Year of the Unicorn

18 The Last Gate of All

He did not come to me, rather he sank to his knees, one arm thrown across a rock to support him. But his green eyes were on me, though his face was still more shadow than true substance. “I slew—”

“You united!” I threw myself down beside him. “That other Gillan, she had to die that we might be whole again—whole! By your sword I am!”

Herrel bowed his head upon his out-flung arm and I could no longer see those eyes which were the most living part of him. I put forth my hand and touched that which was not firm flesh—rather a yielding, changing stuff.

“Herrel!” I saw him as a shadow, but I had expected to touch a man. And this struck new fear into me. Now he did raise his head again, look at me. “I am—far spread—Go—back—Hyron—” The words came with long pauses between them. “No! Herrel—!”

But his head had fallen forward again and he did not answer my call. In me stirred again that anger, and with it my will. I got to my feet and this time I did not plead in my summoning, I demanded: “Hyron!”

The rolling echoes of that name boomed about the walls of that unknown valley, appeared to join with the vibrations set off by the mountain storm. But could it reach from one world to another?

“Hyron!” For the second time I voiced that demand. A shimmering—a change in the air—behind it shadows moved—Come!—Very faint.

“Herrel!” I stooped, strove to draw up that collapsed shadow. But it was as if I scooped running sand in my two hands, there was nothing substantial in him for my fingers to grip upon. “Herrel!”

I glanced up. That troubling in the air, it was already subsiding—perhaps we had only seconds.

“Herrel!” Once more I tried to arouse him—to no purpose.

And when I looked again—that shimmering which marked the gate between the worlds was gone. I covered my face with my hands, dull despair warring with my will, Hyron had warned me that they could not hold the gate—or was it rather would not—for long. Now they had let it close—we were trapped in this nightmare other existence.

Once more I knelt beside Herrel. Was he dead or dying as this world knew those terms, or sore hurt where I could give him no real tending? Why did he wear this shadow form when my body was real and solid? Or did it merely seem so to me, and he saw me as a shadow? If so—then to himself he was real also—A fleeting scrap of memory touched me—that bed on which we twain had lain when we were sent on this perilous venture—had our bodies continued to lie there while we had put on other forms in this alien country?

Herrel?—I could not touch him, bandage his hurts, give him any small comfort.

Or could I?

I had found that other Gillan, sent out that which had entered into her. But that had been because she was a part of me. I could not enter so into Herrel. Maybe not myself, my mind worked on, but could a portion of my will, a desire for life, be so shared with another? It was so small a hope, but now my only one.

I leaned my head on the arms I had folded across my knees. In my mind I fastened upon Herrel—as I had seen him—not on our first meeting, or on other occasion, but at what I knew was a moment when some power had touched us both, when he had stood at the moonlit, silvered pillar and called upon forces known to him in my behalf. And that Herrel I held in my mind—intent on seeing him and not the shadow man beside me.

This was like feeling one’s way along a dark corridor where a danger one could not see stalked, and there were many sideways in which one could be lost. I tried to make of my will a visible thing, of substance—to reach, touch, be one with the Herrel I held in mind, blotting out all else.

He stood there, his bared shoulders silvered as the pillar was silvered. I could smell the sweet scent of the flowers—I could hear his voice chanting in the tongue I did not know, uttering words that I did—he called upon Neave—

Neave! I made of that name an anchor point for my will. Neave—Herrel—and I concentrated the force of my desire on the man who had stood in the moonlight.

Gillan?—

Perhaps that had been several times repeated before it reached me, locked in concentration as I was.

Gillan?—

I turned the head still pillowed on my arms, opened my eyes, the shadow beside me had also raised his head, the green eyes were open, watching me.

Herrel! You are alive?—

After a fashion, but what do you here? The gate—He sat up straight.—They could not hold the gate so long.—

So Hyron said—I answered without thinking.

Again those sparks of eyes swung to mine.—Hyron! He told you, but then, why have you not gone?—

I did not answer. A shadow hand balled into a shadow fist, struck down on the surface of a rock.

Why did you not go. Leave you me no pride at all, Gillan?—

I was startled, and then saw that his way might not be my way after all. That I had delivered hurt where I meant healing. And I made the only answer I had left me:

Matters being in all ways reversed, would you have done so?—

A shadow face shows no expression for reading, and I could see no feeling in his eyes. There was a period of silence between us until I dared to break it:

This gate being closed, where is one we may open?—Not that I expected he could name me any such, but that I might turn his thoughts from within to an without himself.

I know of none. Hyron misled you if he suggested that such might be.—

Hyron gave me nothing but warnings. But, this is the third time I have walked this land. The other two times I believed that I dreamed. And from dreams there is waking.—

Dreams?—Again he moved and this time with more vigour. His hand went to his middle as if exploring some hurt with caution.—Gillan—I—my wound, I no longer bleed! I can move—He pulled to his feet, stood away from the rock which had been his support.—I am whole again! What sorcery have you worked, my lady witch?—

I do not know, truly, I do not. This only—And I told him of my try with will and power.

