A Swiftly Tilting Planet (9 page)

“When people are worshipped, then there is anger and jealousy in the wake. I will not be worshipped, nor will I be a king. People are meant to worship the gods, not themselves.”

“You are wise beyond your years, my son,” Reschal said.

“My father did not want to be worshipped. But some of his sons did. That is why I am here.”

Across the lake the drums were silent.

The Old One watched Madoc and Zyll as their bodies slowly ceased the motions of the dance. Then he lifted Madoc’s hand and placed it over Zyll’s, and then put a hand on each of their heads. And as he did so, the sound of drums came again. Loud and close. Threatening.

A ripple went through the Wind People as they saw three dugout canoes approaching swiftly, each paddled by many men. Standing in the bow of the middle and largest dugout was a tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed man.

With a glad shout Madoc leapt from the rock and ran to the water’s edge. “Gwydyr!”

FIVE

The fire with all the strength it hath

In the attic Meg lay quietly in bed, her eyes closed. Her hand continued to rub rhythmically against Ananda, receiving the tingling warmth. Behind her lids her eyes moved as though she were dreaming. The kitten stood up, stretched its small back into a high arch, yawned, and curled up at her feet, purring.

Charles Wallace-within-Madoc felt the young man’s surge of joy at seeing his brother alive, the brother he had thought dead and buried in a forgotten part of the forest.

The man in the dugout jumped overboard and ran splashing to shore.

“Gwydyr! You are alive!” Madoc held out his arms to his brother.

Gwydyr did not move into the embrace. His blue eyes were cold, and set close together. It was then that Madoc noticed
the circlet around his brother’s head, not of flowers, but of gold.

“Gwydyr, my elder brother.” The joy slowly faded from the sunny blue of Madoc’s eyes. “I thought you dead.”

Gwydyr’s voice was as cold as his eyes. “It was my wish that you should think so.”

“But why should you wish such a thing!”

At the pain in Madoc’s voice, Zyll dropped lightly from the rock and came to stand close by him.

“Did you not learn in Gwynedd that there is room for one king only?”

Madoc’s eyes kept returning to Gwydyr’s golden crown. “We left Gwynedd for that reason, to find a place of peace.”

Gwydyr gestured behind him, and the drummers began to beat slowly on the taut skins. The paddles were rested and the men splashed into the shallow water, and pulled the dugouts onto the shore.

Gwydyr raised the corners of his lips into what was more a grimace than a smile. “I have come to claim the Old Man’s daughter.”

The sound of the drums was an aching pain in Madoc’s ears. “My brother, I wept for your death. I thought to rejoice to see you alive.”

Gwydyr spoke with grim patience as though to a dimwitted child. “There is room for no more than one king in this place, little brother, and I, who am the elder,
am that king. In Gwynedd I had no hope against six brothers. But here I am king and god and I have come to let the Wind People know that I reign over the lake and all the lands around. The Old Man’s daughter is mine.”

Zyll pressed against Madoc, her fingers tight on his arm.

Reschal spoke in his cracked voice. “The People of the Wind are people of peace. Always we have lived in amity with those Across the Lake.”

Again Gwydyr’s lips distorted into a smile. “Peace will continue as long as you give us half of your fish and half of all you hunt and if I take with me across the water the princess who stands beside my brother.”

Zyll did not move from Madoc’s side. “You come too late, Elder Brother. Madoc of Reschal and I have been made One.”

“Madoc of Reschal. Ha! My laws are stronger than your laws.” Gwydyr gestured imperiously. The men with the paddles pulled the blades off the shafts, and stood holding dangerously pointed spears.

A united cry of disbelief, then anger, came from the Wind People.

“No!” Madoc cried, outrage giving his voice such volume that it drowned out the beating of the drums, the shouting of the warriors with the spears, the anger of the Wind People. “There will be no bloodshed here because of the sons of Owain.” He stepped away from Zyll and
Reschal and confronted Gwydyr. “Brother, this is between you and me.” And now he smiled. “Unless, of course, you are afraid of Madoc and need your savages with spears to protect you.”

