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Chapter Three: The Road Up the Mountain in The City of the Gods
Tera had not quite yet learned to temper her expectations. She had expected marvelous sights beyond the ken of Vilim, but the road the wagon slowly but steadily went along was not fundamentally different from any mountain road. The road itself was well made, certainly, but it functioned like any road, and it looked like any road. Along the road grew red clover, yellow and white yarrow, and pinkish-purple thyme, different subspecies but very obviously in the same species as the similar flowers that grew along the roads up to and down from the Hall of the Fire Serpent. The elder trees did seem older and more robust than the similar trees back home, but that was all. The stones by the road were stones still, the dust was dust still. The only major difference was the sky. Davir and Mizur were lands famous for snow and rain, respectively, but the sky here was open and clear and startlingly blue.
The land was gently hilly, although it became slowly steeper as they went. Up and around the road turned, curving this way and curving that way, and for a while it followed a small creek. In terms of size it was not impressive, but the creek was cheerfully oblivious to this and went charmingly along its pre-set path. But it was here that Tera first saw a difference. A creek is not merely a flowing of water but of possibilities, and, just as the gods were more rounded in possibilities than Vilim, so too this creek was more rounded, less possibility-flat, than other creeks she had seen. It was subtle, but also startling. It was only an ordinary creek and yet was an ordinary creek in The City of the Gods, and so many Davnan interacting with it in subtle ways all along its path made possibilities far beyond the reach of the creek itself draw near, and become nearly, not quite but nearly, available to it, as if this ordinary creek needed only a tiny little divine push to do something no other creek could.
The flowers were too transient and small to be much affected by the presence of so many gods in one area; the stones and the sky were too enduring and vast. But the creek was at something like the balance point, a constant and yet transient thing, small yet extensive, and the result was that it popped out from everything else. It was as if you saw a painting with trees and stones and a little waterfall, but when you drew nearer, you could see that the trees and stones were painted, yes, but the waterfall was a real waterfall coming out of the painting.
"That," said Uncle Llew, "is Nanmonyd Creek, which is practically a member of our family. Our father used to take your mother and I to pan for gold in it, although that the place was much farther down. In early spring it rushes and leaps, but it gets quite lazy in the summer and autumn. It never quite dries up, and never quite freezes, though. It is also unusual in going the wrong way. Almost all the waters in these mountains go out to Great Lake, and thence eventually to the Western Bay, or else through Abernant Lake and out in a northeasternly direction to North Sea, but this little creek, as if it had a mind of its own, happens to fall down in the opposite direction, south toward the Eglur River, which comes out of an entirely different mountain range. "
Eventually they came to a forking path. "That path," he said, "if you follow it long enough, will eventually fork again, with one path curving a long way around to Great Lake Harbor and the other taking a very winding path out to North Landing on the other side of the mountains. But we are turning here and heading around and then up Mount Vanyd. Brickanbreck, our family hall almost since the Landing Days, is quite far up. Most of Vanyd and the immediately surrounding area belongs to the Embiadwe and the Muriaki." He stopped, and his face grew darker and harder to read. "And I suppose these days to some of the Wenovar, too, since Manawydan and Rhiannon are out near Abernant."
He was quiet and stormy-looking and thoughtful for a while after that, as they slowly went around and up Mount Vanyd. The trees became more evergreen and more ancient-looking as the road slowly became steeper. On one side of the road, the mountain went rockily upward; on the other side, it went plummeting downward. Uncle Llew's mood slowly improved and he eventually began making occasional comments, pointing out places where he had climbed the rockface or that various minor family events had happened. The scenery was lovely, but very much what you would expect. Here, however, the road itself seemed more than a road should be. In some manner that was difficult to pin down, it became far more obviously a road made by gods than the road had hitherto been. Even to Tera's un-Enrolled eyes, unassisted by Oracle, this road had clearly had its possibilities shaped by Davnan hands. Yet it also did not seem artificial in the way even the artifacts of the gods usually did. It had not had its possibilities shoved into a particular direction, but shaped, cultivated, as if it had been a living thing and had been trained to one specific future, its future, a future in which it could only endure and never fail, in which no weather or normal action could ever make it stop being a road. It was not a road, really; it was The Road, the thing that could not but be road.
Tera fumblingly tried to explain what she saw, in these and other words, to Llew. He nodded slowly, with a smile, "That is good. Not everyone can see it quite so well. This road is one of the oldest roads in The City, built in the early days of First Landing. According to family history, it was handbuilt by Cumor Nine-Mury Forest Deer, one of your answers. It has never needed repair. Even Davnan roads get buried by dust over centuries, but the dust just blows off this one. It is always safe and always clear. They could build them in those days."
