They walked quietly over to where the two dying magicians lay in the shadow of the rocks. Zara was on her back with her hands clasped across her. The Ropemaker was on his side, facing her, slightly curled up, with his cheek resting on the back of his hand, like a sleeping child. Standing, Maja could just see over the top of the rocks to where the round, smoky-orange sun was settling out of a pale gold sky toward the dark hills. Visibly the gap closed.
Chanad took a roll and a small flask out of the folds of her robe. She broke the roll in two, releasing an odor of fresh-baked bread, and poured a little yellow wine into the soft interiors. She handed one half to Saranja, then bent and breathed gently on each of the still faces. The eyes opened. She placed the softened pulp of her half roll against Zara’s mouth and the shriveled lips sucked and chumbled at it. Saranja did the same for the Ropemaker until he turned his head away. The helpers stood back, and they all waited.
“I am ready,” whispered Zara.
“Me too,” said the Ropemaker, and pushed himself up onto his elbow.
Chanad had to lift Zara bodily to her feet and half-carry her across the turf, but the Ropemaker needed only to be helped up and then steadied as he tottered behind them. The others followed. A hollow had appeared in the center of the arena, grassed like the rest of the space, as though it had been there for centuries. At the bottom lay a low stone slab, carved with what looked like a letter in an unknown alphabet. Chanad and Saranja helped the two magicians down the slope and positioned them either side of the slab. Without any discussion Ribek, Benayu, Striclan and Maja spaced themselves out round the rim of the bowl. Sponge was already at Benayu’s heels and the horses came ambling over and joined them.
Again they waited. Maja was facing west. The sun was almost red now, seeming unnaturally huge and near, but dim enough for her to be able to watch it unblinking. Chanad, in deep shadow at the bottom of the bowl, could not have seen it, but when only a sliver of golden sky separated the rim of the disc from the rim of the hills she nodded to Saranja.
The bread had barely touched the lips of the two magicians when they raised their hands and took it themselves. Chanad and Saranja backed away, turned and climbed up out of the bowl. The sun reached the hilltops.
The magicians didn’t stir, but they seemed now to glow faintly as they slowly nibbled the bread, or perhaps that was only an effect of dusk settling into the bowl. They stopped eating, and a rustling whisper rose from the hollow, steady, faintly rhythmic, shaping itself as Maja listened into the sound of two old voices muttering as if in dreams. Gradually the mutter was strengthened into song. They raised their arms in a gesture of invocation. Somehow the space in and above the bowl seemed to begin to revolve, without causing any movement in the windless air, but because it was filled with minute flecks of light, like dust-motes, turning and turning, floating downward and inward, drawn to the two figures standing either side of the slab, sucked in by their quiet song.
Maja knew what she was looking at. It was all in the old story, right at the start of it. This was what had happened to the magician Asarta forty generations ago. She was watching the whirlpool of the years. The motes were all the uncountable instants of those two long lives spiraling back down into the bodies from which they had come. The glow from the two magicians intensified and spread around them, filling the bowl but casting no shadows beyond it. The light contained itself, like a drop of liquid held into a sphere by its own surface tension.
The two voices became distinct. They were almost at the same pitch, but very different, the Ropemaker’s a light, slightly nasal tenor, quavery at first, but true, and soon becoming firmer. By the time he was standing to his full stature it rang with his natural energies and zest for life. Zara’s was deep for a woman’s voice, much darker and sadder in tone, with effortlessly sustained long haunting notes. Their songs were not the same songs, but intertwined gracefully with each other as if they had been made and shaped to do so.
Though there was no wind the whirl of time plucked at their clothing like a fresh breeze, unsettling small bright birds from the folds of Zara’s robes, to flutter and dart around her. The backward-racing minutes twitched and fingered at the Ropemaker’s turban, loosed it and sent it snaking away in a brilliant ribbon of color, and the birds danced in and out of its windings. Laughing through his song he shook loose his fiery shock of hair and it blazed out like sunlight around him.
Their song became laughter, delight in their own youth and strength and the joy of the living world. Still singing, they held out their arms to each other across the slab, gripped hands with hands, and stepped easily up onto the slab. He knelt, bringing their faces to a level. She moved to him, and they took each other in their arms and kissed. Even to Maja it was obvious, from the sudden slight awkwardness after all their assured and purposeful movement through the ritual, and from the long, intense silence breaking the song, that the kiss was no part of the ritual, and that never before in all their immense lives had either of them done such a thing, done it in the love that magicians can never afford.
They separated. She stepped back and he remained kneeling. They raised their arms in front of their faces and moved them closer to each other, all four hands spread and tilted backward at the wrist, forming a shape like the petals of a tulip. The light in and over the hollow, without losing any of its intensity, shrank inward to its center, smaller and smaller, until it became the thing that the hands were holding, all the instants of all their years gathered into a sphere of pure light, that still cast no shadows because it spread no ray beyond itself, an offering up of those lives, the purpose and ending of the ritual.
Quietly they allowed themselves to be absorbed into its brightness, and it floated upward. The witnesses round the bowl watched it go, widening now and fading as it spread across the sky, until it became the light of the newly risen moon. The stone slab vanished and the hollow in which it had lain rose quietly back to level ground.
They stood for some while in silence. Maja’s eye was caught by a movement among the rocks on the further side of the arena. A Jex, several Jexes, a whole rank of them, all round the arena, had returned to their living form to watch the magicians’ going, much as humans might have risen from their sickbeds to witness some astounding event. Rows of lizard eyes glistened opal in the moonlight. Maja had scarcely noticed them before they began to melt back into patches of lichen.
Nobody seemed to want to move or break the silence. Even Chanad, steeped perhaps for centuries in serious magic, seemed awed by what she had seen. At length she walked slowly forward and picked up the remains of the two pieces of roll that the magicians had dropped. She took the little flask from inside her robe and placed it upright on the turf, where the slab had been. As it touched the ground a second flask appeared beside it. She plucked a few stems of grass, rubbed them between finger and thumb, and placed them beside the flasks, where they became a woven grass platter. When she crumbled the two pieces of roll onto it the morsels reassembled themselves into a loaf.
She beckoned and they moved to join her. She gave them each a goblet, and there, still in complete silence, they sat and ate and drank. The bread was the best Maja had ever eaten, and the water in one flask as delectable as the wine in the other. It was a simple meal, but richer and more satisfying than the grandest feast, because it was the final element in the ritual they had witnessed, an act of letting go, their share in the blessedness of the event.