Temple of the Traveler: Book 01 - Doors to Eternity (17 page)

Jotham the Tenor located an ox that would suit his needs; indeed, it was the only ox left within the walls of the quarantine zone. The animal was a little malnourished, but it could walk at a reasonable pace and carry a burden as light as the boy for as long as necessary.

When approached, the merchant who owned the ox moaned, “I can’t leave until the priests show up to bless me. They have to certify me free of plague and accept my sacrifice to Semenos. My quarantine period’s over, but who knows when they’ll be back?”

“I’m leaving for Cardinado tonight,” Jotham noted. “I could take your offering there myself. You needn’t wait for the others.”

“But who’ll sign my travel papers?”

“As it happens, I’m also a vested priest with a signet ring. We could exchange papers giving me responsibility for delivering the offering, and you’ll be beyond blame.”

“How do I know you won’t just steal the ox for yourself?”

“yself. Yhands are clean either way,” said the priest, giving the man the answer he wanted to hear. In reality, no mortal would be so foolish as to steal a gift made to the gods, and no priest would place his signet upon a vow he intended to break.

They shook hands on the deal and drew up the documents.

Under cover of darkness, the night-sighted priest guided the merchant and animal across the river. They parted ways on the far side of the waters, the merchant complaining about his cold, wet boots and how much of the fair he’d already missed.

“A freed mind needs to sleep only one seventh of the day. I get by on three hours, usually under a pine bough during the worst of the noon heat. Doesn’t it seem more reasonable to avoid being burned by the sun’s glare?” Brent conceded the point. “If you feel the need to rest due to your recent illness, do so. The saddle is wide and I won’t let you fall.”

“Jotham,” said the boy as they left the woods he had known his entire life. “Thank you.”

There’s hope for the world yet
, thought the priest.

****

Jotham had to coax and persuade the ox through the underbrush. The ox had a pleasant, ruddy color, but the tip of its left horn had been broken off. Though the priest led it through wide gaps by pulling on the rope, the beast didn’t always follow. Nevertheless, the wild-haired man never cursed or beat the animal. Eventually, Brent’s curiosity got the best of him and he asked, “Teacher, why are you running?”

The priest was evasive. “I’ve told you many reasons.”

“You’ve told me why you continued tonight, not why you started,” said the boy.

Jotham stopped so abruptly that the ox nearly stepped on his foot. “You’re a perceptive student. To fully understand a thing, you must understand its roots. Most recently, I suffered from an error in judgment, which brought the wrath of many upon me. But just to be clear, the reasons behind the anger were mainly political; I have done nothing outside the scope of my authority.”

The boy narrowed his eyes, trying to squeeze meaning from the excuse. “So you made a mistake because you didn’t understand history well enough?”

Jotham laughed at this. After all the books he had written on history, insufficient attention to the lessons of the past had indeed triggered his current situation. “Yes. Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees,” he said, quoting an old expression.

The teacher was saved from an endless series of sch questions when they reached a particularly steep incline. The ground was slick with dew and the ox lost footing. All three pitched uncontrolled down the slope. The man and boy landed safely on the ground, while the ox had its good horn embedded in the trunk of a tree. The ox was level, but the ground was not, and its front legs were dangling a full arm’s length off the ground.

“I think I am going to invent a new proverb,” said the priest dusting himself and the boy off while analyzing the situation. “An ox does not travel well through the woods.”

The boy giggled. “Or sometimes even oxen fall from trees.”

The priest’s face fell. “Hmm, that could be dangerous. His bones are not the strongest, as you can tell from the broken horn tip. If we allow him to fall naturally, he might break a leg and be unable to continue.”

Brent stopped laughing. “My grandmother had that problem, too.”

Jotham calmed the desperate ox by whispering and stroking. “If this were an old woman, it would be easy. We’d give her bread made with ground cliff stone in it, the white kind you find on your shores. Then we’d invoke a minor blessing in the name of Calligrose, asking that the strength of the mountains inhabit her bones. With an ox, however, we must use our brains.”

