by Lee Duigon
“I’ve been to the camp, but Obst is not there,” he said. “I searched, and found signs that indicate he left under his own power. I would have thought that was impossible, but that’s how it looks to me. I do have some skill in tracking.”
“But where would he go?” Ellayne said.
“He didn’t come after us, or we would’ve met him on the way. This is the only trail up to the top, and we’re on it,” Jack said. “So he must have gone back down.”
“Without us?”
“I guess so. But you’d think he would’ve waited for us.”
“I wouldn’t have said he had the strength to crawl ten feet,” Martis said. “He seemed very near the end when I parted from him. Nevertheless, he seems to have walked away. He took food with him.”
“But he’s too sick to go anywhere alone,” Ellayne said. “He wouldn’t get far.”
“It’ll be dark soon. We ought to make camp,” Martis said. “Maybe we can pick up his trail in the morning.” He pointed to Wytt. “Maybe your little friend can find his scent.”
Wytt showed his teeth and growled. “He’ll try,” Jack said.
Yes, Obst was dying when they left him. He didn’t mind much. He was an old man, and he was proud he’d come that far up the mountain. Besides, the bell would ring very soon now, and he didn’t suppose the world would outlive him by very much.
After Martis left him, he drifted into a kind of dreamless sleep from which he was surprised to wake up still alive. It was dark. He was thirsty, but he couldn’t remember where the water was and hardly had the strength to reach for it. He thought he must be pretty near the end.
As he lay there, thirsting, the darkness gradually lightened. It occurred to him that he couldn’t feel anything from the knees down: dying by inches, he thought. God is merciful.
He had just begun to pray when he heard the bell.
What else could it be? The music came rolling down from the top of the mountain; it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. His feet suddenly prickled, but he hardly noticed. He thought, if you could ring the stars, they’d sound like that. He felt his heart throb forcefully with every peal of the bell. He felt a pressure inside his head that made it uncomfortable to be lying on his back.
So he sat up.
By the time the bell stopped ringing, it was light enough to see and Obst wasn’t dying anymore. He didn’t think anyone would die that day, anywhere in the whole world. He could not remember the last time he’d felt so strong. He picked up the waterskin and took a good, long drink. It was delicious! Then he crawled out of the shelter, stood up easily, and stretched.
“Lord,” he asked aloud, “why have you restored my life on the last day of the world? But nevertheless I thank you. It does feel good!”
As Obst understood Scripture—and he’d studied it all his life—the bell would ring, God would hear it, and God would unmake the world. It would be the ultimate punishment of man’s wickedness; every prophet warned of it. God had given to each prophet a different way to say the same thing. Abgar, who lived a thousand years before King Ozias, had it: “As a rush of waters, a clash of mighty waters, the wrath of God shall drown the nations.” A thousand years after Abgar, the prophetess Phobeth said, “Burn, burn, saith the Lord, in the great burning from which there is no deliverance.” And other prophets spoke of plague and pestilence, earthquakes, ice, and all-devouring swarms of locusts with venom in their tails. So there was really no guessing what form the end of the world would take. It might be any one of those, or all of them.
“But what to do now?” Obst said to himself. As a hermit, he had long had the habit of talking to himself.
He had an unaccountable urge to hurry down the mountain as fast as his legs would carry him. It would be too bad not to see Jack and Ellayne anymore, but Obst was sure they were already in Heaven. God would have taken them up as soon as they’d rung the bell.
“I can’t just stay here,” he said. “It may be that the Lord will grant a period of grace, so that souls may be called to repentance before He carries out the destruction.
“Yes—that’s why you have given me a little extra life, Lord, isn’t it? So I can warn the people that the end is close at hand. It has been decreed. Any day now, really! One last chance to repent, and then the end.”
Snatching up the waterskin and a satchel with some dried meat in it, Obst began his trek down from the mountain, back to the inhabited lands below. God had given him one more mission, and he was eager to begin.
