by Anne Perry
His mouth quivered and pulled tight.
“He spilled out the waste of his cleverness into the rivers and poisoned them. He poured his filth into the seas in his rage to plunder the treasures of the world, until everything he touched was polluted by his greed. The earth cried out against his ignorance. In its suffering it called upon God to cleanse it of its burden.”
Ulfin stopped, still nursing the glass very gently in his hands, almost as if it too lived.
Kor-Assh waited for him to end the story, but he did not, as if he needed someone to demand it of him.
It was Tathea who spoke. “And did God hear the earth?” she asked.
Ulfin turned to look at her. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “The old gods had gone long ago, because they knew what would happen and they could not bear it. You see, they loved the earth.” He tipped up the glass and drank the last of the wine. He looked to Kor-Assh. “You wanted to know what the story was behind the musician’s playing ... that’s it. It’s a Flamen myth, an old one. But we are an old people.”
Kor-Assh did not defile the moment with speech. What was there to say?
Tathea turned to Ulfin. She had brought the staff into the hall and to the table with her. No one had questioned it, perhaps assuming she leaned on it, and it would be indelicate to enquire. It was too light and too finely engraved to be a weapon. Possibly they believed it a symbol of office, like a sceptre. Now she raised it a little, and it caught Ulfin’s eye.
Kor-Assh watched her face in the light of the rush torches. The wavering of the flames made her eyes hollow and the gold in them softened her lips and cheeks until he could see the young Empress she had been in Shinabar before her quest had begun. The light moved again, harsher and a little brighter, and he saw the Isarch she had become after her conquest. Then the fires burned up, and the light of them laid bare the loneliness in her, and the years of waiting.
Was Ulfin Ishrafeli at last? And if he were, could Kor-Assh bear it? If he were not—then who? Where was he, and why did he not come forth?
Ulfin reached out and took the staff, turning it over and over in his slender fingers, touching the hieroglyphs, frowning. Seconds passed by. Kor-Assh looked at Tathea and knew what he would see. It was already too late. Ulfin would have seen the words, could he read it. They had not found the sixth warrior. He was not Ishrafeli.
The defeat was stunning, like a blow that robs the body of breath. Where else could they look? Kor-Assh realised only now how deeply he had believed it could be Ulfin. He seemed to fill every need, especially the love of the earth that surely would make him a warrior fit to battle for it against the tide of darkness coming inexorably in. He felt a moment of panic. They had lost Sadokhar, Ardesir was in Shinabar and Sardriel was on his way towards the steppes of Irria-Kand to face whatever savagery there was there, led by men or less than men.
He looked at Tathea, and saw the same bewilderment in her.
Ulfin passed the staff back, frowning, knowing that somehow a chance had passed him by and been lost.
Tathea smiled, but she looked away quickly, hiding her emotions, and as soon as it was courteous to do so, she excused herself, not only to Ulfin but to Kor-Assh also. He rose to his feet as she left, but it was plain Ulfin wanted him to remain, and he had no choice but to do so. There were tales yet to be told, civilities to observe, a kindness to offer which would mask, at least on the surface, the moment of loss,
When finally Kor-Assh retired for the night he found it hard to sleep, and through his dreams the Flamen legend kept returning to him with its vision of a poisoned world where the beautiful and vulnerable creatures suffered and found no help, where innocence was laid waste and its cry went up unheard.
He turned over again and again, staring into the darkness. He got up and pulled wide the curtain, letting in the starlight, then he walked restlessly back and forth across the floor. Finally he returned to the window and stared at the night sky, pale above the black edges of the mountains. He opened the casement and smelled the sharpness of the air. High and north as Kharkheryll was, it was cold in autumn. In the distance he could hear the echo of the cataract they had passed, thundering into the gorge a mile away.
Was the tale myth from the past, and no more? Or was it also their prophecy for the future? Not essentially for the Island, perhaps, but a ruin beginning in the centre of the world and spreading outwards? If God did not answer the cry Himself, was that because He awaited a man to do so? Was this man’s trust, to undo his own sins and wash clean the stain? Was that to be his burden and his gift?