“Why can’t we bless Red?”

The priest rubbed the side of his forehead. “Compassion is an admirable trait. We should be kind to the animals. I do not fault your heart. But there are two very good reasons I shall not pray for this ox. First, one should never resort to miracles when the mundane will suffice. It dulls the wits and angers the gods. Second, the Traveler has not replied to a plea for mercy for seven times seven years.” Even a child could tell from the crack in his reedy voice how much this fact pained the priest.

“It’s better that we gather loose stones, branches, and earth to pile under his hooves. Then when we’re ready, I will bid him sit.” Together, they undertook the small project and built a crude ramp beneath the ruddy ox’s forelegs. When the ox proved unwilling to sit of its own accord, Jotham added his own weight to the beast’s rear and concentrated. In moments the animal’s hindquarters sank as if under a mighty burden. When the horn pulled free, he praised the ox and re-seated the boy.

When they reached level ground again, on a hard-packed, dirt trail, Brent said, “I don’t know what you did, but it was definitely supernatural. I thought you said the Traveler didn’t answer prayers any more.”

“The Traveler has given us knowledge of many Ways, among them the secrets of the giants,” said the priest. Thankfully, the ox seemed to follow the road of his own accord, with no coercion needed.

“Perhaps the Traveler has taught you all he can,” Brent suggested.

The half-breed shook his head. “I would that we could be so advanced. Alas, there’s something wrong in our land and it grows worse every day. I think that before we can speak to the Messenger again, we must put something right. Still, it does no harm to pray because you never know when someone may be listening.”

By dawn, they were back on the Emperor’s Road again. Their pace was about half of what Jotham could have managed alone. At the first opportunity, Brent grabbed a handful of the cliff chalk, which he mixed with Red’s feed. All the while they walked, the boy rubbed the ox’s head andmurmured pleas to strengthen the animal’s bones.

As fate would have it, less than a league later, Jotham and Brent passed a group of three travelers breaking camp. The three carried walking sticks and wore green capes, clearly Sons of Semenos. When he saw others in the distance, the Tenor pulled an eye-patch over his brown eye. This gave him the appearance of a pure Imperial with a disability.

The leader of the local priests was thin and too advanced in years to be on such an errand to the outer towns. His joints ached from the night outdoors, and the younger priests did most of the packing. The youngest priest accompanied him out of untrammeled idealism, the desire to learn from an experienced master. The other was an accountant clerk from the main temple, sent to spy and make sure all offerings were handled properly. As the animal passed, the accountant appraised the Imperial, the boy, and the sorry state of the ruddy ox. He sniffed disdainfully. Such a broken horn would have made the beast unworthy of his temple’s herd.

Nothing more was said of the two travelers until the Sons of Semenos reached Wrensford once more. When the king’s soldiers went to fetch the merchant and his sacrifice, they discovered the escape. Descriptions of all parties involved were related to the priests. The accountant blinked a few times when he heard the report about the ox and the tip missing from its left horn.

Once the priests had blessed and dismissed all the survivors remaining in the small hamlet, the soldiers were ordered to burn the village, bury the coals, and return to the capital with the last few sacrifices. Meanwhile, the priests would track down the escapees as a sacred duty.

****

When Jotham saw the smoke plume on the horizon behind them, he was testing Brent’s reading abilities. Although the priest knew that pursuit was inevitable, he didn’t interrupt his student or goad the ox to move faster. The boy did well sounding out the words on the scroll, but needed help with comprehension. Questions about the Silence led to an impromptu history lesson.

