by Carol Berg
Vroon had told me that most of the newcomers had a difficult time learning how to grow their fastnesses, or even how to get in or out of them, much less where and how to harvest the tappa roots. He and his companions felt bad about it, but didn’t know how to remedy the problem. The idea of teaching the poor souls had never occurred to them. At least Tom had learned about tappa.
The fellow smiled, then. “Listen.” Returning the pipe to his lips and propping it up with his handless wrist, he danced his five fingers over the holes.
I was not a judge of music. Though my mother valued it, and I was told she played the flute reasonably well, four years of listening to her had not made up for twelve years’ lack. But Tom’s playing was something else again. The song rambled slowly and mournfully for a while, up and down the scales as if looking for just the right note. There it was, and the next, not the one you might expect, but a different note that took you around an unsuspected corner, and before I knew it, I was somewhere else altogether…
They’re so green… the fair hills of my land. The lake so clear, imaging the bowl of the sky. Or is it the sky what is the deeps of the lake? The sun is blessed hot. Its firm hand feels so fine beating down on my shoulders, and the heather smell floats on the soft air, boiled up from the ground by the sun, Dora says. The sheep are safe, but I’ve got to get back. Pap’ll beat me for leaving the sheepcrook behind. He’s a firmer hand than even the sun. But I’m free with my pipes, and running. Up and across the hills just like the music… faster and faster, then down, down into the cool valley. Pap says the sheep smell tells of the year’s good fortune…
“You see?”
The music had stopped, taking the vision with it. I had. never felt so light, so… joyful. Now, my bodyguard’s bulk close to my elbow seemed to be the only thing that kept me from toppling over.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Paulo. Whispering.
I shook the fragments of the image from my head. “I’m fine.” I almost shivered as I wriggled the fingers of my left hand, reassuring myself that fingers and hand were all there. From the puzzled looks, I gathered that no one else had seen what I’d seen.
Tom smiled at me crookedly. “How could I leave? I never made such music in the hills, and it brings the hills to my heart so’s I don’t sorrow for ‘em too fierce. And these good folk here” - he waved his stump at Vroon and Zanore and the other Singlars - “they don’t make jest of a man if ’e’s a broken one like me. They’re all broken, too. I belong here.”
Someone had dropped a cloak about my shoulders. I hooked the clasp at my throat. “Your music is very nice. Stay as long as you like in the Bounded. Come and tell me if you decide you want to go home.” I hurried out.
From the outside, Tom’s tower was a squat, ugly place, like a mud wasp’s nest attached to a grimy windowsill. I told Vroon I wanted Tom taken care of, taught how to live properly in the Bounded, and the same for all the others that he and Ob and Zanore had brought here. If they wanted to return to their homes, Vroon should take them back through the moon-door.
Then, we headed back for the Blue Tower. I needed to sleep.
As I had expected, they were waiting for me outside the Blue Tower… the Singlars… filling the commard so that I had to pass through them to get inside. They murmured reverently and bent their knees as I passed. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of it.
CHAPTER 19
The condition of the Singlars nagged at me. I didn’t understand how the storerooms at the Blue Tower had come to be filled with ham, duck sausage, oranges, and silk, while the Singlars had nothing but tappa, mud, and rock. The answer must exist in the garden. I didn’t trust the Source to tell me anything useful, so I decided to do some investigating, putting the question to the Source only if I couldn’t discover the answer on my own.
“I need to understand about the light,” I said one day, as Paulo and I poked around the base of the cliffs near the waterfall and the amethyst cave. “What makes a light so bright that plants can grow inside this place?” And it was only here. No Singlar I’d spoken to, even among those who had traveled widest, knew of anything like this garden elsewhere in the Bounded.
The pale yellow boulders were jumbled and broken around the waterfall and the grotto, the face of the rock less sheer than the rest of the garden perimeter. Innumerable dirt paths squeezed past the rocks, promising to take you higher, only to taper into nothing or end abruptly at a cliff. I climbed back down from the current dead end.
