The Redemption of Althalus (12 page)

“What exactly are we talking about here, pet?” she asked, absently washing her ears.

“I was convinced that I was the greatest thief in the world, but along toward the end there, I wasn’t really much more than a common highwayman hitting people on the head so that I could steal their clothes.”

“That comes fairly close, yes. What’s your point?”

“I could have done more with my life, couldn’t I?”

“That’s why we’re here, pet,” she told him. “Whether you like it or not, you
are
going to do more with it. I’m going to see to that.” She looked directly at him, her green eyes a mystery. “I think it’s time for you to learn how to use the power of the Book.”

“What do you mean, ‘use’?”

“You can make things happen with the Book. Where did you think your supper comes from every night?”

“That’s your job, Em. It wouldn’t be polite for me to stick my nose into that area, would it?”

“Polite or not, you
are
going to learn, Althalus. Certain words from the Book carry the sense of doing things—words like ‘chop’ or ‘dig’ or ‘cut.’ You can do those things with the Book instead of with your back if you know how to use it. Right at first, you’ll need to be touching the Book when you do those things. After some practice, though, that won’t be necessary. The idea of the Book will serve the same purpose.”

“The Book’s always going to be here, isn’t it?”

“That’s the whole point, dear. The Book has to stay here. It wouldn’t be safe to take it out into the world, and you have things you have to do out there.”

“Oh? What kind of things?”

“Little things—saving the world, keeping the stars up in the sky where they belong, making sure that time keeps moving. Things like that.”

“Are you trying to be funny, Em?”

“No, not really. We’ll get to those things later, though. Let’s try the easy ones first. Take off your shoe and throw it over by the bed. Then tell it to come back.”

“I don’t think it’ll listen to me, Emmy.”

“It will if you use the right word. All you have to do is put your hand on the Book, look at the shoe, and say
‘gwem.’
It’s like calling a puppy.”

“That’s an awfully old-fashioned word, Emmy.”

“Of course it is. It’s one of the first words. The language of the Book is the mother of your language. Your language grew out of it. Just try it, pet. We can talk about the changes of language some other time.”

He dubiously pulled off his shoe and tossed it over by the bed. Then he laid his hand on the Book and said
“gwem”
rather half-heartedly.

Nothing happened.

“So much for that as an idea,” he muttered.

“Command, Althie,” Emerald said in a weary tone. “Do you think a puppy would listen if you said it that way?”

“Gwem!”
he sharply commanded his shoe.

He didn’t really expect it, so he wasn’t ready to fend the shoe off, and it hit him squarely in the face.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t start with your spear,” Emmy noted. “It’s usually best to hold your hands out when you do that, Althalus. Let the shoe know where you want it to come to.”

“It actually works!” he exclaimed in astonishment.

“Of course it does. Didn’t you believe me?”

“Well . . . sort of, I guess. I didn’t think it’d happen quite that fast, though. I kind of expected the shoe to come slithering across the floor. I didn’t know it was going to fly.”

“You said it just a little too firmly, pet. The tone of voice is very important when you do things this way. The louder and more sharply you say it, the faster it happens.”

“I’ll remember that. Getting kicked in the face with my own shoe definitely got my attention. Why didn’t you warn me about that?”

“Because you don’t listen, Althie. It’s just a waste of breath to warn you about things. Now try it again.”

Althalus put miles on that shoe over the next several weeks, and he gradually grew more proficient at altering the tone of his voice. He also discovered that different words would make the shoe do other things.
“Dheu”
would make it rise up off the floor and simply stand in front of him on nothing but air.
“Dhreu”
would lower it to the floor again.

He was practicing on that one day in late summer when an impish kind of notion came to him. He looked over at Emerald, who was sitting on the bed carefully washing her ears. He focused his attention on her, set his hand on the Book, and said,
“dheu.”

Emerald immediately rose up in the air until she was sitting on nothing at all at about the same level as his head. She continued to scrub at her ears as if nothing had happened. Then she looked at him, and her green eyes seemed very cold and hard.
“Bhlag!”
she said quite sharply.

