The Stone of Farewell

by Tad Williams

  Tiamak knew he should let the clown have his coin—wasn’t that what he had brought it for?—but still, there was something about the insinuating way the wind-clown pawed at him that made Tiamak uncomfortable. The clown’s mask winked and leered; Tiamak, fighting a growing sense of unease, clutched the metal more tightly. What was wrong... ?

  As his vision suddenly cleared, his eyes widened in horror. The bobbing clown mask became the chitinous face of a ghant, hanging only a scant cubit above his boat, suspended by a vine from a branch that overhung the river. The ghant was prodding gently with its insectile claw, patiently trying to poke Tiamak’s knife loose from his sleep-sweaty grasp.

  The little man shouted with disgust and threw himself back toward the stern of his flatboat. The ghant rasped and clicked its mouth-feelers, waving a plated foreleg as though trying to reassure him that it had all been a mistake. A moment later Tiamak swept up his steering pole, swinging it broadside so that he caught the ghant before it could scurry back up the vine. There was a loud clack and the ghant flew out across the river, legs curled like a singed spider. It made only a small splash as it disappeared into the green water.

  Tiamak shuddered in repugnance as he waited for it to bob back to the surface. A chorus of dry clacking came from above his head and he looked up quickly to see half a dozen more ghants, each the size of a large monkey, staring down at him from the safety of the upper branches. Their expressionless black eyes glittered. Tiamak had little doubt that if they guessed he could not stand, they would be upon him in a moment; still, it seemed strange for ghants to attack any full-grown human, even an injured one. Strange or not, he could only hope they didn’t realize how weak he really was, or what sort of injuries the bloody bandage on his leg signified.

  “That’s right, you ugly bugs!” he shouted, brandishing his steering pole and knife. His own cry made his head hurt. Wincing, he prayed silently that he didn’t faint from the exertion; if he did, he felt sure he would never wake up. “Come on down and I’ll give you the same lesson I did your friend!”

  The ghants chittered at him with offhanded malice, as much as to say that there was no hurry; if they didn’t get him today, some other ghants would soon enough. Crusty, lichen-dotted carapaces scraped against the willow branches as the ghants dragged themselves higher up into the tree. Resisting a fit of shivers, Tiamak calmly but deliberately poled his flatboat toward the center of the watercourse, out from beneath the low-hanging limbs.

  The sun, which had been only midway up the morning sky when he noticed it last, had moved shockingly far past the meridian. He must have fallen asleep sitting up, despite the early hour. His fever had taken a great deal out of him. It seemed to have abated, at least for the present, but he was still dreadfully weak, and his injured leg throbbed as if it were aflame.

  Tiamak’s sudden laugh was raw and unpleasant. To think that two days ago he had been making grand decisions about where he would go, about which of the mighty folk clamoring for his services would be lucky enough to get him and which would have to wait! He remembered that he had decided to go to Nabban as his tribal elders had requested, and to let Kwanitupul go for now, a decision that had caused him many hours of worrying deliberation. Now his careful choice had been reversed in a freakish instant. He would be lucky if he even made it to Kwanitupul alive: the long journey to Nabban was simply inconceivable. He had lost blood and was sick with wound-spite. None of the proper herbs to treat such an injury grew in this part of the Wran. Also, just to insure his continuing misery, a nest of ghants had now spotted him and made him out as soon-to-be easy pickings!

  His heart raced. A gray cloud of weakness was descending on him. He reached a slender hand down into the rivercourse, then splashed cold water onto his face. That filthy thing had actually been touching him, sly as a pickpocket, trying to dislodge his knife so its brethren might drop on him unresisted. How could anyone think that ghants were only animals? Some of his tribesmen claimed that they were nothing but the overgrown bugs or crabs they much resembled, but Tiamak had seen the terrible intelligence lurking behind those remorseless jet eyes. The ghants might be products of They Who Breathe Darkness rather than She Who Birthed Mankind—as Older Mogahib so often proclaimed—but that did not make them stupid.