Kor-Assh kneeled a long time in prayer, then he went back to bed again, wrapping the blankets around himself and trying to warm his body. He was startled how cold he had grown.
He must have drifted into sleep at last, because he awoke with a start. The room was still dark, but the light that had been in his mind was now a certainty. The Flamen legend was an ancient nightmare put into music, woven into art and preserved so that whether men chose to forget it or to remember, it could not die. Man had been given the earth as his home, but its stewardship was his test. Would he love it, nurture it, or in his blind greed destroy it, and with it himself? In all the magnificence of the blaze of stars, this one was man’s, to win or lose, to make brilliant, or to darken for ever. The Flamens had known this in their music, even if their minds had grown tired and let it slip into forgetting.
As soon as it was dawn Kor-Assh dressed and went to Tathea’s door, knocking softly. It had been hard to wait even this long to share his thoughts with her.
After a few moments she opened it, still wearing her long pale gown for sleeping, wrapped around with a robe, and her black hair loose.
“I’m sorry,” he apologised hastily. “I have been thinking of the Flamen story all night.”
“I too,” she said, opening the door wider to allow him in.
“I think it is a prophecy, and Ulfin knows it.” He watched her face, trying to read her understanding. “I don’t know why he couldn’t read the hieroglyph. Surely with knowledge and passion like that, he should be the sixth warrior? He loves the earth with a depth we can’t fathom. His people have revered it more than ours.”
“I don’t understand either,” she admitted. “But I know the purity of what he says, and that if it is not prevented, the prophecy is more terrible than any ruin we can imagine.” She shivered. “I was going to say that it is more fearful than man can make, truly a work of devils.” Her mouth pinched at the corners. “But there is nothing higher or lower, than man. At his best he is the heir of God, at his worst the equal of Asmodeus.” Her voice dropped to a whisper and her face was very pale, her eyes almost hollow. “There is no ‘them’—no creatures of another beginning, there is only ‘us’—angels rising or fallen.”
They remained in Kharkheryll for three more days. Tathea told Ulfin that they believed the Flamen myth, and had heard prophecies of their own which supported it. Quietly, by the light of a single torch, far into the night, she told him of Iszamber’s words to her in the desert long ago, how when ruin and darkness covered the earth, the Island would still stand, because of the faith of its people, stronger than all the destruction even Asmodeus could cause.
Ulfin stared into the distance, his strange face full of courage and tragedy. “So soon?” he said quietly. “I had thought we had longer, but if it is not so, then we must prepare ourselves.” He turned to her. “We will hold the north, and keep the love of the earth bright until the last sunset.” He held out his hand and she took it.
No further mention was made of the staff, and on the fourth morning Tathea and Kor-Assh set off south again across the wide sweep of the Wastelands and down through Celidon.
Kor-Assh became certain that the words on the staff for him meant that he was to love the earth and its creatures, to feel their life and their pain and to fight for their release into the wholeness that was their eternal right.
He was so lost in thought he barely noticed the passage from the
high escarpments of Celidon to the gentler slopes and the first of the great towns and cities which had grown up during the peace.
Midday was a glory of light across the gold of the harvested fields. Huge silken clouds shone in the west, towering into the burning blue of the sky. The land was steeped in abundance; everywhere he looked its rich, open heart lay before him.
As they rode under the canopy of Hirioth the knowledge deepened in Kor-Assh’s heart that the pollution of the earth was one of Asmodeus’ sharpest weapons. Man’s destiny was here, not in some distant heaven or hell, and it was his care of this world entrusted to him that would determine whether he inherited other glories beyond the fire of imagination, worlds without end—or forfeited his birthright to a ruin of his own making, the darkness of the last sterility.
