Did you see how many they are? Gallan asked Yonfi.
Yonfi shook his head, made to speak, and then replied silently, No. But I think I saw a man on top of another tree, looking at me with a – oh, like that thing Yodren had in his room!
A spyglass, Yodren said. So, no matter how many, they already know we’re here.
Raddia, kneeling next to Yonfi to caress his cool cheek with the back of her hand said, Why should we presume they mean us ill? They may be travellers just like us.
In any case, we’d better prepare ourselves for the worst, Gallan insisted, but his tone, cautiously aggressive, prodded Yonfi to a heroic disregard for any and all strategy.
“WE SHALL DESTROY YOU!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
Their presence thus given away, they had no choice but to proceed through the path that led between a clump of trees to a grove of shorter ones, growing on a reddish-brown soil and bearing dense, massive clusters of dark purple fruit.
It wasn’t long before they reached the spot whence the smoke came, from a small camp fire mostly reduced to embers; there was a straw mat next to it, with a blanket on top and a pair of worn leather sandals placed neatly beside. Other than these, there was no sign of the man Yonfi thought he’d seen, though by now they were all – even Yodren and Gallan, the overly protective brothers – more or less convinced that no evil enemies were lying in wait; even the blanket, folded into a tidy square, looked reassuring.
Then, “What are those?” Yonfi said, pointing with a dirty, sticky finger.
Back away, Gallan said, though he needn’t have, as they’d all backed off already at the sight of the two great, fantastic beasts that had appeared from behind the trees.
They were at once formidable and ludicrous, repulsive and strangely familiar – as if nature had taken parts of animals they knew and tossed them playfully together.
Nearly twice as tall as horses, they stood on slender but wiry-looking legs with bulging knees; they had thickly-built bodies with a strikingly big hump in the middle of the back, and their neck, long and curvy and adorned with a beard-like tuft of hair, ended in a head whose shape and facial mobility undermined their overall fearsomeness: long and flat, with heavily-hooded, kindly-stupid eyes and a comical set of lips which never ceased to move, as if the beasts were mindlessly munching on stones. No creature with such an expression of utter idiocy could be conceivably dangerous.
For once it was not Yonfi but Raddia who first burst into howls of laughter, and soon they all joined her, roaring, bending down and holding their sides, then pointing at the beasts and starting all over again. And far from taking offense at their unrestrained ridicule, with only a hint of curiosity in their eyes – perhaps they looked as strange and unintelligent a bunch to them as well – they came over with a lazy, sawying walk, their fat lips still puckered and moving. They all took a step back (after all they were too big not to), apart from Wixelor, who was a little taller, and Yonfi; but it was these two the animals seemed to have in mind, for as soon as they reached them the one on the right grazed the side of Wixelor’s face with the gentleness of a timidly courting mate, while the other bent its shoulders and lowered its head till it hung right in front of Yonfi, who took the hint at once and clambered along its neck and on top of its humb before Yodren had time to stop him. “Look!” he cried, and from the beast’s flank he unfastened what they had at first mistaken for a natural protuberance but which in fact was a huge skin bag filled with water, from which Yonfi drank avidly, before throwing it to Gallan, who had already unfastened and passed around an identical bag, this one containing wine.
“Don’t you think we should wait for whomever these belong to?” Raddia asked, but no one seemed to care, and when the wine sack reached her she couldn’t resist taking a hearty swig – for it was the same as the wine she had first tasted in Feerien, made from some fruit called grapes and infinitely better than the tame whiteberry stuff Lurienites drank and whose effect on the drinker’s mind was nothing compared to the fast elation this pungent red wine brought on. Soon they were all tipsy, staggering and falling down flat on their bottoms with hiccuping laughs – even Yonfi had some, for once half-drunk Yodren could no more deny him than tolerate his screaming, “But I’m Royen!”
