Wintermoon

island.

“Every night of the full moon you lay here,” lamented Seleti.

“We tried to wake you—the moon was full for seven nights!”—Draisis—“But you never stirred.”

“And the old priest, the one with the pet snakes he names after jewels—he said we must let you slumber. You were so young, he said,” affrontedly added Erma, “you would certainly see in your lifetime several more such seasons of seven moons.”

“You missed all the festivities,” elaborated Oani.

“Jugglers—magicians—” Vlis.

“One of them made a bridge over the sky, all like precious stones—green, red, mauve, yellow—” Tuyamel. “Though I knew it was all a trick.”

Clirando lay on the narrow pallet, in the cell of the temple in Seventh Village.

Her heart beat leadenly.

It had been—all of it—a dream?

And yet, she had been enabled to throw away the negative and hateful things. Only proper grief and regret remained. Except…Zemetrios.

If all this had been a dream—including even, as it had, transcripts of actual external things—what had Zemetrios been? His thoughts, his personality—his mouth, his arms?

She lay a few days in the little Temple of the Maiden. Then, when she had recovered enough, Clirando roamed through its courts, admiring columns and the flowering vines on its walls—for summer had continued uninterrupted in the world. Here and there, meeting others, she mentioned a particular name. “Zemetrios?” they asked, the mild priestesses. “Warrior,” they said to her, not unkindly, “no one may be told anything more than the minimum of any other here. This is Moon Isle. For those like yourself, or the man you mention, what each does and experiences is a private matter. Only they and the gods can know.”

So they would tell her nothing. And was there anything to learn?

Everything else had been her dream, so why not this golden man? She had wanted a lover. Tranced or asleep she had had one.

And now she knew for sure she loved him? Well then. She loved a figment of her dreams. She would not be the first or last.

Two days following the celebration of the Seven Nights, which all of them repeatedly reminded her she had missed, Clirando walked around the village.

It was not at all like the one she had seen when asleep. The buildings were clean and garishly painted. The three or four temples were garlanded, and that of the Maiden had walls of deep red patterned with silver crescents.

Just as she had heard, priests and priestesses thronged the Isle, and lingering warrior bands were there too traders and performers, but now the processions and shows were over. A great packing up was going on. A great leave-taking.

And neither was it any use to question these people, let alone the villagers, who seemed educated in coy evasions. There seemed too a polite, unspoken wish that visitors should go. It began to make her band uneasy, and soon enough Clirando, as well.

I threw off my guilt. I must throw off this also.

She slept always soundly at night. She did not dream, she thought, at all, as if she had used all her dreaming up. Would she ever see the ghost of Araitha again? Or him—would she ever see Zemetrios again? No. Never.

On the fourth day they set off along the forest track. It was rather as Clirando had visualized it, but then her girls had carried her this way. Now animals and birds abounded. A statue marked either end of the road, island gods, nicely carved. Clirando thrust her introspection from her. She acted out being her ordinary self, calling it back to her. It came.

Meanwhile her girls were so attentive and careful of her that Clirando eventually lost her temper. “Leave off treating me like some fragile shard of ancient pottery! What will you do on the boat? Wrap a shawl over my legs and pat me on the head?”

There under the sun-sparkling pines, she wrestled Tuyamel and Vlis, and threw them both, and hugged them all. They danced about there, laughing, embracing, loud and boisterous as eleven-year-olds.

Next day they reached the shore and rowed out to the galley. By sunfall they were on the way to Amnos, and life as they remembered it.

Epilogue

Paper

The windblown sky was full of birds that morning.

Summer had stayed late in Amnos, giving way at last to a harsh, bleached winter.

Now spring tides freshened the coast, and men and beasts were casting the torpor of the cold months.

Clirando had been with Eshti, her old servant woman, to the fish market, and coming back Eshti bolted straight to the kitchen with her prizes. Clirando climbed up to the roof of her house. She was watching the antics of the house doves circling over the courtyard trees.

And out of her inner eyes, from nowhere, Araitha came, and stood silent in her mind. Clirando recalled how she had stood in the yard too laying her curse, then turning away from shadow to light to shadow—or had it been light to shadow to light….

Unlike her companion, her dream lover, Clirando had had no dialogue with her dead friend to set anything right between them.

Araitha therefore might always haunt her. No longer injurious, only bitter. It could not be helped. At least her curse was spent.

All winter Clirando had carried on her life as she had in the past. If her mood was sometimes uneven, she hid it. Mourning the loss of a dead comrade was one thing, but to mourn the loss of someone who had not been real was wretched and bewildering. Sometimes she even mocked herself. But now—now it was spring.

Clirando turned. Eshti had come up on the roof, puffing from the steps, wiping fish scales off on her apron.

“What now?” Clirando inquired. “Has dinner swum away?”

“No, lady. The priestesses of Parna have sent for you.”

Clirando’s thoughts scattered apart and back together in concern. She sprang downstairs to fetch her cloak.

In the shrine by the main temple hall, one of the two priestesses who received Clirando was the middle-aged woman who had dispatched her to the Isle.

Clirando saluted both of them. She said, “Have I committed some error, Mothers?”

The two of them gazed at Clirando. Only the older priestess smiled. “Not at all. There are matters which have just come to our attention. Now spring has driven the ice from the harbors, ships are moving, and letters have arrived in Amnos.”

Clirando nodded. Though familiar with books, she had seldom seen a letter. Next moment she saw two. Normally they would be of folded cloth, written on, then waxed, Both of these letters were of fine paper, made from Lybirican reeds.

“A ship’s captain brought them here this morning,” said the other priestess. “One is for you, Clirando. The other—”

“The other was sent to us by one of the Wise Women of Moon Isle. She is over a hundred years of age, but she lives sometimes in a hut on a headland, and still she weaves cloth, for her eyes stay clear and her fingers agile.”

“I met her,” said Clirando. She checked. “Or thought I did.”