by Tad Williams
Soon after the fever came to both of us. I recovered, but my mother Enla never did. During her last days, as the illness overwhelmed her, she was confined to her bed, but she had me come to her every day for at least a short while. She would ask me to share with her all the things I had seen and heard, then we would pray to the Garden together. When she finally died, I did not know what to do or even what to feel. A part of my child’s mind wondered if it had been my fault, since the fever had come to me first, but that unhappiness was one of many things I never shared with anyone else, along with my mother’s words about the mysterious sea that was somehow a part of me.
My father Pamon Sur must have been nearly as bereft by losing her as I was, but he had his work in the stables to occupy his thoughts. I had only the silent Tinukeda’ya neighbor-woman who lived beside us and watched over me in his absence. This woman had no children of her own and seemed to know nothing about tending them, nor did she care to learn. My father came home late every night, exhausted and silent. I see now that he was grieving in his own way, but to me it felt as though I had been entirely abandoned. It was in this time, in the seasons after my mother’s death, that I began to follow my father to the stables every day, and it was in that place that my master Hakatri first came to know me. It would not be foolish to say that in the Zida’ya lord’s kindness I found something I had been desperate for, though I did not know it. It was not only his interest that saved me, but also the fact of who he was. Insignificant little Pamon Kes had been noticed by one of the most important people in all the world. It was this feeling, like a door opening to let sun and air rush into a dark, smoky room, that gave me hope for my life to mean something.
* * *
• • •
After my master had questioned all the best-known mortal healers and clerics we could find in Nabban, he began to seek for other sorts of wisdom—healing secrets that the city-men had lost or never owned. Hakatri did not scorn all mortal knowledge, so as the moons and seasons fled past we began to explore some of the more distant outposts of mortal men in the Southern lands, the places where the earliest mortal arrivals had settled, far from the wide roads and stone walls the city-folk built later. At last, we began a difficult and agonizing journey into the swampy lands east of Nabban in search of a wise woman whose tale my master had heard from mortal clerics, a woman who supposedly cured even the worst illnesses by secret rites. Legends said that she had been practicing her art in the depths of the swamp for well over two Great Years—more than a century by mortal count—and that gave my master hope.
“She must be something different than an ordinary mortal, Pamon, if the stories are true,” Hakatri said one night when his pain was so great he had awakened me to keep him company. His every word was forced out through a grimace; he had to breathe slowly and shallowly to be able to speak at all. “She might be another of your own folk, Pamon, or even one of the Zida’ya or Hikeda’ya who has fled to this backwater.”
His decision made, Hakatri sent his remaining guards back to Asu’a with our horses, which would be no good to us in the marshes. The guards also carried letters to his family, so I was able to include my own letter meant for Lady Ona at Ravensperch.
It was only the two of us now. We made our way east to the edge of the immense swamp that mortals called the Wran, but which my master’s people had much earlier named the Vastmire. When we at last reached a place called Kwan-To-Po, a sprawling, ramshackle settlement that had grown up beside a much-traveled estuary on the edge of the vast wetland, we hired a local guide to carry us in his boat into the depths of the swamp.
After several days in the flat-bottomed craft, sliding through the damp, insect-haunted marshes, we at last reached the wise woman’s village. Her name was Hurma, and she was, in spite of my master’s hopes, a mortal. She was also tiny, toothless, and extremely kind. She lived in a house made of wood and reeds at the edge of a wide, sluggish river. In our ignorance, my master and I had entered the swamp during the Wolf Moon, the beginning of the rainy season. Hurma kindly let us shelter with her and her sizable family, and we lived in their house through the long season of incessant storms—as cramped and miserable an experience as you might imagine.
From my first sight of it, the swampland felt far too much like Serpent’s Vale for me ever to feel comfortable there, but it was a Serpent’s Vale writ so large that it seemed an entire world. And the longer we spent in that wet, unpleasant place, the worse I found it, until the rain drumming on the thatched roof—or on my head when I had to leave the healer’s hut—threatened to drive me mad. But once the rainy season had begun the rivers all flooded and we could not leave. If Hurma and her family had not sheltered us, I do not think we would have survived.
As it turned out, we lived almost three full moons among those kind people, beneath those tangled trees. Vines that looked like snakes hung on nearly every branch, side by side with deadly snakes that looked like vines. Most nights our only music was the braying of apes and the incessant screeching of birds, and not only the serpents were deadly in that blighted land. In truth, some of the swamp creatures were scarcely less frightening than the worm whose blood had burned my master. Armored cockindrills as long as two-team carriages floated in the muddy water just a stone’s throw from Hurma’s door, and one day I saw a spotted cat as big as a pony, a sharp-toothed hunter who, the healer warned us, could climb trees and drop down silently on its victims from above.
It was good that I spent most of my time in Hurma’s hut, tending my master, because in that swamp, death seemed to wait everywhere. Just during that rainy season one of the healer’s sons was nearly taken by some creature in the river—he escaped, but we never found out what had seized him—and one of her numerous grandchildren was snatched by ghants and never seen again. Many say that the earth-goblins of the northern plains are dreadful to see, but they are nothing compared to ghants, which look like huge, nearly man-sized crabs, but can stand on their hind legs like apes and live together in horrid nests made of mud and slime.
