Dying of the Light

Kavalar boy. The eyn-kethi are the breeding women, the perpetual mothers of the holdfast, and a normal child is not supposed to associate with them any more than he has to. When Jaan was older he spent all his time alone, exploring caves and abandoned mines in the mountains. Safely away from his holdfast- brothers. I don't blame him. He was always an object of torment, essentially friendless, until he met Garse. Who is notably younger, but still wound up as Jaan's protector through the later stages of his childhood. Eventually that all changed. When Jaan approached the age when he would be subject to the code duello, he turned his attention to weaponry and mastered it very quickly. He is really a fantastic study; today he is terribly fast and considered deadly, better even than Garse, whose skill is mainly instinctual.

'It wasn't always like that, however. Anyway, when it came time for Jaantony to choose a name, he had two great heroes, but he did not dare name either one to the highbonds. Neither of them were Ironjades, and worse, both were semi-pariahs, villains of Kavalar history, charismatic leaders whose causes had lost and then been subjected to generations of oral abuse. So Jaan sort of shoved their names together and juggled the sounds around until the product looked like an old family name imported from Earth. The highbonds accepted it without a thought. It was only his chosen name, the least important part of his identity. It's the part that comes last, after all.'

She frowned. 'Which is the point of this whole story. Jaantony Ironjade Vikary came to Avalon, and he was mostly Jaantony Ironjade. Except that Avalon is a surname-conscious world, and there he found that he was mostly Vikary. The Academy registered him under that name, and his instructors called him Vikary, and it was a name he had to live by for two years. Pretty soon he became Jaan Vikary, in addition to being Jaantony Ironjade. I think he rather liked it. He's always tried to stay Jaan Vikary ever since, although it was not easy after we returned to High.Kavalaan. To the Kavalars he'll always be Jaantony.'

'Where did he get all the other names?' Dirk found himself asking, despite himself. Her story fascinated him and seemed to offer new insights into what Jaan Vikary had said that dawn, up on the roof.

'When we were married, he brought me back to Ironjade with him and became a bighbond, automatically a member of the highbond council,' she said. 'That put a 'high' in his name, and gave him the right to own private property independent of the holdfast, and to make religious sacrifices, and to lead his kethi, his holdfast-brothers, in war. So he got a war name, sort of a rank, and a religious name. Once those kinds of names were very important. Not so much anymore, but the customs linger.'

'I see,' Dirk said, although he didn't, not completely. The Kavalars seemed to set unusually great store on marriage. 'What has this got to do with us?'

'A lot,' Gwen said, becoming very serious again. 'When Jaan reached Avalon and people started calling him Vikary, he changed. He became Vikary, a hybrid of his own iconoclastic idols. That's what names can do, Dirk. And that was our downfall. I loved you, yes. Much. I loved you, and you loved Jenny.'

'You were Jenny!'

'Yes, no. Your Jenny, your Guinevere. You said that, over and over again. You called me those names as often as you called me Gwen, but you were right. They were your names. Yes, I liked it. What did I know of names or naming? Jenny is pretty enough, and Guinevere has the glow of legend. What did I know?

'But I learned, even if I never had the words for it. The problem was that you loved Jenny-only Jenny wasn't me. Based on me, perhaps, but mostly she was a phantom, a wish, a dream you'd fashioned all on your own. You fastened her on me and loved us both, and in time I found myself becoming Jenny. Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be. All truth is in naming, and all lies as well, for nothing distorts like a false name can, a false name that changes the reality as well as the seeming.

'I wanted you to love me, not her. I was Gwen Delvano, and I wanted to be the best Gwen Delvano I could be, but still myself. I fought being Jenny, and you fought to keep her, and never understood. And that was why I left you.' She finished in a cool, even voice, her face a mask, and then she looked away from him again.

And he did understand, at last. For seven years he never had, but now, briefly, he grasped it. This then, he thought, was why she sent the whisperjewel. Not to call him back, no, not that. But to tell him, finally, why she had sent him away. And there was a sense to it. His anger had suddenly faded into weary melancholy. Sand ran cold and unheeded through his fingers.

