The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  “Who would try?”

  “I don’t know. But you get it all only in the Inner Game. But I am but a novice, one who sits at the feet of the great who deign to lend their arcane skills. I am not so good as you may think; instruction I can do; Maellen who was Aelekle to me and me alone I can easily do. . . . Obviously, for I knew her many ways. I knew her as a lover, and as a student of her wisdom. Random images are harder, abstract ones still more so. But should you wish another demonstration, I can now send you a picture of yourself, as I have seen you. . . .”

  “Myself through another’s eyes? Thank you, no. I must refuse. Please leave me my illusions and memories of the way things were. I should then no longer be able to imagine myself a buck like yourself. I know very well that I-now-Morlenden possess a potbelly from overindulgence at too many weaving-parties. Nevertheless I prefer to imagine myself a svelte youngster, lean and mean.”

  “Ha!” Krisshantem smiled at that. It was the first time Morlenden had seen him do so. And inside himself, he forgave the intrusion. He had in part asked for it. He was thankful this wild boy knew no more than he did.

  During the meal—the stew turned out well despite Kris’s heavy hand with the red pepper—they did not speak, but ate in silence, Morlenden was hungry, for he had walked far in two days and had eaten little, save pathway-food, cold meals packed to be eaten along the way. This was the first real honest meal he’d had since leaving home. Krisshantem, too, ate quietly, with a self-possession and attention to the present that surprised Morlenden. After all, it was beginning to be more than merely apparent that Kris had lost Maellen, to accident, not the usual cause of such separations, and he was only barely older than Morlenden and Fellirian’s own Pethmirvin. But where Peth was still very much a child at fifteen, for all her busy sexuality, this boy was something more than the usual adult.

  Finishing, Kris went to the pantry, returning by way of the stove, pausing, and producing along the way an infusion of the ubiquitous root-tea, then returning and settling back in his place, folding his legs under himself after the mannerism of a tailor, or perhaps a rug-maker.

  Morlenden cleaned the remainder in his bowl with the last crust of bread, observing, “You cook well, indeed. I would become the fatted calf in your house.”

  Kris answered pleasantly, “Not so. When the cook is good, one uses him less . . . once a day or less.”

  Morlenden sipped his tea, looking at the boy from over the edge of his mug. The pleasantries were now over, and the introductions finished, the measures taken. He began, reaching with the words, “You are, so I have observed, a cool one for one who has been along the ways of dhofterie. . . . I should have thought you more, well, apprehensive about the whereabouts of Maellenkleth.”

  “My apprehensions are real enough, for all that I refrain from displaying them publicly like yesterday’s unwashed laundry. They are, of course, much as you might suspect, perhaps more. But they do not, translated into the here and now, have much of an effect upon the nature and course of things. However strong they are.” He looked away and did not meet Morlenden’s glance.

  “Have you thought of going after her yourself?” Gently, here.

  “No. She told me specifically that not under any circumstance should I come after her should she fail to appear. She felt about her little expeditions that if she ever got herself into something that she couldn’t handle, no one else would be able to do it for her, and it would be just throwing good people to waste after bad.”

  “We are edging into it. Shouldn’t we start at the beginning?”

  Kris answered, “Start at the beginning, start at the end, or in the middle; in a well-lived story it makes no difference. Does not everything lead to something else?”

  Morlenden replied, “True, but for all the sophistry, the accipter flies not backward to present life put of its beak and talons to the Lagomorph.”

  “Hawk and hare . . . you are correct. I have been rude. You know that I do not wish to face this; that is the way of the words.”

  “I know these things and walk with you, though I may not now face them myself, in my own life. Once I had a lover. . . .”

  Kris mused, “We never know what we will face and what we will not . . . let me caution you of that at least.”

  The remark rang oddly in Morlenden’s mind. Not that its truth was in question, but that it sounded oddly prophetic after the manner of oracles; ambiguous, indefinable, unknowable as the dream-that-predicts. Until the moment came. What did this woodsman know?

