by Wilf Jones
Alling seemed taken-aback at being called a pipsqueak: it didn’t tally with the very serious picture he had of himself. He looked around the table in search of allies but found none. Even his co-conspirator Jom Alveson avoided meeting his eyes.
‘Continue if you must, but don’t expect me to fall for all of this… claptrap.’
Seama shook his head in bewilderment. ‘Thank you for your kind and gracious permission. If only I could remember where I was—’
‘Haslem. Song of Ages.’
‘Yes, yes. Thank you, Angren. Let me tell you all about the burning book.’
Seama didn’t dwell upon his own discomforts when he gave them the tale. Plunging his arms into the liquid flames became ‘we managed to get the book off the shelf and put out the fire’. The actions were not what mattered, he told them. What mattered was, in no particular order, that someone had tried to destroy the book, that somehow the book had summoned him, and that this was the second time it had done so. Fel Awdrey was curious about the earlier incident in the Collegium Library.
‘It’s all of a piece then: Uh Bib taking the Mayoris, and this Song of Ages calling out to you?’
‘Yes Fel. Uh Bib first discovered The Song thirty years ago but at the time all he took from the library was the Mayoris. That is clear. What’s not so clear is the how or the why The Song called out to me. My thought is that when Uh Bib woke the Mayoris—’
‘Woke it?’
‘Well yes. Because of the spells that surround the making of grimoires of this level of power it’s almost as if such books actually have a life of their own; when they’re not in use they close down, fall asleep if you will, and become active again only when they receive the correct stimulus. The reality is they are less like living creatures and more like machines reacting to the press of a button, the pulling of lever. I guess that when the Mayoris was woken, one of it’s first tasks was to send out a seeker that would in turn awaken the Song. On one of these pages there’s a passage where Haslem states that ‘The Song will bring itself to The Man of Power’. There were certainly other people upon Errensea at that time with great power but I was the only one summoned.’
‘Except for this Uh Bib chap.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that, Fel. Certainly he found the book. Perhaps it was simply that he was nearby when it began to call or perhaps it was something to do with the fact that he’d been the one to wake the Mayoris. The books are undeniably linked. I suspect Haslem presumed that whoever held the Mayoris would likely be a member of the Council rather than an enemy or he wouldn’t have bound one to the other. You see the Song contains information that should never be in the wrong hands. Unfortunately it looks like Uh Bib found himself another copy of The Song, and something in it led him towards a plan of action and, on top of that, it gave him the means to carry it out.’
‘Well that’s just peach!’ said Angren, ‘The only reason Bliss can do what he’s doing is because Haslem told him how to do it? Fine bloody idea that! Better if he’d never written the book in the first place.’
‘The irony hasn’t escaped me, Angren, but I’m not going to stray down the path of ‘If only…’ The fact is we have a problem now and the Song may be the one clue we have that can help us solve it.
‘This bundle of scruffy looking papers contains a secret: a secret beyond the imagining of most people alive today. We all look at the world from the perspective of our own time and everything that’s in the past, even though we might know it to be true, is emotionally little more than a story to us. Nontheless we do have a sense of history and its importance, and throughout the generations we’ve worked hard to keep a record of all that has gone before. But each generation has a different view of that history. Tys Heald, you’re an intelligent and well-educated man. Tell me, what is the oldest historical event we know?’
Heald actually smiled, unused to compliments of any sort.
‘I… well it depends on what you mean. The first specific event was surely the Battle of Grammary Field. But obviously that event presupposes the existence of the Medes and the Parisi and acknowledges that there was a cause of dispute between them. And this dispute takes place in a landscape inhabited by a number of tribes that collectively we call The Wandering People. And this all depends on the viewpoint we share on this continent of Asteranor. The people of Sullinor would certainly point to some event that was local to them: a coronation perhaps, the birth of a prophet – they have quite a number of those – or maybe even some natural disaster. And each of these must undoubtedly mark an end to something just as much as it might mark a beginning.’
