In the Earth Abides the Flame (40 page)

In one place the stream squeezed between granite shoulders, and here a bridge of three ropes arched across the gap like fragile spidery filaments on a frosty morning.

'We cross here?' Leith asked, but even as he did a small, cheeky-faced boy ran past them, leaped on to the footrope and skipped lightly across with unconscious ease.

'It's a cold swim otherwise,' Te Tuahangata told him wryly, laying a hand on the guide ropes.

Shame is an excellent motivator, Leith considered as he found himself perched on the swaying rope fifty feet above a jigsaw of swirling waters and outcrops of shining rock. A minute or so later he was able to complete the aphorism: exhilaration is the reward.

On the opposite bank of the stream the path wound more urgently upwards. Beside it, hidden by tree-high ferns and hill-high trees, the river rumbled down with an ever-increasing voice.

The air grew cold. Ahead, bush, branch and fern shook with the force of a downvalley breeze.

Leith drew his cloak tightly about himself as a protection against the obvious approach of inclement weather.

Around a sudden turn stood a waterfall. A great white pillar of foam it was, a plunge of vitality from the heart of the land. Here, near its mountain catchment, the river encountered a huge hundred-foot-high slab of granite, and dealt with it simply by leaping over it. Though neither the largest nor the highest fall Leith had seen, it was perhaps the most perfect. In a single great plunge the river fell from a narrow crack in the obdurate rock, tumbling, thundering, crashing down into a deep green pool. Delicate water-curtains like filigrees of lace draped themselves on either side of the main fall in contrast to the brutal roar of the river, beaded strings surrounding power with beauty. Moss-bearded rock walls rimmed the bowl of the fall, their sheerness failing to prevent ferns and even trees lodging in their cracks and crevices. The fierce downdraught created by the waterfall beat incessantly against the branches and fronds, sculpting them into strange shapes that flowed away from the booming water.

Leith noticed movements in the dark water of the pool, but for a moment could not identify them. With surprise, he realised children swam in the frigid waters around and even under the waterfall. Others scaled the prodigious cliff-heights to find narrow ledges, from which to launch spectacular dives into the pool, their splashes and their squeals of laughter barely heard against the thunder of the falls.

Here, amid this aching beauty, the Arkhimm sat and ate their midday meal.

'What is this place?' Phemanderac asked. Leith heard the awe in his voice, and was reminded for a moment of the Wambakalven under Adunlok. But no harp-voice would be heard here.

Here a louder, more elemental music prevailed.

'It is called Wainui,' Te Tuahangata replied. 'Bigwater, in your language.'

'A prosaic name for such a place,' the philosopher said reverently. 'So might the Fountain of Life have appeared in the youth of Dona Mihst.'

The swimming children awoke in Leith a great homesickness. As he closed his eyes he saw the lake in the warmth of summer, ringed by Loulea's children diving, swimming, running, chasing, hiding, fighting, talking, laughing; and with a gut-wrenching ache knew of a certainty such a scene was being played out far, far to the north even now. No doubt some of the participants would be his friends. And here he was, forced by circumstance to be old before his time, sitting and watching others enjoying the fruits of what he sought to protect.

An ineffable sense of loss filled his soul.

'Tomorrow we come to the end of our lands, and encounter the Valley of a Thousand Fires,'

Te Tuahangata announced to them late that afternoon. 'There I must leave you, for it is forbidden for a Child of the Mist to set foot in that valley, on pain of exile or death.'

'Why should such a thing be?' Phemanderac asked him. 'How can a place be forbidden you?'

'I don't know,' Tua replied, shrugging his shoulders. 'It is a foul place, beset by desert winds and in which great fires burn, erupting from the ground or even from the tops of mountains -

but don't worry, you will not have to cross it at its worst,' he added, seeing the apprehension in their faces. 'I suppose we are kept out of there for our own good. At any rate there is a boundary just beyond the edge of the forest beyond which no Child may walk.'

'How much further to our goal?' Phemanderac wanted to know.

'I don't know the location of this Kantara, for I have not travelled in the mountains of Nemohaim,' Te Tuahangata replied.

