by Trish Mercer
When Perrin and Guide Gleace came out to the back porch, it was to hear laughter.
“So then Shem glares at me, points his fork and says, ‘Perrin, do something, or I will!’” Deck told Mrs. Gleace.
She laughed. “I would’ve loved to have seen his face when you kissed Jaytsy in front of everyone, and in the middle of dinner!”
“He cried when they told him they were getting married,” Peto said. “Father’s been calling him Crybaby ever since.”
“Well, not quite. Not until he found out I was expecting,” Jaytsy clarified. “The first time he put his hand on my belly and felt the baby moving, I thought Deck was going to have to remove him from the room to calm him down.”
Perrin and the guide only smiled at the laughter.
Mrs. Gleace saw the seriousness in her husband’s eyes and asked, her tone heavy with meaning, “Everything go well, dearest?”
“Of course.” He put a hand on Perrin’s shoulder, and Mahrree noticed some kind of parchment was in his other. “Perrin has agreed to go on a little hike with me in a few weeks when calving is finished. We’ll make sure it’s also well after Jaytsy is finished too,” he nodded to her.
“A hike?” Mahrree asked.
“Yes, to see a ruin, Mahrree,” Perrin said with a hint of a smile.
She sat up taller on the steps of the back porch. “Ruins! Oh, may I go as well?”
Guide Gleace chuckled. “Another time, I promise. And to all of them. But this time I will take only Perrin, Shem, and . . .” he turned to Peto. He studied him for a moment before saying, “You. Peto, you are to come as well.”
It wasn’t a request, but a statement of fact.
“Me? All right,” Peto said a little unsure, but not about to argue with the guide. At least not since Mahrree pulled him aside in the kitchen and threatened his very life if he didn’t start acting more respectful toward the Gleaces. “Why?”
“Because it’s been known to us since we first came here, but this will be new to you,” he sighed before he continued. “Salem will remain a peaceful place until the end of the Test. But before the Last Day, we will see upheavals and turmoil that no one here has ever experienced.”
Mahrree shifted worriedly. “But that may not be for many more years, right? Many more lifetimes? I mean, I’ve always pictured the Last Day to happen hundreds of years from now . . .” her voice trailed off as she saw the earnestness in Mrs. Gleace’s face.
She shifted her gaze to her husband.
Mahrree did so as well.
“We always like to believe we have more time than we do,” Gleace said. “All those little things we’ll do later. But later comes far more quickly than we want to admit. Mahrree, I understand you love old things. Here, take a look at this.” He held up the parchment, pulled a lantern off the nail where it hung by the back door, and placed it on the floorboards so the family could see the document.
They were silent as they read the words.
Deck was the first one to look up. “Perrin, you’re the one from the highest ranks, aren’t you?” He leaned back a little as if his father-in-law were contagious.
Jaytsy looked at her father in surprise, too.
Peto’s hand went up to his chest, until he forced it down again.
The only one not looking up was Mahrree. Her finger traced the words again and again, and Perrin watched her intently.
When she finally pulled her eyes away from it, she was smiling. “My dream of nineteen years is beginning to be fulfilled today. Just days ago I knew it never could be. But Salem is a place of miracles. You were always meant to be . . . ?” She looked at Guide Gleace for confirmation.
He smiled at her. “Salem’s General.”
No one noticed that Peto had stopped breathing.
Mahrree grinned. “Salem’s General! You’re to be the general for a side that, until days ago, you never knew existed.”
Peto leaned against the railing and buried his head in his hands.
Mahrree, surprised at his strange reaction, gently touched his shoulder. “Peto?”
He quickly shook his head, glanced up at her with a reassuring smile, then put his head down again. “General Shin!” he whispered.
Jaytsy looked at the parchment again, then at her parents. “Nineteen years? General? All right, I know I missed something here.”
Perrin still watched his wife. “Sometimes it takes years to understand how something’s supposed to happen. Jaytsy, Deck, Peto—it’s not time for you to know everything, but you can know this: your mother knew the night we became engaged that she’d be living in a wooden house surrounded by mountains—”
Her children gaped at Mahrree, but she beamed at her husband.
“—And when I was eighteen and traveling to Edge to spend the season with the Densals, I knew that I would someday become a general. Neither of us could have imagined those dreams would come true here. But obviously the Creator has a far greater imagination than either of us.”
