Match-That-Artwork Contest Winner
The Beacon and the Keeper by Therese Arkenberg

The villagers at the base of the Kardanions knew that they lived at the feet of the tallest mountains in Knedra. It was a matter of some pride to them. Yet the winters and the storms that struck in the foothills of the Kardanions were wretched; they couldn’t imagine anyone living any higher than themselves. When the light first appeared amid the barren rocks between the treeline and the snow, it was a disconcerting mystery.

When the widow Dhorien saw Ashanie coming down the single street, wrapped in a full, thick robe, she didn’t think at first that the small, dark girl was going to solve that mystery. She rather liked Ashanie, and they had much in common—both had lost their families with the last passing of the Red Plague—but no one in the village had much curiosity about things beyond their ken; nobody was very adventurous. For a villager at the base of the Kardanions to be anything other than satisfied with their life in the valleys and foothills of what were surely the highest mountains on the earth was almost unheard of. Dhorien, like all her kind, assumed the likeliest thing: she thought Ashanie was going to visit some neighbors.

But Ashanie continued walking to the edge of the village, and there she went on, after only the slightest hesitation, going down the road that turned into a path that turned into a trace that faded into nothing as it coiled up the mountainside. And when night fell, she had not come back.

* * *

It was summer, and snow covered the Kardanions’ peaks in only the tiniest caps, but the wind was cold and Ashanie was soon grateful for her robe despite its heaviness. It had been her father’s robe, and still smelled faintly of him; every time she wore it she felt as if she had stolen it from him, and at first she had debated taking it along. She brought in, in the end, for the very reason that taking it made her feel like a thief: it reminded her of what she had loved and lost.

When she went into the mountains, not knowing what she would find, she was not entirely certain that she would return.

The path faded into a trace, and she had to step carefully to avoid placing her foot on a loose stone or even empty air. Night fell early as the sun sank behind the mountains to the west, but the mysterious light still burned bright as a nearby star above her. She could see her way, and since there was anyway no place on the mountain slopes to stop and rest for the night, she continued climbing.

The moon was beginning to set when she slipped and put her foot in the space between two rocks.

The pain was fierce and sudden, enough to strike her blind and dumb a few moments, and the cold of the night faded against the burn of agony in her ankle. She pulled her leg out with her hands, the limb unable to move itself, and she examined the injury in the dark with her fingers. Too tender to search closely, but she thought it was broken.

No way to continue on, then. She had no walking stick that could be used as a crutch, and the nearest pines crouched in pockets of soil far below this rocky slope. And even with such aid, she could not go on, crippled, without a trail.

Yet there seemed no way to go back down, either. Perhaps she could turn the robe into some sort of sled—Ashanie smiled, but realized she would need a good thick layer of snow for it to work, and the idea of sledding down rocks with her ankle tender as it was brought thoughts of pain too intense to smile at for long.

And the smile fled utterly as she considered that she was trapped on the mountainside, alone, in the dark.

She pulled her father’s cloak closer around her and rested her chin on the knee of her undamaged leg. A mountain wind whispered around her, soft and chill. She was too frightened to speak, yet she knew she must call for help if she was to have any chance of getting it.

Ashanie looked at the light above her. It was round and molten-bright, and appeared almost close enough to touch. She thought it looked lonely, even as she was, lost on the dark mountainside, and the seeming camaraderie heartened her enough to shout.

“Hello! Hey! Hellollollollo….Heeyeeyeeey…” The gray rock tossed her words back at her. She called again. And again, and again, until her words were answered by something other than their echo.

“You down there! I’m coming!” A man’s voice, deep and rough about the edges, with a strange accent.

“Thank you! I’m over here!” She saw him when his shadow eclipsed the light above her; his build was slender, and far taller than that of any man of the Kardanions, and when he came closer she saw his skin was strangely pale, a golden goat’s-cream color, his eyes were shaped like almonds, and his hair was long and straight. He wore a full robe of moon-white. Though his features were strange, and his expression was not exactly kind, she saw nothing to fear in him.