Seama was pleased by the reply.
‘You warm to my theme, Chancellor. But let me pick up on that ‘natural disaster’ idea. There are stories in some ancient texts that describe a terrible, cataclysmic event that occurred during the early years of The Wandering. You won’t know about this. It’s the considered opinion of our scholars that this ‘cataclysmic event’ is merely some garbled memory of a less impressive, local disaster; of no more significance say than the 3051 Pulonian earthquake.’
‘Fairly significant for the people caught up in it, Seama.’
‘Yes Angren, I know. People died—’
‘And some good friends of mine too!’
‘Yes, of course. But let’s not get sidetracked. I’m talking about something that was much more ah… momentous… and… Look this isn’t helping. You must keep up.’
‘I think,’ put in Jom Alveson, ‘the Lord Wizard is trying to explain that small people always make more of events than they deserve. A flood that destroys a few villages becomes an inundation that destroys all life as we know it. Primitive people had not and have not the enlightened perspective of modern times.’
‘No Admiral,’ said Seama, ‘I am not trying to say that at all. Other people might but I believe them to be wrong. That is what I am trying to say. The problem with the perspective of the present is that too often we look at the past and presume that earlier generations were primitive, innocent or ignorant, and yet in a thousand years from now people may look at our own civilisation and shake their heads in wonder at our stupidity. An enlightened viewpoint should recognize that human intelligence and endeavour are eternal traits and that the advances and views of each generation are of equal standing and importance.
‘And so, what I am trying to say in my roundabout way is that we would be foolish to dismiss out of hand the knowledge of generations past. What I am trying to tell you is that the perspective of our age is blinkered. We have a picture of history that goes only so far and anything that may have come before that history is left to the priests and their Gods. With the help of the Song I have taken off the blinkers: the cataclysm I mentioned was a real event and beyond that cataclysm lies the deep past of gods and men and this earth beneath our feet. The Song of Ages reveals the hidden history of our world.’
He cast his eyes around the table expecting some comment, some sign of impatience or exasperation but none was forthcoming. He had their full attention at last.
THE AGES OF THE EARTH
Astoril 3057.8.8
‘There have been six ages of our world and everything we know, our lives, our history and even our geography belong only to the last of those. That is a remarkable thought. Our written history takes us back four thousand or more years, our understanding of the unrecorded time before that is vague. But you must understand that I say ‘unrecorded’ because I speak only of Medean History. As Tys mentioned these things depend upon perspective. It’s perhaps not widely known that long before the first words were written of the history we count our own, there was a civilisation of men upon Asteranor that, Gothery apart, would rival any of the nations of our present day. They made their cities on the peninsula we call the Captofinxus, the finger of Masachean land that points towards the eastern oceans. Their history was certainly recorde
d, and in many ways, but most of what they were and what they did and thought and said has been lost. It is such a waste of time away, we guess at eight thousand years, and so the more fragile methods of keeping record haven’t survived. But there are tablets of hard stone kept in the vaults of the faculty house on Errensea, recovered from the ancient remains of those cities, and they’re covered in characters and figures that dance with intelligence and knowledge. Undeniably they represent a script of some sort but it’s beyond our understanding.’
‘What happened to them? If they were so clever?’
‘Being a match to the nations of today, Angren, does not necessarily make them ‘so clever.’ But actually we know little enough about them or what happened to stop them in their tracks, or even if they really were stopped in their tracks. History is full of accidents and catastrophes. How many civilisations have come and gone? How many do we remember, how many are lost to us? Though I may easily tell you that this Sunrise Civilisation is the oldest known, that’s not the same as saying it was the first. Wherever we stop there was a before.
‘But we want our history to be finite: to have a beginning, a middle and an end, just like the most comforting stories. We want to be able to comprehend the whole structure. The scholars of our day believe that all of human history can be compassed by eight and a half thousand years. Beyond that they seem content to say nothing.
