An Alien Light Chapter Two    Between its banks the river was rising, a dark rush of water moving in two directions at once. A Firstnight breeze carried the scent of mountain water to the Ayrys, motionless beside her fire. Built on a wide, bare shelf of rock between the river and t he upland veld, the fire could easily be spotted from the surrounding hills, a beacon in the deepening gloom. Such a fire for a lone, inept traveler was stupidity, or defiance, or both. Ayrys no longer cared.    A knife, which she did not know how to use, lay on the rock beside her, along with a lumpy bottle of blue glass. Small Moon has risen, veiling the veld in cold white light. The vast stirrings of the veld as threenight began, which a few hours ago sent her scurrying wide-eyed for the safety of the barren rock ledge, seemed to have finally ended. What next? Town-bred, she didn't know. Dusk had been bizarre enough.    Just beyond the rock ledge, a huge kemburi plant, which had sprawled quietly soaking up sunshine all threeday, had snaked vast spongy tendrils into a dense ball against the coming cold. One tendril had curled around some small, ragged-eared animal Ayry s could not identify, a small pocket of moving heat, and drawn it inward; the animal had screamed only once.    Beyond the kemburi, spikebushes had fired sudden, sharp, spore-carrying thorns onto the scrubby grass. Small hectic wildflowers, having grown feverishly in the glare from the Firstmorning to the Lastlight, just as quickly folder bright petals under spi ny outer leaves. Something unseen sprayed pungent moldy scent onto the wind, and something else unseen had responded with crackling of twigs. The whole veld had folded in on itself against the night, a dull green spiny skin crawling over the rock beneath, and once those heaving vegetable hours had begun, no animal howled or moved.    They were moving again now.    Wearily, Ayrys moved from the fire to the riverbank, knelt, and thrust her hand downward to grope for the blobs of clay she had stuck under the overhang of rock. Both blobs were still there; the river, then, was not rising as fast as she had feared. It would not flood -- at least, not this portion of it -- until threenight had passed. She could wait here, if she chose, until Firstmorning.    Why should she wait? In a few more hours, Big Moon would rise, providing enough light to walk; there was no reason to wait. There was no reason not to wait.    Embry . . . Eyes squeezed shut, hand still cleaving the cold water, Ayrys waited out this fresh rush of pain. It would pass -- that she had already learned in her three days of exile. It always passed. She dug the nails of one hand into the wrist of the other and waited.    The fire had burned low. Ayrys rebuilt it, skillfully feeding in bits of grass and twig, making themost of each scrap and conserving the rest. A pile of woody scrub lay beside another pile of the long, fork-tipped grass that inexplicably grew in some p laces on the veld and not in others. A good fire builder, she thought derisively -- all glassblowers were good fire builders. It was the first thing she had done well I her stumbling exile from Delysia.    When the fire again burned brightly, Ayrys squatted on her haunches and stared into it. Firelight slid over the curves of the blue bottle. On the dark veld the grass rustled, smelling of thronbush and some sharp, thin reek Ayrys couldn't identify. Beyo nd the veld stretched more veld, always slopping downward, till somewhere three days behind her lay the wide valley sloping to the sea. And Delysia. And Jels. And ahead, higher in the mountains . . .    Something with four wings and a huge, bobbing head flew an arm's length above her head. In the distance a kreedog, night-prowling and vicious, howled at the cold moon.    A sound like jaws snapping, and a scream.    Ayrys rolled from her blanket and scrambled to her feet. For a sickening moment, not fully awake, she didn't know where she was, or why. The scream rose again, something flashed white in the gloom just beyond the rocky ledge, and Ayrys sprinted forward . Halfway to the kemburi, her mind, coming from farther away, caught up to her muscles. The scream hadn't sounded the high pitch of fear; it was something else.    The kemburi, hidden in waist-high grass, had sensed heat and opened up its ropy vines. Encircled by gray-green coils near the rocky ledge, a woman fought.    She slashed at the plant with her knife and screamed again, a cry high enough to hurt eardrums and with enough relish in it to stop Ayrys short, disbelieving: The woman was enjoying her battle with the kemburi!    