The Ancient Enemy

by Christopher Rowley

  Thru trudged back to the inn and climbed the stairs to his room, ignoring the merriment going on in the main hall below. The next day he returned to Warkeen and tried to put his heart into his work on the family farm. On the polder there was always weeding to do, so he became a fanatic of the weeds. His mother praised him for his efforts, but his father could tell that Thru's heart just wasn't in it. By endsummer Thru was taking off on long walks again. He'd finish his weeding early and take his bow and a small pack and set off for Cormorant Rock or some other promontory to clear his head of the dismay and pain that seemed to fill it when he was home in the village.

  At the fest of the Summer Spirit when red Kemm rode above the horizon at night, his mother, bless her, tried to get him interested in the sweet, but plain, Xinne Batir. He was friendly and polite with Xinne, but the feeling for her just didn't grow. Xinne was dutiful, but quiet, and she didn't laugh often.

  Snejet knew his real heart and told him so.

  "You don't want Xinne. I can see that. You must tell Mother honestly. Stop playacting for her. Stop her matchmaking. You know she can't stop trying to help you."

  Thru told Ual that same evening. Xinne stopped being invited over for supper on feast days. Thru remained his silent, withdrawn self.

  The chooks, who knew about affairs of the heart, having several every month, tried to help.

  "That female don't return your love? Go find another female. There be plenty."

  "Thank you, but you don't understand."

  "Oh, but we do, we understand. Your heart got broken, and you just being slow about it mending."

  "Yeah, that may be." But he didn't change.

  The harvest came in quickly, and by the time the first leaves were falling everything on the polder was done for the season. Waterbush was cut, the pods harvested, and the rest of the plant set to soak in the seapond. The wheat and melons had already been harvested, while the nuts, apples, and root vegetables were still to come.

  The main work of the farm went indoors as the nimble fingers of the entire family went to work on the harvested waterbush.

  Waterbush was the source of many things. The shoots in the spring were abundant and highly edible. The early pods of summer and the ripe pods of autumn could both be eaten in different and tasty ways. Leaves mashed up with ripe pods and soaked in water produced bush curd, which could be dried and used right through the winter. But waterbush provided more than food. Fiber was stripped out of the soaked stems and run through a water mill. It was dried, spun into yarn, and woven into cloth, an occupation that would keep most of the older part of the population busy through the winter months. Finally, the juice extracted from the stems in the mill was then boiled down and fermented for the fizzy sap wine, a favorite drink for the snow festivals.

  Seeing that his oldest son was just not recovering, Ware took him aside one evening after supper. They sat outside in the evening cool and sipped small mugs of cellar brew.

  "Have you ever thought of going to Highnoth, my son?"

  The mention of the northern lair of the Assenzi sent Thru's eyebrows shooting up and down.

  "No, Father, but now that you mention it..."

  "I think you may be the kind who would benefit from a visit with the old Assenzi. They have many things to teach us."

  Thru nodded, liking the idea. Going up to the ruins of Highnoth for a year or two was a traditional remedy for young mots who became excessively restless or morose. Life among the Ancient Ones was famously austere, but always challenging.

  It was agreed, therefore, and Ware wrote out a cover letter for the Assenzi that Thru was to hand them when he arrived at Highnoth.

  Ual was heartbroken to see her eldest son go off alone into the wilderness. Highnoth lay two hundred miles north in the Valley of the Moon. There were roads all the way, and there were patrols against pyluk, but pyluk were crafty beasts, justly called the wood devils, and were the most feared enemy of the folk of the Land.

  And yet, there were days when she wished he was gone, because having a silent depressed youth around the house was disturbing to the whole family. But no sooner would such a thought cross her mind than her maternal instincts were aroused once more and she would weep quietly until Ware came to her and took her in his arms and whispered in her ears to calm her.

  Despite all the emotional confusion, Thru packed his kit, calmly, taking a few clothes, his winter cloak and gloves, his bow and a dozen shafts.