  Kris continued, “But, still, I would tell it my own way. Time clouds things, masks significances. You will want what I have, to add to what you already know or suspect.”

  Morlenden laughed. “Then say on as you will, for what I have is precious little enough.” He sipped at the tea again. It was still almost too hot to drink properly.

  “This time,” he began hesitantly, “was to be her last venture outside. Yes, there were other ventures. Many of them. I do not know where she went, or what she did. But they were all short, never more than a few days. But she said that before we met there had been some longer ones . . . months, seasons.”

  “Maellenkleth was outside for a season? Three months?”

  “Yes, among the forerunners the whole time, and they knew it not.”

  “Clandestinely? Where could she go for so long?”

  “She would not speak of it any more than the others. Save once . . . she said in a mood of reminiscence, ‘The humans said long ago that God created the universe in seven days, yet just now have I been to a place where the creation is still going on. And if that be true, perhaps their god still lives and works in that place.’ I know not where it was, nor would she say, in the sense of how to get there. I saw, in deskris, as she sent, and she said that there would be a place like that for us someday. I said, ‘Would we go there and live, us, out of our little land?’ and she became suddenly sad and said no, not there, never. I saw it, but never where in relation to anywhere else: there was a dark sea, salt water, there were rocky beaches, cliffs, brown mountains, that ran in rippling waves above the waters and plunged into them at their northern ends. The sun set into the sea. No one lives there. It is free and open, but now empty. She said that once, long ago, they came there to be cured, to be healed, but that now no one will even walk in it, or pass near it.”

  “A human sfanian, a place of healing?”

  “I would not have thought it, but I am blind to many of their ways.”

  “Just so am I. . . . But the last time she went outside: it was important?”

  “Yes, very much so. She could refuse, but she would not. She could not let it go.”

  “Did she say what she was to do?”

  “She was to break two machines no longer in use.”

  “Absurd! Perhaps if they were in use, but otherwise . . .”

  “They—those with whom Mael spoke—were worried that if these things, still operable, were used, then the Forerunners would be able to see something they must not know before their time. That none of us could know until we were prepared. They could make more of these machines, but they wouldn’t be so good, and by then it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Did she not realize that destroying them would point a finger at the very thing she wished hidden?”

  “I asked her the same question. She shook her head, saying that she knew. That all that had been considered, but she still had to go.”

  “I cannot imagine it. What was the secret?”

  “Believe me when I say that I never learned it. I know the ways of trees, I listen to the speech of the waters, I have learned to watch the clouds move and permutate, I can slow time for myself until the sun whirls across the sky. I have mastered the silences. But I could neither get it from her, however else she gave freely, nor see it in her. Maellenkleth was indeed of the aspect of Sanh, the Water, but something in her was harder than the finest steel, and her mind was a mirror, as are those of all Sanmanon. She received instru
ctions, and she obeyed them, whatever distaste she herself felt.”

  “The faithful soldier.”

  “I think that she liked some of it.”

  “Hm!” Morlenden snorted. “Instructions from whom? The Perwathwiy and her elders of Dragonfly Lodge?”

  “Oh, no. Not from those, or perhaps not directly. Mael worked not for the elders, and in fact she held them in some contempt, for they were so willing to let the Perklarens go without a ripple. She took her instruction from Sanjirmil. Do you know such a one?”

  Morlenden’s mind stopped short, as if he had suddenly walked into a wall. “Sanjirmil? The Terklaren?”

  “There can only be one, as custom allows.” It was a pointed reproof. Morlenden of all people should know there could only be one living. Sanjirmil. He looked away for a time, and said quietly, “I know her. Or thought I did.” Morlenden thought deeply, unable to complete the import of it. Sanjirmil, who came in the night with the Perwathwiy. Sanjirmil who kept secrets at thirteen. Sanjirmil who was an arch-rival, and a co-plotter in something . . . and they were all operating something under the Game called the Inner Game. What had he walked or stumbled into? What devil’s work were he and Fellirian doing, and in reality, for whom? And what cause was he taking up almost by accident, as he followed Maellenkleth’s path, finishing her business? He left it. There was not enough yet.