Such was their joyful overindulgence, that when an ululation suddenly erupted, they all assumed it was one of them who’d broken into shrill song, or that maybe it was the cry of the droll-looking beasts – but then, raising his head and blinking his bleary eyes, Yodren motioned them to hush and listened at the continuous, high-pitched cry, trying to make out the words and whether it was singing in jubilation or belligerence.
“...here go the People of the... the blinding stone?” he whispered, “then something about – about someone called... Iadi? Iabi? and how... oh, damn it!”
But now the beasts, having already raised their heads upon first hearing the cry, turned around and began to walk slowly away, prompting them to stand up and follow them towards the sound that grew louder by the moment. Yodren, holding Yonfi’s hand tight, kept mumbling about a camel herd by the name of Iabi, and how he was the most fortunate of all the sentinels of the Sun for having cast eyes at the people of the blinding stone. And after a short walk, stepping out of the grove and into a vastness of yellowish dunes whose only distinct feature was an extemely tall tree like the ones growing on the beach, they looked up and saw the person whose shrieks had led them there.
It was the man Yonfi had seen – despite the great distance, for amongst Royen’s many gifts he possessed the eyesight of a hawk –, a small dark man in a long green robe, perched on a wooden platform built around the top of the tree, who, along with his cries, was constantly, rapidly kneeling till his face touched the wood and then raising his head and hands skywards, not unlike the way the Castle folk had done after the Scavengers had scattered and they were welcomed as the saviours of Feerien.
“Is he doing this for me?” Yonfi asked of his brother, smiling in perplexion.
“Well, dearest brother, don’t be mad,” he said, “but I think it’s meant for us all.”
After he’d climbed down the tree and humbled himself in front of them with yet more passionate kneeling and praising, the man – not much taller than Yonfi up close, though definitely older – introduced himself; his name was Iabi, Yodren interpreted as he spoke, which in the language of his people meant weak, something self-evident in his small stature, he added with a rueful smile. He was a camel herd – camel being the name of the bizarre beasts – and ever since he’d reached the age of twelve and thus become a man, he’d been serving as Sentinel of the Sun, a monthly duty undertaken by the men of his tribe since the time of the Ashen Curse, when the Blinding Stone had saved him and all the dwellers of the land he called Dwanar from certain and complete obliteration.
Iabi could scarcely hide his happiness and pride at the blessed honour of being the one to first set eyes upon the long-awaited People of the Blinding Stone, and the way he gesticulated widly with his tiny hands and stood at the tips of his toes when the verve overtook him made him so look like an eager, trusting boy, no one had the heart to say that, despite their unusual appearance, they might not be the ones his tribe expected.
Then their diminutive welcomer gave a smack of self-reproach on his forehead so loud that it must hurt, and bowing frantically he dashed to one of the camels, climbed on its back with incredible speed and agility, and from a thickly-folded piece of coarse wool serving as saddle in the hollow between the beast’s neck and hump he produced and brought back to them a parcel wrapped in white cloth and tree leaves containing two loaves of bread and a head of soft cheese, provisions – he explained – which he received once a week; luckily, the man appointed the task of delivering the food had come early this morning, so that they were still fresh and warm, with a mouthwatering smell. These he offered them with the graciousness of a wealthy host, and when Yodren made a weak p
rotest, saying that they had already abused his hospitality by guzzling his water and wine without asking and that they couldn’t possibly consume all of his food, poor Iabi looked as if he were about to cry, insisting in a torrent of objections Yodren was unable to translate on the spot that it was them he waited for, and that he’d rather die a hundred starving deaths before even sharing food intended for the People of the Blinding Stone. In the end they gave in – far from reluctantly – and Iabi was finally mollified by Yonfi’s earnest pleading to have a morsel of bread. There was also a pot of milk, buried in the sand to keep cool (camel milk, they all imagined, though none wished to know for sure) and after they had eaten and drunk to their heart’s content, Iabi, ever generous, brought over more blankets, kept at his sentinel’s perch for the long cold nights of gazing at the sea, and they all sat around a new fire he’d built, the camels grazing idly nearby.
