Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (13 page)

Gasping for breath and seething with frustrated confusion, she tried to get a grip on her rioting thoughts and force herself to reason more coherently. Fenran wasn’t here. He
couldn’t
be. The incense and the chanting and the tense, dreamlike atmosphere of the ceremony had opened the floodgates of her imagination, and that last solitary figure wading from the lake, with its ashen face and stooping, painful gait, must have been a hallucination. She had seen him because she had wanted to see him—perhaps she had even expected it, for this bizarre ceremony under the full moon was a death rite, and where else might she hope to find Fenran but among the shades of the dead?

The old, leaden weight that she knew so well settled on Indigo’s heart and she turned her head aside, not wanting Shalune to see the tears that glinted suddenly on her eyelashes. For one single moment she had felt something close to hope, but cold reason had dashed it. She had dreamed or hallucinated—she didn’t know which, and it didn’t matter. All that did matter was the painful knowledge that her lost love had not been among those who had returned tonight, however briefly, to rejoin the loved ones they had left behind.

Suddenly the drums fell silent. Lost in her unhappy thoughts, Indigo started up in surprise as the last echoes died away and were absorbed by the crowding trees. She blinked rapidly, trying, though her mind railed against it, to drag herself back to reality and the present moment. Was the ceremony over? It seemed not, for the crowd was tense with anticipation, and the priestesses who tended the brazier were heaping on more incense. Then, shattering the hiatus of silence, Uluye’s voice rang out.

“The Ancestral Lady has spoken to us!”

The dancers had drawn back and the High Priestess stood alone in the center of the dusty arena. With a dramatic gesture, she flung out one arm to indicate the rock and the motionless, enthroned figure of Indigo. “Hear me now! Hear me, and I will tell you what message she brings!”

Uluye was hoarse, either with excitement or from prolonged shouting. The crowd pressed forward, listening avidly, and with a sinuous grace that was both awesome and faintly repellent, Uluye began to prowl. She moved toward the throng like a hunting cat, pausing every so often to stare hard into a frightened face or to make a swift hand movement from which her watchers shrank back. She had a finely honed sense of the dramatic; the worshipers were enthralled and as malleable as soft clay in her hands. Then she stopped.

“Tonight we have been doubly blessed,” she said, her voice echoing, eerily out of phase, from the ziggurat wall. “The Ancestral Lady has granted us not one boon, but two! She has sent her servants, who now dwell with her below the lake waters, to commune with us. And more than that, she has also seen fit to speak to us through her chosen oracle! And the message she imparts to us—” she turned slowly on one heel, her eyes glittering like faceted jet in the torchlight “—the message she imparts to us is one of
justice
!”

She began to move again, searching it seemed for one special face among the many. Even Indigo was mesmerized by her, and for the first time, she realized that Uluye did indeed have power, not merely the temporal power of a secular ruler, but a true occult gift. The air around the High Priestess was electric, alive. Her congregation—there was no other word for them, and they
were
hers, hers alone to, manipulate as she willed—hung on her every movement, her every word, like children under the sway of a beloved yet terrible mentor.

“
Justice
.” Uluye repeated the word with awe-inspiring sibilance. “Who among you fears the Ancestral Lady’s judgment?”

She stopped again and pointed to someone in the throng, then began to turn slowly and deliberately, her outstretched finger finding another target, and another, and another: “Who will have cause to kneel in praise and thanksgiving tonight, and who will have cause for lamentation? The Ancestral Lady sees all! The Ancestral Lady knows all! Through her own oracle she has judged you, and I, Uluye, am charged by the oracle to dispense the right and proper justice of our Lady, who is mistress of your souls.”

A female voice rang out, wailing with an emotion that could have been anything from the hysteria of joy to the despair of misery. Uluye spun around, finding the source of the cry with uncanny accuracy.

“
You
! Yes, I see you, and I hear you as the Ancestral Lady has heard you. Come forward, my daughter. Come to me. Don’t dare to hold back!”

Slowly, shaking with fear, the young widow whose husband had died of a fever moved out of the press of people. Uluye waited; the girl approached and crumpled to her knees at the High Priestess’s feet.

