by Lee Duigon
“Please tell these good men,” he said, “that God is merciful to them that show mercy. This country is full of poor refugees. These Abnaks could save many lives, if they cared to. And then I think God will save them.”
“Sunfish, these men don’t know God,” Hlah said. “They worship little gods, which they think inhabit trees and ponds.”
“So did you, not so long ago,” Orth said. Hlah couldn’t deny it.
“Ootoo,” he said, “my friend here says that God will favor you if you stop and take care of any refugees you meet, so that they don’t starve or freeze to death. The favor of this God is worth more than you can imagine. He can protect you from the Thunder King. As I’ve told you, He saved us many times.”
Even as he spoke, Hlah thought, “What foolishness!” Defenseless Obannese were Abnak raiders’ natural prey. It was like asking wolves to protect the sheep.
Ootoo puffed out his tattooed cheeks and blew. “Whew! Ever since the Thunder King’s mardars first came to our country and took away our gods, everything has been out of joint.
“When I was young, if a few men wanted to go over the mountains and lift some scalps, they did—nothing more to it. No one could tell them not to go, nor could anyone make a man go if he didn’t want to. We fished and hunted when and where we pleased. And in the winter we slept in furs among our wives and children. Life was good.
“Now they marshal us into great armies full of foreigners; and if a man wants to go back home, they kill him if he tries. The hunting and fishing are poor because they took away our gods. They promised us the spoils of Obann, but all we got is toil and trouble.”
His men nodded vigorously and grunted their agreement.
“I can only speak for myself, as one man among twenty-six free men,” Ootoo said, “but it seems to me, Hlah, that if I help the Thunder King’s runaway slaves, I hurt the Thunder King. That appeals to me! And if your new God can do anything for me, so much the better. I doubt we’ll ever get across the mountains, anyhow.”
“I’ll stick with you, Ootoo,” one of his men spoke up. “Maybe we can raid the Thunder King’s new road. Arm some of these wretched slaves, teach them to fight, and help them to avenge themselves—the mardars won’t like that, eh?”
No, they wouldn’t like it at all: everyone agreed.
After the Abnaks departed, Hlah turned to Orth. “What have you done, Sunfish?” he said. “Ootoo’s heart is changed.”
“I haven’t done anything,” Orth said; “but I think that maybe God has.”
CHAPTER 38
Helki Picks a Fight
Not all of the Abnaks around King Oziah’s Wood fled to the hills. Some of the fugitives from the westernmost camps managed to get across the river. In sight of the town of Caristun, some two hundred of them crossed the Imperial, assembling on the south bank of the river.
“As soon as they can organize themselves,” Helki told the townsfolk, “they’ll come running to take everything you have. There’s no way to keep them out of this town. The only thing to do is to attack them first—right now.”
“Look at them all!” a man objected. “We’ll all be killed.”
“We’ll all be killed if we wait for them to come to us,” Helki answered. “If you think you can get away during the fighting, God speed you. Take the children with you! But I’m going out there now.”
He spun his staff over his head and set off toward the Abnaks. “Might as well,” he thought. The townspeople couldn’t get away. Even if they could, the winter would kill them as surely as the Abnaks.
Cavall trotted beside him, barking. Angel flew overhead. He spoke to the hound.
“Better stay out of this fight, little brother. It’s likely to have a bad end.” But Cavall only barked louder.
Helki didn’t turn to see whether anyone had followed him. If somehow the children in Caristun could be saved, he would be content. He wondered how many Abnaks he could fell with his staff before they killed him. Knowing Abnaks, he thought a good fight would satisfy them. If they could take his scalp, and the fight was worth remembering, they might be moved to spare the townspeople.
“Helki the Rod!” It was the Griffs, all dozen of them, following close behind him, making noise enough for several dozen. “Giant-slayer!” they cried. “The Flail of the Lord!”
The Abnaks, wet and weary after crossing the Imperial on logs and rafts, could hardly believe their eyes. Most of them just stood and stared; but a few came running to meet Helki and his men, brandishing their tomahawks.
