a tree of fruit, but the carving was rough and had faded away, sanded off by time. Even so, it was a splendid room when once they had opened the door. The window had been shuttered though the night remained close and warm. Clirando undid the shutters. Outside, the village curled away into the dark, hardly a light anywhere aside from a few last smoldering torches.

  They lit the room’s two candles. Despite the low ceiling, the chamber was large, and clean. The bed too was large, heaped with covers and furs as if for the cold months.

  He said, “Maybe after all you’ll sleep tonight.” She said nothing, knowing she would not. “I’ll look forward to seeing you again, in the morning. Rest well.”

  “Wait.”

  “Yes, Cliro?”

  Her back to him still, she said crisply, “This is a great cave of a room. Why not stay? There’s space for both of us, and enough pillows and covers for an army—enough therefore to spare if one of us sleeps on the floor.”

  When he did not reply, she turned and looked at him. In the dull light she could not read his face, saw only the slight scar on his cheekbone, the lucent steadiness of his eyes.

  “If you trust me,” he said.

  “I trusted you in the forest,” she answered flatly. “Or rather, Zem, I trusted myself if you were not to be trusted.”

  I too have now called him by a familiar name—did I mean to?

  He lowered his head. It was a meek gesture belied by his tall, muscular frame, and for a second she did not trust him. But then he said, “You can rely on me, Cliro. Don’t insult me by making out I’m a mannerless oaf. I won’t lay a finger on you. However much—”

  She waited. What had he meant to say? However much he would like to?

  The excitement of the night still fizzed in her blood like strong-spiced wine. Be careful!

  She pointed at the bed.

  “This is a wide couch.” He did not speak. Clirando drew her sword. “Do you know the custom?”

  “Yes. A woman and a man who must sleep in the same bed put a sword between them, and so keep chaste.”

  “Here’s mine then,” she said. “We’ll both lie down here. Neither of us is a baby, let alone a dishonorable fool. What do you say?”

  Another sword rasped, and candlelight slid down it as it in turn was drawn from his scabbard. He placed it in reverse, head to toe with hers, the hilt under the tip of her blade, her hilt upon his point.

  “Agreed.”

  Either side the bed, looking down at the swords which already lay and slept there, she and he.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Do you prefer I sleep clothed?” he said.

  Something flamed at Clirando’s center. No use to deny it. None at all. Nor to deny—she had not been careful.

  “Only if you prefer. We’ve pledged faith. Strip if you want. I’ll turn my back.”

  So she turned again, honorably enough.

  Behind her she heard the click and rustle of his garments undone and coming off. And—there, on the wall, Clirando saw his shadow reflection, clear in every detail, drawing the tunic over his heard, unbuckling his belt.

  Did she dare look around at him?

  She wanted to.

  Her core was full of fire, leaping and alive—no longer frozen flame, defrosted by desire—

  Abruptly he cursed.

  At the signal, irresistibly, Clirando spun about.

  “What is it?” she lamely demanded, hardly knowing what she said, her eyes full only of Zemetrios, standing naked before her.

  “A sharp bramble from the wood caught in my boot—it had a sting—” he said, explaining the curse, breaking off.

  His body was tanned and beautifully made, as it had promised to be. Again she thought of statues of gods, but this one was living. From the width of his shoulders to the narrowness of his hips, the coordination of arms, the long legs—perfect—aside from the scars of old wounds that marked him. Yes, he was soldier and warrior. So much was obvious.

  “What caused that scar?”

  “This? Oh, that was at Ashalat three years ago. A spear. He lived just long enough to regret it.”

  “And that one, over your ribs?”

  “A knife. I can’t recall—Disbuthiem, I think, in the Northern Isles. Or was it Bas B
ara?”

  “That one, then, on your stomach?”

  “Oh, that one. My first year as a soldier. My own fault. I managed to stab myself at practice. Shameful.” He laughed. His laugh was golden, like his body and his beauty. Unselfconscious—no, flaunting himself, yet in such a still, couth way.

  He gave however no sign of wanting her. Judging from evidence already clearly before her, that would have been a proud show, too.

  Did she dare go over and touch him—that slender final long-healed wound on his thigh…? Would he recoil?

  He did not want her? Maybe it was only that. He liked her, respected her, maybe. She was a warrior woman, like his “first love” and like his mother. She meant nothing else.

  “I count four—no, five scars. I include the little scar on your cheek.” She paused. “Is that your total?”

  “You mean my back, do you, Cliro? By the Father, no, I haven’t one on my back.”

  Her gaze left the alluring playground of his body and fastened on his blue eyes.

  “Nor I.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I have more scars than you, Zem. Perhaps this shows me to have also lesser skill in battle.”

  “Or to be more brave? How many scars, then?”

  “Seven.”

  One candle flickered, as if a spirit had breathed on it.

  Neither of them looked at the candle.

  He said in a low voice, “Show me.”

  And at his own words, his thought, Clirando beheld on him all the arousal any woman could ever have required.

  It matched, she conceded, her own hidden want.

  Her hands flew over her garments. She was bold, also flaunting. Her slim and tawny shape came from its concealment, the tips of her breasts already woken and hard.

  In silence she pointed out the seven narrow scars—one on the right shoulder, three at her stomach and waist, two on her right leg, tiny as small coins, and the longest, deepest scar on her left arm, made by a blow that, in the moment it happened, she scarcely noted. It had been Araitha’s in the war-court.

  The bed still lay between them. Divided by two swords.

  “Cliro,” he said, “be sure. If you have doubts, I’ll take myself off into the inn. I do warn you though, I shall then get myself very drunk.”

  “Stay sober. Stay with me.”

  As they moved about the bed to meet each other, each of them saw in a sudden glimpse one more magic, stranger and less strange than the sorcery of sex—

  “The swords—”

  Both blades had twined together, roping each other round like vines.

  “Is that because we—?”

  But he reached her then.

  He took her face in his hands. His body gathered hers in. His mouth was familiar to her. She knew it, as if many times before—

  All the inebriated power of sexual hunger coursed through her.

  Her hands moved over his smooth and unmarked back. She gripped him against her.

  In moments the entwined blades were thrust from the bed, and furs and coverlets in heaps across the floor.

  His lips on her breasts were like a rain of warm honey, his teeth grazed her with shivering darts. At the flaming center of her flesh he woke her fire into a conflagration.

  They raced quickly along the road of lust, unable, either of them, to delay another minute.

  As he filled her, her body sprang to amalgamate with his. The struggle of ecstasy began, and exploded like every firecracker ever loosed on a night of full moon. Blind and moaning, they clung, the crescendo bursting them in an infinity of stopped time. Until, cradling each other, rocking, sighing, they fell back into the hollow of the night.

  “We went too fast,” he said.

  “What else? I have waited.”

  “You waited for me. Did you know that?”

  “But now you’re here.”

  “Cliro,” he said into her hair, as he lay on her, heavy, blissful, one cover she did not wish to push away.

  They stayed like this for a short while, until she felt him stir again.

  “Now we go more slowly,” he said gravely.

  And with his hands and mouth he played her, exquisite as any master musician, the strings of her body flowing with boundless notes. In an agony of joy she held herself away from the brink. They rolled, still connected, and lying over him she now began to search out the melody of his flesh, tuning and waking him, torturing him to the peak of pleasure, casting herself over into the roiling sea only when she saw she had mastered him. The vast wave hurled them up again high as the moon, and over and slowly downward into the second valley of aftermath.

  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 cook
ing 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.”