18

Good morning, Mistress Tenoctris," Ilna said as she joined Garric and the castaway at the shearing corral. "I still have your robe, you know. The dyes are excellent to have stood salt water and direct sunlight that way."

Tenoctris looked up; she'd been tracing carvings with her index finger and discussing them with or reading them to Garric. He turned also and smiled when he saw Ilna.

The corral north of the hamlet was a waist-high structure built from a mixture of fieldstones and building fragments, some of them very old. The stone Tenoctris was viewing was a slate only an inch thick. The edges had been squared, then carved with the cursive characters Ilna knew to call Old Script.

She couldn't read Old Script. She couldn't even read the blockier modern writing derived from it; her childhood hadn't had time for luxuries like schooling.

"It doesn't look like I'll have much use for silk robes, does it?" Tenoc- tris said. Her smile swept from Ilna to Garric. "Do you suppose the Count of Haft wants a court magician? A not very powerful court magician, I'm afraid."

Garric looked embarrassed; Tenoctris might as well have asked him what lay on the other side of the world. "I don't know, mistress," he said. "Maybe my father would. He knew Lascarg before he became count, he says."

Ilna didn't care what happened about the robe; it was a unique garment and doubtless quite valuable to the right buyer, but she still found its touch disquieting. The garment was merely her immediate excuse for joining Garric. She'd seen almost nothing of him since the ship arrived and brought her the profitable responsibility of catering for five soldiers.

Tenoctris might have noticed that her question had made Garric uncomfortable, because she said, "Garric's been showing me carved stones reused in present-day structures. This one was a grave marker." Her finger again traced the band of writing on the stone's edge.

"From your own time?" Ilna said. She'd heard rumors that the castaway was from the distant past, but she wanted to hear confirmation from the woman's own mouth.

"Much more recent than that," Tenoctris said. "This isn't much older than the inn. They must have retained the Old Script for formal uses like graves long after it ceased to be the normal style of writing."

"How do you tell?" Ilna said, her eyes narrowing at the flaw in the logic. "If you were really from the past, the dates on that stone wouldn't mean anything to you."

The feel of Tenoctris' robe told Ilna that the castaway was from somewhere unimaginably distant, but she'd prefer to believe that the feeling was false. That sort of knowledge didn't belong in the world which Ilna understood.

"This on the edge is just a plea that the Shepherd protect the soul of the departed," Tenoctris said with a smile of faint approval. "Perhaps there's a date on the face where we can't see it. I was judging the stone's age from the forces that infused it when it was put over a grave."

"Ah," Ilna said. She was blushing fiercely. "Mistress, I'm sorry."

"That was a good question," Tenoctris said with no hint of sarcasm or patronizing. She glanced at Garric, then focused on his right hand clasping something against his chest through the tunic's fabric. "Garric, what is it you're wearing there? That's the reason you're...different, I think. Isn't it?"

Garric pulled a loop of silk the pale blue of a winter sky from around his neck. He handed it and the suspended gold disk to Tenoctris. Ilna had never seen the ornament before.

"It's a coin my father gave me yesterday," he said apologetically. Consciously or not, he'd touched the object to call it to the wizard's attention. "He won't say anything about it except that it's mine."

Tenoctris held the object in her palm. Her thumb clamped the cord so that it couldn't slip while she peered at both sides in turn. The worn profile of a man showed on one; the other seemed to have writing, though Ilna couldn't be sure.

"Now this is from my time," Tenoctris said, looking up at Garric. "It's not a drilled coin, you know: it's a medallion. See how the boss for stringing it was formed in the die?"

She handed it back to Garric. "It's a medallion of Carus," she said. "It was struck on the day of his coronation as King of the Isles."

Shaking her head in faint amusement, Tenoctris went on, "I can remember most things from before, you know. It's only there at the end when all the memories are jumbled like a fresco painting when the plaster flakes off the wall. When I see the Old Script and touch things of my own day, some of it comes back; but it's still confused."

"Tenoctris?" Garric said carefully. "Did you ever see King Carus?"

Tenoctris shook her head. All her movements were slight and precise. Ilna thought the old woman would be ignored in almost any company, but that would be a mistake. Tenoctris wasn't flashy, but there was an edge to her that could cut glass.

"I was never on Haft before," she explained. She smiled and added, "I suppose if the royal fleet hadn't been sunk, I might have seen him on Yole."

A pair of chipmunks chased each other across the top of the wall, chittering furiously. When they noticed the three humans they stopped dead, stared in rigid silence, and then went racing back the way they'd come.