In no time at all the clash came. Helki was used to fighting alone against a group. He kept the rod moving, whirling, striking whom it would and moving on to strike again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cavall pull down an Abnak and savage his arm, then leap nimbly aside to dodge a tomahawk. He didn’t see Angel swoop down and rake a man’s face with her talons, although he did hear her shrill cry of attack and a harsh scream answer it. Nor did he see the thirty or forty townsmen who snatched up rakes and clubs and rushed into the fray. He had no time to fix his eyes on anything. Spin, stride, lunge—keep the staff in motion, keep himself in motion for as long as he could: don’t stop moving and become a target. His rod would crack skulls and shatter shoulders, and keep on doing it until a stone tomahawk finally found him.
But suddenly there was no fight. Suddenly the Abnaks were all down on one knee, with their weapons on the ground before them and empty hands raised high—even the ones by the river who hadn’t joined the battle.
“Respite, respite!” they all cried. Helki knew this was what Abnaks said when they meant not to surrender, but to declare they had no wish to fight. It was an Abnak truce, which no man of honor would violate.
Helki stopped moving and rested, panting, on his staff. Angel came down and settled on his shoulder. Cavall, unwounded, sat beside him.
“I agree to the respite,” Helki said, which was the proper thing to say.
“Why do you attack us, Flail of the Lord?” an Abnak chief demanded.
“To protect the people in that town,” said Helki. They could all see Caristun from where they were.
“If you are Helki the Rod, we will not fight with you,” said the chief. “Our fight is with the Zephites and the Wallekki and all the servants of the Thunder King who turned against us. We want their scalps, not yours! We will not harm any of your people.”
Now for the first time Helki surveyed the battlefield. All his Griffs were still alive, and all the townsmen who’d come after them. A few Abnaks lay on the cold ground, but no one seemed to have been killed: the men who were hurt were gasping and groaning, but still alive. The fight must not have lasted even a minute, Helki reckoned.
So he did what was proper, according to the manners of the Abnaks. He took the chief’s hand and raised him to his feet, which meant that he and they would be at peace from then on.
“I am Santay, son of Bug, a chieftain of the Marmot Clan,” the man said. “We have all heard of you, Helki the Rod. You have a famous name—and no man but a great chief would a hawk follow into battle. No man would go up against two hundred men unless the gods favored him.”
“Not gods,” Helki said, “but the one God whom I serve.”
Santay nodded. “The God of Obann shows His might, these days. What man has not seen it?
“Helki, Flail of the Lord lead us, that we might be revenged on the men who betrayed us—who accuse us, the Marmot Clan, of witchcraft! Lead us, and we shall follow. I have spoken.”
Leading these men back across the river and carrying the fight to the Thunder King’s troops around Oziah’s Wood ought to keep the Heathen too busy to prey on Caristun, Helki thought. They might recruit more Abnaks and get help from the rangers in the forest. He might yet meet up with Jack and Ellayne and Martis.
“If you give your oath to fight against the Thunder King from now on,” Helki answered, “then I’ll do my best to lead you. And maybe God will make us prosper, after all.”
It took all afternoo
n, but one by one, each in his own name, all those Marmot men swore to follow Helki.
“I’ll never get back to Lintum Forest,” he thought. It seemed that he, who’d never wanted any more than to be left alone, would die an Abnak war chief. “That, at least, is funny!” he thought.
CHAPTER 39
Lord Reesh Says a Prayer
In the golden hall there was a banquet every night for all the mardars. The Thunder King sat on his throne, behind his golden mask, and neither ate nor drank, nor spoke a word, nor moved. It was uncanny, Lord Reesh thought.
Before they sat down to eat, the mardars turned to the Thunder King, bowed their heads and spoke a prayer: “O god over all gods, master of the universe, hail! We pledge our service to you to the death—to you, all-powerful, who cannot die.”
Reesh was expected to dine with the mardars every night and join them in the recitation of this prayer. “You must not keep silence,” Kyo told him. “It would be taken as an act of rebellion and punished swiftly. The mardars would seize you and throw you to the great cat.”
