He shook his head, smiling. “I placed you into the roll of names for the maze too, and then afterward, the lists of those who would speak. There was some… how is it put? Ah, some finessing of Quinnya’s scribbled little list was required.” He waved a hand, lazily. “But the magic was not taxing. Nothing spent. Nothing owed. In my opinion, anyway.”
“That seems to be a bit of a rare opinion around here,” she replied. “I didn’t realise. Thank you.” Although after a moment, she added, “That is, thank you, I think. I’m not really sure I’m cut out for this wizarding thing. It’s all a bit, uhm, strange and dangerous, truth be told. Wizards on the whole are more cut-throat than I imagined.”
He looked to his left, out at the wet grass, then upwards, slowly, into the sky where dark clouds still churned. “There is truth in that. I am curious though–what were you planning to tell the wise and great wizards of the moot? Or those who turn up to listen, anyway. Wisdom and greatness may vary.”
“I don’t even know any more.” This was more honest than she had intended. Between the pain of tiredness still throbbing behind her eyes, and the gathering certainty that she had no idea what was going on any more, Caewen was strongly wondering if she might as well just tell jokes or sing a dark ballad or two. She knew one about a woman who fell pregnant to an unscrupulous lover: the man arranged to meet her on a night to elope together, but strangled her instead. Her ghost wanders the night, clutching her belly, looking for him. So the story goes, anyway. The tune was pretty though.
“Well?” said Samarkarantha, seeming to suspect that Caewen had nodded off in her reverie.
“H’m. Yes. So. What?” She looked at the table, running a finger over the smooth barely perceptible grain. “I suppose I was planning to warn everyone.”
“About what? This supposed war that is coming? I’ve heard the whispers. You can’t go near an oracle or temple of divination without someone telling you there’s war smouldering.”
“Yes and no. What I’ve been told was that the night-folk are hearing the same rumours. They think the followers of the Brightness Queen are secretly amassing an army. And the peoples of the day-lit south think the night-folk are planning the same. Everyone is reacting to something that seems much more… I don’t know. It’s all just nonsense isn’t it? If people want a reason to fight, they’ll find one.”
“That is perhaps true.” There sat a moment of considered silence between them, then he said, “What story do they tell, where you come from, about the conflict of the Day Queen and the Night Queen? The two great goddesses and their cosmic struggle?”
“I presume the same as everywhere. Although I did learn more of the tale from someone I met recently. She told me more of the detail: so, let me see, Old Night and Chaos came into being first, but she didn’t want to share the world when the Day Queen was born out of the darkness. They fought. For a long time there were rival Queendoms, one all in day, the other all in night. Eventually a truce was declared, and the world was divided into the day and the night by the turning of the hours. Both goddesses were supposed to leave the mortal world, but the Night Queen cheated. She raised a fortress in the very north of the world and sits of a dead rock where no living thing has ever stood. She was able to step around the spirit of the agreement that way. She is not standing on living earth, so to speak.”
“I see.” He smiled. “What if I told you that isn’t the story told in my homeland?”
“What is your story then?”
“For one, there was no war. That is not the story my people tell at all.”
“What then?”