“Daughter,” Uluye said, “your man was called from his service to the Ancestral Lady so that you might look again on his face and renew your pledge to him. This you have done, and you are not found wanting. You have been true to his memory and have not deceived him or turned your face to another, and so I will tell you now how the Ancestral Lady has rewarded you. Within the year you will know another good man, and your grieving heart will be healed. You may cleave to this other man without fear of your dead husband’s wrath, and you may take him as your own and lie together under one roof in the knowledge that no vengeful shade or hungering
hushu
shall come creeping to your bedside when the night is at its darkest.“ She reached out and laid a hand on the crown of the girl’s bowed head. ”Go now, daughter. Make your obeisance, and return to your home without fear.“

Still trembling uncontrollably, the young widow rose to her feet. Across the width of the arena Indigo saw her eyes shining like lamps in the torchglow, and the look on her face of dawning joy, of hope rekindled where before there had been only despair, was like a physical blow. As the girl, ushered by Uluye, began to move hesitantly toward her, Indigo felt as though something deep inside her had turned to ashes. She understood the girl’s grief; understood, too, what it was to be granted the hope of a new love when the old seemed lost beyond recall.

In her mind’s eye she saw a face, not Fenran this time, but another who once, years ago, she had for a short while believed might taken Fenran’s place in her heart. She had been grievously wrong, and the stinging guilt of her folly still haunted her. But perhaps tonight, as the Ancestral Lady’s oracle, she had in some small way made amends for that old mistake by being the instrument through which this sad young woman was to be granted a second chance for happiness. It was a cruel irony, for it seemed she had the means to achieve for another the one thing that she herself yearned for above all else but could not reach. No one could grant Indigo the certainty of hope. Not the oracle, not Uluye, not even the Ancestral Lady herself.

The widow came to the rock and stopped. She dared not raise her head to look the oracle in the face, but she dropped to one knee in an awkward curtsy and her uncertain hands touched the hem of Indigo’s robe. Over her hunched figure, Uluye’s gaze and Indigo’s met, and the priestess’s eyes narrowed as she glimpsed something that Indigo had not wanted her to see.

“Enough, daughter.” Uluye touched the girl’s shoulder, drew her back. Her expression was speculative and just a little uncertain.

Indigo watched the girl move away, and the worm of envy that had been squirming within her faded. How could she begrudge the young widow her fortune? She didn’t know whether the Ancestral Lady’s promise would prove true or false, and in some ways it seemed irrelevant. The girl believed, and in belief there was hope and healing. Indigo prayed silently that, for this girl at least, the hope would prove to be real and not an illusion.

One after another they came before Uluye for judgment. It seemed that the Ancestral Lady had been merciful tonight, for almost all of the postulants were granted some measure, however small, of comfort in their unhappiness, or reparation for their loss. The madwoman’s sons were told that the Ancestral Lady had taken pity on their mother and would restore her wits in the Afterworld. The brothers of the headless man were promised that within three more full moons, the murderer would meet an untimely end and his possessions would be rightly theirs. Utterly scrupulous, yet coldly detached, like an austere and domineering matriarch, Uluye dispensed justice, and with it, hope—with one exception.

At first Indigo didn’t understand when the woman who had killed her children broke free from the two priestesses who held her and flung herself in the dust in front of the rock below her litter, yelling hysterically. Indigo could make no sense of the babble of words, which sounded from their tone as though the woman were cursing her and imploring her by turns, and only when the priestesses pounced on the murderess, pinning her down while Uluye interposed herself between the woman and the oracle’s sacred person, did Indigo begin to comprehend. As the woman was hauled away screaming, Uluye turned her head and looked up at the oracle’s throne. For the second time that night, their gazes clashed, and Uluye said in a tone that only Indigo could hear, “Don’t look so shocked. You spoke the words that condemned her.”

Without waiting for a reaction, she stalked off in the wake of the priestesses and their struggling prisoner, and Indigo looked quickly around for Shalune. Shalune, though, had gone. Only Yima stood alone, a few paces from the rock, staring at the small drama with dark, expressionless eyes.

At the lake’s edge three more priestesses were maneuvering into position what looked like an upright framework of lashed branches some six feet square. The woman was dragged toward it; as she saw what awaited her, her shrieks redoubled, but the cries were ignored and she was manhandled to the framework and tied to it, spread-eagled and helpless. As the last knots were pulled tight, she seemed to accept her fate, and her cries faded first to whimpering and then to nothing. She was still, hanging from the frame, her head drooping forward in defeat.