“This whole world is fair odd. I could believe most anything.” Paulo vanished behind a boulder twice my height, then emerged above it, craning his neck upward and snaking his head. “We might try this way. Looks rugged, though.”
I squeezed between the boulder and the cliff, and scrambled up the rocks to stand beside him. It wasn’t exactly a path. More like a flight of granite steps, sized for legs three times the length of mine, with a number of stomach-curdling gaps filled by loose avalanche debris. We started up. Our path held close enough to the falls to keep the rocks treacherously damp.
A quarter of the way to the top of the falls, Paulo sat heavily on a wide boulder. His exaggerated groan bounced off the rocks as he sprawled on his back and flung his arms wide. “Demonfire, but I’m done already. I’ll just wait here for you to scrape me up on your way down.”
No surprise. The way kept getting steeper. Paulo’s stamina was much improved in the last week, but his hands were still bandaged and weak. I’d already had to haul myself over a few of the slabs.
“If I’m passing by too fast on the way down, you might need to stick out your hand and catch me,” I said, peering up into the glare.
By the time I reached the top of the falls, I was climbing rather than walking or scrambling. The effort required all my limbs and all my concentration. And the heat had become murderous. Only the spray from the falls and the eddying air currents set in motion by the massive movement of water kept me from melting into a heap.
Eventually, the steep cleft in the rock led me over the edge of the cliff. I rested for a while on a gentle slope of barren rock that formed both the cliff top and the riverbank, funneling the water over the edge. Before me lay the gut-heaving drop to the colorful blot of the garden. I couldn’t see the roof or sky or whatever it was existed above this odd landscape. Great billows of steam hung over the river as it thundered over the edge of the cliff, causing a hazy glare that obscured the view. The rock underneath me was hot to the touch.
Not much farther. What I was searching for was nearby. My bones told me. My senses and instincts insisted. After the brief rest, I blotted my damp face one more time on my shirt and climbed up and away from the cliff’s side to see what lay beyond the rocky slope. When I reached the summit, my heart almost stopped.
The ridge sloped sharply downward and flattened into a shimmering plain, the shore of an ocean of fire… a sea of sunlight… a rippling expanse of gold that stretched as far as I could see into the uncertain reaches of this strange place. From this gleaming ocean, pillars of shifting light rose into the heights, some gold, some blue-white, some red-orange, ever growing and dissipating like the watery storms and spouts sailors witnessed on mundane oceans. The hazy brilliance threatened to blind me; the heat came near blistering my skin. To stay here long would leave me no strength to go down again.
This marvel, like the moon-door and the garden and the heaving Edge, was no enchantment, but the natural substance of the Bounded. Looking on it left the same warm, satisfied feeling in my belly as a good meal and good wine.
I was not tempted to touch the substance of the sea itself. To stand even so near as I was to the scalding water… fire… whatever it was… was debilitating enough. Yet neither could I retreat. For the great crescent of shoreline that swept alongside the river, where it flowed out of the sea and across the plain to cool and plummet over the edge of the cliff, was not sand, but shingle, great swathes of fist-sized golden rocks abandoned by the sea and the river.
&n
bsp; The rocks were the key to life in the Bounded. The sea and the rocks would brighten and fade with the rhythm of the suns that warmed more familiar worlds. I could not explain it any more than I could explain the fickle weather of the Bounded or the green stars or the expanding Edge. I just understood it. If you waited until the rocks began to fade of an evening, you could gather and carry them in your hand or a bag or a cart. If you set them in a pit of sand in a tower, they would glow and nourish a small garden with healthy light.
Light, food, a world… I could make that happen.
Sharing the sunrocks and the plants that grew in the garden became my highest priority. If I could accomplish what I intended, every Singlar would be able to use the sunrocks to grow a little garden in the heart of his or her fastness, every one of them slightly different. Names continued to be something special that the Singlars had to get directly from me. I used names to recognize those who changed things for the better and obeyed my laws. But although we made a great ceremony of it - that part was Roxanne’s idea - everyone received the rocks and the plants.