So he was long gone when Jack and Ellayne returned to the camp, and they didn’t know what to make of it. Tomorrow they would try to find his trail.
Over the campfire and the last of their food, Martis had a word of caution for them.
“The First Prester will have his servants combing the country for you,” he said. “He will realize that I failed him; he may believe I met with some mischance. But I think he’ll probably be looking for me, too. If any of us fall into his hands, we’ll never emerge from them alive. So we’ll need a safe place to hide, and for a long time. Or until the world ends.”
“Lintum Forest, where King Ozias’ mother hid,” said Jack. “That’s where we ought to go. They’ll never find us there.”
“I’ve already thought of that. But Lintum’s full of outlaws. Any one of them might sell us to the Temple. And you can be sure the First Prester will devote his full attention to the forest.”
Ellayne looked like she might cry. “But I thought we could go home!” she said.
“As if we could get home before the world ends,” Jack said. “We probably won’t even get off the mountain.”
“We must proceed as if the world were not going to come to an end,” Martis said. “I know little of theology, and you know less. It’d be foolish for us to try to make a judgment one way or the other.
“If I had only my own life to save, I’d go back to Obann, to the city. It’s a great city, and I daresay I know it as well as anyone, and better than most. And there’s the Old City across the river, too—what’s left of it.
“A man who knows the city as I do could hide there for a very long time. Many do. Obann is full of men with prices on their heads. Some of them have dodged the hangman for many a year, without ever setting foot outside the city.
“There are sewers, abandoned buildings—even buried buildings. Dry wells and hollow places in the city walls. There are fugitives living on the rooftops. There are whole city blocks where neither the day watch nor the night watch ever go.”
And—but this he didn’t mention to the children—there were ways for a skilled assassin to get close to Lord Reesh: close enough to kill him.
Treason? But I’m already a traitor to my master, Martis thought, and surely he’s a traitor to his God. I’m already condemned to the pit of lost souls; but if these children live, I’ll have one good deed to my name—not to mention the last laugh on Lord Reesh.
“Do you think we could all hide in Obann?” Ellayne said. “Wytt, too?”
“We can think about it while we journey down the mountain. We don’t have to decide tonight,” Martis said. “The Old City might be the best place for you. And I have friends, as it were, in both cities, of whom the First Prester knows nothing.
“Besides all that, it’s the last place he’ll look.”
CHAPTER 3
Of War and Prophecy
We need now to visit Obann ourselves, where Lord Reesh is attending a meeting of the High Council of the Oligarchy.
The chief councilor of every stone-walled town in Obann has a seat among the oligarchs; but only half a dozen lords sit on the High Council. These are the men who truly rule Obann.
They were gathered today in the First Prester’s great audience chamber in the Temple, with its high, vaulted ceiling, tall stained-glass windows, and jewel-like mosaics of the great kings and prophets of Obann’s long history. These, with their wide, solemn eyes, looked down from the ceiling and lent an air of gravity to the proceedings.
The six lords sat at a round oak table, highly polished, that had room for sixty.
Chairing the meeting was Lord Ruffin, the governor-general, elected by his peers, a small man with dark, piercing eyes and a long, sharp nose. At his left sat burly, black-bearded Lord Gwyll, responsible for the management of Obann’s armies; then Lord Chutt, Taxes and Revenue; Lord Davensay, Commerce; Judge Tombo, Civil Administration; and to the governor-general’s right, representing the Temple, Lord Reesh himself.
Fat, his face wrinkled like an old apple left in a closet, his hair white and stringy, his eyes a pale and filmy blue, Lord Reesh sat blinking impatiently as Lord Gwyll went on and on about his preparations for the coming war. It was Reesh who had suggested calling this meeting; but the governor-general first wanted to hear from Gwyll. Thankfully, the general was almost finished.
“If we can just supply the major cities,” he said, “so that they can stand like great rocks awash in the wave, they’ll still be standing when this wave recedes, as it inevitably must. These Heathen confederacies never last for long. Come the winter, they’ll head back home.”