  He swiftly surveyed the contents of his boat to make sure nothing had been taken by the ghants before he had awakened. All his meager lot—a few rags of formal clothing, the Summoning Stick from the tribal elders, a few cooking things, his throwing-sling, and his Nisses scroll in its oilskin bag—lay scattered in the bottom of the flatboat. Everything seemed as it should be.

  Lying in the hull nearby were the skeletal remains of the fish whose capture had begun these latest troubles. Some time during the last two days of chills and madness he must have eaten most of it, unless birds had picked the bones naked while he slept. Tiamak tried to remember how the fever-time had passed, but all he could summon were visions of poling endlessly down the watercourse while the sky and water bled color like glaze running from a poorly-fired pot. Had he remembered to make a fire and boil the marsh-water before washing out his wound? He seemed to have a vague recollection of trying to lay a spark to some tinder piled in his clay cooking-bowl, but had no idea whether a fire had ever caught there.

  Trying to remember made Tiamak’s head swim. It was useless to fret over what had or had not happened, he told himself. He was obviously still sick; his only chance was to make his way to Kwanitupul before the fever returned. With a regretful head shake he dropped the fish carcass overboard—the size of the skeleton confirmed that it had indeed been a splendid fish—then donned his shirt as another bout of shivers ran through him. He slumped back against the stern of the boat, then reached for the hat he had woven from sand-palm fronds during his journey’s first day. He pulled it down low in an effort to keep the harsh midday sun out of his smarting eyes. After dabbing a little more water on his eyelids, he began to push with the pole, laboriously forcing the flatboat along the wide channel while his aching muscles protested with every stroke.

  The fever did return sometime during the night. When Tiamak escaped its clutches once more, it was to find himself floating in lazy circles, his flatboat becalmed in a marshy backwater. His leg, although swollen and tremendously painful, did not seem markedly worse. With luck, if he could get to Kwanitupul soon he would not lose it.

  Shaking loose the cobwebs of sleep, he offered yet another prayer to He Who Always Steps on Sand—whose existence, despite Tiamak’s generally skeptical nature, had come to seem a great deal more conceivable since the misadventure with the crocodile. Whether this weakening of his disbelief was due to the mind-dizzying fever, or to a resurgence of true faith brought on by the nearness of death, Tiamak did not much care. Neither did he scrutinize his feelings about the matter very deeply. The fact was, he did not want to be a one-legged scholar—or worse, a dead scholar. If the gods did not help him, then there was no resource available to him in this treacherous marsh other than his own fast-failing resolve. Faced with those simple alternatives, Tiamak prayed.

  He poled himself out of this latest backwater, at last reaching a place where several waterways came together. It was hard to tell exactly how he had wandered to this point, but using the newly-kindled stars as a reference—especially the Loon and the shining-pawed Otter—he was able to orient himself toward Kwanitupul and the sea. He kept his barge-pole moving until dawn, when he could no longer ignore his weary mind and wounded body crying out for rest. Fighting to keep his eyes open, he floated down the watercourse a little farther, poking in the muddy bank until at last he located a large stone which he levered free. This he secured to his fishing line and dumped it over the side to act as an anchor so he could remain moored in an uncovered section of the waterway as he took his desperately-needed sleep, safely away from tree-clinging ghants and other unwanted company.

  Now able to preserve the gains made by his poling, Tiamak made better time. He lost half of the next afternoon (h
is eighth or ninth since leaving home, he guessed) to another resurgence of fever, but was able to push on a bit during the evening, and even continue after dark in order to make up some of his lost time. He discovered that there were far fewer biting and stinging insects once the sun had vanished into the western swamp; this and the oddly pleasant blue glow of twilight made such a nice change from his sun-battered afternoons that he celebrated by finally eating the rather forlorn-looking river-apple he had found on a branch overhanging the watercourse. River-apples were usually gone by this late in the year, those which had escaped the birds falling free at last to drift on the eddying water, bobbing like fisherman’s floats until their seeds wound up at last in some mud-dam or root-tangled clump of soil. Tiamak had considered the find a good omen. He had put it aside after many expressions of thanks to beneficent deities, knowing he would enjoy it more if he savored the thought of it for a while.

