by Tad Williams
Dinivan returned to the room. “If he were beyond hope, why would he have remained with you after he had received his silver from Streáwe?”
“So he could sell me to someone else,” she responded bitterly. “My father, my aunt, Naraxi child-merchants-who knows?”
“Perhaps,” said the lector’s secretary, “but I do not think so. I think he has conceived a feeling of responsibility to you—although that responsibility does not prevent him from profiting where he thinks you will be unharmed, as with the master of Perdruin. But unless the Padreic I know is totally gone, vanished beyond any retrieval, I think he would not harm you, nor would he willingly let harm come to you.”
“Small chance,” Miriamele said grimly. “I will trust him again when stars shine at noontime, but no sooner.”
Dinivan looked at her closely, then sketched the sign of the Tree in the air. “We must be careful of such pronouncements in these strange days, my lady.” A grin came back to his face. “However, this talk of shining stars reminds me—we have a job to do. When I arranged to use this place to meet you, I promised the tower-keeper that we would light the beacon tonight. The mariners who ply the coastline expect it to be there, warning them away from the rocks so they can go east to the harbor at Bacea-sá-Repra. I should do it now, before it starts to get dark. Do you want to come along?” He clattered down the stairs and returned with the lamp.
Miriamele nodded, following him out onto the hoarding. “I was at Wentmouth once when they lit the Hayefur there,” she said. “It was huge!”
“Far bigger than our modest candle,” Dinivan agreed. “Be careful as you climb here. This is an old ladder.”
The tower’s topmost room was little more than a place to hold the beacon, a very large oil lamp squatting in the middle of the floor. There was a smoke-hole overhead in the tower’s roof and a fence of metal screens around the wick to slow the wind. A large curved metal shield hung on the inside wall behind the lamp, facing out toward the sea.
“What does this do?” she asked, running a finger over the shield’s highly polished surface.
“Helps the light travel farther,” Dinivan said. “You see how it is curved away from the flame, like a cup? That collects the lamplight and flings it out through the window—more or less. Padreic could explain it better.”
“You mean Cadrach?” Miriamele asked, puzzled.
“Well, once he could have, anyway. He was very clever about mechanical things when I knew him—pulleys and levers and such. He studied a great deal about Natural Philosophy, before he ... changed.” Dinivan lifted the hand lamp to the large wick and held it there. “The Aedon only knows how much oil this great thing must burn,” he said. After some moments it caught and the flame rose. The shield on the wall did make it brighter, even though failing sunlight still streamed in through the wide windows.
“There are snuffers hanging on the wall,” Dinivan said, pointing at a pair of long staves, each with a metal cup on one end. “We must remember to put it out in the morning.”
When they had returned to the second floor, Dinivan suggested they look in on Cadrach. Trailing after, Miriamele turned and went back for the pitcher of water and some grapes. There was really no sense starving him to death.
The monk was up, sitting on the lone chair, staring out through the window at the twilit, slate-blue bay. He was withdrawn, and at first did not respond to Miriamele’s offer of food, but at last took a drink of water. After a moment he accepted the grapes as well.
“Padreic,” Dinivan said, leaning close, “do you not remember me? I am Dinivan. We were friends once.”
“I recognize you, Dinivan,” Cadrach said at last. His hoarse voice echoed strangely in the small round room. “But Padreic ec-Crannhyr is long dead. There is only Cadrach now.” The monk avoided Miriamele’s eyes.
Dinivan watched him intently. “Have you no wish to speak?” he asked. “There is nothing you can have done that would make me think badly of you.”
Cadrach looked up, a smirk on his round face, his gray eyes full of pain. “Oh, is that true? Nothing so foul I might have done that Mother Church and ... and our other friends ... would not take me back?” He laughed bitterly and waved his hand in disgust. “You lie, brother Dinivan. There are crimes beyond forgiveness, and a special place prepared for their perpetrators.” Angry, he turned away and would not speak any more.
Outside the waves murmured as they struck the rocky coast and fell back, hushed voices that seemed to welcome the settling night.
