by Lee Duigon
Obst smiled at him. “It has not been given to me to go up to the top, my friends. My Lord wishes me to remain here. Why, I don’t know.
“The writing on the Stone says that King Ozias went up and came back down, marking his route as he returned. That’s how we know we can trust his signs. The way is safe and sure. You won’t need me to get up there.”
“But we do need you!” Ellayne said. “We can’t just leave you here. You might die. Someone has to take care of you.”
“Ellayne, Ellayne—I’m a very old man. Had I stayed where I was when you met me, I wouldn’t have lived much longer. Indeed, I’m amazed I had the strength to come this far.
“Listen to me, children. This is as far as I can go, but I don’t think I’ll die for some days yet. There’s good water nearby and food that I can gather with very little effort. I doubt I’ll die before you ring the bell. And if I die hearing it, I’ll be a happy man.”
“Happy that the world is going to come to an end?” Ellayne cried.
“No. Happy knowing that I’ve served the Most High Lord and been obedient to the end of my days. He wishes me to remain here, and I’ll be obedient in that.
“But you must be obedient, too. You must go to the top and ring the bell. That’s what He wants you to do. As for me, I belong to Him, and He can have me.”
“But if you die—”
“Jack, everybody dies. There’s no avoiding it. But it’s monstrous that the Temple no longer teaches what all the Scriptures say: that we who belong to God belong to Him forever.”
Jack looked at Ellayne, and she looked back. They’d never heard anything like that before.
“In the end,” Obst said, “the only wisdom we have is to obey.”
He seemed comfortable enough that night. The snares had all caught game during the day: mountain squirrels, a fine rock hen, and a young marmot. Obst was able to instruct the children in how to clean and prepare it all to serve as food for several days.
“The worst thing you’ll have to deal with is the cold,” he told them, “especially once you’re up among the clouds. So be sure to take the wolf pelts with you! You’ll have a marked path to follow, and better than that, the Lord’s protection. You shouldn’t have to spend but one night on the way up, and one more on your way down. Load Ham up with plenty of firewood. Ellayne has gotten quite good at getting a fire started. You’ll be all right.”
They had the marmot for their supper, and Obst went right to sleep afterward. He still looked pale, but at least his forehead wasn’t hot anymore.
“I don’t know how I’ll be able to get to sleep tonight,” Ellayne said.
“You heard what he said: we’re only two days from the top,” Jack said. “We can’t stop here. Maybe if we hurry, Obst’ll still be alive when we get back. Maybe we can save him.”
“If there’s anything to come back to,” Ellayne said. “You know he thinks God’s going to end the whole world this time. Remember the Children of Geb. At least God gave them stepping stones. What kind of stepping stones will we have?”
Jack frowned. “We don’t know anything,” he said. “It’d take us years just to learn how to read the Old Books, and the rest of our lives to understand them. We can’t wait that long.”
“No, I guess we can’t.”
Obst sat up to see them off the next morning. Somehow they’d slept. He used a stick to draw on the ground the signs they should look for on the way, carved into stone. They were simple enough to remember.
“Do you feel any better?” Ellayne asked.
“I feel much better, knowing that you’re on your way,” Obst said. “I’ll probably sleep most of the day. I think I may have eaten too much last night.”
It was shaping up to be a fine, sunny day. They were already higher than many of Bell Mountain’s consorts, and no longer had to wait for the sun to rise above them. Down on the plains, it would still be dark.
“Go now,” Obst said. “You know the way to the next marker. Follow the path. Go!”
They went, leaving him sitting in the shelter.
CHAPTER 35
An Assassin’s Conscience
While Obst and the children rested by King Ozias’ Stone, Martis forced his way up the mountain through the dense woods and marveled that an old man and two children had come so far on foot.
After the plains, he found the shade and the confinement oppressive; but at least this country was no place for gigantic killer birds. Any animal bigger than a wildcat would have a hard time making its way through the dense growth. Then again, he thought, something must have made these paths I’m using.
