by Tad Williams
Tiamak shuddered. He was sitting up, wrapped in her cloak, but he had so far moved very little. “I will tell you as best I can, although I do not understand much myself. But you are certain that you brought nothing out of that place with me?”
The rest of the company shook their heads.
“There was ...” he began, then stopped, thinking. “It was a piece of what looked like a mirror—a looking glass. It was broken, but there was still a bit of the frame in place, carved with great art. They ... the ghants ... they put it in my hands.” He lifted his palms to show them the healing cuts. “As soon as I held it, I felt cold running through me, from my fingers right into my head. Then some of the creatures vomited forth that sticky substance, covering me with it.” He took a deep breath but could not immediately continue. For a moment he just sat, tears shining in his eyes.
“You don’t have to talk about it, Tiamak,” Miriamele said. “Not now.”
“Or at least just tell us how they got hold of you,” Isgrimnur said. “If that’s not so bad, I mean.”
The Wrannaman looked down at the ground. “They caught me as easily as if I were a just-hatched crablet. Three of them dropped on me out of the trees,” he looked up quickly, as though it might happen again, “and while I struggled with them, a dozen more came swarming down and overwhelmed me. Oh, they are clever! They wrapped me in vines, just as you or I would bind a prisoner, although they did not seem able to tie knots. Still, they held the vines tight enough that I could not escape. Then they tried to lift me into the trees, but I suppose I was too heavy. Instead, they were forced to grab at vines and sunken branches and pull the flatboat against the sandbank. Then they took me to the nest. I cannot tell you how many times I wished that they would kill me, or at least knock me senseless. To be carried alive and awake through that horrible pitch-black place by those chattering things... !” He had to pause for a moment to regain his composure.
“What they did with me, they had already done with Younger Mogahib.” He nodded toward the other Wrannaman, who lay on the ground nearby, still locked in feverish slumber. “I think he lived because he had not been there long: perhaps he had not proved as useful a tool as they thought I would. In any case, they must have had to free him to get the mirror-shard for me. When they dragged him past, I cried out. He was half-mad, but he heard my voice and called back. I recognized him then, and shouted that my boat was still on the bank outside, that he should escape if he could and take it.”
“Did you tell him to find us?” Cadrach asked. “It was an unbelievable stroke of luck if he was trying to.”
“No, no,” Tiamak said. “There were only moments. Later, though, I hoped that if he did get free and made his way back to Village Grove, he might find you there. But even then, I only hoped that you would find out I had not deserted you by choice.” He frowned. “It was too much to hope that someone would come into that place after me....”
“Enough of that, man,” Isgrimnur said quickly. “What were they doing to you?”
Miriamele was certain now that the duke wished to avoid the subject of their decision. She almost smiled. As if anyone would ever doubt his good will and bravery! Still, after what he had said about Cadrach, perhaps Isgrimnur was a little sensitive.
“I am still not sure.” Tiamak squinted, as if trying to summon an image to his mind’s eye. “As I said, they ... put the mirror in my hand and covered me with that ooze. The feeling of cold grew stronger and stronger. I thought I was dying—smothering and freezing at the same moment! Then, just when I was certain I had breathed my last, something even stranger happened.” He looked up, meeting Miriamele’s eyes as though to make sure that she would believe him. “Words began to come into my head—no, not words. There were no words to it at all, merely ... visions.” He paused. “It was as though a door had been opened—as though someone pushed an entrance through into my head and other thoughts came flooding in. But, worst of all, they ... they were not human thoughts.”
“Not human? But how could you know such a thing?” Cadrach was interested now, leaning forward, his gray eyes intent on the Wrannaman.
“I cannot explain, but just as you could hear a red knifebill squawk in the trees and know it was not a human voice, so I could tell that these were thoughts that had never known a mortal mind. They were ... cold thoughts. Slow and patient and so hateful to me that I would have torn my head from my shoulders if I had not been imprisoned in that muck. If I did not quite believe in They Who Breathe Darkness before, I do now. It was h-horrible to have them inside of my sk—skull.”