Reesh said the prayer. He didn’t know what Kyo would do if he confessed he didn’t believe the Thunder King to be a god.
“What does it matter, my lord?” Gallgoid said, when Reesh told him about it. “You never believed in God when you were First Prester in God’s Temple, yet you led the prayers.”
But it was a commandment of old, according to Scripture, that neither the Children of Geb nor their descendants were to worship any god but God. It was the first divine commandment given to them after the sons of men were cast out of Paradise. How many kings had been destroyed for disobedience? How many times had the people been afflicted with famine, war, or pestilence because they’d disobeyed and set up idols in Obann and honored the false gods of the Heathen?
The Scriptures were just stories that had survived from ancient times and probably not even true stories, at that. So Reesh believed. But it was necessary for the common people to believe in Scripture, and Reesh had spent many years seeing to it that the Temple fostered such belief. It was good for the nation, and his own unbelief had nothing to do with it.
Why, then, did it distress him to say prayers to the Thunder King?
“It’d trouble me,” said Gallgoid, “but I’m only an assassin, not a scholar. Besides which, my lord, they’ll kill you if you refuse to say the prayers.”
So Reesh said prayers to the Thunder King and feasted with the mardars every night and shuddered whenever the great cat’s green eyes chanced to fall on him.
“No one knows what kind of beast it is, nor whence it came,” Kyo said. “Some men captured it one day, up in the hills north of Kara Karram, and presented it to the Thunder King. Our master feeds it on the flesh of slaves and rebels. You will see that done, if we stay here long enough. It is said that our master himself called the beast up, out of the depths of the earth. Certainly no man has ever seen another of its kind.”
Around the walls of the banquet chamber, behind the high chairs, stood massive wooden posts with rudimentary, rather sad-looking faces carved into them near the top and barbarous runes inscribed below the faces.
“Those contain the spirits of the gods whom our master has imprisoned,” Kyo explained. “Here they must stand, powerless, to witness his greatness and his continuing victories. They groan and wail most piteously, but only our master the Thunder King can hear them. Once he has conquered all the nations of the world, then he will devour their gods.”
Superstitious tripe, thought Reesh, fit only for overawing primitive pagans. Nevertheless, he said prayers to the Thunder King while Gallgoid every night had his suppers in a wooden hall with the mardars’ servants, who merely caroused and otherwise enjoyed themselves.
“But we do have to watch what we say, my lord,” he said. “They all believe the Thunder King’s a god. Those who don’t, get fed to the cat. Those who do, might wind up in Hell when all is said and done. But that at least comes later.”
In King Oziah’s Wood, the rangers watched intently as the Thunder King’s army clawed itself to pieces. The Abnaks tried to escape; the Zeph and the Wallekki tried to wipe them out. “They won’t be invading the forest anytime soon,” Huell said. A few of the Abnaks had tried, but the rangers’ arrows had accounted for them all. “But we’ll have to be ready in case they try to come in without the Abnaks.”
Huell didn’t know that the Omah were coming out of the forest every night to kill as many Heathen as they could. They couldn’t kill many, but they were destroying the courage of the army. The Heathen thought they were imps and devils, summoned by witchcraft, and feared them inordinately. Huell didn’t know because there was no one to tell him. Wytt hadn’t told Jack and Ellayne that the attacks were continuing: it wasn’t in his nature to give reports. He came and went as he pleased. Wherever the rangers made camp, Wytt found them. He liked to come late at night and snuggle up in Ellayne’s arms. He would leave early in the morning, and none of Huell’s rangers ever saw him.
But somehow Chillith knew of Wytt’s comings and goings. One night, he drew Jack aside to speak to him alone—a little distance out of the camp, under the stars.
“I know what the little hairy men are doing,” he said. “You remember how my men and I thought your Wytt was a kind of devil, and how we feared him. The men on the plain are more afraid than we were! Their fear cries out to me, even in my sleep. Those men fear witchcraft. At first they thought it was the Abnaks’ witchcraft; but they have driven away or killed the Abnaks and still the little devils afflict them by night.”
