The Longest Night

On the twentieth of December, a little after noon, the thread snapped.

She felt it go.

She had been sitting on the cot with the gray blanket across her knees, working at a hole in the hem of her gown with a splinter of wood, for something to do with her hands. The child had been restless since morning. It had kicked and turned and pressed, and she had hummed to it, and it had settled. A pale light lay on the wall. A bell was ringing somewhere in the priory, a flat, cracked, iron note. She was thinking, with the dreamy detachment of the very tired, about nothing at all.

Then something inside her tore.

It was not a pain. Not at first. It was a sensation like missing a stair in the dark: a lurch, a drop, a sudden terrible absence of weight. The humming in her blood stopped. The pulse that had followed her across the sea, that she had felt in the hold and the carriage and the east bedchamber and the cell, the great slow patient beat of the stone in its vault, simply ceased. Where it had been there was a silence so absolute that she heard her own heart as a thing separate from herself, a small frightened animal beating in a box.

She dropped the splinter.

"No," she said aloud.

She put her hands to her belly. The child was frantic. It twisted under her palms, hard, clawing, with a movement that was almost violent. She felt it reaching down the long dark road that had always led to the Heart, and finding nothing, and reaching again.

Mama. Mama. Where?

"I do not know," she whispered. "I do not know, little one. Hush."

She lay down. She closed her eyes and tried to find the thread, as she had a hundred times, with the small inward turning that was as natural to her as breathing. She reached for the vault. The stone. The warmth. She felt only dark, and under the dark, a faint dull ache like the memory of a tooth.

She tried the marks. They had stopped answering. She held her wrist up to the barred light, and saw only skin, brown, ordinary, with a faint blue shadow beneath it, like a bruise fading. The spirals on her belly lay flat and dull. The glowing was gone.

She tried the dreaming.

It was the last resort. The oldest road. She lay on her back on the cot, with her hands folded, and breathed in, long and slow, and sank, as the priestesses had taught her, toward the place where visions rose. She sank for a very long time. She went down through water and stone and ash. She went down until she was almost afraid, and beneath her there was nothing, no bottom, no door, only an endless gray silence in which no bird sang and no leaf moved.

She opened her eyes.

She was blind.

…

They had shut the stone away.

She did not know it then. She learned it afterward, in pieces, from what Crale said and from what she guessed. But in the afternoon of that day, at the Duke's command, a company of engineers had come down into the vault beneath the Hall and sealed the Aurelith in a casket of lead, three inches thick, and sunk the casket in a pit of black marble beneath the dome. The Duke had decided that the instruments could be better tuned if the specimen's voice were damped.

Or perhaps he had simply been afraid.

She sat on the edge of the cot with her knees drawn up and her hands over her mouth. She was shaking. She had never in her life been without it. She had been born within the sound of the Heart; she had fallen asleep each night of her childhood to its pulse. She had thought that if she were wrenched from it she would die. Instead she lay in the silence, alive, hollow, a clay jar from which the water had been poured.

I am nothing, she thought. I have no gift. I have no god.

I am a woman in a cell, with a child, and three days to live.

She had been afraid before. In the hold, in the storm, at the verdict. But that fear had always been a thing that rose against something, that had an edge. This was different. This was a quiet, steady, bottomless dread that had no object, like a house with the lamps put out.

The pains began at dusk.

…

They were not the pains of a birth. She knew those. She had sat with women in labor, on Corvane, holding their hands through the long nights. This was something else: a tightening, low and sharp, a band of iron drawn slowly round her middle and released. It came every quarter-hour, and then every twelve minutes, and then every ten. It took her breath. She curled on her side with her knees to her chest and her teeth bared.

Too soon, she thought. It is too soon.

It is not time.

But the child had been quickened by the Heart, and the Heart had been taken away, and the body knew things that the mind did not. The little creature in her was frightened. It was fighting. It had been made to depend on a certain rhythm, and the rhythm was gone, and it was thrashing in the dark like a fish in a drained pool.

"Hush," she gasped. "Hush, hush, please, hush."

She sang.

It was an old song. It was the first song she had learned, at her mother's knee, in the green dusk under the trees. It had no words, or rather, it had many, but they were not words of any language now spoken; they were the sounds of the forest itself, rain on leaves, wind in branches, the creak of a great trunk in the night. It rose and fell in a slow wave, six notes and a pause, six notes and a pause. The priestesses called it the Song of the Leaves.

She sang it softly, in a cracked thread of a voice, to the dark.

