Chapter Four
Melisandre
Soon the rutted path narrowed. We left the two royal guards who had taken turns driving the carriage behind and continued on foot.
I followed Antonius with my eyes cast downward for fear I’d turn an ankle on the rock-strewn ground. When he stopped, I nearly walked right into him.
“You must go alone from here.”
The path curved out of sight between two enormous boulders, wide enough for only one person at a time. It was growing dark, but my way ahead was lit with a dull reddish glow. I glanced around nervously, remembering all too well how the place of my dreams spouted geysers of fire, how the earth cracked open and oozed molten rock.
Antonius knew me well enough to sense my fear. He patted my shoulder. “I will be waiting for you. Courage, my child. Remember – you are queen of the World of the Seven Stars.”
Surely the earth wouldn’t split apart and consume me with fire. That was only a dream. A horrid nightmare. I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and headed toward the dull red glow.
I rounded the corner and stopped dead in my tracks.
Before me in the distance stood an enormous structure. An ancient stone temple atop a long flight of steps. The glow I’d seen came from massive cauldrons of fire. Two at the base of the steps, two midway up on a wide landing, and two more at the top. They illuminated a row of columns holding up the roof, each one so big around three grown men wouldn’t be able to join hands and circle it.
A pair of bronze doors easily twenty feet tall stood ajar. As I climbed the steps, I saw the doors were decorated with symbols. I recognized the one for our world, a sphere surrounded by seven stars.
Flickering torches on either side of the doors threw the other symbols into shadow, but I thought I saw depictions of strange beasts and winged creatures. I shivered. One of them looked like a dragon.
I stepped through the doorway. The space inside was cavernous. More torches set along the walls at regular intervals barely penetrated the darkness. Huge columns like the ones outside ran the length of the building in a double row about twenty feet from the walls, leaving a main area large enough to hold a huge crowd. I stared around in shock. Someone in the dim recesses of the past had mounted a massive effort, bringing together thousands and thousands of people in this desolate place to create such a magnificent building. It far exceeded anything in the capital in terms of scale and grandeur, yet I’d never heard of this temple.
The roof was a giant dome, open in the center. I glanced up at the heavens. There they were, shining in the night sky. Our beacons. Our protectors. The Seven Stars. Though I could only see one or two from where I stood, it was a comfort to know they were there. To know the world as I knew it had not disappeared.
The building was completely empty except for one thing. In the center of the temple, directly under the opening in the dome, sat an ornate carved wooden throne on a raised dais. The dais, too, was surrounded by fire, in the form of glowing chunks of incense in bronze bowls. They rested on waist-high stone pedestals carved in the likenesses of more strange beasts. The haze from the incense gave a dreamy, smoky feel to the scene.
A tiny figure, no bigger than a child, sat in the center of the throne. I couldn’t see her clearly in the gloom, but I assumed it was the Oracle. As I drew nearer, I realized she wasn’t as small as I’d thought. The size of the throne would have dwarfed a grown man. Like everything else in this place, it was huge, though because of the scale of the building, I didn’t appreciate how big it was until I started toward it.
Pale moonlight shone down on her from the opening in the dome. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, but as I drew closer I realized her hair shimmered. It flowed over her shoulders and down her back, long wavy locks of silver shot through with iridescent strands of violet and amethyst and deep purple, shades of blue from dark sapphire to turquoise. The colors moved in sparkling waves, lighting up and then flowing from the top of her head to the wisps curling around her breasts. It was pure magic. Mesmerizing.
Instead of dressing in regal golden robes or vibrant silk, she wore a shapeless full-length garment in a hue somewhere between gray and dull beige. But then, if I had a headdress as spectacular as hers, I wouldn’t want my gown to detract from the show. I wondered how she’d pulled off the illusion.
As I drew nearer, I was able to see her face. It was impossible to tell her age. She could have been forty. Sixty. Eighty. Her skin was creamy white, nearly translucent. Her brow was unlined, but I thought I saw tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She’d pulled off another trick there. As she turned her head to watch me approach, her eyes changed color just as her hair did. First deep purple, followed by warm lilac, then morphing through every shades of blue.
I refused to be dazzled by parlor tricks and looked closer. Her eyelids were dusted with silver. Perhaps that was how she did it. The powder must have reflected the lights in her hair onto her eyes, giving the illusion of colors that shifted through a spectrum. Still, from a purely feminine point of view, I was impressed. She’d be the star of any royal ball she attended.
She stretched her hand out, beckoning me closer. Something about the gesture seemed familiar. I took another look. Surely this iridescent figure and the old crone in my dreams weren’t one and the same.
“Melisandre.”
Her voice was low. Almost husky. As though she hadn’t used it in a long time.
“You carry yourself like your father did. Shoulders set, jaw clenched. Hiding your terror behind a wall of bravado.” She laughed. A shrill cackle that had me revise my estimate of her age. At least eighty.
I ignored the poorly-veiled insult. “You knew my father?”
She let out another thin laugh. “Knew him? Hardly. We had only one meeting. The same as I did with his father and his father before him….and his father before him.”
That would put her at nearly 150 years old, assuming she’d started as a child. I shook my head. Impossible. She took me for a fool if she thought I believed that. In this gloom, with the dazzling display of the headdress drawing all the attention, half a dozen women could have played the role of Oracle over the last century and a half with no one the wiser.
“You have the advantage. You know my name, but I don’t know yours. To whom am I speaking?” I thought I sounded confident. Assured. Whoever this woman was, she lived in the World of the Seven Stars. That made me her queen. She might be sitting on a throne, but it was time to let her know who was in charge.
She let out a snort. “Don’t waste my time. Goddess knows, I’ve seen your kind come and go. Full of yourself, now that you’ve been crowned. That will change soon enough – when you find out what you’re up against.
“My name is not important,” she went on. “My message is. Come here.” Her voice changed to a lower, almost hypnotic tone. “Come closer. That’s right. Stand below the dome, so the moonlight falls on you. I want to look upon the one the Goddess has chosen to fulfill the Prophecy.”