by Tim Stead
He tasted the bitter dust in his mouth, but he smelt nothing. It felt almost like blindness, not to smell at all.
He knew that this was water rock. It was sand and detritus lain down in sea or lake a hundred ages past. He did not know how he knew this, but he did. And he knew about fire rock, too, which was smelted in the heart of the world, then frozen like glass. Narak did not know these things, but in his dream he knew them.
He became aware of shadows, hundreds of shadows beside him. They were things that he could not see, but somehow they were still there. One monstrous shadow, a thing out of a nightmare, stirred, and a voice of silken thunder spoke close to his ear.
“You are shown the one, and yet you begin to see the many. It is remarkable.”
He opened his eyes, and he was in the lamp lit gloom of his private room, his aspect full upon him and his body cold with sweat. He scrabbled at the memory of the dream, repeating the images to his mind because he wanted to remember them, and he knew well how dreams fade and become nothing in mere moments, but the dream did not fade. He still tasted the bitter dust, and saw the huge arms and the chisel fingers in his mind’s eye. It was as though the dream was not a dream at all. Most clearly he remembered the voice. It was a voice beside which the noises of men were but the squeaking of mice. It was the voice of a god.
4. The Forest
Best to turn back now before she was lost. Pascha Lammeling, Passerina the god of sparrows, the lady of a thousand eyes, stopped in the middle of the great forest and leaned back against a tree. This was far enough. Wolfguard was distant, hidden behind trees, a hill, a stream, another hill. She was very glad to be away from it, and in truth she was glad to be in the forest again after so many years. She had not thought it would be so welcoming.
She opened her hand and a sparrow descended from a branch above her head and landed on her thumb. It fed from the bread she held on her palm. In a moment it was joined by two more, and three others perched on her shoulder. Each was so light she could hardly feel them, little brown balls of feathers and air.
There was not much for sparrows in the forest. They were creatures adapted to man’s ways. They scavenged grain on farms, stole food from tavern tables, and everywhere they waited for a turned back, a figure that walked away, an opportunity. But these were hers, her special company of devoted servants.
She had hated them once. But hatred had been fear disguised, and she had feared their smallness, the tiny singularity of each sparrow’s mind. She could not do what Narak had done. He became the wolf. He ran and hunted in the forest, passing at will from one form to the other. She could not become a sparrow without losing too much. If she took that step she might never come back, all her will and knowledge extinguished by the bird’s incapacity. But she had learned. Where one sparrow would not do, a flock of a hundred might do very well. She became the flock.
It had been a recent revelation. It gave her a power that she had not expected. As the flock she was all but impossible to kill. An archer with a blood silver arrow might shoot a wolf if he was fortunate, but a hundred sparrows? The thought had given her a confidence that she had never known. Among all the Benetheon she was now much more than the poor sister who could not master her art, the wilful student. It was a tragedy that just as she had grown so late into her ability this war had come, and most of her fellow gods had been killed. Of all the fifteen lords of air and forest and plain now only three others still lived, the snake, the eagle and the wolf.
She was worried about all of them.
Sithmaree she disliked most of all. The snake was pretty, dramatic, self centred, and all the intelligence that she had was bent upon the now and the me. She was no use to anyone, probably not even to the snakes whose deity she was. Yet it had been Sithmaree who had survived an attack by the god killer, and brought the word to what remained of the Benetheon. It was late in the day, for sure. Most were dead by then, but that was not the snake’s fault. Not for the first time Pascha wondered if she had been intended to survive, if the god killer had wanted them to know that they were hunted now that most were gone. She had no reason for thinking this other than it was Sithmaree who had survived, and that was a little unkind.
Jidian was a different breed. He was loyal, strong, honest and stupid. More ox than eagle. With a bow in his hand he could hit any target further away than any other man or god. He was the bowman of bowmen. Pascha herself was an archer of considerable skill. As a lord of the air she had a degree of mastery over her element, and strength far beyond that or mortal men, and she had practiced until her fingers chafed, but that had been centuries ago. She was never a match for Jidian, even then. The eagle followed the Wolf. He was Narak’s loyal servant. She had no doubt that he would stand and fight and even die at Narak’s word. Just like so many mortal men.
Then there was Narak himself: Wolf Narak, god of wolves. He was the thinker, the strategist, the keeper of secrets. But Wolf Narak had changed. More than half a millennia ago they had been lovers. She had lived here at Wolfguard, and for a great many years they had been happy together.
She had left. At the time she had told herself that it was boredom. Narak was too caught up in the forest, too devoted to the wolves that were his charge. She had seen the royal courts of the south and hankered for their amusement and colour, the lightness of their being. So she had left.
