Kelven's Riddle Book Five

by Daniel Hylton

  The voice of a bear.

  “All hail Aram the Mighty,” Borlus repeated, again and again.

  Aram waited until the joyous sound finally slackened and then faded enough that he could be heard.

  “Over the next few weeks and months, we will order the world for the peace and freedom of all its inhabitants,” he declared. “The gifts of the Maker, the gifts of liberty and justice, will guide us in all our deliberations as we build a new world fit for a new age.”

  Once more, he found it necessary to wait until the roar of approval died down, then, “Your princes and I, the representatives of every nation on earth pledge to you a new age in which every person may live out a life of peace and productivity, without fear of war or any evil brought upon them by those who are stronger. And this we will do.”

  Once again, a great chorus of approval crashed against the wall. He waited for it to recede and then lifted his hand. “For now, let those among you with the proper skills go into the storehouse of Regamun Mediar, take what is there and prepare a feast for all.”

  The shouts rose up and rang out again as he turned away.

  As he came back onto the porch and to the leaders gathered there, he looked over at Findaen. “It is true? – there is enough in the storehouse to do as I told them?”

  “Fear not, my lord,” Findaen responded with a smile. “We brought ample provisions with us when we came into your valley. The storehouse of Regamun Mediar is filled to overflowing.”

  “Thank you, Fin,” Aram said gratefully, and then he started to move on toward the city but halted, turned, and looked at them all.

  “Our valley,” he said.

  Eoarl and Dunna were inside the main room of his home when he entered. The old farmer embraced him with joy, and Dunna hugged him and kissed his hand, making it wet with her tears. Then, releasing his hand and moving back, she pointed.

  “Your lady is just in there,” she said.

  Aram went to the door of their bedroom, stepped inside and pulled it shut behind him.

  Ka’en stood very still next to Mae’s small bed, watching him with her eyes wide and soft, like pools of golden amber. Her breath came quick as she stared at him.

  “Findaen told me –”

  Aram shook his head and held up his hands.

  His heart swelled as he gazed back at her.

  “Not now, my love,” he told her, his voice breaking. “I will explain it all to you – that of it which I understand, anyway – another time.” He took a step toward her.

  She did not move.

  “My husband?” Whether this was a question or a statement, Aram could not discern, for it was delivered softly, almost inaudibly.

  He halted, as the abrupt realization of all that she must have heard – and endured – over the last few weeks washed over him.

  “I am Aram,” he assured her, “your husband.”

  Her eyes filled and overflowed. Still, she did not move.

  Aram blinked at the sudden moisture that seeped into the corners of his own eyes. “I told you, Ka’en,” he said softly but firmly, “that when all of this was over and Manon defeated, I would come home to you and I would never leave you again.”

  He spread his arms wide, longing for the feel of her. “It is over – I am home.”

  She ran to him then and he strode forward and enfolded her in his arms, pushing his face down into her hair, filling his senses with the wildflower scent of her.

  As he held her tight, his heart full, he sent a thought up, up into the distant realms far above and beyond the earth. “Thank you, Maker in the heavens,” he prayed, “for my life.”

  And the Maker looked down and smiled upon the satisfactory conclusion of that which had troubled Him for so long. For one moment, one heartbeat of the universe, He pondered that which had been done by one of His lesser children, accomplished by virtue of a stout heart, a determined will, and an unwavering commitment to do what was right because it was right – and found Himself amazed. Then, content, He lifted His gaze, and turned and walked into the far reaches of His domain, to see what new thing He might find to do there.

  End Book Five

  Kelven’s Riddle Book Six

  AND RETURN PEACE

  The Reign of Aram

  When Aram the Magnificent, as he came to be known, ascended the ancient throne at Regamun Mediar, there was no ceremony. For when he returned from the north – and from even more distant, darkly mysterious regions – and rode up the avenue to the city, the crown of his fathers, the symbol of his authority, was already upon his brow.

  He had become king in a manner that transcended ritual.

  As the celebrations that attended his ascension came to an end the people, many of them soldiers, veterans of The Battle Before the Tower, reluctantly filed out of the valley and away over the green hills to the south toward their distant homes. Aram and Ka’en stood together upon the grand avenue and bade them all farewell.

  Nikolus and Timmon, however, he asked to either remain or to return to him ere the winter set in, to receive instruction on all that which the king hoped to accomplish over the next months and years. For despite wanting a period of peace with his family, Aram knew that many things in his new kingdom begged the attention of clever, capable hands.

  Nikolus replied only that he wished to go to Derosa and recover Jena, whom he asked leave to marry before the year was out. Upon granting this, Aram told him to, “Choose any home, either in the city or out upon the verge of the avenue, and make it your own.”

  Timmon, who like Nikolus elected to stay in the east rather than return west to Aniza as was the expressed desire of many of his compatriots when the death of Manon released them from servitude, was extended the same offer. The clever man did not hesitate but immediately sought permission to secure a house near the base of the tower at the upper level of the city.