He found the camp where the Abnaks killed the trappers, and the fresh graves that Obst had helped dig. It was a dreary place, and he would have to stop there for the night, which was almost upon him. There was plenty of firewood lying about, and someone had erected a lean-to after the Abnaks destroyed the trappers’ cabin.
When night descended on those hills, a man who had no fire might as well be blind. Martis sat close to his fire, with Dulayl, hobbled and tethered to a log, to keep him company. He spoke to the horse in the Waal Kota dialect, in case there were Heathen scouts in the woods listening.
“Do you know, Dulayl, there are many people in Obann who wouldn’t dream of walking through a graveyard at night? Let alone sleeping by one! Unlike the wise Waal Kota, they’re afraid of ghosts. And we of the Temple have done nothing to disabuse them of it.
“Why do you suppose that is, my friend? We could surely teach them that there’s nothing in the Scripture to warrant a belief in ghosts: indeed, there are many verses that say that under no circumstances are the dead permitted to return. And yet we let them go right on being afraid of ghosts because it has nothing to do with our higher purpose.
“And what is that purpose? I’m afraid I don’t know anymore!”
He laughed aloud—and at once fell silent again because the echo of his laugh among the trees was hideous.
I am coming unraveled, he thought. Giant birds and missing books, they’ve undone me.
He wondered if the little girl was still alive, Jandra, with her missing book. She wasn’t even old enough to read a book. Out of her head, she must have been repeating something she’d heard her father say. Maybe her father had some Scripture memorized. But Martis couldn’t think of any verses that matched Jandra’s words.
Well, if a bird didn’t get her, she’d die of exposure or starvation.
As Martis slowly grew drowsy, his thoughts reverted to the nearby graves. They held the bodies of five men who’d been killed, who’d probably gone to their deaths in terror and astonishment. As the superstitious had it, ghosts were people who couldn’t believe they were dead.
Martis didn’t believe in ghosts, for the excellent reason that he didn’t believe in any kind of life after death at all. Better to be the assassin than the victim, he always said. And so the killings he’d done over the years had never troubled him—until now.
“We humor the people with a belief in an afterlife,” Lord Reesh often said. “It gives them something to hope for—indeed, for some of them, poor brutes, the only thing they can hope for. Let them think they’ll go on to some ethereal existence as a happy spirit. You can wring that much out of the Scriptures, if you try.
“But we must never so humor ourselves, my boy. Remember that it’s better to live and die a servant of the Temple than a slave or an impoverished peasant. Live as long and as well as possible. That’s all a man can ask.”
Such teachings had always struck Martis as eminently wise, and for most of his life he’d lived by them. But tonight some perverse spirit called up in his mind the faces and the voices of his victims, and reminded him that he had many more than five to answer for.
No! Not to answer for, he argued wearily with himself. I am, and they are not. That’s all the answer I need.
In this frame of mind he nodded off to sleep before he could even lie down. As in a fever dream, he tried to count the persons he’d
killed in the service of Lord Reesh. By poison, by a dagger in the dark, by the garrote and by drowning, by the clever arrangement of an accident on the city streets and by the suborning of false witnesses in a capital trial—he could count the methods, but every time he came close to tallying up the bodies, he would lose count and have to start again.
Dulayl screamed; and there is nothing to wake a man like the scream of a horse in mortal terror.
Half in a daze, Martis dove for the reins and caught them. Dulayl’s struggles to escape jarred him to full wakefulness. He hung on to the leather straps for dear life and tried to get to his feet.
A low, thunderous growl responded to the horse’s screams.
There was still some life in the campfire, and by its light Martis saw what at first he thought was a bear pawing at the graves. But it was not a bear.
