Lords of the Sky

by Angus Wells

  “The Mnemonikos hold all our history in their heads,” the commur-mage said softly. “All the tales of the Comings; all the tales of the land. They know of the Kho’rabi; of the Sky Lords and the Dragonmasters: all of it. Without them, we should have no past. The swords they bear never rust or break or blunt—”

  “They bear swords?” I interrupted eagerly, finding these mysterious Rememberers suddenly more interesting. “They’re warriors, then?”

  The commur-mage smiled and chuckled and shook her head. She said, “Not swords as you mean, Daviot, though some carry arms to protect themselves, and all are versed in the martial arts. I mean the blade that finds its scabbard here”—she tapped her forehead—“in the mind. And that—my word on it!—is the sharpest blade of all. Think you this”—she tapped the short-sword on her hip now—“is a greater weapon than what I wear here?” She tapped her head again. “No! The blade is for carving flesh, when needs must. The knowledge here”—again she touched her skull—“is what can defeat the magic of the Sky Lords. How say you, Andyrt?”

  The jennym appeared no less surprised than I by this abrupt question. He set down his mug, brows lifted, and wiped a moustache of foam from his mouth.

  “I’ll face a Kho’rabi knight,” he said, “and trade him blow for blow. I’d not assume to trust steel against their wizards, though—that’s a fight for your kind, Rekyn: magic against magic.”

  It was the first time I had heard the commur-mage referred to by name. I watched her nod and smile and heard her say, “Aye, to each his own talent. Do you understand, Daviot? When warrior faces warrior, with blade or lance or bow or axe, I’d wager my money on Andyrt. But a sorcerer of Ahn-feshang could slay Andyrt with a spell.”

  “But I’ve no magic,” I protested. “But I’m strong enough, and when I attain my manhood, I want to be a warrior.”

  “You’ve the strength of memory,” Rekyn said. “All I’ve heard from you this day tells me that—and that’s a terrible strength, my friend. It’s the strength of things past, recalled; it’s the strength of time, of history. It’s the strength of knowing, of knowledge. It’s the strength that binds the land, the people. Listen to me! In four years you become a man, and when you do, I’d ask that you go to Durbrecht and hone that blade you carry in your head.”

  So intense was her voice, her expression—though she used no magic on me then—that I heard proud clarions, a summons to battle; and still confusion.

  “Is Durbrecht far?” I asked.

  “Leagues distant,” she answered. “On the north shore of the Treppanek, where Kellambek and Draggonek divide. You should have to quit this village, your parents.”

  “How should I live?” I asked. I was a fisherman’s child: I had acquired a measure of practicality.

  And she laughed and said, “Be you accepted by the college, all will be paid for you. You’d have board and lodging, and a stipend for pleasure while you learn.”

  A stipend for pleasure—that had a distinct appeal.

  There was little real coin in Whitefish village, our transactions being mostly by barter, and the only coin I had ever held was an ancient penny piece I had found on the beach, worn so smooth by time and wave that the face of the Lord Protector whose image marked it was blunted, indiscernible, which I had dutifully given to my father. The thought of a stipend, of coin of my own, to spend as I pleased, was mightily attractive. Nonetheless, I was not entirely convinced: it seemed too easy. That I should be paid to learn? In White-fish village we learned to survive. To know the tides and the seasons of the fish, to caulk a boat, to ride the storms, to bait a hook and cast a net; for that learning, the payment was food in our bellies and blankets on our beds. We expected no more.

  “But how,” I wondered, “should I earn all that?”

  “By learning to use that memory of yours,” she said, solemnly and urgently, “and by learning our history.”

  “Not work?” I asked, not quite understanding.

  “Only at learning,” she replied.

  I pondered awhile, more than a little confused. I looked to where Andyrt’s helm lay, observing the dented steel, the sweaty stains on the leather straps, the sheen of oil that overlay the beginnings of rust, pitting the metal like the marks I saw on the cheeks of boys—men!—older than me. I looked at the jennym’s sword hilt, leather-wrapped and indented with the familiar pressure of his fingers. I looked at his face and found no answer there. I said, “And I’d learn the martial arts, too?”

