WoP - 01 - War of Powers

by Robert E. Vardeman

  Fost struggled forward and shook Moriana's shoulder. Her head swung disconsolately from side to side. 'Lost,' she said. 'We've lost the amulet. What shall become of my City?'

  When a second shake produced no further result, Fost stopped, put his hands under her armpits and hauled her upright. She looked at him, green eyes glazed and dull. When he started walking, she went along without protest.

  As predicted, the ground soon began to rise in front of him. Slick with snow, it offered little traction to his boot-soles, and he found himself and Moriana floundering along on all fours. When he blinked snow from his eyes to look at the princess, her pale face had set in determined lines. Apparently Erimenes had invigorated her as he had Fost.

  The slope went on forever. The fresh vigor ebbed from Fost's brain and limbs, gradually at first, then rapidly draining until he felt as if his life seeped through his boot-soles and into the frigid ground.

  Something jarred his knees. It took him a half-dozen heartbeats to realize he'd fallen to his knees on snow-sheathed rock. Even the jagged pain did not tear through the deadness that shrouded his brain.

  'Up, up! A few more steps. I beg of you, Fost, stand up and walk!' The note of pleading in Erimenes's words roused Fost to action. Dimly he realized that for the shade to abandon his usual superciliousness was a significant event. He hoisted himself to his feet once more, though it seemed he carried the weight of all the Rampart Mountains on his shoulders.

  'Erimenes,' Fost gasped. 'Where are you leading us? Don't toy with

  us. If there's not safety ahead, let us die here and now!'

  'Onward,' the spirit commanded. Fost obeyed. But his limbs were slipping from his control. His senses dimmed. The final weariness set in. Then there was no ground where he put his feet. He fell. And rolled.

  A boulder stopped his headlong plunge. He raised his head and screamed as boiling air scalded his face. He covered his face with his hands. Live steam ate the flesh from his fingers. Shrieks of agony ripped from his throat as madness seized his mind.

  Slowly the realization came to him. He was not being boiled alive. His nerves were only responding to the sudden onslaught of warmth.

  Warmth! He dropped his hands from his eyes. Clouds still billowed around but they caressed with gentle, soothing., life-restoring heat.

  He stood. He was alone. 'Moriana!' he cried, his voice a raven's croak. 'Moriana, we've made it. We've reached the Crater!'

  Silence answered him. He peered about in the fog. Where was Moriana?

  A slim figure approached through the swirling whiteness. With a happy cry, he slogged toward it. 'Moriana!'

  A puff of wind parted the mist that veiled the figure. Fost saw a face of unearthly beauty, of calm and sculptured features. But it wasn't Moriana's. A stranger's face, effeminate but clearly male, regarded him with quiet pity.

  Fost toppled into darkness. He woke with a familiar hand clutching his. 'Moriana?' The name came out in a broken whisper. With prodigious effort he raised his head.

  Lying on a pallet next to him, the woman nodded. The skin on her face had turned to parchment, stretched taut across her cheekbones. Yet for all her gauntness she was as beautiful as when first he'd laid eyes on her. More beautiful perhaps. He perceived nuances of feature and form, shadings of beauty in the planes and curves and texture of her face, that he had never before noticed.

  He let his head drop back and slept again. Delicious warmth bathed Fost's tongue. He raised his head, eyes shut, and felt the tingling warmth suffuse his body. The aroma rising from the earthenware bowl satisfied his hunger almost as fully as the rich, thick broth.

  He opened his eyes. Moriana sat cross-legged on the other side of a low wooden table. She wore a robe of orange cloth inlaid with intricate whorls of red and silver that lay open in the front, revealing creamy slices of her breasts and a tuft of tawny hair below her belly. The sight filled him with desire, yet of a languid sort, not at all demanding.

  Moriana's eyes gleamed like green gemstones. Love and serenity shone from them. Fost and Moriana raised their cups in a silent toast. The broth tasted like hearty meat stew and also like a fine liqueur. Fost found it both nourishing and intoxicating at the same time.

  'Good,' he said. 'You are welcome,' said their host, entering the room and seating himself at the table. The man's nostrils dilated delicately to drink in the essence of his own steaming cup. 'We have not seen outsiders here within our lifetimes. We seek to avoid the brutish hurly-burly of the outside world. Yet we are glad that you've come to us. You are an influx of clear, fresh water into a stagnant pond.'

  A single taper, which burned without flickering, lit the room. Fost glanced around, noticing that the steady, mellow glow illuminated darkly irregular walls of slag. The rock had been poorly cut and dressed, and chinks had been stuffed with moss the colour of dried blood to keep out the questing fingers of the wind. Still, Fost found the chamber pleasing, He recognized a higher standard of aesthetics than he was accustomed to. He couldn't truly appreciate it but he saw enough to know he was in the presence of beauty.

