by Lee Duigon
He crawled back to the water and quenched his thirst, and had the presence of mind not to drink too much.
“Dulayl! Wait for me here. Make friends with the donkey, and eat your fill of grass. I’m going after those children. And if you see that imp, or whatever it is, stamp it under your hooves.”
He found the sign that put him on the trail, and went on without looking back. His hand throbbed where the little fiend had stabbed it.
What—imps, fiends? What superstitious pap was this? And from a man who was the First Prester’s intimate! Martis wondered at himself.
But there was no denying that he’d seen the thing, and imaginary beings don’t jab a man’s hand with a stick.
Martis, with his weariness thrown off like a cloak, strode up the trail. Above him hung the perpetual cloud of Bell Mountain. Inside it somewhere were the two children.
He was to stop them from ringing the bell. “Under no circumstances is that bell to be rung,” were Lord Reesh’s exact words. It had been a long time since Martis had thought of those words.
He had to catch up to the children before they could ring the bell. “If it is ever to be rung, that decision will be made here, in this office, by me or my successor.”
Reesh’s words drove him like a whip. He would have been running, had the way not been so steep.
He knew what his master would expect him to do when he found the children. He had his mace with him.
But why was Reesh so frightened? He didn’t believe in God. What did he think would happen if the children rang the bell? Why send his assassin to prevent it?
The unanswerable questions chased Martis up the mountain toward the waiting cloud.
CHAPTER 39
How They Came to the Top of the Mountain
Snow crunched under the children’s feet. It was hard, frozen snow, and they didn’t sink into it—not even to their ankles.
Jack worried about missing signs. You couldn’t see them if they were buried under snow. Then again, there wasn’t much you could see. The cloud hung heavily. Jack could see Ellayne, who was almost alongside him, and the snow directly under his feet, and whatever rocks and boulders chanced to loom on either side. You could see about five steps ahead and another five back, and that was all. The cloud swallowed up everything else.
“Slower, Jack!” Ellayne hissed at him. “We don’t want to walk off a cliff.”
“I’m trying to find the next sign,” Jack answered.
“What is that?”
Straight ahead rose a low pile of stones. When they were close enough to see it clearly, they realized it was a pile made by human hands. The heavy stone on top was in the shape of a spearhead.
“This must be the sign,” Jack said. “See—it’s pointed the way we were going.”
“They knew the snow would cover any signs they carved into the path,” Ellayne said. “King Ozias made sure we could follow him.”
Their voices seemed to carry very far indeed. They hadn’t spoken loudly, but the empty stillness of the place made it seem so. There was no other sound to be heard, not even a whisper of wind.
They went ahead more slowly, accompanied by the loud crunch-crunch of their footfalls on the frozen snow. They went hand in hand; if the cloud grew any thicker, they might lose each other. Piles of stones guided them. Ellayne thought it would have to be a very big bell for them to be able to find it at all. Jack wondered if there was still a world outside the cloud.
And there stood King Ozias’ bell.
They almost walked into it before they saw it. There it was. Jack had never seen a bell before, but there was nothing else that this could be.
It hung on a chain, supported by a framework of timbers planted in the rock. Ozias’ men must have scraped away the snow and chiseled holes in the rock to receive the timbers. You wouldn’t think wood could last so long; but these timbers were sheathed in some kind of green metal and wrapped in iron bands.
The bell itself was not the gigantic artifact Jack had always imagined it would be. It was a metal cup but little bigger than his head. Brass, probably, although the metal was too discolored to tell. And from the inside of the cup dangled a rusty chain.
“Don’t touch anything,” Ellayne whispered.
“How are we going to ring it if we don’t touch anything?” Jack said. “We have to pull the chain, don’t we?”
“But it might fall apart! It’s so old. Let’s have a good look at it first.”
They stood under the bell and looked up. Inside it was a chain, and attached to the chain was an iron ball. That was the clapper, Ellayne said. “You pull the chain back and forth, and the ball makes the bell ring by banging against it.”
“Do you really think it might fall apart?”
“I don’t know! I’m sure the wood must be rotten.”
Jack stepped back. It all looked solid enough, but he knew about rotten wood. He wouldn’t want to be standing under that frame if it collapsed. But they’d have to stand under it if they meant to ring the bell.
“We have to do what we came here to do,” he said. “At least try.”
“Can we do it together?”
He smiled at her. “It’d be a shame for us not to, I guess.”
They stepped back under the bell. Jack took a deep breath of the thin air. The whole mountain lay in silence.
They reached for the chain.
And a man’s voice roared at them, “Stop!”
Martis scrambled up the trail as fast as he dared—which was much faster than Jack and Ellayne had climbed it. With every step he made up ground, sometimes losing his balance and dropping to all fours. He clutched at the cold, hard rock until he tore his hands, and kept going.
He knew now what Lord Reesh was afraid of. All the prophets spoke of it. The Lord said He would crush the kingdom of Obann; and to be sure, the kingdom was no more. But that was two thousand years ago. There was no more kingdom to be crushed.
