“Winged Famadorians!” Deython yelled over the cacophonous sound as he gasped for breath. “It cannot be! I cannot believe it!”
29
Sympathetic
I cannot believe it!” Rhea said, appalled. “That is what the sword told me,” Galen responded, his voice quivering despite all his efforts to control it.
It had taken considerable effort on his part to stand next to Rhea and Maddoc. The combatants in their group had just finished their turn in the arena. Everyone was breathless and sweating freely from the exertion. Now they all gulped air, sitting on the curved stones that formed the sides of the arena bowl.
“No one . . . but no one ever returns from these wars.” Galen continued to gulp air as he spoke. “They bring the Elect here each fall, they train them for a few weeks, then everyone gets loaded back up on the torusks. We’re all supposed to be taken to someplace called Enlund where the next battle is supposed to be taking place.”
“And then?”
“And then we . . . then we die.”
Rhea shook her head. “That makes no sense! You say this war has been waged for, what, over a century?”
“According to the sword, over four hundred years,” Galen replied.
“That’s impossible! We’re at war? Who are we supposed to be fighting, and why? All those years and all those dead . . . and no one has won this war?” Rhea became more and more agitated, her words tumbling out of her mouth as she thought. “And just a few weeks of training? That’s absurd! It takes months to train even the most dedicated warriors, let alone a group of . . . of . . .”
“Of what, Rhea?” Galen demanded. “Group of what?”
Rhea stopped, realizing what she had been saying. She looked directly at Galen as she spoke. “A group who are at best afflicted and at worst completely crippled by something we know nearly nothing about.”
“But they are training us for war!” Galen insisted, gesturing down at the arena floor below them. The next two groups had already moved onto the bloodied sand and were exchanging blows.
“Yes, but what kind of war? I mean, just look at them!” Rhea said with disgust. “Galen, listen to me. Maddoc and I come from a village on the north shore of the Dragonback. My father was part of the garrison there. You Chebon-shore folk don’t hear about the north shore much. Occasionally some Vordnara raider will get too bold or too drunk and wander down from Indraholm Bay to attack our villages. The Pir have us organize our own garrisons to push them back into the sea until they sober up enough to leave us alone. I’ve seen those garrisons training, Galen, and watched them fight. This”—she gestured down at the arena floor as well, having to shout to be heard over the now cheering masses of her own group—“this is nonsense! They’ve been drilling us in only the most basic of weapons moves! Some of the moves look elaborate, but they are completely ineffective in battle. This training is barely good enough for a traveling bard’s theatrical—never mind any actual combat. Could the sword be lying to you?”
“I don’t think so,” Galen responded, shaking his head. “It’s a vicious blade but seems to be rather sincere about . . . just listen to me! Here I am trying to convince you of the sincerity of my sword? I must be insane!”
Maddoc, who had been sitting quietly next to Rhea, suddenly turned to them both, his eyes focused and clear. “No, Galen, not insane, just thinking differently, knowing differently. You’ve spent your entire life seeing, touching, and knowing what is real. You were wrong, that’s all. Everyone was wrong. Everything we thought we knew was just a metaphor for the true reality. We were living in a dream—a wonderful dream—and now the dream and the reality are linked in the twilight and one cannot sleep without awakening the other.”
“A metaphor? Rhea, what is he talking about?”
“I’m . . . I’m not sure,” Rhea responded. “Maddoc, can you hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you, Rhea.” Maddoc smiled down at her with warmth and affection. “I missed you so, Rhea. I thought I might come and visit you both.”
“Yes, my husband,” Rhea said, smiling up at him, nestling herself quickly against his chest. “How I have missed you.”
Maddoc gently circled his arms around her. “And I you, my beloved. Still, I’ve not much time here and I have little time to answer you before I awaken.”
Galen frowned. What was this madman talking about?
Rhea nodded, pulling herself away from him with infinite reluctance. “Maddoc, what are you saying?”