  There was beauty in his host too, though Fost normally didn't spend much time contemplating the perfection of the masculine form. As tall as Fost, though slimmer of build, the man reclined in a robe of the purest white. His hair was the color and texture of spun gold; cobalt eyes looked forth from a perfect face, aquiline and fine. His only ornament dangled on a silver chain around his neck. An oblong inset with a rectangle of jet, its workmanship appeared as crude as that of the stonework Fost had seen. In the contentment brought by the broth and the smoking incense cones set on the table, Fost perceived the inner beauty of it.

  'Tell me,' he said, pausing self-consciously, aware how harsh his voice sounded after his host's dulcet, quicksilver tones. 'Who are you people? We had thought none lived here but the barbarian tribes of the steppes.'

  Their host smiled gently. 'Perhaps the world has forgotten us,' he murmured, 'just as well. Ah, would that we could forget.' His eyes met Fost's. 'What we are, and who we are, cannot truly be expressed in words; only abstract concepts that require years to comprehend are meaningful. But you may call us the Ethereals. And I am Selamyl.'

  'Ethereals?' Moriana's brow furrowed. She set down her bowl. 'I've heard of you, though I thought the stories were more legend than truth. Aren't you the ones . ..'

  Selamyl raised a slender hand. Moriana fell silent at once, a flush creeping up the column of her throat at the awareness that she had said something to perturb the man.

  'Do not be embarrassed, sister. The past is immutable, and we cannot change our part in it. Yet we do dislike to hear it spoken of by others.' He set his own mug noiselessly on the table. 'Yes, we are the descendants of the Ten Who Did Not Die, the survivors of Felarod's acolytes who summoned the wrath of the Earth-Spirit.'

  He steepled his fingers on his breast, sighing heavily. 'Though the evil our ancestors helped to curb was great indeed, it was only at the cost of further evil that they acted. After the deed was done, they couldn't bear to remain in Athalau surrounded by constant reminders of their guilt. They wandered for years, homeless. Eventually they came here, where a star dragged from heaven by the War of Powers wounded the earth. By that time they had come to realize that they couldn't escape what they had done, and that it was only proper that they should dwell here, reminded forever after of the destruction magic could unleash.'

  'You spend your time in contemplation?' asked Fost. 'For the most part we do. Each must take his or her turn doing small tasks around the village, building, repairing, helping glean food from the lake or raising our few summer crops. The barbarian tribes hold the lake taboo and do not trouble us.' For a moment Selamyl sat with eyes turned inward. 'It took years for our forefathers to find a direction that had meaning to them. Then one day fourteen hundred years ago and more, a man came among us whose wisdom reshaped our lives. Of Athalau he was, yet he turned away from the materialism that had infected the city since the War of Powers. With marve
lous cogency he set forth the very tenets toward which generations of . Ethereals had been groping. Denial - this was the essence of his philosophy; denial of the worldly, its temptations and its baseness.'

  'Wait,' Fost said, 'could you be referring to Erimenes? Erimenes called the Ethical?'

  Selamyl's eyes glowed. 'It is so!' he cried. 'Ah, that saint of a man who walked among us. He left us, alas, and what became of him later has not been revealed to us, though our deepest thinkers have long theorized that he was bodily assumed into the Paradise that is A Gift, to dwell among the Twenty-three and the Five. For such was his holiness.'

  Moriana coughed. She seemed to be choking on her broth. Fost opened his mouth to tell Selamyl that his saint was back among them, but a sudden tightening in his throat squeezed off the words. He glanced at the satchel laying by his pallet. Now he knew why Erimenes balked at passing near the Great Crater Lake. To come among folk who followed his teaching of his earthly years would prove an excruciating embarrassment, to say nothing of a bore.

  Selamyl rose. 'Would you care to tour our village?' he asked. 'It's small enough, but adequate for our needs. Our healers inform me you're well enough to be up and around.'

  'I've never tasted anything like this,' Moriana said, finishing her broth.

  'Nor I’ Fost agreed, rolling the last of his own around on his tongue. 'When we sat down I was famished enough to eat a roast war bird whole, complete with rider. Yet the one cup has filled me.'

  'We do not gorge ourselves on vast quantities of food,' the Ethereal said. 'Rather we have learned to prepare dishes that satisfy the appetite in small portions. Long ago we learned that a growling belly served to distract our minds from higher thoughts.'

  They followed Selamyl into the daylight. He moved with a gliding walk, his sandaled feet seeming to skim the ground. Looking at him in motion, they felt themselves models of clumsiness.

  The cloud-muted sunshine showed them a settlement of two-score huts, all of the same melted rock as the one in which they were housed. The streets were wide, the earth packed by many generations of slowly pacing feet. Ethereals paced them now, men and women of fragile, otherworldly beauty, who discoursed in quiet voices or simply thought. To one side several inhabitants labored inexpertly at restoring a roof that had caved in. The others ignored them, as genteel folk ignore one forced by circumstances to relieve himself in a public place.

  The water of the lake caressed a beach on the outskirts of the village. Flat-bottomed boats plied across the water, ghostlike in the omnipresent fog.

  'Are they fishing?' asked Moriana. 'But no!' exclaimed Selamyl, his face showing horror. 'We wouldn't feed upon the flesh of any living creature. They gather edible weed that grows in great profusion in the lake. This forms the staple of our diet.'

