In the Earth Abides the Flame (56 page)

But I said I didn't want to hear your voice.

Can we talk about this later? Right now 1 have to think about - in fact, you could probably tell me if I'm right or not.

Right. You're going to better me while playing with thousands of lives.

So it's up to me? You're not going to intervene?

The )ugom Ark, the Bhrudwan invasion, the whole lot?

They stopped for a few moments' rest in the burned-out glade. Leith dearly wanted to talk to someone, but the presence of Maendraga and Belladonna among them prevented him.

The magician turned to Leith and looked him in the eyes, appraising him. It seemed to Leith he had little regard for what he saw. 'Where to now, young master?' he asked abruptly. 'You haven't been fooling anyone.'

'That depends,' Leith retorted, angry and more than a little rattled, 'on what you plan to do if I'm right.'

'Nothing. If the Arkhimm find the Arrow without my help, I will not interfere.'

'In that case we go to the right, upvalley. I'm looking for something.' He looked squarely at the guardian, then decided to hazard another guess. 'You've never been there, have you? None of you have.'

'No.'

"That's why you're coming. Because if we find it, you want to see it.'

'If you had lived all your life in the service of an object, wouldn't you want to see it?'

Leith smiled and tried another hunch. 'Many times you've doubted its existence, haven't you?'

Maendraga smiled wanly. 'Since my wife died, I've hardly believed in it at all. I must see it! I must learn whether my life and the many lives before me were wasted.'

'So you think I know where it is?' By now all the travellers attended the conversation.

'I'm not sure. I feel unmade. Part of me wants you to find it, hope against hope, for it is hidden so cleverly even knowledge of the Arrow's whereabouts does not guarantee its possession.

But another part of me wants it to remain undiscovered until the Arkhimm is complete. Why, oh why did you not bring the girl?'

'It must be strange,' Leith reflected, 'being a Guardian of the Arrow. To never see it. Or to see it and find out you had a purpose only when that purpose ended. I don't understand why the Arrow needed a guardian.'

'Bewray did not want it found until the time was right. He was a Seer, of course, or he would never have hidden it. It should have been found, you know, at the time of the first Bhrudwan invasion a thousand years ago. An expedition came, just like yours, only the Five of the Hand was complete. They discovered from one of my ancestors the location of the Arrow, but could not recover it. The way is very difficult. So the Bhrudwans triumphed, and now you come again, just like Bewray foretold. And if you do not succeed—'

'Another group will come in a thousand years' time,' Leith finished for him. 'And in the meantime countless lives will be lost, and everyone will suffer, because of the failings of a few, or even one. Why does the Most High not pick his representatives more carefully?'

'Perhaps the task is beyond any of them,' Belladonna offered dolefully.

'We will never find out whether it is beyond us if we remain here,' said the Haufuth. 'It is time we got moving again.'

The valley mist rolled back, then dissolved in the morning sun, clearing away as though the guardians had no more use for it. Steam rose like smoke from folds and gullies in the valley walls; whether from evaporation or from the deep pools under the numerous waterfalls, Leith could not tell. He imagined little cottages set in hidden valleys, smoke spiralling from chimneys, laughter and play inside, and he found himself longing for rest from his labours, some peace and solitude, relief from the expectations of others. Not for the first time he returned in his mind to the days before his father was sent to Bhrudwo, to the time before the shining knights took his father away.

This brooding is doing me no good.