Dark and huge and lumpy as a bear, but with a small head and long, powerful forelegs and a tail that was like a pillar braced against the ground, the beast interrupted its digging to glare at him with small, cold eyes like little red lanterns and to growl at the horse. It had come for the dead, to pry them from their graves. And it shot into Martis’ dream-befuddled mind that when the beast opened the graves, then he would have an exact count of his victims. They were all down there in the ground, waiting to be dug up, waiting to confront him.
The beast rose up on its hind legs, propped up by its tail, and then dropped onto all fours again.
Martis didn’t try to mount his panicked horse; that would have been suicidal. It was all he could do to drag the hobbled horse into the nearest opening among the trees and lead him away from the accursed site. The beast at the graves grunted like a giant pig, but made no attempt to pursue them.
By blind chance they hit upon a trail. Martis fought the horse every step of the way, pleading with him to settle down. At long last, Dulayl planted all four hooves on the ground and allowed Martis to slip off the hobble.
Martis climbed onto his back. There was no saddle, but he clung to the bare back somehow, and Dulayl set off along the trail, too weary and too hemmed in to gallop, but too frightened to stay in one place. Martis let him have his way. He couldn’t see a thing; he doubted the horse could either. He discovered he was sobbing, but he couldn’t seem to stop it.
Dulayl went on until he could go no farther. Martis drifted in and out of sleep, but by some miracle never fell off Dulayl’s back. They didn’t stop until grey morning began to filter down to the forest floor. Dulayl encountered a spring welling up from the earth, and stopped to drink. Martis slid off his back and knelt beside him, drank from cupped hands, and rubbed cold water over his face until he could keep his eyes open.
He paused to take stock of his situation. He’d lost his pack, his food, his water bag, his blanket, and his saddle. He still had his horse, his clothes, and, thanks to Helki, his mace and his knife.
“Well, old friend,” he gasped. “Are we farther up the mountain, or have we lost our way and gone back down?”
There was no way to tell. Martis shivered. He would have given much for his blanket, a fire, and something warm to eat.
“I don’t blame you for being afraid of the beast—although a bear or a mountain lion might have been worse,” he said. In the stillness of that morning, the sound of his own voice comforted him. “What was it that came out of the woods to eat the dead? Have our nightmares taken the form of fabulous beasts and come to life? I am sure I never heard of any animal with a tail like that.”
Only because he had to, he let the horse rest until the sun was high in the sky and the chill was baked away. Then he took the reins and led Dulayl, selecting a path that led upward amid thick brambles. How far they would have to trudge before they cleared the tree line was something that could not be known. Sooner or later, he thought, he would be reduced to eating mushrooms. And if he ate one that was poisonous—well, he would be one with his victims.
But the sun had not yet climbed past noon when the path led him to a place where the trees thinned out and there were only pines, and he could see bare mountains near at hand and feel the sun on his face.
And there, large as life, he found a recently constructed shelter with someone sleeping in it.
CHAPTER 36
Up the Mountain
There was a path, and Jack and Ellayne followed it as it led them higher and higher. Sometimes it led them through passages between great boulders like the walls of houses built close together; and there they found King Ozias’ sign scratched deeply into the rock. And sometimes it would bring them close to the edge of a cliff. They paused at the first cliff and looked down.
“Kind of dreary, isn’t it?” Jack said.
Below them stretched Bell Mountain’s wooded skirts, looking like thick scum on the surface of a stagnant pond. Below that lay the plains, all grey and yellow. Beyond the plains, the world gradually vanished in a smoky haze. It made Jack think of a poor man’s carpet, all scuffed and dirty and ready to be thrown out.
“Well, we’re too high up to see much,” Ellayne said. “It’s a long way down.”
If you looked up, you couldn’t see the summit—just a cloak of hanging fog, the cloud that crowned Bell Mountain. Sometime tomorrow they would be entering that cloud. It didn’t look very inviting.
“The sooner we get up, the sooner we can go back down,” Jack said. “Come on.”