  Rekyn nodded: “You’d learn to survive.”

  “Is Durbrecht very big?” I asked, and she answered, “Bigger than Cambar.”

  “Have you been there?” I demanded.

  “I was trained there,” she said. “I was sent by my village mantis when I came of age. There is a Sorcerous College there, too, besides that of the Mnemonikos. I learned to use my talent there, and then was sent to Cambar.”

  I scuffed my feet awhile in the dirt of Thorym’s tavern, aware that I contemplated my future. Then I looked her in the eye again and asked, “If I do not like it, may I come back?”

  “If you do not like it,” she said, “or they do not like you, then you come back. In the first year they test you, and then—be you unfit, or they for you—you come back to Whitefish village.”

  “Or to Cambar Keep,” said Andyrt. “To be a soldier, if you still so wish.”

  That seemed to me a reasonable enough compromise. What was a year? A spring, a summer, an autumn, and a winter: not much time, then. But sufficient that I might see something of the world beyond Whitefish village. It seemed an opportunity no boy could, in his right mind, refuse.

  “Yes,” I said, and added after a moment’s thought, “do my parents agree.”

  “We’ll ask them,” said Rekyn.

  I followed her gaze and saw my mother and my father coming with the mantis toward the tavern. They both seemed disturbed, though in different ways. My mother’s face was set in a pattern I recognized from those times I, or my siblings, had been hurt more seriously than was our habit; my father’s was stern and confused at the same time. I had seen that look when he balanced the chance of a good catch against the advent of an approaching storm. I waited, all my pride dissolved.

  My mother curtsied and my father bent his knee, which added to my confusion, for such formality was unlike them and told me that they regarded this woman to whom I spoke as an equal, as their superior. I felt embarrassed for them and, by extension, for myself.

  But Rekyn smiled and rose, greeting them courteously as if they were some lord and lady come avisiting the keep, and motioned soldiers away to clear places, holding back a chair for my mother and thanking them both for granting her their valuable time. I shuffled my feet, studying the dirt, and only when I looked up did I see that all the soldiers save Andyrt were gone, and only Rekyn and the mantis and my parents remained. I paced a sideways step closer to my father, who set a hand on my shoulder and said, “I thought to find you at the boat. We’ve a net to mend, remember.”

  I mumbled an apology, immensely grateful for Rekyn’s intervention: she said, “The blame is mine, friend Aditus. I kept him here to speak of his talent.”

  “My lady?” my father said, and I saw that he held the commur-mage in some awe.

  Rekyn said, “Not lady, friend. That title’s for greater than I. I am called Rekyn. I’d speak with you of your son’s talent, of his future. But first, ale?”

  My parents exchanged glances, awkward and embarrassed as I; they looked to the mantis for guidance, and he beamed and ducked his head, impressing chins one upon the other. Rekyn beckoned Thorym—himself awed by such attention—over to our table and asked that mugs be brought.

  “Your son has a great talent,” she said when they were served and Thorym gone, though not far enough he could not overhear such tasty gossip, “and I’d speak with you of that.”

  I thought then that my mother looked frightened. My father’s face stayed stolid. I had seen it thus when he rode a boat int
o the teeth of the wind and the waves howled up over the gunwales: it frightened me, so that I heard little of the conversation that followed.

  I know only that, at its ending, Rekyn and my parents were friends, and that it was agreed that on my attaining manhood I should be allowed to decide my own future: to go to Durbrecht, or seek a place in the Cambar warband, or remain in Whitefish village.

  That agreement was sealed with more ale than either of my parents was accustomed to drink at that early hour, and neither was entirely steady on their feet as they quit the tavern. I rose from where I had squatted, idly stroking the dust from Andyrt’s helmet, to join them—this I remember clearly—and my father looked a question at my mother, who nodded, and then my father said to me, “I go to mend the net. Do you come with me, or remain here with Rekyn?”

  I think that sometimes there comes a precise moment, a fragment of time, crystallized, trapped forever in the alembic of our internal eye, that tells us all when and where we chose our path through life.