  For three days after the people began filing away to their various homelands, Aram and the princes of the earth spent a good part of each of those days discussing the future. It became apparent during these talks that the relationship between Aram and the others had been altered yet again. Already readily recognized by all of them as their monarch; his stature among them had become something not only apart, but inarguably above.

  He had always been, for all of them, a personage of enigma; now there was the added depth of mystery imparted to him by his absence from the earth for the space of nearly two months – time undoubtedly spent in that dark and strange land beyond the border regions of death.

  Then, of course, there was his astonishing return from those regions.

  The deference paid him was not demanded by him, nor was it evident in his attitude that it was even expected, yet it was given to him because of that which he had always been and because of that which he had become.

  From the beginning of his reign, many titles were bestowed upon him, used easily and naturally by those that were now his subjects – among these were the great, the mighty, the magnificent, the dragonslayer, even godslayer.

  He would tolerate the use of none of them in his presence, only accepting simply that he was, at least for the moment, king.

  This remarkable and often-demonstrated attitude of humility and self-deprecation on his part, of course, did nothing but add to the legitimacy of those titles in the minds of others. As a consequence of that legitimacy, they found ever wider usage with all people, in all corners of the earth.

  Except for one lone man.

  Mallet, as he had always done, still insisted that Aram was a god, believing it to the end of his days, ever resistant to all argument or persuasion in opposition to that belief.

  After the necessary conferences were completed, the princes of the earth went off to their respective homelands, most still mounted, for many of the horses, including Thaniel and Jared, opted to remain with the men they had borne into battle, rather than return to the high plains for the winter. Some even elected, with Thaniel’s permission – that worthy pe
rson now being universally recognized as the Lord of All Horses – to make the journey across the passes to the east in order to gather their mates and families to them and bring them out into the greater world.

  Aram and Ka’en spent the last weeks of that autumn, as the leaves turned gold and red and then brown, and fell to their final resting place upon the rich soil of the valley, in the peace and quietude that Aram had always desired.

  Eoarl and Dunna remained with them. Muray, grousing that he “would be ever a soldier, never a farmer”, nonetheless returned to Lamont to see to the holdings of his family there.

  The ensuing winter was quiet across all the earth. There was sorrow in every land that had sent soldiers to the Great Battle, as the men returned from war, and the cost was counted by the absence of those that did not return, and were now buried in that small valley below the ridge where they had offered up the ultimate sacrifice.

  But there was also pride.

  Yes, Aram the Great had finished the grand campaign when he had gone in alone to face the grim lord, but it was the effusion of their blood that had opened the way. As time passed, mothers found their bereavement and grief being slowly replaced by the dignified compensation of that singular sort of honor that is afforded only to those who have given birth to heroes.

  Some widows went on to live out their lives alone, convinced that no other man could ever measure up to him that had given his all for his homeland, his prince, his woman, and his children. Others found men to help them rear the offspring of the fallen hero. Many of those surrogate fathers were men that had stood beside those that fell on that grim mid-day so far off to the north.

  Fathers of the honored dead, upon finding the pain of grief being dulled by time, would tell tales of the bravery and the mighty deeds that their sons had committed during the Great Battle. And, as whiskey flowed, and the tales were repeated; the heroes of the Great Campaign grew in stature, and grew again.

  In the southwest of Lamont, near the ancient holdings of an ancient family, Muray, Captain of Excellence, told similar stories of his own ken, a man of sixty-two that had stood in the line, facing the grim host of Manon with the best of them.

  In the Valley of the Kings, Aram spent many a day by the fire, watching his daughter grow slowly but delightfully from an infant to a child as winter tightened its grip and the snow deepened out upon the great porch.

  Thaniel stayed in the valley, even occasionally coming up the stairway from the snow-covered rolling swales of the valley to stand before the fire in the great hall, communing with Aram and Eoarl and Timmon as those three indulged in cups of hot kolfa, and now and then tapped one of Eoarl’s kegs.

  Nikolus had married Jena in the late fall and he and his new bride had temporarily moved into the great house in Derosa with Findaen, pending the preparation of one of the homes in the city of the king as a permanent dwelling place. Ka’en’s brother, who by law could not be addressed as Prince, which title would remain with Aram until such time in the future when Ka’en’s daughter, Maelee, would become a woman and choose a spouse, nonetheless was made ruler of Wallensia pending that time by decree from Aram.

  Many of the discussions around that fire in the great hall concerned the various projects that Aram remanded to Timmon and Nikolus, those worthy gentlemen being named respectively Chief Engineer and Chief Architect of the realm. A few of those projects could be completed over the course of the next year or two, but many were of such immense size that they would necessarily consume decades.

  These projects included the restoration of the bridges across the River Broad at Stell, the repair and rebuilding of all the roads throughout the kingdom, and the refurbishing of the façade of the city itself damaged by the dragon, as well as the restoration of every structure along the avenue and downstream at River’s Bend.

  First, though, as most of those projects would require vast amounts of labor, material, and consequently money; Aram needed another thing to be accomplished. In the spring, he intended to take Timmon and Nikolus over the passes and onto the high plains to see what could be done about spanning the deeply quarried gorge where lived that anachronistic beast, the Choalung.