Two thick, spongy vines held her left leg, while more of the coils crept toward her. Slowed by the night cold, the bulk of the kemburi moved slowly as it shifted toward the warmth of the woman's body. It would not shift in tie; already the prep had sev ered one coil and begun on the other with a warrior's practiced blows.    Warrior -- she was a Jelite sister-warrior.    Ayrys tightened her grip on the knife that she had snatched up, without looking, in her half-sleep. But her grogginess had betrayed her; she held in her hand not the knife but the blue glass bottle.    A fierce slash severed the second vine. The Jelite's crossbow lay strapped uselessly to her back, but she didn't need the crossbow to win this battle. With the same motion that cut her free of the second vine, the woman turned toward Ayrys, swinging her face into the moonlight. She was Jelite and she was smiling, a smile of bared, bone-white teeth. She stepped forward.    "Delysian," she said softly. "Now you, Delysian, Now you."    Something in Ayrys snapped. Delysian -- she was going to die for being Delysian, just after Delysia had disowned her, torn her from her daughter, banished her to die on the veld. It was too much, too balanced; the last three days had been too mu ch as balance teetered wildly and everything she thought she know about the city that bred her had blown itself into fragments. Heretic, traitor, threat to the minds of Delysian children, including her own -- and now she was going to die for being Dely sian. She! Reason collapsed and Ayrys coverd her face with her hands and laughed, great howling sobs of laughter tearing up from belly and throats in shrieks and yowls, whooping and choking on shards of laughter. "Now you, Delysian." Delysian!< /P> The Jelite woman frowned, hesitated -- this was clearly not the reaction she had expected. In the moment of hesitation, the second kemburi struck. It lay upriver from the first, hidden in the grass; the Jelite's fighting had moved her warm body toward it. Two coils as thick as wrists closed around her thigh, then another, and another. The woman faced Ayrys, not the kemburi, and she was both caught of guard and positioned badly to fight. But her reflexes were superb. In a moment she had twisted and begu n to slash, warding off coils that reached for her knife arm, shrieking her battle yell as if it, were a weapon.    Ayrys, as repelled by her own savage laughter -- if I go on like this, I will go mad -- as by the fighting, shrank back onto the safety of the rocky ledge.    The Jelite slashed and yelled. She struck two ropes from her right leg while another snaked around her left ankle. To sever that one, she would have to bend, which would bring her striking arm too close to the coils that writhed in the grass. Instead s he threw all her strength into straining backward, stretching the vine to weaken it's grip, trying to edge off the veld and onto the ledge. But she had miscalculated. While her attention had been Ayrys, the first kemburi, further aroused by the body warmt h, had shifted toward her, and her straining backward once more brought her within its reach. A massive coil, gray hairs abruptly silver in the moonlight, wrapped itself around her hips.    The Jelite stopped fighting. Her face, tipped to the light, was etched in white shock, each line as pure and hard as glass. Only a moment, and then she was battling again, evading more coils, slashing with power and precision, her superb reflexes keepi ng both striking arm and face protected from the coils that sought her heat. Only a moment, but Ayrys had recognized that moment's glassy shock -- this cannot come to me -- in her own belly and spine. Nausea, cold, the quick black sweep of faintness -- bu t, no, that had been her moment three days ago; this was the other's. But by the time her sazed mind separated the two moments her arm had swung, as it had not dared swing three days ago, to hurl her knife at her attackers.    Blue glass spun from her arm toward the kemburi.    The bottle, slim at the stopper and wide at the base, arced erratically, struck a rock, and exploded into blue shards and clear liquid. The sharp odor of acid filled the air. The kemburi screamed, a single unanimal note of gases hissing outward to blow off the burning acid, and released the Jelite. She sprang to the rocky ledge, caught Ayrys around the waist, and rolled with her toward the river, out of range, as the kemburi in its agony sent coils thrashing and writhing in all directions. The kemburi screamed again and then, having blown off as much of the acid as it could, drew its shuddering and burned vines ino its central mass. Within moments it had vanished into the grass.    