“I’ve hurt my ankle,” she said. “I can’t walk.”

“Then I’ll have to carry you.” He spoke matter-of-factly, giving no impression that she was inconveniencing him or that their circumstances on the slopes of the highest mountains in Knedra were unusual.

She clutched her father’s robe around her as the stranger knelt and put one arm around her back and slipped the other gently beneath her knees. He lifted her with a grunt, and held her awkwardly, and the feeling that she might fall caused her to wrap her arms around his neck.

His face, so close to hers, was inscrutable. He started up the trackless mountainside.

“My name is Ashanie,” she told him, feeling almost as if she should apologize for causing inconvenience. “I wanted to see the light more closely.”

“And you came up the mountain for no other reason?” He sounded displeased.

Ashanie assumed that, like her fellow villagers, he was one who had no use for curiosity. “It is a silly reason,” she said.

“It can be dangerous,” was all he said, and there was silence between them until they reached the light.

It was not, as she had expected, a fire; she realized now that its light had been too steady for that. Instead it was a vast sphere of light, wider than the span of her arms and high enough off the ground that she could crawl under it. It was not bright enough to be painful, but something about its glow brought tears to her eyes, it seemed so melancholy and alone.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The Beacon,” he said simply. “A place to come for the lost, a refuge for the hurt and forsaken. I am its Keeper.”

By the golden light she could see the broadly striped cloth of a tent, a long low shelter staked in the lee of a granite outcrop. It looked sturdy and not uncomfortable, but it had an air of the same forlornness as the Beacon’s glow.

“Why is there a refuge for the forsaken in the Kardanions?” Ashanie asked, forgetting for the moment that her curiosity might be unwelcome.

“The Kardanions?” He stopped at the entrance to the tent. “Is that where you’re from?” Before she could answer, he added, “Pull back the door flap, will you? Both your hands are free.”

The tent cloth was heavy but smoothly textured, made of some material Ashanie had never seen before. Perhaps silk, though she had always heard that fabric was light. And surely it was far too expensive to make an entire tent out of.

Inside, one wall was lined with jars, each large enough for a small child to climb into. A folding bed piled with soft-looking furs was set against the wall opposite. The only other furniture consisted of three folding stools surrounding a softly glowing iron brazier.

The brazier and jars seemed heavy and permanent, at odds with the folding camp furniture and, of course, the tent itself. She wanted to ask the Keeper about it, but she wasn’t sure what form her question should take.

He set her down in one of the stools and examined her ankle in the brazier’s light. It wasn’t as bright as the Beacon, but its glow wasn’t as strange or lonely, either, and it felt good to be out of the cold night, within four walls, even walls made of cloth.

“Not broken,” he said, “but badly sprained. I’ll splint it, but all you can do is rest, mostly. I can bring down snow to soothe it.”

“Thank you,” she said, “For all of that. But the snow—it seems like an awfully long walk just to make me a little more comfortable. You don’t have to do it.”

“The length depends on where you’re walking.” He rose and went to the wall of jars. “You said you’re from the Kardanions?”

“Yes,” she said. “A little village on the southern slopes.” There were many questions she wanted to ask, but she managed to force them down.

He had gathered a roll of bandages and a slender shaft of wood from one of the jars, and as he returned to the fire, she saw he was frowning pensively. “The southern side?”

“Yes.”

“So close…” He shook himself, then, as if throwing off something unpleasant that had clung to his robes. “Here, put your leg up…”

He bandaged her ankle in silence, quickly and gently enough, but with a distracted air. She wasn’t sure, with his foreign features ,but she thought he was young, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-four, not many more than her own fifteen years. He had a young man’s restless energy. But he seemed so grave, like a much older man.

“Where are you from?” she asked, the easiest of her questions.

“Ishichiben,” he said. “It’s a land northwest of here…of the Kardanions. I live…lived on the floodplains, where the great cities were. They were surrounded by groves of orange trees.” He spoke tonelessly, as if the place meant nothing to him, and Ashanie thought of when the Red Plague struck the year before, recognizing in his voice the sound of grief.

