The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) Read online

  the darkness turned...

  They pursued. With the heads of ken’nu-wolves they pursued. On wings of eve they pursued, creatures with the heads of ken’nu-wolves and the feet of horses, sickly yellow hooves gleaming in the dark. She ran for her life, for her soul. Their eyes glowed as they pursued and they laughed with the voices of women.

  She ran toward the light, the safe, lovely light. Their hot, putrid breath scored her back, spurred her heels as she ran through the murky sand, and she leaped into the circle of light...

  the light turned...

  It was cold and green, that light, dim and lifeless, not like the warm, golden brilliance of Av... And at its center danced a creature, like a man blended with the attributes of a yora, covered from head to heels with the quills of porcupines. He looked at her with dead eyes, eyes that were a total, dull white, eyes that held cold malice and hate. He gyrated in the light, his head hardly seeming to move as he twisted and leaped to a wild, raucous beat. His dance held her enthralled and his eyes burned through her. In his eyes she read her fate. She turned through liquid light to flee the man-thing and his terrible dance - just as he turned and whipped his head and arms back, releasing arm-length, razor sharp, poison-filled quills. They thudded into her back, her legs, her arms. She fell. Sickly yellow laughter rang all around her as she fell...

  the darkness turned to light...

  She was falling. Something caught at her ankle, twisting it, and she cried out, but she continued to fall. The laughter echoed through the darkness into which she fell. She landed on her back, driving the quills into her, through her...

  darkness turned from light...

  “Well, you’re not dead,” a deep silver voice said and cold hands, hands like ice touched her. She tried to scream but could not, tried to see but did not. “At least not yet, anyway,” the voice continued.

  The hands of ice turned her paralyzed body over, pulled one of the flaming quills out. Again she tried to scream - again her body betrayed her, not even permitting her that release.

  “Don’t raise such a fuss,” the silver voice said into the dark as the hands pulled out another quill. “These needles are only a quarter of a digit long. You were lucky. I’ve seen some grow as long as two digits.” The voice paused, then added, “Of course, you could have chosen a less poisonous variety of stinging nettle to fall in; boro’thrista would not have been my first choice.”

  She tried to tell the voice that they were quills, not needles, and that they had been thrown at her by a man/yora beast, but the voice did not seem to hear. The hands pulled a quill out of her heart. She heard herself scream this time, and then the darkness became a solid thing that closed in around her, silencing the voice and numbing the hands of ice...

  …and the darkness turned...

  She floated in a boiling sea, and it scalded her when she moved, scorched her eyes when she tried to open them. The sea was red with her blood. She was sinking, drowning, drowning in bitter red, sinking in boiling blood. She thrashed about, coughing, the bitter water filling her mouth, her lungs. The seaweed tried to tangle her and pull her down. She fought the stinging strands, clawing to get away, blind with redness. She was drowning...

  The ice hands touched her, and she struck out at them, thinking that they would pull her further into the boiling sea. But the hands held her, dragged her out of the sea and the silver voice tasted of peppermint and sage. The deadly sea came out of her lungs, her stomach, and the hands of ice touched her everywhere, leaving behind their coldness, soothing her fevered, burned skin. She reached out blindly and felt the arms that were attached to the hands. The hands let go, leaving her to the boiling sea that tried to suck her back into itself. She clutched after the hands, huddled against the body, cried as the sea surrounded her, creeping over her head, devouring her feet. She cried out that it burned, and she pleaded to the hands to save her. The hands picked her up and ran with her, away from the searing sea of fire and blood. It pursued, sometimes covering her completely with its licking waves of flame, but the hands did not stop, did not drop her or permit her to be swept away.

  The hands, with the sound of hooves striking the earth, took her to the shores of another sea, a sea of ice, and plunged in with her. The voice of peppermint again touched her lips, spread over her tongue, sought to clear away the boiling in her throat, her lungs, her belly.

  Jeliya held fast to the hands, begged them not to let the sea of red take her.

