by Lee Duigon
“Maybe it’s Gurun who taught her,” Ryons said.
But when Gurun joined them, she said, “No, my lords, I haven’t taught her anything. It is hard for me to read the Obannese lettering.” Gurun knew the Scriptures better than anyone but Obst, but she was not Obannese. She came from Fogo Island in the distant north, blown to Obann by a storm, which she accepted as God’s providence. Everyone here called her a queen, which embarrassed her. She loved Ryons, but he was just a boy, much too young to have her or anyone else for a queen. At home she would have been married by now, but island girls married young. The Obannese calendar was different, so Gurun had lost track of her birthday. She was at least seventeen, she reckoned. Ryons always looked at her with admiration—tall and straight, with bright blue eyes and shining golden hair. She deserved to be a queen, he thought.
“If Jandra reads the Scriptures, and no one here has taught her,” Gurun said, “then it can only be the gift of God.”
Onlookers exchanged perplexed glances, but Obst nodded. “That’s my thought, too,” he said. Obst had seen God take a boy from Heathen slavery and make him king of Obann; He could certainly make a little girl to read. It was Jandra who had first announced God’s choice of Ryons as king, and everyone recognized her as a prophetess. Since King Ozias’ bell had rung from the summit of Bell Mountain, many marvelous things had happened in the world—not all of them pleasant.
It was a busy time at Carbonek. It was God’s will that they should carry His word into Heathen lands, and the chiefs of the army were preparing their campaign. They would have to get across the mountains before the end of summer. But where should they cross, and how would they supply themselves?
“Wherever we cross, we’ll have plenty of fighting,” said Shaffur, chief of the Wallekki. His riders had been scouting far and wide. “Maybe more than we can handle, I think.”
The First Prester was on his way to Lintum Forest to bless the king and his army, but no one knew where Helki was. He’d gone off with three of his best woodsmen to find a way across the mountains and hadn’t been heard from for two weeks. “Let the chieftains get things organized,” he’d said. “I’m no good at that.”
Chief Buzzard wanted the army to cross into Abnak lands and help his people in their revolt against the Thunder King. “We’ll have all the Abnaks fighting on our side,” he said. “We’ll take many scalps.”
Obst hardly thought that the best way to export God’s word, but he couldn’t deny the army’s need for allies.
“We should wait for God to speak to us,” said the Fazzan chieftain, Zekelesh. “What’s the use of having a prophetess among us, if we aren’t going to listen to her?”
And now the prophetess had spoken—a little girl who couldn’t read, reading from the Scriptures. And no one understood the message.
Along with Gurun and the old Abnak subchief, Uduqu, a boy named Fnaa had escaped from the city of Obann upon the destruction of the Palace last summer. Now he spent much of his time with King Ryons, playing and exploring the forest together. Both had Heathen blood in them. Both had been born slaves. But that wasn’t all they had in common.
Fnaa was the king’s double, and you could hardly tell the two of them apart—two dark-haired, dark-eyed boys, slightly undergrown. But Ryons had a red streak in his hair, a sign of his descent from King Ozias. If you covered it with charcoal, the boys were practically identical.
By the time Ryons and Fnaa got together at the supper table, the whole settlement buzzed with word of Jandra’s reading. Fnaa was sorry he’d missed it.
“I did see the whole Palace go up in flames,” he said, “and that ought to count as a miracle. But for Jandra to read that great big book—why, I can hardly lift it!”
“Abgayle has a little book of stories someone gave her, but she says Jandra can’t read that.” Ryons shook his head. “I wish Helki was here.”
“What for? He can’t read, either! He’s out hunting bandits somewhere—unless they’re hunting him.”
“I don’t like to think about it,” Ryons said. When he was a slave, nothing ever worried him as long as he had enough to eat and escaped beating. Now he was a king, and many things worried him. “I don’t know how we’d ever get along without Helki.”
“Oh, he’ll be all right,” said Fnaa. “My mother always prays for him.”
CHAPTER 3
Helki the Hunted
As the day gave way to dusk, Fnaa’s mother would have prayed harder had she been able to see what was hunting Helki even as she and the rest of Carbonek settled down to supper.
He’d had a fleeting glimpse of it, up there in the trees, an animal whose like he’d never seen before. Obann was full of strange animals these days. This one looked something like a marten, but almost the size of a grown man, and bearing a thick coat of shaggy black fur. It stalked him from above, waiting for a chance to spring down on him. It moved with great care, making hardly the slightest sound. It had positioned itself upwind from him, so there was no scent to be detected. He wouldn’t have known it was there at all, but for the shrill, scolding chirp of an unseen sparrow and the indignant chattering of a squirrel as it fled out of the hunter’s way.
Helki the Rod was a big man. You wouldn’t think he could make himself invisible, but he could: that was how he stayed alive. His clothes, a mass of sewn-together patches in every shade of green and grey and brown and yellow you could think of, helped him to blend in to any kind of forest background, and he was a master of the arts of silence and stillness.
