Tathea

by Anne Perry

“How do we travel?” he said at last.

  She knew what he was thinking. She had seen his expression every time circumstances forced him to pass close to a horse. Fear was written deep in his eyes, the angle of his body and the haste and clumsiness of his movements. But there was no other answer. The forest tracks were not wide enough for even the smallest cart, and they could not carry on their backs all they would need, let alone copies of the Book. Apart from that, she doubted Tugomir’s narrow chest and spindly legs would carry him the thousand miles or so they needed to travel.

  He anticipated her answer. Perhaps he read it in her eyes. “Horseback,” he said quietly. “I suppose God will preserve me.” He did not sound as if he believed it.

  And indeed it proved even more difficult for him than he had imagined. He hated his horse because it terrified him. Although it was normally a good-natured beast, it seemed to sense his dislike and reacted accordingly. It fidgeted, started at sudden sounds or movements, shied at the running of a rabbit or the flight of a bird across its path. Once, to Tugomir’s outrage, it twisted its head round and actually bit his foot.

  The horse Tathea chose for herself was a long-legged creature, largely gray but with fine black speckles and patches across its back. She named it Casper. It was not especially beautiful, but it was swift and intelligent and of a gentle temperament. She grew fond of it very quickly.

  On the second morning, having slept in a blanket on the ground, Tugomir was so stiff he could not rise to his feet. Pain shot through every joint, and he sank back again. Tathea was standing by the horses and saw his predicament. She came over quickly and offered her hand to help him. He took it because he had no choice, but it was humiliating, and he was acutely embarrassed.

  “Thank you!” he snapped. She wanted to offer to anoint his feet, but before she could he hobbled away to find a private place to perform his morning ablutions.

  Two days later they left the open woodland and entered Hirioth itself, where ancient tree roots twisted deep into the earth like gnarled hands clinging on. Tugomir had a painful sense that the forest was alive and sentient. Branches spread above them in towering layers so dense the very light between seemed green like deep water, and the sun penetrated only in glancing shafts in clearings and glades where suddenly all was gold. The sounds of the human world, all that meant sanity and reason to Tugomir, were closed out. Yet there was never silence. He was uneasily aware of constant movement around him: leaves, birds, small animals about their business, night and day. Always something was whistling or snuffling, rustling leaves or snapping a twig. The forest itself seemed to breathe.

  And of course the days were growing shorter, the nights longer, and it was incessantly damp. He ached for the burning heat of Shinabar. He remembered its clear, dazzling sunlight as some lost heaven from which he had been forever cast out. This was a form of slow torture.

  He rode hunched up in the saddle, jiggled around like a sack of grain. Every bone hurt. The trees closed in on him, and he shut his eyes and imagined the great open sweep of the desert skies and the sharp smell of bitter herbs. Even the endless shift and abrasion of sand would be infinitely preferable to the cold trickle of rain, dripping from leaf to leaf, and the ceaseless, hidden, whispering movement all about him.

  He did not complain. He knew Tathea was aware of the depth of his misery and that if she could have relieved it she would have, but it was the nature of the forest, and there was nothing for him but to endure it. But it did not help that she seemed to find it beautiful. It was incomprehensible to him; she was as Shinabari as he was, but glancing sideways at her face when they stopped, he thought from her expression that she even felt strangely comforted by it, as if in its own way it were familiar from some other age or time.

  She tried to show him the beauty, to make him laugh, even to teach him to like his horse, and he tried to respond, to please her, but it was an alien world to him. He missed the civilized conversation of his old friends, whose experiences and tastes matched his own. Above all he missed the sweetness and safety of being known and respected for a lifetime’s devotion to his priesthood. He knew that was gone forever. Now he was a follower of the Book of God.

  This was a hideously uncomfortable way to travel. He spent the entire day being constantly jolted around on the back of a creature that disliked him and seemed as nervous of the forest as he was. He was wet at least half the time. The leaves around him were turning brown and gold and red; soon they would fall off, and stark branches like withered limbs, the grotesque bones of dead giants, would surround them. It would be worse.

  Their first meeting with the forest people came on the eleventh day. They rode into a wide clearing within which wooden houses were set so close under the trees they were almost hidden. A man was standing in the sunlight. He was stocky, fair-haired, and dressed in browns and greens. He showed no surprise at seeing two travelers on horseback, and Tugomir assumed the man had been alerted to their approach by some system of vigil. Perhaps that explained why he always felt watched in the forest.

  “Welcome,” said the man courteously but with the wariness of one who is unused to strangers. “I am Garran. The hospitality of my house is yours. Where do you travel?” He looked puzzled.

  Well he might, Tugomir thought. He must answer! He must do something to make this whole abominable journey have meaning. He dismounted with embarrassing awkwardness. For all Tathea’s teaching and encouragement, he had never mastered it satisfactorily. This time he all but fell at Garran’s feet, jarring his aching bones so sharply he knew his face must reflect his pain. He gritted his teeth and straightened up.

  “My name is Tugomir,” he announced. “And this is Lady Tathea. We have come to bring you good news, the word of a great love that the hosts of heaven bear for you and all your people.” He had learned not to speak of a single God to those who revered many.