Neave! You called upon Neave, and now you speak of dreams. Dreams—

He reached down his hand as if to draw me up beside him. I felt a wisp of mist wreath about me, but with no force. Herrel recoiled.

“What is this?” he whispered aloud.

“To me you are shadow.” I told him hastily.

He held his hand up before his eyes as if to reassure himself. “But this is solid! Flesh—bone—”

“To me you are a shadow,” I repeated.

“Dreams!” Once more he struck the rock surface with his fist. “If we now share a dream world—”

“Then how do we wake?”

“Yes, the waking—”

His tenuous form swung around, he stared about him as if to locate in the valley some means for shaking us out of nightmare slumber.

“What do you remember of this world, tell me all of it!”

Why he wished me to retrace in memory I did not know, but I obeyed his order, spoke of the forest, the coming of the bird—

“Bird?” Herrel halted me at that point, demanded a description of the bird. And then said:

“So in that much they kept their oath. That was a guide sent by the Pack. Where did this bird lead you?”

I told him of the passage through the bog, the coming to the place of light where I had found him and the company of Gillans.

“Yes, that was where I awoke, in that place of light, seeing them pass back and forth through it, and knowing that only one was the right one, and only you could find her. But none of this gives us any clue to the gate or our awakening—”

“Do we have a key left us?” The muttering of the storm in those mountains grew louder. There was a kind of menace building up about us which broke through my concentration, as if the alien world was gathering its forces to deal with what we represented, an irritation foreign to it.

“I do not know. But while we can move—and think—then perhaps we still have a chance. I wonder—” I saw his head turn again as he surveyed that narrow valley. “That place of light is undoubtedly a place of power. And so might well be where we could find answers—”

“The times I awoke here were in the woods—” I suggested. Though to cross the bog land without a guide was a journey I did not relish.

“Then you dreamed under their command, awoke by it,” Herrel’s husky whisper continued. “If we are to go forth from there now it will be by our wills, united. And I believe that power, no matter from what source, can be drawn upon in times of need—”

“But what if the power is evil, a danger to our kind?”

“I do not think that the place of light is either good or evil. We entered therein, the creatures of this world hunting us entered it. Took no part in our battle, either for one side or the other. We were apart from it, left to our own concerns. Tell me, how did you drive the hound masters forth—that I did not understand—”

“By my anger—I think,” I made answer, but I was considering what he had said. That force of anger, so strong, carrying all before it—never before in my life had I been so possessed. Had that emotion been fired, fuel fed, by some power within the enclosure? Could Herrel be right in his guess that what abode there could be tapped to aid us?

I had said there was no change from day to night in this haunted world. But around us now it grew darker. Either the storm was reaching out from the mountains, or else there was a night coming I had not seen before. We made our way dimly back up the slope to the higher land where stood the enclosure.

Within the light still swirled and around the gate lay small white heaps. Herrel stirred one with the point of his dusky sword, cleaned bones collapsed and rolled, remains of the hounds. But of that which had feasted on the losers, or of its nature, we had no clue.

We had come here, but what must we do now? I turned to Herrel with that question, and it seemed to me that his shadow self was even thinner. “What do we?”

“It becomes a matter of walking an unknown road, trailing across never charted mountains, my lady witch. In my mind it is that we two still lie in the Grey Towers,. that we dream there—so stand within these walls. Unless we can wake, we are lost for ever. For the deeper the dream, the less able will our bodies be to escape it. As for how to wake—well, we must try different ways—”

“What ways?” His confidence seemed overly bright to me who had no trace of plan moving within my mind. “What brought you to that other Gillan, then led you to me?” He counter-questioned. “What led you to summon me from what was death in this world?”

“I thought, I centred my will—on Gillan—on you—”

Herrel looked into the light. “If we do have bodies left in our own world and time, then they anchor us in part there. Perhaps if we strive to be reunited with those bodies, we shall find them. I see no other path for us.”

“But—I have no clear picture to fasten upon—” And I did not—that glimpse of Herrel lying in the room which might have been in the Grey Towers—that was too fleeting a thing to serve me.

“I have!” He seemed possessed now by a rising belief in himself, as if, instead of being daunted by our plight, he was stimulated to greater efforts.

“Now listen—” He laid his hand on my arm, and I felt his touch only as I might the passing of a feather across my flesh. “This is as I saw it last—before I came here—”

He told me in detail of that tower room, of the divan on which we had lain side by side, of small things which had been imprinted in his memory in such vivid pictures that he must have rested there with greatly heightened senses before he had gone forth on this strange journey. And such was his telling that he made me see it, too, bit by bit, piece by piece, as if before my very eyes he was setting up figures and furnishings.