  “Don’t worry,” whispered the voice of silver over the roar of the sea, “I won’t let you go...”

  the light turned to darkness...

  The Beloved stepped from the cold dark, a pool of light in the endless eternity of nothing.

  She cringed, afraid, the darkness so void of substance that it seemed to tear at her being with its nothingness. But then that Other moved closer, calling to her in a voice of golden vastness; a voice so sweet that it made her forget all else. She looked up into the face of the Beloved and smiled at His welcome...

  And He smiled back...

  The hands of warm ice touched her from far away and the silver voice from seas of gray and claret called to her also, despairing that she should go further, that she should go to the arms of the Beloved. She glanced back, uneasy, then looked to the placid expression of the Beloved who stood motionless now, neither beckoning nor urging away, neither challenging the voice nor moving forward to claim her nor turning away back to the cold darkness. The silver voice called again from the empty darkness behind her, closer, louder this time, fueled by desperation. Jeliya took another step forward, to the golden glow. Then she shuddered as a force from behind took hold of her, made her look back, kept her from advancing to the alluring light ahead. She quivered with strange conflict, turned; and then an explosion of heady silver, radiant pleasure seared through her with sweet fire, the touch of brilliance piercing her with a thousand needles of ecstasy. And from out of the heart of the blossoming expansion of silver light stepped a figure of glowing darkness, a darkness hard and real and full of life, totally unlike the ungiving cold that had gripped her before. The dark arms enfolded her in a loving embrace, the silver light blinding her to all else, the touch burning away all thought or feeling save orgasmic connection. Union. Oneness.

  The dark presence sighed her name, drew her back, the silver radiance around her cutting off almost everything else from view, even, when she looked back, the sadly smiling face of the Beloved...

  light turned to the flow of darkness...

  The trushi birds pecked at her eyes with red-hot beaks. She shrieked and clawed at her face, trying to catch them or drive them away but the devilish birds eluded her hands and kept stabbing her eyes. She cried out in anguish and threw her head from side to side, but the birds always found her eyes, pecking, clawing, pecking...

  The hands of ice held her wrists, leaving her to the mercy of the demonic birds. She screamed and fought, but the hands held her; then a cool cloth covered her face and chased the trushi away. Her eyes burned still, but the dampness in the cloth seeped under her lids, soothed her, and took the burning itch away.

  The hands refreshed the cloth and the voice of peppermint water touched her lips. She drank deeply of it. The hands stroked her face, kept refreshing the cloth until she slept...

  and the darkness turned...

  The gila cat sat back, blinking feline eyes at her as she pounded corn in a stone bowl and mixed in sand.

  “Have you found the cause?” it asked, licking its whiskers absently.

  She shook her head and kept pounding the corn into meal and mixing in sand.

  “How do you think to find the cause?” it asked.

  She shrugged, added more sand. She took up the golden half globe in her lap and added it to the bowl, began to pound it.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the gila cat said, then sighed. “But I suppose you have no choice, do you? It must break sometime.”

  She tried to stop but the pestle kept pounding and grinding, an
d she watched with terror as the amber hemisphere began to crack. Then someone took a piece of rotting seaweed dripping red and began to choke her...

  light turned...

  The crown rested heavy on her head and the purple and gold mantle weighted down her shoulders. She faced the Great Laine filled with bones and wreckage, and dark shadows moved in the dim corners of the great room, shadows that slowly advanced on her, pushing the darkness before them so that she could not see their numbers. At her feet lay a shattered half globe, luminescent as amber, and in her lap, a thing that played with a shard of the fractured hemisphere, crumbling it to dust. Voices whispered accusingly at her.

  “You failed,” one said maliciously in her ear. She turned her head to find the speaker.

  “We’re all dead now,” another baited. She opened her mouth to protest but another choked off her words.

  “Our land is dust and ashes. Hail High Queen of ashes!”

