Rudi Mackenzie made another step, and another. Arrows drifted past him, and he could see them turn as the fletching caught the air. He cast away the world-huge weight of his shield and knocked the sallet helm off his head. Their clatter on the cobbles was distant, like the beating of surf on beaches a world away. Mathilda staggered beside him, then slid to the ground and crawled, dogged and brave, and her love like a force behind him, pushing him forward into a world of resistant amber. A building loomed, handsome and simple, three stories of red brick with white pillars beside the door.
The door swung open, and light blazed from it. His hand went up before his eyes, but the light shone through it, through him, as if it were real and he a shadow. Within it was a shape, straight sweep of tapering blade, crescent guard, long double-lobed hilt, pommel of moon opal grasped in antlers. Pain keened into his ears, his eyes, his mind. A lifetime of it passed in each step. His foot touched the first step, the second, the threshold?Mother?? Rudi Mackenzie said, walking forward.
The three figures around the campfire looked up at him. His eyes flicked back and forth. The fire killed some of his night vision; he could sense huge trees rearing skyward, like the Douglas fir in the Cascades above Dun Juniper but grander still and with more deeply furrowed reddish bark. Scents like spice and thyme and flowers drifted on air just cool enough to make him glad of his plaid.
He glanced down for an instant. He was in shirt and kilt and plaid. The short slight redheaded figure in the middle wore a shift and arsaid, and leaned on a rowan staff topped by a silver raven?s head. On her left was a tall thin woman with black skin and broad features scored by age, her cropped cap of white hair tight-kinked, wearing unfamiliar clothes that had the look of a uniform. On her right was a not-quite-girl of a little less than his own age, long-limbed and blond and comely, in a strange outfit of string skirt, knit tunic, feathers and a necklace of amber-centered gold disks. ?Mother?? he asked again.
Then the wholeness of what he was seeing caught him. Three women, youthful and matronly and aged… ?Yes,? the one who bore the countenance of Juniper Mackenzie said. ?I am.? ?Are you-? He hesitated.?Are you my mother? Or… Her??
His hand moved in a sign. She answered it.?And the answer to that, my lad, is… yes!?
Impish amusement glinted in her green eyes for a second. The black woman snorted; there was something about her that reminded him of Sam Aylward, though there was no physical resemblance at all. When she spoke there was a soft drawl to her words: ?Call me a Crone, and you?re toast, bukra boy.?
Rudi didn?t know what a bukra was, but he suspected the word-she prounced it as bookra -wasn?t a compliment.
He brought the back of his right hand to his brows. ?As you wish, Wise One,? he said-which was just another name for the eldest of the Three. ?Damn, but it?s annoying to be just a person again when you?re used to being an archetype. Or vice versa. I suppose we had to. I feel like someone has squeezed me down into a can of Coke.?
She looked at her own hands, flexing the fingers as if the sensation were unfamiliar. ?Marian, how long have we known each other?? the blond girl said, a soft purling lilt in her tones. ?Forty-seven years, or untold billions, depending on how you define we and know.? ?And either way you?re still a grouch.?
She smiled at Rudi.?And they called me Deer Dancer, in my day. I died three thousand years before your birth, on another turn of the Wheel. I was the Maiden sacrifice, and I was the Mother who loves, and in my age I tossed silver hair to dance down the Moon. Now I wear this face of Her once more, for a little while.?
Two ravens soared down from the branches and landed on one of the logs that flanked the fire, preening and grooming themselves. Somewhere a wolf howled. Sparks drifted upward, into boughs underlit by the flames, towards stars larger and brighter-colored than any he?d seen before; yet that paled beside the shining glory of a full moon. Despite the darkness, what he could see was hard-edged, somehow more definite than any vision by the light of common day.
If the trees had spoken, he would not have been surprised. He did not feel as if he dreamed; rather that he had woken, as if he had been drifting beneath the sea all his life and now had plunged upward like a leaping dolphin into the shock of air and light.
Rudi made reverence; then he stood erect, his arms crossed on his chest. ?Why am I here, Ladies?? he asked bluntly.?When last I remember I was on a task of some urgency.? ?You are here to understand, a little,? the Mother said.?We have to come towards you in forms you can grasp so that we can talk at all; but that limits Us.? ?Of course,? he said.?How can a man tell all his mind to a child, or a God to a man? What can you tell me?? ?What did I tell you about magic, child of my heart??
Many things, he thought. But… ?That it doesn?t stop being magic when you understand it??
She nodded.?Then see.?
Darkness; a nothingness in which he floated, nothingness so complete that even emptiness was absent and duration itself had not yet begun. A point of light, and existence twisting as it expanded and the arrow of time sprang from the string, soaring upward. Darkness that swelled, dense and hot and pregnant with Being, and then a flash of light as suns fell in upon themselves and lit. They burned with a glow that illuminated curtains of red and yellow fire, structures so vast that worlds would be less than grains of sand amongst them. Stars and galaxies flying apart from each other. Darkness again, as they dwindled into distance. Suns turned swollen and red and guttered out, or exploded in cataclysmic violence that faded into cankered knots of twisted space. Those boiled away in turn. Darkness more absolute than imagination could encompass, as the stuff of matter itself decayed into absence. Darkness without end, for nothing was different from nothing and nowhere was anyplace and everywhere. ?What does that remind you of?? his mother?s voice asked.
He blinked back to something like the waking world, where light flickered ruddy on tree bark. ?It?s… it?s like the way Sandra Arminger sees the world. From what I picked up over the years in what you might be callin? her unguarded moments. Dead, in a way. Everything moving on its own, without spirit. Grand and glorious and wonderful, but… empty. And we gone like a candle flame when we die.?
He blinked alarm.?You?re not saying that?s true, are you now??
She smiled gently at him, and indicated their surroundings. He nodded, taking the point, and she spoke: ?No. But once it was, until it was made to be different. What did?-she looked up at the ravens-?a certain old gentleman tell you once about history and time??
He blinked again; that night on the mountainside was far distant in miles and months, but it wasn?t the sort of thing you forgot. Even if you?d been dreaming a vision while your wasted body lay on the edge of death. He repeated what those deep tones had so cryptically revealed: ?Fact becomes history; history becomes legend; legend becomes myth. Myth turns again to the beginning and creates itself. The figure for time isn?t an arrow; that is illusion, just as the straight line is. Time is a serpent.?
After a moment he went on:?Was that truth? The whole truth?? ?Yes. No.?
The figure who bore his mother?s semblance smiled sympathetically as she denied him certainty. The blond maiden spoke:?It?s so hard to say this in words-? ?But hey, you?ll give it a try,?dapa,? the black woman said sardonically.
The Maiden tossed her fair head and said:?Then see again.?
His body dropped away, and once again he floated in nothingness. The point of light, and the same eon-upon-eon passage from light to dark. But this time a light was born in the last darkness, and it looked at him. ?That is Mind,? the Mother whispered.?Wisdom. Wisdom itself, that brought together all knowledge of all that ever was.? ?Hope,? the blond Maiden added.?Love.? ?That?s us,? the black figure of the Wise One said.?Including you. Many times removed. Mo? removed than you can imagine. More than we can say in words-? ?You keep saying that, but you speak in words nonetheless!? Rudi said, exasperated.?And it?s more ignorant I am afterwards than ever I was before!? ?Then see,? the Three said together.