* * *
“Farewell, then, Enco. Or ‘Kar Enco’, I ought to say.”
“No. Let me always be plain ‘Enco’ to you.”
There was little time left. Paoul looked once more round the small dormitory room that had been his home for almost two years. All but Enco’s shelves and locker were bare; all but Enco’s bed had been stripped and the bedding neatly rolled and tied. Buin and Relle had already left Hohe, gone to vanseries in the south, and this afternoon Paoul was due to board the Gehan ship taking the annual commission of inspection to Brennis. Only Enco, at the special request of Kar Ander, was staying on: he would soon be given his own chambers in the kars’ quarters, where he would be employed as an assistant to the Chief Herbalist. The announcement of this honour had come as a surprise to nobody but Enco himself.
A week had passed since then, since the day of the autumn equinox and the last in the series of solemn ceremonies that had transformed Paoul and eighteen others into initiates of the Red Order. At the final ceremony Paoul had been allowed to touch the Vessel of the Forzans, and the Prime, as vansard, had supervised the completion of his tattoo and heard his vows of obedience, celibacy, loyalty, and faith. Then the Prime had touched his forehead and he had arisen as a priest.
After the rite of initiation, Forzan Zett had called in each new priest to tell him what and where his first post was to be. The vansery at Valdoe had sent word to say that, if Paoul’s initiation were confirmed, and if his services were not required at Hohe, then he would be expected to begin his duties with a period of one year as a teacher in the school at Valdoe Village. His pupils, Forzan Zett had explained, were to be the sons of the military and civilian officers at the Trundle. When the year was up, he would either have to continue at the school, or, more probably, he would join the astronomers working under the new vansard, Phede Keldis, whom he would eventually serve as a legal adviser. “However,” Forzan Zett had added, in a cryptic tone that had immediately put Paoul on the alert, “However, I doubt whether you will spend much longer in Brennis than is needed to repay Valdoe for their sponsorship. In something less than five years you are likely to return to the citadel. This is a delicate and strictly confidential matter to be discussed with you by the Lord Prime, and you are invited to present yourself at his quarters tomorrow at the third hour of the forenoon.”
The substance and import of that interview had thrown Paoul into a turmoil from which he thought he might never recover, a turmoil of conscience in which, by the cruellest irony, his doubts had become deeper and more numerous. And yet, even if he had not been ordered to keep silent – he had been empowered to divulge only the details of his duties in Brennis – he would still have felt unable to discuss the least of his worries with his best and closest friend.
“I must be going, Enco.”
“I could come with you as far as the gate.”
“Better not.”
Enco held out his hand. Paoul took it.
“Farewell. Paoul … I hope this is not the end of our friendship.”
“So do I.”
Paoul walked alone to the vansery gate. He had already taken leave of his teachers, of Erta and the other lay staff, and of the rest of his contemporaries. There was nothing left but to summon the gatekeeper and say goodbye to him also.
Once through the township, once through the main citadel gates, Paoul hefted his heavy leather bag on his shoulder and started down the steep road to the river and the Lower Township.
The afternoon was warm and bright, with a solid azure sky above the yellowing birches that lined this part of the road. Each twist and turn kept him facing more or less towards the south-west, and as he walked, passed now and then by respectful peasants and townsfolk heading uphill, he knew exactly how the appearance of the citadel behind him was changing. With the sun at his back, the darkness of the palisade would just be visible through the trees, and above it, to the right, the south face of the temple and the balconies of the Prime’s quarters. There would be smoke rising from the township, perhaps three slate-blue pigeons circling in the air. And here, further down the road, the temple would have disappeared, its place taken by the twin towers of the western gatehouse, each bearing at its pinnacle a tall staff flying the personal standard of Lord Heite – an emerald green serpent on a scarlet ground. These two flags, brilliant against the autumn sky, would be the last of the citadel that he would see before reaching the river.
The temptation was to turn and look, to permit himself a trace of sentiment. But that presupposed his continuance as a priest, his adherence to an order which he now felt he had entered dishonestly, with fraudulent vows of loyalty and obedience. And it presupposed he could live with what the Prime had told him almost a week ago.