Tiamak watched Older Mogahib, Roahog the Potter, and the other elders climb into the rocking flatboat. Their faces were grave, as befitted the ceremonial occasion. The ritual feather necklaces drooped in the damp heat.
Mogahib stood uneasily in the stern of the boat and turned to look back. “Do not fail us, Tiamak son of Tugumak,” he croaked. The ancient one frowned and impatiently brushed the leaves of his headdress out of his eyes. “Tell the drylanders that the Wrannamen are not their slaves. Your people have given you their greatest trust.” Older Mogahib was helped to sit down by one of his great-nephews. The overloaded boat wallowed away down the watercourse.
Tiamak made a sour face and looked down at the Summoning Stick they had given him, its surface knobby with carvings. The Wrannamen were upset because Benigaris, the new master of Nabban, had demanded greater tithes of grain and jewels, as well as young sons from the houses of the Wran to come and serve on the holdings of Nabbanai nobles. The elders wanted Tiamak to go and speak for them, to protest this further meddling by the drylanders in the lives of the Wrannamen.
So yet another responsibility was now laid on Tiamak’s slender shoulders. Had any of his people ever said one respectful word to him about his learning? No, they treated him as little more than a madman, someone who had turned his back on the Wran and his people to follow the ways of the drylanders—until they needed someone to write or speak to the Nabbanai or Perdruinese in their own tongue. Then, it was: “Tiamak, do your duty.”
He spat from the porch of his house and watched the green water ripple below. He pulled up his ladder and left it lying in a heap instead of neatly rolled as was usual. He was feeling very bitter.
One good thing would come of this, he decided later while waiting for his water pot to boil. If he went to Nabban, as his tribesmen insisted, he would be able to visit his wise friend who lived there and find out if anything more could be discovered about Doctor Morgenes’ strange note. He had been fretting over it for weeks, yet felt no closer to a solution. His messenger birds to fat Ookequk in Yiqanuc had returned, their messages unopened. That was troubling. The birds he had sent to Doctor Morgenes had returned as well, but that, although disappointing, was less worrisome than Ookequk’s silence, since Morgenes had said in his last note that he might not be able to communicate for some while. Neither had his messages been answered by the witch woman who lived in Aldheorte Forest, or by his friend in Nabban. Tiamak had only sent those last birds out a few weeks ago, however, so they still might reply.
But if I am traveling to Nabban, he realized, I will not see any replies for two months or more.
In fact, now that he thought of it, what would he do with his birds? He didn’t have nearly enough seed to keep them penned for the entire time he would be gone, and he certainly couldn’t take them all with him. He would have to turn them loose to fend for themselves, hoping that they would stay close to his little house in the banyan tree so he could recapture them when he returned. And if they flew away and did not come back, what would he do? He would have to train more, that was all.
Tiamak’s sigh was subsumed in the hiss of steam escaping from beneath the pot lid. As he dropped in the yellowroot to steep, the little scholar tried to remember the prayer for a safe journey that one should make to He Who Always Steps on Sand, but could only think of the Showing-the-Hiding-Places-of-Fish prayer, which was not really appropriate. He sighed again. Even though he didn’t quite believe in his people’s gods anymore, it never
hurt to pray—but one really ought to say the right prayer.
As long as he was pondering such things, what would he do with that damnable parchment Morgenes talked about in his letter—or seemed to talk about, for how could the old doctor know that Tiamak had it? Should he take it with him and risk losing it? But he had to, if he was going to show it to his friend in Nabban and ask his advice.
So many problems. They seemed to be crowding his head like black-flies, buzzing and buzzing. He had to think it all through clearly—especially if he was to leave in the morning for Nabban. He had to look at each piece of this puzzle.
First Morgenes’ message, which he had read and reread dozens of times in the four moons or so since he had received it. He took it from the top of the wooden chest and smoothed it, leaving smudges with his yellowroot-stained hands. He knew the contents by heart.