  “I tried!” she cried out to the shades of her people. “I found it!” she held up the thing on her lap. “See, I found the cause!”

  “But not in time,” a cryptic voice said, sardonic. “You still failed. You failed and we paid for your failure.”

  “No!” she moaned in despair, falling to her knees, not seeing the darkness creeping up behind her. “No! I will find it in time to save you!”

  “What’s dead is dead,” a voice like her mother’s sneered. “You cannot undo the past, little princess. You cannot change the future.”

  “The future is not set in stone!” she denied, but the voices still jeered, distracting her, and then the darkness with its hidden host closed over her with midnight jaws...

  darkness....

  turned...

  Jeliya woke up in absolute darkness, coughing and choking, her lungs closing up. Her head throbbed with each spasm. She moaned, and began coughing again, breath rasping, her body trying to clear the blocked air passages of the fluid constricting them. She felt hot and weak and her head hurt savagely, as if every nerve ending had been pounded to a pulp. She groaned again, labored to breathe, was gripped by another fit of coughing.

  Something clattered around, sounding like the hoofsteps of a kati’yori. She tried to sit up, fought for a single breath, could not get enough air. When she began coughing once more the hooved creature came into the place where she was and cool hands touched her. She started, but continued to cough, tasted blood. A strong arm raised her up.

  “Try to drink this, little ky’pen’dati,” a silver voice from out of a dream said, and the smell of peppermint came to her from the darkness. She felt a bowl touch her lips and she tried to drink, but coughed instead and choked, came up sputtering.

  “Gently - slowly. It is alright, try again.” The second sip was more successful, and with the third her breathing began to ease and her lungs opened. She gasped for breath, feeling as if she had been trampled by a herd of yonido bulls.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice hoarse from the soreness of her throat. The hands, in the middle of helping her lie back, flexed in surprise.

  “You spoke,” the voice said in wonderment. “Can it be that you are over the delirium?”

  “Delirium?” she echoed, wondering dully why her eyes and head hurt so much and why it was so dark. A general feeling of un-wellbeing pervaded her. She grimaced and groaned, covered her aching eyes and felt for the first time the thin swath of silk covering them. Her face felt hot and she could count every vein in her eyelids, rasping her eyes like a layer of fine sandpaper. The hands touched her forehead and the sides of her face, cool against her fevered skin. She pressed them close - they felt good. She wondered who the hands belonged to.

  “Yes, delirium. You’ve been very sick, dear one. But the fever has finally broken enough that you are out of immediate danger. How do you feel?” the voice asked. She made a face and the voice chuckled.

  “I feel nauseous and my head hurts to the Lora’lons,” she whispered.

  “Well, I am glad that you are at last coherent.”

  “Are you an ol’bey’one - a healer?” she asked, her voice not sounding like her own.

  “I do have some talents in the ways of healing and medicine. Are you hungry at all?”

  Her stomach did a slow roll to the left at the thought of food. She bit her lip and shook her head, carefully. She could not remember ever feeling this bad, not even when she had caught the coughing sickness or the swelling of the neck glands as a child. Not ever to the point where she was repulsed by food. She swallowed in a throat gone hot and painfully dry.

  “I understand; but I want you to try to get this down in spite of that. It’s a very light and mild broth - it shouldn’t upset your stomach too much. Besides, it has a medicine in it for your eyes.”

  She nodded in acquiescence, instantly regretted it as queasiness fought up her throat and turned everything from her mouth to her stomach bitter green.

  “Oh sweet Ans’ra, I -”she moaned, “think I - I’m going - to be sick!” and clutched at her belly. “What’s wrong with me?” she cried, but anything else she was going to say was overwhelmed by a dry heave. She fought it, tensing her whole body as she clamped down on the rising taste of bile. The effort made her head explode with red, dull starbursts of pain, grinding at her eyes and temples in time to her pulse. The agony sharpened with each heartbeat until she screamed in torment, vomiting forgotten, wanting to tear her head off and give it away. One scream was all she managed. Her voice almost instantly gave out; soon she could only whimper and groan as the pain became more and more intolerable. The hands touched her and the voice tried to calm her, but the pain was simply too much. The hands grabbed her wrists when she tried to beat her fists against her temples in an irrational attempt to mask out the pain, even if with another, different kind of pain.