In the clear morning air the true grandeur of the upper Neume valley stood revealed. The mountains were impossibly high, impossibly steep. Not as tall, perhaps, as the heights of Grossbergen far to the north, but their bulk was more immediate, more oppress sively daunting, because of the precipitousness of the lower slopes. The sheerest faces wore no cover, bare grey giant-hewn stone vaulting skyward; while slightly gentler angles managed to hold soil, bushes and trees. At about three thousand feet above the valley floor the forest ended: above the treeline brown grasses grew up to the shoulders of the mountains on either side. Higher than this Leith could not see. From every mountainside waterfalls sprang, and though they were not overfull as on the previous two days, their fragile beauty was enhanced for it. Ahead of them, at the head of the Vale, two great snow-tipped peaks towered above them, rising almost as high again as at their shoulders, the lower slopes of the rightmost peak hidden by a bluff jutting out from the rock wall. On the leftmost massif he could make out a huge scar slicing down from just under the peak to near the valley floor. Be patient, be patient, he told himself, as he waited for the bulk of the other peak to come into view.

Nearly six months' walking in the wilds of the world should have conditioned Leith to be patient; however, he could not help but continue to glance ahead, craning his neck as if it would make the difference.

'What are you looking for?' Belladonna asked him. Leith listened carefully, but could detect no suggestion or coercion in her voice.

'I think you know. I'm looking for water falling from a high place.'

'So serious, yet so young,' and she laughed. This time Leith heard something beside the bare words, and he did not dare examine it, except to realise a woman with such control over her voice must have meant to say what she said. He tried not to blush, though he knew she said what she said in order to distract him.

Suddenly, above the ridge in front of them, it sprang into view, the topmost stair of a waterfall that fell ribbon-like from a hidden basin set between the two great peaks, still a league away.

Leith let out a relieved sigh. 'That's it, isn't it,' he asked Belladonna, but it was more of a statement than a question.

Maendraga answered for her. 'So it seems you've discerned something from what I said, or from some knowledge of your own. What else do you know?'

'Let's walk on until the whole thing is visible,' the youth replied boldly. 'I want to see it.'

This landscape affected the senses cumulatively. In the clear mountain air the slopes appeared to steepen, the peaks grew in size and the waterfalls crashed and foamed until their ears were full of the sound. Yet the forest did not alleviate their sense of smallness. The huge, spreading pines, firs and beeches towered over them, enfolding them in leaf-rustle and birdsong, one vast entity on a scale even the mountains could not match. The Vale of Neume, surrounded by the Almucantaran Mountains, was not a place mortals could suffer easily.

'How do you live with all this?' Leith asked Maendraga, waving an arm around him.

'You learn to break it down into manageable segments,' the magician replied, intuitively understanding Leith's question. 'It helps that my magic allows me to control parts of it, such as the mist, otherwise I think the land would be too burdensome. I must admit I have wondered what the rest of the world is like.'

'Insipid,' relied Phemanderac instantly. 'Compared to this, anyway.'

'Compared to that waterfall, anything else is bound to be insipid,' added Prince Wiusago. As they talked, they rounded the spur, and the head of the Neume valley came into view. The two peaks were revealed as enormous sentinels, standing guard over some secret set between them. Where their spreading ridges met a waterfall issued, seemingly spouting forth from the rock itself, a thrilling cascade plunging to the valley floor two thousand feet below in three great leaps, each larger than the one above.

'It is beautiful,' Te Tuahangata murmured. 'Beside this, all other cataracts are mere driblets of water.'

'Yes, it is beautiful,' said Leith, and he did not keep the grim-ness from his voice. 'It is beautiful, and we've got to climb it.'

The Arkhimm and their companions ate lunch as near to the base of the great fall as they could get without being drenched by the spray. Away to their left a stream gurgled out from a narrow valley, while above it the scree slope they had used to enter the valley stretched upwards until blocked from their sight by a ridge. However, the place was dominated by the waterfall. It leapt down at them from unguessable heights, and the roar it made as it plunged into its pool belied the fact it carried relatively little water. By craning their necks they could make out the highest of the three steps almost directly above them. Leith focused on one splash of water and tried to follow its progress down the cliff face. It slammed into a stone step, was thrust away from the slope, sparkling as it dropped, diamond-like, through space, then again bounced from the wall and took the long, slow plunge down into the black pool at the foot of the cliff.