The first supply of sunrocks went to the Rift Cluster. I carried them there myself, excited to tell the bent philosopher of the new things I had seen. So much had happened since I’d sat in his fastness. Weeks had passed. As we traveled through the rain and gloom, I chafed at how Avero’s crude wheeled sledge slowed our progress. When we reached the rift, I left the others behind and hurried down into the dreary cluster. A gaunt young woman with a stunted arm stepped forward in the muddy narrows to greet us. My excitement withered.
“Your leader,” I said, as the cold rain beat down on my head, “the tall Singlar with the bent shoulder… who sings… ”
“To our loss and sorrow, our leader is unbounded, good traveler,” said the woman. “Six wakings before this.”
“Was it a beast… or did he drown…?” But I knew better.
“He weakened greatly in the cold just past,” said the woman, her eyes bright in the torchlight. “But happy was he always, teaching us to endure. He told us that he, a humble Singlar, had supped with the Bounded King, who was traveling his realm in disguise! Is that not a wonder? We hold his thoughts dear, and they warm us more than flame.”
A wonder? I could not answer the woman. Could not look at her. All the bright pleasure of my discovery… my plan… dulled and fell into ash. Why had I not thought to send these people help in the past weeks? Selfish, stupid fool. Paulo had warned me. Too caught up in playing king. In playing god.
The woman stood waiting for me to make sense of the world.
“Grieved… sorrowed… greatly sorrowed am I to hear this,” I said. “I had hoped to give him - Well, we’ve brought things to help you. My companions will show you.”
The woman summoned the rest of the rift dwellers who waited shyly beside their towers in the cold rain. Vroon opened the stone caskets and distributed the sun-rocks, teaching the Singlars how to use them to warm their towers and nurture the tappa roots and other plants Zanore pulled out of our wheeled sledge. I stood in the rain contemplating pride and thoughtlessness and how little difference sorrow or shame makes once a deed is done.
When the lesson was finished, I asked the Singlars to stay one moment before returning to their fastnesses. “Though I neither sought nor wanted the office, and though I’ve neither experience nor wisdom to commend me, it seems I am your king. To your leader” - I nodded to the woman - “I give the name Vanaya, which means wise follower, for I see that she follows in the footsteps of a great leader, her own kind spirit learning from his wisdom and grace. To the one who is gone, I grant the name Daerli, which means farseer in the language of my people. This name will be held in the highest respect in the Bounded forevermore, and his life will serve an example and reminder for us all.”
A reminder for me.
Any surmise that my presence in the Bounded had stopped the firestorms was quickly dispelled. Whatever the cause of the previous cessation, it was done with, for at about the same time I discovered the sunrocks, the storms took up with a virulence and regularity the Singlars had never before experienced. Every two or three days the world fell apart with a bolt of white brilliance, and I retreated into the fastness of myself so I could put it back together again. Paulo said the storms stopped quickly once I got to work, though I seemed to experience their entirety. By the time the fires burned themselves out and I slipped into insensibility, I had long lost all sense of time.
Once I came to expect them, I caught most of the storms early on, so the Bounded suffered little injury or damage. When a particularly violent storm struck one night while I was sleeping, though, it was devastating-fifty towers lost in the Tower City alone, and many more in the smaller clusters throughout the land. Being waked so suddenly made it almost impossible for me to get control. Paulo admitted that I was screaming worse than when I had nightmares at Verdillon by the time I’d stopped the storm. Almost an entire cycle of the light passed before I woke up again.
From that day forward, I posted a guard outside my door whose sole function was to wake me in case of a firestorm. The Singlars considered it the highest honor I could do them, so I kept the position active even after I’d come to sense the storms’ birth in my sleep, like any trained warrior who learns to feel his enemy steal through his dreams. Or maybe I never really slept any more.