“Ah, well said!” declared the guide. “Sometimes we wish we knew the end from the beginning, but that would take all the joy and mystery out of life, wouldn’t it? I thank the Creator He isn’t limited by our feeble imaginations.”
“I’m guessing,” Jaytsy said, shaking her head in a daze about what she was hearing of her parents, “that we don’t need to worry about any Dinners?”
“No, I won’t be that kind of general, Jayts. I only create plans for securing Salem. General is just the title so everyone I enlist to help knows I’m in charge.”
Mahrree squirmed in anticipation. “Why ruins, Guide? What’s the significance?”
The guide sat down on a stump on the porch.
Mahrree marveled briefly that the Creator’s Chairman of Salem had old stumps for stools on his back porch, just like she had in Edge.
“I’m not entirely sure, Mahrree, to tell you the truth. But I have a good idea. I only know that I am to go there in a few weeks with those that the Creator has sent me.” He gestured to Perrin and Peto. “The ruin was a temple created many civilizations ago. From our best guess, over a thousand years ago, but maybe two or even three thousand—”
Mahrree gasped at the numbers.
Concerned about her breathing, Gleace paused.
Perrin patted her on the shoulder. “She’ll be doing that a lot,” he told the guide. “Just keep going.”
Gleace kept a watchful eye on Mahrree who was fairly panting. “Many, many years ago this great stone temple, now only a foundation with broken walls that are overgrown with vines, was the site of the last gathering of the Creator’s people. The images carved there suggest that they were being chased down by their enemy, and they took refuge at the temple. Then, some kind of deliverance was sent. The last image is of people holding up their hands in what seems to be joy. There are many stones with markings that we guess are other languages and writing systems, but we’ve never been able to understand them. However, it seems that the temple ruins may have been used as a refuge for others’ Last Days a few times since then.”
“This has . . .” Mahrree gasped and Perrin patted her back, “all happened before?”
“Many times, with many civilizations on this sphere,” Gleace told her, his brow furrowed in worry. “The Creator establishes patterns and follows them. Are you going to be all right? Can I get you something?”
She shook her head vigorously, and rolled her hand to tell him to keep going.
“If I were to guess,” he continued, still keeping the gasping Mahrree in his view, “I would assume that is where our descendants would gather as well at the end of their Test. It would make sense He’d send us there as well.”
“How far is that ruin?” Peto asked, since Mahrree wasn’t able to.
“Not too far,” Gleace bobbed his head. “About nine miles from here in the southwest is a canyon. That lasts about a mile, then opens into a vast valley we have never allowed to be settled. The few times people have gone there and dug in the ground they�
��ve found steel arrow heads and rusting balls of iron. Larger iron balls may have smashed down the remaining walls a few civilizations ago.”
“Iron balls?” Perrin rubbed his chin in thought. “Knocking down walls? They must have been propelled in some way?”
Gleace shifted on his stump, as if uncomfortable. “We have a theory about that,” he said cagily. “We’ll try to find a few for you. Most have been buried, by time and by those who find them. Anyway,” he said, seemingly eager to shift the subject again, “at the end of that valley is a mountain, but the top of it is flat, like an immense table. The front of it is a sheer cliff overlooking the valley, but we’ve cut a trail along the side full of switchbacks that’s much easier to scale. The trail itself is less than a mile up to the site of the ruined temple. Behind that ruin on top of the mountain is a large plain that sinks down into a hidden valley, sheltered by mountain peaks. It’s almost as if the mountain in the middle had the top of it cleanly sliced off to create an enormous flat camping area. The temple ruin is near the front of it, overlooking the cliff and the valley.”
“That’s quite a journey,” Mahrree whispered, her breathing calming down enough to let her speak.
“Ah, it’s not that bad,” Peto smiled. “With horses we could be there and back in just two days. Maybe even do a little fishing.”
“I wasn’t thinking about your trip,” Mahrree told him. “I was thinking about families, children, expecting women, and the elderly trying to reach safety when the army of Idumea is on their heels.”
“Oh,” Peto whispered.
Mrs. Gleace nodded. “Now it sounds a bit harder, doesn’t it?”
Deck put his arm around Jaytsy.
“Our hope is,” Guide Gleace continued, “that with sufficient preparation and warning, the people of Salem won’t be running frantically. They’ll be able to move in a manner carefully planned so that no one’s left behind or in a panic.” He shifted his gaze to Perrin.
So did Mahrree. “Sounds like his kind of work. And it sounds like you’ve found your purpose as well,” she said to her husband.