“I saw oranges once,” she said. “My brother took work on a plantation in the lowlands, and I went south to visit him. The trees were blossoming then—I still remember the scent.”

“So do I,” he whispered in the softest tone she had yet heard from him; then he jerked tight the knot of her splint and announced, “Finished. Now there’s nothing to do but rest and wait. I’ll get that snow.” He was gone from the tent before she could tell him he needn’t bother.

In the moments he was gone, she looked about the single room. It struck her that it seemed so impersonal—like a daughter’s room when the daughter had left for the house of her husband, taking all her loved possessions with her. Bed, stools, brazier, jars of supplies in a line—one more thing she saw, that she had missed before: a low alter and a tiny stature, a slender, gracefully curving form in some white material. A goddess , Ashanie thought, and she wished she could look at it more closely, but with her injured ankle she was caught in her seat.

The Keeper returned with a bowl of melting snow. He packed her ankle in it and after the first knife of cold passed she sighed in relief. “Thank you,” she said again. “It didn’t take you so long as I thought.”

“No.” He held out his hands, angry red at the tips, over the brazier. “The snow is from Mount Naral, on the other side of Knedra. It’s winter there, and I don’t have to go very far to reach the ice.”

“The other side of—” She peered at him, leaning so far forward she nearly toppled from the stool. “How did you get there?”

“The Beacon and my home touch many places.” Again that toneless, almost heartless voice, signaling again the presence of some secret pain.

“Is it magic?” she asked.

“In a way. It’s God-Chosen.” He gestured to the alter and the small white figure there.

The hair rose on Ashanie’s arms. Her village, quiet and content, had little to do with Gods. “God-Chosen? By…by Whom? And for what?”

“In my homeland she is called Juag Yan.” The Keeper straightened and tucked his hands in his full white sleeves, a motion like a self-embrace. “What is she called here, the Goddess of Mercy?”

“I-I don’t know. We revere mostly the Eight Guardians in my village, not the Gods. Only…” She frowned, chasing a thread of memory. “A little more than a year ago, a priest came from the west and told us of Karlestatan, the Lady of Compassion.”

“Another name.” The Keeper nodded. “They call her that in the valleys of the Henthine Hills. The Beacon reaches that place, too.”

“After the priest left…There came the Red Plague…and a little after that passed we first saw the light. We were puzzled, because it’s only barren rock up here. But for you…it isn’t just the Kardanions.”

“No. Anywhere the Goddess is worshipped, there I am. On the mountains.”

Ashanie nodded. Everyone knew mountains, the parts of Knedra closest to the heavens, were where the Gods best worked. “Then Karlestatan’s priest must have made a convert, and she must have prayed…certainly there was cause for it.” She shivered and pulled her father’s robe closer around her.

“The Red Plague, you said. Did it strike hard?”

“Very.” She half-buried her face in a fold of the robe. “I lost my family. Mother, father, two brothers. And other families, too…” But, selfish as it was, when she thought of her own grief she could care little for the pain of others. No one else as young as she had been left entirely alone.

“I’m sorry,” the Keeper said. “It is very hard to lose a family.”

She nodded, and the gentleness in his voice prompted her to speak further. “A woman, Dhorien, offered me a place in her home…but I refused. People said I’m young to live alone, but…being under the same roof with people who aren’t my family…seems strange. As if I’ve betrayed them.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t a betrayal—to continue living after others have died. It isn’t a betrayal when they’re already gone.”

“If you had been there…if the Beacon had appeared earlier…could you have saved them?”

He stared into the fire, his face half-hidden by the fall of his hair. “Perhaps. I know no cure for the Red Plague…but I might have been able to help. All things are in the hands of the Goddess.”

The last words were spoken bitterly. The Keeper stood. “I’ll leave you to sleep now. Rest will help you heal. And…I’m sorry, about your family, that is.”

