David Drake - The Gods Return

Tenoctris and Garric had the privacy they wanted, and the laymen weren't compelled to witness wizardry. Tenoctris straightened. She'd placed only five pebbles, one between each pair of trees to mark the inner angles of a pentacle. The points were the trees themselves.

"It's the Grove of Biltis," she said. "Who's Biltis?" Garric said. He was fighting his instinct to lay his hand on the pommel of his sword.

He knew-not because Tenoctris had told him, but because of the feeling of quiet sadness he felt in this grove-that it wasn't a place for weapons. His disquiet-and King Carus' universal response to anything unusual-kept drawing him to the blade, though. "A very long time ago…," Tenoctris said, taking items out of her satchel. Besides a codex and two scrolls, she began to unwrap what turned out to be the silver statuette of a wasp-slim woman. "Biltis was a God. Biltis wasthe God, in fact. Later she was revered as an oracle whose answers were given in the ripples of her sacred fountain. By the time this grove was planted-and that was before the dawn of the Old Kingdom-Biltis was a spirit of the night who eased childbirth. The cypress as a tree of the waters was thought to be a proper attribute for such a spirit." Tenoctris let her fingertips drift over the curve of the figurine's molded hair. She met Garric's eyes again and smiled sadly. "It's a place of power," she said. "And it suited my sense of whimsy, if you will, to use a site created by ordinary women who had ordinary female concerns. Since both those things are utterly divorced from my own life." Garric cleared his throat. "I had a pretty ordinary life myself before you arrived in Barca's Hamlet, Tenoctris," he said.

"If you hadn't changed that, I guess I'd be dead by now. Along with all the other pretty ordinary people in the world. I'm glad you came."

Tenoctris chuckled. "I might as well complain that I was born a wizard instead of being a mighty warrior, I suppose," she said. "No doubt I'd have been far happier then." "Maybe until she drowned," Carus said.

"Because she didn't have a clever wizard and the other fellow did. No, I'm getting used to things being the way they are now." Tenoctris looked at the books she'd taken out, then returned them unopened to her satchel. "They were crutches," she said apologetically. She seemed to be speaking to the figurine, not to Garric. "I don't need crutches any more." Without further preamble she chanted, "Basuma bassa…"

The statuette bobbed in her right hand, a dip to each syllable. A wisp of violet flame shimmered from the center of the hinted pentacle, as pale as moonlight. Garric thought the first flickers were reflections thrown from the silver, but it mounted as quickly as real fire in dried vines. It was silent and gave off no heat. "Ashara phouma naxarama…," Tenoctris said. "Can the troops see the light or only us?" said Carus. His expression was as bleak as a granite headland, concealing the discomfort he felt even as a ghost to be a part of wizardry. Garric shrugged. The tempo of the guards' murmurs didn't change, nor did the sprightly galliard a musician among them picked out on a three-string lyre. If they'd noticed the flame, there'd have been silence or perhaps shouting. Tenoctris was facing Garric across the fire. Her lips continued to move but he no longer heard the words of power. The grove vanished. Instead of a fire, Garric and Tenoctris stood a pool of violet light. The statuette in her hand rose and fell to the rhythm of the unheard syllables. The charged atmosphere shattered into planes. Garric felt a rush of vertigo: there was no up or down, but there were infinite numbers of universes from which he and Tenoctris stood apart. A speck in one of the planes swelled. Everything shiftedagain. A blur of darker violet coalesced into a boat-a perfectly ordinary vessel, different from the dories fishermen had used in Barca's Hamlet but of similar size and utility. It had one mast, a tall triangular sail, and a single boatman in the stern. The boatman brought the tiller sharply over and at the same time loosed a halyard, dropping the sail as the bluff bow grazed to rest on the shore. The beach beneath Garric's boots was sand, not the black volcanic shingle of Barca's Hamlet and certainly not the expanse of roots, leaves and sedges of the grove they'd been standing in. The boatman stepped out, gripping the sides of his vessel to keep it from drifting away when his weight no longer held it onto the bottom. He was a slight man with thinning hair and ink-stained fingers; though he was obviously strong enough, he seemed incongruous in this job. He reminded Garric of his own father rather than the fishermen who drank in the inn of an evening. Tenoctris curtsied.

"Thank you for coming so promptly," she said. The boatman smiled faintly. "You have the right to command me, your ladyship," he said in a quiet, cultured voice. "Where is it you wish me to take you?" "To the Gate of Ivory," she said. "Can you do this?" "I can take you to the edge of the lake," said the boatman. "But no farther. Is that sufficient?" Tenoctris sighed and lifted her chin in assent. "I feared as much," she said. "But yes, if that's the reality, it has to be sufficient. We'll find our own way across, then. Are we free to board?" "Yes, your ladyship," said the boatman, offering the wizard a hand over the gunwale. She seated herself primly on a forward thwart.

"Ah," said Garric. "Sir, would you like help shoving off? I've done that, well, often enough." "That's won't be necessary, your highness," said the boatman. Neither Tenoctris nor Garric himself had told the man who his passengers were, but he clearly knew. "Though if you'll sit on the thwart just ahead of me, the boat will ride better.

Whatever you please, of course." Garric stepped aboard, placing his foot on the keelson so as not to rock the vessel any more than necessary. The hull settled slightly into the sand. He sat, facing the stern and the tiller rather than the mast. The boatman strode forward, leaning into the vessel and bringing the bow around. Even on sand, that required great strength as well as skill. Garric felt the hull bob free. The boatman took two more strides and clambered in over the transom. Keeping the tiller between his left arm and his body, he raised the sail of linen, tarred to hold the wind better. It filled with the breeze and drove the vessel into the seeming twilight. Garric looked to port, then to starboard. The beach was vanishing into the horizon; he hadn't seen anything above the strip of sand The sea lifted with the slow, powerful motions of a brood sow shifting in her sty. The water was gray with a hint of green where foam bubbled in the vessel's wake, but when Garric bent to look straight down over the side he thought he saw twinkles of the violet flame which Tenoctris had kindled. "I always liked the sea," Carus said. "Of course, that didn't keep it from killing me in the end." He chuckled. "If it hadn't been the sea," he added, "it might well have been a woman. And I liked them too, lad." The boatman eyed the sail, then let out the sheet he'd snubbed to a starboard stanchion. Garric couldn't imagine how the fellow navigated; the sky was the featureless gray of a high overcast.

"Sir?" he said. They faced one another, so closely that Garric could have touched the boatman's knees just by stretching out his hand. "I'm Garric or-Reise. May I ask your name, please?" "'The Boatman' will do," the man said, smiling again. "I don't have a name any more, only a task." Garric cleared his throat in embarrassment, though the fellow hadn't been deliberately insulting. Mainly to break eye contact, he looked to starboard as they crested a swell. Midway to the horizon, an enormous back humped out of the water. It continued for over a minute to drive forward in a shimmer of droplets, like the paddles of a millwheel. Neither the head nor the tail broke the surface before the whole dripping mass sank into the depths again. "Sir?" Garric said.