Gwydyr made an enraged gesture. “And what of your peaceable Wind People?”

Then Madoc saw that the festive garlands were gone from the young men, flung in a heap in front of the great rock. Instead of flowers they carried spears, bows and arrows.

Reschal looked at him gravely. “I have been hearing the war drums since last sundown. I thought it better to be prepared.”

Madoc flung his arms wide. There was grim command in his voice. “Put down your arms, my brothers. I came to you in peace. I will not be the cause of war.”

The young men looked first at Madoc, then at the People Across the Lake, their spears threatening.

“Brother,” Madoc said to Gwydyr, “have your men put down their spears. Or do you fear to fight me in fair combat?”

Gwydyr snarled an order, and the men on the shore behind him placed their spears carefully on the sand in easy reach.

Then the Old One nodded at the young men, and they, too, put down their weapons.

Gwydyr shouted, “If we are to fight for the Old Man’s daughter, little brother, I choose the weapon.”

“That is fair,” Madoc replied.

Zyll made a soft moan of anxiety and placed her hand on his arm.

“I choose fire,” Gwydyr announced.

Madoc sang:

“Fire it shall be, then. But in what form?”

“You must
make
fire, little brother,” Gwydyr said. “If your fire cannot overcome mine, then I will be king of the Wind People as well as those Across the Lake, and I will claim the Old Man’s daughter for my own.” His close-set eyes flickered greedily.

Reschal walked slowly toward him. “Gwydyr, sixth son of Owain, pride has turned the light behind your eyes to ice, so that you can no longer see clearly. You will never take my daughter.”

Gwydyr gave the old man a mighty shove, so that he fell sprawling on the beach, face down. Zyll screamed, and her scream was arrested in midair, to hang there.

Madoc sprang to help the old man, and bent down on one knee to raise Reschal from the sand. But his eyes followed
the Old One’s to a small pool of water in a declivity in the sand, and his movements, like Zyll’s scream, were suspended. Only the reflection in the small pool of water moved. Gwydyr’s face was quivering in the wind-stirred puddle, his face so like and so unlike Madoc’s. The eyes were the same blue, but there was no gold behind them, and they turned slightly in to a nose pinched with cruelty and lust. This was not, Madoc thought, the brother who had come with him to the New World. Or was it? and he had never truly seen his brother before, only Gwydyr as he hoped him to be.

Ripples moved over the shallow oval and the reflection shimmered like the reflections in the soothsayers’ scrying glass in Gwynedd.

Madoc had always feared the scrying glass; so he feared the small oval of water which reflected Gwydyr’s face, growing larger and larger, and darker and darker, quivering until it was no longer the face of a man but of a screaming baby. The face receded until Madoc saw a black-haired woman holding and rocking the baby. “You shall be great, little Madog,” she said, “and call the world your own, to keep or destroy as you will. It is an evil world, little Madog.” The baby looked at her, and his eyes were set close together, like Gwydyr’s, and turned inward, just so, and his mouth pouted with discontent. Again the face grew larger and larger in the dark oval and was no longer the face of a baby, but a man with an arrogant
and angry mien. “We will destroy, then, Mother,” the man said, and the face rippled until it was a small, slightly pear-shaped sphere, and on the sphere were blotches of green and brown for land, and blue and grey for seas, and a soft darkness for clouds, and from the clouds came strange dark objects which fell upon the land and fell upon the sea, and where they fell, great clouds arose, umbrellaing over the earth and the sea; and beneath the bulbous clouds was fire, raging redly and driven wild by wind.

Gwydyr’s voice rippled across the scrying oval of water. “I choose fire, little brother. Where is your fire?”

The flames vanished and the oval was only a shallow pool reflecting nothing more than the cloud that moved across the sun.

Time resumed, and Zyll’s scream continued as though it had never been broken. Madoc raised Reschal from the beach, stepping into the oval as he did so, splashing the shallow water onto the sand. “Stand back, Old One,” he said. “I will break the scry.” And he stamped once more on the water left in the puddle, until there was not enough to hold the least reflection.