“Meanwhile, Lord Gwyll, it’ll be a bit hard on those of our people who don’t live behind fortifications, won’t it?” the governor-general said. “It sounds as if you’re giving up a whole year’s crops for lost.”
“We’ll come out of the walled cities and hit the enemy hard, every chance we get,” growled Gwyll. “I’m sorry if you don’t like a defensive strategy, Lord Ruffin. I don’t either! But by all accounts, this is going to be one big, nasty invasion—worse than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. We shall do well just to hold on to our cities till the winter.”
“It’s always bad when the Heathen unite behind a holy man,” Lord Davensay said. He didn’t look especially worried about it; but then he never looked worried.
Wearily, Lord Reesh held up a hand. Ruffin nodded to him.
“My lords,” said Ruffin, “the First Prester wishes to speak.”
“Thank you, my lord,” said Reesh. He looked at each of the five great lords. He was finding it difficult to begin, although he’d been brooding for hours over what he was going to say. Might as well begin, he thought. The words will come to me.
“My lords, there is no longer a cloud over the top of Bell Mountain. The Heathen have gathered in unprecedented numbers to attack us.
“In our thinly populated regions, strange beasts have been seen, creatures for which we have no names. Strange fish have appeared in our waters. I am sure some of you saw that enormous lobster-thing that some yokels carted in from the coast the other day.
“Here in our own city of Obann, hysterics run to and fro, babbling about their dreams and visions. Right here in the Temple, we’ve had kitchen-maids, scullions, and old washerwomen going out of their heads and speaking nonsense. Old wrecks who never learned to read or write, who never listened to a sermon in their lives, now speak words that sound very like passages of Scripture. I doubt there’s a great house in Obann that hasn’t heard this moonshine from its servants.”
The other lords nodded. Reesh was telling them nothing that they didn’t know already; but this was the first time anyone would speak of it.
“You are well aware, my lords, that seven days ago, just as dawn was breaking, the pealing of a great bell was heard throughout the city. We have, of course, many bells in Obann; but it was none of them. Furthermore, we know now that the same thing happened elsewhere, at precisely the same time. Even in towns that haven’t any bells! I think we may just assume that this bell was heard everywhere in Obann.
“By now, you have all been reminded of the Scripture in which King Ozias, going into exile for life, announced his intention to erect a bell on the summit of Mount Yul, which most of us call Bell Mountain. Someday, the king said, someone would climb the mountain and ring the bell; and it was the king’s hope God would hear it. To which the prophet Penda replied, ‘Yea, God will surely hear it.’
“It is my belief that the mysterious tolling we all heard at dawn a week ago was the ringing of that bell.”
Lord Chutt, Taxes and Revenue, laughed out loud, a harsh and unbelieving laugh.
“My lord First Prester—you, of all people! You’re talking rot, pure rot. Medieval superstition. You don’t even believe in God. We all know it.”
Reesh silenced him with a look.
“I am an old man, my lord, the oldest man in this room,” Reesh said. “I don’t have time for fantasy. I don’t have time to push the facts away until I’m forced to swallow them.
“The fact is that we heard the bell, and it wasn’t any bell of ours. The fact is that they heard it in every city, every town, every farming village, and every logging camp that has reported in so far.
“The fact is that the cloud that hid the summit of Bell Mountain for uncounted generations has disappeared, and it disappeared the day we heard the bell.
“And the fact is that the Scriptures speak of this. The old and the young shall dream dreams, the prophet Ika said, and see visions. And Prophet Asara said, ‘The lowliest among you shall be as prophets to you.’
“This is exactly what has happened, and it is a fact. It cannot be ignored.
“I have devoted all my life to laboring for Obann, toiling to lift it back to those heights of glory and greatness that it enjoyed a thousand years ago under the Empire. I take no pleasure in these facts that I have enumerated to you.”