  In addition, Ware pressed on him a staff, as tall as Thru and as thick as two thumbs, cut from a piece of ash and hardened by the fire. Ware had made it himself, with his usual skill with wood.

  "I call this staff 'Strongwalker,' and I give it to you, my eldest and most dear son." Thru hefted Strongwalker in his hands. It was a good staff; light but strong.

  "Thank you, Father."

  Thru left the village before the first big storm of autumn rolled in off the ocean. Northward he took the narrow roads of the Land. Through Shellflower County and Canton Blurri he went. This part of the trip was on well-traveled roads, and he stayed in large roadside inns—sometimes in a room, sometimes bedded down in the common room, or even in the yard, depending on what was available.

  After Glashoux in Blurri, by the Lake of Blue Swans, he took the less-traveled road to the northeast. Here the land was wilder. There were no cities beyond Glashoux, and the strip of cultivation was thin and soon left behind entirely. The road narrowed to a single lane, paved in only the wettest places.

  Along the way he slept at small inns or in farmhouses, where the scattered mots were always glad to see a traveler and learn the latest news from the cities to the south. When he mentioned Highnoth to these folk they always nodded and whispered a prayer with a little awe in their faces.

  At one small place he arrived on the Day of Sadness. There were three families living there, working the long narrow strip of polder they'd built in the valley bottom. They were a hardworking, narrow-faced folk, and they sat at the stone ring in a glum-looking clump and listened to the words of the Great Book, weeping with genuine emotion as they chanted from the "Song of the Broken Pig."

  For the festival dinner they ate fried fish and pickled melon and washed it down with thin country beer. It was meager rations compared to the lavish table that Ual Gillow would set for all her relatives on the Day of Sadness, yet it filled their bellies and left them content. They sang the traditional songs of the season and asked Thru endless questions about the big towns and cities of the coast. He answered as best he could and later slept soundly on the guest pallet in the pantry.

  These folk lived hard lives compared to the folk in lusher parts of the land, but still they were cheerful with what little they had. They praised the peace of lives carved out in the wilderness. He bid them farewell the next day and went on.

  But the country now gave way to the foothills of the Drakensberg. The greater mountains glittered in the east. Thru went northeast to where the Valley of the Moon nestled among the feet of white-capped mountains.

  The hills were afire with scarlet and yellow in the day, for the turning leaves were at their peak of beauty. At night he slept wrapped in his heavy cloak and got used to the hard ground. The stars gleamed down with chill fury. Great red Kemm was setting early in the evenings, and the nights were filled with many more stars.

  The next night found him camped out on the shoulder of Mount Ulix. It was cold, so he made a small fire to heat water for tea to wash down the dried biscuit in his pack.

  The tea brought a nice glow of warmth to his insides, and he huddled back inside his cloak with a blanket wrapped around his legs. The hillsides below shimmered beneath the light of the Moon. Once through the pass at Ulix he would be only another day's journey from Highnoth.

  Then, from below, he heard the howl of wolves. The fur on the back of his neck rose instinctively. Something about the howls expressed a sense of warning. The wolves were telling the world to beware. The wolves knew he was in their territory, but they would
not object to a traveling mot. Between mots and wolves there had always been respect. But wolves always howled when they detected pyluk in their range.

  Thru took the warning seriously and put out his fire. He moved off well before dawn and took the short road to Pembri Village, a small place, inhabited by stonecutters. He had no intention of ending up in the bellies of the green-skinned lizard men.

  Pembri lay up the Edejj Valley, which had been carved by repeated forays of the ice sheets and had high, steep walls. He hurried his pace. Pyluk hunted with the long spears, hardened in the fire and thrown with great force and accuracy. They were great runners as well, almost the match of mots in that regard. Thru had strung his bow and had his quiver on his hip, the arrows ready to hand, of which a good half dozen had steel points, just in case.

  Dark clouds whirled overhead, and a stiff wind came out of the west. The road ran due north for a while straight up a narrow U-shaped valley. He made good time and came over the Stark Pike before noon.

