The Visitor (4 page)

F
ar north of Bastion, across mountain and desert and over the Yellowstone Sea, lay the pleasant land of Everday. Its capital city, Ginkerle-Pale, had been named for Henery Ginkerle and Nylan Pale, twenty-first century west-coast ship-builders who had been on a ship when the Happening occurred, a ship that had been washed up, along with many others, on what had previously been a landlocked highland, perhaps in Idaho or Montana. Though the world lay mostly in darkness at this time, a hole in the cloud blanket hung above this particular spit of ocean and its adjacent coast. The opening allowed the daylight to penetrate and at night admitted reflected light from an orbiting ring of ejecta, which led the refugees to name it Everday.

Though the climate had chilled considerably, the area was largely untouched by flood, fire, ashes, plague, or monsters, and the resident population, which was tiny, scattered, and very confused, found comfort and strength in the arrival of new people. Both residents and the accidental arrivals eagerly joined in doing whatever needed doing to guarantee their survival over the terrible years that followed when the hole in the cloud cover closed.

The country around had been agricultural. As the silos had been full of grain when the Happening occurred, as an enormous food repository from the former age lay nearby,
and as a seemingly bottomless abyss had opened between this repository and any neighboring population to the east, the people of Everday were able to preserve themselves and their breeding stock throughout the dark years. Rarely totally covered, the skies in Everday were among the earliest to clear, and when the sun reemerged, the people began building their stocks of fertile seed and tilling their fallow fields. Throughout this time, almost all the new arrivals had continued to live on their ships.

When the skies had cleared more generally, the shipwrights set to sea with their sons and grandsons to explore the ruins of the great cities they had known before the Happening. Though the boats returned laden with salvage, those who manned them said the original monsters had grown great and were everywhere among the ruins. No culvert was empty of them, no pipe but contained a foully crusted rootiness that emerged squirming and oozing to grasp at whatever person might be near. Those who returned from the expedition recommended that their voyage be the last. To make sure that no future generation ignored this advice, all the ships not suitable for coastal fishing were sailed up-river as far as was possible and there dragged ashore to be converted into housing for the new hamlet of Shiplea.

The people early adopted a township council system of governance for most matters, but they added the frippery of a king simply because they liked the idea of having one. There was little entertainment in Everday, and some of the settlers felt that a prolific royal family would guarantee a fountain of continuous merriment. Thereafter, the Everdayans concentrated on building, farming, and enjoying the luxury of slow time and long sagacity spent in joyful celebration of living.

It was to this mellowed land that the sign of the Guardians came to Camwar Vestavrees, an unlikely recipient for any such distinction. If one named any forceful attribute, there were a myriad others who had more of it than Camwar. He was a simple, slender, brownish man with an easy walk and plain clothes. His eyes were his most noticeable feature, for when he felt wonder or delight, they
glowed with an astonishing luminosity. Camwar earned his livelihood as a cooper. He loved wood: the slip of the plane along its surface, the mute curl of the shavings, the pure arc of a stave that knew itself to be perfect and needed no puffery. He had from time to time, under unique circumstances, loved one woman or another for similar attributes of quiet perfection, begetting upon several of them children of remarkable beauty. He was unaware of this, as his partners had in each case been married to men who quite properly considered that such beautiful children had to be their own.

Camwar had been born to a couple who managed a goat dairy and nut orchard some miles north of Ginkerle-Pale. During his second year of life, a sudden storm brought down a large nut tree directly upon the Vestavrees couple who had been working beneath it. Camwar's father's body was found beneath the trunk, and it was assumed his mother's body had been washed into the river and away by the storm. After the crematory fires had died down, Camwar was adopted by his father's brother, a cooper well known for his fine kegs, barrels, watering troughs, and bathtubs.

Camwar's uncle was generous, thoughtful, and remarkably understanding for an old bachelor. He raised the child Camwar on stories of wonder, on jobs of work, and on music—the cooper's hobby was creating stringed instruments. Tales, tasks, and songs were suited to Camwar's age and became more complex with passing years.

Occasionally a ship would come by; even less frequently a traveler would come down from the mountains. These infrequent visitors always confirmed Everday's decision to keep to itself. There were still monsters and wars out there, along with a people who called themselves The Spared who were actually slavers. Still, not all that came from outside was rejected merely on that account. A Mungrian ship, for example, brought with it some remarkable maps, new and shiny, with tiny letters and immaculate labeling of places in the style of pre-Happening things.

“They come to us from the Guardian Council,” said the
bearded Mungrian. “Take them. There's no cost. We are paid to distribute them for the benefit of the people.”

“The Guardian Council? That's an old legend, isn't it. Are they real? Where are they?”

The Mungrian stroked his beard and pontificated upon the subject: “It is thought The Council may dwell far to the north, for in that land great mountains have risen to hide the pole from the low sun that creeps impotent upon the horizon, and in that darkness something huge has lived since the Happening and now moves southward like a great flow of ebon shadow, into the peopled lands.”

The people of Everday knew that the world no longer tilted so far on its axis as in ancient times, that the year was now 400 days long, and that summer never came to the far north, but this account of flowing shadow was new to them, as was the idea that the Guardian Council, long a favorite tale of Camwar's, was a reality. Everday was to hear of The Council yet again. This time the informant came from the northern mountains.

“You will be visited,” said the Messenger, “by people who will bring you a device. When the device is brought to you, put it somewhere safe, for you will need it when the sign comes.”

“What sign?” asked the King, who was always sent for when there was something ceremonial to be done, such as opening the horse fair, or awarding the annual prize for preserves, or welcoming visitors.

“The sign of the Guardian Council. The sign may come anywhere, wherever Appointed Ones are to be found. The sign will appear suddenly, and you will bring that person to the device. That's all.”

