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.
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.”
“And lost,” the other grated. “I have ruined it. Besides, what do I care? Give it me back, the wine—” But Yazon’s voice dropped away into sobs. He sank down on a couch. And Zemetrios seated himself beside him. “No, my friend. No wine. You’ll have to kill me first.”
Zemetrios. His face was weary as that of a man who had been entirely sleepless for months, yet also hard and resolute. Yazon—he could be no one else—was speaking now of horrible secrets of drunkenness. But his eyes at last were growing sane and sad.
As if some god had told her—Sattu, perhaps, the little god of domestic things—Clirando seemed to know it all.
This naturally was not what had taken place in the world, at Rhoia. Instead, the house of Zemetrios’s father had been magically rebuilt here on the slopes of the moon, by some spirit or spell. And now, in this new reality, Zemetrios—having given up his post in the king’s legions and sent all his servants, women and men both, away to safety—cared for Yazon, striving to cure him, to make him whole.
That then must have been in Zemetrios’s hidden mind. Not that he had killed Yazon in rage—but that he had not devoted his life, however briefly or lengthily, to helping Yazon. Not with money or shelter, but with the comradeship and dedication they had each shown the other in war. Now Zemetrios wished to atone.
It was very plain that Zemetrios believed utterly this situation truly existed.
Clirando did not know if she could, or should, have any part in such a scenario. But the previous bliss of her own liberation now filled her with the desire to assist in whatever way was possible. To assist, that was, Zemetrios.
She spoke his name. Could he hear her?
Yes. He looked across at her instantly. His face, which had seemed older than its twenty-four years, was suddenly as she recalled. A smile lit his mouth and eyes.
“And here is my beautiful wife, Clirando.”
The other man—ghost—illusion—whatever he might be—also looked up at her. And he too gave her a smile. It was not corrupt, only distant. Some half-forgotten good-manners from an earlier time when he had been himself. And she wondered then if perhaps really this was Yazon, come back from death to undo this knot of pain and anger, as needful for his phantasmal life as it was for Zemetrios’s mortal one.
“And I warn you, Yazon,” said Zemetrios, with amused lightness, “try nothing stupid with her. She’ll kill you and have your skin sewn up as a sunshade.”
His
Zemetrios got up, came to her and kissed her gently on the lips. “Things will be better now you’re here.”
Only Clirando marked accurately the passing of the last three nights of full moon. Though perhaps she did not do it as accurately as she meant to, because she had to get her bearings from the rise and fall of the blue-green earth-world above.
In the house, apparently, months went by.
She herself was not conscious of these. Her time frame functioned very differently, and the scenes that were enacted, and in which she sometimes took a small part, were fragments of some vaster drama, played clearly for Zemetrios alone.
She went along with everything, knowing he did what he must. His penance and self-examination were longer than hers, deeper and darker though less savage.
In the segments of events that Clirando witnessed, Zemetrios hauled Yazon back to sober health. Zemetrios was by turns dominant and consoling, as appropriate. He never gave up, and gradually the physical ghost-image of Yazon responded. Then Clirando would find the two of them at friendly, noisy practice with swords or bows, or wrestling, eating, talking. They played Lybirican chess. They would discuss the army days, and reminisced away the nights that somehow came and went inside the outer time which she alone observed. They would look up at the blue orb in the sky, and call it the moon.
Of course, Zemetrios never separately sought her. It seemed she was tucked away somewhere in his illusory life in the house. Mainly, she was peripheral to his task. Sometimes he did not even see or hear her as she entered a room only a few paces from him. He only ever fully saw Yazon, the one in fact who probably was not there.
She began to think Yazon was not a ghost, working out the dilemma of its life. No, he was solely a conjuring of Zemetrios’s mind. And of Moon Isle.
She came to believe all this would end at the finish of the moon’s Seventh Night. Till then she could do nothing but be present, offering her slight participation—a touch, a cup filled from the well in the courtyard. Every
