Then, he had carried it away, confident that no one alive could have done what he did.
Ahead of him, the rounded shapes of the mountains and clouds gave way. Before him, glinting in the sun, lay his destination. Oron Castle—first stronghold of the first kings of Orontae—had been abandoned for more than a thousand years, yet its shape resonated with the force of the personality of those long-dead rulers who had pulled their unruly, nomadic people into a civilization that was the envy of the rest of humanity. A road, still navigable after millenia, wound through the mountain passes to six sets of double gates. The gates were long gone, the metal stripped for other, long-forgotten purposes, but the stone pillars, majestic in size and form, guided his flight to the outer walls. Oron stood on a plateau among peaks with a unique view that revealed the great, fertile valley, a thousand miles wide and many hundreds of miles long, that was its first settled province. He stayed high enough that the farmers working the fields below would not spot him. No one would have an inkling of his presence.
A scream interruted his thoughts. He looked up to see the sinuous shadows of a dozen thraik. His heart pounded frantically in his chest. They must not see him! He clutched the book and made ready to fly down into the rocky landscape spread out below.
Then he laughed at himself. Of course they did not see him, he realized, as the oily, black monsters cast around the sky in vain. He thumbed his nose at them. His spell prevented them from having more than a hopeful impression that he and the book were there. They sought in vain.
There, on their worthless, horrible bodies, were their runes. It would be so easy to slash them in half. Let them fall wailing to earth, unaware of who had been responsible for their doom! He drew back his hand, preparing the stroke.
No, wait a moment, he thought, with a fierce grin. Let them live. They could not see him, but they surely could sense the ones who followed him. He sensed that the trees had not been enough to defeat his pursuers. Let them face the thraik.
Go that way, he urged the hovering shadows. He sent them an image of the forest. What you seek is back that way.
The thraik dithered a moment longer, then shot through the air, heading southwest. Deeply satisfied, Nemeth watched them go.
The castle awaited him like a returning conqueror. He set down lightly in the high courtyard and turned to survey his new domain.
It was surprisingly intact, despite not being occupied by anyone other than shepherds, bats, and curious children for more than a thousand years. A few hardy mountain trees had grown up amid the cubes of stone, pushing some up at angles and cracking others. Pure white moss spread over the remnants of colored plaster and mosaic tiles on the walls, which towered high and lonely against the backdrop of the mountains. He did not refer to the book for the images he wanted, because it would only show him what the castle was like now. But each rune of the tumbled stones aided him in harkening back to the way the castle was in its glory. In his sight he saw the grand city the way it had once been. Every one of the white towers sparkled in the sun, pennants flying from their conical roofs. Every outer wall was well-built enough to withstand any incursion. The oldest chambers had been hewed into the face of the cliff itself, but in later years as the court had grown, the castle had spilled down the face of the mountain like wax dripping from a pillar candle. He saw it in his mind. Fluted arches rose above the flagstone roads that ran among gracious apartments, galleries, workshops, nurseries for the many children, tilting yards, even a study or two for wizards. Balconies and terraces overlooked the successively lower levels like kindly nursemaids watching over beloved children. The lowest level was like a fortress, with a circle of walls so wide three men could walk on them abreast between guardhouses that could each hold a hundred soldiers, armed with cannon and crossbow. In fact, in five thousand years the castle had never fallen to attack, and the stones themselves were proud of that.
Below the castle, the remains of the city of the Oros lay jumbled like a child’s building blocks. If he felt like it, he might turn his attention to it later. In the meanwhile, he claimed the castle for his own. Proudly, he marched through the thirty-foot-high doorway into the great keep itself.
“Good bones,” Nemeth said, running his hand possessively along the carved stone pillar that held the roof more than sixty feet over his head. The ancients had been master craftsmen. The traceries like lace that spread out from the top of each pillar were actually carvings that were deeper than his hand was long, and many were still intact. “You have kept your trust all these years. You were abandoned, unwanted. Now you belong to me. I belong here!” he cried to the empty ceilings. His voice echoed away into whispers. By then, Nemeth had turned to making his new realm comfortable.
With an act of will he restored the stones using their old runes, which he could see almost superimposed upon the runes the way they stood. He held the book to his chest and watched while the blocks and sheets of unimaginable weight glided slowly around him. Row after row relaid themselves, crunching into place as the mortar, long crumbled to dust, packed itself into the crevices and filled in behind with plaster. Shadows crept from wall to wall, but Nemeth still watched the past revive itself. More dust flew up in spirals, repainting the frescoes and gilding the traceries around high, pointed windows that filled again with colored glass. Banners dropped from the ceiling. He did not recognize most of the devices. The lordlings who had earned them were long dead and forgotten.
Above the rear wall of the chamber, the ancient standard of the Orontae kings started to form. Nemeth dismissed it with an angry wave. He would not fly the cursed Orontavian flag. They no longer deserved that. He would make his own. His standard would show the beloved book in all its beauty. He forced the particles of the discarded flag to become a banner, ivory white for the parchment, with the outline of the book picked out in gold. It was a shame none would ever see it but him. He rebuilt the grand doors, shining, coppery wood bound with bronze polished to a bright gold. He caused them to remain open so he could see the country.