From the central dugout came one of the warriors, carrying a smoking brazier. Gwydyr took one of the spears and held the sharp end over the coals. “You must make your own fire, Madoc!” He laughed derisively.

Madoc turned to the rock where the young men had
laid their chains of flowers. He gathered the flowers in his arms and placed them in a heap over the oval where the water had been. Then he took the crown of flowers from his head and added it to the garlands. As though responding to a signal, Zyll cast hers on the fragrant pile. One by one all the men, women, children of the Wind People threw their headpieces onto the heap of flowers, Reschal last of all.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Gwydyr screamed, dancing about on the sand, thrusting his flaming spear at his brother.

Madoc leapt aside. “Wait, Gwydyr. You chose fire. You must let me fight fire with fire.”

“You, you alone must make the fire. These are my rules.”

Madoc replied quietly, “You were always one for making your own rules, Brother Gwydyr.”

“I am the king, do you hear me, I am the king!” Gwydyr’s voice rose hysterically.

Madoc, moving as though in a dream, pushed his brother’s words aside, and focused the blue fire of his eyes on the great pyre of flowers. The scent of crushed blossoms rose like smoke. Madoc thrust his arms shoulder-deep into the garlands and pushed them aside so that once more he could see the oval. A thin film of water had bubbled up from the sand.

“No more of Gwydyr’s nightmares,” he commanded, staring fixedly at the water, which sparkled from the sun. The water rippled and shimmered and resolved itself once again into a mother holding a baby, but a different baby, eyes wide apart, with sunlight gleaming through the blue, a laughing, merry baby. “You will do good for your people, El Zarco, little Blue Eyes,” the mother crooned. “Your eyes are an omen, a token for peace. The prayer has been answered in you, blue for birth, blue for mirth.”

Then the oval broke into shimmering, and all that was reflected was the cloudy sky. Madoc looked heavenward then, and cried in a loud voice,

The sun burst from behind the clouds and shafted directly onto the garlands. The scent of roses mingled with the thin wisp of smoke which rose from the crushed petals. When the smoke was joined by a small tongue of flame, Madoc leapt toward his brother. “There is my fire, Gwydyr.” He wrenched the spear from his brother and
threw it with all his might into the lake. “Now we will fight in fair combat.” And he clasped Gwydyr to him as though in love.

For time out of time the two brothers wrestled by the lake, both panting with exertion, but neither seeming to tire beyond the other. Their bodies swayed back and forth in a strange dance, and the People of the Wind and those Across the Lake watched in silence.

The sun completed its journey across the sky and dropped into the forest for the night’s rest, and still the brothers held each other in an anguished grip and their breathing was louder than the wind in the trees.

The fire slowly consumed the garlands, and when there was nothing left but a handful of ashes, Madoc forced Gwydyr into the lake, and held him down under the water until rising bubbles told him that his brother was screaming for mercy. Then he raised him from the lake and water spewed from Gwydyr’s mouth as dark as blood, and he hung limply in Madoc’s arms.

Madoc gestured to the People Across the Lake. “Bring out your boats and take your king back to your own land.” His voice held scorn and it held pain and his blue eyes were softened by tears.

The three boats pushed into the water. The spear-oars were returned to their blades. Madoc dumped Gwydyr like a sack of grain into the center dugout. “Go. Never let us hear the sound of the war drums again.” He reached
into the canoe and took the golden circlet from Gwydyr’s head and tossed it far out into the lake.

Then he turned his back on his brother and splashed ashore.

Zyll was waiting for him. Madoc looked at her and sang,

And to him Zyll sang,

Madoc held her close in his arms. “Tomorrow I will mourn for my brother, for this death is far worse than the other. But tonight we rejoice.”

The children lifted their voices and began to sing, and then all the People of the Wind were singing, and Reschal said softly to Madoc, “That which your brother wanted us to believe from the scry is part of his nightmare. Perhaps our dreams will be stronger than his.”

“Yes, Old One,” Madoc said, but he thought of the
things he had seen falling from the sky, and the strange mushrooming clouds and the fire, and shuddered. He looked at the water that had seeped into the oval. But all that he saw was the smiling face of the moon.