And little by little the iron band slackened. The child's frantic motion eased. She felt it turn, with a great slow sigh, and curl against her palm like a kitten, and she lay on her side in the whitewashed cell with the tears sliding down her face and sang until her voice gave out.

…

Crale came at nine.

He did not bring a chair this time. He did not bring a lantern, or a priest. He came alone, in his plain gray cassock, with a small covered bowl in his hands, and when the bolt dropped behind him she heard how very still the priory had become. It was the vigil of the Lantern. The brothers were at their devotions. The long corridors were empty.

He set the bowl down on the stool. It was soup.

"You have not eaten since morning," he said.

"I am not hungry."

"The child is."

She said nothing. She sat with her back against the wall and her knees up and her hands protectively on the swell of her belly. In the thin light, his face looked older than she remembered, long and gray and creased, with something unguarded in it, as if a mask had slipped.

"The pains are early," said Crale. "Sister Agnes told me. She says they began this evening." He did not ask it as a question. "I have sent for the midwife. She will come at midnight. I thought it right that you should be attended."

"Why?"

"Because I am not a monster."

"You are going to burn me."

"Yes." He said it quite simply. "On the feast of the Lantern. At dusk. I should like you to understand that I take no pleasure in it. I have done this more than two hundred times, and I have never grown used to it. I do not think a man should." He lowered himself onto the foot of the cot. "But it is what is required."

"By whom?"

"By God."

"By the Duke," said Ixara.

His eyes sharpened.

"Do not think I am a fool," she said. "I have lain here for fifty days and I have thought. You say the Order does not make war on the unborn, and then you condemn my child to the fire. You say you take no pleasure, and then you stage a play for the crowd. You are too clever a man to be a zealot. You do it because someone is pulling a string." She lifted her chin. "Is it the Duke? Does he want me gone? Does he want the child gone? Or is it that he wants it alive, and you wish to keep it from him?"

For a moment the Magister did not move.

Then, slowly, he smiled. It was the first real smile she had seen on his face: wintry, rueful, almost admiring.

"You are very quick," he said.

"Which?"

"The second." He folded his hands. "The Duke of Draymoor has sent me three letters this week. They are most courteous. They request, with great delicacy, that the prisoner's confinement be extended until the birth. He is concerned for her health. He would like the child to be delivered into his custody, for its protection, and for the benefit of science." Crale's mouth thinned. "I have replied that the Order has its own law, and that Lantern Night is Lantern Night."

"He wants the child."

"He wants a key." The deep-set eyes held hers. "I do not know what the child is. I do not know what it will be. But I have seen what happened in the vault, and I have seen the Duke's face when he spoke of it. He is a man who has found a door and means to walk through, and I have spent forty years learning what comes through such doors. I do not mean to let him."

"Then let us go."

"I cannot."

"Why not?"

"Because it would not be enough." His voice was low. "If I release you, the Duke will take you within the week. If I send you away, he will follow. The only way to put you beyond his reach is to put you beyond anyone's." He paused. "That is the logic of the fire."

She stared at him. She had thought herself past horror. She found there was a little left.

"You would burn a woman to save her?"

"I would burn a door."

"I am not a door."

"No," said the Magister, quite gently. "You are not. And that is what I regret."

…

He was silent for a long time.

The cell was very cold. The window had gone black. Outside, in the courtyard, a bell began to toll the vigil, one stroke every minute. Crale sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the wall, and she saw the light of the single candle move in the hollows of his cheeks, and thought: He is going to ask for something.

"There is a way," he said at last.

She waited.

"The child." He did not look at her. "I cannot spare you. That is beyond me. The sentence has been read, and the faithful have heard it, and the Order's honor is engaged. But the child is another matter."

Her heart stopped.

"A child born in a cell is born in the Order's keeping. It is a ward of the Church. It may be christened. It may be raised in a convent, in the country, with every kindness, far from the Duke, far from London, far from anyone who knows its name." He turned his head. "I have the authority. I would put it in writing. I would give my oath."

"You said it must perish."

"The sentence says so. The sentence can be amended." Quietly: "I would need a reason."

"What reason?"

"You know what reason."

She stared at him. And understood.

"The island."

"The island." He nodded. "I want its name. I want its bearings. I want the truth of what lies there, and what is guarded, and by whom. I will not tell the Duke. I will tell no one in England. I will tell only Rome, and Rome will do what Rome does." His voice was soft and dry and utterly steady. "Your people will not be harmed. They will be brought into the Church. It is a mercy. It is the only mercy that remains."

"You want to burn them."