From the dust that was all that was left of all the palace furnishings, he restored to existence chairs, tables, sculptures, tapestries, carpets, and upon the latter a line of thrones that arose nearly in the center of the room. No humans had left their dust in this place. They had all departed alive and in peace. Nemeth was glad. He wanted to be alone with the book and his intentions.
The seven white thrones had been carved of a pure white wood whose grain was finer than skin. The backs rose into fanciful flourishes as though they had been drawn by a master scribe’s pen along the side of a manuscript page instead of a carpenter’s plane. Nemeth chose the center seat. It had been the first king’s. It would not be his seat, though. He made it rebuild itself as a raised table for the book, and settled his precious burden onto it. He was glad to give it pride of place. The seat to its right was his. He felt humble and small as he took it. His ancestors had bowed down before it.
“Now,” he said, turning to the book. He held his breath. The book seemed to know exactly what he wanted. It spun under his hands until it revealed its chosen page.
It was filled with but a single rune. In the archaic tongue, it read, “The Land of Orontae, which Comprises of its Diverse Parts …” Lovingly, Nemeth traced its outlines, which showed the entire country in a single symbol: every person, every horse, every acre of land. Such was the skill of the long-lost Shining Ones that he could almost see them in motion, going about the day’s tasks, all unaware that they were being watched from above. It would be wrong to use this one, for where he stood was one of Orontae’s diverse parts, and he wanted to enjoy his revenge, for a while at least. He unrolled the book farther, to where the book began to enumerate each of the geographical elements. Every mountain had its illustration, as did every river and every tree. It was the book’s delightful magic that he could hold the scroll under his arm, yet it had an infinite number of pages, each describing a nearly infinite number of items.
He surveyed each feat
ure with a delighted interest, as if he was sightseeing. Orontae was a handsome country, with picturesque rivers, broad valleys and forests, all surrounded by its share of the ring of mountains that protected the three noble kingdoms. He ran his finger over the rune that depicted the valley at the front of the old castle. That would be a good demonstration that he could see with his own human eyes, not his mind’s eye.
Nemeth hesitated, then laid his hands on the edge of the page. He hated to think of what he was about to do. It was sacrilege to harm something so beautiful, but he had no choice.
“I am so sorry,” he whispered. He tore out the rune and held it in his fingers. It seemed to pulsate, shocked, like a heart torn out of a living body. He felt like weeping, but he could not stop now. He kept hearing the derisive voice of Soliandur in his mind. His need for vengeance overwhelmed his sorrow and shock. It would not go away until the treacherous king was dead. “Tal.”
The fragment of parchment and the rune upon it burst into flames. Nemeth watched it burn almost all the way to his fingertips, then dropped it to the floor, where it smoldered to black ash. He sat and stared at the gap in the page, the perfect page, and felt as if he had ripped out his own heart and was bleeding into his lap. He loved the book, and he had hurt it. Tears dripped down his cheeks.
Beyond the doors, rumbling commenced. Nemeth gathered up the book and walked out upon the courtyard to watch.
In the valley below the lowest of the six sets of gates, the ground was heaving. Trees rocked and bounced until they fell over. Cracks opened in the earth all the way around the valley to the feet of the hills on either side. Suddenly, Nemeth felt an outrush of hot power that blew back his thinning hair and plastered his robes against him. He spun and crouched to protect the precious book in his arms. Blazing arms of fire surrounded him but did not consume him.
When he turned around again to look, the grass and trees were gone, as had the earth for yards beneath them. Fine ash filled the air. The blackened, raw stone edges of this new chasm seeped with water from a half-dozen interrupted underground streams. Nemeth looked down at it, disappointed. He thought that if he destroyed the valley that the land would wash in on either side like waves filling a trough. It had not. He would have to do that himself. He looked down at the book in dismay.
“I thought you were my ally!” he shouted.
It did not answer. He carried it back inside to decide what he must do to make the rest of Orontae disappear.
Chapter Thirty
The white horse was waiting for Magpie in the courtyard. It was so well trained that the reins lay on its neck yet it did not move a muscle until he stepped up into its plain black saddle and touched his heels to its sides. He wished he could have been riding Tessera, but the skewbald mare had been stabled out of the way, possibly even under lock and key, to keep him from indulging the fancy.
Magpie trotted out, the shaded robe flapping around his shoulders. He was not at all surprised to note that peddlers had set up their wares on either side of the road that led from the castle to the temple, all the better to catch people who might want to mark the occasion, this regal and sacred event, by putting a couple of coins into the hands of crafters who had made souvenirs to commemorate the day. There were cloths, hastily and badly embroidered, with his name, Inbecca’s, and the date. In fact, the woman behind one of the trestle tables was still sewing another cloth on a treadle-driven machine as he passed.
He thought the greatest piece of cheek was the peddler who was selling rabbits with the bride’s and groom’s names painted upon each one, depending upon gender, of course. The gesture was obviously meant to wish them fertility and a long happy life together. The notion made him grin. Still, he was a king’s son, and speculating upon the fruits of their love seemed more forward than usual. He made a mental note to send one of the servants back to buy all of the rabbits before Inbecca saw them. He intended to free them if they were wild caught, or bring them to the palace kitchen yard as company for the chickens and geese if they were domesticated.