  “Calm down, you’re only making it worse by thrashing about!” the voice said, but she was beyond reason. The hands pinned her to the bed. She threw her head from side to side, hot tears leaking from her eyes and croaks coming from her raw, tortured throat.

  “Need lemon grass and tokba,” the voice said as the hands continued to hold her in a bruising grip. A renewed slash of pain sliced through her eyes, ripped red in the darkness and she howled like an anguished soul. The voice sighed. “No time. I can’t leave her like this. I didn’t want to do it this way...”

  Cool fingers touched her head and the voice murmured softly.

  “Cool as starlight

  Cool as mist,

  Cool as palm from unclenched fist:

  Dull the heat,

  Ease the strain,

  Cool to blue the red heart’s pain.”

  Jeliya froze in mid-thrash. Her limbs flopped back to the bed, no longer responding to her tormented brain. The hands then covered her eyes and the feeling of coolness from them seeped down through the blind, through her lids, her eyes, into her brain where it spread like sweet clover and gently, inexorably smothered the pain out. Mouth open in a gasp petrified, Jeliya hovered on the dividing line between euphoria and blazing agony, the consuming pain, but the coolness pushed her further and farther away from agony and into floating beds of mint and nutmeg. Her senses were set adrift, totally detached, with false lights and calm, cool colors forming swirling patterns on her retinas. Her body, far away, relaxed totally. She took a deep breath of mint and clover with a touch of honey, sighed, felt a smile touch distant lips.

  “Is that better?” the voice asked her, floating in a silver-green sphere beside her.

  “Oh, yes, thank you. It is very nice,” she heard her voice murmur dreamily, also beside her in a golden sphere. The thought for some reason struck her as funny. She heard herself giggle, which was also funny. A far away part of her knew that something was not quite right with the way she was feeling, but she could not figure it out.

  The owner of the voice looked down at his patient, chagrined. He had not wanted to use that method to help her, but he was afraid that if he had left her alone to get stron
ger medicine she would have hurt herself. What he had done was a last resort, but there had been no other course. With deep regret he picked up the bowl of cooling broth. It would not taste as good now, but in her present condition he doubted very seriously she would care.

  “Drink,” he said, supporting her head and raising the calabash to her lips.

  “All right,” she said, laughed as some missed her mouth and dribbled down her chin. She drank about half the bowl, then pushed the rest away. She curled up after he wiped her chin clean and with a contented sigh fell asleep.

  He pulled the covers up around her and left her to sleep off her euphoria.

  CHAPTER II

  slowly the light turned...

  The light of Av’dawn was just turning, driving the wild dance of the stars and the moons before it, green lances tearing through the music of eve.

  With the vanquishing of the last shred of eve and the turning of Av’dawn, the Queens all assembled in the Great Laine, the place of gathering for the royalty of Ava’Lona.

  Soku sul Doan arrived at the Great Laine from her Lan’mba half a san’chron before the commencement ceremonies of the Bolorn’toyo. One of the last Queens to take her place, she av’tunned to the Westernmost receiving suite of lains within the outlying compounds of the Great Laine. The av’tun, a tunnel of light capable of bridging vast distances, was a construct of her own magic, her av’rita.

  Up two san’chrons before dawn, Soku had had just enough time to offer Av’dawn praise and perform the Rite of Solu, bathe, dress, and last, have her Dakua crown redone, before her required arrival at the hall. The fancy headdress consisted of her own long, tightly spiraled hair tamed in long guinne. Her hair was arranged in to the traditional crown of her Tribe using bands of gold and Doan cloth of her Tribe colors.