Greater than the kingdom, as the noonday sun is greater than the faintest star, was the Empire; and the ruins of the Empire were a thousand years old. Martis knew the Scriptures well enough to know that if the kingdom of Obann had displeased God, the Empire must have infuriated Him. So some scholars taught that the awful day of the Lord’s wrath, proclaimed by all the prophets, applied to the destruction of the Empire—a far greater and more thorough destruction than the destruction of the kingdom.
And what would be a greater and more terrible destruction than the destruction of the Empire?
Surely the destruction of the whole world: and that was why the First Prester had sent his assassin to kill a pair of peasant children. Martis understood it now.
He hated Reesh for believing in God and pretending not to, and teaching others not to. “For teaching me not to!” Martis growled through his teeth. For these lies he’d been chased by giant birds. Had Reesh not believed in God, he would not have feared the bell. He would not have believed in the bell, either, and Martis would never have had to make this accursed journey.
He was still cursing his master when he became aware that he’d entered the cloud and was all alone in it. Bent low, he saw tracks in the snow—the children’s tracks. Licking his chapped lips, he pressed on, following their tracks.
He must have been going faster than he thought, because when he looked up again, he saw two small figures standing underneath a structure that supported a hanging bell. The sight froze him in his place.
“Stop!” he cried; and he reached for his mace.
Ellayne did stop, but Jack looked over his shoulder and saw a man approaching them. The cloud hid his features and the details of his dress. He might have been a ghost. All Jack knew was that this man, whatever he was, meant to stop them from ringing the bell.
“Now, Ellayne!” he cried, and reached again for the chain.
Ellayne didn’t fail him. Together they seized the chain, and their bare skin stuck to it.
And they pulled.
The bell began to move. They
tugged on the chain. The iron clapper struck the bell. And Jack, who had never heard a bell before, heard this bell peal.
The first sound was only a clank; but as they set the bell in motion, it began to toll as a bell should. Jack had expected the sound to be overwhelming, even shattering, as it was in his dream. But Ozias’ bell brought forth a rich, mellow tone, sweet and pure and powerful, and it echoed among all the neighboring mountains hidden by the cloud. It was a wonderful, glorious, musical sound.
Jack caught a glimpse of Ellayne’s face. She smiled radiantly, and tears poured from her eyes. He felt tears freezing on his cheeks. The bell was in a rhythm now, and it took no effort to keep on tolling it.
Martis dropped to his knees and clapped his hands to his ears, and tried to drown out the tolling of the bell by screaming over it. But each knell was a hammer blow that fell on him, the sound of the world being hammered into fragments. He screamed, but no one heard him. He couldn’t even hear himself. The bird’s beak gaped to swallow him.
The song of the bell played around the mountaintops, and traveled downward.
On the slopes of the mountain, just at the tree line, Obst heard the bell as he lay dying. He smiled in his sleep.
Instead of dying, he got up. He picked up his staff, tied a water bag to his belt, and began to walk back down the mountain, with the sweetest sound he had ever heard ringing in his ears and filling all the space among the mountains. The thought of Jack and Ellayne never entered his head. All he knew was that he had preaching to do, a great deal of it. He’d be a hermit no more.
The song rolled past him down the slope, even as the sun began to rise above the mountains.
East of the mountains, it roused Heathen warriors to mill about their camps in wild surmise. Not knowing the Scriptures, they had no understanding of this strange event, and they were afraid.
In the forested hills, birds woke and sang in response to the song of Bell Mountain. Deer and bear and wolves lifted up their heads and raised their voices, not knowing why.
Trappers and hunters crawled out of their shelters, and settlers emerged from their cabins, all amazed that they should hear a bell tolling in the wilderness.
The song flowed over the plains. Helki and Jandra woke. The little girl, who had never learned to read and never visited a chamber house, recited Scripture. So did Helki. They couldn’t hear each other; they could hear nothing but that marvelous music that seemed to come from every direction at once. The sun peeked over the mountains, and they rejoiced.
The song rolled on. In Lintum Forest, Latt Squint-eye fell out of his bed and cursed the terrible noise, not knowing if it meant an earthquake or a storm that would uproot every tree.
Along the Imperial River, boatmen and dockworkers and lumbermen woke and scrambled out into the dawn, staring this way and that, seeing nothing that could account for the tolling of a great bell. Many feared it, but a few felt something in their hearts that was like a release from the worst trouble they had ever known.
In the town of Ninneburky, Ashrof sat up in his cot and knew at once why he was hearing the sound of a bell in a town that had no bell. He sat huddled in his ragged bedclothes, shivering with more than cold; but whether it was fear, or inexpressible joy, he could not say.
Across town, Ellayne’s mother and father woke at the same instant, each filled with a sudden conviction that their daughter, who was lost and for whom they mourned, was not lost and had not died, and their whole house and their bed vibrated in response to the loud tolling that had awakened them. They held each other tightly, and Ellayne’s mother wept for joy. The chief councilor tried not to cry, but in the end, he did.
The song flowed on. In the great city of Obann, crowds filled the streets and people looked up in wonderment at the bell towers. There were many bells in Obann, but not a single one of them stirred; and yet the whole city was filled with the sound of a great bell tolling.
