by Tad Williams
“Father!” he said. “You live once more!”
“You are a good and faithful son,” Nushash told him. “You have saved me. Where is your mother? I wish to see her.”
When Habbili told him that Suya the Dawnflower had died so that they could escape from Xergal the Earthlord, great Nushash was full of grief. He went away then to his house in the highest heavens and resumed his old chore of driving the sun chariot across the sky each day. Habbili remained on the earth, where he taught the sons of men the truth about Argal the Thunderer and the rest of that traitorous clan of gods, revealing them all as the enemies of Nushash Whitefire. So the people drove out Argal’s supporters and the lands all around Xandos ever after worshipped Nushash, the true king of the sky.”
Pigeon squeezed her hand. She looked down and saw the question in his eyes. “Yes,” she said, “that is the truth. That is why I told you the story. Habbili the Crooked was dead, with his heart cut out, and yet he returned to defeat his enemies—and they were gods and demons! Yes, he was frightened, but he did not surrender to fear. That is why things turned out right in the end.”
Pigeon squeezed her hand.
“You’re welcome. So do not fear, little one. We will find a way. The gods will help us. Heaven will preserve us.”
She held him for a long time until she noticed that the sound of his breathing had changed. Pigeon had finally fallen asleep.
Against all odds, the crippled boy Habbili survived, she thought to herself. Against all odds. But to save him, his mother had to die.
“Are you a believer, King Olin?” The autarch’s golden eyes seemed even brighter than usual.
“A believer?”
“Yes. Do you believe in heaven?”
“I believe in my gods.”
“Ah. So you are not a believer—at least in the old sense.”
“What does that mean, Xandian? I told you I believe in . . .”
“ . . . ‘In my gods,’ is what you said. I heard.” Sulepis turned up his long hands like the two sides of a scale. “Which means you acknowledge that other people have other beliefs . . . other gods. But those who truly believe in their own creed think that other gods cannot exist—that the beliefs of others are superstition or devil-worship.” The autarch smiled. For a handsome man, he had a terrible, frightening smile; even after more than a year of serving him Pinimmon Vash had still not grown used to it. “I gather you are not that type.”
Olin shrugged, but his words were careful. “I try to understand the world in which I live.”
“Which is to say you find it hard to believe in anything so foolish as the idea that every word of the Book of the Trigon is the truth. Ah, no, do not grow angry, Olin! The same is easily said of my people’s Revelations of Nushash. Fireside tales for children.”
Even Vash, with all his years of practice, could not suppress a small grunt of astonishment. The autarch turned to him, grinning. “Have I offended you, Minister Vash?”
“N-No, Golden One. Nothing you do could ever offend me.”
“Hmmm. That sounds like a challenge.” Sulepis laughed, the high, careless mirth of a happy child. “But at the moment I am involved in a deep philosophical discussion with King Olin, so perhaps you would be more comfortable doing something else.” His smile abruptly disappeared. “In other words—go, Vash.”
Vash bowed and immediately backed out of the Golden One’s presence. As he passed the Scotarch Prusus lolling in his chair, Vash thought he noticed something other than the usual fear and confusion in that rheumy eye. Had the cripple’s interest been pricked by the autarch’s careless blasphemy? Was the simpleminded creature actually offended? Vash was coldly amused. Perhaps Sulepis was sending away the wrong man.
Once he had gone into the main cabin, Vash climbed as quickly to the deck above as his old legs would allow, then circled around so that he could stay within earshot of the autarch’s voice. One did not reach the paramount minister’s exalted age by being ignorant of the substance of important conversations, but since he did not have his usual resources in place here on the royal ship he’d have to do the spying himself, degrading and dangerous as it might be.
Sulepis was still talking when Vash drew near enough to hear.
“ . . . No, there is no need for coyness, King Olin,” said the autarch. “Wise men know that the ancients spoke secrets in the great religious books that are too powerful for simple folk to hear. Knowledge of that sort is for the elite—for men such as you and I, who have studied the deep arts and know the truth behind the gaudy pageant of history.”
Vash leaned forward a little until he could see the back of Olin’s head where the northern king stood at the railing below him. The autarch was out of sight, although Vash could tell from Olin’s tense stance that he must be near: how well the paramount minister knew the nerve-jumping fear that even an apparently friendly conversation with Sulepis brought.
“You mistake me . . .” Olin began, but the autarch only laughed.
“No, do not argue, my good fellow—a man who has so few breaths left to him in this world should not waste even one. I know much more about you than you do about me, Olin Eddon. I have watched you and your family, you see.”
The northerner grew very still beside the rail. Were it not that the green, unsettled waters of the Osteian Sea continued to hump and thrash themselves into white froth beyond Olin’s shoulder, Pinimmon Vash would have thought the entire world had suddenly paused like a skipped heartbeat. “You have watched us . . . ?”
Sulepis went on as though the other monarch had not spoken. “I know that you, your royal physicians, and other philosophic explorers of your court have made a study of the old teachings, the lost arts . . . and of the days of the gods.”
“I do not know what you mean,” Olin said stiffly.