By then they were all exhausted and sleepy, and the warmth of the crackling fire, fragrant with cedar kindling, was more than enough to carry them swiftly to oblivion – and yet their curiosity was greater than their desire to rest, so, joining hands to be able to comprehend his words, they listened to Iabi’s extraordinary tale.
He was a boy of eight, he began, when the world almost came to an end. On that dreadful, unforgettable day, he and his friends had shirked their herding chore, leaving the camels in the care of an old man who was also mute, and thus could neither chase nor tell them off, and come to the sea – to the very beach they’d landed themselves – to swim and fish and frolic in the sand, still burning from the noon sun. But before they could do any of these things, a roar erupted in the pale blue sky, louder than a hundred thunders, so loud the very earth shook with its mighty rumble, and suddenly the bright sun was obscured by an immense black sphere with a tail of red that tore through the heavens.
So big was this terrifying mass (which Dwanars also called the Stone of Death), that its plummet must have been visible from every corner of the world, and seemed to last forever, so that by the time they had fled in a panic to the date palm grove they were met by their parents, too frantic to scold them and equally unknowing of what to do.
Most of the animals – even the fattest, slothful calves – had taken to the hills as soon as the ominous black thing appeared, and though the nearest hill was an hour away on foot (for the camels they’d tried to mount had shaken them off and fled as well), and they’d have to abandon the old and the infirm to their fate, perhaps there was still time to follow suit – but right then the shaking ground beneath their feet began to burst open like a vast, festering wound, wide long chasms and gashes ripping in every direction and letting out thick white jets of steam, boiling water, and fiery chunks of molten rock.
Thus they were driven back to the shore, where they were confronted by an even more petrifying sight: the sea, its turquoise waters calm as a lullaby so little ago, raged now black and blue, while tall waves like rabid frothing mouths agape crashed brutally against the beach, so that they had to scramble up the palm trees, lest they be dragged in and drowned – and high above the sky, dim as dusk in the burning stone’s dark shadow, yet moonless and starless as if put out, extinguished, dead. They’d all be dead, and soon, not just the few men and boys clinging to the gale-swept trees, nor just the womenfolk with their babes and the old, perhaps already vanished into the crumbling ground, but all and every man and beast across the world would die, killed by this horrible thing the God of Death had sent their way without any more sense than that with which the God of Life had moulded them out of the lifeless clay and given them breath.
Oh, and how long it lasted, that awful, unspeakably awful time of hanging by a branch and praying it would withstand the violence of the wind! Knowing that this was the end, for that was how the world behaved, as if it was about to be finished: even the great fearless sea, one moment charged at them and the next was drawn back like a sheet by some invisible hand, ebbing so fast and far away it left whole schools of fish flapping on muddy ground that had never before lain thus naked. As for the wind, Iabi said in a low voice, a spark of the old terror burning still in his wide-open eyes, it was like being a thought in the mind of a madman: it struggled to tear them away, storming one way and then anoter, till some unlucky souls were sucked into its fury, disappearing in the sky as if drawn by celestial strings before they could even scream. And all the while the hateful black invader seemed to hang mockingly at the exact same spot, so certain of their doom it merely hovered, an evil eye relishing at the devastation it was bringing.
But fall it did, even if slowly and agonizingly, for in the distance of the madly swirling sea they could make out the horizon speckled with bursts of fire and smoke, as mountains exploded and islands sank and life of all kinds came to a brutal end. And the more it approached, the louder its plummet became, till all was trembling to a deafening din, while the stone’s maliciously glowing red tail broke into giant shards which in turn burst into a rain of burning stone, whistling down to earth and blasting whatever lay in their paths. Till those who could still bear to look saw the Stone of Death, by then big as the world and wider than the sky, strike some unthinkable place in the distance.