Doctor Morgenes wrote of his fears that “... the time of the Conqueror Star” was surely upon them—whatever that might mean-and that Tiamak’s help would be needed “... if certain dreadful things which—it is said—are hinted at in the infamous lost book of the priest Nisses ...” were to be avoided. But what things? “The infamous lost book...”—that was Nisses’ Du Svardenvyrd, as any scholar knew.
Tiamak reached down into the chest and removed a leaf-wrapped bundle, unrolling it to remove his prized parchment, which he spread on the floor beside Morgenes’ letter. This parchment page, which Tiamak had stumbled on by luck at the market in Kwanitupul, was of much higher quality than anything he himself could afford. The rusty brown ink formed the northern runes of Rimmersgard, but the language itself was the archaic Nabbanai of five centuries gone.
“... Bringe from Nuanni’s Rocke Garden
The Man who tho’ Blinded canne See
Discover the Blayde that delivers The Rose
At the foote of the Rimmer’s greate Tree
Find the Call whose lowde Claime
Speakes the Call-bearer’s name
In a Shippe on the Shallowest Sea—
—When Blayde, Call, and Man
Come to Prince’s right Hande
Then the Prisoned shall once more go Free ...”
Below this incomprehensible poem was printed the name “NISSES.”
So what was Tiamak to think? Morgenes could not know that Tiamak had discovered a page of the near-mythical book—the Wrannaman hadn’t told a soul—yet still the doctor had said that Tiamak would have important work to do, something to do with Du Svardenvyrd!
His inquiries to Morgenes and the others had gone unanswered. Now he must go to Nabban to plead his people’s cause to the drylanders, yet he still did not know what it could all mean.
Tiamak poured the tea out of the pan into his third-favorite bowl—he had dropped and broken his second-favorite bowl that morning, when Older Mogahib and the others had started braying beneath his window. He cupped the warm bowl in his slender fingers and blew across the top. “Hot day, hot tea,” his mother had always said. Today was certainly hot. The air was so still and oppressive that he almost felt he could leap off his porch and swim through it. Hot weather alone did not make him unhappy, since he was always less hungry when the heat was fierce, but nevertheless there was something disconcerting about the air today, as though the Wran were a smoldering bar of tin on the world-anvil, with a great hammer trembling above it, ready to smash down and change everything.
That morning Roahog the Potter, taking a moment to gossip while Older Mogahib was helped up the ladder, had said that a colony of ghants was building a new nest just a couple of furlongs down the watercourse from Village Grove. Ghants had never come so close to a human settlement before, and although Roahog had chuckled about how the Wrannamen would soon put the nest to fire, the story nevertheless left Tiamak unsettled, as if some undefined but recognized law had been violated.
As the slow, sweltering afternoon wore on toward evening, Tiamak kept trying to think about the demands of the Duke of Nabban, and about Morgenes’ letter, but visions of the nest-building ghants pushed in—their brownish-gray jaws clicking industriously, their mad little black eyes glittering—and try as he might, he could not rid himself of the ridiculous notion that somehow all these things were related.
It is the heat, he told himself. If only I had a cool jug of fern beer, these wild ideas would disappear.
But he did not even have enough yellowroot to make another cup of tea, let alone any fern beer. His heart was troubled and there was nothing in the wide, hot Wran that would give him peace.
Tiamak rose with the first light of dawn. By the time he had cooked and eaten a rice-flour biscuit and drunk a little water, the swamp was already becoming unpleasantly warm. He grimaced as he began his packing. This was a day to go splashing and swimming in one of the safe ponds, not set out on a journey.
There was actually little to pack. He selected a spare breechclout and a robe and pair of sandals to wear in Nabban—there was no reason to reinforce the unfortunate opinion of his people’s backwardness held by most Nabbanai. He had no use on this trip, however, for his stretched-bark writing board, his wooden chest, or most of his other meager lot of possessions. His precious books and scrolls he dared not take, since there was a better than average chance he would wind up in the water a few times before he reached the cities of the drylanders.
