In the Earth Abides the Flame (42 page)

Te Tuahangata had no such qualms. 'What do you mean by this, my father?' he stormed.

Unmoved, the chief replied to his son's insolence with a steady stare of his own. Tua was not finished, however. He took the woman's hand from Wiusago's grasp and dragged her some distance apart from the others; intending, no doubt, to hold a private discussion with her.

'I would remind my son how much he detests humiliation,' said the old man in a level voice, using the common speech to widen the audience to his son's discomfort. 'I would ask him to consider how many generations it has been since the Children were led by a queen, and what implications his possible disinheritance might have. Has he considered, for example, whom the queen might choose for a consort?'

'You wouldn't,' Te Tuahangata replied, injecting into his voice as much certainty as he could muster.

'Unquestionably I would,' came the reply, and the certainty it contained was entirely natural.

'My son, you have yet to demon-strate the self-control required to be paramount chief of the Children. Perhaps your sister might serve better in this role.'

'But I—'

'Be silent and learn, my son. You are not yet ready for that which you desire. That is why I send you on a great mission to accompany the strangers from the north, and aid them in their quest.'

'But we are not allowed into the valley—'

'It's true, Tua,' said the woman, holding his right hand with both of hers. 'I have spoken with the ancestors and they gave me a message to give to you.'

'You spoke to them? They gave you a message?' Anger and bewilderment wrestled with each other on his face. 'Why could they not speak to me? I have sought them long and fervently.

Why do they not speak?'

'Because you have not yet learned to listen,' came the ready answer from the lips of the chief.

'But a girl—'

'You have not yet learned to listen,' the old man repeated. 'And we have yet to greet our guests. Hold your tongue and shame us no more.'

With a great effort Te Tuahangata restrained himself.

The woman spoke as she walked gracefully away from her brother, back towards Wiusago.

'The ancestors said to me that nothing was forbidden us. Nothing is tapu. Our calling is more sacred than tapu. Do you understand? Nothing is tapu. The Children of the Mist are not to be bound.'

Her father nodded and fixed his stern gaze on his son. 'You will travel with the strangers, you will give them aid, and you will be my eyes and ears in the outer world. I wish to know what course of action to choose when the time comes to fight. I do not want the tide of war to sweep up and over our little land unchecked.

'Now, let us welcome our guests.' The chief turned to the members of the Arkhimm with uncompromised dignity. 'Please forgive our rudeness. We are not accustomed to making outsiders welcome in our land. Prince of Deruys, be twice welcome; and consider the words of the ancestors as you think on your heart's desire. Those from the north, recognise that we do you a great honour by allowing you to walk on our land. The number of strangers who have been embraced by the Mist in a thousand years can be summed by the number of trees in the grove under which we stand. Tua has explained something of your cause, but I would hear more. Spend an hour with me. Tell me of Faltha and Bhrudwo, and help me decide whether this is anything to concern the Children of the Mist.'

He came forward then and greeted each of the Arkhimm in turn, lingering a little in his embrace of Wiusago. 'You are our hope; you and my children,' he said to the prince.

'I have given my life for such a hope,' the prince said.

'And so have my children, one albeit reluctantly.'

'Yet I have seen goodwill enough to hearten me,' said the young man. 'Pride and beauty have been given in great measure to you and your seed.'

'Be patient yet a while longer, my child. You will not be cheated of your destiny.'

Wiusago nodded solemnly. Then he and the Princess Hinerangi went aside some distance to spend the hour alone. Te Tuahangata glanced darkly in their direction once or twice, but said nothing.

The chief would not be gainsaid, even though Kurr, in particular, sounded anxious to get on with the journey. He was worried, he said, both by the immediate threat of the Arkhos of Nemohaim, whom he imagined would be even at this moment sweeping down the coast towards Bewray, and the (hopefully) less imminent but infinitely more dangerous threat of the Bhrudwan army. However, in the light of the honour done them, the Arkhimm stayed and shared a meal with the chief and his daughter.