“Our sect’s current difficulties began seven times seven years ago when the Traveler ceased speaking. With no more miracles to offer, fewer people supported us. Kings, and even the emperor himself, grew nervous about so large an unaligned force loose in the world. Yet no one remembered how our patrols maintained safety. They saw only an opportunity to gain at the expense of someone weaker. At first, the kings merely refused us provisions. Toward the empire’s end, they began to take active measures of aggression. I believe that the emperor’s failure to defend the temples led to his own decline. Three cycles ago…”

“Cycles?” asked Brent. The boy didn’t mind the big words, because listening grew easier as it stretched him in small ways.

“A cycle is seven years,” the teacher explained. “…the temples began to fall to the greed of kings. On the eve of the last temple falling, the emperor met his doom. Thus, this land entered its darkest hour. Priests and Imperials both were punished. The rule of law failed, and there were several civil wars raging at once. Whole cities starved because the emperor’s ships no longer brought them grain from the distant fields of Mandibos.” There were far more personal tragedies of which Jotham said nothing.

“Out of those three years of utter chaos rose an alliance. The kings of Intaglios and Semenos joined their armies together and invaded the steel foundries of Kiateros. This move took their neighbon s surprise, and enabled the aggressors to consolidate their new holdings before anyone could react. Then they picked an Imperial of the lowest caste, rescued from the dungeons of Kiateros, to be the new emperor: Sandarac the first. Like Myron, he’d been named for a type of incense burned in the temples. There were enough details matching his description from fringe prophecies that some people believed.

“Controlling the source of all Honored swords, this Pretender might have succeeded in reuniting all the land. However, the spymaster at the Great Library received news of this attack and mobilized the kingdoms of the south, Bablios and Zanzibos, otherwise known as the twins. The vast kingdom of Mandibos didn’t join their blood pact, but vowed to defend her borders against aggression by the false emperor. These are the battle lines still drawn today, with both sides evenly balanced. The slightest advantage to one side or the other could mean the beginning of a bloodbath such as we’ve never seen.

“To make matters worse, no trade will be permitted until the kings of the north restore the crown of Kiateros to its rightful owner, or until the heir dies. Mandibos shelters the only surviving member of the Kiateros royal family, Lugwort the Jeweler.” He then went on to describe Lugwort in great detail. Occasionally, Jotham would take long digressions such as this one, causing the boy to fall asleep in his saddle.

The Jotham’s chase was nothing compared to the lion-like hunting of Tashi. With the infirmities and frequent stops of the eldest priest of Semenos making progress only slightly faster than the lumbering of the ox, the race took almost three days. By now the landscape was flat and they’d almost reached the medium-sized town of Cardinado. At evening mealtime, the accountant demanded that they press on, before the criminals could reach town and disappear into the crowds. The long delay had given the clerk time to work himself into a frenzy of righteous indignation about the theft.

They finally came upon their quarry in a small clearing between the road and the Inner Sea. While Brent stirred a pot of vegetable stew, Jotham tied the ox to a branch and located a collection of tiny, delicate ferns. The patch went quickly back into place over his brown eye. When the three Sons of Semenos crept up from all sides, the Tenor exclaimed, “Welcome to my camp. All who travel are my brothers.” He laid his staff on the ground in a grand gesture.

Almost without thought, the old priest replied in the old ways that few today remembered. “We are all travelers.” In doing this, he inadvertently accepted the offer of hospitality, and could do nothing to harm his new host. “I’m Harkan, and these are my acolytes.”

“Indeed,” said Jotham raising the eyebrow over his patch. “I thought them pledged to Semenos.”

Harkan’s mood lightened at this. The distinction told him that he was in the presence of a trained theologian, not a career criminal. The eldest priest held out his arms and warned his companions, who were bridling at the perceived slight. He lay down his staff, and the other Sons followed his lead. “Peace, brothers. We are here to speak and to dine with our host…”

“I am Jotham the Tenor, also known as Jotham the Historian. The boy Brent is an orphan in my care,” he said, introducing them both, as protocol demanded. The half-Imperial eyed them all closely, waiting for them to make the first foray.

The accountant pointed a stubby finger and accused, “You are harboring a plague carrier!”