The old man smiled through his wild beard. “That I really must talk with Galen. We’re old friends now! We have walked the bloodied fields together, he and I. It was there that Galen chose the Circle of Brothers Forged by Galen’s Will, now called the Secret Circle of Brothers Forged by—”
“Yes, we understand!” Galen said impatiently.
“Of course.” Maddoc nodded quickly. “I . . . I really must apologize for that name, Galen. I’m still working on something more clever. I don’t think that such a long title will catch on.”
“Look.” Galen leaned forward, trying to be heard by his companions alone in the roaring crowd. “The idea of those warriors came from the winged woman, not me! And that was in the dream . . . not here!”
“Of course it was.” Maddoc smiled politely. “Here is the metaphor, there the reality.”
Rhea’s eyebrows arched suddenly.
“What?” Galen shook his head, confused.
“The powers of twilight are sympathetic, Galen.” Maddoc spoke calmly and slowly, as though to a child. “What happens there is a metaphor for what happens here. It is a translation of meaning and symbols. It is an entire language of being, and completely symmetrical. You gave your winged woman a set of symbols and she gave you a set in return. The power of the twilight gives them force. How those symbols translate into meaning in this world is all part of the language bound in the metaphor.”
“What’s a metaphor?” Galen was still struggling to understand.
“A metaphor is like . . . A metaphor is like . . .” Suddenly, Maddoc started to giggle. “That’s a good one, Galen! A metaphor is . . . like!”
Galen looked at Maddoc in alarm.
Rhea reached for him. “Maddoc, quiet! Please!”
Maddoc stood up. He was nearly apoplectic with laughter. His voice rose louder and louder. In a moment he was up on his feet screaming over the warriors arrayed about him. “A metaphor is like! A metaphor is like! A metaphor is like!”
Several members of the crowd soon joined in with him. They chanted at the tops of their voices, “A metaphor is like! A metaphor is like!”
“Rhea! You’ve got to stop him!” Galen shouted.
“Maddoc! Maddoc, please stop! Please!” Rhea pulled frantically at the madman’s arm. “Galen, help me! I can’t get him to stop! The Pir are starting to take notice. Help me!”
Galen could see them at the top of the arena. Each of the robed figures held a staff, each staff gazed across the arena with the Eye of Vasska. If that eye should turn on them, Galen knew its effects all too well. Already he could feel their attention turning toward them.
He pushed Rhea aside and grabbed Maddoc by the front of his tunic. He cocked back his fist with his weapon arm.
Sound overwhelmed his senses. The swords throughout the arena were screaming at him. Light patterns filled his vision, then collapsed inward with the sounds down a dark and bottomless well.
The towers of Vasskhold stand behind me. I know them well now, but these towers are twisted and deformed. Their stones are loose and they sway precariously back and forth. They are also much smaller than I remembered them. Their doors and windows remain the right size, but it is as if they are less significant and grand in their design. The Temple itself appears to be only two stories high, sagging precariously to one side. I move about the small buildings carrying long lengths of bleached white timber and shoring each of them up in turn. The walls of the city sag as well. These I also prop up with great urgency.
&nb
sp; There is danger. I hear the terrible howling of the demons dancing outside the walls. I fear that they will break through and bring disaster to me. My life would end if they were to breach that wall.
I pause at the base of the Temple itself. The great tower rises behind it, Vasska’s tower. It, too, slumps badly to one side. I reach down to lay another length of timber against its walls.
The tower sways above me, then steadies. Looking up, I see a light in its highest window. It is the only light I see in all the city.
“Curious, isn’t it?”
The voice is all too familiar to me.
“Yes, curious indeed,” I reply.
The hooded Pir monk once more stands beside me. He pulls back his hood, running a hand through his straw-blond hair. “It is a strange landscape that we walk together, you and I. Still, I had hoped to find you here.”