All the long journey Kor-Assh and Tathea had not spoken of Ulfin, nor did they now. It was enough for Kor-Assh to be with her, and yet the nature of his feeling for her also troubled him. On the brink of joy, there was always the fear that reached from something beyond him, and the nagging whisper of betrayal, an older loyalty that sealed the core of his heart.
Tathea knew the forest so intimately she found food and shelter as if without thought, though he understood that it was long years of skill. He saw her face as she bent to find a root or to choose a fungus that was edible, and he knew she was remembering her years with Sadokhar when he was a child and a young man, before the days of the Eastern Shore. He longed to be able to comfort her, but there was no ease or hope to offer, and he was afraid to intrude into a loss in which he had no place. He watched her silently, and hurt with her.
The third night in the forest he awoke abruptly to find a man standing above him. He was tall, thin-shouldered, with a high-collared cloak which fell to his feet. His head was bare and in the radiance of the moon his hair shimmered around his face almost as if it were alight.
“Be still!” he said softly. “I mean you no ill, Lord Kor-Assh. The woman sleeps. It is you that I and my brethren would speak with. Come.” And without waiting he turned and trod on tiptoe across the leaves of the forest floor and out of the clearing and under the shadows again.
Kor-Assh sat up, but he did not go. He had no weapon except his knife, and he knew Tathea could not be injured by mortal man, perhaps not even by immortal, until her task was completed, but still he would not leave her alone.
He stood up, looking around him. She did not stir. She slept without moving at all, as if so deeply she were unaware of him, or the faint stirring of the forest. He could barely see her chest rise and fall. There was no flutter of eyelids, no hint of dreaming.
The man in the cloak was there again, beckoning, impatient now. “Come!” he said urgently. “She will sleep until you return, and beyond. The forest will not hurt her. You know that! Be quick, there is much to speak of.”
Slowly Kor-Assh obeyed him as if drawn, whether he willed it or not. He trod softly over the grass and earth into the shadow at the further side, then beyond and into a tiny pool of moonlight where four other men stood waiting, each dressed in a cloak of sombre hue.
“I am Karguish,” the first man said quietly. “First of the Silver Lords of Lantrif. The rest of us you do not need to know yet.”
Kor-Assh felt a shiver run through him of both fear and understanding.
“We hold the lost skills of sorcery,” Karguish went on, his voice delicate and subtle, caressing every syllable as if the words themselves held power. “In the beginning of the world our ancestors learned the secrets of creation and destruction, and we are masters of many of them still.”
It was true, Kor-Assh knew it without argument, and yet it was also wrong. He did not know how, but there was incompleteness in it.
They were all watching him, but again it was Karguish who spoke.
“You wonder why I seek you in the night to tell you this, which all Lantrif has learned in infancy and whispered one to another in the darkness, even though they scarcely believed it, and did not understand.” He did not wait for a reply. His voice was urgent, full of emotion. “Because the world lies in peril—not only men but beast and tree, even the stones of the ground. The last great war of all things is upon us. You know it even as we do.” He nodded slowly, his eyes invisible in the shadows. “Tathea knows it, but there is nothing she can do. She has wisdom, but she has no power.”
Kor-Assh drew in his breath to argue, but Karguish silenced him.
“You have seen her try!” he said impatiently. “Ardesir is gone to Shinabar and sends no word. Sardriel of the Lost Lands marches with armies somewhere at the ends of the earth—and achieves what? The barbarian harries the Empires of the west, the centre and the south, the borders crumble and no man bars the way.” He lifted a pale hand, silver rings gleaming in the light. “But it hardly matters. The war is of the mind, not the flesh. Battles of swords are incidental.”
“We fight him with both!” Kor-Assh contradicted. “Do you think we have not thought of that? Of course it is of the spirit, but man is a whole creature, of heart and mind, passion and intellect, body and spirit. Asmodeus will fight on every level. We must be prepared on them all, and armed.”
“I know!” Karguish said impatiently. “Your warriors are brave, and honourable—Tathea above all. But this war is not won by good intent, but by strategy, by skill, by unbending resolve, and, most importantly, by knowledge of the Great Enemy, and of the laws of creation!”
