9 Eleasias
The rose-pink soft fingers of the dawn's early lights rose above the pale bright rocks of the eastern cliffs, and gold flowed across the tops of tall trees. Iridescent dewdrops crossed the thick grass; the way was quiet and clear, and I forgot to feel tired at the early hour. There was a warmth in the air, and a cool sea breeze from the north-east with the smell of fresh salt. Durlyle looked tired, dark shadows under his eyes, finding that to be an adopted parent of a wolfwere pup was difficult; but Ajantis' namesake seemed definitely less hairy by today. His skin below his sparser fur was fairer than Durlyle's, and his eyes were a bright blue, rather sharper in colour than the original. He chewed on a lump of goat bone inside the sling Durlyle used to carry him.
"He...woke often in the night," Durlyle confessed, trudging over the beginning of the rocks on the eastern cliffs. "But he is quieter now; and we will enjoy this day. He will be raised in the same peace as I."
"Did your mentor take you here?" I asked; we could see the sea now, the yellow sand of the beach laid out below the rocks like a thick ribbon, a natural lagoon and indeed the shape of the promised boat lying upon the waters in its obscure place between the walls of the rockface. But let the others inspect that; Durlyle and I would go further, and to a more interesting place.
"He did; he find stories and tell clan," Durlyle said. "Here long before we came, and we cannot carve as they. It is unknowable what people before were like and gave stones to tell."
Stone-carvings of runes, he had given me to expect.
"Only the carvings; no bones or anything?" I asked, and then felt ashamed of myself. It wasn't as if I was one of those strange necromancer-archaeologists, and it was such a subject for a day like this.
"The markings only," Durlyle said. "My teacher thought that their dwelling-places would have been near, but lie long buried by disturbances of the earth."
That had happened to other great cities of the past: taken by earthquake or drowned by mountain ashes.
"Or perhaps they needed no dwellings—" Durlyle said, somewhat whimsically. But in the distant past, I suppose, there were powerful magics before the fall of Netheril. It depended on how or if I could give an approximate date for these remains, whatever they would turn out to be.
We walked further along the cliff face, and the pup raised his head to look about. The sea flowed in soft tides across the sands, and the sun had risen to give the day a comforting warmth. We left the sight of the moored ship far behind, continuing north along the eastern coast, far into the territory that the wolfweres had held. The pup whined, and Durlyle stopped briefly to drip creamy milk into his mouth from a hide flask; human's food.
I saw it the moment before Durlyle, jubilantly, pointed it out. It was a lone half-column of stone that jutted tall and proud from the sand; it was made by no natural means; it was nobly artistic in architectural design; —and it was absolutely foreign to me.
"It has been long since I have seen it. And it awes me as much as the first time it met my eyes," Durlyle said softly, fixing his eyes to it as to a bright distant lodestar.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair..." the old lines came unbidden to my lips. A vast and trunkless leg of stone; alone in the sands, nothing besides remaining. Yet the words of memory remained graven upon that pedestal. There was ineffable tragedy that clung to it: a forgotten island and a people still more forgotten, any who could see it far distant strangers to the days of its making. Carved inscriptions, I could see by squinting, marked the surface of the half-broken pillar. "Can we get closer?" The peaks were steep.
"There is a path," Durlyle said, and pointed almost gallantly to a smooth passage between a pair of high rocks that would have been almost impossible to discern. The way was steep and curved, but the rocks had been worn to smoothness by wind, and it was possible for him to pass through with the child. Then we were on the beach; and I saw more than the lone column. I was silent. The cliff face was covered by glyphs that had been carved with incredible precision even for today. "Only this remains of the before people; this and the column."
None of them were symbols that I knew of, or even knew the form of. They were intricate and somewhat of the structure of language rather than art. Some symbols occurred more frequently than others, and there seemed a sort of order where some combinations showed tendency to occur in conjunction; but impossible to decipher. Plainly non-pictographic, or at least not pictographic in a way that my understanding of symbol could pierce. We walked slowly across them, the column at our backs, our eyes taking in all that could be taken.
"These are what we believe are star-maps," Durlyle said, showing a section of more clear purpose. "Some we do not see in the sky, but others are shapes pups are taught to find by night." I saw the dotted markings of astronomical positions, geometrical lines and sketchings about them, and strange and exaggerated pictures. A creature something like a roaring leopard, rearing high and brave. A figure like nothing so much as a spinning kaleidoscope, the drawing almost seeming to rotate as the eye fixed upon it. That one was close to the tides, though; I could see below that the water had eroded the rock, and sorrowed at the dreadful loss that beckoned.