  Garran looked surprised, but not resentful. He regarded Tugomir as the leader, probably because he had spoken first. Tugomir had not done it to usurp Tathea, but to remind himself why he had journeyed into this version of hell and perhaps make it bearable.

  Garran offered them food and water, care for their animals, and shelter for as long as they chose to remain. Tugomir was grateful at least to hand over his horse and go inside one of the forest houses and sit on a stationary and well-cushioned seat.

  He looked around with more pleasure than he had expected. The small room was constructed with great skill and needed no ornamentation to make it beautiful. This excellent use of timber somehow justified the endless legions of trees. In the coming winter, which he dreaded, they would at least be warm. He noticed the logs already piled against the outer walls in anticipation. There were also bins, presumably to store food, and he had noticed fowls outside. Maybe there would be eggs.

  Garran invited them to take the evening meal with him, and it turned out to be very agreeable, composed mostly of root vegetables and something that looked like stalks. Tugomir was careful not to ask what it was, but murmured a silent prayer over it and ate. It was delicious. The texture was firm and the taste delicate.

  The meal was finished with fruit and berries as full of sweetness and juice as any he had ever tasted.

  Afterwards they went outside into the clearing and found about forty people gathered in great expectancy. Word had traveled of the stranger who brought good news, and they had all come to hear him.

  He rose to speak in the hazy gold of the late sunlight amid the shimmer of leaves and sudden liquid birdsong.

  “I have so much to tell you,” he began. His voice with its hard edges caressed the words and rang with a certainty of truth no listener could deny. “It will take me a long time, but I shall begin with what is most important of all, and that is who you are!”

  They stared at him. No one moved.

  “You are the children of God! He created all things, worlds beyond your imagining or mine, worlds beyond counting, more numerous than the leaves of all the trees in Hirioth. And
yet He knows your name, each of you, and your face, and He loves you as if you were the only one.”

  There was a sigh of breath. A bright weasel darted out of the shadow, its coat gleaming like bronze, stood motionless a moment, then shot away.

  “Your spirits have existed from eternity, and shall continue forevermore. In an age before this one which you cannot recall, you walked beside God and spoke to Him face to face, as one man with another. God has loved you with a power and a truth beyond imagining. He wishes us all to grow up, not to remain like little children, unknowing and unfulfilled, just as all of us wish it for our sons and daughters. So He has created a plan whereby we can do so, and one day become heirs to all the glory and the joy which He possesses.”

  The sunlight was lengthening on the grass, and the air cooled, but no one moved.

  “To achieve this will naturally be long and difficult,” Tugomir went on. “As men of the forest, you will know that the great prizes come only to the brave, the diligent, those who are prepared to labor and to learn. You are free to accept this challenge or to pass it by. To take it up will be dangerous. Just as there is God, so also there is an Enemy, one who hates you and has done so from the beginning, who burns with jealousy because he has forfeited his chance of what may be yours. Above all things he hates the thought that one day you will pass beyond all the griefs and pains of the world and into a region so blessed that the darkness can touch you no more, and once again you will walk with God, only this time not as a child, but as a man!”

  He looked at them and saw reflected in their shining faces his own passion, but with an innocence that moved him to a strange sadness, and a love for them which caught him by surprise, bringing a sting to his throat.

  The following day it was the same. More people came, and word spread of the wonderful teachers who brought a new way of life and of a God who loved all men.

  By day he and Tathea taught them from the words of the Book, and they learned eagerly. In the evening they lingered, keen to hear anything they might say, and Tugomir started to tell them stories. He invented as he spoke, not Shinabari legends, but something else—tales of a land of his imagination, a beautiful city by the sea where an old and exquisite culture created great works of art and an enlightened form of government, where all played a part in discussion and decision. He invented characters, and a tale of one man who seized an unrighteous power and began a tyranny, and of brave men who stood against him, and a great civil war.

  It was only a tale, something with which to end the day, but in its people he showed the passions of good and evil, and he saw in the faces of those who listened that they understood his deeper message.

  Tathea listened to his stories as well, and they rang in her heart with a strange echo of familiarity, although she knew they were only a way of showing greater truths. But watching Tugomir’s strange, ugly face and seeing the fire in it, the gentleness, and the softening of his eyes, she knew that he was strong enough to remain here without her. She must press on alone, north and westwards towards the farther edge of Hirioth and the mountains of Kharkheryll, where the Flamens still kept the ancient faith of the island people, and from there to Celidon and the Waste Lands.

  Parting from Tugomir would be hard after nearly a year and a half in his company, sharing so many things, sad and joyous, funny, harsh, and wretched. But she had only to look at his face and hear the passion in his voice to know that he would be too enthralled in his work to miss her more than now and again, perhaps in the darkness of the night, and when there was no one else to understand his terror of the forest, no one with whom to speak his own tongue. But even when they had been enemies in Shinabar, which seemed now like another life, she had known he was no coward.

  The day she departed, he stood in the open glade in the morning light, staring at her with slight surprise, as if he had not truly realized that the parting must come.

  “Going? So soon?”