A bottleneck of blue glass rolled out onto the rocky ledge.    Ayrys lay dazzed. The Jelite sprang away. When Ayrys finally sat, staring at the shadowly line where veld met rock, the Jelite stood on the other side of the fire, Ayrys's knife in her hand. She stared at the knife incredulously; when she raised her ey es to Ayrys, the incredulity still shone in them, and Ayrys suddenly saw how young she was.    "This is a carving knife!"    Ayrys said nothing.    "A carving knife, Delysian. What did you hope to do with a carving knife?"    The howling, horrifying laughter, sour as bile, licked again at Ayrys's mind.    "I asked you what you hoped to do with a carving knife!"    "Carve," Ayrys said, and pushed away the awful laughter, and resisted the impulse to put her hands to her ears. The bottle had been fired only a tencycle ago: Embry's small hand excitedly pulling at the cooling tray, tracing the curve of the rough blue glass with one satisfied dirty finger, showing off the childish design to the other women in the glassyard. And she, Ayrys, had smashed Embry's bottle. In a stupid panic, and to the benefit of a Jelite sister-warrior who, Ayrys now saw, was mistaking Ayr ys's self-mockery for bravery.    Across the fire, the two women studied each other.    The Jelite was much younger -- was in fact little more than a girl; her skills as a warrior must be formidable for her to already wear the embroidered tebl. She was beautiful. Smooth black braids coiled into a warrior's knot at the back of her head; lo ng slim neck; dark Jelite eyes; and the effortless vitality of a superb athlete superbly trained.    "What did you throw at the kemburi?" she demanded.    Ayrys looked toward the veld. The blue bottleneck, still stoppered, lay at the edge of the stone. She inched toward it, picked it up, and turned it over and over in her hands. A few drops of acid burned her fingers.    "I asked you what the bottle held!"    "Acid. To mix with copper paint," Ayrys said; she scarcely heard herself. "It gives the paint a better flow, and a better bite on the glass. …"    "You are a maker of glass?"    "I was." At the contempt in the Jelite's voice, Ayrys looked up. "Fortunately for you. The acid burns plants as well as fingers."    The girl flushed irritably and moved closer to Ayrys, who stood, tightened her grip on the bottleneck, and said, "Be careful. Now I am armed."    "With that? Against me?" the Jeilite said, outraged. "Sit down!"    Ayrys sat. The girl squatted nearby, posed lightly on both heels, intensity radiating from her like heat from a kiln.    "Delysian. Why did you save my life?"    Ayrys. Why do you endanger you child's life? The tone was the same: the circle of accusing men, city father of Delysia standing in the brilliant multicolored light from the council windows Ayrys's own mother had once painted, and the Jelite sister-warr ior, squatting in the chill gloom on bare rock. The same tone. The mirthless laughter pushed up against her yet again, and Ayrys almost opened herself to it, gave in, let reason go -- and with it, most probably, her life. Did it matter if she died at the hand of this girl, or from cold and exposure on the veld? Let the laughter come.    But, bleakly, it didn't. Apparently she was choosing to live. "Does it matter why I saved your life? I did."    The girl's black eye glittered, waiting.    "I saved your life. Now we stand on the same blade of honor."    The girl sputtered at what must, to a Jelite, seem blasphemy. How did she, Ayrys, get so skilled at blasphemy? She?    The Jelite said, "The warriors' code does not extend to Delysians!"    "Doesn't it? Then it isn't a code of true honor."    "A Delysian talks of honor?" The girl spat dramatically -- and a little ridiculously -- into the fire. An ember smoked.    "Our cities are not a war. At this moment. Therefore, we stand on the same blade. What is freely given must be freely returned."    The Jelite sutdied her narrowly. Ayrys made herself see with the girl's eyes: a Delysian citizen, not even a soldier; dirty despite the cold river; Delysia and Jela at war three years ago, uneasy allies this year, war already again in the wind for next year. And against that, only the girl's youthful trust in the exaggerated simplicities of a warrior's honor. She would not do it. She would find it easier to kill Ayrys and be done with her.    