In the Earth Abides the Flame (50 page)

The rain kept up for two days and a night. By the morning of the second day no article of clothing, whether worn or carried, remained dry. It proved impossible to sustain a fire in such weather. In spite of the increased pressure to make progress, with Kantara and the Jugom Ark ahead of them and the Bhrudwan threat behind, the Arkhimm elected to stay where they were that long day.

They found shelter of sorts in a hollow at the side of a rocky outcrop, though it was more of a concavity than a cave. What wind there was bent the grey rain-curtain somewhat to the west, away from where they sheltered, but the rock itself was wet and cold, and the travellers were altogether lost and miserable. Within their limited field of vision were a few moss-bearded mountain birch trees, some kind of flaxen bush, much larger than those which grew in the North March, and a rocky descent, down which milky water tracked to the valley bottom stream-bed, which rumbled with water-power. Of the ridge behind and the heights in front of them the travellers could see nothing.

'If I'd wanted weather like this I would have gone north, not south,' Kurr grumbled, flicking water-drops from his nose.

'This lot could push off a hundred miles north, where it's needed,' said the Haufuth. 'What manner of country is this, where mist, drought and flood are close neighbours?'

'This is indeed an unexpected and unfortunate storm,' Prince Wiusago agreed. 'I am afraid I have led you astray.'

Leith asked the question that bothered him. 'If the Most High has appointed this task for us, and has foreseen our journey, why has he not provided good weather for it? Why doesn't he do something about this storm? Why doesn't he supply a path to guide us?'

'Come to that, why allow the Jugom Ark to be hidden here?' Phemanderac commented. 'It would have been far easier for it to have been rediscovered in Instruere.'

'Exactly,' said Leith.

The philosopher took his harp from across his shoulders, unwrapped it and played a few chords. 'I wonder whether it has anything to do with us,' he said thoughtfully. 'Perhaps something needs to be formed within us, something which is brought forth only by hardship.

Maybe the Right Hand is knit together by the sinews of struggle.'

'So we're here for the Most High to remake us,' said Leith quietly.

'All of life is a making,' Phemanderac responded as he rewrapped his harp against the foul weather. 'In this case, however, we may be partly aware of the purpose.'

'What if we don't want to be remade? What if we don't like being someone else's plaything?'

'Then I doubt the Most High can achieve his purpose. You can't prevent yourself from being changed. After all, everything changes you to some degree. But you can thwart Him.'

'Good,' said Leith quietly. If you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.

After a while the discussion extended into an examination of their quest. The Haufuth, as was his wont, argued against the influence of the Most High, supported at times by Te Tuahangata. After his initial outburst Leith remained quiet, and Hal, who had suffered more than the others during the trek of the last month, slept quietly at the foot of the outcrop. The Escaignian woman had said nothing for days, and remained silent now, staring into the greyness within and without: the reality of the world outside Instruere, bright with life and dark with death, had unnerved her. Phemanderac led a spirited defence of the Most High, while Kurr revealed that he had thought carefully about these matters by admitting he now felt a sense of destiny. The Jugom Ark had to be found, he argued; it would be found; it was their destiny to find it. Hardships were irrelevant. The only way they would fail to meet with their destiny was to stop moving, to give up.

'We have stopped moving,' commented Wiusago.

'Have you given up?' Kurr asked him, eyebrows arched.

'I would like to. Though we have water aplenty, the answer to our prayers of only a few days ago, we are about to run out of food. We are going to have to live off the land. I see no problem when the weather is dry. Tua and I can hunt, and perhaps you northerners have skill in this area, as you have in so many others; but while it rains the animals remain in their dens, their lodges and their burrows, and even the birds do not venture abroad. Our path is unclear, and the rain will without doubt have brought down slips and raised rivers until the valleys are impassable. We are lost. We are wet. Soon we will be hungry. How can we go on?'

'Yet we are alive!' declared Te Tuahangata. 'We cannot give up now!'

'I agree with you, my friend,' said the Prince of Deruys. 'I see no reason to go on except that we cannot contemplate failure. I said I would like to give up; 1 did not say I would give up. If this rain would but relent for a moment, we would be on our way once again.'