The crowding watchers were silent now. Uluye turned to them once more.

“Go,” she said. “Go back to your villages and give thanks for the boon we have all been granted tonight. The Ancestral Lady has spoken, and her will and her justice have been done. Turn your faces now, and depart in awe and in gratitude to the rightful mistress of us all.”

There was no more ceremony, no drums or horns, nothing. In an eerie atmosphere of anticlimax, and without even the smallest murmur, the crowd began to disperse. On quiet, shuffling feet they melted away into the forest, and within minutes the lakeside was deserted and only Indigo, the priestesses and the bizarre wooden framework with its motionless prisoner remained on the dusty arena before the ziggurat.

At a signal from Uluye, the torch-carriers began to extinguish their brands. One by one the guttering yellow flames were plunged into the sand and went out, and the night’s natural darkness closed in like a shroud. The moon stared down at its own distorted reflection in the lake, and the figures of the priestesses became faceless silhouettes. Shalune’s heavyset form loomed out of the gloaming with the litter-bearers behind her; she glanced up at Indigo and put a finger to her lips, forestalling anything Indigo might have tried to whisper to her. Silence, it seemed, was the women’s watchword now, and in silence the litter was lifted from the rock, and the procession, with Uluye at its head, turned toward the cliff-side stairs.

As she was borne away, Indigo thought she heard a sound from the lake’s edge, a whimper of despair and misery and abject fear that carried over the litter’s creaking and the soft, muffled hush of the priestesses’ bare feet in the sand. She looked over her shoulder, asking herself uneasily what the murderess’s ultimate fate would be. Death by starvation, or by broiling in the heat of the sun? Or something still worse?
You spoke the words that condemned her
, Uluye had asserted. Indigo wondered what she had said. What dire punishment had the Ancestral Lady decreed through her lips and tongue?

They reached the foot of the first staircase. Just before the litter carriers turned to begin the ascent, Indigo had one last glimpse of the lakeshore. A column of mist was forming on the water, an oddly isolated patch of moonshot silver-gray. Though she couldn’t be sure, Indigo thought she saw three small figures forming in the mist, and saw them begin to move, drifting over the surface like wraiths as they slowly converged on the wooden frame and its condemned occupant.

Then her bearers turned, set foot on the first stair, and the high back of her throne obscured the arena from view as she was carried away toward the high caves.

In the pearl-gray mist of predawn, Indigo woke from a nightmare screaming Fenran’s name. Grimya, who had been curled at the foot of the bed, sprang to her feet and ran to her, licking her face and projecting messages of comfort and reassurance until Indigo had struggled through the awful borderland between dream and reality and was fully awake.

For several minutes they sat together, Indigo hugging the wolf close. “I’m sorry,” she said over and over again. “I’m sorry, Grimya.”

“Wh-at is there to be sorry for? You cannot control your drreams.”

“I know, but I thought those nightmares were behind me now. It’s been so long since they’ve haunted me, I thought I might at last be free of them.”

Grimya said hesitantly, “You dreamed of...
him
?” She was reluctant to speak Fenran’s name in Indigo’s presence.

Indigo nodded. “I dreamed I was standing on the lakeshore, and he ... he came out of the water, searching for me. Only when I looked into his face, I realized that he wasn’t the Fenran I knew. Something had happened to him, something
terrible
. He was mad, and he didn’t know me, and I knew he meant to kill me, so I ran, but whichever way I turned, he was always there in front of me, waiting...“ She shuddered. ”Why did I dream of him like that, Grimya?
Why
?“

“I don’t know.” The wolf looked up at her unhappily. “Perhaps it was because of last night.”

They both fell silent for a few moments. Returning to her quarters after the somber procession back up the great stairways, Indigo had found Grimya in an abject state. The wolf had been desperately ashamed of the fear that had made her run away from the ceremony and hide herself in the cave, but at the same time, as she told Indigo, she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that something very evil was taking place, and she simply hadn’t had the courage to face it. The incense smoke had been affecting her head, she said, so that she could barely distinguish reality from illusion, and she had felt so sick and disoriented that when Shalune told her to go, she obeyed immediately and with relief.