Wiusago spoke. 'We have perhaps another two weeks at best, maybe more, before we climb down into the Vale of Neume. I have been there once, but only to the mouth of the valley and from the other direction; I am unfamiliar with what waits for us at its head.

'Now, my friend,' he said, turning to Te Tuahangata, 'I have seen nothing of your sister, though she must know I am here. Why has she not come to see me?'

Te Tuahangata frowned, and spread his palms wide. 'Who knows women? Perhaps she has taken up with someone else.'

'You and I both know how unlikely that is,' the prince replied quietly, as the northerners struggled to apprehend the sense of the conversation. 'You have not forgotten the words spoken over her and I on the green mound of Pohaturoa. There is no one else; there will never be anyone else for her or for me.' A hard edge underlay his voice.

'I am a warrior, and give no credence to soothsayers.' There was no mistaking the menace behind the words.

'I also am a warrior,' Prince Wiusago asserted in his turn. 'Yet I would rather fight an enemy than a friend.'

'You lowlanders have little stomach for a fight. Not so we of the Mist.' Fingers twitching, his hand hovered above the handle of his war club. 'I will protect the honour of my sister.'

From this Prince Wiusago knew that Te Tuahangata alone stood between himself and his love. Her father would not have prevented that which his own soothsayer had predicted. He frowned; but the importance of their mission and the words of his father both forbade him challenging his fellow prince. 'I question the wisdom of attempting to thwart your father's soothsayer,' was all he allowed himself to say as he walked away. Behind him Te Tuahangata smiled. Their last night in the land of the Mist was spent high on a steep ridge. The eastern margins of the land were sparsely inhabited, as they were more subject to the winds of the desert, though, paradoxically, they also suffered the severest rainfall. As a consequence of these winds the vegetation grew somewhat thinner, so their progress was a little quicker.

Though at least two hours of sunlight (or what passed for sunlight in the late spring mist) remained, Te Tuahangata found a little clearing on the ridge and insisted they halt here, rather than continue over the divide and into the Valley of a Thousand Fires. 'I will not spend a night in that valley,' was all Te Tuahangata would say about his decision.

Leith awoke to deepest, darkest night, the moonlight unable to penetrate the blanket of mist wrapped about this ancient land. Something, some noise or other, had woken him. He struggled to his feet, vaguely uneasy. Beside him Phemanderac, Kurr and the Haufuth slept on. There was someone else awake, standing a little distance away. He could feel rather than see his presence.

'Who's there?' Leith whispered into the night.

In answer the sound of bare feet on soft earth drew closer. 'It is I, Te Tuahangata,' came the whispered reply. 'Come with me. We have a meeting to attend.'

Leith thought about refusing, but remembered how everyone acquiesced to this man's leadership. They were in his power, he could have them killed any time he wanted to. He had to trust him, to regard him as a friend, just the same ...

'You won't need your sword,' said Te Tuahangata. 'Come.'

Leith followed as best he could, trying not to stumble on the treacherous ground. By his admittedly unreliable sense of distance they walked perhaps two hundred paces, then turned to the right and descended a slope. Ahead of them a hearth fire burned, beside which two figures warmed themselves. Something dreadful, a weight like fear but not quite, hovered over this place. Leith dragged his reluctant feet after Te Tuahangata.

'Step into the light,' said a voice, 'and let us see you.'

Leith could do nothing but obey, and found himself standing in front of a man and a woman, the two oldest people he had ever seen. Te Tuahangata bowed low before them, and Leith did likewise. Then the man and the woman drew up to Te Tuahangata and touched noses with him in the same form of ritual greeting he himself had offered the Arkhimm in Brunhaven, and which had been repeated many times since on their journey through the Mist-lands. Leith found he was expected to do the same.

In the moment of touching the two old people many sensations settled on Leith. His breath mingled with theirs, and he smelled the richness of freshly turned earth, then the moist echo of a rain-laden morning breeze. Old eyes drew close to his, eyes yellow-rimmed and rheumy, but deep, steady and powerful. The touch of skin was soft, and somehow welcoming and comforting. Irrationally, he felt as though he had been embraced by the land and the sky themselves.