"That is the celestial lady," Durlyle said, showing it. She was, perhaps, female and human-like; but impossibly tall and slender, the sword she carried majestic in its shape of stars. Oddly proportioned; but as beautiful as a few sketched lines on stone could make it. Behind her back was a shape not unlike a wing, though it seemed not quite bound to her back. I reached up to touch the hieroglyphs that spun above it, perhaps explaining who she truly was and what she was supposed to have done. The surface of the carvings was glass-smooth. Not a technique I had seen before at all. And it had certainly succeeded to last its time. "This last of running free we make from the star in the north ourselves." The constellation was another strange image of alien aspect: furred and long-nosed, a little like a centaur and a little like a wolf and a little like a winged thrush. Was it intended as something that existed upon Faerun, or had at that time existed? So many questions; so much that a historian would die to finally gain the understanding.
We turned to the column; I had seen that it was light brown, and would have guessed it granite from a distance, or limestone perhaps. But more closely it seemed like...neither of those, not quite alike to the stones of other monuments I had seen. Nor was it of any rock I had glimpsed elsewhere on the island; not the same as the cliffs. It was cool to the touch, and covered by a multitude of spinning runes that seemed the same foreign language as the cliff carvings; the tides had eradicated some of these also, though the stone must have been far more durable than the ordinary rock. I looked at the runes, saw something within them; and then unsheathed the Burning Earth from its plain, modern-day scabbard.
The runes upon that of unknown tongue; and the runes on this place. Five lines, two scratches, and a circle, carven together as two characters combined. A similarity here, in-between other unknown and indecipherable characters; no, not a similarity. An identicality. The same tongue. I looked to Durlyle, and he saw it too.
"Is it...a common tongue in your land?" he said; his voice was reedy and half-broken in the silence that had sprung between us, no other sound audible but the waves that governed the shore.
I shook my head; I felt as if the blood had drained away from my face, down below my heart. "Neither is...a language known on the mainland. That I have the sword at all is only...coincidence..."
If only there was more than those two! If only these people had left a three-tiered stone as that found for ancient Untheric, showing a combination of Old Chessentan in the demotikan script and historical Mulhorandi in the pictographic form to translate and understand. Burning and Earth interwoven, deciphered by imoen to have that meaning because of the magic animating the blade. But here she wouldn't be able to cast the spells, and when the cultural differences were large spells faltered. I could pick out the reoccurrence of those symbols separately in a few places, now; but they were not enough to read in the rest of it. By the celestial there was the sigil of burning, for that sword aflame she bore, but guesses of the other words of her led nowhere. Elsewhere I saw Earth reoccur three times. Common concepts of the earth in old texts were home, travel, crops; but each time I began to make that assumption on one of the nearby runes I found that it led nowhere. Burning, Earth, and...absolutely nothing. In a year and a day, perhaps; studying and searching and none else; trying to make lengthy chain of assumptions after lengthy chain of assumptions and hoping eventually to conjure a sensical story out of possibly entirely false imaginings; perhaps even if I was wrong that no scholar knew of this language, even though I was sure that in Baldur's Gate at least it was true...
It was a beautiful and amazing sight that I would have given much for the viewing, and yet of incredible frustration. Durlyle worked with me on the supplies we had taken with us, thin cloth and dark pigment to make some traced record of what those ancient peoples had made. We paid especial attention to the carvings nearest to what the tides had worn away; something at least that could be preserved for the sake of future knowledge and discovery. We laid out the cloths carefully to dry on the sand; and sat together at the column's base for something of a picnic while the tides foamed white.
I'd known him for these four days, I thought, seeing Durlyle play with the pup—the baby, letting the little Ajantis crawl on the sands and examine seashells, picking him up when he came too close to our records. He was kind and caring, clearly and obviously, even enough to take in the child of his people's enemy and to frolic with that child on the beach; and he was contemplative and careful and loved the learning of history. And he was brave, the more so since he did not fight. He was broad and tall and gentler even than Minsc, for he was no warrior at all. Somewhat clumsy and taking a great deal of care in each of his movements to compensate for it; not particularly interested in the use of muscle, though his frame held little or no surplus weight. Harmless, and warm and broad and...able to enfold much in his careful arms. He'd shown what he was like by all he had done since we had come: he was a friend, and I thought that I knew all that I needed to know of his character. A good friend.
He looked up at me, and perhaps I'd been staring too long; at his bare brown arms, at his sun-drenched face and curling hair. I fixed my eyes on his own.