Then everything – everything – shifted: the air, their tiny insignificant beings, the heavens themselves, inert from time before time, groaned as the impact moved them out of balance. And the sea – or rather what was left of it, some pools of water across an emptiness of mud and a thin grey line far away – was sucked even further away, but not just the visible part of it but the very ancient Mother Sea which hugged the world, it all came rushing towards the stone’s ill-fated landing place, discernible by a pillar of black smoke rising higher and growing vaster by the moment. And with a final shudder of the dying earth they saw all this unimaginable quantity of water rise as well, and form a mountain white and grey, a mountain more towering than any in existence.
This was the end, no doubt about it, and in the sudden stillness of the air, as if the spectacle had robbed reality of its breath, they wept and wailed and sliding down the limp palm trees they fell on their knees and sobbed, because the aquatic mountain range had slowly begun its fatal progression towards them, and before long it would descend upon them like Death itself, on this day they had never known would be their last.
But then! Iabi said, stirred into wild-eyed excitement by these memories, as if he lived them anew through his narrative – but then out of the heavens came salvation!
It took them quite a while to become aware of the faint whistling sound, for they were utterly dazed and spent and their ears still rang from the dissonance of the world’s final agony, but little by little they all raised their heads, first hearing the eerie silence and then, in its depth, as though coming not from some external source but from within their own frenzied souls, a faint, high-pitched whistling that grew steadily louder.
However, in the throes of the overall havoc every change signified a new terror, and so they stopped their ears just as they’d shut their eyes against the nature’s ruin and cried aloud in panic. Iabi remembers his father crawling about, blindly as a babe ripped from the womb before its time until he somehow sensed him and drew near, and covered his convulsing little body with his own, as if this were enough to keep him safe, and then in a voice he didn’t so much hear as feel through the strength of his embrace, he told him not to fear, and that soon they would all awaken in the wondrous Nema Koth, the place of bliss and magic where nanna had gone to, yet far from being soothed this sent Iabi in an even wilder state of dread and misery, for he’d been told of Nema Koth when he was little, grief-stricken by the death of his cherished grandmother, but over the years it had become a tale of empty cheer and false assurance, a tale he himself had passed on to his three younger sisters to console them when their pet mouse had been devoured by a neighbour’s cat, Don’t cry, he’d said, he’s happy now, playing with other mice at Nema Koth!, and to hear his father speak the same untruthful word
s of comfort was an even greater devastation, for deep down he believed that nanna was nowhere, she had lived and then died, forever, and he didn’t want to surrender his own young life to nonexistence.
And still the whistling became louder – was it perhaps Death approaching, and shrieking with greed at the prospect of so many lives to reap? – until Iabi did something his father tried to stop him from doing: he slid through his arms and looked up. He was half-expecting to see the sky crashing down upon them (an ancient fear, for they were all covering their heads), but instead he saw the sun, or at least that was what it seemed like to him, the white-hot sun of noon tumbling from the firmament, and instantly he bowed his head once more though he’d already been dazzled, seeing only darkness with a light blue circle blazing in its midst, and now his father seized him again, muttering the same nonsense till Iabi screamed, Damn Nema Koth – the sun is falling!
Yet instead of rising to an earsplitting pitch, an invincible warrior’s battle cry, the whistling had suddenly changed, becoming not shrill but mellow, musical almost, a seagull calling its young or its mate so that the sharpness of its cawing is transformed by the sweetness of longing and love – and then despite the hands blocking out sound they all heard it land, even though it struck the sand as softly as a ripe fig falling on grass.
It was the thing’s warmth that first drew them to it, for ever since the black stone had appeared, concealing the sun, it had grown punishingly cold. But now, as if indeed Iabi was right and Sun the Sustainer of Life was right there before them, the shuddering men and boys felt gentle waves of heat waft towards them, caressing the cold off of their skin and entering as deeply and delightfully as the bone. Sunshine at hand.