‘Well I can tell you, friends, that it is not so. The world is not eight thousand years old. Those wastes of time I mentioned stretch on and on unimaginably. They go back so far that there is no sense in even trying to make a count of years. They go back past thousands of beginnings and middles and ends, the civilisations of man are legion, each rising through the ruins of what has gone before and each ultimately doomed to fall in their turn. Nothing we men have made can be held onto; nothing remains what it was. What stands today fair and proud will one day lie beneath the sands leaving only fragments to make passing strangers pause and wonder. And yet there is so much; and always we continue. The full tale of life is truly awesome. What is frightening, ladies and gentlemen, is that this deep past, this great weight and burden of year on year on year now bears down upon our present lives and lays siege to our very existence.
‘The Song of Ages is a complete history of Earnor. Or at least it would be if I had the entire text to hand. Unfortunately I have here only the introduction and parts of the main text that describe the first two Ages of the world. The Introduction is brief, and actually that may help: often too much detail clouds the truth. Haslem gives us what he believes to be the important issues of each Age and after that a conclusion. But the approach is thematic: he follows one train of thought at a time; he pays scant attention to any idea of chronology. It has taken me all of these weeks since the fire in the library to get even the order of the ages clear in my mind.
‘There was a creation: an Age of Creation. We’re used to regarding such talk as conjecture at best or at worst plain fantasy. We may choose to take the story as a metaphor of a more prosaic truth, or an attempt to make simple a reality unimaginably complicated, but it is important to realize that in the Song of Ages the history of even this first age is given as though it were fact. Zurvan is the great creator god. His name actually means Time. For reasons not stated he decides to create The Earth – yes that’s the name given, as if the soil beneath our feet is all it is – and he makes the growing things and the animals of Earth and the weather of the world so that the key to his creation, mankind itself, can find food and shelter. But also he makes the world a dangerous place. From him come all the convulsions of the earth, the winds, the tides, the floodwaters, the lightning. The idea is that man will learn to deal with these things and so become stronger and more wise. At the same time Zurvan creates also the gods of Earth, the nature gods as we would say, and their role is in part to govern the forces of nature and in part to help mankind through its earliest years.
‘You’d have thought all that enough for any decent sort of creation, but Zurvan knew that one thing more was needed. For some reason we cannot know, it was not to Zurvan’s purpose that he should impose himself upon the Earth. Having created he wished to remain beyond his creation. Like the man with an ant colony he has set in glass, he chooses to withdraw his influence and merely observe the dramas that unfold before him. And yet Zurvan could see that the progress of his creation would need governance, mankind would need a father to look up to, would need a source of just authority to give order to life on Earth. With such a need plain to see, Zurvan got himself a son.
‘Here we come to the great problem of the Age of Creation. Instead of one son Zurvan actually got himself twins. One of the twins turned out to be entirely good and we know him even in our own age as Ohr’mazd, God of the Just. The other is also worshipped today, though most likely you won’t recognise the name. Ah’remmon he was then and now but he has had other names throughout the ages. He is in fact the source for the great God of Masachea presently known as the Rightful King or Father of Mankind. A worrying description if what Haslem says is correct. You see Ah’remmon is the exact opposite of his brother and he is entirely evil.
‘Yes, I see that some of you, Angren, are finding this all a little too fanciful—
‘Not so much that it’s fanciful, Seama: it’s just that it’s like a bloody history lesson.’
Seama’s reply was frosty. ‘I make no apology: if you want the knowledge you suffer the lecture. If you don’t there must be something else you could be doing outside? I believe they’re still looking for extra labourers?’
‘Ah. Well, if you put it that way, I guess I’ll sit it through.’
‘I’ll get on then, shall I?’
‘Fire away.’
