by Tim Stead
He was sitting, staring at the blank stone wall. It was something that he did a great deal. He tried to remember his life in detail, each day going to a different part, and today he was a child, remembering his stern father, a tall man with silver and black hair, clean shaven with unsmiling eyes. His father had been a farm labourer, but dedicated to his son’s advancement. Every day he insisted that Keb explain what he had learned at school, and explain in detail.
Jarl had known what he had know – that doing something was the best way to learn - and he could not think of a way to bring this discipline to his son other than by making him the teacher. Keb knew that every night he would be forced to teach, and so he learned. He made notes. He struggled to understand his lessons with a desperation born of his father’s hard hand. He learned to ask the questions that he knew his father would ask; simple questions with simple answers. His father was not a clever man.
He did well. With that kind of motivation he could do nothing else. His father was not impressed that he was top of his class. Jarl saw the other children playing in the street and frowned and shook his head. Wastrels. Lazy children. Derelict parents. He wanted Keb to be different. He forced Keb to be different.
Keb was brighter than his father, but he was clever enough to know that he was not clever. Other children had thoughts that startled him, ideas that amazed him, but Keb learned by rote. It was his good fortune that learning by rote was what his teachers desired. Originality was not valued, not encouraged.
What did Keb learn? He learned The Book. It had no other name, but in fact it was many books, each dealing with different aspects of life. He learned to read and write, to do arithmetic, he attended the skills classes and learned a little of weapons and ploughs, and potters wheels, though he showed no talent for manual skills.
He learned so well that he became an oracle. Other men in his village came to his father’s house to ask if they could consult Keb. They wanted to know how they could do things that would comply with the law. It was cheaper and less frightening than going to a green clad master of the rule, a priest. Keb saw his father’s pride in this, and for the first time he knew that his father was pleased with him. He redoubled his efforts, learned more, studied The Book even at home. He remembered the words well enough, and began to take seriously his duty in the advice he gave. He studied houses, and pottery, and the way that farmers planted. He struggled with the application of the words to the world around him.
Often he would sit in one place for a long time, trying to pick fault with everything he saw, because he never saw perfection. How ever many times the priests were summoned, or came of their own accord, there was always something left that was tainted, wrong, an insult to Seth Yarra.
Then came the day that ended his childhood; the day the priests came for him.
It was a day like any other summers day. It was hot. He sat indoors with The Book, a copy that his father had borrowed from a pious farmer for whom he worked. Keb was reading about clothes, about the correct dress for scholars and priests, the cloths to be used, the colours and lengths, when there was a banging on the door.
His father answered it, and he listened for a moment to quiet words spoken, and then the tiny living room was full of men, full of black and green. Keb was afraid. He had never seen so many priests in one place.
His fame had spread. Word of his knowledge, and of the advice he gave had reached even the ears of priests, and as far as the chancellor of the seminary in the great town of Larris, a hundred miles away.
What he was doing was wrong, they told his father. It was for priests alone, and masters of the rule in particular to give advice on the true path, the right way of doing.
Keb listened to them, and listened to his father whining in their presence, all his strength sapped by fear. He studied them, and was shocked to see that even here there was no perfection. One priest had a belt that was too broad – it did not match his rank – and another wore his cloak too long.
“Test me,” he’d said. It was an arrogant thing to say. It was the boldest and most arrogant moment of his life, and when he remembered it he cringed inwardly. Their eyes had turned on him like dogs on a trapped animal. He could see the hunger for punishment, his punishment, in their eyes. There was one priest there, however, a teacher at the seminary he later discovered, who outranked the others, and was amused by the boy’s challenge.
“Very well,” he said.
There followed a barrage of questions. When he did not know the answer he said that he did not know, but most of the time he knew, and he spoke the words from The Book. Sometimes he even expanded on the words, strove to make them plainer, as he had done so many times for the farmers and craftsmen of the village.
At the end of it the priests had been silent, all but the teacher who had asked the questions. This man turned to Jarl.
“Your boy is a prodigy, Jarl, son of Hern. You have been blessed by Seth Yarra, but your punishment is that he will be taken from you. He will return with me to the seminary and be examined to see if he is fit for the green or black.”
Jarl had bowed and scraped, smiled like an idiot. It was the moment that Keb lost respect for his father, seeing him so cowed among a group of weak men that he could have broken in two with his massive hands. Later he understood, and he forgave Jarl’s weakness. Nobody could defy the masters of the rule. They were the servants of Seth Yarra. They were his voice, bore his knowledge on behalf of the people, but that first day, the first time he saw them all together like that, he had thought them pompous and self important.