“It could be that you did so originally for your own reasons—to learn more of the mystery of your family’s tainted blood—but in your years of study you cannot have failed to learn more about the way the world truly works than the simpletons who surround you, who call you the monarch anointed by the gods without truly knowing anything about the gods at all.” For a moment Sulepis came into view and Vash shrank back, but the autarch only moved closer to Olin, his back turned to Vash’s hiding spot. Vash couldn’t see any of the guards but he knew they would not like the autarch being so close to the foreign prisoner.
It was a strangely ordinary scene, the two men leaning side-by-side against the rail: had it not been for the autarch’s ceremonial costume—the high-peaked headgear known as the Henbane Crown because it resembled the poisonous seed of that plant, the huge golden amulet of the sun on his chest, and of course his golden finger-stalls—Sulepis might have been an ordinary Xandian priest discussing tithes and temple maintenance with some northern counterpart. But to face those golden eyes directly, Vash knew, was to feel quite differently about what sort of creature the autarch was.
The northern king seemed to be surprisingly brave: anyone else feeling the autarch’s heat so close, the fever of the Golden One’s thoughts, would have shrunk away. People in the Orchard Court whispered that standing near Sulepis was like standing in the unshielded desert sun, that if you stayed too long first your wits, then your very skin and bones would burn away.
Vash shuddered a little. Once he had called such talk nonsense. Now he felt he could believe almost anything about his master, this terrifying god-on-earth.
“Perhaps this is all a bit difficult to grasp.” The autarch stretched his long fingers toward the western horizon as if he would pluck the sun setting there like a fig from a branch. “I have perhaps pondered more on these things than you have, Olin, but I know you can grasp them—that you can understand the truth. And when you do . . . well, perhaps then you will feel differently about me and what I plan.”
“I doubt that.”
The autarch made a comfortable, satisfied noise. “Do you know the story of Melarkh, the hero-king of ancient Jurr? I’m sure you have hear
d it. His wife was cursed by evil fates and so she could not give him a son. He saved a falcon from a great serpent, and in reward the falcon flew him up to heaven so that he could steal the Seed of Birth from the gods themselves.”
Olin looked up, his expression so odd that Vash could not read it. “I have heard something like it told of the great hero Hiliometes.”
“Ah, you illustrate my point. Now, most of those who hear that tale believe ‘This is a true thing. This is what Melarkh—or Hiliometes, if that is how they hear the tale—this is what the great hero did.’ ” For a moment the god-king’s hand rose again, finger-stalls glittering like fire in the sun’s dying rays. “But those, of course, are the very simplest of the simple. Cleverer men—clerics and other wise men, leaders of the common folk, they will say, ‘Of course Melarkh may not have flown up to heaven on a falcon or brought back the Seed of Birth, but the story speaks of how the secrets of the gods must be discovered by brave men, how mortals can change their fate.’ And the wildest minds, the loneliest of philosophers living far from the disapproval of others, might even think, ‘Since no falcon large enough to carry a grown man exists, perhaps the tale of Melarkh riding one to heaven is false. And if that tale is false, perhaps others are false too. And if the tales are false, perhaps all the stories they tell are lies. Perhaps the gods themselves do not exist!’ And from such blasphemy even the wisest recoil, because they know that such thinking could uproot heaven itself and leave men alone in the void.”
The autarch’s tone changed now, growing softer and more intimate, so that Vash, cursing his old ears, had to lean down to the point where his back, already sore, began to ache in earnest. He was also terrified that the railing might creak under this greater weight, giving him away.
“But here is what I say to all of them, the stupid and the curious and the brave,” the autarch continued, “they are all of them right! And they are all of them wrong as well. Only I understand the truth. Only I of all living things can bend the gods to my will.”
Vash took a breath. This was a scope of madness even he had not seen before, and he had witnessed many of the autarch’s strangest and most savage ideas.
“I do not . . . I do not understand you.” Olin sounded weak and ill now.
“Oh, I think you do. Or at least you grasp the general drift of what I say—because you have thought such things yourself. Admit it, Olin, you are surprised to hear such ideas—ideas more exalted but otherwise not so different from your own—coming from one you think of as so different from yourself. Well, you are right—I am different. Because where you have learned these secrets and thought these thoughts in the depths of despair, trying to learn why you and your line are so cursed, I have stepped forward and said, ‘These secrets are what I seek, but I will not be the anvil, I will be the hammer. It is I who will do the shaping.’ ” The autarch let out another gleeful laugh. “You see, I know what is beneath your castle, Olin of Southmarch. I know the curse that has bedeviled your family for generations, and I know what caused it. But unlike you, I will shape that power to my own will. Unlike you, I will not let heaven rule me with ancient tales and infantile warnings! The power of the gods will be mine—and then I will punish heaven itself for trying to deny me!”
After the autarch returned to his cabin, King Olin remained at the rail, staring silently at the water. Pinimmon Vash, whose knees were throbbing now too, dared not move yet for fear the northern king would notice him. At last, Olin turned and let his guards lead him back toward his small cabin. For a moment Vash could see the foreign king’s face clearly, its skin so slack and its hue so ghastly pale that Olin might have already been dead. In fact, the foreigner looked as though he had seen not only his own death, but the end of everything he loved.