  He said, “Tell me about your weaving with her. How was that to be arranged?”

  Kris answered, “We met and became lovers by accident. Indeed. I am Air aspect. It became more than casual, and she found that I could do certain things, things she gave value to. She offered to me, and I accepted. That is not so hard. Imagine, me becoming a shartoorhosi player of the great Game! But once I learned it, I felt it odd and . . . unfinished, and I thought of the flow of the life I have learned in the forest and visions of the sky. Very odd, those two.”

  “Odd? Why?”

  “Because at first the two seem so different, but from a certain level of awareness they are much the same thing.”

  “I know. The wise say that there is only one reality, and that we catch only glimpses of it. The mad are so because they cannot turn away from it; but they also cannot live in it. They are pulled apart. And that categories are errors caused by the degree of imperfection; the more highly categorized, the greater the degree of imperfection. But the universe is one.”

  “Spoken like a Gameplayer, Ser Deren!” Krisshantem exclaimed. “But for all that,” he continued soberly, “we imperfections must live on a workaday world, where there are, after all, categories, divisions, classifications.”

  “There is always, in any good list, a sort called ‘other.’ ”

  “Thus the Game as well. I had always thought of it, when I reflected on it, as a kind of manipulation, but as I learned more from Maellen-Aelekle, I saw that it was also a very curious way of looking at a process of perception, to perceive small detail and large overview simultaneously. Perception!”

  “All games are that in part.”

  “But this one more so.”

  “I know that Maellen was a player of the First-players. A good one, indeed. Which came first—was it that she was to rebuild because she found you, or were you the last part of a larger plan?”

  Kris answered without heat or offense, “We came first. She had thought of it before, but never seriously. She went for it long after we met. She did not use me, nor was there trade—legitimacy for becoming a Noble Player. In fact, she thought of taking the Inner Game by storm. It was rather impractical . . . the one we could have done in time, but the other would have been death for both of us; Maellen had many enemies.”

  “To start a new Braid would require the permission of the Revens. And I know that they do not grant that lightly, even to the simplest of farmer Braids. And to Gameplayers? When the community of the Players, past, present, and future, was allowing the Perklarens to end, just like that, without a whimper of protest—including the Perklaren parents themselves?”

  “It sounded fantastic to me as well, when we talked and plotted of it, here, in this very place where sit you and I. But not impossible. I said she had enemies; she also had powerful friends. There was something about a check upon Sanjirmil, which both Pellandrey Reven and the Perwathwiy had come to. I think that they came to regret the decision to let the Perklarens go, after it was too late and they were committed. The others had a stake in it, and wanted things left as they had been committed to. Still, one must train for the real Game. That which I gave you in instruction-mode is nothing, just the basic foundation. It is not something most have any talent for. In fact, Maellenkleth was the only one anyone ever heard of who had a real talent for it. And, of course, the Terklarens were rather violently against it. They said that the work of two Player Braids was done,” He paused, and then added cryptically, “Whatever that work really was.”

  “So, then; attend. You are now, for all intents, a Player, if somewhat unauthorized and unpermitted. Why would Pellandrey wish Sanjirmil counterweighted?”

  “Hard to explain, Ser Deren. As a Player, now, I see things I could not realize before. There are many revelations therein. Now Sanjirmil, she’s competent enough in the Game, I suppose, but there’s no style to her. It’s like swimming or dancing or making love or just good old dhainaz . . . there’s a sense of flow, motion, style. Dynamics. Maellenkleth’s Inner Game names among the masters were Korh, crow, and Brodh, otter. But Sanjirmil has no grace, no style. After all, she knows well enough that at fertility she’ll be the Terklaren. Perhaps I should say the Klaren.”