He had gone with them. It was the first time that he had left the village, and the first time he had seen a town. It was the first time for so many things. He asked the teacher if he might be loaned a copy of The Book, for it was all that he read, and the teacher had nodded with approval and gave him a fine, illuminated, leather bound volume, as fine a thing as he had ever seen.
“The words of the book are for all,” the teacher had said. “But this form of the book is appropriate only for those who have taken the green cloth, as I hope you may.”
Keb had been impressed. At the seminary he was prodded and questioned and taken to a village. It was not a real village. It was a place that had been built as an examination, a place tainted with error. Find the taint, they had told him, find all that is wrong and tell the man who walks with you.
Two hours later he had returned to the gate where the priests waited and the man, not a priest, but a scribe and servant to priests, had given over a paper to the teacher who compared it with a list. The comparison took some time, and Keb had stood anxiously by while his future was decided.
The teacher raised his head, and to this day Keb remembered the words he had spoken.
“He has correctly identified the twenty seven grave errors,” he said. “In addition to that he had identified forty-two of the sixty-five lesser errors, and fifteen of the twenty-three trivial errors. There are no false errors.”
There was a muttering among the priests.
“Let me see,” another said. The teacher had handed over both lists, and they waited again while the man made his own comparison.
“It is true,” he said eventually. “The boy has passed the exam.”
It was only later he learned that the exam was one given to students after their first year of study. It was an exam for boys of age nineteen, and Keb was sixteen. That had decided his future. He had entered the seminary, studied for a year and formally chosen the green cloth. After another eight years he had been selected, taken away from his studies, and sent here.
Keb was startled from his reverie by keys rattling in the door of his cell. Had he been asleep? It was surely not yet time for the clockwork progression of his meals?
The figure that came through the door was not the one that he expected, and he recoiled from the sight. It was the demon, Fenris Godkiller, the one they named Narak.
There was nowhere for Keb to go. He could not run, but he feared this one
more than all the others. He had not seen him since the day of his capture, since his questioning and the threat of torture.
The wolf god moved the chair so that it faced the bed where Keb sat, and sat down.
“I have meant to come here for some time,” he said. “But I have been busy.” He smiled.
“I have no other secrets,” Keb said.
“Secrets,” Narak mused. “You have knowledge that I do not have. You have lived in a place that I have never seen. Tell me about it.”
Keb shrugged. “Tell you what?”
“Tell me what is important.”
“Different things are important to different people. I do not understand the question.”
“Think about it.”
Keb thought. He thought about the village where he grew up, about the seminary, about the work he had done here, about the men who had sent him.
“The rule,” he said. “The rule is important.”
“Then tell me.”
Keb laughed. “I studied it for ten years. How could I tell it to you?”
“Tell me about it. I do not want to know the details. What is it for?”
“The rule is the law of Seth Yarra. It tells us how we must live.” Keb saw no harm in this. A part of the law was that he spread the word, correct innocent error, make sure that people understood.
“How you must live? In what sense?”
“In every sense. It tells how we should build houses, how we should dress, plant crops, make pots. It defines the proper way of living.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“And what does it say about gods?”
Keb studied Narak, but there was no threat in his voice or his demeanour. He knew that Narak was considered a god here, a god of wolves, and he was wary of angering him, but the truth was the truth, and it was written in The Book.
“That there is only one god,” he said.
“I have never met a god,” Narak said. “I am disinclined to believe in them.”
The statement shocked Keb to the core. “Then what are you?” he asked.
“I am a man. I was born a man, and nothing has happened since to convince me that I have become anything else.”
“Your powers? You do not fight like a man.”
“I have certain abilities, it is true,” Narak agreed. “Many people consider me a god, but in here,” he tapped the side of his head. “I am the same man chosen by Pelion hundreds of years ago to protect the wolves and the forest. The ‘powers’ as you call them are merely tools to help me do those things.”
“And Pelion?”
“A man. I knew him. He liked wine, and he liked cheese that had been allowed to mature a while, and venison, and he liked the sound of his own voice.”
“Yet you permit men to worship you.” Keb was even more outraged. He was angry, but he checked himself, sat back again. It would not do to make this one angry. For all his protestations of manhood this demon could strike him dead in a moment.
“It helps them,” Narak said. “And who am I to say that I am not a god? Pelion named us so, and men have accepted it, for the most part.”