He had decided he must take the Nisses parchment, so he wrapped it in a second layer of leaves and bundled the whole into an oiled skin bag given to him by Doctor Morgenes when Tiamak had lived in Perdruin. He put the bag, the Summoning Stick, and his clothes into his flat-bottomed boat, along with his third-best bowl, a handful of cooking implements, and a throwing-sling with a folded leaf full of round stones. He hung his knife and his coin-pouch on his belt. Then, having stalled as long as he could, he climbed up the banyan tree to the top of the house to set his birds free.
As he climbed across the thatched roof he could hear the drowsy, muffled speech of the birds within their small cottage. He had put the remaining seed in his fourth-best-and last—bowl, setting it out on the windowsill below. They would at least stay near the house for a while after his departure.
He poked his hand into the little bark-roofed box and delicately removed one of his pigeons, a pretty white-and-gray named So-fast, then tossed her up into the air. She fanned her wings briskly, settling at last on a limb above his head. Unsettled by this unusual behavior, she hooted quietly, questioningly. Tiamak knew the grief of a father whose daughter must be sent to strangers. But he had to remove the birds, and the door to their house, which only opened inward, had to be fastened shut. Otherwise, these birds or their absent kindred would enter and be trapped. With no Tiamak to rescue them, they would soon starve.
Feeling very unhappy, he carefully removed Red-eye, Crab-foot, and Honey-lover. Soon there was a disapproving chorus perched above him. Alerted that something unusual was happening, the birds still inside had fled skittishly to the back of the little house, so that Tiamak had to strain to reach them. As he tried to grasp one of these last recalcitrants, his hands brushed against a small, cold bundle of feathers that lay just out of sight in the shadows at the far end.
Suddenly full of worry, he closed his hand around the object and lifted it out. It was one of his birds, he saw immediately, and it was dead. Eyes wide, he examined it closely. It was Ink-daub, one of the pigeons he had dispatched to Nabban several days ago. Ink-daub had apparently been injured by some animal: many of his feathers were missing and he was spotted with dried blood. Tiamak was sure the bird hadn’t been there yesterday, so he must have arrived during the night, flying with his last strength despite his wounds, reaching his home only to die.
Tiamak found the world swimming before his eyes as the tears came. Poor Ink-daub. He was a fine bird, one of the fastest fliers. He had been very brave, too. Everywhere on the bird’s body that Tiamak looked, blood showed beneath the tattered feathers. Poor, brave Ink-daub.
A slender strip of parchment was curled around the
pigeon’s twiglike ankle. Tiamak placed the silent bundle aside for a moment and coaxed out the last two birds, then wedged the small door closed with a notched stick. With Ink-daub’s body curled in a gentle hand, Tiamak climbed down to the window and into the house. He set down the pigeon’s body and carefully removed the parchment, spreading it out on the floor between his fingertips, squinting at the tiny characters. The message was from his wise friend in Nabban, whose hand Tiamak recognized even in bird-writing, but was inexplicably unsigned.
The time has come, it read,and you are sorely needed. Morgenes cannot ask you, but I ask for him. Go to Kwanitupul, stay at the inn we have spoken of, and wait there until I can tell you more. Go there immediately and do not stray. More than lives may depend on you.
At the bottom was scribbled a drawing of a feather in a circle—the symbol of the League of the Scroll.
Tiamak sat dumbstruck, staring at the message. He read it two more times, hoping it would miraculously say something different, but the words remained unchanged. Go to Kwanitupul! But the elders had ordered him to Nabban! There was no one else in his tribe who could speak the drylander languages well enough to serve as an emissary. And what would he tell his tribesmen—that some drylander they didn’t know had told him to go wait for instructions at Kwanitupul, that this was reason enough to turn his back on his people’s wishes? What did the League of the Scroll mean to Wrannamen? A circle of drylander scholars who talked of old books and older events? His people would never understand.
But how could he ignore the gravity of the summons? His friend in Nabban had been explicit—had even said that this was what Morgenes wanted him to do. Without Morgenes, Tiamak would never have survived his year in Perdruin, let alone gained the wonderful fellowship to which the doctor had introduced him. How could he not do this one thing—this, the only favor Morgenes had ever asked of him?