“Why do you tell me this?” Kor-Assh asked, the truth of it troubling him. And yet the core of it was missing, like a coldness. “Do you imagine we don’t know that?” he challenged. “That we haven’t talked for hours, days, discussed every method man or devil could use? He wants the whole world, the physical, life-giving beauty of it, just as we do, and he will attack us where we can see and where we cannot. But if you imagine it will be a struggle in the air between your mind and his, then I believe you have little concept of the magnitude of his power, or the width of it.” He stared at Karguish, who still stood motionless. “The whole world must be armed with faith, or at least with hope.” He took a shuddering breath. “And if hope is gone, then with love. Compassion is the last and best weapon against him.”
Karguish smiled, a patient, contemptuous curl of his lip.
“None of us denies your courage,” he said softly. “Or your good intent, only your wisdom. You have not the knowledge.”
“Then why have you come to me?” Kor-Assh demanded.
“Because we are the five Silver Lords,” Karguish answered. “And for the fullness of our power to save the earth we need the sixth.”
“Who is he?” Kor-Assh asked. His words were whispered, yet they seemed to fill the glade.
“He is not yet one of us,” Karguish said. “We must choose him, covenant with him and teach him the arts of the mind beyond ordinary men to dream. You can be he. Then the war can begin in earnest. We need wait no longer, helpless, dancing on Asmodeus’ will!” Now his voice vibrated with power. “We can begin the real defence of life, all precious, tender and beautiful life, both man and beast. Virtue is a fine defence from day to day, but we need more than a shield, Kor-Assh, we need a sword to attack! And that blade is knowledge. Then as fast as evil strikes, we can summon the forces of creation to defend. We can dare the stars and stand face to face with the Father of Lies, and put him to flight for ever.”
He leaned forward, his long face vivid, eyes burning silver-bright. “Have you the courage to accept your destiny, Kor-Assh? Will you be our leader, take up the weapons of power which can shake even Erebus, and drive terror and pain and death from the world and give it back again, whole, into the hands of life?”
“Life?” Kor-Assh said the word slowly, very carefully, needing to be sure. His answer must stand for eternity.
“Life!” Karguish repeated. “Joyous, wonderful, everlasting life! You can do that! There is only one question ... will you?”
One of the other Silver Lords pushed back the cloak, showing a high b
row and scarred cheek. “Dare you?” he murmured. “Asmodeus is terrible! He desires the death of all things, to ruin the earth, to pollute the stars beyond the furthest edge of imagination. Have you courage to think of that, and to stand with us?”
“Do you love the world enough?” a third asked, his voice lifting.
“We will stand with you, back you, but the glory will be yours,” the fourth one said.
Only one remained silent.
“Give it back from destruction into life?” Karguish repeated. He held out his hand.
Still Kor-Assh hesitated. Was this after all the great purpose of his life? Was this the tiny whisper within him that held him from giving himself to Tathea? Not a memory of love at all, but of a higher calling?
“Life!” Karguish said for the fourth time.
Then Kor-Assh knew the word that was missing. It was like a clarion call, clear as a trumpet across the sky.
“There is no life without God,” he answered, looking at Karguish. “I am His servant, or I am nothing. You fight with the wrong weapons. I am not of you. Your enemy is my enemy, but your god is not mine. Walk the road of your knowledge, if you must. I walk the road of faith.”
Karguish stepped back. “You walk the road of blindness!” he snarled. “You walk the road of defeat! You could have had the love of all men for eternity! You have cast it aside like a thing of no worth.” His voice shook with rage and contempt. “You have trampled the crown of ages as if it were paper and denied your destiny.”
For an instant Kor-Assh was swept with doubt. Could it be true?
Karguish turned back to him, his eyes wide, waiting.
Kor-Assh thought of Tathea, of all the things Karguish had not said, of mercy and patience, of trust in the love of God. “Go in peace,” he said aloud. “We fight our own way.”