Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  “So you’re not even certain they’ll have one?”

  “The Pure revere our old traditions even more than we do. But, no, Prince Morgan, I am certain of nothing except that each hour the danger grows. The Hikeda’ya are still few and would not wage war so far from home on a whim. Something is happening—something dire. I know it like a mortal can smell a fire burning, or spilled blood.”

  “But even if these Pure people have a Witness in their city, how are we going to follow a river through this forest on foot? It will take forever!”

  This time Tanahaya did laugh, amazed and almost pleased by the complete helplessness of mortals. “Oh, Morgan! Your ancestors came here out of the western seas! Surely you know how to build a boat.”

  “Not me,” he said with more than a touch of sullenness. “They showed me how to fight and do a few sums. I’m a prince.”

  “Then I will teach you,” she said, smiling again, though her heart still ached. “In that way at least I can still honor my lord Himano.”

  * * *

  Crickets buzzed in the dry grass as they made their way down the hill, and seeds clung to Morgan’s clothing like tiny, desperate refugees. The sun was bright enough that he threw his cloak on and pulled the hood low over his forehead.

  The talk of Witnesses had made Morgan think uncomfortably about the things he had kept from Tanahaya. “Can someone talk like you want to do without a Witness?” he asked her. “Perhaps in someone’s dreams?”

  She gave him an odd look. “It is possible some adepts might do so, especially if they were close to a Master Witness. There have always been questions about the Road of Dreams and whether the messages received there are trustworthy. But I am still a young scholar. I do not know the answer, Morgan.”

  “I don’t understand much of what you’re telling me,” he admitted. “Witnesses, the Road of Dreams. These are things I’ve only heard about in stories for children. But there is something I think I should tell you.” He took a breath, then another, like a child confessing to a parent. “Your Queen Likimeya spoke to me. In the cave with the butterflies. She spoke in my head. I heard her!”

  “I know.”

  He stared back at Tanahaya in honest surprise. “You know?”

  “Of course. Something so strange, so unprecedented—did you think Jiriki and Aditu would not tell me when I was recovered from my poison-fever?”

  That had not occurred to him. “So you know. But you can’t know—they don’t know—that she still speaks to me. In dreams.”

  “Likimeya speaks to you in dreams? You are certain it is her?”

  “Yes, your queen. But it has been some time since she last did.”

  Tanahaya shook her head slowly. “She is no queen—she is the Sa’onsera, which is a title far more rare and exalted, but I will not explain now. Tell me what she said to you, quickly.”

  Morgan related what he could remember, but the dreams and Likimeya’s words had been strange and confusing when he first heard them, and most of what she had said was already gone from his memory.

  When he had finished his tale, Tanahaya was silent for a long while. “These mysteries are beyond me,” she said finally. “They will have to wait until I can speak with others wiser than myself.” She let out a fluting sound that might have been a sigh. “But it is growingly obvious to me that you play some important part in all this, Morgan. You have heard the words of the sleeping Sa’onsera, you have seen Misty Vale and met its monstrous guardian and lived—things that almost none of my own people have ever done. The currents of fate have carried you to many places mortals have seldom or never gone. I believe that you—like your grandfather—must have some part to play in the affairs of my people, although what that might be is far beyond my wisdom.”

  “Some part in what?” Whatever sense of being special Tanahaya’s words gave him was more than offset by his growing homesickness.

  “A part in this struggle that never ends,” she said. “In the war between the Zida’ya and Hikeda’ya—the Sithi and the Norns, as you know us. Because it is your fight now, too. The Hikeda’ya have been thwarted too often by mortals. They want your people gone even more than they want my people gone. That means you have little choice—you must prepare to join the fight.”

  “What fight? I don’t understand you.”

  “Of course you don’t. How could you? But you should know the stories, Prince Morgan, especially if one day you will rule over other mortals. If my people are still here when your time comes, you will need to understand us. If we are gone, you will need to learn from our mistakes.”

  Morgan could only wave his hand in surrender. He knew when someone older than him was going to tell him things, whether he wanted to know them or not. “So you’re not just going to teach me how to make a boat, you’re going to make me learn history as well?”

  She smiled, and the sadness in it was something he recognized. His father had often worn that expression in his last year of life when he left his family to return to the studies that had taken so much of his time.

  “I fear I must. And, as I said, at least by teaching I can keep my master Himano alive in my heart—and perhaps yours, though you do not know it.”

  He sighed. “Go on, then.”

  “Before you can see and understand Da’ai Chikiza, where we are bound,” she began, “you must know how my people came to these lands of exile. Because we began our own journey far away, in another land entirely—Venyha Do’sae, the Garden That Was Lost. If my people existed before the Garden we have no memory of it, no writings or tales. Even the oldest of the Keida’ya could not remember a time before the Garden.”

  “Kay-die-yah?” He watched a greenfinch hop from branch to branch and wished he was that bird, or at least back in the trees again. Life had been so much simpler there. He had almost enjoyed it.

