The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain)

by Lee Duigon

  “We ought to tell the rangers,” Jack said.

  “I’m sure they know already—at least the rangers in this part of the wood,” Martis said. “We’re going to have to change our course. We can’t come out of the forest anywhere near here.”

  “Chillith says they’re going to come in,” Ellayne said.

  “We don’t want to be here when they do,” said Martis.

  Angel the hawk saw more than any man could see.

  She saw the new road inching its way down from the mountains along the north bank of the Chariot, the masses of slaves toiling over it, the armies poised to march—and some already marching. She saw Heathen hosts camped in forts along the west slope of the mountains, slowly working their way down the Imperial River into the heart of Obann. She saw several camps made north of the Imperial, where men mustered for the invasion of King Oziah’s Wood.

  She flew sometimes as high as the mountains themselves, and higher still—high enough to see what was on the other side. High up in a pass, where the new road began, she saw fresh snow on the mountains and a vast army of warriors and slaves feverishly working.

  Across the pass, facing Obann, they were constructing a stone wall, with great gates bound in iron. Behind the gates they had enclosed a wide area within a palisade, occupying nearly the whole pass itself; and inside the palisade were staked out the shapes of many buildings yet to rise. An endless procession of teams of oxen transported lumber up the east side of the mountains to the site. Men toiled day and night, hammering, sawing, digging.

  Angel was a man’s hawk, hand-raised, not a wild bird: she looked on wild birds with disdain. The man who had raised her from an egg was gone now, killed by enemies. For a time Angel hadn’t cared whether she herself lived or died. But there was a new man for her now, a man who knew how to look into a hawk’s eye, and how to let her see into his. They couldn’t speak to one another, and yet their minds met. So Angel was content; and no matter how high she soared, nor how far, she always came back to Helki.

  When she did, she tried to tell him what she’d seen, because he was a man and he would want to know. But of course no hawk has ever learned quite how to do that.

  “I wish I could fly up there with you, baby-girl,” Helki said. “You must know where everything is—if only you could tell me!” He tickled a special spot at the base of her neck that she couldn’t get to with her beak. The twelve Griffs watched him uneasily. They were convinced Helki and Angel spoke to one another without words, by some kind of magic.

  They’d turned back and were following the Chariot down to what was left of Cardigal Town, where the Chariot flowed into the Imperial. From there it would be an easy trip back to Obann City.

  But now Helki didn’t feel like turning back. “Something’s up,” he muttered. Today the hawk had stayed aloft for a long time, flown clear out of sight, and had come back tense and fidgety. She was seeing things that made her so. And Cavall kept pricking up his ears and prancing around in circles; something had his nerves on edge.

  “What’s bothering the animals?” asked one of the Griffs.

  “I don’t know,” Helki said. “Maybe they sense bad weather coming.” And maybe, he thought, they feared worse.

  They were passing many parties going down the mountains into Obann, Lord Reesh noted, as the coach and its escort carried him up into the foothills.

  “I have told you my master the Thunder King cannot be defeated,” said Mardar Kyo. They had stopped at an outpost on the road for a change of horses. “Even now his thought speaks to me, as he speaks to all his mardars.

  “He is stretching forth his hand. Before this country sees another summer, he will have seized all Obann. He will pull down that great city and build a greater city in its place, one that will bear his name forever. He will not stop for the winter, as a mortal man would do.”

  When they were on their way again, Gallgoid said, “I wonder what he meant. I wonder what they’re going to do.”

  “The Thunder King is going to finish what he’s started,” Reesh said. “It’s obvious he’s moving new armies into Obann. They’ll be poised to strike as soon as spring begins. His resources must be inexhaustible.”

  “Unless he dies,” said Gallgoid. “I’m surprised he’s lived this long. They mustn’t have very good assassins out there in the East.”

  Reesh then answered, very slowly, “And what if he were not to die?”

  Gallgoid looked at him, leaving the question to lie unanswered for a minute.