So it was only natural, since so sudden a pleasure in the midst of such horror was reminiscent of the salvation at the end of a nightmare (a notion they had all been secretly entertaining, for what could be better than to wake up and find out all was well?), that they took heart, stood up, and opened their eyes to this source of sweet warmth.
Iabi had retained his sight purely by chance, because in his dazzlement and the confusion of the voices that babbled with growing confidence he didn’t know which way to turn, and was facing away from the stone, stumbling amongst torn branches and roots and calling his father. Yet he, and several others, had already taken their first and last glance at the Blinding Stone, which, true to its subsequent name, robbed whomever cast eyes upon it of his sight forever. However in times to come, when the voice of divine madness ceased to pour from their lips, allowing them some respite and soberness, not one of these men would recall having felt the slightest pain or fear, but on the contrary, they all described that moment, that final sight before becoming sightless, as containing the greatest happiness the mind can conceive, a feeling of knowing at once what life was, and why it was good, and how all existence possessed not just an underlying order but a neverending nourishment of love: Love made the world and love sustains it, the white-eyed men would say, and then once more slip into tongues and states of godly insanity.
What this ecstasy meant at that crucial moment, though, was that they all leaped at the Blinding Stone, not to spare their sons – they weren’t even thinking of their sons – but wishing merely to possess it, to feel its heat directly on their bare skin and its light shine through them as if through parchment and its heart of bliss beat to their own. Of course the little ones, those who could still see at least, protested loudly and violently, trying to break up or wrestle through the heap of male bodies that covered the sun-like orb, but then they felt drops of cold water fall on their heads and a thin spray of brine on their faces, and looking up they beheld the wonder of wonders: Death denied passage.
A wall of sea so tall it hid the sky, visible only in the beams of light escaping the mens’ firm hold on the Stone, towered before them, its crest of foam curled above them like the lip of a snarling beast of prey which, for all its viciousness, is tethered to a chain that can’t be broken. For where the sky-fallen Stone was, this mountain of furious water could not go, even though their fathers’ heads lay not an arm’s length from its quivering dark surface, through which the awestruck boys could discern floating shipwrecks and boulders and the shreds of dead flesh – belonging to men or fish, no one could say.
Almost unafraid they stood and stared with gaping mouths, although they knew they should flee, run away from this colossal, murderous wave that would squash them like blood-filled lice given a moment’s chance, for this was the way of nature, what rise must fall, so in their childish brashness they were all but willing it to happen, taunting the sea to smite them, because they knew it couldn’t. And so they laughed in its face, and as if mortally offended, the waters roared once more in livid impotence and then began to lower and subside, lower and subside, until all became as before, the sea a windswept expanse and the sky a grey clouded canopy, while the boys cheered frantically on.
And then, Iabi said, it was time to resume their interrupted lives, or rather what could be salvaged from them. First the men who hadn’t gone blind wrapped the Stone in many layers of cloth and hide, and guiding their unseeing, ranting friends by the hand, they began to make their slow way back to the village. But despite their hopefulness and joy at having eluded, along with Creation itself, certain annihilation, despite the miracle that had saved them, sent doubtless by the God of Life and cradled in their very hands, it was not a sight of life unharmed and triumphant that awaited them.
For all they encountered on their sorrowful journey home was the aftermath of the destruction visited upon the land. Where only that morning thrived luscious woods thick with life, now there was nothing but trees torn clear off their roots, leaving great holes where not even a worm stirred; gone were the birds, the hares, the deer and all the other creatures of the wild; not a single peep or rustle greeted their passing, made slow, hard and perilous by the chasms that forked here and there like evil lips, still spewing a stench of sulphur and turning the desolate plain into a veritable maze.