"You have travelled much, and seen much, in your land-home," he said, his expression warm and welcoming; "will you tell of your adventures?"
It was dark and dripping and rather horrible in the Nashkel mines. And then Imoen and me were almost abandoned and trying to find Shar-Teel; and then Damon and everything that happened at the bandit camp...and then what I did in the Cloakwood. In truth it was...
"The truth is that I haven't really been adventuring for long," I said, "I had some tutors for sword and bow before it, but most of what I know comes from Shar-Teel. A lot of it's...not very nice. And there are things I did that I wish I hadn't; I hurt some people that I shouldn't have. Killed some people that I shouldn't have." And yet Durlyle didn't change the look in his eyes; did not turn away in horror. "But we've done some things that I don't regret. We went to an underground tower—dwarves, you see, people from deep in the earth; and we found someone's son and rescued him and brought him to the surface. And then we saved the Sword Coast from a demon..." Things we had done, of late, that we could be grateful for.
He listened, wide-eyed, and I told the story in a few quick sentences. "There's...it's not so bad in our lands," I said. "There's much to see and travel to; a lot of places still that I think I'd like to visit someday. You could...would you ever think of leaving, Durlyle? We could show you the world; there are people there as kind as you. You could see so much more of what shaped your people here, where you came from, and how amazingly different other lands can be..."
But he was shaking his head, and I stopped. "No..." he said, half-afraid in the tones of his voice, perhaps. "No, I cannot; others may wish, but there is no place for me. No place for young Ajantis..." He looked to the child. "No, I must stay. I belong; I am content here. The other world must be only a dream of strange attractions."
"Then let it alone, and let us stay for the afternoon," I said; disappointment grew greater than I had expected, but it would be ungentle to make him feel guilty for his choice, and his responsibility. "We should remain friends, regardless of what comes."
"Yes," he said gently; and I wondered if I had not, in fact, given him the brief wish to leave and a struggle to speak of his decision. "What of you, Skie?" It was the first time I remembered him speaking my name: in his tongue the word lilted and flew upward like a bird. "What if you chose...to remain? You are heroes to this place; many would welcome you, as Taloun was not born to the village. We would..."
And I too paused, having been given the same wish to wonder if a different choice could be made. The child chose that moment to laugh, baring only slightly sharpened teeth, a sound that was not a howl but glee at finding a shell that twinkled brightly at him in the sunshine. Durlyle, this sight, his people's peace and freedom, this very isle. It wouldn't be so bad; rough, but an improvement upon the conditions of adventuring: and so content.
"But I have to go back," I said, and it was only by speaking that I was able to convince myself. "I saw... There is a man who wants me dead; and though Imoen doesn't know it yet I believe that he was the same man who killed her uncle. It's a dramatic story, but it's true. I have to go back with her; we have to find him once more and know he's not doing any more evil. I wanted to avoid him, but now I know we have to go and fight..."
It was Durlyle's sense of what was right that gave a reply of encouragement.
"I will dream of you successful, then," he said; "I have seen all of you fight to protect us. And you are so swift, so graceful. You dance; you dance with fire truly like the shape in the skies."
He knew little about fighting, for Ajantis and Shar-Teel were far better at it; but I do know how to dance. I took out the Burning Earth for him, and performed not a standard drill but movements I learned from a tutor who had performed on stage with his rapier: steps that were impractical for a true battle but elegant and a drawing for the eye, a dance with the fiery sword that would have been improved by its bright light. He smiled to watch.
"Beautiful; and impossible," he said; I sheathed the blade with a final flourish. The look in his eyes was far more of a compliment than any words. "There is one other of your skills I should like to see more of..."
We walked together further down the beach; the rock darkened to near-black stones, overhanging the sands in jagged patterns.
"Not everyone has the knack for it," I explained, "it was a kitchen-boy who taught me how, it's best to be old enough to understand when you do it for the first time... Using the shadows to hide away isn't magic, it's just a trick about how you move and how carefully you can fade away; you're not invisible, and definitely not invisible to other people who know how to do it or to spellcasters, if they want to find you. Something like Naril, Nerlan, I think his name was? He was nice, but he was only with us a tenday because he stole Cook's silver and ran away. Anyway, he showed me how; the first thing, he said, is that you stand under the darkness and stay as still as you can, not even moving a muscle..."
Durlyle obeyed; he blushed slightly, perhaps feeling a little silly.