Leith listened as Kurr, Phemanderac and the Haufuth attempted to convince him of the danger to his own people should Faltha fall. The noble old man was a little puzzled as to why the best course of action appeared to be flight to the south and, as his warriors did not use arrows, found it hard to give much credence to the Jugom Ark. What moved him when nothing else would, however, was his son's account of Leith's meeting with the ancestors.

This tale had not been told even to the Arkhimm, and caused much astonishment, and a little incredulity, when it was told to the chief. Phemanderac in particular clearly wanted to ask Leith many questions, but waited with increasing impatience as the chief sought to verify his vision.

Finally, at the end of the hour, the paramount chief stood and embraced Leith. 'You have met he and she; Mother and Father, Earth and Sky, Eldest of us all. They have spoken to you and in so doing sanctified your quest. It is not insignificant that at the moment we consider involvement in the affairs of Faltha, our tupuna should speak to a Falthan, something they have never before done. I can do you no honour as great as that which they have done you; can offer you no blessing beyond that which you have received. But let it be known that this youth, the one on whom the favour of our Lord and Lady has been bestowed, I name land-friend; for he is truly one with this land. I have my sign. Commerce between my land and yours will increase, and one day soon this will be sealed by a marriage of prince and princess.'

They bade the old man and his daughter goodbye, and the sadness in Wiusago's eyes was palpable. Nevertheless, he turned his feet with those of the Arkhimm towards the great valley which lay many thousands of feet below them, baking in the desert sun. A few minutes after they began their descent into the valley, Leith turned and looked back. The chief raised his arm in farewell. A moment later they crossed the boundary between the land of the Mist and the Valley of a Thousand Fires. There was no visible marker to indicate the border, yet Leith felt it keenly; as though he stepped from living soil on to mere dirt. He looked about him. No one else gave any sign that they had noticed the change. He could not read Te Tuahangata's face.

THE VALLEY OF A THOUSAND FIRES lay long and narrow, northeast to southwest, three hundred miles in length and no more than fifty miles wide. The Arkhimm, the questers for the Jugom Ark, entered the valley from the west about halfway down its length. It lay along an ancient fissure in the surface of the earth, and here the deep fire that warmed the brittle skin upon which all humans lived burned close to the surface. Forces old and powerful beyond human comprehension pulled the land apart along this fissure, in places exposing the fire below. To the west of the valley the skin bunched up in folds, forming the land of the Mist, while to the north and south stark mountain ranges bounded the valley. Yet these mountains themselves were under long, slow and inexorable pressure. To the north the Veridian Borders, and to the south the Almucantaran Mountains, buckled upwards as the great rent in the earth sought passage. The land itself resisted the enormous pressure it was under, trying somehow to heal the wound, prevent the bleeding.

For here the earth bled. Deep fire welled up in scores, perhaps hundreds of places. Along the eastern margin of the tear in the earth it erupted violently, forming volcanoes that filled the air with dust, ash and the reek of sulphur. Some were tall and proud, conical in shape, while from the flanks of others grew smaller parasitic cones. Still others looked like low-sided pits of ordure, violent blast furnaces that did not waste energy on the building of elegant peaks, but simply vomited their innards contemptuously into the sky. Where the fire rose through underground reservoirs the superheated water emerged from the earth's fragile crust as steamy geysers and fumaroles, or hot, sulphurous springs, or boiling mud pools, or fantastic combinations of them all. In other places the ground itself bubbled and heaved like skin stretched too tight over roiling corruption; bubbled and heaved, but held.

To the east of the valley lay Khersos, the Deep Desert, to which no country laid claim. In the centre of this arid wasteland the sun held absolute sway, and no rain ever fell. Warm, dry air from the heart of the desert drifted slowly to the west, then grew even hotter as it descended the irregular edge of the Valley of a Thousand Fires and blanketed the valley floor in temperatures beyond belief. A number of streams found their way into the gaping wound from the north, south and west, forming a ribbon of lakes in the irregular floor of the valley. No water flowed into the ragged cut in the earth from the east, and no water flowed out from the Valley of a Thousand Fires; the greedy mouth swallowed all the moisture offered it.