  “I’m a plain man, my lord,” he said. “I can’t make out what your lordship means.”

  Reesh suddenly knew exactly what he meant. The idea had been a-birthing in some dark cellar of his mind where he didn’t have to look at it, or acknowledge it was there. For a time there were only faint stirrings of it, easily repressed.

  But now here it was, fully formed and right out in the open: his own words, just now, had let it out of the dark. It was an appalling thing to see—to know that a thing like that had come out of your own mind.

  “My lord?” said Gallgoid.

  Reesh shook him off. What he had in his mind was for the Thunder King alone. Not for Gallgoid, not even for a mardar—this was a thing to be kept secret.

  And it was rapidly revealing itself as a thing that had to be. It would be wrong, and foolish, to shy away from it. If you begin by admitting that there is no God, Reesh reasoned—

  “My lord!” Gallgoid was staring at him. “Are you going to be sick, my lord? You’ve gone all pale.”

  “It was just a little spasm,” Lord Reesh said. “I’m all right now.” At least he would be, he thought, if this new burden didn’t crush him.

  CHAPTER 28

  How the King Saved Hamber

  The chiefs who were with Ryons decided to clear the Zamzu out of Hamber right away. Growing up as a slave among the Wallekki, Ryons had heard of the Zamzus’ taste for human flesh. For this all the peoples of the East despised and loathed them. But they feared them, too.

  “We’ll hit them before they even know we’re here,” Uduqu said. And so it was that they marched out that very night, and Shingis and the Blays marched with them, overjoyed that the king would have them for his friends.

  Gurun rode with Ryons in the rear. She’d never been on a horse before and was trying very hard not to look like a clumsy fool.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?” Ryons said. “I’ve had a lot of practice, and I’m still afraid I might fall off. And then my Ghols would be ashamed.”

  “We don’t have many horses, where I live,” she said.

  “Did you really come here over the sea?” Ryons asked.

  “Yes—and it wasn’t easy,” Gurun said.

  “What is the sea?”

  To someone who has lived on an island all her life, that is a rather difficult question to answer. But before she could get halfway into an answer, the chief of the Ghols bade them to be quiet from now on. They were approaching Hamber and mustn’t be heard.

  It was just midnight. Because the Blays had already scouted the approaches to the town, the chiefs had been able to devise a plan. Part of it was for the king and Gurun to stay out of the fighting, with a few Ghols to watch over them. Ryons had already been in battles and had no wish to be in any more of them.

  The Zamzu had dug a ditch around the town but not yet flooded it with water, nor erected a stockade. The Blays knew where all the sentries were. Abnaks crept up and silenced them before they could raise an alarm. The rest of the king’s men, most of them dismounted, rushed over the ditch and into the town. Abnak war-whoops, Wallekki battle songs, and the weird and wolfish howling of the Fazzan shattered the silence of the night.

  Taken in their sleep, the Zamzu had but little chance. Some fought their way out of the town, only to be shot down by Ghol horse-archers and Blay slingers. The rest fell to Abnak tomahawks, Wallekki swords, and the short spears of the Fazzan. The Zamzu were big men and strong, but badly outnumbered and surprised. Three or four of th
em broke through and charged straight for Ryons and Gurun, but they didn’t get far. Ryons couldn’t help admiring how Gurun sat straight up in her saddle and didn’t turn a hair, when it was all he could do not to jump to the ground and run away. If he had known more about such things, he would have thought her every inch a queen. But he did think she was very fine indeed.

  “Now hear this, you people of Hamber!” That was Uduqu, whose barbarously accented Obannese was better than anyone else’s in the king’s company. He stood on a barrel in the middle of the town, with a crowd of pale-faced, wide-eyed townsfolk gathered round him. “We’ve saved you from your enemies at the command of Ryons, King of Obann by the grace of God whose mercy endureth forever.

  “There is a king in Obann now because God wills it. We who fight for him were Heathen once, but we aren’t anymore. Don’t be afraid of us! When the sun comes up again, you’ll find yourselves safe and free, with all your enemies destroyed. Praise God and honor your king.”