Pinimmon Vash, who had never wasted a drop of pity on others, thought of Olin’s bloodless face and found himself hoping that the gods would show mercy on the northern king and let him die in his sleep that night.
5
A Dropletof Peace
“During the years of the Great Death, most fairies were driven out of the lands of men, accused of spawning and spreading that terrible plague. But Phayallos and others claim that fairy-villages such as a cave city near Falopetris in Ulos were found empty but for the bodies of dead Qar, who had succumbed to the pox before any man had reached them.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
“ NO.” THE BARMAID SLAMMED the coin down on the wet, greasy board and walked away.
Matt Tinwright wanted her to take it, but he had to admit to a certain ambivalence. It was the last of his money, a single silver sturgeon borrowed—along with the three he’d already spent in the last fortnight—after a heroic wheedling of old Puzzle, a feat of flattery, exaggeration, and outright sniveling that would be celebrated among the guild of beggars for centuries to come. Not that Tinwright had exaggerated everything he had said to get Puzzle to take his coins out of the odiferous little bag he kept in his boot: he really did need the money, and it really was a matter of life or death.
“Please, Brigid,” he said quietly as the barmaid passed him again. There weren’t many people in the Quiller’s Mint at this time of the day, and those who were would doubtless not know the difference between voices inside their head or outside, but it was not the sort of thing one talked about loudly. “Please. There is no one else who can help me.”
“And I don’t care.” She stopped in front of him, fists on hips, and bent forward so that her face was only a hand’s-breadth from his own. Normally he would have been distracted by the amount of bosom this pose displayed, but even his most dominating instincts were at the moment shriveled by fear of his awesome responsibility. “My brothers helped you get her out of her rooms and I helped you get her over to the new place—I even carried the snobby cow while you ran off and piddled your pantaloons.”
“A base lie!” he said, then lowered his voice. “I had to go and distract those men. They were priests—clerics from the castle’s counting house. They are sober men and would have known right away something was not right.” He remembered the terror of that moment, hearing them coming down the passage as he and the serving wench were dragging a dazed, barefoot Elan M’Cory to the room he had rented and prepared for her near Skimmers Lagoon. It had been even more frightening than the time he had thought he was about to be executed by Avin Brone: that time he had not known why he was in trouble, but this time Tinwright had helped a young noblewoman poison herself—although without letting her actually achieve that goal. Now he had to keep the recovering Elan hidden from Hendon Tolly and the others. Almost being caught like that—well, he wouldn’t admit it to Brigid, but the state of his clothing had been a near thing.
“You know, it’s a funny thing, Matty, but I still don’t care.” Brigid tossed her curly hair. “I’m not interested in your problems anymore. I’ve got a new man and he’s got money. Not just drips and drabs like you and that poor old stick you cadge yours from, but a good living. He’s got a house in Oscastle, and a shop, and he has nice clothes and a walking stick with a handle made of real whale ivory . . .”
“And a wife back home?” Tinwright said, none too nicely.
“What of it? She’s a sour old cow—he told me so. He’ll set me up in a place of my own and I won’t have to live in this bloody place anymore and let Conary feel my bubs just to earn my wages.”
“But Brigid, I’m in terrible trouble . . . !”
“And who put you there, Matt Tinwright? You did. And who’s got to get you out? None other than the same person. Learn that lesson and you’ll be halfway to being a man instead of a boy and a fool.”
She turned and walked briskly away, but only got a few steps before she turned back. Her face had softened a little. “I don’t wish you harm, Matty. You and I had our laughs, and you’re not a bad sort. But you can’t build a house on water. You have to find a place to stand.”
She left him then. For all his years of chasing the
poetic muse, he could not think of a word to say.
“Oh. It’s you.” Her dark eyes seemed to take up half her face. Elan M’Cory was frighteningly thin—she had not eaten a full meal since she had taken the tanglewife’s potion many days ago. “I thought it was that cruel, red-faced woman.”
Tinwright sighed. “Brigid is not cruel.”
“Do not defend her just because you have had your way with her. I am not a child—I know how the world is wagged. And she is cruel. She tried to pour soup down my throat. She nearly drowned me.”
“She was trying to get you to eat. You must eat, Elan.” He sat down on the end of the bed. It was a cheap, frail thing and it creaked under his weight. “Please, my lady, you will make yourself ill . . .”
“Make myself ill? Who was it that did this to me, I ask you? Who tricked me when I would have ended it all?”
Tinwright hung his head. She had been like this since she had awakened, furious and argumentative or sad and silent, but always miserable. No wonder Brigid refused to come anymore. He couldn’t blame himself for not wanting to see the woman he loved take her own life, but he certainly could have wished things might have gone better. “I did,” was all he said. It was easier not to argue. As it was, he heard her doleful voice in his head for hours after he left her. He had not been able to write a line in days, and just at a time when he had begun to think he was actually finding his way.
“All I asked of you was the smallest thing—a gift of kindness.” She closed her eyes and let herself sink back into the cushion. “You say you love me, say it over and over again, but did you bring me what I wanted? A droplet of soul’s peace, that was all I asked. A simple thing.”