  Mine was then: I said, “I’ll remain.”

  That was the moment, the instant, that I opted to be a Rememberer.

  I was a celebrity for a few short weeks—the lad who had stood with the men on the beach when the Sky Lords came, the lad singled out by the commur-mage. But the fish still swam in the Fend, and the boats still put out, and I still had duties to attend, favored or not. Fisherfolk are above all practical, and until I quit the village for greater things I remained a fisherman’s son.

  Then, for a while, my new-won prominence grew irksome. The mantis found a fresh interest in me, perceiving it to his advantage I suspect that he school me above and beyond my fellows. Consequently I found myself expected to undertake additional lessons that, given those duties I owed my parents, left me little enough time to myself. I am grateful to him now, but then, during those four years, I came close to hating him at times. What boy would not, when his friends went to gaming in the sunshine whilst he must sit indoors at his lessons, prisoner of his own elevation? I sulked, I think, but the mantis pressed on, blithely oblivious of the imaginative fates I dreamed of inflicting on him, and in time I found myself enjoying his pedagogy. History, I discovered, was fascinating, for all the mantis’s grasp of Dharbek’s past was at best tenuous, circumscribed by his religious training. Even so, what he told me through those long hours put flesh on the bones of legend so that by the time I left for Cambar Keep, I knew more of this land of ours than any other child in the village.

  He spoke to me primarily of the Dhar, hardly at all of the Ahn, who were, in his narrow opinion, no more than demons, banished by the will of the God to Ahn-feshang, from whence they sought to return to spread their evil. Having then no other knowledge with which to balance this hereditary view, I accepted it: I had, after all, spent my life hearing tales of the Sky Lords’ atrocities. But the stories of the Dhar—oh, those thrilled me, and I lapped them up, binding them to me with the ropes of my memory.

  Of the Dawntime he spoke, when the Wanderer Kings came down-out of the unknown north into the Forgotten Country and there encountered the dragons. He told me of the Dragonmasters and their magic that bent the ferocious flying creatures to their will. The which, he carefully explained, was the first gift of the God. The second was that magic that enabled the creation of the Changed, and when I questioned—innocently enough—the morality of such action, the mantis bade me still my heretical tongue on fear of losing that favor I had won whilst earning in its place a cuffing. I obeyed, for I knew I might push only so far and no farther, and besides there was sufficient else to occupy me without risking a beating on behalf of creatures I had never seen and knew of only as vague legends. So I held my tongue and listened to the old tales of the crossing of the Slammerkin and the conquest of Draggonek, where Emeric, first of the Lords Protector, built Kherbryn; the bridging of the Treppanek, when the people entered Kellambek and met the Ahn; the exodus of those folk to their unknown land; of great Tuwyan, who ordered the construction of Durbrecht; and Canovar, who founded the Sentinels on the seven islands that ward our eastern shores; of the gift of peace that brought all Dharbek to worship of the God.

  This latter, I comprehended, was to the cost of the Ahn, who had, after all, been first come to Kellambek, but as the Dark Folk were enemies of the God and become the Sky Lords, I accepted what the mantis told me quite unthinking, save for one question.

  “Why,” I asked him one winter’s evening as we sat before the fire in his little cottage beside the cella, “does the God allow the Comings? If we Dhar are his chosen people, and the Ahn are his enemies, why does he not destroy them?”

  Had I been already precocious, I was worse now, and my question clearly took the good mantis aback. He delivered a sound blow to my head and then murmured a prayer that the God forgive me my ignorant heresy. Then, as I rubbed at my stinging ear and bit back tears, he thought to offer an explanation.

  In the Dawntime, he told me—a trifle nervously I thought, as if this were a matter he had rather not discussed—the Dhar had worshipped false gods, the Three Deciders, and for that sin had earned the displeasure of the one true God. Even now, albeit we had come to the true faith, we must suffer for that sin, the memory of the deity being, naturally, prodigious. Until such time as this original sin should be forgiven, we must suffer the depredations of the Sky Lords in penance for our transgression.