And when at last they gained the outskirts of the village, so tired they couldn’t wait to lie down and sleep this terrible day away, they realized that no such comfort was forthcoming – for there was no village anymore, only the ruins of homes and families. Of those who hadn’t perished under the heaps of broken roof beams, bricks and stones, some had been stampeded by panicked cows and camels trying to break free, others had been killed by tree limbs cast by the gale like spears, while a tragic few, mostly mothers of infants and babes, had first killed them and then themselves, cutting their throats to avoid the much crueller fate they foresaw in the black stone’s fatal plummet.
Of Iabi’s family, only his mother and his youngest sister had survived, yet when they reached them, – his father speaking incoherently at the sky, completely unaware of their blight – it was her two dead daughters that his mother, covered in blood and soot and mad with grief, held tight against her bosom, while her youngest, reduced to utter infancy by so much terror, was sucking her tiny fist with passionate intensity.
And as if they hadn’t suffered enough, the massing clouds began to disgorge the ceaseless rain of ashes that would, in less than a year, devastate the plant life of Dwanar, decimate the animals, and plunge the few survivors in famine, sickness and death.
However, just as humankind had always managed to endure the adversities of fate, the people of Iabi’s tribe somehow found the willpower to build on what little was left and persevere through the sorrow of loss, through the cold and the hunger, and still think of themselves as fortunate to be alive – for they had been blessed to have and keep the Blinding Stone, even though it was a decidedly mixed and ambiguous blessing.
For one thing, most of the men who had survived, and who would otherwise be the ones to bear the brunt of restoring the village to liveable conditions, were blind and mad, rambling on about fantastic prophecies (and then only when they spoke their own tongue, which wasn’t often), with brief interludes of clarit
y, during which, however, all they would talk of was the Stone – protecting the Stone, trusting in the Stone, even if all it seemed to do was emit an uncomfortable brightness despite the sheep and camel pelts heaped upon it at the back of a tiny, empty hut, guarded day and night by fierce-looking fools that stared at the sky with clouded eyes. Stranger yet was the fact that, although they had no way of knowing it even existed, people from all over Dwanar occasionally appeared, exhausted by weeks and sometimes months of walking the increasingly bleak and barren land. What they sought of the Stone was never clear; some would steal but a glance through the door and flee with words of prayer on the lips; others, like the tribe’s children, would spend long hours squatting on the hut’s bare mud floor, gazing at the Stone as if expecting an answer to unuttered questions, or some sort of revelation.
But despite the attention and reverence it received, the Blinding Stone couldn’t stop the ashes from precipitating and snuffing out life under and over the ground: the crops kept shrinking and eventually dying off, the meek herbivorous beasts, famished beyond endurance, turned on and savaged one another, and mere boys like Iabi, become men from necessity – though most of them had been stunted by lack of proper food and sunlight – saw their families lose hope and felt even more helpless and miserable.
So as time passed the living, gaunt and hollow-eyed and perpetually ravenous, begen to envy the dead, and to resent the Stone for saving Dwanar only to make it suffer a prolonged and agonizing death. Crazy fools, as the blind men were spitefully called, started disappearing, their bodies, when found at all, burned and clearly missing chunks of flesh or entire limbs. Babies continued to be born, lust being the only way the people had of pleasing their wasted bodies, but most were said to be stillborn, and were spirited away before anyone could confirm it – and then for a few days a thin broth appeared on the table, which no one wished to question or refuse, not even the mothers themselves.
It was the end of the world all over again, Iabi said, his eyes now guiltily cast on the ground and his voice no louder than a sigh; but then he raised his head, and with a faint smile he added, “Until one day, incredibly, we were saved by a dog.”