  “Yes, Keida’ya, as we called ourselves in those days. It means ‘Witchwood Children.’ In the Garden, in the Valley of the Star, beside the great Dreaming Sea, the witchwood trees were the center of our world. At first the trees grew wild on the mountain slopes, but in our earliest remembered days we learned to harvest their seeds and grow witchwood for ourselves; to tend it and shape it and use it not just for its wood but also the bark, the fruit, the leaves. We built our homes around the witchwood orchards, and those homes became our first great city, Tzo—‘the Star,’ because at night its lights blazed like the constellations of the night sky. We also learned how to cultivate grains and fruits to feed our growing numbers.”

  Morgan could hear the quiet murmur of a stream below; he hurried to keep up with Tanahaya as she moved confidently down the hill.

  “The witchwood gave us tools and building materials,” she said, “making us more than we had been. Its fruit gave us life—and not just ordinary life, but life longer than ever it had been before. Its leaves and flowers gave us dreams so that we could understand who we were and where we were going. But those dreams, no matter how dark, never warned us about what was to come, what dark fate we would bring on ourselves.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “I will explain as much as it can be explained, Morgan. But it is not part of the story yet. Now listen.” She stopped, so Morgan stopped too, thinking she had heard someone following, but Tanahaya only went on speaking. “We Keida’ya made the witchwood our own, bending the living world to our will. We thought all was as it should be and would remain so forever. Then the Garden began to struggle against our mastery—though we did not understand that at the time.” For a moment she seemed unable to find words. The sun made her golden skin seem almost as smooth and polished as metal. “At first all was mystery and fear. Terrible things came out of the Dreaming Sea, bringing fear to our people. Sea-beasts broke our ships. Strange shapes roamed the darkness where only moonlight and starlight had been before. Dragons—the first ever seen—came up from those deeps and cra
wled onto the land, destroying all who came against them.” She began moving again, leading him downhill toward the sound of moving water.

  “Each of my people’s Great Years is as long as the life of a mortal, and many Great Years passed in that new, unsettling Garden, a place that had once been all delight, but now contained darkness as well. We fought the great dragons and the other fearsome things that had come from the Dreaming Sea—the sea that we did not yet realize was our enemy, or at least our rival for sovereignty over the Garden. Some among us, like the great warrior Hamakho Wormslayer, drove the serpents into the highest heights, so that for a while it was as if they had never been, but that respite did not last long. Sa’onsera, Hamakho’s mate, who was clear-seeing and thoughtful where her husband was brave and certain, went to the Gatherer’s Temple and fasted for many days. At last she dreamed of the Garden as one great thing, and of the Dreaming Sea that surrounded it as the greatest part of it, with all of the creatures swimming together harmoniously in its deep and unknown waters. From that dreaming came the Path of the Sa’onserei, something we Zida’ya still strive to honor, but her dream was not welcomed by all who made Tzo their home.

  “That was where the fabled Parting of the Norns and the Sithi truly began, Morgan—not here in the lands you know, but in our old home, which none of us but ancient Utuk’ku can now remember. Hamakho Wormslayer’s followers believed as he did, that only by destroying that which threatened us could we survive. They could not understand those of Sa’onsera’s mind, who argued that we must find a way to live in peace with the world that surrounded us.

  “Her followers saw themselves as waiting for a new dawn of understanding. Hamakho’s followers believed that the blackness of the ocean and what came from it would destroy the light for all the Keida’ya, and that without their strength the race was doomed to utter darkness. Thus, for the first time, they began to call themselves Dawn Children and Cloud Children, and lines of belief were drawn between them. The followers of these two ways lived together still as they always had, and married each other and worked side by side, even among the oldest families, but it was a crack that would widen.”

  As they reached the bottom of the hill the stream finally came into view, murmuring and singing, surrounded by brown and gray reeds crowding the banks. They rested for a while beside it, or at least Morgan did: Tanahaya remained standing, still restless, words spilling out of her.

  “But the Garden had not finished surprising us,” she went on as though, like the burbling stream, once started she must follow her course to the end. “After many years of war against the dragons and other threats, after many of our people had died—and many dragons and other creatures, too, though they were not so mourned—the Tinukeda’ya themselves appeared in the Garden. Nobody was certain where they came from, though many claimed that like the dragons they emerged from the Dreaming Sea itself, and that is why they were called Ocean Children. At first they did not look much like us, but over time these changelings grew to resemble the Keida’ya more and more, until it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between our two kinds. But though they might look like us, the Tinukeda’ya did not think like us. Some of them founded settlements of their own and did their best to live near us, to tell us what they understood of the Garden and to show us ways to live we had not discovered. But others took on stranger shapes and lived apart from the Keida’ya—some of them seemed little more aware than animals. Soon these more bestial changelings were being forced into what was no better than slavery, doing work we Keida’ya did not wish to do, or could not do. Worse, we bred them as you men breed dogs and horses, to make them what we wished them to be, because the changelings could grow into very different shapes even from one generation to the next, and with practice, we learned to force those shapes to breed true. Carry-men, Niskies, even the hairy things men call giants, all had their first existence in lost Venyha, bred by our hands for our own purposes.”