“Do you see, Gillan?” For the first time a note of anxiety crept into his whispers.

“You have made me see.”

“If I have only done so aright!”

“And now?”

“And now we do what you have done before, we fasten our wills on this—” he paused. “I am counted by half-man among them, since my power does not always serve me as I will. So, mayhap I put now to the test a flawed blade. But that I can not know until I use it. Let us go!”

I closed my eyes upon the light, upon Herrel. For this time him, too, I must shut away. He had his battle and I had mine, to the same end, yet we must fight it singly. I brought to mind that room Herrel had pictured for me—there were the windows—two—one looking north, one south, between them walls covered with tapestries so old their patterns had long since been lost, save for a hint of face here, a trace of a beast’s gleaming eyes there. Braziers and from them smoke, aromatic smoke. And in the centre of that chamber the divan. On it lay Gillan, Gillan whose face had shown a hundred times, a thousand times from mirrors when I looked therein, Gillan who bore the scars of wounds which had pained me. That was Gillan, the Gillan I must seek and find.

And I centred upon that Gillan, not only the body which slept, but the nature of that which wandered afar from it in dreams. Who is Gillan? No, rather what is Gillan? She is this and this, and she is also that. Some parts of her could I welcome, others I would shun if I could. For this was a measuring and an inner seeing of Gillan such as I had never known and it made me writhe for a nakedness beyond all stripping I have believed could exist. Almost did I wish to forego the awakening of that Gillan who had such small meannesses, such ill within her.

Who is Gillan? I am Gillan, in this way was I fashioned, by nature, by the will of others, by my own desires. And with this Gillan am I united for good or ill, therefore I must pick up the burden of being Gillan and—awake!

But did I wake? I was afraid to open my eyes, lest I see again the light of the alien world. Until at last I had to force myself—

I looked up at grey stone, very old, I turned my head and saw tapestries also faded by the years. I was awake!

Herrel! Swiftly I turned my head in the other direction to see him who must share this couch with me.

Empty!

I sat up, reached forth my hand to that emptiness, to prove to myself that my eyes were the deceivers, not that he was gone. And then I saw the hand I put forth and I was stricken motionless.

The people of Arvon in that village—they had been shimmers of light in my eyes, so now was this hand of mine. Swiftly I pressed it down upon the fabric covering of the divan—fingers—palm—my full weight—But there was no impression!

From my hand I looked to my body. No body—merely a mist through which I could see the surface whereon I rested. Then Herrel had been wrong—we had not had bodies to focus upon left here—to draw us back to our right world!

There was a shimmer—No, I had not moved—it formed beyond me, at the other side of the divan—

Herrel?

I tried to call his name. There was no answer from my throat and lips. Why should there by—I no longer possessed throat or lips! I was not Gillan for all my willing.

That shimmer which lay in Herrel’s place moved. He must be sitting up.

Herrel?—I tried to reach him by the other way as we had sometimes spoken together in the spectre world.—What has happened?—The bar of light stood upright by the divan.

I think—I think—Slowly, painfully words came to me (and what was me?)—that they believed us dead. Our bodies have been moved elsewhere.—

Had I had then the power I would have shrieked aloud. If he spoke the truth what would now become of us?

Come!—

Where?—

He had already moved the door, that light which was now Herrel and no man.

To find what we seek.—

We were back in the familiar world where there was night and day and, suitable to our state as wraiths, it was now night. These Grey Towers must be very old, old and steeped in a life afar from the Dales. It was in all I looked upon—that age and difference.

Along a short hall, and then down a stair which wound and wound about the skin of the Tower, Herrel led and I followed. I heard no sound, saw no one move. Slumber must have claimed those who abode here. And for a fleeting moment I thought of Kildas, of Solfinna, and that company among whom I had once ridden. Did they look upon these ancient walls as now I did, as a shell which held nothing of warmth or welcome? Or would they abide ever under the spells their Were mates wove, seeing only that which would make them happy and content?

We came out at last in a hallway which was paved and walled with stone. At set intervals on the walls were the carved representations of beasts. It seemed that their eyes measured and surveyed us as we passed, even as I had once been measured and studied by those long dead kings set up as Guardians on the frontier of Arvon. But of their findings concerning me I could not guess.

On we went into a space which was shadow hidden as to its width or length. At the far end light burned and towards that Herrel sped, I ever behind. Green was that light and it came from the Were flames I had seen before, those which had burned about me on the mound in the road’s parting. Here, too, they burned about two who slept on one bed.

Once more I looked upon Gillan, and this was a Gillan in more splendour than I had ever seen her, or arrayed her with my own hands. She wore a robe of pleasant green overworked with silver, and among the twists of that silver ’broidery were set small milky gems, which a net of the same jewels confined her hair. Her hands were crossed on her breast, and she had, I thought, a beauty which had never been hers in life. For now that I looked down upon this sleeper it no longer seemed true that I was Gillan and this was the envelope of flesh and bone fashioned by birth to hold me.

