Vedientir

by Ivan Hladni

  "Grak," the black raven continued in the old language. "The hunters are following you."

  "Where are they?" asked Dion nervously.

  "What happened?" asked Kerkio worried by Dion's reaction to whatever it was that the raven was saying.

  "Hunters," Dion replied to Kerkio just as the raven continued speaking.

  "They are following us on the south side of the mountain," Dion translated the rest of what the raven said to him and then smiled with relief.

  "They could not pass through Tialoch, so they have to take the south road to Eborum. It's not easy to reach that city from any direction and they have to pass through it to get to the north side of the mountains. If they manage to wrestle their way out of Eborum and reach Phares, we'll surely be on a ship by then. The only problem is that they will know we're going to Syevnor."

  Kerkio waved off Dion's concern.

  "Let them know where we're going. What matters is that we don't see them again, especially on this road with no help in sight. Even plain boars are nasty beasts when angry but these are worse in so many ways."

  "Grak!" croaked the white raven differently than ever before, as if he was nervous.

  "Grak! Vedientir!" croaked the white raven again and flapped his wings furiously as if he wanted to fly away.

  "Where?" asked Dion, surprised and puzzled by what the raven was saying, even though he had heard of that name before.

  The raven pointed with his beak to the pine tree forest on their left.

  "The raven mentioned Vedientir," said Dion to Kerkio. "Perhaps he is referring to the temple that is there in the forest, at least it's there according to Daedar's map. I don't know how the raven knows about it or if he indeed knows about it. I might have arrived at the wrong conclusion."

  "How far away is it?" Kerkio sounded tired and unwilling to go. "We absolutely cannot waste a lot of time, especially after the ravens' news."

  Dion looked at the map once more.

  "A day's part to reach the temple and return to where we are standing right now."

  "You really must?"

  "It seems so," he answered while honestly deliberating Kerkio's question and then he pulled out an acorn from one of his pockets.

  "I wish to know what this acorn does," he said. "Grandfather said that its spell should only be cast inside one of the old temples, otherwise it is spent uselessly. I want to see for myself what happens, and I want to be able to tell him that I've kept my promise, if I ever see him again."

  "Zmai, hody. V les," said Dion and called the dragon into the forest.

  "Just let us be quick about it," said Kerkio and went after Dion and the dragon into the forest and onto what looked like a seldom used path that led uphill and west between massive trunks of tall and ancient pine trees. The ravens once again flew away, but this time into the forest in front of them. The path stopped taking them uphill soon. It then led them to the edge of a small ravine which they followed, walking next to the tops of the pine trees that grew at the bottom of it, and finally it led them to a clearing in the forest, covered mostly by a calm lake of dark green water.

  "The temple is probably there," said Dion when they stepped out of the forest. The north part of the clearing belonged not to the lake but to a meadow full of bright-colored mountain flowers that kept their red, purple, white and yellow petals open to daylight and various insects that were buzzing around. A small stone house stood at the northern edge of the meadow, and opposite it, there was a small stilt house on the lake's north shore.

  "Seems strange that the forest did not reclaim this meadow," said Kerkio. "Looks like someone is taking care of it, or used to take care of it until recently, but I don't see signs of life here. Perhaps there is somebody in that temple of yours, but I doubt it."

  Kerkio pointed toward the round stone house that was some hundred footsteps away from where they were now standing.

  Some kind of uneasiness crept into Dion as he watched the house built of rough, unworked stones with roof tiles of pine bark that were covered in as much moss as the stones were.

  "I doubt that is a temple. It looks more like an abandoned house or a shed," said Dion, but he wasn't utterly sure.

  "Voda," said the dragon and went towards the stilt house. A thick patch of reed, almost as tall as the dragon, grew in the shallow water around the low bridge that led to the stilt house.

  "I'm going to the temple," said Dion and left Kerkio alone at the edge of the meadow.