"Even more still. Now, keep holding it... That's it." I held the child; he squirmed in my arms, but he didn't try to bite me and was warm. "The next step, which is the really difficult part and usually you can't finish it on the first try, is the mental part: you have to imagine the shadows covering you. I think of it as a bit like weaving cloth, embroidering; you've got the black thread and you're sewing it over yourself, like Imoen says she sews magic together. You think about how the shadows hide things and that everyone's just going to look past and around you, because you're just one of them. That's not so bad..."
We passed a pleasant hour or two by those hollows; laughing and talking between his many attempts to learn the skill. There were moments, I thought, when at least his legs were becoming enwrapped by the shadows; but then I'd want to say something or he'd want to say something, and we'd talk once more until at last the tides had come in far enough that it would be wise to turn back.
Then while we gave a last look to those shadows Durlyle pointed above them; to where on the rough ground of the black stone grew fronds of purple flowers, of a thick and beautiful scent that had just blown down to linger with us, and of plump and delightfully-formed petals.
"They are...simple flowers," Durlyle said, "that grow in but a few places; they are strangely alluring, and I have uses for them. Belladonna; beauty within and without... Could I ask the further task of you?"
"Willing as always," I replied, trying to swashbuckle properly for him, and clambered up the rocks; Imoen and I had done more than this in our time. I took the chance to look around, at the top of it, and plucked a bouquet for the taking.
He held them carefully and gently, and we both took in the strong scent. Somewhere between roses and sandalwood and jasmine, heavy and bewitching as if it tempted one to gently sleep in a field full of them. The deep purple colour lingered before the eyes even after one looked away from them.
"They are rare, and they are beautiful," he said. "Like many things. Like...friendship, and like other things..."
He took a single bloom from them, the one of perhaps the deepest purple and lack of blemish; and I felt him gently wind it into my hair. A blush had more than begun, I thought, in both our faces, and we stood close together. I could feel heat from his skin.
"Rare and beautiful?" I said; and quoted in a voice not certain of itself. "Go and catch a falling star; get with child a mandrake root; tell me where all past years are, or who cleft Asmodeus' foot..."
"All sights of amazement..." he said, trying to smile. "I suppose that adventuring heroes must be given...many flowers like this..."
"That's not true," I said, and his warm fingers still lingered by my earlobe. "And what of you... Many like Maralee are probably glad to know someone like you..."
"No. I have not received belladonna blooms before, or shared them..." Durlyle said, softly and slowly, and the child did not disturb the moment.
"There was one man," I said. I wanted to tell him the honest truth; and as I told it I felt that the bandages covering some long-ago wound had been ripped away, and below it was not the ugly scar expected but instead skin that had been healed. "His name was Eldoth. I was in love with him, but he left. I'm glad he did; I wanted to be glad at first that he was still alive, and now, no matter what he deserves or doesn't deserve... I've come long past him now. Grown differently..."
"I am...not used to this..." Durlyle said. We were both hesitant, and did not move out of each other's grasp. My right hand reached out to rest against the skin of his arm; there was far more of it than I could wrap inside my fingers.
"The night before he left..." Viconia, gloating of knowing, was the only person I had even spoken to; I had not even wanted to tell Imoen of it. Durlyle would be disgusted, but I had to tell him the truth. Probably it was better this way, because we would be separated. "I did it with him. I even asked for it. What I remember of it is that it was painful. Though that wasn't his fault, truly. My fault."
"No," Durlyle said, "no, of course not. I do know it's not supposed to be painful. Feelings are kind to one another. That for you, you should come to know...of others..."
"I know others," I said. We were both fumbling, leaning closer together above the child's head. I raised my face to his, he bent down and enfolded me in his arms. Somehow—for quite a long time, actually, everything coming to a standstill for that moment—we kissed. Salt sea and belladonna bloom and sun above us, grass and stone by us, distant history within the background...
Ajantis squirmed, and we turned from each other.
"Think nothing of it," I said, and blinked heavily. "I doubt we'll forget each other, Durlyle."
Something was tugging at the corner of my eye; I'd seen the first trace while fetching the flowers. It was a distraction that I welcomed.
"There's something concealed by...almost like the wall with the secret passage at Ulcaster, I think; it might be a cave." It lay between the black stones of the beach; a shadowy glimmer that to my eyes seemed to conceal a passageway that lay behind it, a dark space that looked to run deeper than only shadows from an overhang. "Can't we go look at it before we go back?"
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"Leave the gauntlets on," Edwin heard her request, order to him—
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My name is Ozymandias... is by Shelley, wilful misinterpretation of it by Skie.
Go and catch a falling star - John Donne, misinterpretation again Skie's fault.
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