“Thank you.” He carried her to the bed, then went and lay down in the opposite corner of the tent, on the ground near the alter. Ashanie watched him. It was said to be a great thing, to be God-Chosen—though her brother, who had picked up habits in the southern valleys, called it ‘great and terrible’. Perhaps the southerners were right. She had never imagined a God-Chosen person might seem so sad.

* * *

Ashanie awoke late the next morning and breakfasted with the Keeper on flatbread made from mountain grain, goat’s milk and cheese, and small, sweet red berries with their seeds on the outside.

“They grow on the low slopes of mountains on the far side of the world,” he said. “The people there must worship the Goddess in some form, but they’re strange. In my youth I was educated…” He shook his head at something remembered and continued, “I speak many languages, but I don’t understand a word of their tongue. They dress in animal skins and live in hide tents shaped like gaming pegs. They’re sturdy, though—they need little help from me.”

Ashanie realized she was leaning forwards, as if eager to catch every word falling from his lips. She sat back, feeling a blush creep over her face. Though she was always curious, she usually managed to hide it better.

“I’ll see your leg now,” the Keeper said. His examination, as on the night before, was gentle, complete, and done patiently enough, but with an air of distraction—like an apprentice at an unpleasant task that had become second nature, Ashanie thought, so that his mind could wander to games and friends and girls while he did it. But she doubted the Keeper was thinking of games or girls.

“Try putting your weight on it,” he said.

She tried, and collapsed back onto the bed with a gasp.

“A little more rest, then.” He nodded. “It looks better, though. You’ll be able to go home soon.”

“All right,” Ashanie said, but her stomach twisted at the thought of returning to her village. Small as it was, it felt crowded, and too full of sad memories. The night spent at the Beacon, alone except for the strange Keeper, had been a welcome respite. There was also the matter of many unasked questions. She thought a moment, then selected the most pressing, hoping he wouldn’t mind. “What is it like to live on so many mountains at once?”

A smile ghosted across his face. “Would you like to see?”

She grinned in return and held out her arms.

He carried her out into air far colder than the summer night before. Ashanie’s breath caught in her throat. These mountains were not the Kardanions, they had none of the sharp outthrusts of dark rock, and they didn’t knife so far into the sky. They were low and gently sloping and blue, greenish at their feet with a feathery coat of trees, purple in the distance where mist cloaked them. The tent sat on a wide ridge dotted with small wildflowers sprouting in pockets of slate-blue gravel and sand, and the Beacon glowed not far away, its light flashing on distant snow caps like sheets of silver.

Slightly darker against the mist, smoke rose from a huddle of logs houses in the valley far below them.

“Danriad today,” the Keeper said. “Or at least this morning. It changes, sometimes…like this.”

And then the blue was draining away, and the mountains rose sharper, the mist vanished, the valleys deepened into canyons. They were in a dry, red landscape, with no settlement that she could see.

“The priestess of Lesiat is praying.” The Keeper pointed to a tiny spot of white in the shadow of a blood-colored pillar. “I speak to her sometimes, when she comes up this far. A devout, respectful woman, but completely mad. The solitude…” He stopped, his words dying in his mouth.

It must get very lonely up here, Ashanie thought of saying, but didn’t, knowing it would only hurt. “We can go back inside, if you like,” she said.

“You don’t need to worry about getting home,” he told her as they returned to the tent. “If you start down the mountain, you’ll be back in the Kardanions before you reach the base, wherever I might be. Only the Keeper must stay where the Goddess is called.”

He eased her down onto the bed. He met her eyes and flushed. “I’m sorry. I must be talking your ears off.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’d like nothing better than to listen.” She paused, and when he smiled, almost eagerly, she asked the second of her questions. “How did you become the Keeper? How were you Goddess-Chosen?”

He looked away and moved as if to pull the white robe closer around him. White, like the vestments of the lonely, mad priestess of Lesiat. It was a color of sacredness, sacrifice, and in some lands, she had heard, of death. “In Ishichiben,” he said, “I have a wife—and a daughter.”

Ashanie nodded, though he didn’t see her. She almost said I’m sorry, replying, not to his words, but to the grief in his voice.