No. He had to look. He would never see this place again.
But when he turned, he saw that the two standards had also disappeared. The citadel lay completely hidden, like Paoul’s falsehood, like his reaction when he had been informed that, five years from now, he was destined to be brought back from Brennis, brought back, and entered on the long and gruelling course of preparation that, one day, might end with him becoming Prime.
PART THREE
1
“Forzan Paoul! Are you here to take tea with me again? What a delightful surprise! Do be seated. Yes, there. Tell me, are they working you too hard down at that school? You mustn’t let them, you know.”
“I won’t, Kar Houle.”
It was Paoul’s free afternoon. Bringing a gift of Kar Houle’s favourite oatmeal-and-hazelnut biscuits, he had left his lodgings at the settlement farm and, well protected against the snow falling on Valdoe Hill, had climbed up to the vansery to visit once more the priest who, twelve years ago, had first examined him. Even then it had seemed to Paoul that Kar Houle was impossibly ancient; but, although now becoming rather frail, the old man was still quite active, taking regular walks on the hillside, practising his daily routine of martial exercises and working each morning in the physic garden or in the herb room indoors. His skin was liver-spotted and beginning to acquire the texture and colour of the finest parchment; he had lost two or three teeth and his white hair was not quite so thick, but his eyes were as clear and perceptive as ever. He was in his ninety-seventh year, the oldest inhabitant of the vansery, and indeed of Valdoe and perhaps the whole domain.
Paoul liked him. But there was another reason for today’s visit. On the way up here, Paoul had been trying to find the words that would enable him to seek Kar Houle’s advice without seeming to do so. He wanted above all to talk freely, to find a listener who might shed light on the paradox that had taken control of Paoul’s life: the paradox of distrusting the aims of the priesthood and yet revering its individual priests. Until this was resolved Paoul could not decide how to deal with the astounding revelation that they were planning to prepare him for the highest office of the empire. He did not know how many other candidates there would be, or how many different posts would intervene before the final question of his accession. But, given the opportunity, given that he was spiritually suited to such a position – and this, surely, they already believed – then he knew he had the ability to succeed. This was a fact he had demonstrated to himself over and over again. If he chose to become Prime, if becoming Prime depended solely upon himself, then, no matter how long it might take, he felt he could do it.
The Vansard, Phede Keldis, should have been the recipient of a young priest’s questions, but Paoul, living as he did away from the vansery, had only conversed with him twice. Besides, to ask fundamental questions of that kind would be regarded as an act of heresy.
Yet Paoul had to unburden himself. He had to talk to someone. Kar Houle, with his irreverent manner, his vast experience, his wisdom, and his apparent fondness for Paoul, would be unlikely to report a dubious conversation to Phede Keldis; Kar Houle was himself the senior kar at Valdoe and a member of the vansery board. And, alarmed, fascinated, and also peculiarly reassured to discover in himself a self-protec
tive streak of chilling and ruthless realism, Paoul had not overlooked the fact that Kar Houle did not have much longer to live.
As the servant brought the tea and arranged Paoul’s gift of biscuits on a carved willow platter, Paoul framed his opening remark and decided he would speak as soon as the man had shut the door.
At last the door closed; the peg of the latch dropped into place, and Paoul felt his tenseness giving way to the act of forming the first word.
Suddenly, one of the logs in Kar Houle’s hearth, whitish grey and all but consumed, collapsed and projected a smoking cinder onto the mat. Kar Houle rose and quickly threw the cinder back, and, pulling fresh logs from the basket, made up the fire. “One of the few privileges of age,” he said, once he had sat down again, and nodded at the hearth. This chamber, on an outside wall of the vansery, was one of the few private rooms to have a fireplace rather than the customary cradle for heated rocks or, what more usual still, no heating at all. “Have your lodgings improved, Forzan Paoul? Last time we spoke I sensed you were not entirely comfortable.”
“I did not mean to give that impression, Kar Houle.”