Tiamak was shaking. Miriamele reached forward to pull the cloak up around his shoulders. Isgrimnur, nervous and fidgeting, threw more sticks onto the flames. “Perhaps you have told enough,” she said.
“I am almost f—f—finished. F-forgive me, my t-t-teeth are banging together.”
“Here,” Isgrimnur said, relieved to have something to do. “We’ll move you closer to the fire.”
When Tiamak was relocated, he began again.
“I half-knew that I was speaking like a ghant, although it did not feel like that. I felt as though I was taking the terrible, crushing thoughts inside my head and speaking them aloud, but somehow it came out as clicks and buzzing and all the noises those creatures make. Yet it made sense, somehow—it was what I wanted to do, to talk and talk, to let all the thoughts of the cold thing inside me just bleed out for the ghants to understand.”
“What were the thoughts about?” Cadrach asked. “Can you remember?”
Tiamak scowled. “Some. But as I said, they were not words, and they were so unlike the things I think or you think that I find it difficult even to explain what I do remember.” He snaked a hand out from the folds of the cloak to take a bowl of yellowroot tea. “They were visions, really, just pictures as I told you. I saw ghants swarming out of the swamps into the cities—thousands upon thousands, like flies on a sugar-bulb tree. They were just ... just swarming. And they were all singing in their buzzing voices, all singing the same song of power and food and never dying.”
“And this was what the ... the cold thing was telling them?” Miriamele asked.
“I suppose. I was speaking as a ghant, I was seeing things as they did—and that was terrible, too. He Who Always Steps on Sand, preserve me from ever seeing such a thing again! The world through their eyes is cracked and skewed, the only colors are blood-red and tar-black. Shimmery, too, as though everything were covered in grease, or as if one’s eyes were full of water. And—this is the hardest to explain—nothing had a face, not the other ghants, not the people running screaming from the invaded cities. Every living th-thing was just a muddy 1-1-lump with I—legs.”
Tiamak fell silent, sipping his tea, the bowl trembling in his hands.
“That is all.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “It seemed as though it lasted for years, but it cannot have been more than a few days.”
“Poor Tiamak!” Miriamele said with feeling. “How did you keep your wits!?”
“I would not have if you had been any longer in coming,” he said firmly. “I am sure of that. I could feel my own mind straining and slipping, as though I hung by my fingertips over a long drop. A drop into darkness without end.” He looked down into his tea-bowl. “I wonder how many of my fellow villagers besides Younger Mogahib served them as I did, but were not rescued?”
“There were lumps.” Isgrimnur spoke slowly. “Other lumps in a row beside you—but bigger, with no heads sticking out. I came close to them.” He hesitated. “There were ... there were shapes under that white ooze.”
“Others of my tribe, I am sure,” Tiamak murmured. “Ah, it is horrible. They must have been used up like candles, one at a time.” His face sagged. “Horrible.”
No one said anything for a while.
Miriamele finally spoke. “You said that the ghants had never been dangerous before.”
“No. Although I am sure now that they became dangerous enough after I left that the villagers ma
de a raid on the nest. That is why the weapons were missing from Older Mogahib’s house, almost certainly. And the things Isgrimnur saw tells what happened to the raiders.” He looked over to the other Wrannaman. “This one was probably the last of the prisoners.”
“But I still don’t understand all this about a mirror,” the duke said. “Ghants don’t use mirrors, do they?”
“No. Nor do they make anything so fine.” Tiamak offered the duke a weak smile. “I wonder too, Isgrimnur.”
Cadrach, who had been pouring out a bowlful of tea for silent Camaris, turned to look over his shoulder. “I have some ideas, but I must think on them. However, one thing is sure. If some sort of intelligence does guide those creatures, or is capable of guiding them sometimes, then we cannot afford to tarry. We must escape the Wran as swiftly as we possibly can.” His tone was cold, as though he spoke of events that barely concerned him. Miriamele did not like the distant look in his eyes.
Isgrimnur nodded. “The monk’s right, for once. I don’t see that we have any time to waste.”