  The stone temple was much smaller than his house in Echa Rei. There were no windows on it, but only an old wooden door that hung flimsily on two hinges struck between stones. Enough sunlight managed to reach the inside of the temple between the planks that he could see that the temple was empty, save for a spider that had made a net in the corner of the door.

  He looked for some kind of a sign, a symbol or a message on the floor or the wall, but found nothing. Nothing seemed special or important.

  He knelt down in front of the temple and got the scrolls from his bag. He read all of them but not one said anything about gods or how to ask for their help. For the first time he regretted not listening to his grandfather's stories with more care.

  "Reading the rune out loud will probably be enough?" he asked himself aloud while he traced the wrinkles on the acorn with his finger, but when he looked at it more carefully he saw that there was no rune on the surface of the acorn.

  "What now?"

  He turned the acorn around in his fingers.

  "I should give it a first and last try," he answered himself, opened the door of the temple, stooped a little to fit through the small door and walked in.

  "What if someone actually appears?" he thought and surprised himself with that thought but then straightened his back, took a deep breath and almost ceremoniously raised the hand with the acorn.

  "Pomoch," he said in the old language and waited for the acorn to activate. It seemed as if the acorns reddish skin grew brighter, but nothing else happened.

  "Help," he repeated his request but that served no purpose either.

  "Sovem," he tried with another word. "I'm calling." Still nothing.

  "I am the son of Arnos, son of Daedar," he spoke to the empty temple. "We need your help. Can you hear me?"

  "Spirit! Spirit!" he heard Kerkio's sudden yelling from the distance and when he looked out the door of the temple he saw Kerkio running from the stilt house's bridge back to the meadow. He stopped only when his feet touched the grass, and then drew his sword and turned to face the lake house.

  "What happened? Is there somebody in there?" shouted Dion back while he struggled his way out of the building that he was now sure was not a temple but some long since abandoned shed of a hunter or fisherman who used to live there by the lake.

  "As I said, a spirit! The door opened by itself. I went inside and I saw a female spirit in the water. Beneath the house."

  Kerkio seemed agitated, more so than Dion had seen thus far. He kept watching the house as if he expected something to jump out of it.

  "There's a story circling in the legion that there are ghosts of drowned women in the lakes and that they stalk armed men the most. The legionaries never go swimming in a lake alone for fear that they will not get out of it alive."

  "Old wives' tales again," said Dion when he joined Kerkio in the meadow, but Kerkio would not accept his judgment.

  "Remember when you told me that the witch Roga was simply a tale, and yet we saw her alive and well with our own eyes. I tell you - I saw something."

  "Hey, where are you off to?" Kerkio demanded an answer when Dion started walking.

  "I have to see for myself. What if it's not a spirit?"

  He was afraid to tell Kerkio out loud that he thought that it might be related to his attempt to reach the gods.

  "Lyud, sto bit?" asked the dragon as he returned to the lake house. He had wandered away while Dion was busy with his grandfather's acorn but their shouting brought him back. "Human, what is it?" he aske
d Dion.

  "Nothing," he replied in his own language.

  "Nita," he repeated the same answer to the dragon and then stood in silence for a few moments in front of the ajar door.

  "Where?" he asked Kerkio before entering.

  "There's an opening through which you can see the surface of the water."

  "Of course it creaked," thought Dion when he made his first step inside the house and stepped onto a rotten plank, most probably the only rotten plank in the whole house. It creaked so loudly that it surely must have called some spirit to come forth.

  Opposite the door there was a small window and it allowed enough light to enter the house for Dion to see that it too was completely empty, just like the stone house was.

  "Nobody has been living here for quite some time," he said to himself as he kneeled next to the opening in the floor of the house. He looked into the water and saw no spirit there so he turned back to Kerkio.

  "You must have been seeing things. There's nothing out of the ordinary here," he shouted so Kerkio could hear him, but Kerkio still wouldn't come near the house and he gestured at Dion to come back out. "Don't play games!" Kerkio shouted impatiently.