"I want to save them."

"By sending ships."

"By sending priests."

"Priests who come with soldiers. Priests who come with Dukes." She was trembling, a deep slow tremor that began in her belly and spread to her limbs. "I know what happens, Magister. I saw it in the stone. They will come with their ships and their guns and their Bibles. They will cut the trees. They will take the stone. They will teach my people that their gods are devils, and when they will not learn, they will burn them." She was weeping now, with rage. "You ask me to buy my child's life with a hundred thousand. I will not."

"It is one child."

"It is my child."

"And the Ahtelan?"

"They are my people."

"You cannot save them both."

She laughed.

It came out of her, short and cracked, a sound of pure weary disbelief. She laughed until the tears ran down her face and her chest hurt, and the Magister watched her with his long gray patient face, and did not stir.

"You do not understand," said Ixara, when she could speak. "You think it is a choice. You think I will weigh the one against the many, like a clerk with a balance, and decide." She wiped her eyes. "That is what he did. The man I love. That is what he did on the mountain. He set his sister against my people, and he weighed, and he took. And it has destroyed him. It has followed him through every room in his house. He has never been free of it for a single hour."

"And you would not do the same?"

"I would not do the same." She held his gaze. "There is a thing that the priestesses say. When the scale is held by a man, it will always tip toward his heart. The only way to be just is to break the scale."

Crale said nothing.

"You may burn me," she said. "You may burn the child. I cannot stop you. But I will not give you the island, and I will not give you the name, and I will not give you a single leaf of it." Her voice shook and steadied. "And on the day you stand before your God, Magister, and he asks you what you did with the daughters of the Mother, you will remember that I told you no."

The candle guttered.

The Magister rose. He stood for a moment looking down at her, tall and gray and strangely stooped, as if some invisible weight had settled on his shoulders. Then he bent and picked up the bowl of soup.

"Eat," he said. "Please."

"No."

"Then I shall leave it."

He set it down on the floor beside the cot. He straightened. At the door, with his hand on the latch, he paused, and she saw him in profile, the long nose, the thin mouth, the deep-set eyes shining wet in the light.

"For what it is worth," said Osmund Crale, "I think you are the bravest person I have ever met."

The bolt dropped.

…

She did not eat.

She sat on the cot in the dark, with her back against the wall, and listened to his steps die away. The vigil bell tolled. The cold crept up the walls. Far off, somewhere in the heart of the building, a choir of men began to chant a psalm, low and slow and sad.

The pains came again, and she bent over them, and breathed.

I am not afraid, she told herself.

I am a priestess of the Gate.

I am a daughter of the Mother.

She laid her palms on her belly. She felt the child turn, and settle, and press its small hard fist into her hand. It was awake. It was listening. It had listened to everything: the Magister, the offer, the refusal. She did not know what it understood. She only knew that in the silence where the stone had been, there was a different kind of presence, small and bright and fierce, and that it was hers.

"Listen to me," she said.

Her voice was a whisper. It trembled in the dark like a candle flame.

"I am going to tell you a thing. I do not know if you can hear me. But I must say it. I have never been able to promise anything, because I did not know what the world would do. But I promise this." She drew breath. "You will have a home. I do not know where, or when, or how. I do not know if I shall be there to see it. But there is a place, little one, a green place, with trees that sing, and you will walk in it. You will put your hands in the earth. You will hear the Mother in the roots. And no one, no Duke, no Magister, no king, will ever take it from you."

The child lay quiet under her hands.

"I swear it," said Ixara. "On my mother's name. On the Heart. On your father's life."

And she began to sing.

She sang the Song of the Leaves, softly, steadily, the six notes and the pause. She sang it again, and again, and as she sang the cell grew warm, or seemed to, and a faint violet glow rose from nowhere, from the thin faded lines on her wrists. The child sighed. The vigil bell stopped. And the song rose through the whitewashed ceiling and through the stone of the priory and out into the black frozen night, thin as a thread, clear as a silver wire, the oldest lullaby in the world.

Far below, in the dark of the earth, in the black stinking water of an ancient drain, a man with a crowbar in his hand and a lamp at his belt stopped dead.

He stood motionless, up to his thighs in filth, with the water rushing round him. His men stopped behind him. Someone swore under his breath.

"Captain?"

"Hush."

He lifted his face. He was listening to a sound that could not be there, a sound that came down through twenty feet of brick and rubble and wet clay, faint and sweet and impossibly clear.

Garrick Wynmore closed his eyes.

"She's singing," he said.