But even more disturbing were the changes that overtook my master as we suffered through the long rainy season.
“My dreams, Pamon,” he said to me one day. He had not been able to get out of his bed that morning. “Something happened to me that night on the ocean, when we floated above the Green Column, and it seems to grow stranger and stronger each time I sleep.”
“Truly, my lord?” I found that hard to believe. Hakatri had told me so many outlandish tales about his wormsblood visions that I could not imagine how they could be any more strange.
“Because now something or someone is calling me,” Hakatri told me when I asked. “And it is different from the other dreams, maddening as they are—this one seems more real and far more powerful. Often I see a tall, pale figure, like a woman in a white robe, waiting for me.”
My skin crawled. “Ever since you first told me about it, I have thought that your summoner sounds like the queen of the Hikeda’ya.”
He shook his head. “I do not think it is Utuk’ku. I see no silver mask in these dreams, and sometimes the figure is no figure at all, but more like a finger held up before me, as if in warning.”
“But you said the dream was calling you. How can it also be warning you?”
He fell back, exhausted, though the day had just begun. “I do not know, Pamon. I do not even know whether it is real or just more madness, Sometimes I feel as though the dragon’s foul blood has burned all the way through me, even into my waking thoughts—as though it is destroying everything in me that existed before Serpent’s Vale.”
“Do not say such a thing, Master!” I was truly terrified. “That is only despair speaking. You are still you. If anyone knows it, I do. You are the same person, though you have suffered in a way no person ever should.”
His head lolled on his pallet of marsh reeds. “To tell truth, I am no longer certain I can tell what is real and what is imagine
d. Am I speaking with you now, or with some dream-Pamon, some memory of my old life?”
“My lord, never say such things!” And even though I knew it was cruel, I reached out and took his hand. He grimaced at my touch, but I held on. “This pain is real—but so am I.” I was in tears at his agony, but I clung to his fingers until he at last managed to pull away. “I am real, Lord Hakatri. Never doubt that.”
“Still, I must find this thing that calls me,” he said. “Of all the visions that have plagued me since the dragon’s death, only this new dream seems to have a meaning—a point. I must find that tall, pale figure. I sense that it portends more than my own life. When I see it, I feel a great cold emptiness—like a deep hole opening beneath me after I have already taken a step and cannot stop myself.” He shivered and sat up. “Help me, my good and trusted servant. Promise you will help me learn what this dream means. I have no more claims on you—”
“No more claims?” It was all I could do not to grab at his hand again. “Master, you have every claim on me, both of loyalty and friendship. I swear I will never desert you—never.” Sadly, I had still not learned the lesson that Ineluki’s pride had taught us.
Lord Hakatri let out a long, ragged sigh. “North,” he said. “It calls me north, Pamon. And I must follow its call.” After those words he fell back into restless sleep, leaving me to wonder what it all meant.
The old healer Hurma never found a true cure for my master’s afflictions, but she tried many things, and at last managed to concoct a paste from the roots of swamp plants that, when spread on his wounded skin, eased his suffering somewhat. I was grateful, for we had used all our small supply of kei-vishaa.
When the rainy season finally ended and we could leave the marshlands, I gathered up our few possessions, which now included a sack full of Hurma’s root bulbs. We left the healer a goodly amount of our remaining gold to repay her for her time and hospitality, then slowly made our way back through the jungle along the brackish waterways of the marshlands.
* * *
• • •
Our journey north started well enough. We returned to Kwan-To-Po and used the last of our gold to buy new horses. The trader, seeing my master’s ailing condition, tried to sell us inferior beasts, but after a lifetime in the stables of Asu’a tending the fairest, swiftest horses in the world, I was easily able to tell the useful ones from the hopeless. I forced the trader to sell us mounts that were, if nowhere near the quality of the horses we knew, at least capable of crossing the wide grasslands between us and home. Because I knew we were still overpaying for barely ordinary stock, I used the trader’s superstitious fear of my master’s kind by hinting at fairy curses if he mistreated us, and thus convinced him to give us a pair of decent saddles and other tackle for the horses as well. It hurt my heart to use the cruel mouth-bit mortals favored, but these animals had never known anything else, and I had neither the time nor any moth harnesses to retrain them.
My master chose the unimaginatively named Gray, while I took Boots, a chestnut with white feet and a white blaze on her nose. They are not long a part of this story, but I name them because they gave surprisingly good service, especially considering the dubious honesty of their former master. In fact, they both seemed quite pleased to leave his stable, and also seemed to enjoy the care I gave them as long as we had them.
Once mounted, Hakatri and I set out north beneath gray skies, across the seemingly endless, grassy plain the Zida’ya called the Whisperwaste. I hoped that we were heading home, but I was to be disappointed, at least for quite some time.
The heaviest storms had passed, but at that time of the year the mists still hung over the grasslands late into the day, only burning off when the sun was high. But the sky seldom lost its blanket of heavy overcast, so that we seemed to ride through a world without color. Occasional rains still swept across the flat plains, turning the meadows to mud and slowing our progress considerably. But nothing could hold back my master’s dreams.