It had been an excuse. She knew that now. Pascha had come to her gift very late, but in coming to that she understood Narak better than she ever had. The bond between her and the sparrows had stormed all her preconceptions, cast new light across all the shadows of her life. Now that she had an inkling of Narak’s passion for his wolves she could not understand how he had spared any time for her at all. It was a form of worship. Her sparrows worshipped her, but it was a devotion that flowed both ways or not at all, and she burned with their life more brightly than she ever had with her own.
That had been Narak then, but he was changed. The war was pulling him away from the wolves and the forest. Men and gods alike leaned on him and he had become the world’s crutch. It was too much to ask of any man.
Yet Narak had done the right thing, yet again. He had asked for help. And Pascha had rebuked him for it, knowing that Sithmaree was selfish and Jidian stupid, she had rebuked him for asking when all the time she should have known that he was asking her, just her. The others were there for the sake of form, that was all.
When she had realised this she had given the matter serious thought. She had listened carefully to his laying out of the situation and the options, so she was able to examine the problem, but it had been pointless. She could not see what he could not. There was no obvious way, no escape from the inevitability of an unequal battle with Seth Yarra. Yet she had felt this way before.
She remembered going to the wall on the Green Road, finding it taken by Telans and the remnant of the Berashi garrison hiding in the woods. Then she had thought it would be a difficult thing to take it back, but Cain Arbak had done that. After that she had thought it would never hold against the Seth Yarra army, and Cain had done it again, making the wall harder to scale, inventing new ways of fighting using archers on the ground behind the wall to sweep away incursions. Each innovation seemed simple, even obvious once you saw it, but Pascha was an old enough head to know that the cleverest ideas were often so.
So she had told Narak to ask Cain how to defend the indefensible. She did not know if the innkeeper could find what eluded them both, but she thought that he might. It was at least possible.
She had no more bread to feed the sparrows. They sat and looked at her, perched as close as they could. Perhaps there was another crust, she thought. There might be scraps of the food that she had brought for herself and long since eaten. She crouched down to look in the small bag she had carried.
There was a sound like an axe striking the tree just above her head. She knew it at once and threw herself flat on the ground, rolling towards some shrubs nearby. As she rolled she caught sight of the
arrow embedded in the tree against which she had been resting. Luck. It was pure, freakish luck that she was still alive.
She heard a twig break under a foot and realised that the archer was not that far away, and he was walking towards her. Now was the real test. She closed her eyes and concentrated, relaxing in defiance of the danger that approached. It was difficult, and she knew that she had only seconds in which to act.
Pascha became the flock. A hundred sparrows burst from the place where she had been the moment before. They flew up into the trees and perched, looking down. Now she could see everything. She could look in a hundred directions at once. She was aware of the forest around her as only the flock can be.
Her attacker was standing between two trees not thirty paces from where she had been lying. He stood, arrow on the string and looked up at the sparrows that now milled around in the trees above him. He raised the bow, and then dropped it again, seeing the futility of shooting at the flock. He took the arrow off the string and put it away, slung the bow over his shoulder and began to walk.
Pascha did not miss the significance of the moment. She moved through the trees, keeping to the low branches so that she was free to study the assassin. He walked swiftly and confidently through the forest, but she kept pace easily. It was a man, not a woman, but she judged that by his gait, for he wore a metal shell about his head, like a mask that covered everything above the neck, barring two holes for the eyes and what looked like a multitude of smaller perforations where the ear should be. He wore black with a thick green cloak concealing any further detail. There was a sword, a quiver of arrows, and the bow, and even as a flock of sparrows she was aware of the blood silver that tipped his weapons.
If she could follow him far enough then she may discover something about him – who or what he was – where he came from – anything. She knew that anything would be valuable. But the assassin knew she was there. She could see that he glanced back every few minutes as he walked, and he was walking further and further from Wolfguard, heading south. Yet he still continued to walk. Would he walk all the way to wherever it was he was headed? She didn’t think it possible.
Was he leading her into a trap? She dispersed further, spreading the flock out over an acre all around the man. She looked out as well as in. Nobody was going to surprise her.
For all her caution she was surprised. A sudden sharp pain, and the flock was shaken, confused for just a moment. One of the sparrows had been attacked, seized by another bird that had dropped down from the canopy. It was a large crow, and that was something she should have looked for. Crows, especially the big ones, were predators within the forest, and small birds were prey. The rest of the flock flew at the bigger bird. It could not kill the crow, but it could damage, could worry it. In a moment they had driven it off, and it flapped heavily back up into the canopy with raucous sounds of outrage, leaving a few dark feathers behind, startled by the assault. Prey creatures were supposed to flee, not turn on their legitimate predators.