“It was all down to a bet. At the beginning of things, then, as now, there were gods, people and animals who loved best the night, and gods, people and animals who loved best the daytime. They bickered and bickered. Some wanted everlasting night. Some wanted unending day. So the people–who back then were few and lived in just a handful of villages–they proposed a game to decide the matter.” He waved a hand to emphasise the words as he spoke. “They all gathered together to play a game of knuckle-and-chance, which people still play today, with knuckle bones of kine or goats carved with numbers. Each side choose their best player of the game, and all the beasts and birds gathered to take up a side. The gods came too, including the night herself, along with her children: sleep and dream, silence, chaos and death. They all whispered advice to the player for the night. Song, love and story threw in with night too, for that is the best time for those things. The gods of the air and skies, light, fire, work, reaping, harvesting and all the fruitful things, then crept up to the player for the day, and spoke their secrets that might allow him to triumph. And so too did the Day Goddess, who was a radiant as the dawn and noon altogether.” He stopped a moment and took a drink of the chill goat’s milk. “The game commenced, and while it ran, the day and the night fell into a pattern of alternation, as this had been agreed to ahead of time. The turning of light and dark would play out, one after the other, until the game was resolved. Everyone gathered and cheered and shouted advice. Only one beast did not join a side, and that was the jackal, who was too clever to take to just one side, and so drifted from one party to the other as the fortunes of the game waxed and waned, one side winning, then the other. Ah, and there was a god missing too, the Lady who Breaths Weather, for she does not care if it is night or day. She will send her storms, rain or droughts whensoever she wishes. This went on for hours and hours, days and days, nights and nights, and still neither player was closer to winning. Whenever one got a little ahead, the other got up a little luck, or skill, and pulled back the lead. At last it seemed to the jackal that no one would win, and he would have to go back and forth between the sides forever. He thought on this, and decided it would be both boring and exhausting to so spend eternity. So, he sneaked away, and quietly, he called the Lady of Airs. ‘Oh, Blusterer’, he said, ‘Oh Promulgator of Summer Thirst, Oh Majesty Who Rules Above Fogs and Rain: why are you not attending to the game?’ She heard him from her palace atop the highest, remotest mountain of the world, for when jackal speaks, his voice carries. She replied, ‘I have no care for the outcome either way. I will send my howling winds whenever I please.’ Well this is a good turn then, thought the Jackal, and he said, ‘Then let us have a little fun. These gamblers are all so pompous and self-important, huffing and yelling and stamping their feet. Send a little water to wet their heads, oh Lady Whose Breath is Darkest Clouds and Desert Mirages. Make them dash about and squeal.” It always amuses the Lady of Airs to make a prideful person wet, so she agreed, and sent her coldest, meanest, nastiest most blustering of winds: a terrible lashing of rains and hail and sleet. All the gathered gods, animals and people had to abandon the game and run for shelter, and the Lady Whose Breath Destroys Crops and Villages laughed. Jackal was merely happy to have a bit of a rest. No more running back and forth. Afterward, it never could be agreed who was ahead when the game broke up, so the game was never resumed. As such, the turning of day and night stayed as it was, now day, now night, now day, and so on. It was only ever meant to be a temporary situation, but it has worked out well enough.”
“Except in the farthest north, where it is darkness always.”
“That is also true. Yes.”
Far off somewhere a voice struck up a high bright song in a sharp brogue. They both looked in the direction. The followers of the Sun Queen were beginning their own festival as the sun rose. The Festival of Firstborn Day, to counterbalance the Uncreated Night.
“It is an interesting story,” Caewen mused, at last.
“Isn’t it? And you know what I find more interesting than the story alone?”
“No, tell me.”
“The story in a throng.”
“How do you mean? I don’t follow.”
“I have always held in my heart an interest for stories, and so I collect tales, when I hear them. What interests me is this: there are many, many stories about the conflict, all of them different. Yes, all agree that the two great goddesses fell out, long ages ago, and they could not decide between themselves how to divide the world into day and night, but the tale is always distinct. In Aracthanortha the tale goes that they are two sisters who quarrelled over a lover. In Sorthe they say that the Brightness Queen ambushed her mother, Old Night, and kept her locked in a cave for a thousand years before guilt made her let Night out of her cage. In Fraenkish lands they tell a tale of a thousand knights, and three impossible tasks, and the two goddesses bickering over the laying out of a garden, of all things.”
“That’s interesting, I suppose, but what does it mean?”
“What indeed? Why is it that everyone agrees there was a disagreement of some sort, but no two peoples seem to have the same story? It makes one wonder. How much truth is there in the old tales at all. Put simply, are we being lied to about something?”