"Have you ever seen a man in a black robe with a black hood covering his face, even his eyes?" Garric said. He was looking down at his feet. "I don't know how to describe him better because—"

Tenoctris reached out slowly and touched Garric's chin to bring his eyes to meet hers. "Where did you meet the Hooded One?" she asked in a soft, wondering tone.

"It wasn't real," Garric said. He hung the medallion's loop over his head to have an excuse for breaking eye contact again. The business made him uncomfortable, just as the feel of the wizard's robe had Ilna. "It was only a dream."

"Dream perhaps," Tenoctris said, lowering her hand again. "But don't doubt that it was quite real."

She shook her head again as if to settle her shattered memories. "I don't know who he really was or where he came from, though he was the most powerful wizard I ever thought to see. He claimed to be Malkar, but that was a boastful lie."

"He claimed to be evil?" Ilna said in amazement. Malkar was a bogey to frighten children, not a god like the Lady and her consort the Shepherd, or even the Sister who ruled the Underworld. No one worshipped Malkar. It would have been like worshipping a cesspool.

"Malkar isn't—" Tenoctris began. She looked from Ilna to Garric, assessing how they'd react to the phrasing she'd been about to use. She nodded and said, "Ah. Let me put that another way."

Before Tenoctris resumed, she seated herself on the wall. She had to rise up on tiptoes because the corral was otherwise a little high for her. The whole borough used the corral during the spring shearing and at the fall Sheep Fair, when buyers of mutton on the hoof came from Carcosa and more distant cities.

"To a wizard," Tenoctris said, "the sun is an ultimate source of power and Malkar is an ultimate source of power. But no one can reach an ultimate source directly. The forces that a wizard works with aren't pure, any more than the water you drink is pure."

"You're saying that Malkar isn't evil?" Garric said with a frown that Ilna hadn't seen often. Because he usually wore a boyish smile, it was easy to forget how tall and strong Garric or-Reise really was. "That you serve Malkar?"

"No," Tenoctris said, tapping her finger on the wall beside her with sharp emphasis. She was seated on a squared block of white limestone, an ashlar from an ancient temple. "No one serves Malkar. And as for using the forces that stem largely from Malkar, I don't drink seawater either. There are differences of degree."

Ilna turned her head to watch the waves dancing in the sunlight. Near shore the water was dark, almost purple, but beyond that and as far as her eye could reach the Inner Sea had a pale green translucence like that of the finest jade. It was much more beautiful than the colorless fluid brought up from a well; but of course no human could drink seawater....

"The Hooded One was very powerful," Tenoctris went on musingly. "He had the power to sink the seabed beneath Carus' fleet. The power to sink Yole as well, though unintentionally....That's quite amazing, nothing any wizard would have believed possible until it happened. But the forces the Hooded One worked with, the forces that all wizards work with, had increased a hundredfold in less than a year. There was something more than human influence involved."

"Was it Malkar that caused the increase?" Ilna asked. Talking of magic made her feel warm but oddly queasy. It was like imagining that she was swimming out into the shimmering, lovely sea.

Tenoctris shook her head, frustrated at her inability to explain. "That's like asking if winter wills it to be cold," she said. "There are cycles, there are forces. They act whether we understand them or not. Malkar waxes and wanes. But they don't—"

She paused and looked at the two younger people in the bright sunlight. "I don't think the sun and Malkar have wills of their own. But I don't really know, do I?"

She smiled engagingly. Though Tenoctris wouldn't have been beautiful even in her youth, her face was as attractive as a sheet of fine vellum. "What I do know," she said, "is that the forces are building in the same way that they did in my day; the forces that sank Yole and flung me here to Haft. Perhaps that's a coincidence."

Garric grimaced. He touched the medallion with an index finger, realized what he was doing, and shook his head ruefully. "I don't know what to think," he said. "I guess I don't need to. Barca's Hamlet isn't going to change much no matter what happens."

Ilna looked at Garric and saw the lie in the tenseness of his facial muscles. The planes of his cheeks were as hard as oak boards.

"I remember at the end," Tenoctris said, "that the Hooded One sat on his black throne. He claimed it was the Throne of Malkar, literally the seat of power. But it shattered in the first shock."

"But Malkar is real?" Ilna said, her face calm, her mind filled with an intensity as cold as the depths of the sea.

Tenoctris looked at her with an expression that became appraising during seconds of silence. "Oh, yes," the wizard said. "Malkar is real, just as the sun is real; and is just as eternal. And I'm afraid that the Hooded One may be part of present reality also if Garric sees him in dreams."

Ilna shivered as though a cloud had drifted over the sun. The sky above was a fine clear blue all the way to the eastern horizon, and the green sea danced beneath it.