“From whence comes your power?”
“I do not know, but I assume that Pelion understood. I was made to act, not to teach, and that knowledge was not given to me. Some of us have sought it, but none have learned Pelion’s secrets, and he in no longer… available.”
Keb thought for a moment that Narak was trying to mislead him, to confuse him in some way. It was said among the priests of Seth Yarra that the demon Narak was the cleverest of all the demons in this land, that he could foretell the actions of others and lead them into error. It was said that he could even make the truth lie on his behalf. Keb saw none of that. Narak seemed relaxed. He seemed honest. Keb had seen men with power. In the weeks before he had boarded ship for this land he had been spoken to by the highly exalted, the black and green clad men who ruled his own and, and in Narak he saw the same ease, the same confidence.
“Why do you tell me these things?” he asked.
“Call it whim,” Narak laughed. “I could not say such words to others. Now you tell me, from where comes your power?”
“Power? I have no power.”
“Your rule; the stick with which you beat your common folk. Where does it come from?”
“We beat no-one,” he said, but in his minds eye he saw his father again, a strong man whining and bending before the pompous priests.
“Your truth, then, though I’ll wager it amounts to the same thing. Whence comes your truth?”
“From Seth Yarra.”
“He speaks to you?”
“You mean The Book. It is all written down in The Book.”
“A mighty volume, then, if it tells all you say.”
“It is many volumes,” Keb said. “Together they are known as The Book.”
“And who wrote this book?”
“Seth Yarra.”
“What? Your god took up pen and ink and sat at a desk writing words on parchment?”
Keb tried to frame an answer in his head, but found that he could not. The image of Seth Yarra with a quill in hand scratching at a parchment by candle light seemed blasphemous, but most of the alternatives were worse.
“That knowledge has not been given to me,” he said, resorting to Narak’s own words. The Wolf smiled.
“A fair answer,” he said. “But it is a question that you should ask if you ever have the opportunity. So all the words in this book, they remain unchanged, year after year, century after century.”
“They do.”
“There is never any improvement, no advance, no better plough, no stronger bow, no better way to sail a ship?”
“No. Why would there be? All are things that Seth Yarra has revealed to us. They are the best of everything.”
“No new tactics in battle, then? No adaptation, originality, creative thinking?”
“No.”
“Then you will lose, because our tactics are better. They change and adapt to our enemy. Our cavalry gives us a great advantage, and four hundred years ago we beat you. Nothing changes. Your own book says that you must lose, that your fellows must be slaughtered.” He stood and rapped on the door. “I must go now. There is an army to be led, and another to be defeated. I will come back and tell you how it went.”
The door opened and closed, and Keb was abruptly alone once more. How could that be? Narak’s words had a ring of truth. He had read the section of The Book that dealt with warfare. He had read it many times. Whole passages still lived in his head.
He knew with awful certainty that Narak was correct. If they obeyed the book they would lose. If they did not then they were indeed lost.
36. Beyond the Wall
Pascha watched the men for some time. It was quickly apparent from their behaviour that they were hiding, and shortly after that she saw that several of them were wounded. A flock of sparrows moved from branch to branch above them, and through sparrow ears she listened to their conversation. Through their eyes she studied them.
They were Berashi. These were men who had escaped when the gate fell, and she was surprised that there were so many. There were enough of them to be a useful force.
Pascha was unsure what she should do. She had stayed on the hill outside Benafelas until the Seth Yarra army marched, but it had not been a lengthy wait. She had expected it to be days. The camps were not even half complete when they left. It was as though they had seized upon a new urgency. There was a lot of shouting, and men had formed up into marching order, long columns snaking through the camps, and then they had gone, followed by ox-drawn carts laden with supplies. Pascha did not recognise the breed of ox, and thought that they must be something that had come with them on the ships.
She had tried to count them, and had reported their number to Narak using the calling ring. Ten thousand men marched. The remainder stayed behind.
Now she was in the woods close to the pass, west of
the Green Road, west of the gate. She had looked at the gate, and seen that it was still closed, blocked by a great stone. She had passed through it many times, usually disguised as a mortal woman, and she had seen the great stone that hung above the arch. From the activity around it she guessed that the Berashi had cut it down as they left.
But what to do? She had told Narak about the Seth Yarra, she had found the men as he had asked, but he had not told her what to do when she found them. What would Narak want?
She should speak to them. They would be afraid, thinking that they would be unable to return home, that all was lost. It would help them to know that Narak meant to retake the gate.