This was the province the Arkhimm sought to penetrate, to survive in, to pass through.

Their descent into the Valley of a Thousand Fires rapidly became a nightmare, and soon everyone, even the guides, doubted the wisdom of choosing this path. Under a piercingly clear sky the nine-strong Arkhimm made their way down through waist-high clumps of sharp-edged brown grasses; tussoci, Prince Wiusago named them. For half an hour or so they encountered isolated clumps of straggly trees, outliers of the forest above, under which they received temporary shade; then these petered out altogether, leaving them at the mercy of the hot sun. She had not forgotten how powerless she had been to hinder them on the Westway in winter. Now these foolish creatures stumbled into territory not ruled by Qali - not ever touched by Qali - in the late summer at the height of her power, and she would make them pay for their folly. Twin lakes sparkled invitingly immediately below them, and in the ever-increasing heat Leith found he had already pinned his hopes on them. He remembered the village smithy, how he lent his help there one afternoon, and had been scorched all down one side by the heat from the furnace. Appallingly hot, it became hotter as they descended; the heat coming not only from the sky but also from the earth.

The air grew fouler, more and more sulphurous, leaving a metallic taste in their mouths at each breath. It would take more than a thousand fires to create this much heat, thought Leith.

'This better be a good short cut,' Kurr muttered.

Long before they reached the lakes, Leith's hopes faded. For rather than water, these lakes were filled with salt. All around them stood crazy pillars, arches and fantastic shapes, differentially eroded crags and pinnacles. The earth under their feet was painful to the touch, and crunched under their tread like broken glass. 'Keep to the white rock,' Wiusago advised.

'No human can walk on the black rock.'

In the heat of the day the Arkhimm were forced to take shelter, crouching between tall, asymmetrical shapes, their heads swathed in cloths dampened with small amounts of the precious water supply they carried on their backs. A gentle wind came up from the valley floor, many hundreds of feet below them. The breeze which would have been a blessing in any other land, here drove volcanic dust and noxious fumes before it, reducing them to a miserable state.

'It wasn't this bad last time I took this road,' Prince Wiusago said.

'Last time? You say it's possible to survive?' The Haufuth was incredulous.

'Will we have enough water?' Kurr asked him.

'No,' came the immediate and disconcerting reply. 'But, believe it or not, there is water to be found in this valley a few days south of here. There we will have water enough for our comfort.'

Late in the afternoon they set out again, though the air was still cruelly hot. 'Stay close behind me,' Wiusago warned. 'Do not leave the trail. We are coming to treacherous parts.'

'You mean it gets worse?' inquired the Haufuth. The heat affected him badly.

'Only if you stray from the path,' reiterated the prince.

To the left and to the right Leith noticed small craters, some of which were filled with grey mud. As he watched, the mud popped and bubbled, as though it were merely porridge in his mother's pot.

'Careful,' Wiusago called from the front. 'If you step into one of the mud pools you'll lose your leg.'

The surface of the rocky landscape surrounding them was an unfortunate collision of red, yellow, ochre-brown and green stains. Here and there steam arose from cracks in the ground; and once, to their right and some distance ahead, a great shot of steam roared up at least a hundred feet into the sky.

Thousands would flock to see a marvel such as that, thought Leith, if only it were not here.

Amid a landscape such as this it was difficult to think of anything else but survival. The Arkhimm had hoped to take time on their journey south to devise some plan, to discuss how they might decode the Riddle of the Arrow, which Phemanderac had repeated to them until it had become embedded in their minds; and how they might use the Arrow, once found, to unite the Falthans against their enemy. But the air was too hot to talk for long, the act of opening their mouths enough to scald their lungs. They had little to talk about in any case, the severity of the valley making it virtually impossible to concentrate for any length of time on a subject so esoteric as the future.

However, one substantial conversation took place on the afternoon of the second day, just after they resumed their march. Te Tuahangata had spent the morning walking silently, muttering to himself, drawing unpalatable conclusions if the look on his face was anything to go by. That afternoon he spoke to Wiusago.