As though to mock his words a huge clap of thunder reverberated around the valley, and the rain redoubled in intensity. In what seemed only a few minutes water began to cascade from the rock behind them. The air around them boomed with the fall of rocks and water, and from the flood that had once been a stream came the appalling sound of rocks grinding together, tearing at and seemingly shattering the valley into pieces. The small grey world about them appeared to be tearing itself apart. Then, just as it appeared as though everything was about to explode, the rain stopped.

As though a veil parted, the clouds lifted, the greyness lightened, the far slopes of the valley came into view. The travellers lost the sense that they were drowning in the very air.

However, the water poured from every ledge, down every slope and showed no sign of abating: a thousand waterfalls coruscated from misty heights, seeking out the valley floor.

Prince Wiusago smiled at Te Tuahangata, his antagonist. 'I have gained heart from you, my friend,' he said. 'Shall we go?'

* * *

Early the next morning they came to the confluence of two rivers. The stream they followed ran into a larger, broad-bottomed river with narrow flats on either side, flanked by steep-sloped mountains. It reminded Leith of the Mjolk River up near Windrise, except where the Mjolk was a collection of narrow, braided streams interwoven with broad shingle bars, these rivers were tumultuous floods, stretching from bank to bank. The clouds remained, but withheld their rain, and the Arkhimm could continue their journey.

'It's just as well we're on the correct side of this stream,' Kurr observed as they struck across the river flats. 'We'd never cross it in its present state.'

'But the same will apply to the next stream that bisects our path,' the Haufuth responded. 'We will be delayed eventually.'

Prince Wiusago, who was perhaps fifty yards ahead of them, stopped and bent over, examining something on the ground. 'Come!' he called to them. 'Look what I've found!'

The prince held up what he had found in the half-light. He stood to one side of a symmetrical cone perhaps fifty feet high. Leith and the others made towards him.

'It's a shield,' he told them, rather unnecessarily, as they came up to him. 'Look at the device!'

On the shield, which was mostly red in colour, was a cross of white, overlaid by a jagged yellow line like a lightning-stroke. 'This is an ancient shield of Tabul.'

In a moment they all made discoveries of their own. Strewn about them lay the remnants of a great battle: swords, shields, helms; boots, mail-shirts and sundry clothes; staves, arrows and other weapons of war. The cone to their left was a huge cairn, placed above a mass grave containing many warriors, valiant and forgotten. Wherever the Arkhimm wandered on the river flat they found articles of war, bearing the lightning devices of Nemohaim, the yellow sun of Tabul, or, more seldom, the sable simplicity of the Pei-ra. As they moved about, Prince Wiusago and Te Tuahangata put aside their reluctance and told them what they knew of the ancient wars.

In a number of places throughout Faltha, they said, during the formative years after their expulsion from the Vale, the various houses of the First Men contended with each other for land and resources. The bitterest and most protracted battles took place here, in the land formerly known as The Peira, a triangle of land wedged between the Valley of a Thousand Fires to the north, Nemohaim to the west and Tabul, the arid kingdom south of the Deep Desert, to the east. There had been people here before the First Men came, an industrious but not a numerous race called the Pei-ra, naming themselves after the land they loved. Their land was claimed by Nemohaim and Tabul both and, to establish their claims, both kingdoms sent settlers to this land to take possession of it. The Pei-ra quickly became skilled in the art of war, particularly those aspects involving stealth, ambush and betrayal, and they fought for their lives, harried like some small animal wedged between two rocks. It took hundreds of years and many bitter battles for Nemohaim to wrest control of The Peira from Tabul - and from the people called Pei-ra, though nobody thought to write them into the records of war -

and it would have taken much longer but for the chance discovery of gold far to the east in southern Tabul, a chance which robbed the Tabuls of many of their fighting men.

The final battle fought in this land, at this very spot barely a generation ago, was perhaps the bloodiest ever fought in Faltha. Each side had at least two thousand casualties on each day of the fighting, which lasted six frightful days before Tabul abandoned the field. The dead had not been buried, for the forgotten Pei-ra came upon the victorious Nemohaimians with bitter fury in a final assault, allowing their own blood to be shed in what seemed careless abandonment, until the very ground turned red beneath them. The Pei-ra fought long and valiantly, but incrementally they were forced southwards until they faced the might of Nemohaim with their backs to the south coast. Then, with great anguish of spirit, the survivors abandoned the land they loved and found habitation on a large island a hundred miles or more out to sea; and the once-proud people became pirates, highwaymen of the seas, scavengers picking over the leavings of the First Men. So Nemohaim took possession of the land, naming it Astraea in recognition of the justice of their cause.