She saw his face, and her voice softened. 'I'm sorry, Dirk,' she said. 'But you called me Jenny again. And I had to tell you the truth. I have never forgotten, and I can't imagine you have, and I've thought of it over the years. It was so good, when it was good, I kept thinking. How could it go wrong? It scared me, Dirk.

It really scared me. I thought, If we could go wrong, Dirk and I, then nothing is sure, nothing can be counted on. That fear crippled me for two years. But finally, with Jaan, I understood. And now it came out, the answer I found. I'm sorry if it is a painful answer for you. But you had to know.'

'I had hoped…'

'Don't,' she warned. 'Don't start it, Dirk. Not again. Don't even try. We're over. Recognize that. We'll kill ourselves if we try.'

He sighed, blocked at every turn. Through all the long conversation, he had never even touched her. He felt helpless. 'I take it that Jaan doesn't call you Jenny?' he asked finally with a bitter smile.

Gwen laughed. 'No. As a Kavalar, I have a secret name, and he calls me that. But I've taken the name, so there's no problem. It is my name.'

He only shrugged. 'You're happy, then?'

Gwen rose and brushed loose sand from her legs. 'Jaan and I-well, there is a lot that is hard to explain. You were a friend once, Dirk, and maybe my best friend. But you've been gone a long time. Don't press too hard. Right now I need a friend. I talk to Arkin, and he listens and tries, but he can't help much. He's too involved, too blind about Kavalars and their culture. Jaan and Garse and I have problems, yes, if that's what you're asking. But it's hard to speak of them. Give me time. Wait, if you will, and be my friend again.'

The lake was very still in the perpetual red-gray sunset. He watched the water, thick with its spreading scabs of fungus, and he flashed back to the canal on Braque. Then she did need him, he thought. Perhaps it was not as he had hoped, but there was still something he could give her. He clung to that tightly; he wanted to give, he had to give. 'Whatever,' he said as he rose. 'There's a lot I don't understand, Gwen. Too much. I keep thinking that half the conversation of the past day has gone past me, and I don't even know the right questions to ask. But I can try. I owe you, I guess. I owe you for something or other.'

'You'll wait?'

'And listen, when the time comes.'

'Then I'm glad you've come,' she said. 'I needed someone, an outsider. You're well timed, Dirk. A luck.'

How strange, he thought, to send off for a luck. But he said nothing. 'Now what?'

'Now let me show you the forest. That was why we came here, after all.'

They picked up their sky-scoots and walked away from the silent lake, toward the thick of the waiting forest. There was no trail to follow, but the underbrush was light and walking easy, with many paths to choose from. Dirk was quiet, studying the woods around him, his shoulders slumped and his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Gwen did all the talking; the little there was. When she spoke, her voice was low and reverent as a child's whisper in a great cathedral. But mostly she just pointed and let him look.

The trees around the lake were all familiar friends that Dirk had seen a thousand times before. For this was the so-called forest of home, the wood that man carried with him from sun to sun and planted on all the worlds he walked. It had its roots on Old Earth, the homeforest, but it was not all of Earth. On each new planet humanity found new favorites, plants and trees that soon were as much a part of the blood as those that came out from Earth in the beginning. And when the starships moved on, seedlings from those worlds went with the twice- uprooted grandchildren of Terra, and so the homeforest grew.

Dirk and Gwen passed through that forest slowly, as others had walked through the same forest on a dozen other worlds. And they knew the trees. Sugar maples there, and fire maples, and mockoak and oak itself, and silverwood and poison pine and asten. The outworlders had brought them here even as their ancestors had brought them to the Fringe, to add a touch of home, wherever home might be.

But here these woods looked different.

It was the light, Dirk realized after a time. The drizzling light that leaked so meager from the sky, the wan red gloom that passed for Worlorn's day. This was a twilight forest. In the slowness of time-in a far-extended autumn-it was dying.