“Four years ago, when she was a little more than a year old—just starting to walk…” A smile began at the corners of his mouth, then faded. He had half-turned to her, but still didn’t face her completely. “She became sick with Summer Fever. It comes of Ishichiben during the hot, damp months, especially in the cities on the Great River. We were in the city that summer, in from our country estate, because I was completing my tests for civil service. If I did well, I might get in a high position and—it doesn’t matter.” He shook his head. “I came to the city months early, to study—there are tutors whose only work is to prepare young men for the tests—and my family came with me. We didn’t want to be apart from each other so long—my wife from me, or I from my daughter. She was growing so fast, and I didn’t want to miss anything.”

“Would you like to sit down?” Ashanie asked. She nudged a nearby stool with her uninjured foot, wanting to offer him something, wanting to show her care and ease some of his obvious hurt.

“Thank you.” He sat down. His dark, almond-shaped eyes were narrowed on something in the distance, looking through the tent walls at some other place. “So my daughter was there when the Summer Fever came. She grew ill. It’s hard, for the very young—nothing like Red Plague, but…hard. We feared for her. So I went to the temple of Juag Yan.

“I offered her anything. I told her…my fortune, my estate, my family’s honor if it would serve her, my very life…any or all of it was hers if she would have my daughter spared. I felt responsible, after all—I had brought her there—and I would do anything to save her, anything to make it up…” He raised a hand and rubbed his eyes; the golden skin around them turned red, raw-looking, and his hand came away wet.

“The Goddess healed her.” Ashanie said it to spare him from having to. “And she took…what you offered…”

“My life. Yes.” He folded his arms. “I went on a pilgrimage to give thanks, to the Beacon in the An Mar mountains. And old man was waiting for me—the Keeper. He told me what was required…He died, soon after. I replaced him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged. “In time I’ve grown used to it. It’s just that…sometimes I feel very alone, up here.”

* * *

The Keeper brought Ashanie a crutch of some smooth, dark wood, and as the days passed she was able to walk haltingly around the tent and outside. There was little to do. After telling her his history the Keeper spoke less often, and there were few chores to do, no neighbors to visit. On the third day a young man arrived and spoke with the Keeper, who mixed a strong-smelling liquor using materials from several jars and gave it to him. On the fourth there arrived a wooly, but thin, sheep, and on the fifth his shepherdess came for him. Ashanie tried to speak with her, but she was strange, with skin the color of ginger and charcoal-dark hair as thick as the sheep’s, and her language was so different that all they could exchange were smiles.

“Even when there are people, it’s very lonesome up here,” she told the Keeper that night.

“I know it.” His smile was bitter, and she regretted speaking.

“Is there nothing I can do for you?” The question felt torn from her; she hadn’t planned to ask it.

“What?”

“Is there any way I can help you?”

He turned to the fire and rested his face in his hands. “I don’t believe so.”

“Is there any way you can leave this place? Return to your family? Is there any way you can stop being the Keeper?”

“I can die.”

She shrank back from the cold despair in his voice, but even as she did she said, “What if someone else offers their life to Juag Yan? What if someone chooses—”

“Nobody chooses to be the Keeper.” He rose, and she saw again how much taller he was than other men she knew. But she couldn’t be afraid of him, not even in his anger—she realized he was afraid himself, hurt and lonely and afraid there was no way out, that this was his fate and he would be trapped with the Beacon forever.

“Nobody chooses to be the Keeper,” he said again. “Who would? Who would want this—to be a stranger everywhere, and to lose their home, and to live in such places…alone…” He turned his back to her. She saw his shoulders shake and realized he was weeping.

Ashanie wanted to rise and put her arms around him, like she would to comfort a child, but he wasn’t a child—and she realized she didn’t think of him that way, that her yarning to hold him wasn’t just to provide comfort. When and how had that happened?

He already has a wife, she told herself. A wife and child, and he misses them very much, because he was torn from them to live on this barren mountaintop and mend the ankles of silly little girls like you…

She listened to him cry for his loss, and she could do nothing to comfort him, because what he needed wasn’t for any mortal to give, especially her. She stared into the fire and, when he turned back and apologized, assured him that she hadn’t noticed the spilling of his emotions. Pride, at least, she could leave him.