'Climb that?' said the Haufuth. 'It's hard enough even to look at it.'

'Does it have a name?' Te Tuahangata asked Maendraga.

'No. All the other falls have names. I don't know who named them. One of my forefathers, most likely. But this, the Father of all, has no name. It is the Waterfall.'

'But the basin above has a name,' said his daughter slowly, carefully, as if afraid to give away the secret. 'It is called Joram.'

'Perhaps someone might like to explain what this has to do with our quest?' Kurr asked plaintively. 'It's all very nice - though I prefer something a little quieter and more restrained, myself -but I see no Arrow.'

'All right,' said Leith. Now the time had come to explain himself, he became self-conscious, keenly feeling the risk of ridicule he ran. He cleared his throat, then began.

'Walk this through with me. The only way to approach Kantara from the north is through the Mist, the desert or the Valley of a Thousand Fires. We all know how difficult that was. My guess is that Bewray and the guardians he appointed discounted the possibility of people approaching the Arrow from that direction, and so their defences were slight, as we found out.

Instead, they expect the few travellers who come to the Vale of Neume to approach it from the south, from Nemohaim, and their webs would deal with them. After all, there is supposedly no knowledge of magic in Faltha.' Here Leith could not help but cast a sidelong glance in the direction of his brother. 'At least, the guardians would be alerted that someone approached them. That's the way we would have gone if Prince Wiusago hadn't diverted us in Kinnekin. We might not have gotten this far.

'So if the defences are concentrated in the south to prevent access to this valley, I guessed the Arrow might be located in the north, at the head of the Vale.

'Now the riddle becomes important:

Through the air, over water, In the earth abides the flame.

'It is a map of words, telling us more specifically the location of the Arrow. My guess is, had the Arkhimm been complete, the guardians would have led us here, told us to climb the falls and left us to figure the rest out for ourselves. We have to go through air, over water, and find the flame in the ground. That could be anywhere. But what the guardians were not expecting was that we would come down that scree slide. But come down it we did, and because I was well ahead of the rest of you I saw the resting place of the Jugom Ark, without realising it at the time.'

Maendraga pursed his lips. 'It seems a lucky chance, if indeed chance it was. I wonder if the Most High has not compensated the quest for the missing girl.'

Leith continued. 'Did anyone else see the lake on our way down? I thought not. I only saw it for a few moments. Away to my left it was, lying in a basin between two ridges, with a small island at its centre. The water drained out in a deep gut between the ridges, and disappeared over a cliff. I could not see where it went.' He turned and looked up at the waterfall. 'I can now. This waterfall drains the lake far above us. To get to the island in the middle of the lake, where I expect we will find a cave, we must climb the cliff beside this fall and find a way across the water to the island. I guess we must choose carefully which side of the waterfall to ascend, as one side will be unclimbable. That's why the first quest for the Arrow a thousand years ago failed, wasn't it?' He turned to the magician and his daughter.

'Yes, it was,' Maendraga confirmed.

'They chose the wrong cliff, and either gave up or fell to their deaths. But the other cliff, the one they did not choose, is the correct way.'

'But how do you know all this?' Phemanderac asked him, bewildered by the breaks in his logic.

'On my way down the scree slide I saw something else. Stretched above the gap where the water drains the lake was a thin, gleaming wire. I wondered about it at the time. But I think now that it provides access from the correct side of the cliff to the location of a hidden boat.'

'A rope?' Wiusago repeated. 'But what prevents an adventurer from simply circumnavigating the lake and coming on the boat that way?'

'I don't know,' Leith said. 'I hadn't thought of that.'

'There is an impassable bluff on the lake's shore,' Maendraga said. 'Or so we've been taught.

Bewray judged it easier for questers to hazard the rope than try to surmount the bluff.'

'So now you're talking,' Phemanderac said with some bitterness. 'You might then want to explain why the illusions of the guardians were not defence enough. Why did he not simply leave the Arrow with you?'