  There was some cheering, but most of the people didn’t yet understand what had happened and were still afraid of the Zamzu. They were probably afraid of Uduqu, too.

  “Let the Zamzu lie where they’ve fallen,” said the Wallekki chief. “When the people find them in the morning and have to bury them, then they’ll understand.” The other chiefs agreed; and before there was a hint of dawn in the sky, they were on their way back to Jocah’s Creek. Shingis came running up to salute Gurun with his spear.

  “Good to see Zamzu all killed—very nice!” he said. “You pray good and strong, Gurun, and Obann God hears you. He sends a king. A king for everybody—eh?”

  “Yes,” said Gurun, looking at Ryons and not knowing exactly what it was she saw, or what she said. “Yes—I think a king for everybody.” And she believed it as she said it.

  There was resting and feasting at Jocah’s Creek all the next day, but the king’s men wouldn’t stay a second day. They understood it would deplete the village’s stores if they did.

  Gurun tried to explain to Ryons the nature of the sea. He wasn’t the only one who’d never seen it. Only a few of the Wallekki in his company had ever been that far west.

  “There is the earth, and heaven, and the sea,” she said. “The sea is water. I think there must be more of the sea than there is of the earth. Once upon a time there was nothing but the water, until God made the dry land to rise up from the deep and placed the heavens over all. That was in the very beginning, as Holy Scripture tells us.”

  “But how can people live in the sea?” Ryons wondered.

  “They don’t! They live on islands, which are dry land in the middle of the sea. My home is on an island. A great storm blew me all the way across the sea to Obann.”

  It amazed Gurun that men could know so little of the sea. Tim told her that no one in Obann ever ventured out on the sea, not ever. They had boats of all kinds for going up and down the rivers, and there were the ruins of cities by the sea—cities that must have once been ports. But there were no live cities, with people living in them, within miles of the coast. Why this was, Tim didn’t know.

  Ryons pleaded with Gurun to come back to Obann with him. Now that they had amnesty, the Blays were happy to go there with her. “Where you go, we go,” Shingis said.

  “All of us here in Jocah’s Creek will miss the Blays,” Loyk said. But at least the Zamzu were put down, and the king’s chiefs had promised to send officers to raise a militia in the country. “We’ll miss you, too, Gurun. But maybe you’ll come back to us someday. Maybe in the spring, God willing.”

  “I’ve never seen a great city,” Gurun said. “We have none, on our islands—not even villages like this. I will be the first of all our people ever to see a city.”

  Yes, the idea of it excited her; but it was more than just the lure of the city. The filgya had told her she must see the king, and now she had. There had to be more to it than that, she thought: “No filgya speaks without good reason. There must be something about this little king, something very important. But I must wait to find out what it is.”

  They said he saved the city just as the enemy was about to destroy it. They said prophets of God had named him king. There were prophets in the Scriptures, but those were tales of ancient times. Who, wondered Gurun, would have thought there could be kings and prophets in the present day?

  So it was that Gurun rode beside the king when he returned to Obann, and her Blays marched around her, among the king’s Ghols on horseback. It was funny to see them try to talk to one another. As for the king himself, he sat a little taller in the saddle, thinking about the sea, and how it had brought this marvelous creature of a girl to Obann—and to him.

  CHAPTER 29

  How the Animals Fled

  Ordinarily it would be a day’s hard hiking from Oziah’s Wood to the edges of the forests on the foothills. But with his madman in tow, Hlah thought, they would do well to make the trip in two days, maybe three.

  He soon began to doubt that estimate, too. The snow didn’t come down hard, but it didn’t let up, either. Not a ray of sunlight peeped through the clouded sky.

  There were movements in the grey grass. Ever on the lookout for edible game that he might bring down, Hlah found a few stones suitable for throwing. Sooner or later an animal would show itself. When they came to a place where there were some bare spots in the grass, he stopped.