'Sit down, young one, and tell us why you journey through our lands.' It was the woman who spoke, in a voice cracked with the passing of the years, but strong nonetheless. 'We will hear of your travels.'

As though spellbound, with neither the power nor the volition to resist, Leith found himself recounting their adventures one after another. No detail was spared, and it was many hours in the telling. Beside him Te Tuahangata listened with growing amazement. He had heard parts of this, but the telling in full of the exploits of the Company moved him powerfully. The two ancients listened with grave faces, saying nothing.

The man interrupted finally, just after Leith described the night of the Fire, when he had dreamed about the Most High and had received his promise of love.

Ah, the Most High,' sighed the old man. 'Yes, this sounds outrageous enough to be one of his plans. Do you feel comfortable entrusting yourself to the will of this god?'

'Yes, of course,' Leith answered defensively, then remembered the pact he had made the previous day when he decided to ignore the interfering voice should it speak to him again.

'Well, perhaps not, but I can't see any other choices.'

'Oh, there are other choices,' said the old woman in a mysterious tone. 'There are always choices.'

'I don't see how,' Leith replied, a touch of bitterness in his voice. 'It seems I am easy to manipulate, and that whatever I do serves his purpose.'

'Are you certain? Can you truthfully look back and say none of the choices were your own?'

Her eyes looked into his, not allowing him to brush the question aside.

Leith took a long time to answer as he reviewed his adventures. 'No, I cannot say that,' he admitted finally.

'So what is this god like, the one you so unwillingly serve?' asked the man.

'What do you mean, what is he like? He is a god! How can I know what he is like?'

'Is he good or is he evil? Is he light and holiness, or is he dark and malevolent? Or is he neither good nor evil, but awesome, majestic beyond our comprehension? Some great dragon of the sea, ready to lash out at us with his poisonous tail the moment any of us break some unwritten, unguessable law simply by following the natural desires he gave us in the first place? Or is he simply a fool, too frightened to admit things are beyond his control and the notion of giving the gift of life to humans was a mistake?'

'None of those things,' Leith said stubbornly.

'So what is he like, then?'

A number of glib answers came readily to Leith's tongue, but he tried and discarded each in turn as being dishonest. Dishonesty would not do in a place like this. In the end he shrugged his shoulders and said, 'I don't know exactly.'

'You don't know? You don't know? Do any of you know?' The old man's sudden incredulity stretched upwards towards rage. 'It's the conceit of it all that makes us the angriest. For thousands of years we have lived here, grappling with the power in this place and in each other, and then you people come, asserting some sort of special relationship with the Most High. "We are the First Men," you claim. "We are the chosen people." As though we who lived before were something other than human!

'So what do the chosen people do? Not satisfied with taking the choice lands by the Mother of Rivers for your own, you proceed to drive our kind out to the fringes of the world. You transform the land beyond recognition. Gone are the sweet-smelling lowlands in which the mariswan bred and blessed the land; in its place the slimy, silt-choked waters of the Maremma. You take our land still, smothering it with your parchments recording purchases and sales, using your pens to slice it up into parcels, red ink marking the places the land bleeds. Each parcel is so small it cannot contain within it all the seeds of survival, yet it is isolated from the parcels around it, and slowly it withers and dies.'

A badly frightened Leith wondered what the passionate words meant. No reply came to his lips, but it seemed none was, needed. There was anger here, but it was not directed at him; and he realised suddenly that they did not expect him to take the blame upon himself.

'There is a certain deer that lives in the high mountains south of the Valley of a Thousand Fires,' the old man continued. 'Even a hundred years ago it roamed freely over the foothills, through the misty valleys and down to the sea. But not now, not now.' The speaker paused to wipe a tear from his eye. 'Perhaps that is of no consequence to you. But the deer used to eat the seed of the mightiest trees, and in its belly the seed travelled hundreds of miles, so the trees could grow here, far away from the high mountains, in strange soil. And now, because of your inky knives, your fences and your hunting dogs, all brought to make real the blood-red lines on the parchments, the deer come no longer to the Children of the Mist. One by one the great trees die, as they will, and there is not enough seed to replace them. Our trees die.