  There were two reasons for this. Firstly, and before all, Aram wished to recover the remains of Joktan from the barren ridge top where they lay and remove them inside the pyramid where they would be interred with those of his queen, Kressia. Secondly, he intended that the great wealth that had been bequeathed to him by his ancestry be brought west and stored at Regamun Mediar, where it could be more easily accessed and put to use restoring all regions of the earth to a semblance of the glory they had once known.

  Upon being informed of all that his monarch desired of him and Nikolus, including the order in which Aram wished them to be accomplished, Timmon’s mind turned instinctively to still another project. The engineer had planned to remain in Regamun Mediar for the whole of the winter, but now found his thoughts turned away from that prospect. Going outside one unseasonably warm day near the turning of the year, he pivoted and gazed into the south for several minutes.

  When Aram came out to join him, Timmon turned to him and begged the use of Huram for the remainder of the winter.

  “Why?” Aram asked him.

  “I have often been troubled – as I know you have as well, my lord, by the fact that Wallensia is separated in two halves all along the length of the Broad,” Timmon told him. “By your leave, I would like to go south to Stell and see to constructing a ferry there, using one of the bridges as a support structure. It would be temporary, for use only until we can see to the restoration of the bridges, but I promise to make it sound and serviceable.”

  Aram gazed back at him with surprise and sudden gladness. “Go,” he said, “and do so with my gratitude.”

  Another incident that had occurred in the late fall, just before the winter came and shut them in the valley, particular gladdened Aram’s heart. This event also relieved the fierce anxiety Thaniel had endured since his mad rush into the south and away from the battlefield in the north after the fall of Manon.

  Two months after the battle, as the armies of Duridia and Lamont passed by the southern flank of Burning Mountain, a saddle was discovered, lying in a ravine just to the south of the roadway. A small silver cylinder suspended from a chain looped around the horn of the saddle told of its owner. Stored in Arthrus’ shop in Derosa when it was yet believed that Aram was gone for all time, it had at last been remembered, retrieved, and brought north to the city.

  The Call came once more into Aram’s possession.

  Spring arrived rather earlier than usual the following year; almost as if the earth itself understood that a new age had dawned upon it. Intending to give Mae another few months to grow before taking her on an extended visit of all his subject principalities, Aram collected Nikolus from Derosa. Then, along with Timmon, who now was once again mounted on Duwan – the horse having finally and fully recovered from his wounds – rode up over the eastern pass, through the gray and rotten snow that yet clung to the shadowed places in the pass, and down onto the high plains.

  The next day, just after mid-day, leaving the horses at the southern edge of the jungled forest that surrounded the ruins of Rigar Pyrannis, they worked their way inward until they came at last to the rim of the chasm. Aram pointed out the obvious obstacles, informed them of his need to find a serviceable way across, and then sat on a mound of ancient piled stone and watched the two of them. His Chief Engineer, along with his newest brother-in-law, also now his Chief Architect, wandered back and forth along the edge of the gorge, gesturing to one another, indicating this – and then that – for the consideration of the other. And by turns simply gazing across at the enormity of the problem.

  Then, as the day wore away, while Aram still sat and waited in the thickening shade, the two clever men sat down, and ignoring the gaping chasm to their front, began to design a solution to their king’s need.

  The next day, after camping upon the low hill to t
he south of the forest where the spring arose and gurgled southward, they went in again and for hours, measured first this, and then that, and then discussed – and argued over – how to solve the difficulties presented by this, and by that.

  But the problem remained enormous and so far, unsolved.

  On the early morning of the third day, while Nikolus and Timmon once more entered the dark jungle to see whether or not they might examine the problem from yet another, previously undiscovered angle, Aram and Thaniel rode off to the east. Aram told the two men that he meant to journey all the way to the shores of the Inland Sea, promising to return the next day to hear that which had been decided by them, if anything.

  Reaching the sea late in the day, Aram dismounted and the two of them walked the shores as the sun declined to the west, and the breeze freshened off the water. The curiously long-legged waterfowl rose up in great flocks, squawking their disapproval at having been disturbed.

  Coming up onto a low ridge, where the northern mountains rose up before them in grand display, they halted, and Aram gazed northward. Another low, thickly wooded ridge could be seen a few miles off in the distance, at the base of those mighty mounds of rock. Aram stood still for a moment and then pointed.

  “There, my friend,” he said to the horse. “That farthest ridge, there, the one just visible in the mist. That is where I spent the remains of that winter when I returned from Kelven’s mountain.” He turned and looked at Thaniel. “I would ask your permission to build a home on that ridge – something small, where my family and I might spend a part of each summer, away from…..everything else.”

  Thaniel gazed in the direction indicated for a brief moment and then looked over at Aram. Deep, rumbling laughter abruptly redounded and burst out from him as if it were as tangible as his head or his hooves and not simply a product of his thoughts.

  Confused, and somewhat irritated by this response, Aram stared back at him.