  Once again he heard the wolves, this time ahead of him, up on the higher parts of the pike. Again they broadcast a warning: Pyluk were nearby and probably aware of him.

  He turned back at once, then climbed the steep gravel slope of a side canyon. It was narrow and twisty, and the walls were nearly vertical on either side. At the back of the space it simply came to an end on a pile of debris washed down by an intermittent waterfall high above.

  He climbed. The rock was well bedded, with clear lines between layers. There were many handholds in the chert beds. He got halfway up and ran into a problematical layer of crumbly shale that did not offer handholds. The slope shifted away from the vertical, but the footing was treacherous. Every so often the shale would slide out from under him and a few pieces would go tumbling off the cliff and fall into the canyon below.

  At one point he lost his footing and had to dig his fingers into the shale to hang on. Pieces of shale went wicketing down the slope. He was still sliding. If he went all the way down the shale, he'd go off the edge of the steeper cliff below. And then he got a foot into a slight gap and that gave him enough traction to halt the slide. He took a deep breath and started to move back up. A few minutes later he stepped up onto the top of the little cliff. He took a deep breath; it had been close. He turned and looked down into the narrow canyon from which he'd climbed.

  He felt his heart hammer in his chest for a moment. Three tall, green pyluk were standing there, great jaws agape, long spears in hand. They looked up at him with hungry eyes, then coughed and rapped their throwing sticks on their spears, a chilling sound. Then they turned and vanished back down the gully.

  He had a good head start on them, but they would find a way up in time. He would have to run the rest of the way to be sure. Back above the pike he lifted his own voice in loud cry, thanking the wolves for their timely warning.

  Then he ran.

  When he arrived in Pembri Village, his news aroused immediate alarm. Small gangs of pyluk were an occasional menace in the Edejj Valley. There were stone carts coming up from Glashoux, and the drivers would be vulnerable to pyluk, who would spear an ox from concealment and then wait to collect it when the cart had freed the dead ox and gone on with its remaining ox taking up the slack. The pyluk would follow and spear the other ox the next day. Then at night the lizard-skinned pyluk would swarm the wagon and kill the mots. Oxen, mots, brilbies, all would go into pyluk bellies.

  The folk organized a patrol to set out the next day and track down the pyluk and kill them, or at least chase them out of the valley. That night they set a strong guard on the village and howled to the distant wolf pack of the Edejj to tell them that the presence of the pyluk had been noted.

  The village patrol spotted the pyluk trail the next day and chased the three marauders all the way across the valley and up the jambles stones in Soaring Creek. The pyluk eventually escaped by climbing into the wild lands of the higher Drakensberg.

  Thru waited in the village for another day until the patrol returned. Then he set out on the last section of his trip, up the Edejj Valley to the watershed and down into the Valley of the Moon. Highnoth lay at the northern end of the valley, where the great mountains of Basht and Redapt faced each other.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The mountain was wreathed in cold mists when Thru arrived at Highnoth late in the morning. He was glad of his cloak, for the damp seemed to go right down to his bones. Like everyone else there, he would have to get used to the cold and the damp.

  Inside he was greeted first by a friendly mot named Meu, a native of Dronned, who was to become a good friend while they were at Highnoth. The Assenzi themselves were amazing little beings, smaller and thinner than mots, looking almost like herons in their grey coats and black cloaks. But it was their eyes, twice the size of a mot's eye, that were the most striking thing about their thin faces. They peered in at one with such intelligence and understanding that it was a little frightening at times. You never thought you could keep secrets from such a being.

  The place itself was nothing but ruins. Gigantic ruins, of buildings so large as to be cities in themselves. Some were nothing but hills of rubble covered in trees, but others still partially stood, lurching up hundreds of feet into the air. Great slabs of fallen wall material lay about their feet, but the legs of these giant warriors of stone still stood. And within them were areas that had been kept habitable, for aeons, by the wit of the Assenzi and the labor of their students.