The blow took Althalus squarely on the point of the chin, and it sent him rolling across the floor. It seemed to have come out of nowhere at all, and it had rattled him all the way down to his toes.

“We don’t do that to each other, do we?” Emerald said in an almost pleasant tone of voice. “Now put me down.”

His eyes wouldn’t seem to focus. He covered one of them with his hand so that he could see her and said
“dhreu”
in an apologetic sort of way.

Emerald settled slowly back to the bed. “That’s much better,” she said. “Are you going to get up, or did you plan to lie there on the floor for a while?” Then she went back to washing her ears.

He more or less gathered at that point that there were rules and that it wasn’t wise to break them. He also realized that Emerald had just demonstrated the next step. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Book when she’d knocked him across the room.

He continued to practice with his shoe. He was more familiar with it than with his other possessions, and it didn’t have any sharp edges, as some of the others had. Just to see if he could do it, he put a pair of wings on it, and it went flapping around the room blundering into things. It occurred to him that a flying shoe would have been a sensation in Nabjor’s camp or Gosti Big Belly’s hall. That had been a long time ago, though. He idly roamed back through his memory, trying to attach some number to the years he’d spent here in the House, but the number kept evading him for some reason.

“How long have I been here, Em?” he asked his companion.

“Quite some time. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious, I suppose. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t here.”

“Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this house, pet. You’re here to learn, and some of the things in the Book are very difficult. It took your mind a very long time to fully grasp them. When we came to one of those, I’d usually let your eyes sleep while your mind worked. It was a lot quieter that way. Your arguments were with the Book, not with me.”

“Let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that there’ve been times when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a week or more?”

She gave him one of those infuriatingly superior looks.

“A month?” he asked incredulously.

“Keep going,” she suggested.

“You’ve put me to sleep for years on end?” he almost screamed at her.

“Sleep’s very good for you, dear. The nice thing about those particular naps is that you don’t snore.”

“How long, Emmy? How long have I been penned up in here with you?”

“Long enough for us to get to know each other.” Then she heaved one of those long-suffering sighs. “You
must
learn to listen when I tell you something, Althalus. You’ve been here in this house long enough to learn how to read the Book. That didn’t really take too long, though. It was learning to understand the Book that took you so much time. You haven’t quite finished that yet, but you’re coming along.”

“That means that I’m very, very old, doesn’t it?” He reached up, took hold of a lock of his hair, and pulled it down so that he could see it. “I can’t be
that
old,” he scoffed. “My hair hasn’t even turned white yet.”

“Why would it do that?”

“I don’t know. It just does. When a man gets old, his hair turns white.”

“That’s the whole point, Althalus. You haven’t grown old. Nothing changes in this house. You’re still the same age as you were when you first came here.”

“What about you? Are you still the same age you were as well?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“If I remember right, you told me once that you haven’t always been here.”

“Not always, no. I was somewhere else a long time ago, but then I came to wait for you.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the mountain peaks looming out beyond the south window. “Those weren’t there when I first came,” she added.

“I thought mountains lasted forever.”

“Nothing lasts forever, Althalus—except me, of course.”

“The world must have been very different back in the days before those mountains,” he mused. “Where did people live back then?”

“They didn’t. There weren’t any people then. There were other things here instead, but they died out. They’d done what they were supposed to do, so Deiwos let them go. He still misses them, though.”

“You always talk about Deiwos as if you knew him personally.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, we’re very well acquainted.”

“Do you call him ‘Deiwos’ when you’re talking together?”

“Sometimes. When I really want to get his attention I call him ‘brother.’ ”

“You’re God’s sister?” That startled Althalus.

“Sort of.”

“I don’t think I want to push that any further. Let’s go back to what we were talking about before, Em. Just how long have I been here? Give me a number.”

“Two thousand, four hundred, and sixty-seven—as of last week.”

“You’re just making that up, aren’t you?”

“No. Was there anything else?”

He swallowed very hard. “Some of those naps I took were a lot longer than I’d thought they were, weren’t they? That makes me just about the oldest man in the world, doesn’t it?”