No one knew where the dog in question had come from, or how it was even alive – for dogs, trusting by nature, were among the first victims of the famine. The only one to have actually seen it go into the hut and come out with the Blinding Stone gripped in its jaws, had been a girl of five looking after her father, who at the time had been asleep at his post. It could almost be a myth, if it weren’t for the ample proof and the tangible result, which had kept Iabi and his people alive to this day. According to the girl, (who had only taken furtive peeks through her woollen cap, lest she lose sight and reason) the dog, behaving as calmly as if the Blinding Stone were a bone he didn’t want to share, had taken his trophy to a gnarly olive tree, bent over like a cripple and slowly dying as even the hardiest of trees did, and buried the Stone in the ground, amongst the roots. And the next morning the villagers, braced for yet another day of starving, were confronted by a scene right out of their collective dreams: the olive tree, grown overnight to an amazing height and robustness, was laden with fruit – and not just olives but dates as well, and almonds, peaches, apples, pears and coconuts; and from the soil around the tree, bare as bone until the night before but now thick with bright green clover, shot the sprouts of beans and onions, garlics and turnips, carrot leaves and heads of dew-beaded lettuce.
For a while they could only stare in wonderment, fearful of disturbing what was so completely inconceivable, that the slightest touch could very well make it disappear like a mirage. Even with the Blinding Stone shining from beneath the soil like a bulb of pure light, this was a miracle so tempting, the urge of profiting from it was as strong as the urge to leave it be. But then Iabi’s sister, a tiny bag of bones with bald patches on her egg-thin skull and the face of an old woman, stepped carefully among the lettuce, stood on the tips of her toes, and plucked a shiny purple plum from a low-hanging branch.
It was the sign they’d been waiting for; within a moment, screaming with joy or sobbing with gratitude, the skeletal women, men and children fell upon the magical tree and its bounty like a swarm of locusts, wolfing down whole apples, devouring oranges complete with their bitter, moist peel, and swallowing apricot pits as if their stomachs were the seed-hungry earth, while others, down on all fours like grazing cattle, pulled pungent onions and blood-fleshed beets and gobbled them up still caked in soil. Soon people were rushing off to be sick yet kept returning for more, until their bodies, weary from such sudden satiety, began to lose what little strength they had, forcing them to lie down on the grass – tall fragrant grass that wasn’t there before – and give in to the first decent, restorative sleep they had enjoyed since before the catastrophe. And while they slept, they felt a tingling warmth creep along their skin and stroke their faces – and with blinking eyes they sat up and saw the sun shine upon them from a clear blue sky.
Of course, the clouds weren’t gone, and over the next few days they spent hours of staring hopefully at the solid greyness, willing the reappearance of the Sun who, after more than a year of cringing behind the ashen mantle of the sky, had grown as if timid, showing himself erratically, uncertainly, and briefly – and yet these peeps were enough to bring on the rebirth of nature. In the days and weeks that followed the magic tree, its constantly budding flowers seized by the breeze and carried off across the dead fields, became the first in a spectacular orchard, while the fruit of the soil spread as quickly as the verdant carpet above them. And then, as suddenly and mysteriously, young animals began to emerge from the reborn woods, wandering in a daze as though just abandoned by their mothers: thin, bleating lambs, throngs of loud chicks and goslings, piglets, kids and calves, seeking food and shelter and soon thereafter mating and breeding. And all the while the Sun continued to pay his invaluable visits to the prospering land.
Thus Iabi’s home, growing to and surpassing by far its old size and population, came to be known as Vistri-rah, The Land of the Sun, and they, finders of the Blinding Stone that had saved the human race, as the much-lauded Khum-rah – People of the Sun. Crowds of travellers from all over Dwanar, drawn by rumours and distant sightings of the precious sunlight, kept arriving, and on the shores of the sea, once more filled with fish like the rivers and ponds, often there lay the flotsam of makeshift vessels, although to the generous tribe’s chagrin, there were never any survivors amongst them.