Ayrys's fingers tightened on the neck of Embry's bottle.    The girl swore, a vivid flow of warrior's curses, and then spoke as if the words were carrion in her mouth. "You claim the blade of honor?"    "I have saved your life."    "You haven't said why!"    "Honor does not require that I say why."    "You know too much about warriors, Delysian!"    She was going to do it; she was going to acknowledge the claim of honor. No until Ayrys became sure did she feel her own fear, and then it was a crawling thing, slimy at the back of her throat. Had she not thrown the bottle, had her glassyard not trade d enough with the Jela to learn it warriors' convoluted ideas of honor, had the Jelite been older, or been male . . .    "'We stand on the same blade,'" the girl snarled, hatred in every word of the formal oath, "'bound in -- Stand up, Delysian whore! 'We stand on the same blade, bound in honor of life itself. What is freely given must be freely returned. None but my chi ldren may accept as a right the strength of others without return, lest it weaken their own strength and they become cripples in life. None may choose to offer their own strength in bargain, lest they put life a the service of clay. What is freely given m ust be freely returned.'    "Now name your return, your shit-licking kreedog!"    Ayrys thought swiftly. "Your protection for one cycle of traveling. This threenight and next threeday. Then the claim of honor will have been met."    The Jelite scowed. She was free to refuse the offer; the oath bound her only to save Ayrys's life once, as Ayrys had saved hers. But that would mean she would have to stand on the blade of honor with Ayrys until such an occasion arose, and plainly she hated the idea. Ayrys had learned from the furtive inter-city trading, which nothing short of actual war seemed to stop, of warriors' alternate offers of settlement for claims of honor. Without them, the crossing and recrossings of loyalties for various c laims of honor would have become a web too dense to unravel. She had never heard of a Jelite warrior who had not fulfilled a claim of honor. They died first -- or perhaps they were killed by their own fierce, unbending kind. If so, not even their own citi zens, considered not good enough for any warrior to even bed, ever heard of it. "Jela for loyalty, Delysia for treachery" ran a Jelite proverb quoted even in Delysia itself. Ayrys thought of the city council, and her mouth twisted.    "I accept your return," the girl said sourly. "Where do you travel?"    "To the Gay Wall."    The Jelite's chin jerked upward, "Why?"    "I don't choose to tell you that."    The girl scowled. "As you choose. But you don't think they'll take you behind the Gray Wall?"    Ayrys stared at her. Slowly she said, "You're going there, too. To the Wall."    "They accept only warriors and soldiers, Delysian."    Ayrys had not heard that. Rumor, counterrumor, denial -- Delysia boiled with conflicting stories of the Gray Wall, mixed and heated with conflicting stories of another war with Jela. Delysians did not like to leave the city to verify the rumors; better use of them could be made unverified. But she had not heard that only warriors and soldiers were admitted behind the Gray Wall. If it was true . . .    If it was true, she would have not place at all left to go.    "I don't care where you choose to be denied," the Jelite said. "The return has been accepted. My protected until we reach the Gray Wall. It won't take a whole cycle -- only a flabby Delysian citizen would think so. We sleep now and travel through Darkd ay, or as much of it as you can stand up for, and rach the Wall by the end of Firstmorning. Or during Lightsleep at the latest. But I don’t rest by fires that attract any scum on the veld, and I don't make camp with whores, I'll protect you, Delysian, but you sleep and walk alone. If you need me, call"    "Wait -- what do I call? What's your name?"    "Jehane. What other weapons do you carry in your pack?"    "None"    Jehane snorted. "Unarmed and alone on the veld?"    "Yes!"    "The why so loud a denial? I need a better knife than this one."    