In spite of his reluctance about rites and ceremonies, Magpie loved the old temple. It genuinely felt as if it had been built on a holy spot. The temple occupied a raised oval of land on a tortoise-shaped hill, the highest occupied point in the kingdom, just slightly higher than the castle itself. It was lower than the original castle, with which it also was aligned. The old castle had been unoccupied for thousands of years, ever since the population of Orontae had outgrown the arable land in the valleys below it between the bands of mountains to the north, and they had gained access to better farmlands, those which he could see spread around him like a green-and-gold quilt.
As youths he, Benarelidur, and Ganidur had often explored the ruin, before Bena got to be so officious. It was more than two hundred leagues away, behind the first low crest of mountains, beneath the crest of the volcanic peaks that still smoked now and again. In the history, that valley was supposed to have been where humanity arose in the beginning of time, but Magpie suggested that perhaps it was the first safe place that humankind found to raise children and crops, away from the terrible beasts that threatened them in the more open countryside. The other two noble kingdoms also laid claim to the origin of humankind. Now he had to consider the elves’ claim, so Magpie had to admit he did not know at all what was really true.
His horse blew through its nostrils as it began the long climb up the steep slope of the temple hill. The path had been strewn with white flowers. He hated to scatter them before his bride arrived to see how pretty it looked, but there was no safe way to avoid them. It was his task to mount to the temple alone. No doubt more servants, or townsfolk would be along to strew more appropriate flowers once he had passed. He guessed that the flower-scatterers were concealed in the woods that rose on either side of the wide, paved road.
The temple, devoted to Mother Nature and Father Time, the forces of nature, was a tall, gorgeous structure of white, glistening granite that stood a hundred feet tall at its peak. Taller temples had been built across the land, but none had so magnificent or so holy a setting.
The earliest decorations on the temple walls were primitive and painted, which had always puzzled him, since the makers clearly knew how to make something beautiful, with the angles that caught the rising and setting sun of each major seasonal change. Perhaps they weren’t human as he knew humans in the present day. That observation had often gotten him a clout from Bena, who was tired of hearing that kind of blasphemy from his indiscreet youngest brother. In their language, Nature and Time were also known as Ahmah and Abbah. In Inbecca’s, they were Breetah and Huwer, two names he needed to begin getting used to for his future life. In Halcot’s land they had other names, and he bet that in the Quarters the little smallfolk called their creators something different yet. But Magpie knew they were all the same, for how could Time and Nature be anything else? No statues had been made of them, for it was considered presumptuous to try and give a single face to the two avatars, but sculptors had filled the formal gardens around the spirelike building with perfect images in stone, wood, and metal of Their creations: birds, animals, trees, fruit, fish, and, of course, humans. Magpie glanced to his left for his favorite, a woven stone arbor of roses, among which real roses intertwined in season. It was full of red blossoms, which Magpie took as a good sign for his betrothal.
The temple was virtually empty when he arrived there. He had a rare chance to admire the beauty of the interior space. From a polished stone floor to the arching ribs of the ceiling, the temple formed a gently rounded teardrop. The pillars supporting the roof were carved in the semblance of oak trees, complete to gilded acorns peeping out from between the leaves. Between the buttresses of the walls were niches dedicated by past kings and queens of Orontae for favors such as victory in battle, good harvest, or the safe delivery of children. Vases of flowers and garlands of faded ribbon decorated these small altars, and plaques of every material and nearly every size climbed the walls for twenty feet above them,
thanking the Mother and Father for their blessings. Above the dedications, colored windows reached another twenty feet. These were depictions of beauties of nature, such as fields of wheat, flowers native to Orontae, deer and wolves, wild birds, and domestic animals. Magpie had always been fascinated by the two windows nearest the altar, which were dark blue glass speckled with silver-and-gold glass constellations and comets. Behind the altar itself, the wall was one enormous window, crystal clear to allow the congregation to see the natural countryside beyond.
For the day’s celebration, thus far only the long wooden seats for the guests and the altar were in place, and, just inside the door, two pairs of shoes, green for Inbecca, and black for him. He changed out of the brand-new shoes he had donned at home, and slipped into the new pair. It was another part of the tradition. New shoes, never worn anywhere else, were to indicate the promise never having been made by him to anyone else in his life, to tread life’s path with this one woman. He knew, with deep happiness, that he would like nothing better. He hoped that she thought so, too. He was concerned, during the time they had spent together after his return, that her aunt had gained her trust, and was undermining her interest in the upcoming marriage.
The tradition was for the groom, the personification of Father Time, to stand vigil before the ceremony as the temple was decked out, as if the origins of life were going on around him, under his aegis. It seemed silly to be doing it now, when the same procedure would be repeated all over again at the time they married, but it was tradition. He was supposed to be left alone, but in practice, as long as he did not stir from his position, friends and guests often came up to pass the time with him until the bride’s party arrived at the temple.
An Unexpected Apprentice Page 38