Beside her was Herrel, his helm by his head so that his face was plainly to be seen. He wore mail and between his clasped hands rested the hilt of a bared sword.

They do me full honour—He who stood beside me spoke soundlessly.—That honour they never granted me—awake.—

But these, they are dead!—

Are we? I say nay to that!—

He was so very sure. Yet when I looked upon her lying so, I thought the truth was as I said. And there was not reason to doubt it.

Gillan!—Sharp as any warning given when an enemy creeps upon a comrade-in-arms who sees him not.—You are she. Think not otherwise or you are lost. Now!—

The shimmer moved up to those who lay there. By what feat of sorcery he wrought the next I never knew. But those upright flames nearest him bent horizontally and over them he swept me with him.

What is death? Twice in the spectre land I had tasted it, perhaps in my world this third time. But still I can not put into words what it is. If I were dead indeed when we so returned to the Towers that night, then death itself was rent asunder by what brought us there.

Gillan was again Gillan, I did not need to open my eyes to know that at long last I was whole. But I did, I raised hands across a firm body finely clad, saw the small, moon radiance of the gems I wore as they glistened with my movements. “Herrel?”

“Yes—”

He put aside his sword to hold out his hands to me, draw me close. So for a moment we were breast to breast, and I met his eager lips with a need as great as his. Then he held me off a little, his eyes searching, but his lips smiling.

“It would seem, my dearest lady, that we comrade together very well in war; now let us try that state in peace.”

I laughed softly. “Right willing shall you find me for such purpose, my valiant lord!”

He slipped from the couch and then raised me to stand beside him. The long folds of the fine robe they had put on me fell heavily about my limbs, hampering my feet. I pulled at the cloth impatiently with my left hand, my right being prisoned in his.

“I go very fine,” I commented. “Too fine—”

“Beauty deserves beauty. “ Herrel did not say that lightly and I think my hand trembled a little for his pressure about it tightened.

“Mayhap, but I would go freer!” For suddenly those weighty robes tied me to the past, and that should be gone. I withdrew my hand from his, my fingers sought clasps and ties, and I shed that dragging magnificence, tossing back upon the empty couch its gemmed skirts, standing in the shorter under-robe.

“Shall we go?” His hand once more sought mine. “Where, my lord?”

He was smiling again. “Now that I can not answer you, for in truth I do not know. Save we shall ride away from these Towers and this company to seek our own fortune. Do you nay-say that?”

“No. Choose you a road, my dear lord, and it shall be mine. But you do not take your helm, your sword—”

“Nor this—” one-handedly he unbuckled his belt, tossed to lie with my discarded robe. By the empty pillow still rested his cat-crested helm. “Those I shall not use again.” And there was such a note in his voice that I did not question him.

As two who would join some formal dance, Herrel led me by the hand down that long chamber until we came forth by another door into a courtyard where we strode under the stars and the moon. Seven great towers were about us. But nothing there moved as Herrel brought me to a stable wherein were those dun coated, shadow spotted horses of the Pack. My mare he brought out and saddled, and his own stallion, and leading them we came once more into the open. Before us was a gate.

“When we ride out, my lady, we go into the unknown—”

“Have we not travelled other unknowns, dear lord?”

“Just so!” He laughed. “So be it.”

“Who goes?”

From the dusky overhang of the gate came one who wore a rearing stallion on his helm, and the moon was bright on the drawn sword in his hand.

“Yes,” answered my husband, “who goes, Hyron? Give us names if you know us.”

The Captain of the Were Riders looked upon us. If I had expected a sign of amaze or wonder from him, I was to be disappointed.

“So you found the way to return—” he said.

“We found it. And now we pass through another gate—” Herrel pointed to the portal behind Hyron.

“You are Were blood, these towers are your home.”

Herrel shook his head. “I do not know now what I am, for we have been a journey like to change any living thing. But of these towers I am not, nor is Gillan. So we shall go to seek that which we are—for that we must learn.”

Hyron was silent for a moment, and then he said in a troubled voice. “You are one of us—”

“No.” for the second time Herrel repudiated his half blood.

“You will go to your mother?”

“Do you fear that? You who have chosen not to be my father?” Herrel retorted. “I tell you, I will have none of you, dame or sire. Do you think to hold the gate against us?”

Hyron stepped aside. “The choice is yours.” His tone was now as emotionless as his face. He did not speak again, nor did Herrel as we rode forth. And we did not look back, but Herrel said:

“That, lady wife, was the last gate between the past and the future. And who we are, what we have now is but Gillan and Herrel—”

“Which is enough.” I made him answer, and so it was.