“It is hard to rest,” Hakatri told me one night as we sat by the fire I had made. We never rode much past twilight because our mounts were not as sure-footed as Zida’ya horses, and we feared one of them might break a leg in the dark. “It is only while we travel north that this feeling of being tugged along subsides a little.”
“But we are traveling north, my lord.”
“Whatever summons me does not cease its call when we stop for the night, Pamon. It pulls at me every moment.”
I could only shrug. Now that I was Hakatri’s last and only servant, the journey was wearing on me badly. I cared for the horses, made a fire every night when we stopped, foraged for food and prepared a meal for the two of us, then took the roots Hurma had given us and crushed them into a paste to spread on my master’s wounds while he recovered from the agony of the day’s ride. At the end of each evening I would fall into a helpless, exhausted sleep until the thin light of grassland morning woke me to my duties again.
I did not know then that those were to be the most comfortable days of that journey.
But during the first days crossing the Whisperwaste, things seemed almost hopeful. All around us the approaching Season of Renewal was turning the grasslands a vital green. My master found enough relief in old Hurma’s root salve that he could sit in his saddle and ride and could even sleep sometimes without the terrifying dreams that had punished him since he killed the Blackworm. His mother’s Word of Preservation doubtless had a part in that as well, and some days it almost seemed as if the old days before Serpent’s Vale had returned. I sang songs for my master, ancient ones that I knew he liked, though he laughed and told me that I mangled the old words terribly. I could almost convince myself that things were slowly returning to what they had been, that Lord Hakatri and I would make our way north across the grasslands and be back in Asu’a before Renewal had given way to the Season of Growing.
Then, as we rode deeper into the Whisperwaste, the wise woman’s root salve stopped working. It did not happen suddenly, but once it began it was impossible to ignore. The easing of Hakatri’s terrible pains no longer lasted as long, nor did the paste soothe the agony as much as it previously had. As the days passed, each one as empty as the flat, grassy landscape around us, we used more and more of the salve, so that I spent at least an hour every night pounding down the next day’s supply into something that could be rubbed gently on his scarred flesh. The sack of roots was fast emptying, but even if we had turned then and rode straight for Asu’a, we would have run out long before we got there.
My master even considered a return to the swamps for more of the soothing medicament, but I pointed out to him that with just the two of us and our horses, even if we went back and filled our saddlebags to the top, we would never be able to carry enough to cross all of the Whisperwaste before it ran out again.
“So then, what do you suggest, Armiger Pamon?” he demanded. “That I just lie down here to die?” The anger in his voice and the glint in his eye frightened me: in all our time together, my master had never spoken to me in that way before; for a moment it felt as though I looked at a stranger. “You are always so full of wisdom when I do not need your suggestions,” he said. “Where is that wisdom now?” And Hakatri actually lifted his hand as if to strike at me. When I started back with a cry of surprise, he realized what he had done and his face crumpled in horror.
“Forgive me, good Pamon,” he cried. “I scarcely know what I am doing or saying sometimes. The pain has returned—I am on fire! It never stops, not even when I sleep, but still that pale figure commands my dreams and calls me onward. I have no other hope now but to follow the summons and pray that it signifies some possibility of salvation.”
In truth, Hakatri grew increasingly strange as we crossed the grasslands, even before Hurma’s salve stopped working. The scars on my master’s chest and belly and arms had lost some of their furious redness, but if the pain had subsided a very small amount, ot
her aspects had grown worse. Several times during our journey I woke from sleep to find him hobbling back and forth across our campsite in darkness, swiping with Thunderstroke, his sharp witchwood sword, muttering and moaning. The first time I thought he might be practicing, using the night hours when we did not travel to keep himself in some kind of fighting trim, and I only rolled farther away and went back to sleep. But when it happened again and I listened to what he was saying, it became clear to me that he was sleepwalking—or, rather, sleep-fighting. This of course frightened me, because even wounded and limping my master was a deadly hand with a blade, and if his dreams caused him to mistake me for an enemy, I knew I would stand little chance. When he finally woke to something like his ordinary mood, I asked him about the dream and he told me he had been fighting Hidohebhi. “I stabbed it and stabbed it,” he said, “just as I did in Serpent’s Vale, but the monster would not die.”
I did not bother to remind him that he had killed the dragon with a great spear made of a witchwood tree.
Another night I woke up when Hakatri violently lifted me off the ground. For a moment, in my confusion and fear, I thought my master would break my back, but it soon became clear he thought I was his brother Ineluki, and that he believed I had been killed by the worm of Serpent’s Vale. He cried out so loudly and mournfully that I feared wolves or bandits would come to see what made so much noise in the middle of the empty grassland.
And all through our travel across the grasslands, that mysterious but powerful summoning, the tall, white shape, came to him again and again, generally during his fitful sleeps, but even sometimes when he was awake.
* * *
• • •
The Whisperwaste is a strange place, and our time crossing those wild lands was strange, too. My master sometimes seemed to have a purpose firmly in mind, but at other moments he would ask me where we were going and why, and seemed distressed when I told him that he was the one leading us, not I.