This reflection, when spoken out loud, seemed suddenly to make Llew moody again, and he said nothing more for a while, until he pointed out something like a spire of rock down below, rising above the trees. "That rock is The Face. They say that this side of it, despite being an entirely natural formation, used to look exactly like a Davnan face. It was said to be a sign that we belong here, although a sign from what or from whom no one would ever say. When I was a boy, though, it was starting to look rather shabby, and there was talk of shifting its possibilities back to the way it had been said to be. That turned into a big argument over whether it was an appropriate use of the Vault of The City. It was still going on when I left, but as you can see, it does not look like any kind of face at all now. Nothing was done and it has just been weathering for almost a thousand years, wearing down and wearing away." Moody again.
Tera could appreciate that coming back to his old haunts might have this effect, so she simply endured it and tried to enjoy the scene, the piney air, the picturesque ruggedness of the rocks.
It was starting to get warm, though, and she was starting to wish they were already there, when they came to a place where The Road went on around the mountain, but a path moved off and more directly up it. At the crossroads great, almost flat, slanted rock heaved up.
"Ah," said Uncle Llew, suddenly casting off his moodiness and exchanging it for delight. "The Starwatching Rock! Still almost exactly as it was. This is the beginning of the family estate. And I'll give the Embiadwe credit for having the sense and taste to recognize that the Starwatching Rock was one of the things on the estate that needed to be preserved properly. "
From this, Tera expected the house to be soon in sight, but in fact this just began a long, slow zigzagging up a switchback trail on an increasingly steep slope. It was perhaps half an hour before any buildings at all came into sight -- various sheds and servant's course. One particularly beautiful circular building Llew pointed out as the 'Brickanbreck Platform'. Only on the path turning at the Platform did the actual hall come into view.
Brickanbreck was built directly into a sheer cliff face across a deep chasm from the Platform, across which one long glittering arc of a bridge spanned. A short distance to the left side of the bridge was a small waterfall pouring slowly out of a long, thin crack in the rock and then falling in glittering drops and streams to the distant floor below. A short distance to the right was a tower graceful arching out and upward from the cliff wall. The bridge leaped out to a large ledge, about twice the length of a man's height deep and about three times that wide, right before a doorway in the wall. The doors were very wide and tall, and in their ancient wood, glittering like rubies and topazes, was inset the glyph of the Fire Serpent.
They went across the bridge, and as Llew's foot stepped on it, the doors opened, and they went inside, wagon and all. The great arch of the doorway was quite deep, almost a short tunnel, and then there was another set of great doors that swung open into the welcoming hall, which was a large room several times the size of that at Fire Serpent Hall. Great tapestries with Llew's emblem-name were hung at one end. As he helped Tera down from the wagon, Vilim servants entered the hall, and Llew set them to collecting the baggage before sending the wagon away.
"We should have something to eat," said Llew, and one of the servants showed them to the high table in the large dining hall, where they were served slices of chicken simmered in clarified butter from a sideboard, which Tera thought was quite good for Vilim food, and a tea of hibiscus and chamomile. Llew took one drink of the latter and made a face, but Tera thought it quite refreshing. All in all, it was the best Vilim meal she had ever tasted, and she noted that, despite the face, Uncle Llew drank two large cups of the tea. After the meal, Llew went down to the workshops to see their condition, and Tera was free to explore the place.
It was all quite strange. Everything was well lit, although in most rooms there were no windows, and she usually could not tell the source of the light. Brickanbreck was also much more labyrinthine than the Hall of the Fire Serpent, and there were many rooms that could only be reached through a long succession of other rooms. There was a small room near the welcoming hall in which a great clock mechanism one wall ticked away the time. She found a large room full of shelves, which she assumed was intended to be a library, but none of the shelves had any books of any kind on them. She did find, in one corner of the library, a nook with cabinets with glass-like doors, which clearly contained scrolls and loose parchments of some kind. The possibilities available to the cabinets were very strange, and Tera did not fully understand them. She supposed that the cabinets had been designed to preserve what was inside them. Perhaps also they were designed to prevent theft, because the cabinets were simply impossible to open. Usually physical shiftings like this could be overcome by physical means, if you applied enough power or force, but that required a path of available possibilities. The possibilities of being opened or broken had been so far removed from these cabinets that Tera could not, however much she strained, see where they had gone, much less how to make them available again.
Off the library there was a small room that Tera assumed was supposed to be a study of some kind, but it was empty except for a large, very stylized painting on one wall of a very Llew-like person with a smile that was almost mischievous. A small symbol on the signet ring on his hand turned out to be the emblem-name 'Forest Deer', so this was probably be the Cumor Nine-Mury who had built The Road.
