Green Eyes

  He went to the carpeted depression at the center of the room, knelt beside the control panel and began flicking the switches two and three at a time. As he engaged a switch on the middle row, her voice burst from the speaker, incoherent. A harsh babble with the rhythm and intensity of an incantation. He switched her off, continuing down the rows, and at last heard the grumble of machinery, the whine of the pumps. He waited beside the panel until the whine had ceased, until whatever was going to die had managed it.

  It was very quiet, the sort of blanketing stillness that pours in between the final echo of an explosion and the first cries of its victims. The quietness confused him, lending an air of normalcy to the room, and he was puzzled by his sudden lack of emotion, as if now that he had completed his task, he had been reduced to fundamentals. He stood and almost fell, overwhelmed by the bad news his senses were giving him about death: dizziness, white rips across his vision, his chest thudding with erratic heartbeat.

  Done.

  Stamp the seal of fate, tie a black cord round the coffin and make a knot only angels can undo.

  Both life and duty, done.

  Filled with bitterness, he smashed his heel into the control panel, crumpling the metal facing. Smoke fumed from the speaker grille. Then he spun around, sensing Jocundra behind him. No. She was elsewhere, coming toward the house, and she seemed to surround him, every sector of the air holding some intimation. He could taste her, feel her on his skin. He started to the door, thinking there might be time to go back downstairs.

  No, not really.

  Not according to the twinges at the base of his skull or the dissolute feeling in his chest.

  The leaves on the ebony bushes seemed to be stirring, and the dark loom of the forested walls held lifelike gleams of color, a depth of light and foliage showing between the trunks. To the south a road of pale sand plunged off through the trees, and at the bend of the road was a tiny orange glow. He laughed, recalling the light he had seen earlier in the gap made by the toppled oak; but he walked toward it anyway. The place where the road left the clearing was choked with branches, and they scratched him when he crouched to gain an unimpeded view. He must be very near the edge, three floors up, yet all he saw beneath was the starlit dust of the road. He shifted his field of focus toward the glow. The orange light rose from a metal ring, and beside it, sitting with his back against a stump, was a lean, wolfish man. Heavy eyebrows, dark hair flowing over his shoulders. He appeared to be gazing intently at Donnell, and he waved; his mouth opened and closed as if he were calling out.

  Someone did call to him, but it was Jocundra, her voice faint and issuing from a different quarter. He forced all thought of her aside. Without access to his ourdha, it would be essential to concentrate, to synchronize thought with vision, or else the winds would take him and there would be no hope of return. He pressed forward into the gap, ducking under the branches. Right on the edge, he figured. He shifted his field of focus beyond the wolfish man, who was now waving excitedly, and out to the bend in the road. The forest plummeted into a valley, and below, nestled in a crook of the river, were the scattered orange lights of Badagris. Above the town and forest, the aurora billowed, and higher yet were icy stars thick as gems on a jewel merchant’s cloth.

 Pain lanced through his chest, an iron spike of it drove up the column of his neck. His vision blurred, and to clear his head he fixed his eyes on the hard glitter of the stars. Something about their pattern was familiar. What was it? Then he remembered. The Short War against Akadja, the Plain of Kadja Bossu. There had been a night skirmish with a company of dyobolos, a difficult victory, and afterward he had stood watch on a hummock, the only high ground for miles. The myriad fires of the cadre burning about him, the sable grass hissing with a continental pour of wind. It had seemed to him he was suspended in the night overlooking a plain of stars, its guardian, its ruler, and he had thought of it as a vision of his destiny. Solitary, rigorous, lordly. Yet he had been much younger, barely past induction, and despite the elegance of the vision, the clarity, it had been a comfort to know the war was over for a little while, that the shadows in the grass were friends, and the hours until dawn could be a time of peaceful meditation. The memory was so poignant, so vivid in its emotional detail, that when a branch scraped at the corner of his eye, aggravated by the distraction, he knocked it away with his hand - a black, featureless hand - and thinking to avoid further aggravation, he took another step and shifted forward along the road.

Epilogue

  July 15, 1988