“Of course not—but burn it all, what do they mean?” Lord Gwyll roared. “Another fact is that we’re about to have a war—a war such as none of us has ever seen in all our lives. We can’t be chauntering on about bells and prophecies at a time like this! There’ll be precious little time for pondering Scripture, if the Heathen get over our walls.”
They nodded at that speech, too. Reesh could hardly blame them. Until the day the bell rang, he, too, would have dismissed it all as medieval superstition.
“My lords, my friends,” he said, spreading his wrinkled hands on the cool, smooth surface of the table. “It is popularly believed that the ringing of the bell on Bell Mountain presages the destruction of the world. A few country presters who should have known better have already said so in their sermons.
“This belief is spreading like a fire in a dried-out cornfield. We have to do something about it. Who’s going to fight if he thinks the world’s about to end? Who’s going to work? Unless we find an effective answer to it, we will not win this war. We shall be unable to defend our cities; and then, whether God ends the world or not, it’ll be all over with us.”
Judge Tombo, fatter than Lord Reesh by fifty pounds, and twenty years younger, remained after the meeting was over and the others had gone.
“They don’t believe you,” he said.
They had adjourned to Lord Reesh’s private drawing room and ordered wine. The judge was the First Prester’s best friend. Between them, Tombo liked to joke, they’d buried a whole cemetery’s worth of men who would never be missed.
“This has to be stopped, and I don’t know how to stop it,” Reesh said. He noticed his hands were trembling: a bad sign. But his mind continued to grapple with the problem, nonstop.
“I agree,” Tombo said. “You alarm me, Reesh. If there really is a God, and the Scriptures tell the truth about Him, then you and I are in serious trouble—notwithstanding everything we’ve done was for the good of our country.”
“And ourselves!” snapped Reesh. “I’m old enough to be honest.”
“There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about God deciding to end the world.”
Reesh waved those words away. “Bah!” he said. “All the Scripture says is that God will hear the bell when someone rings it. It doesn’t say what He will do. All those prophecies about the end of the world were fulfilled when the Empire was destroyed. That was a thousand years ago, and we still haven’t struggled but a part of the way back to where we were when it happened.”
Tombo grinned at him. “But then you weren’t chosen First
Prester for your attainments as a theologian, were you?” he said.
“I was chosen because I made it my business to be chosen. I never had time for all the holy books and commentaries. I did what I could to make religion a force for order and stability. Now I realize I should have done more. But it’s too late: every half-wit in Obann is prophesying these days. I underestimated the power of superstition, and its persistence.”
“I can’t tell my people to arrest everyone who prophesies,” Tombo said. “That’ll only make it worse. And yet we can’t ignore it, either.”
“You can help me find out who rang the bell, and take them into custody,” Reesh said. “I had a report of two children from somewhere up the river. They dreamed dreams and ran away from home to climb the mountain. I put my best man on it—Martis—to find them, follow them, and stop them. It seems he failed.”
“He never fails.”
“Well, this time he did! Someone rang that bell, probably those two children. The whole nation heard it, which is supernatural in itself.”
Tombo peered into his wine. “So we were wrong,” he said. “Wrong about everything.”
“Not everything! We were right to labor for order and progress. We were right to remove anyone who stood in the way. But now we are confronted with a supernatural event, one that threatens to demoralize the nation in a time of crisis. We must find those children and question them—exhaustively. The Temple doesn’t have the manpower for that, so you must help me, Tombo.”
“I will. I promise you that.”
“My task will be even harder. The entire Temple must be mobilized. Every prester, every reciter, in every chamber house across the land, must preach against these wild prophecies. We cannot deny the event, so we’ll have to dream up another explanation for it. We may even have to rewrite parts of Scripture. It won’t be easy to get everyone to agree to that.”
“Those who don’t agree must be replaced,” said the judge.
Reesh sighed. The wine had lost its taste for him. Even so, he relaxed in Tombo’s company.