She reached for Ayrys's pack. There was nothing Ayrys could do. She couldn't get to the pack first, couldn't . . . what? Throw it into the river before the sister-warrior opened it? Helplessly she watched while Jehane searched for the weapon that was n ot there, and watched while Jehane's hand closed and drew an object into the moonlight. The Jelite gasped. It was a sculpture of glass, a double helix of half-blue and half-red, the two spirals joined by a curving ladder whose rungs, spaced not evenly but with some pattern of their own, shaded from blue to indigo through purple to magenta to red. Moonlight gleamed dully on the heavy glass. Against that watery light, the helix shone in balanced precision, curves balanced by straight lines, the lure to the cradling hand subtly balanced by some mysterious pull on the mind, as of a pattern glimpsed but not unde rstood. The glass was without flaw, but some markings or light shifted between the walls of both spirals and made them seem more than glass, as if they curved of themselves and the breath that had blown them was their own and not the glassmaker's.    Jehane stared, stupefied, across the fire at Ayrys. "You dared to make . . . you . . ."    The city council had asked her the same question, and with the same outrage. "Yes," Ayrys said.    "You -- a Delysian?"    Ayrys closed her eyes. "Yes."    "Why?"    "Because it is beautiful."    "Beautiful! It's the emblem of rank of a Jelite warrior-priest. Did you know that when you cast it? Did you?"    "it is not cast. The glass is blown."    "Blow! You put it in your mouth . . ."    So had the council looked. Stupid, they were all stupid. How could people be so stupid?    "You dared to --" Jehane said, stopped, stifled by her own outrage. She had tightened her grip on Ayrys's carving knife. Ayrys saw the girl's murderous face reflected over and over again in the curved sections of glass, distortion upon distortion.    "Delysia and Jela are not at war. What does it matter what emblems artisans make?"    "We will be at war again. As soon as your city breaks the alliance!"    It was probably true. It had always been true before. The fertile land along the coast shared by both cities was not quite enough to support them both, and growing crops on the higher ground of the veld was more trouble than arranging for Jela to have fewer mouths to grow crops for. Crops, game, fish, timber -- Jela for loyalty, Delysia for treachery. . .    "I made the helix," Ayrys said deliberately, "because it is beautiful. And because I knew how to make it. And because if the legend your priests tell should happen to be true --"    "How do you know what legend our priests tell!"    "-- should happened to be true, and both Jela and Delysia were built by people who escaped in the same boat from the Island of the Dead, then your daughter and my daughter share motherlines. And because even if they do not, and even if the cities are e nemies until the end of time itself, no city can own a shape make of matter and air. It is a shape, Jehane -- look at it. A shape of glass. Not the object of fear and respect you make of it, just a shape --    "No more!" the girl yelled. With all her strength she threw the double helix to the ground and brought her boot heel, metal sheathed with leather, down hard on the fragments. The glass first shattered and then crunched. Jehane did not stop grinding her heel until the sculpture was a smear of powder on the stone.    "I sleep within call," Jehane said. "Don't try to sneak up to me, Delysian, I sleep light." Without glancing down, she stalked into the darkness.    Ayrys sand to her knees and touched the powered glass with one finger. A few grains stuck. Closing her eyes, Ayrys dragged her finger across the stone, pressing down as hard as she could. When she opened her eyes, blood smeared the rock and her finger was embedded with ground glass. Viciously she dragged another finger across the glass, and then a third.    When she forced the heal of her thumb across the glass, a sharper pain leaped the whole length of her arm, so that for a moment she could not even see.    For a long moment Ayrys crouched on the rock, head bent, blinded by pain. When it had subsided a little, she rose and thrust the hand into the river, holding it there until the cold had numbed it completely, and then a long time afterward.    With her left hand she built up the fire and pulled her burnous around herself. Her right hand lost the cold of the water and began to hurt agonizingly. Ayrys laid it outside her bedroll, on the hard stone. With the pain of the mind thus dwarfed by the pain of the flesh, and for the first time since she had been pushed, hooded and booted and without Embry, through the east gate of Delysia, she was able to sleep without dreams.

Copyright ©1999 Nancy Kress