“Not quite. There’s a man named Ghend who’s quite a bit older than you are.”

“Ghend? He didn’t really look all that old to me.”

Her green eyes went very wide. “You know Ghend?”

“Of course I do. He’s the one who hired me to come here and steal the Book.”

“Why didn’t you
tell
me?” she almost shrieked at him.

“I must have.”

“No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t.
You idiot!
You’ve been sitting on that for the last twenty-five hundred years!”

“Calm down, Emmy. We’re not going to get anywhere if you turn hysterical.” He gave her a long, level look. “I think it’s just about time for you to tell me exactly what’s going on, Emmy—and don’t try to put me off this time by telling me that I won’t understand or that I’m not ready to know certain things yet. I want to know what’s going on and why it’s so important.”

“We don’t have time for that.”

He leaned back on his bench. “Well, we’re just going to
take
the time, little kitten. You’ve been treating me like a house pet for quite a while now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have a tail, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t wag it every time you snapped your fingers. You don’t have me completely tamed, Em, and I’m telling you right here and now that we aren’t going any further until you tell me just exactly what’s going on.”

Her look was very cold. “What is it that you want to know?” Her tone was almost unfriendly.

He laid one hand on the Book. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t we start out with everything? Then we can move on from there.”

She glared at him.

“No more deep, dark secrets, Emmy. Start talking. If things are as serious as you seem to think they are, then
be
serious.”

“Maybe you
are
ready to know what’s going on,” she conceded. “How much do you know about Daeva?”

“Just what it says in the Book. I’d never even heard of him before I came here. He’s very angry with Deiwos, I gather. Deiwos seems to be sorry that he feels that way, but he’s going to keep on doing what he’s doing
whether Daeva likes it or not—probably because he has to.”

“That’s a novel interpretation,” she said. She mulled it over a bit. “Now that I think about it, though, there seems to be a lot of truth in it. Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be. Deiwos thinks they’re supposed to be one way, and Daeva thinks they’re supposed to be another.”

“I thought I just said that. It’s the business of making things that started the fight then, isn’t it?”

“That might be an oversimplification, but it comes fairly close. Deiwos makes things because he
has
to make them. The world and the sky weren’t complete the way they were. Deiwos saw that, but Daeva didn’t agree. When Deiwos does things to make the world and the sky complete, it changes them. Daeva believes that’s a violation of the natural order. He doesn’t want things to change.”

“What a shame. There’s not much he can do about it, though, is there? Once something’s been changed, it’s been changed. Daeva can’t very well go back and
un
change it, can he?”

“He seems to think so.”

“Time only moves in one direction, Emmy. We
can’t
go back and undo something that happened in the past just because we don’t like the way it turned out.”

“Daeva thinks he can.”

“Then both of his wheels just came off the axle. Time isn’t going to run backward just because he wants it to. The sea might run dry and the mountains might wear down, but time runs from the past to the future. That’s probably the only thing that won’t change.”

“We can all hope that you’re right, Althalus, because if you aren’t, Daeva’s going to win. He’ll unmake everything Deiwos has made and return the earth and sky to what they were at the very beginning. If he can make time go backward, then things he does now will change things that happened in the past, and if he can change enough of the past, we won’t be here anymore.”

“What’s Ghend got to do with all of this?” Althalus asked her suddenly.

“Ghend was one of the early men who came to this part of the world about ten thousand years ago. That was before men had learned how to cook certain rocks to make copper or how to mix tin with copper to make bronze. All their tools and weapons were made of stone, and Ghend’s Chief put him to work cutting down trees so that the tribe could plant grain. Ghend hated that, and Daeva approached him and persuaded him to abandon Deiwos and worship
him
instead. Daeva can be very persuasive when he wants to be. Ghend’s the high priest of the Demon Daeva, and the absolute master of Nekweros.” Emerald looked up suddenly. Then she sinuously flowed down from the bed, crossed the floor, and jumped up to the sill of the north window. “I should have known,” she said in an irritated voice. “He’s doing it again.”