  “I must,” she answered. “Before the winter. I must reach the people of the western shore.”

  “Alone? Should you not wait until we have taught these people and I can come with you?”

  “You do not need me,” she replied with certainty, smiling at him.

  He flushed faintly. “Have I assumed too much?”

  “No!” she assured him with a quick touch to his arm. “This is as it should be. I shall leave for Kharkheryll.”

  “But should I not go with you? Will you be safe alone?” He looked anxious, his narrow face filled with concern.

  “I don’t think two of us will be any safer than one,” she replied truthfully. “As long as I walk in the pathways of God, He will preserve me until the work is done. And He will be with you also, Tugomir. I shall miss your company.” And she kissed him lightly on the cheek and turned to mount her horse. She rode into the forest, disappearing into the green shadows among the trees.

  Chapter XVII

  SHE RODE ALONE FOR many days, always north and west, as far as she could judge, although under the trees it was not easy to be certain.

  The forest was thinning, the open spaces wider and more frequent when she met the first people of the old faith. She knew a little of it from Ortelios. It seemed an animistic cult, a worshiping of trees and stones; something left over from a more barbaric age. Yet the man who stood in the glade before her was possessed of an extraordinary dignity. His face was powerful with a curved nose and broad brow. His gray hair stood out in a mane, and his beard melted into it in one magnificent sweep. He wore a cloak whose color was neither blue nor green and yet was both.

  “What do you here, woman?” His voice was deep and held a startling music in spite of the challenge of his words.

  She could not answer with the simplicity Tugomir had used to Garran. This man was more sophisticated and far more deeply rooted in his own certainties. She saw it in his eyes, in the stance of his body as he stood before her, spiritually if not literally barring her way.

  “To speak with you,” she answered him. “To learn of your beliefs and tell you of mine.”

  “You are the one who brought a Book to tell us who we are and how we should live,” he said grimly. It was almost an accusation.

  She kept her voice level. “It is for all people to take, or to leave, as they choose. Hear what I have to say. Then search your heart and do as it bids you.”

  “And you, woman, will you listen to me and the beliefs of the Flamens, who have lived in this land since long before you or the Camassian Empire were born?” There was a note of anger in his voice, a deep, shivering timbre of outrage. “You and your kind come here with marching legions and swords of steel. You build mighty roads across the land as far west as Lantrif of the River, south to Kyeelan-Iss, and north to the borders of Celidon and the Waste Lands. The fortress of Layamon is like a city graven in a mountain’s form. Ten million bricks stand witness to your holding of our land. Am I really free to take or to leave this Book of yours?”

  It was so easy to force without meaning to. Freedom was delicate; it could be marred by a word or the omission of one. When given by a conquering race, an inflection of the voice might unintentionally imply punishment or reward.

  “There is no prize except life in the eternity ahead,” she answered. “And no penalty except its loss.”

  He smiled slowly, the sad, bitter smile of a man who had been cheated often. “Then I too may speak to my people, and remind them of their fathers dead on the battlefield, of the land which gave them birth?” he asked. “I may bid them stand here in Hirioth and touch the bark of these trees,” he held his arms wide, “listen to the boughs murmuring, and see the leaves move in the sun, and say aloud that they have taken a new faith from our conquerors? I may bid them go to the mountains of Kharkheryll, where the bare cliffs brush the sky and the wind blows clean and hard from the edge of the world, and tell the earth that has nourished and fostered them that they are heirs to some new god and have no need of their old faith anymore? That they are lords of another h
ope now, and the past has no more meaning?”

  She did not know how to answer him. She must not fail, and she could feel his anger and his pain like a living thing in the air.

  “Then I will learn from you.” She heard her own words as if from a stranger, and was filled with doubt as to whether she should have said them.

  It was a reply he had not expected. It was written plain in his face. He drew breath to respond, and then also found he did not know how to.

  “I am Immerith,” he said slowly. “High Priest of the Flamens. If you will in truth listen, then I shall take you west to Kharkheryll and teach you our laws, and you must do with them what you will.”

  Tathea dismounted and from then on led Casper behind her, going with Immerith on foot, in the old way of the Flamens. For some time they traveled in silence, and Tathea observed how this strange man seemed to watch and listen to the forest, even in his own fashion to commune with it. When he stopped to eat he knew without hesitation which leaves or fruit to take. It was a long, slow autumn. The last flowers of summer still entwined in long, fantastical golden trumpets, sweet-scented at evening, which climbed in vines spreading over the fallen branches in the rare glades where sunlight pierced the canopy. He looked at them long and in deep satisfaction. He shared his food with small animals—squirrels, weasels, a badger. Even the wide-eyed deer did not run at his coming.

  It was the second day before he began to tell her of his faith. It was unlike anything she had heard in either Shinabar or Camassia. Some echo of it seemed to sound from legend, but too primeval to be written.

  “You Camassians trample through the world as if it were without life or meaning, other than that with which you invest it,” he said grimly as they set out in the morning. He walked beside her with Casper behind. “You are blind and arrogant beyond the mind to grasp.”

  She drew breath to deny being Camassian, then realized it was irrelevant. She waited for Immerith to continue.