  The first bite through the rind of the river-apple was sour, but the pale flesh nearer the middle was wonderfully sweet. Tiamak, who had been surviving for days on waterbugs and edible grasses and leaves, was so overcome by the taste of the fruit that he nearly fell into a swoon. He had to put most of it aside for later.

  Kwanitupul could have been said to occupy the northern shore of the upper prong of the Bay of Firannos, except that there was no real shore in that location: Kwanitupul lay on the Wran’s northernmost fringe, but it was still very much a part of the greater marsh.

  What had once been a minor trading village made up of a few score tree-houses and stilted huts had grown vast when the merchants of Nabban and Perdruin and the Southern Islands discovered the array of valuable things that came from the Wran’s unreachable interior—unreachable by any except the Wrannamen, of course. Exotic feathers for ladies’ gowns, dried mud for dyes, apothecarical powders and minerals of unequaled rarity and potency, all these things and many more kept the bazaars of Kwanitupul thriving with merchants and traders from up and down the coast. Since there was no land worthy of the name, pilings were driven deep into the mud instead, and shallow-drafted boats were laden with powdered stone and mortar and allowed to sink along the banks of the swampy waterways. Across these foundations countless huts and walkways had sprung up.

  As Kwanitupul grew, Nabbanai and Perdruinese drifted in to share its dilapidated precincts with the native Wrannamen, until the trading city had spread its way over many miles of canals and swaying bridges, growing across and clogging the outer byways of the swamp like water-hyacinth. Its ramshackle eminence now dominated the Bay of Firannos as its older and larger sister Ansis Pelippé did the Bay of Emettin and Osten Ard’s north-central coast.

  Still dizzy with fever, Tiamak found himself at last drifting up out of the swamp’s wild interior into the increasingly crowded arterial waterways of Kwanitupul. At first, only a few other flatboats shared the green water with him, and these were almost entirely poled by other Wrannamen, many wearing feathery tribal finery in honor of their first visit to the grandest marsh-village of all. Farther into Kwanitupul the canals were choked with a host of other crafts—not only small boats like Tiamak’s, but ships of all size and design, from the beautifully carved and canopied barks of rich merchants to huge grain ships and barges carrying cut stone that slid along the waterways like imperious whales, forcing smaller boats to scatter or risk being swamped in their rolling wake.

  Tiamak normally enjoyed the sights of Kwanitupul enormously—although, unlike his tribesmen, he had seen Ansis Pelippé and the other port cities of Perdruin, beside which Kwanitupul was only a slightly shabby copy. Now, however, his fever was upon him once more. The lapping of water and the shouts of Kwanitupulis seemed curiously distant; the waterways he had traveled many times before were forbiddingly unfamiliar.

  He wracked his wandering mind for the name of the inn to which he had been directed to go. In his letter, the one whose delivery had martyred Tiamak’s gallant pigeon Ink-daub, Father Dinivan had told him ... told him...

  You are sorely needed. Yes, he remembered that part. The fever made it so hard to think ... Go to Kwanitupul,Dinivan had written, stay at the inn we have spoken of, and wait there until I can tell you more. And what else had the priest said? More than lives may depend on you.

  But what inn had they spoken of? Tiamak, startled by a smear of color before his unfocused gaze, looked up in time to prevent his boat sliding in front of a larger vessel with two flaring eyes painted on its hull. This boat’s owner jumped up and down in the bow, waving a fist at Tiamak as he drifted past. The man’s mouth was moving, but Tiamak heard only a dull roaring in his ears as he poled out of the wake. What inn?

  “Pelippa’s Bowl!” The name struck him like lightning out of the sky. He did not realize he had shouted it aloud, but such was the din of the waterway that his indiscretion mattered little.

  Pelippa’s Bowl: an inn Dinivan had mentioned in a letter, because it was run by a woman who had once been a nun of Saint Pelippa’s order—Tiamak could not summon the woman’s name—and who still liked to talk theology and philosophy. Morgenes had stayed there whenever he traveled in the Wran, because the old man liked the proprietress and her irreverent but thoughtful mind.