  “Be quiet now, and be still,” he said. “Something tasty might come our way.” Orth made no answer, but he did keep quiet.

  First Hlah saw a few birds running, birds with long tails and dirty purple plumage. There was something about them that looked wrong, but he only glimpsed them for a moment, and when he threw a stone, he missed. They vanished back into the grass in the blink of an eye. He wondered if they were like the bird Jandra had—that hissing horror with teeth in its beak and claws on its wings.

  Just out of sight, always out of sight, small creatures darted here and there. And then Hlah saw an animal he couldn’t name, although he’d been a hunter all his life. If he had ever seen an alligator, he might have described this as a small alligator covered with untidy black fur and running very fast indeed with a peculiar scuttling motion. But he’d never seen anything remotely like it, and he wouldn’t mind if he never saw it again.

  Then, of all things, a fat groundhog burst out of the grass and Hlah had the good luck to knock it over with a stone. He killed it with his tomahawk before it could recover, and held it up triumphantly.

  “Look! A fine supper for us tonight!” he said. “We could have asked for nothing better.”

  Even a madman would be pleased, he thought; but Orth only stood and stared. He stared so hard that Hlah turned around.

  Coming straight at them at a high speed was a bird the size of a horse, with a massive hooked beak gaping open like the gulf of doom. And there was absolutely no chance of escape and nothing to hide behind.

  Hlah had heard of these great birds, even seen some at a distance, and he knew that they were lethal. There was nothing he could do but stand his ground, tomahawk in one hand, knife in the other. “So dies Hlah, the son of Spider!” he thought.

  But he didn’t die. The bird veered a little and charged right past them, turning only its head to glare and hiss at them as it passed, not even breaking stride. And behind it came a stag and several does. These passed, too, following the giant bird. Hlah turned and watched them go.

  “What do you think of that?” he said. “If you asked me, I’d say they were all headed for Oziah’s Wood. Does something chase them there? But I don’t see anything.”

  “The prophets said it was the end of days, the day of the Lord’s wrath—but I hanged the prophets. The Lord sent His prophets to us, and we hanged them!” The madman threw back his head and laughed. “The beasts run from the wrath of God. Someone must have told them Oziah’s Wood has a blessing on it. But all blessings are revoked, revoked—hah!”

  It was the longest speech Hlah had ever heard him make, but he couldn’
t get him to explain it. It took some doing to get Orth moving forward again. All around them, running past them, fled animals and birds in the opposite direction. It kept on snowing. You could now see it on the ground.

  “We’ll have to stop early to set up any kind of decent shelter,” Hlah thought. “If it turns into a heavy snow, then God help me”—he meant it as a prayer.

  Cavall faced the East and howled. None of Helki’s men saw anything for a dog to howl at, so Cavall’s performance made them all uneasy. Cavall didn’t care about them, and paid them no attention. Snow blew into his face, and he howled. Great evil lay in that direction. It lay heavy on his heart.

  Helki knelt beside him.

  “You know something we don’t know, don’t you? There’s a good dog—you’d tell me all about it, if you could.” The man ruffled the thick fur between the great hound’s shoulders. Cavall realized the man understood as much as any man could understand. Cavall inched a little closer to him and howled again.

  With a harsh cry, Angel flew down and landed on Helki’s shoulder. She hunched up her wings and scrunched her head between them, glaring fiercely. She, too, had things to say, if only she could, Helki thought. Then he noticed the Griffs staring at him.

  “Don’t be so superstitious, boys—there’s no witchcraft here,” he said. “These animals are upset. If you look around, you’ll see they’re not the only ones. Birds have been flying east-to-west all day—and when was the last time you saw a squirrel? You can hear them chattering at someone, but not at us. Use your eyes and ears.”

  “Our eyes and ears are not like yours, Giant-killer,” said Tiliqua. “You understand the speech of birds and beasts. The soles of your feet see and study the ground even as you walk on it. Probably the snow is speaking to you, too.”