  Of all the Assenzi, Thru came to know Uzzieh Utnapishtim the best. Utnapishtim taught history, mathematics, and astronomy. Thru enjoyed the first and the last and struggled motfully with the mathematics. His efforts brought a twinkle to Utnapishtim's ancient eyes.

  Then there was Master Graedon, the engineer. He was the Assenzi who maintained the physical plant, what was left of it, that kept them alive. Thru worked without complaint on many of the hardest jobs that winter, which earned him a place in Graedon's metallurgy class. There he was privileged to forge a sword for himself.

  From Master Sassadzu he learned kyo and the art of weaving. Kyo included archery, and Thru became a very useful mot with his bow.

  And from great Cutshamakim, the spiritual leader of the Assenzi, he learned that there were things that were unknowable, that just were.

  He also learned how to adjust to a diet stripped down to its essentials. They weren't that far wrong in the Land when they said that the Assenzi lived on cold air and imagination. Gone were the hot pies and chowders from his mother's kitchen. Gone was the habit of dining in the manner of the Land. A bowl of porridge and sour butter became a luxurious dinner. And to wash down their twice-baked biscuit, there was usually nothing more than guezme tea or water. Thru got used to being hungry.

  The kyo class met Master Sassadzu on an open gallery. At the slight sound of the command from the Master, they would spin on the spot, slant their upper bodies back with the smoothness of the cobra, and snap the foot out with the speed of the striking snake. The movement was fluid, the feet arriving in space in front of them with near unanimity. Sassadzu would watch, then let them return to rest. He would show them the motion again. His own slight form seemed to become almost a liquid as he sliced his foot through the arc of contact.

  They summoned their sense of the Spirit, felt the strength rise through their waists and gather in their shoulders.

  "Now!"

  A bend, a smoother stroke, the foot seeming to flow out, unstoppable.

  Cutshamakim's lessons were taken in his room usually, a veritable library in a warm part of the Red Brick tower. Sometimes they were taken outside though, where they practiced holding a handful of snow in their hands, watching it melt to water, and then drinking the water. The hand got so cold! The water tasted so delicious afterward.

  "Why is it good sometimes to feel the cold?" asked Thru.

  "Because it shows us that we are alive."

  Utnapishtim's history class was another popular one. One day close to the end of the class, young Be
lloc, a Farblow Hills mot, raised his hand.

  "Utnapishtim?" The Assenzi preferred not to be called Master by their pupils.

  "What is it, Belloc?"

  "I have heard it said that Man the Cruel came from a star beyond the constellation of the Calf."

  "There is a school of opinion that believes this. There is no evidence either way."

  Salish, from Sulmo, asked next. "You remember Man the Cruel, Utnapishtim?"

  "I do."

  "I sometimes think it cannot have been as bad as it says in the Book. Was it really like that?"

  "Not all men were cruel, Salish."

  "They teach us that there were good men, the men who raised us up."

  "They raised you up, my fine young mot. That they did. The ancient men they raised you up."

  "And before then there are no memories, and we did not know anything."

  "Before then you were animals and had no need of long memories. The High Men remade you in their image. Just as they made us to watch over you."

  "And we live in the Garden of Eden."

  "That is one way to describe it."

  "And we have always lived in it."

  "No, young Salish. You have not been listening to Master Acmonides. For a long time the world was frozen. There was ice a mile deep over the northland. The ice ground the mountains down. The ice filled the Valley of the Moon, and Highnoth was walled in by ice that towered over these walls."

  "Did you live then, Utnapishtim?"

  They were at it again, distracting old Utnapishtim and getting him off onto tales from the past. Which was much more fun than writing down the names of the local stars and also helped to prolong the class in a pleasant way, listening to the old Assenzi speak about the ancient world, gone forever beneath the ice.

  "Oh yes, young Salish, old Utnapishtim lived then. Utnapishtim first came to life more than one hundred thousand years ago. The ice came four times and retreated each time. Now we think the period of the ice is over for a while."