“I’m just as glad for your company,” I reply. “I need your help. The demons are trying to get in. I’ve been shoring up the buildings and walls with these.”
I hold a long white timber out to him.
The monk shrinks away. “I’ve been shoring up these walls for as long as I can remember . . . far too long. You don’t know what you are asking.”
I shake my head questioningly.
“Galen,” the monk says quietly, “it never pays to look too closely at one’s past.”
I gaze down at the long timber in my hand.
It is not a timber at all. It is bone . . . human bone. I drop it at once, glancing about.
“Who are they?” I plead.
The monk sighs. “They are the warriors. They are the Elect. They are the ones whose blood flows like a river each fall until all that is left are the bones to prop up this city. They are the dead of many centuries that fertilize the land. They are the ones who carry their secrets to the grave before they can learn to speak.”
I dread my understanding. “The Elect!”
The monk nods. “The great army of Vasska, which is formed each fall and marches out never to return.”
“No!” I snap. Berkita’s face drifts through my mind almost as a ghost of some wonderful past. I cannot give up, for her sake if not my own. “If I am to die, it won’t be for this creaking city, or Vasska’s pleasure, or your precious Pir Drakonis! I have a life to live—my life—and neither you nor anyone else can have it!”
The monk grasps my shoulder with a powerful hand. “I don’t want your life, Galen! I want to help you . . . you and your friends . . . but I need your help, too. I’m trapped just as much as you are! Maybe I’m not under the eye of Vasska or held in the Garden under guard, but I am imprisoned just the same.”
“Prison? You?” I scoff. “What enthralls a ruling monk of the Pir?”
“This!” he hisses at me, pain suddenly crossing his face. His arms fling wide, gesturing to the strange, terrible world that surrounds us. “This! This terrible, wonderful place of madness! I hate this place, Galen. I hate it with every fiber of my soul! It is my sin against Vasska; against everything that I have ever held sacred and true! It is destroying my life! Can you understand?”
“How can you even ask that?” I return bitterly. “These dreams have brought me nothing but pain.”
“Yes, that’s right!” the monk urges, his blue eyes fixed on mine with understanding. “As they have for me. And yet . . .”
“Yet?” I coax.
“Yet there is something . . . something alluring about all of this!” The monk’s arms suddenly cross. He rubs his upper arms as though chilled. “It calls to me, whispers to me, and will not be denied. Its tendrils curl around my mind during the day in spite of all else. It summons me to sleep. It seduces me. I love it. I hate it. It consumes me and will destroy me just as surely as the war will destroy you, Galen.”
“Then we are both doomed?”
“No, there is hope, and that is why I had to find you.” The monk steps toward me, speaking quietly, although I wonder just who it is he is afraid will hear us. “I have seen a vision. If I help you escape from the Garden—get you out of the city and on your way back to this life you say you have lost—will you help me?”
“Of course!” I nod quietly, with no small surprise on my face. “But how can I possibly help—”
“Will you agree?”
“Of course, I agree!” I say quickly.
“Excellent!” the monk replies, shaking my hand. He then once more gazes upward. “Do you suppose she awaits us there?”
“I don’t know,” I say cautiously.
“Well, there is one way to find out.” The monk shrugs, and he steps through the tower portal.
I ponder for a moment, curious not only about the lit window far above us but about this man who appears so amicable in my dreams and denies me when awake. Who is he that he should walk this strange twilight place by my side? His own words, however, resound through my thoughts: help me and I will help you.
I step through the portal after him.
The tower changes around us. What appeared moments ago to be a small structure proves, once within, to be extraordinarily exaggerated in size. There are neither stairs nor ladders within its soaring confines.
Far above us, the winged woman drifts at the top of the tower shaft.
“Tell me your name,” I say to the monk.
He smiles crookedly at me. “Call me . . . friend.”
“Gladly,” I rejoin. “But you do have a name, do you not?”