“Where did you learn all this?” asked the King.

“Difficult to say,” said the Messenger, rubbing his brow. “The message got passed on to me from someone else, though it originated with the Guardian Council.”

“What do you know of this Council?” the Everdayans asked.

“Ah, well, little enough, though it is said that Tamlar of the Flames will know the time it is to be convened. Among
the first to be called will be Bertral of the Book, for it is he who calls the role of the Appointed Ones.”

“Have you seen any of these Guardians?”

“No.” The Messenger shook his head. “I have seen one of the devices, however, and it is quite real.”

The Mungrian visit wasn't repeated, nor was there another Messenger, though as promised, the device was subsequently delivered, and when Camwar's uncle told the story, he always told how the device had arrived.

“Later on, another ship came to Everday, the first and only ship of its kind that had ever been seen. It was a black ship, flecked with gold, and on its deck was a device, wavy and glassy and strangely shaped, like a frozen flame of space, with stars in it, accompanied by some silent and dark-robed persons.

“The King directed his people to go out in a boat and get the device off the ship, and put it upon a wagon and haul it into the city, to the Temple, and there it is, in the apse behind the altar, and there it has been kept safe for generations, but no one has come bearing the sign.”

Camwar learned this story along with a hundred others. By the time he graduated from the limited schooling all Everdaylings were given whether they wanted it or not, he was much sought after as a teller of tales, a singer of songs accompanied by a lute or guitar he had fashioned himself. Story tellers and song singers were much valued in Everday, where even the antics of the royal family tended to be repetitive, generation to generation. Indeed, Camwar had recited the “strange device” story so often that whenever he went about his business, buying wood or strap iron, charring vats or making a stringed instrument for a special client, he always searched for the sign, thinking to see it almost anywhere except in his own mirror.

Nonetheless, nine years after Camwar's uncle had died and left him the business, on the morning of the Festival of Lights, Camwar woke, bathed, went to his shaving mirror and stared at himself in bewilderment, for above his eyebrows, inexplicably, unexpectedly, astonishingly, there
burned a twisted loop of fire that glowed like an iron white-hot from the forge.

Because it was festival, he had planned to walk among merry makers, drink a few glasses of beer, eat some hot sausages, listen to the marching bands—which cost nothing—and then come home again in the early evening to his narrow bed and the quiet of his room. The man in the mirror, however, was not the man who had planned such a day. The man in the mirror blazed with purpose, and the blazon could not be ignored, for it glowed; nor could it be covered with a cap, for it sang like the reverberation of a great peal of bells, a mighty and harmonic throbbing that spanned the range of audibility.

Trembling, he dressed himself in the best he had, garments that were clean and neatly repaired though by no means festive. He drank a glass of water to calm the queasiness he felt, an unsettling quake somewhere in his gut that was not pain but was nonetheless disturbing. He went out into the street and, keeping to the back ways as much as possible, made his way toward the palace. Unobtrusive as he tried to be, several people came trailing after him, nudging one another and whispering among themselves when he arrived at the palace gate. Though the sign had never been seen before, everyone had heard the story, and the sign could only be what had been foretold to come, so when Camwar presented himself to the guard, that man took one look at the glowing sign and asked him to wait—courteously, as it happened, which was sensible of him.

The Regent was being shaved. When the messenger arrived, in some haste, the barber dropped the razor, cutting the Regent very slightly on the chin, a fact that the Regent did not even notice. He leapt from the chair, struggled into his coat without waiting for his valet, and went bloody, belathered, and disheveled down the stairs, where he found Camwar waiting in a small reception room. He peered at him first, then he went near to him and touched the sign, drawing his hand away with an exclamation. The sign burned. The sensation was not exactly one of heat, but one could feel a force of fire when one
touched it. One could, as a matter of fact, hear and taste and smell something fiery and forceful as well.

“Does it hurt?” the Regent asked in wonder.

“No, sire,” Camwar replied. He had felt something when the Regent touched him, but it was not a sensation he could describe easily. It was rather as though he had answered a question without knowing what it had been.

“When?” the Regent asked.

“I've had a little itchiness there, in the forehead, for…oh, some years now. But this morning the itchiness was gone and
it
was there.”

“Well,” said the Regent, sitting down and staring at the floor. “Well. I suppose…I suppose we must get in touch with…who is it?”

“We're to go to the Temple, perhaps?”

The Regent stared for a moment more, chewing his lip, then asked Camwar to be seated, sent one footman off to bring breakfast on a tray and another one off to summon the Royal Historian and several of the younger historians as well since the Royal Historian had become somewhat forgetful and vague with advanced age. These worthies assembled quickly, in various stages of bewildered disarray, and the Regent—who had completed his shave and been properly dressed in the interim—told them in a hushed voice that the sign had come.

“You must go to the Temple,” said the Royal Historian, firmly and without a moment's pause. “That is, if you're sure it's the sign.”

The Regent suggested the Historian check for himself, which that man did, returning to say yes, it was the sign. “We must go to the High Priest,” he repeated, with no wavering or doubt whatsoever in his voice.

“We have not thought about the device in hundreds of years,” said one of the younger historians. “Is it even still here?”

“The device is in the Temple,” said the Royal Historian. “You are correct that it has been there for a very long time.”

“Is it really? Well, but…if no one has…oiled it or
greased it or powered it up or whatever one does in all that time…” the Regent muttered unhappily.

The Royal Historian forgot himself so far as to pat the Regent comfortingly on the shoulder. “We need not be concerned. We were told, as everyone, everywhere was told, that when the sign came, the device would be in operating condition. We have only to bring the sign to the device. The device will function.”

The Regent looked uncertainly at the mouse-quiet younger historians who would normally have been spouting contradictions to everything the old man said.

“Now?” he asked.