Amber and Ashes
Page 15
Rhys looked about at the dead, looked at the hideously contorted face of the Master, and Rhys felt a sudden stirring of rage. Lleu was right. Majere could have done something. He should have done something to prevent this. His monks had dedicated their lives to him. They had worked and sacrificed. In their hour of need, the god abandoned them. They had cried to him in their death throes, and he had turned a deaf ear.
Majere’s monks were commanded to take no sides in any conflict. Perhaps the god himself was refusing to take sides in this one. Perhaps the souls of his beloved Master and his brethren were having to fight alone against the Lord of Death.
Anger twisted inside Rhys, hot and clenching and bitter-tasting. Anger at the god, anger at himself.
“I should have been here. I could have stopped this.”
Rhys had pleaded as an excuse that he was with the god, but in truth, his own selfish longing for peace and quiet had kept him from being where he was needed. Because both he and Majere had failed those who put their faith in them, nineteen people were dead.
He wrestled with himself, berating himself, and at the same time, fought against the rage that made his hands itch to seize hold of his murderous brother and strangle him. Rhys was so involved in his internal struggle that he took his eyes off Lleu.
His brother was quick to take advantage. Seizing the heavy crockery bowl, he hurled it with all his might.
The bowl struck Rhys between the eyes. Pain burst in his skull, red-hot pain fringed with yellow-tinged fire, so that he couldn’t think. Blood poured down his face, into his eyes, blinding him. He staggered, clutched at the table to remain standing. He had the dizzying impression of Lleu lunging for him and another impression of a black and white body hurtling past him. Rhys tasted blood in his mouth. He was falling and he stretched out his hand to stop his fall, reached out his hand to the Master …
A monk in orange robes stood before Rhys. The monk’s face was familiar to him, though he’d never before seen it. The monk had a resemblance to the Master, and at the same time to all the other brethren of the monastery. The monk’s eyes were calm and tranquil, his demeanor mild.
Rhys knew him.
“Majere …” Rhys whispered, awed.
The god regarded him steadily, not answering.
“Majere!” Rhys faltered. “I need your council. Tell me what I must do.”
“You know what you must do, Rhys,” said the god calmly. “First you must bury the dead and then you must cleanse this room of death, so that all is clean in my sight. On the morrow, you will rise with the morning sun and make your prayers to me, as usual. Then you must water the livestock and turn the cows and horses out to pasture and take the sheep to the fields. Then weed the garden …”
“Pray to you, Master? Pray for what? All of them died and you did nothing!”
“Pray for what you always pray for, Rhys,” said the god. “Perfection of the body and the mind. Peace and tranquility and serenity …”
“As I bury the dead bodies of my brethren and my parents,” Rhys returned angrily, “I pray to you for perfection!”
“And to accept with patience and understanding the ways of your god.”
“I don’t accept it!” Rhys retorted, his rage and anguish knotted inside him. “I will not accept it. Chemosh has done this. He must be stopped!”
“Others will deal with Chemosh,” said Majere imperturbably. “The Lord of Death is not your concern. Look inside yourself, Rhys, and seek the darkness within your own soul. Bring that to the light before you try to wrestle with the darkness of others.”
“And what of Lleu? He must be brought to justice—”
“Lleu speaks truly when he claims that Chemosh has made him invincible. You can do nothing to stop him, Rhys. Let him go.”
“And so you would have me skulk here, safe inside these walls, tending to sheep and mucking out the barn while Lleu goes forth to commit more murders in the name of the Lord of Death? No, Master,” said Rhys grimly. “I will not turn away and let others take on what is my responsibility.”
“You have been with me fifteen years, Rhys,” said Majere. “Every day, murder and worse has been done in this world. Did you seek to stop any of them? Did you search for justice for these other victims?”
“No,” said Rhys. “Perhaps I should have.”
“Look inside your heart, Rhys,” said the god. “Is what you seek justice or vengeance?”
