Kingfisher(37)

Perdita sat down again. She contemplated the reflection of the goddess in the water, and the wild, wide-eyed face in the pool seemed to come alive, her expressions changing at every flare of candle fire, every riffle of water.

“If the artifact is Calluna’s, it wouldn’t be metal,” she mused. “There would not be a jewel on it. A river stone, maybe, hollowed to hold water. A wooden bowl. A clay cup. She might have carried the water in a leaf.” She paused, thinking again, while the walls of the cave formed in her mind, images covering them, symbols, the silent language of tales telling and retelling themselves. “I’ve never looked at the images in the context of that story. That gesture of the goddess. What would she have used to carry water to a dying god?” She looked up, aware of but hardly seeing the watching faces of women, flickering with light and shadow, like the goddess’s reflection. “If anyone asks, I’ll say that I’m studying the cave as a form of worship. If I don’t find anything, I’ll try Sylvester’s library again.”

“Be careful around Sylvester,” the mystes warned. “He reads minds.”

“He won’t pay any attention,” the queen said dryly, “if it’s only about Calluna.”

—

Perdita drove to Calluna’s cave early the next morning. She brought a set of keys to the outer and inner doors, and a pair of bodyguards, who stationed themselves at the cave entrance, one watching the stairs, the other the steamy, murmuring pool. Nobody else was there at that hour. The constant darkness edging the frail lights around the pool made true time vanish; it might have been any hour of any lost century Perdita stepped into as she followed the water flowing away from the pool. She had turned on every light; most illumined the visitors’ path along the narrow river and the images carved and painted on the walls. Those—handprints, trees, and flowers dedicated to the goddess, toads, dragonflies, deer, strange, huge-eyed faces—she knew well; they were in every souvenir guidebook.

What she did not know so well lay in the dark beyond the path, beyond the reach of light.

The bodyguards had given her an assortment of lights, tools, flares, even a weapon. She carried them to the little bridge across the river that marked the boundary of familiar tourist territory. She left everything on the bridge but the candles and matches she carried in her pockets. The oldest images had been made under the earliest form of light; they would speak, she guessed, more clearly in the flickering uncertainty of fire than in the glare of a flashlight.

She carried several tapers together, enough to illumine the shallow water, to draw an image on the stone walls out of the dark, then let it melt back into black. Most repeated the patterns of the early ones in the sacred cave. But as she wandered farther from the pool, now and then something would surprise her: the goddess’s face, with its stark, powerful gaze, its wreath of hair, attached to a human body, or that same face with light, or water, or power streaming from its eyes. The Calluna itself quickened under that gaze; the water’s voice changed, became stronger, cleaner, as its waters gained depth on its journey to the sea.

The paintings came to an end where all the books Perdita had seen on the subject ended: the goddess’s face on one side of the river’s wall, on the other a pair of hands, cupped, angled down, spilling drops of water shaped like tadpoles or tears. Beyond them, two massive wedges of stone leaned against one another across the river. The water pushed through the narrow opening between them, carving more deeply into its bed, its voice grown assured, imperative, echoing against the walls as it ran on, clamoring for the world and light.

The dark beyond the huge stones, Perdita knew, was caused by the human hands that had shaped the tunnel above the Calluna River to support the busy street named for the goddess. In an earlier century, the river had unearthed itself, glittered with sunlight, expanded in the luxury of meadows and fields for a brief, innocent moment of freedom before it met the Severen and was swept into the embrace of the god.

There, at that point of collision, a god dying of thirst, a mighty river drying up, might well have drunk gratefully and ceaselessly from the stream of water whose birthplace was buried underground, its source untouched by the light that had burned with such ruthless destruction across the whole of the land from the wyvern-riddled mountains to the sea.

Here, where the princess stood, was the goddess’s face on one wall. There, on the opposite side, were her hands, water flowing out of them. In this form of the early tale, the sacred, powerful, life-carrying vessel took the simplest shape of all: the open hand.

Perdita, gazing perplexedly at the goddess’s face, at her hands, wondered if they had ever truly taken any other shape.

Then she thought: The story isn’t finished. Where is the god in distress?

On impulse she stooped, held her bouquet of flames above the dark water rushing between the slabs of stone. She tried to see beneath the surface to the river stones and what they might reveal if, perhaps, they had once been part of the ceiling or the walls. They might have spoken, continued the story long before the monstrous machines of a later era had shaken them down into the water.

A face formed in her light.

Her own reflection, she thought at first, seeing only the suggestion of a human in the coiling, rippling flow. Slowly it took on color, dimension. Her lips parted. She sucked air, felt the quickening, terrifying touch of the goddess on the nape of her neck. She knew that face like she knew her own. She stretched her hand toward it, her mouth opening soundlessly; her fingertips touched the water, and the face, the reflection in the goddess’s eye, misted away.