  That seemed to me harsh. I had not, before that evening, even heard of the Three Deciders—so why should I, or Whitefish village, pay for a sin not of our commitment? I wondered, albeit briefly then, being not much used to wrestling with such theological mysteries, if it had not been better had we Dhar made peace with the Ahn, so that they should never have fled to become our enemies. My ear still burned, however, and I held my tongue. That church of which our village mantis was a lowly representative was a power in the land, an authority unquestioned, versed in the God’s mysteries and invested with the temporal interpretation of his will. I elected to accept the ritual explanation.

  Before I attained my manhood, I saw the Sky Lords’ boats again.

  The first was too far out to sea and too far south to present any threat to the village, and after a while it passed out of sight.

  The second time I was at sea. It was midsummer, a little after the Sastaine festival, the days long and gentle as the Fend’s soft swell. Dusk approached, the sea a match to the sky’s transparent blue, glinting bright where the westering sun laid bands of gold across the water. We were bringing in a filled net when Battus loosed his hold, eliciting a curse from my father that became a gasp as he followed my uncle’s gaze to where the sky was marred by a distant shape. I recognized it on the instant and saw that it must pass north of our position, save it change direction. Still, it rode very low and I felt a mixture of excitement and dread.

  My father said, “In the God’s name, are the Sentinels asleep?”

  And Thorus replied, “I think perhaps the Sky Lords own new magicks,” which set a chill on my spine, for I heard a great doubt in his voice and found myself reminded of the priest’s talk of ancient sin.

  Then my father said, “Best we bring this net in and turn for home, I think.”

  We had our catch aboard and the boat turned about before the Sky Lords had advanced more than three fingers’ width across the blue. There was no wind to speak of, and so Battus and Thorus manned the oars, my father the tiller, leaving me free to watch. Or act as valiant lookout, I chose to think.

  So it was I saw for the first time what the magic of the Sentinels could do.

  I saw the darkening sky grow brighter above the closest island. It was akin to the jack-o’-lantern fires that would sometimes dance over the marshier fields above the village, pale and pink as a wound at first, then stronger, like a kindling flame. Then it became a column of searing red that sprang skyward to envelop the airboat, wrapping about the cylinder. For a moment that seemed to me a very long time, it bathed the vessel, then came an eruption of light and I saw the air
boat broken like a spine-snapped beast, falling down in a great ball of flame, mundane now, trailers of smoke dragging behind it. There was a sound, as of distant thunder, and the Sky Lords’ craft went down to meet the sea. In a little while there was only a single plume of smoke that drifted leisurely shoreward, merging with the sky.

  Thorus said, “I believe they are awake,” and my father chuckled, nodding, and we turned again for home.

  The third airboat I saw was an anticlimax after that.

  It was sighted late in the year before I left for Durbrecht, when the season hung undecided between autumn and winter, the winds contrary and the Fend choppy. It was clear from the first that the airboat must pass south of Kellambek’s farthest shores, and I wondered to where. Later I questioned the mantis, but he professed ignorance, pointing out to me that argument still continued as to whether the world be flat or round, and if the one, then the Sky Lords must pass over the edge; if the other, then they should likely perish for want of food and water. Either fate suited him.

  I was then fifteen, my manhood now in sight, the past three years flown as years do, unnoticed save in their remembrance. I had come to realize the mantis had little more to teach me, that his knowledge was boundaried by his calling, limited by that dogma I yet accepted whilst sensing larger truths beyond its narrow borders. I had learned—courtesy of sore ears and more than one flogging—either to hold back my less orthodox questions or to put them circumspect. The matter of the Sky Lords’ fate I left to destiny.

  I had also discovered another interest. For some time now I had grown increasingly aware that I was not alone in my approach to adulthood. It was obvious, from the blemished skin and fluctuating voices of myself and my friends, that we grew. It was equally obvious, from other, far more appealing signs, that those girls with whom we had roughly played as children matched us.

  I was intrigued by this new aspect life revealed, and there were (this in all modesty) not a few daughters who flirted with me, for all I passed the next year sporting a ferocious crop of pimples and was seldom sure whether my voice should come out squeaking or gruff.