“But Tiamak is sick!” Miriamele said angrily.
“There is nothing to be done, Lady. They are right. If I can be propped up with something to lean against, I can give directions. I can at least take us far enough from the nest by nightfall that we might risk sleeping on land.”
“Let’s to it, then.” Isgrimnur rose. “Time is short.”
“It is indeed,” said Cadrach. “And growing shorter every day.”
His tone was so flat and somber that the others turned to look at him, but the monk only sloshed to the water’s edge and began loading their belongings back into the flatboat.
By the next day, Tiamak was much recovered, but Younger Mogahib was not. The Wrannaman slid in and out of fever-madness. He thrashed and raved, shouting things that, when Tiamak translated them, sounded much like the nightmarish visions he himself had experienced; when he was quiet, Younger Mogahib lay like one dead. Tiamak fed him concoctions made from healing herbs gathered along the banks of the watercourse, but they seemed little use.
“His body is strong. But I think his thoughts are wounded, somehow.” Tiamak sadly shook his head. “Perhaps they had him longer than I suspected.”
They sailed on through the Wran, bearing north in the large part, but going there by a circuitous route that only Tiamak could follow. It was clear that without him they would indeed have been doomed to wander the swamp’s backwaters for a long time. Miriamele did not like to think about what their end might have been.
She was growing tired of the swamp. The descent into the nest had filled her with a disgust for mud and stench and odd creatures that now spread to include all the wild Wran. It was stunningly alive, but so was a tub full of worms. She would not want to spend a moment longer than necessary in either of them.
On the third night after their escape from the nest, Younger Mogahib died. He had been shouting, according to Tiamak, about “the sun running backward” and about blood pouring through the drylander cities like rainwater, when suddenly his face darkened and his eyes bulged. Tiamak tried to give him water to drink, but his jaws were clamped shut and could not be opened. A moment later, the Wrannaman’s entire body went rigid. Long after the gleam of life had faded from his wide eyes he remained as stiff as a wooden post.
Tiamak was upset, although he tried to maintain his composure. “Younger Mogahib was not a friend,” he said as they drew a cloak over the staring face, “but he was the last link to my village. Now I will not know if they were all captured—taken to the nest ...” his lip quivered, “... or fled to another, safer village when the raiding party failed.”
“If there are safer villages,” said Cadrach. “You say there are many ghant nests in the Wran. Could this be the only one that has become so dangerous?”
“I do not know.” The small man sighed. “I will have to come back and search for an answer to that.”
“Not by yourself,” Miriamele said firmly. “Stay with us. When we find Josua, he will help you find your people.”
“Now, Princess,” Isgrimnur cautioned, “you can’t know that for certain....”
“Why not? Am I not of the royal blood as well? Doesn’t that count for anything? Besides, Josua will need all the allies he can find, and the Wrannamen are nothing to scoff at—as Tiamak has proven to us time and again.”
The marsh man was dreadfully embarrassed. “You are kind, Lady, but I could not hold you to such a promise.” He looked down at Younger Mogahib’s shrouded form and sighed. “We must do something with his body.”
“Bury him?” Isgrimnur asked. “How do you, when the ground’s so wet?”
Tiamak shook his head. “We do not bury our dead. I will show you in the morning. Now, if you will forgive me, I need to walk for a while.” He limped slowly out of the campground.
Isgrimnur looked uncomfortably at the body. “I wish he hadn’t left us with this.”
“Do you fear ghosts, Rimmersman?” Cadrach asked with an unpleasant smile.
Miriamele frowned. She had hoped that when the monk’s oil-fire missiles had helped them escape, the hostility between Cadrach and Isgrimnur would diminish. Indeed, the duke seemed ready to call a truce, but Cadrach’s anger had hardened into something cold and more than a little unpleasant.
“There’s nothing wrong with caution ...” Isgrimnur began.
“Oh, be quiet, both of you,” Miriamele said irritably. “Tiamak has just lost his friend.”
“Not a friend,” Cadrach pointed out.