  Dion shook his head and turned away from Kerkio once more, and as he did that he felt warmth coming from the acorn he held in his clenched fist. He opened his fist and saw that the acorn was now as red as the sky when daylight reaches the horizon and evening takes its first breath. The heat emanating from the acorn began to hurt his skin so he tossed it into his other hand. He noticed a movement in the house's opening as his eyes followed the acorn. He thought it was a fish and he looked through the opening but instead of a fish or empty water he saw a woman's face looking at him. He screamed and like a cat doused with water he jumped back, clawed against the wooden floor until he got up on his feet and ran out of the house.

  "What did you see?" shouted Kerkio as Dion sprinted toward him and the dragon.

  "A woman's face. But I must be seeing things. Perhaps because that's what you said that you saw. Perhaps it has something to do with my..."

  The ravens' croaking stopped him. They sounded impatient and they received his nervous, almost frightened attention.

  "Sto?" he asked the ravens. "What?"

  "Hody!" the two ravens called as one voice for him to follow them and then immediately stopped circling above their heads and flew over the lake house towards a small forested peninsula to their left that protruded into the lake and hid a large part of the south shore from their view.

  "Putodrvo!" croaked the white raven from the distance while the men and the dragon were catching up to them on the sandy shore.

  "Dion! What is going on?"

  "I think it's a Great Oak!" he shouted back to Kerkio and then stopped next to the tree that grew at the tip of the small peninsula.

  "Putodrvo?" Dion asked still not believing the ravens who sat on one of the branches and were nodding back at him affirmatively.

  The tree grew so close to the lake that water touched its trunk. Its massive branches spread over the lake like brown open arms of some giant frozen in the moment when he wanted to hug the lake.

  "I thought only willows can grow this close to the water," he thought out loud.

  "Putodrvo an Vedientir," again the ravens spoke as if with one voice.

  "If this is a Great Oak there should be an entrance," said Dion. "I don't see one."

  The white raven croaked in response and flew away to the branches that overarched the lake, just out of Dion's sight. Dion followed the raven through hip deep water and when he got next to the lake side of the tree the raven jumped off the branch onto the trunk, grabbed hold of it with his claws and started ripping off small parts of the tree's bark with his beak.

  "Karv," said the raven when he had taken off enough bark to expose a bit of the white meat of the tree.

  "Whose blood? Mine?" asked Dion in the old language.

  "Ada. Et tzrven zhyr," spoke the white raven and looked toward Dion's hand that still held the acorn.

  "The red acorn?" thought Dion, and that reminded his body that the acorn was burning his hand.

  "The raven seems to know more about the temple than either Daedar or myself."

  "Hody," the raven called him closer and Dion came and extended his hurting hand that held the acorn and offered it to the bird.

  "Hey!" shouted Dion in surprise and anger when the raven, instead of taking the acorn, poked his hand. The strike was so forceful that blood came rushing out of the wound at once. Only then did the raven take the acorn in his beak and turned it around several times in Dion's hand until the entire acorn was covered in blood, along with the raven's pink-white beak.

  "Step away," said the raven and picked up the acorn from Dion's hand. Dion stopped when he was a few steps away from the trunk of the tree, in water that was now well above his belly button. The raven then turned toward the tree and placed the blood-smeared acorn into the hole that he carved for it, and as soon as the raven dropped it out of his beak he flew away from the tree.

  The acorn exploded loudly and forcefully and Dion's blood got mixed with the yellow glowing kernel of the acorn.

  Like liquid fire it spread through the furrows in the tree's bark until the fire lines drew a familiar shape of a Great Oak's entrance, just like the one in Echa or Echa Rei. The fire lines burst into such a flame that Dion had to shield his eyes from the light and the heat that struck him, but both light and heat died out quickly. He went numb when he finally uncovered his eyes and looked at the tree.

  "What do you see?" asked Kerkio from the shore.