“I seek answers from you!” Rhys cried. “Why didn’t you protect your chosen from my brother? Why did you forsake my them? Why am I alive and they are not?”
“I have my reasons, Rhys, and I do not need to share those reasons with you. Faith in me means that you accept what is.”
“I cannot,” said Rhys, glowering.
“Then I cannot help you,” said the god.
Rhys was silent, his inward battle raging. “So be it,” he said abruptly and turned away.
hys woke from a profoundly disturbing dream in which he denied his god to throbbing pain and flickering light and a rough, wet tongue licking his forehead. He opened his eyes. Atta stood over him, whining and licking his wound. He gently pushed the dog away and tried to sit up. Rhys’s stomach heaved, and he was sick. He lay back down with a groan. The monks’ rigorous practice session often resulted in injuries. Learning how to treat such injuries and how to bear pain was considered an important part of their training. Rhys recognized the symptoms of a cracked skull. The pain was acute and he longed to give into it, to sink back into the darkness, where he would find relief. Victims who did that, however, often did not ever wake up. Rhys might not have awakened, if it hadn’t been for Atta.
He fondled her ears, mumbled something unintelligible, and was sick again. His head cleared a little and a wave of bitter memory washed over him, along with the realization of his own danger.
He sat up swiftly, gritting his teeth against the sharp pain, and looked for his brother.
The room was dark, too dark to see. Most of the thick beeswax candles had gone out. Only two remained burning and their flames wavered in the melting wax.
“I’ve been unconscious for hours,” he murmured dazedly. “And where is Lleu?”
Blinking through the pain, trying to bring his eyes into focus, he cast a swift glance around the room but saw no sign of his brother.
Atta whined, and Rhys petted her. He tried to recall what had happened, but the last thing he remembered was his brother’s charge against Majere: He has neither the will nor the power to stop Chemosh.
One of the candles sputtered and went out with a sizzle. Only one tiny flame remained burning. He fondled the dog’s silky ears and he had no need to ask why Lleu had not murdered him while he was unconscious.
Rhys did not have to look far for his savior. Atta lay with her head in his lap, regarding him anxiously with her dark brown eyes.
Rhys had seen Atta stand guard on the sheep during an attack on the flock by a mountain lion, placing her body between those of the sheep and the lion, facing it fearlessly, brown eyes meeting and holding the cat’s yellow-eyed gaze until it turned and slunk away.
He let his eyes close drowsily, petting Atta and imagining her standing over her unconscious master, glaring balefully at Lleu, her lip curled to let him see the sharp teeth that might soon be sinking into his flesh.
Lleu might be invincible, as he claimed, but he could still feel pain. The yelp he’d given when Atta bit him had been real enough. And he could still picture quite vividly what it would feel like to have those sharp teeth sinking into his throat.
Lleu had backed down and run off. Run away … run away home …
Atta barked and leapt to her feet, jolting Rhys awake.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, sitting up, tense and afraid.
Atta barked again and he heard another bark, distant, coming from the sheep pen. The bark was uneasy, but it was not a warning. The other dogs could sense something was wrong. Atta kept barking and Rhys wondered grimly what she was
telling them, how she would describe this horror that man had perpetrated on man.
He woke again to find that she was barking at him.
“You’re right, girl. I can’t do this,” he muttered. “Can’t sleep. Have to stay awake.”
He forced himself to stand, using the bench to pull himself up. He found his emmide lying on the floor beside him, just before the flame of the final candle drowned in its own wax and went out, leaving him in moonlit darkness, surrounded by the dead.
The throbbing ache in his head made thinking difficult. He focused on the pain, and he began to mold it and shape it and press it, compact it into a ball that became smaller and smaller the more he worked on it. Then he took the small ball of pain and placed it inside a cupboard in his mind and shut the door upon it. Known as Ball of Clay, this was one of many techniques developed by the monks to deal with pain.
