Stargate by Pauline Gedge

Author:Pauline Gedge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2016-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

13

She bathed and dressed, ate a little, and then took her cloak from its hook by the door and let herself out into the thin light of predawn. She lifted her head as she walked and inhaled the morning. The wind still tugged at the city, ringing the thousands of bells, but Rilla was so accustomed to them that she hardly heard them. Occasionally she passed someone going to work early and greeted him with a smile. But most of the streets that ran to meet her own were deserted. The perfume of winter filled the air, dry, delicate, and faint, the odor of resting trees mingling with gusts of sweetness from clumps of white winter flowers. She climbed steadily, and once above the city, she set out past the Towers of Peace and across the plain. The suns were up now, shimmering new and red on the horizon. She strode rapidly along the well-worn path, head down, hands folded under her billowing green cloak. Up here above Shaban the wind blew with a steady, keening whine, pulling at her neatly tied hair and bringing a flush of red to her sallow cheeks, coaxing her blood to run faster and tingling in her ears. On any other morning she would have hummed as she went, matching a tune to the working of her long brown legs, and taken time to watch the steadily lifting suns rise above the city and splash the face of the rock-held palace, but now her mind was full of an odd sadness that made her wish she had stayed in bed or got up only to sit before the wide window in her workroom and think nothing. A flock of birds wheeled by overhead, circling the plateau and screeching to one another, and she flinched and hurried on.

Reaching the long, gleaming terrace of the palace she climbed the steps hurriedly and passed under the lofty arches of the entrance with relief. In a matter of moments she was knocking on Melfidor’s door.

He opened, greeted her gaily, and kissed her, and she followed him into the room. Sunlight hung everywhere, blushing the walls, entangling in the rigging of the huge ship model resting along one wall, lying across his desk, and picking sparks from his pens.

“I would have come to your house in another hour,” he said, “but Veltim is busy with Sholia, and I had to wait.”

“I don’t want to sail today in any case,” she replied, moving to the desk. “I think the wind is too strong for little boats, and besides, I have work to do.” Green leaves, she thought. I don’t want to embroider any more green leaves. I feel ill just remembering how long it took me to do half of one last night.

“Will Yarne come?” he enquired.

She turned, troubled, unseeing eyes upon him, her hands passing absently and clumsily over the litter beneath them. “Perhaps. You can stop at the house on your way down to the bay and ask him.

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