‘The second age of the world is called The Age of the Oath. At the time of the birth of his sons, before he understood anything about them, Zurvan made an oath that whichever came first then he should have rule of the Earth for 9000 years. Ah’remmon, lusting after power, as was always likely, ripped himself from the womb, before he was due, to make sure that the Kingdom of the Earth would be his. And so the second age is the time of Ah’remmon’s dominion. This was a terrible time. Imagine all the foul and cruel rulers there have ever been all rolled into one. Mankind had no choice but to accept his Kingship, and such is human nature that while most of mankind abhorred Ah’remmon’s rule, there were always some who were more than happy to bow to him. One of the more confusing passages in the introduction is to do with The Gift of Ah’remmon. It’s an idea that affects all of the Ages of the Earth and seems bound up with The Gift of the Father, with an Act of Communion, with Life Eternal and The Bounty of Death – Haslem’s a little over fond of these phrases. The way I read it the gift is a tithe of the God’s own blood – very gory – and given in The Age of the Oath as a reward to the followers of Ah’remmon; and it was most certainly given contrary to his Father’s design. You see, Ah’remmon was not content merely to rule: his desire was to challenge and supplant his Father. In all things he considered himself his father’s equal and in that mind he took up the role of creator. He made for himself all manner of demons and monsters, all filled with his own insatiable urge to subvert or destroy the work of Zurvan; and he set them free upon the Earth, and mankind, the pinnacle of his Father’s creation, could do nothing against them.
‘In his pride, Ah’remmon presumed that his rule would have no ending, but he was wrong. Zurvan wasn’t weakened at all by anything Ah’remmon had done and his will could not be set aside. The nine thousand years he had promised were soon done and a new age of the Earth was begun. This was supposed to be the Age of Long Dominion when good Ohr’mazd would take the crown and rule the earth, according to the Father’s purpose, until the ending. Instead Haslem names this time The Age of Chaos.
‘The third Age was in some ways better and in some ways worse than the long years of Ah’remmon’s rule. It was better becaus
e Ohr’mazd could at last order the world to the defence of mankind. It was worse because Ah’remmon was unceasing in his attack upon his brother and his brother’s people. Even for Haslem not everything is clear about this age. It’s undeniable that a portion of mankind kept Ah’remmon as their God despite the goodness of Ohr’mazd. Chief among these were his acolytes: those who had taken the god’s blood. There is a suggestion that because of this the Bright God commanded a flood to wash away all the filth of Ah’remmon and in this flood a great part of mankind was lost. But this may be a corruption of the real story: a lie put about by the servants of the Dark God himself.
‘The significant advance made in the Age of Chaos was in the joining together of Ohr’mazd with the Kings of Men, and with those gods of the Earth as yet un-swayed by Ah’remmon. It was only in this alliance that enough strength and will and power of magic could be raised for a decisive victory. The demons and monsters of Ah’remmon were already hugely reduced by the great flood and now, assailed by new generations of men, in company with the Gods of the Earth, they had little strength to resist. Many of Ah’remmon’s creatures were killed outright but then, with a great act of will, Ohr’mazd managed to end their threat entirely: he cast out the survivors from this existence to another place and they had no power to return. The demons of Ah’remmon should never have been a part of this world and it is a great shame upon mankind that some among us have since sought to bring them back.
‘From the beginning, whatever he believed to be the truth of the matter, Ah’remmon was the weaker of the twins. Now, without the protection of his creatures, the Foul God was defenceless in the face of the wrath of Ohr’mazd. Ah’remmon accepted his banishment from the world but said at his leaving, and this is a direct quote from the Song, ‘I will live on the edges of this World you call now your own, for the peoples of the Earth still hold me in their hearts as Lord. I would not have them call upon me and I could not hear. And my people will do my work even though I dwell beyond and they cannot see me, for so I have taught them. And for every man of yours there will be three of mine. And how will you know, Brother, which is yours and which is not? You name me the Father of Lies but man is an apt pupil and his thoughts are his own according to your law and by our Father’s design.’