Mercedes Lackey - Wintermoon

All around the circle she pelted, and around again. Still not one of the black pigs retaliated. None harmed her. She stopped all at once, panting, somehow disabled—Each blow had lessened her.

And only then the circle gradually fell quiet.

After the unbearable horror of the noise, the un -air of this second world congealed inside her ears. It was as if she had gone deaf—

And now they must close in. She had hurt them. They would trample her and kill her. Eat her alive.

Clirando straightened. She could sell her life expensively, even if she must sacrifice it in the end.

And so she saw.

It was like a blindfold dropping from her eyes.

The creatures stood there quite motionless and still making no sound. They were striped and running with blood. Much worse that this, from their greenish eyes enormous glittering tears poured down like rain.

Crying, they clustered in their circle, and they looked at her. And as Clirando stared into their weeping eyes, she saw through to the backs of these eyes, as if through polished mirrors, and then straight down to some other thing, repeating, amplifying, which she could not make out.

“Why do you do this?” she whispered.

They only wept.

Clirando took now a few tentative steps. She approached the nearest of them.

It lifted its head. It was ugly, terrible, piteable. The crying seemed to have made its eyes much larger. They were deeply green, like the leaves of a bay tree.

Memory flashed in Clirando’s brain. Her mother was picking her up from the courtyard, where she had fallen, a Clirando then about four years old. “Don’t cry, my love.”

“Don’t cry, my love,” Clirando murmured.

She found she had dropped the knife. She put out both her hands and touched the pig’s nightmare face quite gently. “Don’t cry. It will be better soon.”

To her bewilderment, the pig at once nuzzled in close to her. It was warm. It smelled healthy and wholesome, but not really animal. Her hands slid over it. It had no spines after all. It was smooth. Under her fingers, the wetness of the blood, the wounds she had caused, healed like seams sewn together.

Now the next animal was nudging at her. Eagerly?

“Come here,” said Clirando.

She had shut her eyes.

She took the second pig into her arms.

She took all of them into her arms, one by one. She stroked them. She kissed their bizarre faces, she kissed the tears away and their wounds healed.

All this, with her eyes shut.

She too was crying, she discovered. And then, softly laughing. And from the pigs as she went around to them, embracing them, soft laughter, too.

She knew when she had reached the end of her ministrations and closed the fateful circle. That was when she opened her eyes.

Twenty or thirty other Clirandos stood all about her. They were her age, and her height and weight, clothed as she was under the furs, in summer garments, tanned and fit, shaking back brown hair.

The pig-creature had been—herself? No, no— facets of herself. Her self .

Jeering, tormenting— ugly.

Was this then what she really was? Or what, deep in her mind, her heart, she had believed she was?

If so, then she had mocked herself, and driven herself, hurt herself, made herself weep if not actual tears, then symbolic tears. To lose love was a very terrible thing. To lose affection for one’s own self—this must be worse. For you could, at least in your mind, move far off from others. But from yourself you never could, until death released you.

She regarded the other Clirandos, and they her. Clear-eyed, these looks, and mouths that did not laugh, calm mouths, quiet.

They were separated from her, her other selves. Her anger, and her attempt to suppress anger, both, had done this. And her pain and her denial of that pain. For pain and anger needed to be felt and to be expressed—and then let go.

She tried to count them, the other Clirandos. Twenty—thirty—ten—she could not get the number to come out.

But she had split herself into these pieces. She thought of a mirror made of glass, as they formed them in the East—shattered.

Clirando bowed her head. Anger was spoken. Pain acknowledged. Both now must begin their journey away from her. She visualized a glass mirror, mending…

Did she feel her other selves return? Perhaps—perhaps. When she raised her head, they were gone. Only she remained. But all of her now, she thought all mended and in one piece.

And so when, next moment, she saw rushing across the moon’s long vista, the dappled lion-beast she had first seen on the cliffs of the Isle, she did not draw her knife. Now, she knew .

As it sprang, she too sprang forward.

In space they met. The collision was instantaneous and had no impact, only a brilliant lightning that coursed through her, cold then hot, then warm.

Landing in a warrior’s practiced crouch, Clirando knew herself for one moment to be a dappled lynx-lion, tail lashing, claws ready, eyes of fire. And then the beast sank back into her spirit, accustomed as a fine knife in a sheath of velvet.

The male lion also had been—was—hers. It was a part of her. She had no need to dread it, only to know and guide it—and permit it, at the correct times, to guide her.

A joy beyond all joys filled Clirando. She ran about the moon plain, jumped high, whirled through the air, light as a feather, playing.

Never had she known such liberation. But even as she experienced it, intuitively she recognized it could not and must not last. Mortals had their duties in the world. Only before and after death could such freedom deservedly be theirs.

She sat thinking this for a while, there on the surface of the moon, quite calm. Until something altered in her mind, and suddenly she began to see instead her ridiculous predicament. For she knew no route back. If a psychic gate had been opened for her, where was it now? She did not think the ghost of Araitha could conduct her home into the world.

The surreal euphoria had left her. Perplexed, Clirando stood and looked away to all the white horizons.

Vaguely then, she heard a distant shouting. It was no longer any nightmare of her own.

“Zemetrios…?”

Had he too been pulled through to this other place, to contend with his past?

At this thought Clirando became fully herself, or reckoned she did. In the heat of battle you could not always carefully plan.

It took her some hours to walk across the long curving of the moon’s back, and the fish-bone spikes of the mountains were much nearer when she halted in astonishment.

Before her lay a fine house, that would have fitted well in the upper streets of Amnos. It was surrounded by a grove of trees, winter bare and thick with icicles. The house seemed to think an ordinary earthly night had fallen, for lamplight burned in the visible windows and over the gate of the courtyard. The gate itself was ajar, as if to invite Clirando in.

She hesitated. But then the strident shouting came again. She had heard it many times as she traveled; it had guided her here.

She pushed wide the gate and crossed the yard, between ranks of frozen urns and shrubs.

The door of the house too was open.

Clirando entered, sword in hand, and reached the threshold of a graciously furnished room now rather spoilt. A chair had gone over. Broken pitchers lay on the floor. Two men were there also, one of them stumbling, shouting. It was this awful voice she had heard before. Then, in the moment before the shouting stumbler fell, the other man caught him back. “Yazon, listen to me. This would have been your twenty-ninth day without drunkenness. Think what you had achieved.”