Pascha’s attention switched back to the forest floor, but she could see no trace of the man. She threw the flock out in all directions, seeking a sign, but there was none. He had gone as completely as though the earth had swallowed him up. She went back to where she had last seen him, but he had been lucky. It was stony ground, and she could see no tracks.
She had failed.
She stayed in the area for another ten minutes, searching for anything that might tell her something, even a boot print, but she could find no evidence that the assassin had ever walked in the forest. It was almost as though he was a ghost. But ghosts do not shoot arrows, and certainly not blood silver ones.
As soon as she thought of the arrow she turned the flock around and flew back the way they had come, rushing in most un-sparrow-like flight between the trunks of the trees. She was not even sure that she could find the place where she had been attacked, but the sparrow part of her remembered, and she flew unerringly to where she had abandoned human form. It was good that she remembered, for all her clothes were there, laid out like a body in the leaf litter.
The arrow was gone. All the proof she had was a hole in the tree, cut large with a knife of some kind to get the barbed head out.
At least she had learned something. The assassin could travel quickly, in a moment perhaps, to where he wanted to be. And somehow he had found her, alone in the woods when nobody knew where she might be. He had found her. When she thought that, she was more afraid. How had he found her? She dismissed the thought that he had come across her by chance. He had known where she was, and that meant he might even now know where she was.
Thinking that, she was reluctant to retake human form. She looked down at the clothes from the branches in which the flock perched. If she left them here she would have to fly through Wolfguard to her room. She was certainly not going to stride naked through Narak’s home. What a disaster this had become.
She sent the flock out and became aware of the woods for hundreds of yards in every direction. She listened and looked. There was no movement. She heard the wind. Birds sang in the distance. A deer moved slowly by, alert but calm. She saw another. She could trust their senses even if she could not trust her own. But she wanted more.
She stretched further, trying to gather every nuance of what she could see or hear or feel, feeding it all into her mind. The world lurched around her, seemed to spin. Her stomach rebelled and she had to fight to keep her breakfast down. Suddenly she was not just the flock, she was the deer, she was another bird, she was all the birds, she was wolves and foxes and flies and trees, even trees. For a moment she was the whole forest, and then it was gone, and the flock was scattered, gasping, disoriented among the branches.
What in Pelion’s name was that? It was as though she had become everything, crossed from her sparrows into the entire forest, but that wasn’t possible, or at least not without Pelion’s gifting ring, which was lost. Did it have something to do with the assassin, or was it just her? She didn’t know, And she was afraid to try again. Now she must get back to Wolfguard.
She brought the flock together, and feathers became flesh. She was once again a human woman.
She dressed quickly, sent her small troupe of sparrows, her devotees, out among the trees with a compulsion to watch, to warn. Once dressed she set out for Wolfguard at a steady run, covering the ground at many times the speed of her outward journey.
As she ran she thought. The running was mechanical, leaving her mind free. She thought of all that had happened. She thought of the crow that had attacked her flock, and she thought of Fashmanion. The crow god had been an accomplished archer, and he had not been very fond of the rest of the Benetheon. He had thought differently. But Fashmanion was dead. Sithmaree had seen the body. On the other hand, she had seen nothing of the face. But no, he was dead. The one thing that the members of the Benetheon could not do was hide from each other in the Sirash, and Fashmanion was gone from the Sirash, like all the others.
Like Narak and the other Benetheon gods Pascha did not tire, and within ten minutes she was within sight of the gates and safety.
She had survived again.
She closed the heavy door behind her, taking the trouble to bolt it. Finally safe, it occurred to her how foolish she really had been. She had risked her life to avoid embarrassment. It was proof, if proof were needed, that she was still a woman, Narak still a man, and all the rest of it just power and pretence.
Now was the time to be a god. She would tell Narak everything; do what she could to help him. If she did not, then they would never prevail.
The Governance of the Green Isles
It is often said with ill informed certainty that the Green Isles are not a Kingdom because they do not have a King. It is, however, equally valid to suggest the opposite, because, in fact, they have three.
It is a model of governance that has a certain appeal to common sense, though of course it lacks the effectiveness of our own system in which all the powers of state are brought
together in a single noble individual, whose wisdom and generosity ensures the happiness and prosperity of his people.
The Islers think thus:
If a man is a great warrior, if he is noble of spirit and a natural leader of men in battle, then he should have the land in time of war. He should rule and have all the kingdom do his will if the land is threatened. The same man, in time of peace, is not so ideal a choice for governance, and so there is another man, skilled in negotiation, in farming, fishing and manufacture, who is lord of all in happier times. Yet there are other times when the land is neither at war, nor yet in times of plenty. There are droughts, storms, years when the fish are not plentiful in the sea. In these times a third man may be needed, one who will do what is required to nurse the land and its people back to health.