  “I know. She is very strong-willed.”

  “I know not how you know her, but I know her in the Game; strong-willed is not the word. She is fierce and dominant. The masters call her Slansovh, Tiger-owl, and Hifshah, the Werewolf. She is Fire aspect. Her Braidmates, co-spouses, follow her implicitly. They are already woven.”

  “Woven?” Morlenden exclaimed. “Why, they aren’t fertile yet, none of them!”

  “None the less, it is so. She already has them trained. All four of them. The Revens know, the Perwathwiy knows. And had things gone as Maellen and I had hoped and dreamed, so would it have been with her and me and two others I do not know.”

  Morlenden sighed. “And we, the poor Derens who must register such things, are the last to be informed. I have never heard of such a thing, even among the Revens. Do they live together?”

  “Indeed. The old Terklarens have already left, and joined Dragonfly Lodge; with the Perklarens. Once enemies, now uneasy allies.”

  Morlenden interjected, “Against two romantics.”

  Krisshantem said, with great dignity, “I assure you there was nothing of the sort in it. There I know Maellen well. There was more than desperation in her plan; rather, an urgent sense of necessity.” He paused momentarily. “Maellen was very concerned about this preweaving of the younger Terklarens; for, despite the radical air which she may have projected, she was in fact very traditionalist-minded, very conservative. Her view of this was that is was stealing what you already possess, in the person of Sanjirmil, which is as you may know one of the omens not desirable to be seen. And so her idea was that with practice, and constant pressure on them, we could eventually win it all back and recover the rightful order of things. But however much she showed me of the Game, she always left something out; I sensed deeper purpose in it, but it remained behind the veil—within an inner adytum into which I was not yet permitted. And she did obey the Law of the Game, thus. I put together that there was to be an initiation in a cave somewhere near or on the Mountain of Madness, but only Pellandrey could permit it—or, in my case, perform it. And she said, ‘not for love, not for dhof, not for all the sweetness we have shared, will I initiate you until they say I can. It is something more than I can give of my own desire.’ ”

  “Even in dhof? She spoke exactly thus?”

  “Aye, even in dhof, just so, Ser Deren.”

  “So now—what could it have been?”
/>   “There I am lost, blind. Yes, with all that I can do of my own added to all that she gave me, it is still ankavemosi, that which is concealed. ‘You cannot get there from here.’ It is unprojectable; the knowledge of the Outer Game is both insufficient data and a program of misdirection as well. But now you are a Player just as I . . . everything varies in it, even the dimensional matrix. Those were the kind of games that Maellenkleth liked best. Because Sanjirmil falls upon her fundament within the higher-order Games. And Mael said, ‘Present Sanjir-Dear with a matrix higher than four-dimensional and she can’t tell her own arse from a knot-hole in a plank.’ As unskilled as I was, I could see that from the plays I saw her make. But the lower-order Games she could handle well enough: crude, but very effective—her Game plans are heavy-handed, brute-force assaults. There is a feeling of destruction about her maneuvering.”

  “I believe,” said Morlenden.

  “When she faces a problem, she burns her way out. Power, raw imposition of order. Maellen, of the other thumb, plays a delicate, laughing Game . . . artful, skillful, balanced. To follow her Games is to experience the wind and the water, to know sailing and flight and the surge and rush of the mounting wave of the sea.”

  “I have the idea,” said Morlenden, “that much seems to be focused in these two . . . Braid traditions as well as what they may differ among themselves.”

  “Indeed, indeed, both. Their natures, their talents and abilities, the force of the traditions of both Braids. That was why two Player Braids were established in the beginning—that each should explore different aspects of approach to the Game, substance and style. Another battle in the eternal war between harmony and invention. We must have both elements. And you must not think that Sanjirmil was of necessity at a disadvantage for her lesser talent in the Game. She had other abilities . . . the majority would follow her, within the Game, and she has power under those closest to her; lust, hope, and fear. She is dangerous.”