48
Moon would not have believed it was possible to clear a space as long as her arm and keep it clear for even a moment in the quicksand shifting of the Festival mobs. But somehow order had been created out of chaos; somewhere in the seemingly formless super entity that was the Festival an underlying structure existed. A course had been cleared along the Street’s upper reaches for a mile below the palace, and eager spectators lined the way like the elegant townhouse walls at their backs. Most who had a viewing place had been holding it for hours, and the Blues who patrolled casually up and down before them had little trouble keeping them there. They had come to watch the beginning of the end, the first of the ancient ceremonies of the Change: the footrace that would thin the numbers of the women who had come to compete for the mask of the Summer Queen.
Moon had come out into the Street as soon as the nucleus of Summer women began to form around an elder of the Goodventure family, who carried in her the blood of Tiamat’s last line of Summer Queens. Members of that family were forbidden to become Queen at this Change, but instead bore the honored responsibility of seeing that its rituals were faithfully preserved and carried out. She had pulled a colored ribbon from one of their sacks to tie around her head — the ribbon that would give her a place at the front, middle, or back of the starting mass. The band she drew was grew, the sea: the color that put her in the front, ahead of brown for the land, blue for the sky. She tied the ribbon across her forehead, her face paley expressionless against the triumph and the disappointment around her. Of course it had been green… how could it not be? But a tension born of certainty wrapped her, tightening like tentacles; she pushed toward the front of the forming field of runners to escape it.
She looked around her as she struggled to hold a new equilibrium in the jostling mob of colored ribbons and eager Summer faces in this crowd of strangers. Most of the women who had come to the Festival intending to run in the Summer Queen’s choosing had brought with them traditional-style holiday garments: soft wool shirts and trousers dyed sea-green, summer-green, to please the Lady. They were all elaborately sewn with designs made of shell and bead and traders’ baubles, ribbons that dangled fetishes of their family totems. But she wore the nomad’s tunic she had brought back with her from Persipone’s, the only clothing she owned, its gaudy color as alien as she suddenly felt herself, among the people who should have been her own. She had covered her hair with a scarf, to hide her resemblance to the Queen. Some of the Summers had challenged her right to run because she wore no totem or proof that she was even a Summer. But then she had shown them her throat, and they had backed away. She felt the irony of wearing a Winter’s clothes today, and not ones that were rightfully hers; and yet somehow it was appropriate.
She had not seen anyone she knew, either among the runners or in the crowd of spectators beyond. Even though she knew that she could hardly expect to find anyone from Neith or its few island neighbors in these hundreds, in the thousands that filled Carbuncle, still she searched, and was disappointed. The sights and the sounds and the smells of her home surrounded her here; but her grandmother was far too old to make this voyage, and her mother — “Festivals are for the young,” her mother had said to her once, with pride and longing, “who don’t have ships to tend and mouths to feed. I had my Festival; and I hold the precious memory of it close beside me every day.” Her arm had gone around her daughter’s shoulders, steadying her on the rolling deck…
Moon whimpered, seeing the ugly truth hidden in her mother’s merry begotten memory. The woman next to her apologized and edged nervously away. Moon looked down at herself as the half-fearful sibyl-space opened around her again; suddenly glad that her mother had not come, would not watch her in the race today, whatever its outcome was. Her mother and Gran must think she was dead, and Sparks, too, by now; and maybe it was better that way. Their time of mourning must be long past. Was it better never to let them know the truth, or to always be afraid that once they had learned part of it they would somehow learn the whole, terrible truth about their children? She swallowed her grief, choking on it, turned her vision outward again.
She was not her mother’s child… and not Arienrhod’s, either. Then what am I doing here? She looked around her in sudden doubt. She was the only sibyl she had seen here anywhere. Was she the only sibyl among all the Summer people who wanted to compete? Was it really the Queen’s ambition running in her blood that made her want to be a queen herself? No, I didn’t ask for this! There must be a change; I am only a vessel. Her fists tightened as she repeated the vow. If no other sibyl ran in this race, maybe it was only because none of them knew the truth.
None of them know. She could read on the faces around her the spectrum of motives and gradations of desire that had brought the runners here: some of them hungry for the power (although the power of a Summer Queen had always been more ritual than secular), some for the honor, and some for the easy life of being worshiped as the Lady incarnate; some simply for the sheer joy of competing, a part of their celebration, with no cares at all about winning or losing. And none of them knows why it really matters, except me.
She kept her fists tight as tension wound its springs inside her, pushed forward again until she could just see the piece of weighted ribbon that marked the course’s start. The Goodventure elder was shouting for quiet and announcing the rules. She did not have to be the first in this race, she only had to be among the sacred first thirty three — and the course wasn’t long, it was meant to give some besides the strongest a chance. But there were a hundred women behind her, two hundred more… she couldn’t even see them all from where she stood.
The voice of the Goodventure elder called them all to the mark, and Moon felt her self-awareness slipping, caught in the swell of many moving forward as one. Through a gap between heads and arms she watched the fragile bunting that held back their tide — saw it fall at a signal. The mass of runners surged, sending her forward, helpless to resist if she had wanted to, and the race of the Summer Queen began.
She danced like a reef spotter through the first hundred yards, needing all her concentration just to keep on her feet in the crush before the knot of bodies began to loosen. As spaces opened she broke between, not always easily, feeling elbows bruise her sides in retribution. She couldn’t keep track of how many were ahead in the shifting field; she could only weave and spring and try to put as many of them behind her as her feet could overtake.
A mile was nothing, a mile was hardly enough to quicken her heartbeat when she and Sparks had raced along the endless gleaming beachs of Neith… But this mile ran uphill, on hard pavement, not yielding sand. Before she had reached halfway her breath rasped in her throat and her body protested with every jarring step. She tried to remember how long it had really been since she had run on that shining sand; couldn’t even remember how long it had been since shed had enough food or sleep to satisfy the body of a bird. Damn Carbuncle! There were only a dozen women ahead of her, but they were slowly gaming ground. New runners began to come up on her and pass her from behind. She saw with a kind of dread that one of them wore a brown ribbon, not green — the second group of runners was overtaking the first starters; and she stumbled as her mind left her straining legs unguided.