Unable to see or hear its prey, the beast now hunted by scent alone. The sparrow kept on scolding, by which Helki was able to know the beast’s location. It would be too bad if he had to kill it, he thought. Maybe if he remained invisible a little longer, it would give up and move on. Already it seemed to be hesitating, unsure of what to do.
Helki was alone. Yesterday he’d sent his three men back to Carbonek to report his plans. They’d raced across the plains to reach the wooded foothills of the mountains.
“We know there’s an army waiting for us on the other side of Silvertown,” he’d told them, “and a much bigger army hammering the Abnaks. I’m thinking we might be wise to take the long way around, by the new road the enemy made to the Golden Pass. That means we’ll have to get an early start; it’ll be a long march. Go back and tell the chieftains. I’ll go on ahead and see what’s what.” He would cover much more ground without them.
The sparrow’s cries got shriller; the predator was now almost directly overhead. The wind had shifted slightly, and the hunter was confused. Helki heard it snuffle, trying to pick up his scent.
A new plan suggested itself.
With a roar that made the woods ring, Helki leaped out from concealment and whirled his staff over his head with a whoosh.
“I see you!” he bellowed.
Startled and unnerved, the hunter leaped with a snarl to the next tree and went crashing off through the foliage. Helki wasn’t surprised: ambush predators didn’t like it when their prey could see them and seemed ready for a fight. He laughed quietly to himself.
“I win,” he said aloud. There would come a time, perhaps, when he didn’t win, and that would be the end of all such games. But as Obst would say, “That’s in God’s hands, not ours.”
Helki continued on his way.
The next day he found what he’d been looking for, a small encampment of refugees, Obannese and Abnaks together, some twenty adults and a few small children. They lived in a handful of Abnak wigwams, saplings fastened into arches and covered with skins, sheets of bark, and layers of leafy boughs. He did his best to avoid startling them, but the Abnak men were annoyed with themselves for letting him get so close without their knowing it.
“Peace to all the enemies of the Thunder King!” he said, raising a palm. “I come from King Ryons. My name is Helki.”
“How did you get past our hunters?” demanded an Obannese man in ragged clothes.
“Very carefully!” Helki said.
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“You’re lucky no one speared you,” said an Abnak with a grey scalp lock. “I am Ogo, of the Cicada clan, the headman here. If you are Helki the Rod, I’ve heard of you. You killed the giant.”
“God blessed my staff that day.”
“We have heard of the Obann God, too. Hlah tells us that He is the God of Abnaks, too.”
“I know Hlah—old Chief Spider’s son,” said Helki. “I’d like to talk to him.”
“His camp is a half-day’s march north of here,” said Ogo. “He visits us sometimes to tell us things that come out of a book. He is the servant of this God.”
“And so am I,” Helki said.
He stayed the night with Ogo’s people and learned what he had hoped to learn. The war with the Abnaks on the east side of the mountains had drawn off much of the Thunder King’s strength—and there was no Heathen army guarding the way down from the Golden Pass.
“They fear that place,” said Ogo, as they ate roasted squirrel around a campfire. “Thunder King doesn’t like for anyone to see where all the snow came down and buried his golden hall. They say it’s haunted by the ghosts of all the mardars who died there. Maybe it is. Some say the Thunder King himself died there, but that cannot be.”
“The troops get discouraged if they see that, eh?” Helki said. “The truth is, Ogo, that the Thunder King did die in that avalanche. I was there; I saw it. But they just raised up another one and pretended it was the same man. Who can tell the difference behind a golden mask?”
Ogo and his people had never heard that news before. They filled the night with excited murmurings.
“It’s good to know the Thunder King can die!” Ogo said. “If there were more of us, we would send men back to Abnak country to help in the war. But we have to hunt food for our wives and children. Most of our young men have taken Obannese wives—who would have ever thought a thing like that could happen? But everybody says that if the war goes on much longer, all the Abnak tribes will have to come over to this side of the mountains. King Thunder has too many men; Abnaks can’t kill them all.”
“They can try!” added a woman with a baby in her arms. And Ogo laughed at that.
Hlah, the son of Spider, had a wife and child of his own, but he wasn’t thinking about the war. He was thinking about the helpless madman he’d brought up into the hills with him and then taken down again, all the way to Obann City—a starving, dirty madman who was now best known as Lord Orth, First Prester of Obann by the grace of God and election by the College of Presters. But Hlah and his wife knew him better by the name Hlah had given him: Sunfish.
“I can hardly believe it!” May said, as they discussed the matter privately. “The First Prester coming here!”
“He was here for quite a while, as Sunfish,” Hlah said.
“That was different. He wasn’t First Prester then. He wasn’t really anybody.”
By special messenger Lord Orth had sent Hlah and May a book of Scripture, one of the first of what was going to be thousands of new copies. It came with a letter from Lord Orth himself, stating his intention to visit the hill country in person late this spring. He had signed it “Sunfish.”
“We ought to keep it a secret until he’s almost here,” said Hlah. “It might be bad if the Thunder King got wind of it.”
