The Bright Lady was waiting for him. He stood before her, all terrors forgotten.
“I am pleased that you have come again,” she said. “When the other came…it was not you.”
This was the first time that he had heard her voice. She spoke the words in human fashion, but there was something else, like an after-echo, just beyond the range of hearing, a quality of sound not of Earth at all.
He did not ask if she wanted him to play again. He merely did, and at once the four-armed musicians joined him on the tambang, the zootibar, the kabukkuk, and others for which the languages of men have no names. Once more the Lady danced, whirling the auroras around her, and a great force came over Ain, something as elemental as any which moves the Earth or causes the seasons to change. He could not comprehend the vastness of it, but he felt it in his music, and played on.
The Lady began to move away. The white-robed man with the staff approached Ain, becoming like a cloud, drifting over and around him. Then the boy felt himself rise up. He was caught in the spell of the music, and even that part of his mind which was still conscious knew better than to hesitate for even the tiniest instant; but still he perceived that he was being borne aloft on a litter by some of the winged musicians, who held long, curling horns in their free hands. The knights with the flower-tipped lances were his honor guard. The Lady circled him like a bright planet in its course. For a time he seemed to be high in the air. The Moon was very close, but then the horizons whirled. The stars spun like beads in a top. The ocean rose up to meet him, but there was no coldness, no splash. He had been translated into some other form of being, not wholly material. Still he played his song, as the company passed down through the earth.
At last he came to a place few men have seen even in visions, where all solid things, all soil and stone melted away and only light remained, not blinding, but bright beyond seeing, bright on a whole new scale of perception. Brilliant against brilliance, there were shapes and forms, and gradually Ain discerned an overall pattern as he approached the center of the realm of light: a huge, burning rose unfolded before him, swallowed him up, filled the core of the world. This was the home of the Bright Powers.
* * * *
It seemed that he sang forever, without stopping, and that he had stopped, as if he were separated into two Ain Harads. There was no sense of time. He could dimly make out the Powers as they gathered around him, as he drifted suspended in light. Sometimes a shape would flash intensely blue or red or green, then fade away, like an afterimage in his eyes.
* * * *
Once he drifted through a long, wide place lined with many pillars. Fountains spewed gold. He sang. The Bright Lady sat on a throne before him, flanked by her knights. The musicians hovered above, high among the pillars like bright moths.
An image came to him: a tiny fish in a glass bowl, being passed from hand to hand among the splendidly garbed lords and ladies of the court. They talked and laughed and made intrigues, and the fish in the bowl, only faintly aware of them, understood nothing. He was that fish.
* * * *
Beautiful? he said to himself. There were no words, no sounds, no sights, no memories, but something beyond all senses, which could not be encompassed by eye or ear or mind.
* * * *
He sat by the Lady’s side in a small boat, motionless on a mirrored lake, his lyre in his hand, the strings strangely solid to his touch, more substantial than anything else. He ran his fingers over them gently, then paused. Of their own accord, they made music.
The Lady wore something around her neck. She leaned forward, holding it up for him to see. It was a sphere of blue glass. Inside, a tiny boat lay on a mirrored lake. A boy sat beside a lady, playing softly on the lyre. He could hear the music, coming out of the glass sphere. The lady sitting inside it, beside the other boy, held up something, and within that yet another lady and boy sat, and the lady held up a gleaming sphere, and the scene was repeated endlessly, as if in a procession of mirrors; and somehow his eyes were made able to see all that tiny detail, into infinity, and his ears could hear the vast harmony of the music made by endless fingers.
* * * *
Once he awoke and was astonished to feel the chill night air and a lumpy mattress beneath him, and to hear straw rustle as he sat up in the loft in his parents’ house. Eagerly he opened the trapdoor. More than anything else he wanted to behold his parents sleeping down there, to know that they were real and solid and not some kind of dream—
He set foot on the top rung of the ladder—
—and the light—
—the burning rose, slowly unfolding—
—he awoke into the light, and the Lady spoke inside his mind:
“Ain Harad of Randelcainé, son of Thain, surely you have known since you arrived here that all your ideas about this place are…to use an example from your world…like the efforts of a worm to describe the running deer. You are someone special. Your music alone, of all the productions of your race, has attracted the notice of the Bright Kind. Do not ask how this has come to be. It is from within you. You may never be able to comprehend the source, but the miracle and the mystery are within you. You thought to move me and win my love. That cannot be, but nevertheless I am pleased, in a simple way. Now your song is part of the great dance which is our world. For this I am grateful.
“No, no, do not ask anything more. No questions. No wishes, no granting of boons. It is not like that. Do not presume to raise yourself any higher than you are, for it cannot be done. We are of the substance of the Goddess, whose nature and death even we cannot understand. Your words have no meaning. They cannot encompass such thoughts as would be meaningful to us.
“I wish you no ill, Ain Harad. In a small way, you have pleased me. But now, think of something else from your own world. Think of a lady who holds a beautiful songbird in a cage. After a time, she has heard its song and grows tired of it, but she does not hate it. Therefore she sets it free. Think now, focus your mind, on the world from which you came, to which you must return. The door to the cage is open.”
* * * *
—and flying on wings of light, the two of them soared or descended or moved in some direction which Ain Harad’s mind could not grasp, through the center of the great, burning rose. He felt the Lady’s hand on his. There was an illusion of solidity and warmth, though in some abstract way he knew it was an illusion even as he experienced it.
He thought of stony hillsides and grass-filled plains, of rivers and forests, of men and their noisy cities, of marching armies, ships under sail, of gulls drifting on columns of air; of the winter when a dog snatched his slippers and he had to run after it, out into the darkness in his bare feet. As he recalled that particular sharp, clear sensation of cold, the familiar world became more substantial to him, more tangible. He smelled the smoke of a hearth fire. He reached out with his mind, grasping the place of his birth, his home, his parents’ house, with all his, drawing himself toward it, like a moth toward a distant light.
For just an instant he had a vision of something else, of a realm equal and opposite to that of the Bright Powers, where a dark rose gleamed at the world’s heart, facing into the night, but the Powers dwelling there were no more as his father had described them than the running deer or the stars of the midnight sky can be described by the worm that crawls in the mud.
The Lady led him inward, his beacon on the dark way, until at last he seemed to be rising from the depths of a murky sea. There were pinpricks of light above.
Imperceptibly, his motion stopped. There was solid ground beneath him, and his body seemed solid once more. He held his lyre in his hands, and stood, rather unsteadily, in the middle of a flat, grassy meadow under a clear midnight sky.
Light flickered behind him and he turned, and beheld for the briefest instant the image of the Bright Lady, like a candle flame snuffed out. He was sure—he forced himself to believe—that she was smiling.