  As these memories came back to him, Tiamak felt his weary spirits lifted. Perhaps Dinivan would join him at the inn! Or, even better, perhaps Morgenes himself was staying there, which would explain why Tiamak’s latest messages to the old man’s home at the Hayholt in Erkynland had gone unanswered. Whatever the case, with the names of his Scrollbearer friends to offer as currency, he was certain that he would find a bed and a sympathetic ear at Pelippa’s Bowl!

  Still fever-addled, but with a more hopeful heart, Tiamak bent his aching back to the pole once more. His frail boat skimmed along Kwanitupul’s greasy green waterways.

  The strange presence in Simon’s head spoke on. The spell of the woman’s voice held him gently prisoned, enwrapped in a charm that seemed to have no seam or flaw. He was in perfect darkness, as in the moment just before the final tumble into sleep, but his thoughts were as janglingly active as those of a man who only pretends to slumber while his enemies scheme across the room. He did not awaken, but neither did he pass into forgetfulness. Instead, the voice spoke on, and the words summoned images of beauty and horror:

  “... And although you have gone away, Hakatri—to death or the Ultimate West, I know not which—I shall say these things to you; for in truth, no one knows the way time flows on the Road of Dreams, or where it is that thoughts may wander that have been cast out on the scales of the Greater Worm or on the other Witnesses. It could be that somewhere ... or somewhen ... you will hear these words and know of your family and your people.

  “Also, I have need just to speak with you, my beloved son, though you have been long absent.

  “You know that your brother blamed himself for your terrible wounding. When you went away at last into the West in search of heart’s-ease, he became cold and discontented.

  “I will not tell you all the story of the maraudings of the ship-men, those fierce mortals from across the sea. Some hint of their coming you had before you went away, and some would say that it was these Rimmersmen who struck the greatest blow against us; for they threw down Asu‘a, our great house, and those of us who survived were driven into exile. Some would say that the Rimmersmen were our greatest foes, yet others might say that our most terrible wound came when your brother Ineluki raised his hand against your father, Iyu’unigato—your father; my husband—and slew him there in the great hall of Asu’a.

  “Still others would say our shadow first grew in the deeps of time, in Venyha Do’sae, the Lost Garden, and that we brought it with us in our hearts. They would say that even those born here in our new land—like you, my son—came into the world with that shadow already staining your innermost selves, so that there has been no innocence anywhere since the world was young.

  “And that is the problem with shadows, Hakatri. At first consideration they seem to be quite simple—
amatter only of something that stands before the light. But that which is shadowed from one side may from another angle show as a brilliant reflection. What is covered by shadow one day may die in harsh sunlight another day, and the world will be lessened by its passing. Not everything that thrives in shadow is bad, my son ...”

  Pelippa’s Bowl ... Pelippa’s Bowl ...

  Tiamak was finding it difficult to think. He repeated the name distractedly a few more times, having momentarily forgotten what it meant, then realized he was looking at a swinging signboard that bore the painted image of a golden bowl. He squinted at it woozily for a few moments, unable to remember exactly how he had wound up in this spot, then began looking around for a place to tie his boat.

  The sign of the Bowl hung over the door of a large but rather undistinguished-looking inn in a backwater section of the warehouse district. The rickety structure seemed to sag between two larger buildings, like a drunk with a crony at each elbow. An armada of small and medium-sized flatboats bobbed in the waterway below, tied at the building’s crude wharf or lashed directly to the pilings that held the building and its slovenly fellows above water. The inn was surprisingly quiet, as if both the guests and ostlers were sleeping.

  Tiamak’s fever had returned strongly and his exertions had left him very little strength. He balefully regarded the rope ladder that depended from the landing. It was badly tangled: even reaching up with the steering pole he came short of the lowest rung by a good cubit. He considered jumping to make up the last bit of distance, but even in his diminished state Tiamak realized that when one was too weak to swim, there would be few things more foolish than jumping up and down in a small boat. At last, stymied, he called hoarsely for assistance.