And there was yet another thorn in the people’s happiness: the handful of blind men still alive – who, after being reviled and killed, were now treated as actual prophets and holy men (for, after all, it was they who had brought the Stone of salvation) – were dying; the same light that had taken their sight and replaced it with an obscure wisdom, had drained the life out of them, and though on that fateful day they had all been men in their prime, not two years later they seemed ancient, withered, toothless and bald, frail shadows that dwindled fast. And each of them, in dying, seemed to take with him a part of the Stone’s power: where once the ground was so soaked by its light it could scald the bare foot treading upon it, now, with every death, the brightness and warmth seemed to wane. Yet for all their alarm, there was nothing the people could do to stop this.
Perhaps because he’d been the first to touch the Blinding Stone, Iabi’s father was spared, even if temporarily, and was the last one to remain alive. By then the poor man had become a veritable fright: a bent, shrivelled, completely hairless creature with sharp claws and talons and great white globes for eyes, whose only evidence of humanity were the barely audible words that sometimes came out of his blackened lips. Furthermore, the old man had grown possessively attached to the Stone, spending all his time seated at the roots of the olive tree and gruffly resisting any attempt to either move him to the warmth of his home or to make him more comfortable with pillows and blankets.
And since there seemed no reason anymore to keep the Stone buried if
all it did was produce increasingly fitful peeks of the sun which resulted in crops and beasts that diminished in number and vitality, they decided to unearth the venerated object and let the old man hold and treasure it – which he did, living in the back of the Stone’s old hut, gazing at the ebb and flow of its light with wide, unsleeping eyes, as though fearing that a single moment of carelessness on his part might extinguish its magical glow forever.
Four long years Iabi’s father lasted in this fashion, in obsessed isolation, and his only interaction with the villagers – and not all of them; he seemed to prefer speaking to children – was through his occasional mutterings, which concerned a group of heroes he called ‘The People of the Blinding Stone’ and who, according to his repetitive rambling, would one day arrive to dispel once and for all the dangers of an endless, sunless winter and of another, this time fatal, famine, that still loomed from time to time. And though at first it was hard to make out his half-whispered words, soon there appeared a pattern in the old man’s prophesying, and instead of vague or fable-like predictions he began to speak of five specific people, whose traits were so distinct and remarkable the children turned them into a rhyme which spread among the tribe like a prayer or incantation:
One of enormous height,
And two more, amazingly white.
The two gifted fruit of one womb –
These shall come and lay waste to the tomb.
Thus the Sentinels of the Sun came into existence, because in the aftermath of the old man’s death the instability of the sunlight and the vegetation dependent on it became so alarming, the people began to feel once more the chilling breath of extinction on their necks. And so they laid their hopes on the five saviours of the prophesy, and kept watch upon the nearby shores with fearful faith, gazing at the grim horizon for a sign.
“And now here you are, sitting before me,” Iabi said, his voice breaking and tears of joy and gratitude rolling down his cheeks. “My poor father was right after all.”
The last smoldering logs were breaking off into chunks of white ash by the time his story reached the present, and the heroes neither looked nor felt particularly heroic, for they were all in the process of falling gently, imperceptibly asleep.
Standing up and yawning himself, Iabi looked up and saw a hint of dawn in the sky, a faint rosiness behind the dove grey, and bowed his head in deference even to such little light. Then he went around picking blankets and hides and pelts and covering the blessed visitors, who, huddled close together with faint smiles on their sleeping faces, were the picture of peace. Yet one of them, the little boy named Yonfi, shook his head and blinked at Iabi as he was tucking a camel’s hair rug around his chin.
“And what happened to the Stone?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep.
“Sleep, now, noble Yonfi,” Iabi said. “You shall be needing your strength.”
But the boy sat up, frowned and said sulikly, “My strength is infinite.”
Iabi knew this, from one of his father’s last utterances, but still had to suppress a smile. “Well,” he whispered, squatting before the boy, “the Stone is still in the hut. But it glows no more, and it has grown so impossibly heavy that no one can remove it.”
“I shall fix it and bring back the sun,” said the boy, and fell asleep at once.
Iabi eased him back into his brother’s arm. “I’m sure you will,” he said.
The Runes of Norien Page 59