The old man smiled. “Well, the least we can do is give you a hot cup of tea.” He handed Paoul one of the two beakers and proffered the biscuits. The gesture, the faintly sweet smell of oatmeal and honey and chopped nuts, the aroma of clover-blossom tea, reminded Paoul of the Kar Houle who had waited with him in the harbour Trundleman’s quarters, who had sipped the same kind of tea and eaten the same kind of biscuits while the Veisdrach had been loading. For an instant Paoul was transported back there, to the moment on the ship when he had doubted Kar Houle’s affection for him, and he realized that he was still no nearer knowing whether Kar Houle or anyone else in a priest’s tunic was to be trusted. That providential little cinder might have spared him from what could have proved a fatal mistake.
“Tell me, Kar Houle,” Paoul said, once they had drunk their tea, “how thorough is the archive we keep here? At Hohe everything that is written is put into store.”
“The same applies at any vansery. Is there something specific you wish to know?”
“Not really. I was just curious.”
But later, as darkness was falling and Paoul left Kar Houle’s chamber, he decided to make his way to the library, not quite sure what it was that he hoped to find. From the sleeping-quarters he passed through narrow corridors lined with polished wood and lit by stone cressets, through the refectory and past the taug room, and came to the double doors of the library. After a moment’s hesitation, he went in.
On the day of his arrival, Phede Keldis, conducting Paoul round the vansery, had given him the freedom of the library and had shown him how the shelves and pigeonholes were arranged. The shutters had been open then; it had been sunny, and three or four priests had been reading at the low, sloping tables; another had been illuminating a copy of one of the legends.
This afternoon there was only a single priest present, on the far side of the room, a young phede who Paoul remembered was one of the leaders of Phede Keldis’s team of astronomers. His table lit by two free-standing lamps, he was engrossed in the uppermost of a heap of large parchments, a sky map showing the celestial dome as a circle and the stars and constellations as points of black, red, yellow, green and blue. A measuring-rod and pair of compasses lay across the parchment and he had been making notes on a tablet.
He looked up as Paoul entered, acknowledged him in the informal manner and, after making an offer of assistance which Paoul politely declined, went back to his work.
Lighting a portable lamp, Paoul approached the end of the room devoted to the archive, twenty racks extending from floor to ceiling and almost from wall to wall, so closely spaced that there was barely enough room to pass between them. Either side of each of the first fifteen racks was divided into five hundred compartments, each a hand’s-width square. Many of the compartments were as yet empty; in each of the rest, tightly and concentrically rolled, were stuffed several parchments. The other five racks, differently divided, held clay tablets, sheets of wood or reedpaper, and the more precious parchments, which were stored in capped cylinders.
Some of the hieroglyphs labelling the rows of compartments were flaking away; it took Paoul a while to deduce their meaning and to trace the section containing the records of induction. These were arranged in chronological order. Finally he found the parchments covering the Year of the Blue Hare, the two hundred and eighty-seventh of the Gehan era, and pulled them out.
Of all the secrets preserved by the priesthood, writing was one of the most powerful and the most arcane. In its higher forms it was denied even to the ruling clan. The notation was based on pictures of the object to be represented, refined and augmented with a stylized version of the smoke-signalling system evolved by the army. The characters were written with a pen or brush, vertically, in columns from left to right. Paoul had been taught the latest Hohe script: Kar Houle’s hand, full of old-fashioned flourishes and lacking many of the contractions that Paoul used, was nevertheless neat and readable, and Paoul had no difficulty in finding the parchments relating to himself.