In his private bedchamber, Lord Reesh heard the sound, knew that his assassin had failed, and fainted dead away.
The tolling of Ozias’ bell woke trappers camped in the mires and bayous where the great river ran to meet the sea. And all along the coasts, fleets of white gulls took to the air, flying in tight circles over the waves, calling raucously as gulls do.
The song rang out over the seas, and the islands in the sea, and through lands and peoples unknown to the scholars of Obann. In less time than it takes to tell, the song of the mountain pealed to the ends of the world and back again. There was no place where it was not heard.
And then it ended.
Jack and Ellayne had no more strength in their arms. They stood, panting, looking up at the bell. Jack was sure he saw cracks running all over it. And he saw something else, too: the frame that supported it began to sway. Only just in time, he grabbed Ellayne’s arm and hastily stepped back, pulling her with him. And the timbers parted, one from the other, and collapsed; and King Ozias’ bell broke into several pieces.
Except for the sound of their heartbeats, silence reigned—until Ellayne spoke.
“Do you think God heard it?” she said.
Jack nodded. “If He can hear us when we whisper, then He must have heard the bell. I hope so. It wasn’t as loud as it was in my dream—nowhere near.”
But then a breeze blew up, and swirled around the mountaintop, and chilled their cheeks. It scooped up snow and made a screen of it, so that now the children couldn’t even see the fallen timbers two steps in front of them. The breeze swelled into a wind, and whistled in their ears. Grains of ice pelted their lips. Terrified of being blown right off the mountain, they dropped to their knees and held on to one another. They had to close their eyes, or have ice driven into them.
This is the end, Jack thought. The mountain’s going to fall down. God heard the bell, and it means the end of the world.
Just as his face began to go numb, the wind stopped—just stopped. He imagined he felt sunshine on his forehead.
“Oh, Jack! Look!”
Ellayne jumped up. Jack opened his eyes.
“There’s no more cloud!” she cried. “It blew away! Look—you can see everything!”
Jack stood up and looked. At the same time, miles and miles away, men and women and children, Temple and Heathen, looked up and wondered what had happened to the cloud upon Bell Mountain. For the first time since people started keeping track of time, the bare peak gleamed under the morning sun against a bright blue sky.
But Jack and Ellayne looked down, not up; and that worn-out, weary world that was like a dirty carpet, that world that they’d looked down on so many times on their way up—that world was changed.
“What happened?” Jack said. “The colors are so bright!”
The grey plains were now an emerald green, the steely grey river a shimmering blue. The forests that had yesterday looked like old scum piled on a stagnant pond, today bloomed lustily in more shades of green than Jack had words for, and bright red where the trees were just coming into bloom.
They were too high up to see people or animals or even towns, but if this was truly the same world they’d left behind when they entered the great cloud, it had since received a very thorough cleaning, buffed and washed and polished till it shone.
“It looks new,” Jack said.
Martis swooned before the bell stopped ringing. It was as if he fell into a black pit and just kept on falling and falling, forever.
Now he opened his eyes. He lay on solid ground, falling no more, with one side of his face pressed into snow and the other side receiving sunshine. The effect was so strange that it blew the panic and the madness out of his head. He pushed himself up with his hands and looked around.
He saw that the bell was down, its supporting framework ruined. He saw the children pointing this way and that, and heard them chattering excitedly about a new world. He saw that he could see now: the cloud was gone.
His first thought was that he’d failed in his mission. They’d rung the bell, and it would never ring a
gain. He’d failed to stop them. If he ever returned to Obann, Reesh’s new assassin would kill him.
And his second thought was this: “Everything Reesh taught me was a lie.” All those people he’d killed, all the hard missions he’d completed—probably those people should have been left alive and those missions left undone.
His whole body ached, and he stood up with a sigh. The children wheeled, and saw him.
“Who are you?” the boy demanded.
Martis laughed. “You don’t know what you’re asking me, young sir! But to answer you briefly, the Temple sent me to make sure you didn’t ring the bell. I was sent to kill you. But you needn’t reach for your knife. I won’t hurt you now—or ever.”
“Why should we believe you?”
“Because I can’t stop you from ringing the bell, now that you’ve rung it.Because the man who sent me on this mission was a liar. And because I doubt very much that God would let me hurt you.”
Jack and Ellayne stared at the man from the Temple. Ellayne recognized the Temple insignia on his torn, stained coat. Jack thought the man looked ill—or maybe just worn out close to the point of death.
“If it’s any help to you,” Martis said, “I’ve followed you all the way from Ninneburky. I know your names are Jack and Ellayne. I met a man named Helki, who saved my life. I met your friend, the hermit, Obst, and parted from him in friendship. I’d very much like to see him and talk to him again, if he’s still alive. It was Obst who taught me how to read the signs, so I could find you.”
Jack and Ellayne exchanged a look. Obst! In all the excitement, they’d forgotten him.
“We want to see him, too,” Ellayne said, “more than anything in the world.”
“Then we’ve got to go back down the mountain,” Jack said. “There’s nothing more for us to do up here. We’ve done it!”
They all went down together.