But the Nemohaimians never settled in their hard-won land. Their young king had taken a chance wound in the war and, though only minor, this wound became infected and he died before they could take him back to Bewray. A curse, it was said. A bitter wrangle developed over the succession, for his oldest sons were twins, the younger being much the more fit to rule than the older, but denied the throne because of the laws of succession, even though his twin would willingly have ceded the kingdom to him. The prospect of being a prince to his minutes-older brother's king did not suit this proud youth, and he plunged Nemohaim into a costly civil war. At the height of this war the Pei-ra swarmed ashore to give them battle, and a great engagement took place at Vassilian, in the north of the Plains of Amare, nigh to Bewray itself. There the army of Pei-ra was finally broken, but at great cost to the Nemohaimians; and after this they no longer had the reach to grasp the land of Astraea.

Neither did the Pei-ra, of whose army only a handful returned to their island fortress. And the men of Tabul had found something else to fight about.

From that time the land of Astraea had a name of evil portent; and even when Nemohaim regained its former strength it did not put forth to settle the lands to its northeast. The earth still ran with the blood of soldiers, the sayings went; the ground was cursed, and those who ventured by chance or design into that land seldom returned.

None of the Arkhimm had heard the sayings, though Wiusago knew something of this history, and counselled his fellow travellers to be careful. This, he reasoned, was because of the physical dangers: the chance of becoming lost, or falling from the steep-sided hills, or twisting an ankle on the stony ground. He did not suspect himself of fearing the land for other reasons.

As the two fighting men spoke Leith fancied he could see the wraiths of warriors trading blows amid the thorny trees and wide, well-grassed flats.

'This is an eerie place,' Kurr said.

'The sheer numbers involved here frightens me,' Phemanderac said quietly. 'But even more concerning is the image of such a conflict about the walls of Instruere.'

As if to echo the sombre mood, the clouds lowered a little, and a light drizzle filtered down.

The Arkhimm took their leave of this grim scene, but not before arming themselves with the best of the equipment. Armour and helmets they found, barely heavier than their normal clothes, fitting easily into their packs. More importantly, many of the blades were of the highest quality, and Leith chose a short sword that had survived the passage of years with no blemish.

'That blade was made for a noble or even a king,' Prince Wiusago said. 'We have no craft in Faltha today to match it. Look at the black hilt: it was owned by a Peiran. This is a weapon to grace the best swordsman.'

'Then you'd better have it,' said Leith quickly, smiling. 'I have just enough skill to draw it from its scabbard without cutting myself.'

'I've found one more to my liking,' came his answer. 'You keep it. Perhaps one day I might have the leisure to teach you how to use it. In the meantime, that blade will intimidate any swordsman with sufficient knowledge to recognise it. That may keep you safer than any skill I could impart.'

'What would Bhrudwan rule be like?' Leith asked Phemanderac later that day. The sky was still low, but the light rain had stopped, and conditions for travel were pleasant. They were working their way upriver, using the narrowing river flats to strike southwards towards the mountains.

'Bhrudwan rule?' The philosopher looked at Leith blankly for a moment, as though waking from a reverie. 'Bhrudwan rule? The thought cannot be contemplated.'

'We have to think about it,' Leith insisted, 'if only to help us resist it.'

'You have seen the Council of Faltha, and in particular the Arkhos of Nemohaim. Their actions give you some idea, for they learned the art of government from their Bhrudwan masters. Yet they are pale imitations of the Destroyer and his lieutenants, who would rather annihilate Falthans than subjugate them. They would begin by pressing the able-bodied of Faltha into service as slaves to exploit the resources of the land. That is, if any remained after a conflict with Bhrudwo. The best and fairest of Falthan children would be taken from their parents and transported to Bhrudwo, to be remade into something horrible. A thousand years ago they made the mistake of trying to govern Faltha as a nation: this time they would more likely treat it merely as a source of raw materials for Bhrudwo. There would be no hope for the remainder, who might be allowed to live if killing them proved too much trouble. And whoever lived would be traumatised beyond measure by what they would see in the war.