“His clansman, then. You heard him: this man was the only one of his village he’s found since he returned. This is the only other Wrannaman he’s seen! And now he’s dead. You’d want a little time alone, too.” She turned on her heel and walked over to sit next to Camaris, who was twining grasses to make a sort of necklace.
“Well ...” Isgrimnur said, but then fell silent, chewing his beard. Cadrach, too, said no more.
When Miriamele awoke the next morning, Tiamak was gone. Her fears were allayed a short while later when he returned to the camp bearing a huge sheaf of oil-palm fronds. As she and the others watched, he wrapped Younger Mogahib with them, layer after layer, as if in parody of the priest of Erchester’s House of Preparing; soon there was nothing to be seen but an oblong bundle of oozing green leaves.
“I will take him now,” Tiamak said quietly. “You need not come with me if you do not wish it.”
“Would you like us to?” Miriamele asked.
Tiamak looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “I would like that, yes.”
Miriamele made sure that the others came along—even Camaris, who seemed far more interested in the fringe-tailed birds in the branches overhead than in corpses and funeral parties.
With Isgrimnur’s help, Tiamak carefully laid Younger Mogahib’s leaf-wrapped body in the flatboat. A short way up the watercourse, he poled against a sand bank and led them ashore. He had built a sort of frame of thin branches in a flat clearing. Beneath the frame, wood and more oil-palm leaves had been stacked. Again with Isgrimnur’s assistance, Tiamak lifted the bundle up onto the slender frame, which swayed gently beneath the weight of the corpse.
When everything had been arranged to his satisfaction, Tiamak stepped back and stood beside his companions, facing the frame and the unlit pyre.
“She Who Waits to Take All Back,” he intoned, “who stands beside the last river, Younger Mogahib is leaving us now. When he drifts past, remember that he was brave: he went into the ghant nest to save his family, his clansmen and clanswomen. Remember also that he was good.”
Here Tiamak had to pause and think for a moment. Miriamele remembered that he had said he and the other Wrannaman had not been friends. “He always respected his father and the other elders,” Tiamak declared at last. “He gave his feasts when they were allotted, and did not stint.” He took a deep breath. “Remember your agreement with She Who Birthed Mankind. Younger Mogahib had his life and lived it; then, when They Who Watch an
d Shape touched his shoulder, he gave it up. She Who Waits to Take All Back, do not let him drift by!” Tiamak turned to his companions. “Say it with me, please.”
“Do not let him drift by!” they all cried together. In the tree overhead, a bird made a sound like a squeaky door.
Tiamak went and kneeled beside the pyre. With a few strokes of flint and steel, he set a spark among the scraps of oil palm. Within moments, the fire was burning strongly, and soon the leaves wrapped around Younger Mogahib’s body began to blacken and curl.
“You do not need to watch,” said Tiamak. “If you wait for me a little downstream, I will join you soon.”
This time, Miriamele sensed, the Wrannaman did not want company. She and the others boarded the boat and poled a little way along the watercourse, until a bend in the stream hid from their view all but the growing plume of dark gray smoke.
Later, when Tiamak came wading through the water, Isgrimnur helped him aboard. They poled the short distance back to camp. Tiamak said little that night, but sat and stared at the campfire long after the others had bedded down.
“I think I understand something of Tiamak’s story, now,” Cadrach said.
It was late morning, six days since they had left the ghant nest behind. The weather was warm, but a breeze made the watercourse more pleasant than it had been in days. Miriamele was beginning to believe they might actually see the last of it soon.
“What do you mean, understand?” Isgrimnur tried to keep the surliness out of his voice, but without complete success. Relations between the Rimmersman and the monk had continued to worsen.
Cadrach favored him with a magisterial stare, but directed his reply to Miriamele and Tiamak, who sat in the middle of the boat. Camaris, watching the banks intently, was poling in the stern. “The shard of mirror. The ghant speech. I think I may know what they mean.”
“Tell us, Cadrach,” Miriamele urged.
“As you know, Lady, I have studied many ancient matters.” The monk cleared his throat, not entirely averse to having an audience. “I have read of things called Witnesses....”