It had been Hlah’s dream to go back over the mountains and preach the God of All Nations to the Abnaks in his native land. He hadn’t been able to do so; his people needed him here.
“They probably would have killed me, anyway,” he said.
“Remember what Lord Orth said to you before we came home from Obann,” May answered. “Carry out the work that God has given you.” Which he found himself content to do.
CHAPTER 4
News from the East
Under the back porch of Baron Bault’s house lived Wytt, when he wasn’t living in the baron’s stables or somewhere in Ellayne’s bedroom. He liked it under the porch because it ran beneath the kitchen and he could smell everything that was being cooked and overhear everything that went on in the house.
Maybe you already know what kind of creature Wytt is: an Omah, a little manlike thing about the size of a squirrel, with a glossy coat of reddish fur. He was Jack and Ellayne’s companion and protector on their travels.
He shared the space under the porch with an old rat that had been driven out of the stables by the younger rats. The ones in the stables were aggressive. Wytt had had to kill one, and so they learned not to be aggressive toward him. But the old rat under the porch was peacefully inclined, and he and Wytt had become friends. If the baroness had ever known she had a rat under her kitchen, she would have set a trap for it. She didn’t much care for Wytt being there, either, but she didn’t complain. As long as she didn’t have to have anything to do with him herself, she accepted his close bond with the children. “Still,” she said, “if he’s your pet, Ellayne, he ought to be in a nice hutch, like a rabbit.”
“Oh, Mother! That would be like putting a person in a hutch! He’s not an animal!”
The baroness couldn’t quite understand that. For her daughter’s sake, she put up with it.
Sometimes Wytt brought tasty tidbits from the kitchen, which he shared with the rat. It would have offended the cook to know that. On this particular evening he brought bacon scraps. Knowing that he was eating much better than the youngsters in the stables, the old rat was content.
They didn’t converse—how could they?—but had they been able to, their talk might have gone something like this.
“A change is in the air,” the rat would say. “I feel it in my hair and in my bones! Don’t you?”
“I do,” Wytt would answer. “It’s almost like the way you know that spring is coming, even before you see any buds on the trees. Only spring is already here, so it must be something else. I wonder what it is.”
“It’s got me all excited,” the rat would say, “but I don’t know why.”
Even had he been able to talk, here he would have run out of words. Whatever might be going to happen, it was beyond his imagination. As for Wytt, he very seldom imagined things at all. His was not a human mind, nor was it an animal’s.
Around the city, which some said was a dying city, life in Obann had begun to settle down. The remnants of the Thunder King’s vast army, which Ryons on the great beast had scattered in every direction, were starved, killed, or had fled into parts unknown or gone into the service of the king of Obann. Having failed to take the city, they could never return to homelands ruled by the Thunder King. Many of them, now under Obannese officers, patrolled the roads.
So it was deemed safe for the First Prester to travel to Lintum Forest and beyond. The project of copying and distributing the Scriptures he’d left in good hands. Prester Jod in Durmurot was now the Vicar of the Temple—not the old Temple, which lay in ruins in the middle of the city, but the new one envisioned by Lord Orth, not built with human hands but with God’s word and His people. And General Hennen, now Baron Hennen, governed the city in King Ryons’ name.
It was a new thing for the First Prester to travel. “The people must be brought to know that God is with them,” Orth said, “and it’s our mission to lead them back to Him. The old Temple was in Obann, and in Obann it stayed. But the new Temple must be everywhere.”
There was, of course, another New Temple—the one built by the Thunder King at Kara Karram, far out in the East in Heathen lands. “He means it as a snare and a temptation to us,” Orth said. “We must not permit him to deceive us.”
Orth traveled by the roads along the river in a fine coach drawn by two white horses, with an escort of twenty mounted spearmen clad in mail. People came out to see him, and he delivered sermons to them wherever he stopped. To see and hear the First Prester was a new thing in their lives and a new thing for the First Prester, too. Everywhere he spoke, he preached repentance.
“We have entered a new era in our history,” he said. “God is shaking the earth, so that the things that cannot be
shaken will remain. We have a king again, of the blood of King Ozias. We have rediscovered God’s word. Rejoice! For you all heard Ozias’ bell ring from atop Bell Mountain, far away. Rest assured that our God has heard it, too.”
Before he left the city, Gallgoid advised him there was war on the east side of the mountains—“war that might spill over into Obann before you can even reach the mountains.” Gallgoid ruled a network of spies, and he knew whereof he spoke. “It might be better if you didn’t journey quite so far, First Prester.” Gallgoid had once saved Orth from a dangerous plot and felt an attachment to him.
“I must go where I am led,” said Orth.
Not everyone in Obann wished to enter a new era.
Ysbott the Snake, who didn’t die when Ellayne had escaped from him, was one of those. He dared not return to Lintum Forest, where Helki’s men continued to hunt down outlaws. He haunted the woodlands that marched along the river east of Ninneburky, recruiting desperate men with prices on their heads.