Though the storms terrified her beyond any sorcery or dungeon, Roxanne suggested that I should let some of the storms have their way and maybe they would stop. Paulo urged me to leave the Bounded until they subsided again. I refused both suggestions. Now that the Singlars had sunrocks and gardens, sledges and kilns, I could not allow the destruction, not to mention the loss of life. And, as storms had occurred even before I came to the Bounded, we had no reason to believe they would stop if I left. Besides, I wanted my answers from the Source, and I wanted to leave the Singlars able to take care of themselves so I wouldn’t feel so responsible.
Four or five weeks after the storms had taken up again, a violent firestorm struck on the eve of a long-planned journey to a remote tower cluster. I was insensible for half a day after it. Paulo suggested postponing the trip so I could rest, but I wouldn’t hear of it. We were delivering sunrocks.
We left the Tower City just after the lights came up and were soon walking through sparsely settled countryside. The weather was wild, dense clouds of purple and black surging and boiling across the sky. The wind was blowing a gale, and sleet threatened to remove our skin or at least any prominent features we left exposed.
During our first rest stop, I huddled into the lee of a rock while Paulo, Vroon, and the others ate. Even after the rest period had come and gone, I couldn’t seem to muster the will to move on. My limbs felt like lead.
“They’re eating you up, aren’t they?” Paulo lowered himself to the frozen mud beside me. I hadn’t even heard him coming.
“What do you mean?”
He offered me a piece of sweet tappa bread. I shook my head and burrowed deeper in my cloak as a gust of wind swirled around the rocks.
“That’s what I mean. You haven’t eaten three mouthfuls of anything since the storm yesterday, and I’ll wager I could take you down in three moves as I’ve not been able to do since you were a nub. The princess could take you down with her tongue.”
“I’m just tired. I’ll recover.”
“Not while the storms keep up.”
“I’ll figure out something. It’s only another few weeks till we can leave this cursed place.”
“You won’t last that long. And if some of these oddments that still believe the Guardian was their friend find out you can’t think straight for half a day after a storm, they might come up with some way to do us in.”
We’d had some trouble with some of the old maintainers trying to force Singlars back into their fastnesses, beating them and telling them I was destroying the Source. Most Singlars were still easily intimidated.
“I can’t leave now.”
“Then go
back to the Source. Try what it said would help you.”
“Drink from the spring? Not likely. I don’t want to take anything from the Source. You said yourself that you didn’t trust it.”
“I don’t. But I don’t want you dead neither. I want to go back where they make jack and real biscuits, and where I can plant my backside on a piece of horseflesh. If you’re going to be dead, then you might as well be dead from trying to stay alive.”
I didn’t answer him then. I just got to my feet and said, “I’ll be all right. Let’s get moving.”
Three days later another storm struck, worse than the last. Another sevenlight, three more storms, and I couldn’t go up the stairs in the Blue Tower without stopping every third step to rest. I’d lost so much weight, my breeches wouldn’t stay up. I felt as scrawny as Zanore, but Zanore could have tied me in a knot with one hand. My mouth tasted like ash, as if everything inside me had burned up. Paulo kept looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking.
I went to the Source while everyone was asleep. I didn’t take Paulo with me, didn’t tell him or anyone where I was going. I didn’t want anyone seeing how hard it was for me to get up the stairs.
The lamps were down in the tower, so it was night in the garden. But it wasn’t completely dark. Lamps just like the ones in the tower hung on iron posts, scattered throughout the plants and trees, casting a soft yellow glow on the path. The air felt chilly, but that was no surprise. I couldn’t seem to get warm any more.
“Greetings, my king.” The voice washed over and through me when I walked into the cave and dipped my hand in the water. “Too long it’s been since you’ve come here.”
I didn’t waste time. “What did you mean when you said the water from the spring could sustain me through my trials?”
“Just that, my king. The water is of you, and thus will strengthen and nourish you.”