What she had never really been prepared for was the sheer vastness of the place. Tera had lived all her life in large buildings, first the palace in Davir and then Fire Serpent Hall in Mizur, but both of those places seemed small and cozy compared to Brickanbreck. She went through room after room, some furnished but most empty, upstairs several levels and downstairs even more, and nothing ever seemed to come to an end. She was not afraid being lost. As a goddess, doorways were to her not merely doorways but possibilities of reaching other places, possibilities that she, unlike the Vilim, could directly read, if she tried. Yet here too there was something strange, because not all of the possibilities of the doorways were stable. This was another puzzle that Tera could not figure out. She would look at a doorway once and see that she could get back to the library from it, but then look at the same doorway again and see that there was no way through that doorway to get to the library. Perhaps that could be done by completely sealing doors, but the only person in all of Brickanbreck who could have done that was Uncle Llew, away down in the workshops. She also could not imagine what possible reason he would have for randomly sealing and unsealing doors. The only other solution she could think up was even more unimaginable, namely, that the rooms of Brickanbreck occasionally changed which other rooms they adjoined.
Eventually she tired all of this exploration and began to make her way to her bedroom for a late afternoon nap. On some level below -- with a disconcerting strangeness similar to that which infected the doorways, a room would seem in one direction to be one level below another and in the opposite direction seem to be two levels below it -- she discovered with interest a large, long room, filled with looms, and sewing equipment of various kinds, some of which she had never even seen before.
Growing up as Goddess-Princess of Davir, Tera had been taught the basics of many textile arts, since that was one of the things Princesses of Davir were expected to do, and she had always made her own clothes, since if she had not, she would have had to wear the sorts of things Vilim make. Their clothes were never quite right. But whoever had stocked this room knew the crafts and arts of cloth to a degree so far beyond Tera's own knowledge that it was practically wizardry.
She explored the weaving room for a while, and then went up to her bedroom. It was about the same size as her bedroom back home, but much more nicely furnished. It had no windows, but one of the doors connected to the tower she had seen from the outside. It had several excellent windows from which she could look across the chasm and down the mountain. It was later than she had thought, as the the light across the trees was that of the setting sun. She went all the way up the tower, looking out each window, with the topmost views being dizzyingly high, until eventually she reached a level she could not go beyond, since there was no further stair. There was a ladder to a door in the ceiling, but that door was sealed in exactly the same way the cabinets in the library had been.
Tera went back down and began to unpack, and she was still at it when Uncle Llew came by.
"I was thinking of going down to the Starwatching Rock to see the stars. Would you like to come?"
She did, so they went down. It was much faster going down than it had been coming back up. It was also all in the dark but, being Davnan, neither were likely to stumble. Uncle Llew did have a small orb that, when twisted, gave off a softly glowing light, but they did not need it going down. They also had soft blankets that they laid down after they had clambered up the Rock.
They laid back, looking at the stars for a long while. It was a good night for star-viewing, clean and clear.
Finally Llew said, "Your mother and I used to come down here all the time. When I was a boy, I would look up at the skies, and it seemed like infinite freedom. A universe of possibilities beyond imagining. I suppose it never stopped being that, but later it always seemed like looking at the stars is looking at freedom from behind prison bars. A universe of possibilities that are not available and can never be reached."
"But we came from the stars," said Tera. "That was what mother always said. We sailed the seas of the heavens from star to star to star."
"Yes," said Uncle Llew. "Our people once lived among the stars. That much of our history is known."
"And we came to this world in ships from the stars. They say we were a traveling folk until we discovered the Vilim, a sad and desperate people, and we took pity on them. We landed and became their gods and gave them the ways of the gods."
There was a palpable pause. "Did your mother tell you that?" Llew asked in a cautious tone.
"No," said Tera, "it was in one of the books you had me read. I forget which."
"Hmmm," said Uncle Llew. "Well, it is not quite right, but we did indeed land our ship at First Landing and make ourselves gods of the Vilim. There was only one, whose name was The City of the Gods, although there was a smaller survey ship attached to it that ended up at North Landing. The ship was wholly dismantled, though, as was the survey ship. The Oracle, the Engine, the Vaults, the essential elements of the Platform network -- they are all repurposed parts of the ship. We do not know how to make it again." He reached up his hand as if to grasp the stars, and closed his hand. "We sailed the heavens once, but now they are closed to us." He let his fist drop to his chest.
They lay there a long while, looking up at the stars, occasionally talking of this and that, and then, somewhere after midnight, went back up to Brickanbreck.
to be continued