“Yes, well, Ellayne and I saw it, the first time they did it,” Jack said. “There’s no need to tell me.”
“That’s not what I want to tell you,” Chillith said. He lowered his voice. “Your God has spoken to me. I must confront the Thunder King. God has shown him to me in a dream, sitting in a golden hall atop the mountains. He feasts with his mardars. In the spring he intends to come down and destroy Obann. But before that happens, I must stand before him and denounce him. And then God will destroy him.”
Jack shivered. “Why are you telling me this, Chillith? What do you mean, ‘denounce him’?”
“That will be seen when I do it. Only then.”
“But what do you want from me?”
“Your little hairy man, to guide me up the mountains: to protect me. He’ll do it, if you ask him.”
“They say the mountains are crawling with warriors,” Jack said. “Even with Wytt to help, you’ll never get past them.”
“If they capture me, well and good—they’ll take me to the Thunder King,” Chillith said. “If your friend can keep me from stepping off a cliff, it’ll be enough. But I must start soon.”
Jack didn’t like any of this, not a bit. “I can’t just tell Wytt to go,” he said. “It’d have to be both me and Ellayne. You should ask her, too.”
Chillith smiled. “She would say no.”
“If I send Wytt away without asking her,” Jack said, “she’d kill me. And then she’d follow after him, and Martis and I would have to follow her, and the next thing you know, it’d be a cuss’t parade—and we’d all get caught.”
“That’s what I’m trying to avoid,” Chillith said. “There is no need for anyone but me to stand before the Thunder King: I only have been called. Let it be a secret from Ellayne. Wytt can return to you after I’m captured.”
Jack shook his head, forgetting Chillith couldn’t see him. “She’d find out. I won’t do it. You’ll have to ask her.”
“I’ll go alone, if I have to,” Chillith said. “It is the will of God.”
“What are you two doing?”
Jack startled. It was Ellayne; they hadn’t heard her coming. “What’s the will of God?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“You might as well know,” Jack said, and so they told her.
“You must be crazy,” she said to Chillith. “They’ll kill you.”
“I know,” he said. “But when God called you
to climb Bell Mountain, did you not go? If He can take away my sight, He can take away my life at any time. So I will obey!
“I was a mardar. One day I would have been presented to the Thunder King, and I would have sworn to serve him as my god. He would have taught me secrets and invested me with powers. For this, the true God blinded me. He put me in the dark so I could see. Only then did I see my own wickedness.”
“We should all go with you,” said Ellayne, “Jack and Martis and me.”
“I forbid it. You have not been called.”
Ellayne didn’t answer right away. “What’s she thinking?” Jack wondered. It was one thing to obey God, he thought—and quite another to do something foolhardy because you wanted to do it. He wished Obst were there. Obst would know what to do.
And then Ellayne said, “All right. When Wytt comes again, I’ll ask him to guide you up the mountains. I don’t know that he’ll do it, but I’ll ask.”
Wytt didn’t come that night. The children lay awake in their shelter, waiting for him, but he didn’t come. After an hour or two of thinking, Jack whispered to Ellayne, “I know you—and you’re up to something. You’d never let Wytt go without us, so what’s your plan?”
“To do what God wants: to help Chillith,” she said. “Wytt won’t leave us. It wouldn’t matter how I asked him. But God wants Chillith to go—I do believe him, you know!—and Chillith can’t go without Wytt, and Wytt won’t go without us. So we’ll go. We’ll follow along behind, and Wytt will know we’re there, but Chillith won’t.”
Jack snorted. “And what about Martis?” he said. “The last time we snuck off without him, it was nothing but trouble. You know he’ll follow us.”
“He won’t have to, this time,” Ellayne said. “This time we’ll ask him to come along with us.”
Right on up to see the Thunder King! It was daft, Jack thought. “He’ll kill us all.” And he was pretty sure that if God didn’t call you to do a foolish thing like that, it was better not to do it.