  “I know the Niskies,” Morgan said, relieved to recognize some part of her tale at last. “And giants, too, of course. The Norns who attacked us on the way back from Rimmersgard had a giant with them. The soldiers and even my grandfather said it was the biggest one they’d ever seen.”

  “Old then,” she said. “They do not stop growing, I am told. Some of the oldest even talk.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Because whether you speak of Niskies, or giants, or even those like Carry-men who are treated as beasts of burden, they are all Ocean Children. Whatever their form, they are not animals.”

  “And that’s what you think the Chikri are too? Tinooki . . . that they’re changelings as well?”

  For a moment she looked puzzled. “‘Chikri’—the little tree-folk you traveled with. Yes, I feel certain they too are Tinukeda’ya, although I have never seen that sort before.”

  * * *

  • • •

  They followed the track of the stream, winding down through the golden hills in a burble of bird and insect noises. Tanahaya had been silent for a while, which was a bit of relief for Morgan, overwhelmed by all the names and tales, but a thought suddenly struck him.

  “You’ve talked about your people leaving the Garden,” he said. “But why? If it was such a beautiful place, why did they come here?”

  “Because in their arrogance the Hamakha made a terrible mistake.” She cocked her head, listening. “The river is not much farther now. Perhaps you will even have fish for your supper, Morgan.”

  Even that mouth-watering prospect could not distract him. “What mistake?”

  “In their determination to destroy the dragons and other things birthed by the Dreaming Sea, Hamakho’s followers—including his descendant Utuk’ku—began searching for new means to defeat their enemies. And that led them to the discovery of Unbeing.”

  “Unbeing?” For the first time he doubted Tanahaya’s nearly flawless command of Westerling speech. “Are you sure that’s right? It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She looked him directly in the eye, and as he saw the sadness in her face he was reminded of her much greater age. “I wish that were true. We call it A’do-Shao. In your tongue, ‘Unbeing’ comes the closest. There are no other words in your tongue that fit it but ‘Unbeing.’

  “There are some things, mortal prince, that simply should not be—that cannot be. Mere words cannot encompass them, not in your tongue or mine. How can something be both huge and small at the same moment? How can something be both alive and dead? How can anything exist and yet not exist? But that was the secret that the Hamakha uncovered, the secret of Unbeing. It did not merely destroy the things it touched, it made them as if they had never been.”

  As Morgan tried to make sense of it, they continued down the steep, grassy hillside between tormented-looking oak trees with limbs more twisted than those of the cripples that begged in front of St. Sutrin’s Cathedral. Morgan could hear the river below them too—a rumble beneath the splashing music of the nearby stream, a dull roar like a crowd of people all shouting at once a long distance away.

  “I don’t understand,” he admitted at last. “Was it something like the plague? Like the Red Ruin?”

  She shook her head. “We know so little about Unbeing now, but it was nothing like even the worst pestilence. Amerasu’s mother Senditu, the last Zida’ya alive who remembered Venyha Do’sae, could only say that it spread across the Garden like a storm cloud, and where it touched nothing was left—not grass, not stone, not sky, not even regret. Nothing. Unbeing ate everything that was.”

  “But how did it happen? And how did your people escape?”

  “The only thing that saved us was that it began slowly, but once it began it could not be stopped or turned back. How it first came into being, I do not know. The Hamakha philosopher Nerudade who created it—or discovered it—was the first thing it devoured.” Words seemed to come only with difficulty now. “They say it was like a black fire noth
ing could extinguish, although it had no heat and no shape. It was nothing, but it was a nothing that rendered everything else into nothing too.”

  “But it’s not here, is it?” he said anxiously. It was all he could do not to look around for a black fog rolling down the hillside behind them.

  “No. The secret of its creation is said to have died with Nerudade. But it is in our people’s hearts, nevertheless. Sometimes I fear that particular damage is beyond repair.” She took a breath. “It hurts to speak of it.”

  The stream they followed bent one last time, and as they made their way around a drooping stand of willows, Morgan suddenly saw the river’s great, shiny back sprawled across the valley’s floor below them like a monstrous serpent, its surface undulating in the last of the afternoon sun.

  “There,” Tanahaya said, and stopped. Then, to Morgan’s astonishment, she suddenly gave voice to a peal of song in her own speech, a liquid cadence of words he could not understand in a melody that seemed to rise and dip like something floating on the dark, lively water.

  “It is a song about the river T’si Suhyasei,” she said when her brief song had ended. “It means, ‘Her blood is cool, Her thoughts are green, She is older than Thought, She is wider than Time.’ It is a hymn to the great forest and the rivers that are her veins.” She spread her arms wide. “It is good to see you again,” she cried, as if the river had ears. “It is good.” Tanahaya turned to Morgan. A smile curled her lip, giving her for a swift moment the look of a mischievous girl. “Now that we have reached it, can you catch fish? Or would you rather cut reeds?”