  In the past Fost had always been partial to great steaming joints of dog or hornbull beef, washed down with oceans of black ale. Now the thought of consuming the flesh of a fellow creature stirred uneasiness in his stomach. He found himself pleased that the broth he had consumed contained no meat. He looked at Moriana and knew at a level beyond words that she felt the same.

  Her hand gripped his. They smiled at one another. It was as if they were children discovering the vastness of the world. The gentle Ethereals had opened to them vistas of a reality neither of them had imagined existed.

  Laughing, they followed Selamyl along the beach. The first day Fost felt a few vagrant tugs of urgency to continue the journey to Athalau. They quickly diminished to nothing. The Ethereals were expanding his mind to realms beyond the mundane. Time ceased to matter.

  He and Moriana joined the routine of the Ethereals' life. They sat in circles with the rest on the floor of the round temple in the center of the village, chanting meaningless monosyllables meant to open their minds to oneness with the universe. They attended a dance in which the dancers stood all but motionless for hours on end and learned slowly to read the infinities of meaning implicit in each minuscule gesture. They listened to music played on a stringed instrument that produced sounds both above and below, as well as within, the normal range of human hearing and came to appreciate the richness inherent in the unheard. They reclined on mats in the evening, breathing subtle essences from tiny phials and groping after truths.

  When night came they made love in their hut, but without the wild intensity that marked their earlier couplings. Instead they performed their sex in a detached fashion, almost as if the nearness and joining of the flesh in no way involved them but happened to someone else observed from afar. At times Ethereals watched them, but it didn't trouble them. Their hosts seemed pleased at the progress they made away from material concerns, and that approval warmed them more than any carnal sensations could.

  Erimenes, of course, did not approve. 'You must understand,' Fost told him one night after making love, when the audience of Ethereals had drifted away to their beds and perfumed dreams. 'They have elevated mere sex to the level of art.'

  'Boring art,' the spirit said. 'You fail to appreciate the nuances,' Moriana chided him. 'It's the same as with their dance. The tilt of the head, the gradual alterations of posture - these assume paramount importance. It's all part of divorcing oneself from the material.'

  'I don't believe it,' Erimenes wailed. 'A tilt of the head more important than a passionate thrust of the hips? Alteration of posture merits greater enthusiasm than a male organ thrusting into your sex? You're as mad as these whey-faced Ethereals!'

  'Erimenes.' Fost shook his head with the same mild reproof Selamyl displayed earlier when he had spoken of leaving the village. 'Try to understand them. They have been kind in sheltering us and in granting us the fine gift of their teachings. You of all people should appreciate their wisdom.'

  'I'm not people. I'm a spirit and I tell you they're trying to become as disembodied as I. They venerate death, which I assure you is not all it's cracked up to be. This is boring! Boring!'

  Fost chuckled sadly. He pitied Erimenes. That the philosopher, once so wise, should himself become blinded by the illusions of the material world struck him as tragic.

  'Moriana!' Erimenes appealed to the princess, who sat by fondling one of the small clay figurines the Ethereals devoted so much of their time to sculpting. 'Get us away from here. These people will swathe you in wool and suffocate you. You're a lively wench, you hunger for life and all that it implies. Don't deceive yourself into believing they offer anything but death in the guise of life.'

  Moriana didn't listen. She laid the figurine down and took up a glass phial filled with yellowish liquid. She unstoppered the phial, drank of the fumes and passed the container to Fost.

  The fragrance tickled his nostrils, as fleeting as a snowflake. His mind struggled to unravel the complexities of that one brief sniff. He reclined on his mat, letting the implications of aroma percolate through his consciousness.

  At the back of his brain he felt a prickling. It was familiar somehow, and then he realized he had known a similar sensation as he struggled up the slope of the crater, when Erimenes had stimulated him through some mental trick. Fost was not stimulated now. Instead he ignored the feeling, concentrating on the fragrance until sleep claimed him. He dreamed he walked on clouds of light.

  The education of Fost and Moriana continued. They worked at modelling statues of yellow clay and were rewarded by murmurs of praise from the Ethereals, though they knew their efforts were shoddy in comparison. Their turn came at the menial tasks that needed doing. Moriana worked making robes and Fost helped in shoring up a part of the temple wall that had begun to sag. His physical strength, immense by comparison to the Ethereals, enabled him to do more than all the other workers combined. He felt abashed by this, as though his bodily powers were a sign of some gross imperfection.

  When the job was done, he went back to his hut. Selamyl, who was the chief instructor of the village, had given him a smooth blue stone and told him to meditate upon it. He sat on his pallet and began to eat a meal of stewed pods taken from t
he lake.

  'It's not too late to see if any slop-jars have been left unemptied,' Erimenes told him.

  Fost stared dumbly at the satchel. 'What are you talking about?' 'You seem to eat up the Ethereals' dung with relish. I thought perhaps a dollop might liven up your meal. You're a pig, and you rut with sows.'