“Majere,” he began the ritual chant without thinking. “I send my thoughts upward among the clouds—”
He stopped. The words meant nothing. They were empty, held no meaning. He looked into his heart where the god had always been and could not find him. What was there was ugly and hideous. Rhys gazed inside himself a long time. The ugliness remained, a blot on perfection.
“So be it,” he said sadly.
Leaning on his staff for support, he staggered toward the door. Atta padded along beside him.
First, he needed to determine what had become of Lleu. He thought it possible that his brother was lurking somewhere around the monastery, waiting in ambush to offer up his final victim to Chemosh. Logic dictated Rhys search the stables, to see if horse or wagon was missing. He kept close watch as he went, peering intently into every shadow, pausing to listen for sounds of footsteps. He looked often at Atta. She was tense because she felt her master’s tension and watchful because he was watchful. She gave no sign that anything was amiss, however.
Rhys went first to the barn, where the monks kept a few cows and the plow horses. The wagon his parents had driven was still here, parked outside. He entered the barn cautiously, his staff raised, more than half-expecting Lleu to attack him from the darkness.
He saw nothing, heard nothing. Atta buried her nose in the straw spread over the floor, but that was probably because she was not usually allowed in the barn and she was intrigued by the smells. His father’s draft horses were inside their stalls. The horse that Lleu had ridden was not.
Lleu was gone, then. Gone back to his home. Gone to some other city or village or lonely farm house. Gone to create more converts of Chemosh.
Rhys stood in the barn, listening to the heavy breathing of the slumbering animals, the rustling of bats in the rafters, the hoot of an owl. He heard the night sounds and he heard, far louder, the sounds he would never hear again—the thwack of his emmide against the staff of a brother, the animated discussions in the warming room in winter, the quiet murmur of voices raised in prayer, the ringing of the bell that had divided up his day and marked out his life in long, neat furrows that had, only a few hours before, stretched into the future until Majere took his soul onto the next stage of its journey.
The furrows were jagged now and crisscrossed, one over the other in confusion, leading nowhere.
He had lost everything. He had nothing left except a duty. A duty to himself and his murdered parents and his brethren. A duty to the world that he had shunned for fifteen years and that had now come down on him with a vengeance.
“Vengeance,” he repeated softly, seeing again the ugliness inside him.
Find Lleu.
Rhys left the barn, and headed back to the monastery. His head pounded. He was dizzy and sick to his stomach, and he was having trouble focusing his eyes. He dared not lie down, as he longed to do. He had to remain awake. To keep himself awake, he would keep busy and there was work to do.
Grim work. Burying the dead.
“You need help, Brother,” said a voice at his shoulder.
Atta leapt straight up at the sound. Body twisting in mid-air, she landed on her feet, hackles raised, teeth bared in a snarl.
Rhys raised his emmide and whipped around to see who had spoken.
A woman stood behind him. In looks and in dress, she was extraordinary. Her hair was pale as sea foam and in constant motion, as was the green gown that rippled over her body and flowed down around her feet. She was beautiful, calm and serene as the monastery stream in midsummer, yet there was that in her gray-green eyes that told of raging floods and black ice.
She was all in darkness, yet he saw her clearly by her own inner radiance that seemed to say, “I have no need for the light of moon or stars. I am my own light, my own darkness, as I choose.”
He was in the presence of a goddess and he knew, from the strands of seashells she wore in her unkempt hair, which one.
“I need no help, I thank you, Mistress of the Sea,” Rhys said, thinking that it was strange that he should be conversing with a goddess as calmly he might have spoken to one of the village milkmaids.
Looking down at the broken pieces of his world in his hands, he thought suddenly that it was not so strange after all.
“I can bury my dead myself.”
“I’m not talking about that,” said Zeboim irritably. “I am talking about Chemosh.”
Rhys knew then why she had come. He just did not know how he was to answer.
“Chemosh holds your brother in thrall,” continued the goddess.
