He brought the goats into a cave and set a fire at its mouth to keep the dread things of the night away. Then he took out his lyre again, and softly touched the strings, and sang a song about sailors drifting in an open boat on a wintry night. All are frozen to the oars, stiff, nearly dead as they sit. The darkness around them is impenetrable, the sea black, but flecked with foam-capped waves. The wind chills them to the very bone, until the sensations of land beneath one’s feet or the warm of a fire, seem impossible, half-forgotten dreams. But then a light appears, and brightens. It is a watchtower. The mariners take heart, the vessel leaps forward as if it had wings, and they reach the harbor and all are safe.
The goats huddled quietly as he sang. They had heard other versions of this one before, about men lost in the desert, about mountaineers, or the folk of Randelcainé venturing into the forbidding forests of the far north.
Ain looked out over the flat countryside to where the Endless River curved like a vast, gleaming serpent in the starlight. To the east, it passed through mountains beyond which he had never gone. To the west, it vanished in the horizon. Both the beginning and ending of the River were mysterious. He had once been told that it flowed in a circle, engirdling the world. He wondered about that dimly, but did not really care, save that someday he might make a song about it. He had a verse already:
Oh Endless River, return your waters,
return your waters, to where they sprang.
Oh Endless River, return your waters.
The Goddess made you, to bring us home.
Then, after a pause, he was moved to make another, different song. He scarcely had words for it, but he sang, and the words came. He sang of a longing for something more beautiful than anything on Earth, something to transcend human conceptions of beauty, and he wanted to be raised to this new level, to be reassured, to understand.
There was a tiny portion of his mind which was not involved in the song, which could analyze the wonder which had settled upon him; and this portion looked out through his eyes and beheld the landscape.
A light, which was not a reflection of a star, appeared in the middle of the river, and began to drift to the nearer bank, a point of faint blue, with a hint of rosy pink, the color of the twilight that precedes the sunrise. Then it moved onto the shore, a little larger, yet no more distinct; definitely approaching him. As it climbed the hillside it brightened. All this while he sang, his fingers dancing over the strings. That detached, calculating part of his mind remarked, As if a fisherman had caught the sun on his hook and were reeling it in.
More intense grew the light, and still Ain sang, unafraid. The moment of transition was imperceptible, but there was a distinct moment in which only a growing bubble of light drifted up the slope and another in which a procession of figures moved slowly and gracefully within an illuminated sphere.
Still he sang.
He had never seen such people before. There were knights in plumed helmets and golden armor, bearing lances with flowers on their tips instead of blades. An old man, robed in white, led the group, bearing in one hand an ivory staff from which auroras flickered. There were tall musicians too, not all of them human, some with lacy wings that they could beat in time, or with four arms, enabling them to play upon the tambang and the zootibar and other unearthly instruments. One had a face like an elephant, with lips extended a full arm’s length in front of the face, forming a trumpet. At last came she for whom all this was an entourage, beside whom all paled into drabness, a lady clad in a gown of woven light, the burning white of noontide, the pale blue of a summer sky, the crisp oranges, reds, and yellows of autumn, the glittering silver of winter ice. She rode a shapeless beast which rippled over the ground like a wave and flashed the brilliant, harsh blue of electric fire. When she came to a stop and dismounted, the creature vanished, and all the company fell silent, and knelt before her.
They waited just beyond the mouth of the cave, silent as mist, armor and jewelry and brilliant gowns gleaming with light.
Still Ain Harad played and sang. He should have been speechless with awe, terrified, but the music burst forth like the ocean out of the earth when the spear of the Goddess struck it, on the first day of her reign and her epoch. He had passed a threshold. There was no turning back. He drifted, like a leaf in a torrent, unable to understand what was happening to him or why, unable to care.
Then the Queen—for obviously she was—bade her followers rise, and the musicians joined in the boy’s song, and she danced in the middle of the circle of her knights, who banged their lances on the ground in time to her steps.
Now he had before him, concretely, the source of his inspiration, and in her honor, to praise her, he sang with greater voice, struggling to describe her in a song when mere words were not enough, and she leapt and whirled, and she rose to fill the sky, touching the ends of the world, clad in the auroras.
Somehow, Ai gradually recovered some sense of himself. He became fully aware of what he was doing, and he truly saw what his singing had conjured up. And as he watched the lady in amazement and wonder, his concentration broke, and he missed a note.
The dancer paused in midstep. The ghostly musicians were again silent. Still filled more with pride and awe that he had summoned such a one than with any fear, he asked, “Is the great lady pleased with my song?”
At this the whole company turned toward him, as if noticing him for the first time. The Lady looked down on him. Their eyes met. He was sure that her expression was that of an adult reproving a child who has begun well, but gone on to make an utter fool of himself.
She might have smiled. He could not tell. The movement was so slight that before the image could register in his brain, all of that company vanished into the night like sparks cast off from a burning log.
* * * *
In those days the Earth was disordered, and the Goddess newly dead, and things were changing, but this didn’t stop Ain’s father from screaming furiously at him when he arrived home in the middle of the afternoon, dazed, dreamy, stumbling, and missing at least half of the goats. Zadain, the boy’s elder brother and the very image of the soldier Thain in his youth, was equally wroth. The two of them seized switches and chased Ain around the yard in front of their farmhouse.
“Fool!” cried Thain, striking.
“Idiot!” added Zadain, striking.
“Good for nothing!” (Thwack!)
“Brainless cretin! The goats should be taking care of you!”
All the boy could try to do was shield himself and evade the blows, not very successfully. When Patek, his mother, wife of Thain, came out from behind the barn where she had been feeding the chickens, the boy looked to her for sympathy but got none. “To think I wasted myself nursing such a dolt! Quick! Give me another switch!”
It was a very bruised and miserable Ain Harad who spent long hours climbing through briars, limping across stony plateaus, scaling hillsides in search of the missing goats. He found them, one by one, but was sure the imps of evil had spent all that morning placing the creatures in the most inaccessible places. There was a pillar of stone in the middle of a plain. It was said to be part of a palace from some ancient time, before the age of the Goddess. It was smooth on all sides. Sure enough, there was a goat on top, gnawing on a weed that grew there.
He was not allowed to sleep in the house that night. When he got home, his family wouldn’t feed him. They had barred the door. So he sat out under the stars, and tried to play a song. It was a simple one, something he had known for years. But for the first time he could remember, he could not play. It was terrifying. All the music was wrung out of him.
Only after many hours of sleepless sorrow did anything come. It was as if breath had returned. He