Kar Houle’s report was exceedingly thorough. Paoul read it to the end. The part describing himself at seven was uncanny, so unfamiliar and yet recognizable was the embryo of his adult self. It was curious to see how much and how little he had changed, and how incompletely the boy he had known himself to be had been perceived by the kars. But the account of the search at Sturt, the interrogation of the villagers, Kar Houle’s interviews with Beilin Crogh and, most of all, the detailed examination of the ten corpses recovered from a grave in the woods and brought back to Valdoe, all this – and especially the description of an “aboriginal male in fourth decade, subject’s putative father, incapacitated by old spear wound, killed by severe blow above right ear”, the impartial, clinical, inch-by-inch dissection and measurement of the body of Tagart, Paoul’s father, Shode, leader and chieftain of the southern tribes – all this he read with a surge of pain and adult understanding, realizing now something of what Tagart must have endured and trying to imagine him as he must once have been, in the days when he had been whole and proud and free. The knives and probes and note-taking of the kars were not the last indignity he had suffered, nor was the callous disposal of his remains, like so much refuse, “by fire”: for, throughout the report, Kar Houle again and again expressed doubt that Paoul was Tagart’s son. Only at the very end did he relent. “Without confirmation of our suspicions, the child’s word has been accepted on this matter.”
The library was empty when Paoul had finished reading: the phede, leaving one of the lamps burning for Paoul, had gone. Paoul rolled up the parchments and returned them to their place. The rest of his personal records, dealing with his career at Hohe and his arrival at Valdoe, would be in the Vansard’s quarters. Even if he had been free to see them, he was sure they could have told him nothing, any more than he had learned from the archive here. He did not even know what he had wanted to find.
From the common-room he could hear a five-voice chant, the contrapuntal Benison of the Night, a chant he himself had sung at Hohe. The words then had seemed moving and profound. Now they seemed to have no more warmth and solidity than the snowflakes falling so thickly outside.
Resolving to go back to his meagre lodgings at the farm rather than take supper here, Paoul left the library in darkness and quietly shut the doors.
* * *
Paoul had been at Valdoe for just over three months, and he had yet to settle in or feel himself at home. The place, or his memory of it, had changed almost beyond recognition. Under the firm administration of General Teshe, the domain had prospered. Valdoe Village had grown in size, with many new buildings.
The house where Paoul had once stayed, the house of Beilin Crogh’s father, had been taken over by another family. Both the father and the mother, however, were still in the village, living, Paoul discovered, with their son, who had long since left the army and built a co
mmodious dwelling on the outskirts, with a large plot in which he kept beehives. He owned many more hives in surrounding villages: Crogh had become the foremost producer of honey in the district. He was now an important freeman, with a place on the village council. This entitled him to send the youngest of his sons, a lad of thirteen, to the school where Paoul taught each day.
Classes were held in the schoolroom, part of the ornate Meeting House, and attended in all by forty or fifty sons of notables from the Trundle and the village. The pupils varied in ability as much as they did in age, from five to fifteen. The curriculum, determined by Hohe, was limited to the simplest treatment of practical subjects – craft, agronomy, applied mathematics, language, a little of the more accessible philosophy as it affected the blue priesthood and the beliefs of the farmers.
Paoul’s two fellow teachers, a middle-aged phede and the old ilven who was in charge, seemed content with the drudgery of their lot, but, for Paoul, only the knowledge that his position was temporary enabled him to continue. Often, though, when he was able to treat the boys as children rather than pupils, when he was able to forget that he was equipping them to perpetuate the rule of the Gehans, he derived enjoyment, even delight, from his work. The ilven had hinted that he was pleased with Paoul’s influence on the school.
One afternoon almost a month after his visit to the archive, Paoul was approached between lessons by the ilven, who, vaguely alluding to the fact that he would be “sorry to lose him”, handed Paoul a sealed note from the vansery. The note ordered Paoul to report to the Vansard the following day. No reason was given for the summons, but from the ilven’s reassuring manner Paoul guessed that there was nothing much to fear. On the contrary, it looked as if his promotion had come sooner than he dared have hoped.
The course of the interview, though, soon took an unexpected turn. “I have received impressive accounts of your aptitude as a teacher,” the Vansard said, once the formalities were over. He was seated at his high-backed chair, the raw light of a late winter morning falling across the neatly ordered parchments and tablets on the broad surface of his desk. His brown eyes, more than ever, seemed to be inquisitive, assessing, secretly ironic, watching Paoul from deep sockets set under a wide forehead and closely cropped black hair.
The Earth Goddess Page 16