They’d been at it since early in the morning, pushing themselves, and now it was the beginning of the afternoon. Between glimpses of the worn-out, weary world below and the looming cloud above, their spirits flagged. Obst was much in their minds, although neither of them chose to speak of him.
Jack tried to imagine King Ozias coming this way a thousand years ago, or whenever it was, dragging a great heavy bell behind him. Whatever had given him such a mad idea? The men who followed him must have been as mad as he was, carrying that burden through the forest.
Once he caught a glimpse of Ellayne’s face and saw her lips moving. How do you like that? he thought. She’s praying, just like Obst. That’s what he’d be doing now, if he were with us.
Praying didn’t seem like such an odd thing to be doing, under the circumstances. All you had to do was talk to God, Obst said, and He would hear you—even if you didn’t talk out loud. By and by Jack prayed, too: silently.
God, he prayed, I still don’t know why You’ve sent us here to do this. I don’t know why You sent me the dreams and picked me and Ellayne to ring Ozias’ bell. Why us? We’re only kids. Couldn’t you find a grown-up man to do it, or a hero?
But I’m glad you picked us, even though I’m burned if I know why I’m glad.
He wondered what he would do if God talked back to him, like Obst said He did sometimes. He wondered why Obst wasn’t terrified when that happened. Jack was sure he’d be, if it happened to him. God’s voice, coming out of nowhere—
“Jack!”
He startled, but it was only Ellayne.
“Are you all right?” she said. “You didn’t answer me.”
“I was praying.” And how foolish that would have sounded not too long ago. But up here on the mountain it didn’t sound foolish at all.
“I was just wondering how we’d ever have found the right way without the signs,” Ellayne said. “Look over there—up a ways.”
Jack looked where she pointed and saw there was a deep gorge between them and another shoulder of the mountain. That way was as smooth as glass and tilted upward at a very sharp angle. Above it towered steep crags like a stone wall built by giants.
“No getting up that way,” he said.
“We’ll have to stop soon and make a fire. The sun’s on its way down. There’s already a chill in the air.”
“Let’s go just a little farther. Just until we find a better place to sleep.”
For a moment Martis thought the old man lying in the shelter was dead. But when he squatted down beside him, the man opened his eyes and said, “Hello!”
“Are you Obst, the he
rmit?”
“I am. And you wear the insignia of the Temple. That’s funny!”
That remark irritated Martis, but he ignored it. “Where are the children?”
“On their way to the top of the mountain. But you must know all about that, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Which way did they go?”
“Young man, you look all done in. Jack and Ellayne are quite a few hours ahead of you, and you’ll never catch up to them unless you rest first and recover some of your strength. I have food here and a place to sleep. Have something to eat and rest yourself; and then I’ll tell you which way to go. There’s only one safe way to the top.”
“I’d rather you told me that now,” Martis said.
“You’d only go stumbling off to your own destruction. Rest first. You look worse than I feel, and I’m dying.”
Ordinarily Martis would have used force to make the old man tell him the way, with no more thought than he would have expended to squeeze the last few drops of water out of a damp rag. Pain was always a powerful persuader. But this time he refrained from violence—why, he couldn’t have said.
“I want to be there when they ring the bell,” he said.
“It’ll be a clear night tonight with a nearly full moon,” Obst said. “You can make your climb then, and make up the distance while Jack and Ellayne are sleeping. The cold will be cruel, and you’ll need all your strength. But I think you’ll be there when they ring the bell if God has brought you this far. Meanwhile, you should rest. I can see how badly you need it.”
Surprised at himself, Martis acquiesced. There was a small store of fresh-caught game. Martis started a fire, spitted a skinned squirrel, and roasted it over the flame.
Perhaps because the old man was dying and would die up here and never repeat it to another living soul, Martis found himself telling him all that had happened to him since he set out from Ninneburky. Once he’d started, he couldn’t hold it back. He could not remember the last time he’d talked so much about himself—or if he ever had. He couldn’t stop.