  "A Great Oak. The raven has created a new Oak!" shouted Dion in surprise and he looked at Kerkio as if somehow his acceptance of that fact would make the Tree a reality.

  "An Vedientir!" croaked the white raven and flew into the Tree as soon as the Path inside it opened.

  "Grak! Berzo!" the white raven called them to hurry from the other side of the Path.

  "A Path is opened!" shouted Dion and went after the white raven but stopped in the very last moment in front of the Tree and picked two acorns from a low hanging branch.

  "Come on, Kerkio. Zmai! While the Path is open! Daedar's temple must be on the other side of the Path."

  He stepped into the Tree and the black raven followed him.

  "Lyud!" the dragon panicked seeing that Dion had disappeared inside the tree. He shouted once more but Dion did not answer. A moment later the dragon was in the water, running to where he last saw Dion.

  Kerkio noticed the dragon's surprise when the dragon saw the Great Oak. He could see the exact moment when the dragon understood that this was not an ordinary tree.

  "Lyud!" the dragon called Dion fearfully and Dion heard him now. He turned around and waved for the dragon to come across.

  "Hody, Zmai!" he called from the other side and the dragon then spotted a dark shadow next to Dion. Frightened for his friend, the dragon rushed into the tree and a moment later a loud thud came from the other side of the Path.

  "Wet again," grumbled Kerkio to himself but nevertheless ran into the lake when he understood that they had left him behind. His mood soured even more when he looked up into the sky and saw gray clouds forming above them.

  "I hope it's dry on the other side."

  Chapter 14 - Eya

  They found themselves on a hilltop meadow surrounded on all sides by a lush forest of deciduous trees. This meadow was smaller than the meadow they left behind, and the hill seemed lower also than the mountains to the south of Phares. The grass was shorter except for a few larger thorny patches that were left behind by the picky cows that were still eating the grasses near the trees to their left.

  "Is that the source of the thud I heard moments ago?" asked Kerkio while the dragon carefully climbed off of a wooden statue of some warrior or hunter. The statue was carved from a single piece of wood slightly taller than the dragon and stood in the center of the meadow, very close to the Tree from which they came out.

&n
bsp; "Zmai charged the statue and knocked it down. He must have mistook it for a man," Dion answered and looked up at the sky once more.

  "What now?" he thought as he watched the ravens bicker once again above their heads.

  "Do you know whose statue that is?" asked Kerkio, trying to figure it out himself while the dragon was struggling to restore the statue to its upright position.

  "No," was Dion's answer after he took one more look at it.

  "We probably shouldn't have gone into the Great Oak without knowing what's on the other side."

  "The raven opened the Path for me. It hopefully leads to Daedar's temple. That's why I went in. Besides, even if we do not find a temple, we have one more Tree that we may be able to use to defend the kingdom. It is our duty to at least determine its location in the world and map it. The tree is useless to me if I don't know where it's located and certainly dangerous as things currently stand."

  "So, you still have no idea where we might be?"

  "Near some settlement, guessing by the cows there," answered Dion. "I did see someone north of us for a moment, there on the edge of the hill where it looks like a dirt road begins, but whoever it was ran away quickly before I could see any detail. It was perhaps a shepherd. We should try and catch up with him just to ask for our whereabouts, so I can report everything to the king when we get back home."

  His breathing suddenly quickened as new plans began emerging in his head.

  "Kerkio, do you know how to reach the village of your parents in Syevnor?"

  "I think I can find it, yes. Why?"

  "Daedar's Great Oak. If it hasn't ended up in someone's hearth during the last thirty winters it means that we now have this Tree, a Tree in Syevnor, and a Tree in the mountains south of Phares. We can return the legion to Aelan. We just have to find them."

  He was finding it hard to stop smiling.

  "Perhaps this is your grandfather's Tree? Perhaps we already are in Syevnor?" asked Kerkio feeling that Dion's euphoria was beginning to slowly lift his spirit up as well.