“Why not just move people there now?” Peto asked. “If you know the end’s coming, go sit at the end and wait for it.”
Gleace chuckled. “I love the optimism of youth. First, my dear boy, there isn’t enough room for one-hundred-twenty-thousand people to sit and wait for something that may not happen for generations. Second, we can’t live our lives in fear of some distant unknown terror. We have to live each day now, enjoy the now, rejoice in the now. Do you really want to sit at a ruin until you’re an old man fretting and wringing your hands, or do you want to go out and find a beautiful young woman, and see what the Creator has in mind for you next?”
“Beautiful young woman, Guide! Show me where they are.”
The entire family gawked at Peto.
He slapped his hand over his mouth.
“What happened to, ‘I’m never getting married here?’” Jaytsy reminded him.
Deck snorted.
Peto shook his head. “I don’t know why I keep saying such things. I really don’t.”
Gleace laughed. “Finding beautiful young women is your job, Peto. I quit doing that kind of work fifty-three years ago. But I promise you, at your new congregation are many lovely girls. I was visiting there just last season. I go to every congregation. Takes me two years to make the rounds, and you can believe me: she’s out there—you’ll find her.”
---
At the end of that long, exhausting, incredible day, Peto wearily tromped into his bedroom which he hadn’t fully inspected. Earlier, when he’d found the pocketknife, and heard that food was being delivered, he’d headed downstairs, not too concerned with where he’d sleep that night.
But now he smiled at his room—about the same size as in Edge—and decided he should see what the other drawers in his dresser contained. He experimentally opened a drawer and peered in at the tidy stacks of tunics.
The crinkling in his shirt pocket reminded him of what had been hiding there all day.
He pulled out the thick parchment envelope, gently removed the document, and smoothed it on his new bed. When he read the words about the greatest general that the world would ever see, his chest burned in sublime anticipation.
“This is it, isn’t it, Grandfather? Here in Salem? We got him here!”
Then, feeling the dishonesty of his statement, and realizing that Salem likely wasn’t a place for exaggeration, or for cynicism—
Salem was going to take a lot of getting used to, he sighed to himself.
Anyway, realizing that he needed to be more accurate, or Salem would be running him back to Edge, he said, “This is where he’s supposed to be that greatest general, right Grandfather? That’s what you were trying to tell me, back on the kickball field in Edge?”
His dark bedroom didn’t answer him anything, initially, but in the distance he heard a low rumble, as if the cosmos were sending him an answer via thunder. The rumble swelled ominously, impressively, until Peto was forced to admit it was only one of the Zenos’s wagons leaving their work on the Briters’ house for the night.
Still, it was a good effect, and he took it.
Grinning, Peto slid the document back into the envelope, and was about to put it back into his pocket for safe keeping when he stopped.
Under the tunics was as good as spot as any, Peto decided, and he shut the drawer.
Because he was home.
---
In a dark office of an unlit building sat one man.
Around Nicko Mal were strewn nineteen years of notes, questions, findings, conclusions, and drafts of the greatest study never published, “Human Nature.” The room looked as if the author had taken the crates of meticulously written pages and hurled them in an explosive fit of rage.
Which, in fact, he had done.
The old man now sat calmer, primarily because he was exhausted, and stared at years of wasted effort littering his study like an untidy blizzard.
It was no longer an experiment. It was personal, oh so very personal. It had been ever since the Shins deliberately defied him by taking that stolen caravan to Edge—
No, no, Mal considered. No, it started much earlier than that. It began with a nosy little woman who dared to suggest his elevated thinking and high-minded measures were no better than the selfish and despicable kings he deposed. It started with her.
He wondered what else there was to do. How does one take revenge on those who no longer ‘officially’ exist? They abandoned him, his project, and his world without a thought for anyone else but themselves.
He kicked aside some of the papers scattered around the floor until he saw the hastily written note that had arrived by messenger not long ago. He bent over, retrieved it, and tried to smooth the crumpled page he had balled up earlier that day.
There was a beginning. A rather impressive beginning at that, he was loath to admit. He stood up, went to his desk shuffling through several inches of parchment, and pulled out a quill and ink. Then he began to write one idea, then another, and another as quickly as they flowed into this mind.
He would not let them destroy his greatest work. There was one more reaction that still could be observed, and it was going to be the most extraordinary one ever.
It just might even change the world.
Chapter 17—“Not even one trumpet.”