“One of the Death God’s High Priestesses, a woman named Mina, cast a powerful spell on your brother.”
“What kind of spell?” Rhys asked.
“I—” Zeboim paused, seeming to find it difficult to go on. The admission came out with a wrench. “I don’t know,” she said sullenly. “I can’t find out. Whatever Chemosh is doing, he is taking great care to conceal it from the other gods. You could find out, monk; you being mortal.”
“And how would I discover Chemosh’s secrets better than the gods?” Rhys demanded. He put his hand to his head. The pain was seeping out of the cupboard.
“Because you are a mite, a flea, a gnat. One among millions. You can blend in with the crowd. Go here. Go there. Ask questions. The god will never notice you.”
“It seems as though you need my help, Mistress,” said Rhys wearily. “Not the other way around. Atta, come.” He turned aside, resumed his walk.
The goddess was there in front of him. “If you must know, monk, I’ve lost her. I want you to help me find her.”
Rhys stared, perplexed. His head ached so that he could scarcely think. “Her? What her?”
“Mina, of course,” said Zeboim, exasperated. “The priestess who enthralled your wretch of a brother. I told you about her. Pay attention to me. Find her and you find answers.”
“Thank you for the information, Mistress,” said Rhys. “And now I must bury my dead.”
Zeboim tilted back her head, regarded him from beneath her long lashes. A smile touched her lips. “You don’t even know who this Mina is, do you, monk?”
Rhys did not answer. Turning on his heel, he left her.
“And what do you know of the undead?” Zeboim pursued him, talking relentlessly. “Of Chemosh? He is strong and powerful and dangerous. And you have no god to guide you, protect you. You are all alone. If you agreed to work for me, I can be very generous …”
Rhys halted. Atta, cringing, crept behind his legs.
“What is you want, Mistress?”
“Your faith, your love, your service,” said Zeboim, her voice soft and low. “And get rid of the dog,” she added harshly. “I don’t like dogs.”
Rhys had a sudden vision of Majere standing before him, regarding him with an expression that was grieving, and at the same time, understanding. Majere said no word to Rhys. The path was his to walk. The choice his to make.
Rhys reached down to touch Atta’s head. “I keep the dog.”
The goddess’s gray eyes flashed dangerously. “Who are you to bargain with me, maggot of a monk?”
“Mine do, I assure you,” said Zeboim.
She placed her hands on his face and kissed him, long and lingering, on the lips.
Rhys did not flinch, though her lips stung like salt water in a fresh wound. He did not return the kiss.
Zeboim shoved him away.
“Keep the mutt, then,” she said crossly. “Now, the first thing you must do is locate Mina. I want—Where are you going, monk? The highway lies in that direction.”
Rhys had resumed his trek back to the monastery. “I told you. I must first bury my dead.”
“You will not!” Zeboim flared. “There is no time for such foolishness. You must start upon your quest immediately!”
Rhys kept walking.
A bolt of lightning streaked down from the cloudless heavens, blinding Rhys, striking so near him that it sizzled in his blood, raised the hair on his head and arms. An enormous thunder clap exploded next to him, deafening him. The ground shook and he fell to his knees. Chunks of debris rained down around them. Atta yelped and whimpered.
Zeboim pointed to a huge crater.
“There is a hole, monk. Bury your dead.”
She turned from him with a rustle of wind and a flurry of rain and was gone.
“What I have done, Atta?” Rhys groaned, pulling himself up from the ground.
By the confused look in her eyes, the dog seemed to be asking him the same question.
Rhys buried the dead in the grave provided by the goddess. He worked through the night, composing the bodies to some semblance of peace. Carrying them, one by one, from the dining hall to the gravesite. Laying them in the moist, soft earth. When all were laid to rest, he took the shovel and began to fill in the grave with dirt. The pain in his head had eased with the goddess’s kiss, a blessing he had not even noticed she had granted him until after she was gone.