* * *

The Beacon was in Danriad that evening, and he offered to carry her outside, but she declined, weary of using the crutch and not trusting herself in his arms again. He went out alone. She hoped the beauty might be some consolation.

“Why him?” she asked the small white statue of the Goddess. “Couldn’t you have taken the other things he offered—his wealth, his estate—or nothing at all, aren’t you the Goddess of Mercy? Why couldn’t you have been merciful? At the least—” She swallowed, realizing she had raised her voice too much, that he might have heard her outside. “At the least,” she continued in a murmur, “if you must have had your Keeper, couldn’t you have taken someone else? Someone with no family, no future, nothing to miss…”

For a long time she sat silently, thinking.

She had nothing. Why else had she climbed into the Kardanions, chasing after the mystery of the Beacon, not certain if she would ever return?

Thinking of the beautiful mountain night outside, and the man taking solace in it, she bowed to the ivory statue on its alter, folded her hands prayer-fashion and whispered, “If you release him, Goddess of Mercy, I offer you whatever you desire, I offer you my very life to see him freed…”

Her prayer finished, she took the crutch the Keeper had made her and hobbled to the bed, where she curled in her father’s robe and shed a few, quickly muffled, tears. The robe smelled less of her father now and more of the high, fresh, lonely air of the mountains.

* * *

She went out early the next morning to watch the sun rise over a long finger of sea reaching up an ice-sheeted valley. The Keeper had called it a fjord, something in the language of the strange, snow-pale people who lived in these lands. The sea was something new to her, but in the bright morning she saw it was beautiful.

When she came inside, leaning on her crutch, she said, “There’s someone coming up the mountain. I think he needs your help.”

“Oh?” the Keeper looked up with the distracted expression she had come to know.

“Yes. He’s in the landward valley, pretty far down, moving stiffly…” She followed him outside, their breath forming clouds. “Perhaps he’s injured.”

The Keeper went to the edge of the shallow slope where Beacon and tent rested. He peered down, frowning; his expression turned quizzical. “I don’t see anything.”

“Perhaps he’s moved into the shadow of a rock.” Ashanie swallowed—her voice had wavered. She was a poor liar at the best of times, and this…She only hoped that she was right, that this would go as she had planned. She knew of no other way to get him down the mountain—and she couldn’t explain what she had done, in case it hadn’t worked, or even if it had, because he wouldn’t understand.

He nodded. “Yes. I’ll start down. Thank you for altering me.”

She nodded in turn, and her heard froze when, after a few steps more, he turned back. “Is there…?”

“Can you start heating a kettle of water? He may need it when we get back.”

“Of course,” she said. She kept her tears away until he was too far below to hear or see them even if he turned around again. Her mouth opened at the last, almost ready to cry out, to tell him, but she stopped it.

Nobody chooses to be the Keeper, he had said. Who would? Mixed with the pain in the question was contempt, or something like it. He wouldn’t understand why, and she couldn’t explain it to him. She didn’t dare tell him why she offered what she had for his sake.

Yet, perhaps… He had, after all, become the Keeper for the sake of someone he loved.

Far below, he glanced up a moment, and she raised her arm. He waved in reply, no doubt puzzled, likely wonder if she’d started the kettle boiling, before he continued on his way. She wondered what had inspired him to look back then.

Her eyes followed him as he made his way along the cliff-side path, but at some point she realized she could no longer see him. There were no turns or corners, no rocks whose shadow he might fall in, he had simply vanished from the Beacon’s mountain.

From the east blew the faint scent of orange blossoms.

Ashanie smiled, turned and hobbled back into the Keeper’s tent. She nodded to the statue of Juag Yan and set a kettle over the fire, ready to prepare a solitary breakfast. Outside, the Beacon burned, bright even in the day, beckoning the lost and forsaken from hundreds of mountaintops, a light against the loneliness.