“Yes,” he says, turning toward me. His blue eyes look piercingly into mine. “And I promise you shall have it when the time is right. It is for your sake as well as mine that I withhold it. Do you understand?”
“No,” I answer. “But I can live with it.”
The monk laughs. “That is the idea . . . that we both find a way to live with it! Now, how do you suppose we are to get up there?”
It is my turn to smile. “I promise to tell you when the time is right!”
I summon in my mind a great wind. Suddenly the wind sweeps through the tower, bearing me up from the floor. I soar upward, leaving my monk friend far below. Soon, I drift in the air near the winged woman.
She is sad. Her dark face is lined with worry and pain. As I look about, I find that the entire upper part of the tower is gaudily ornamented in ironworks. Ravens have settled among the rungs of iron. Each in their turn pick at the winged woman with their sharp beaks, tearing at her clothing.
Her eyes plead with me and she opens her mouth to speak!
I quickly hold my hands up before my mouth in warning. She apparently understands me and makes no sound.
I glance about, carefully examining the ironwork. I am looking for a metaphor, not entirely sure—even in myself—what that means.
Something inside me suddenly speaks with deeper understanding than I have ever experienced before, and I know what I must do. I reach upward. Grasping the wrought iron, I easily bend it from the wall fixtures. It heats quickly in my hands, becoming pliable.
I start shaping the iron, pulling more pieces as they are needed from the wall ornaments. The long iron strands begin to take the shape of a great sphere—a cage for the birds that so menace the winged woman.
I offer it to her, and to my surprise she holds it in her hands, bowing her thanks. The cage I have crafted for her disappears, as do the ravens. She reaches out, taking me by my hands, and pulls me upward through the remaining ironworks onto the top of the tower.
We stand under a blood-red sun. Its light is terrible on us: its heat burns us and its light blinds us. I shrink from it, but the winged woman reaches out and plucks the sun from the sky. She cuts the terrible sun in half as though it were a fruit. Reaching inside, she pulls from it a pit of darkness and hands it to me.
I hold it in my hand, a seed of black streaked with purple lightning. As I hold it, my skin cools and I am no longer blinded by the light.
The winged woman sets the sun back in the sky. Its red rays stretch over the land, cradled between the clouds that strea
k the horizon. The clouds form the head of a great dragon. The sun winks out its eye and darkness falls around us.
I drift downward once again through the tower. The monk remains at the bottom, waiting for me.
“You must teach me how you do that,” the monk says softly as the light fails.
“And I promise that I will,” I respond cautiously, “when the time is right.”
The blackness falls over us.
“Will I see you again, friend?” I ask the night.
“Yes, friend, you will,” the monk replies from the darkness. “And we will find our freedom together.”
BOOK OF GALEN BRONZE CANTICLES, TOME IV, FOLIO 1, LEAVES 39-44
Galen awoke with a start.
“Easy, Galen!” Rhea said quickly. “Lie back and be still! You’re back in the barracks. The dragonstaffs put you out for a long time.”
Galen could not relax; there were too many things running through his mind. He pushed his way up to sit despite Rhea’s efforts. “Please, we’ve got to get out of here!”
“No one is more in agreement with you than I am,” Rhea said sharply, “but I don’t see how that is possible! The guards are suspicious of you. Even if they weren’t, we would still have to get you past the Pir monks. They line the walls of the Garden.”
“Yes.” Galen nodded. “The ever-watchful eye of Vasska, eh?”
“None of the Elect can escape its gaze,” Rhea said flatly.
“Perhaps.” Galen smiled. “On the other hand—”
Rhea gasped.
Galen held a strange sphere of darkness about the size of an apple in his hand, streaked periodically with purple lightning.
“On the other hand,” Galen said, “perhaps Vasska’s eye won’t see us!”
30
Master and Servant
I cannot believe it!” Lirry sniffed joyfully as he reclined on the overstuffed chair. “I’m making it, Mimic! I’m finally getting what I deserve!”
Mystic Warrior Page 24