The mountains stretched long into the valley, branching veins of twisted roots and broken stone, dry and dead, still clutching the silent tableland below. Brone moved with great effort now, her hips wide and aching, her feet cautious on the cracked and broken slopes. She lived in a shadow land, the frozen trees, the ice-burnt boulders only shards thrown into the orange sky. Herself, her hands and feet, the globe of her belly, only a flicker of darkness moving over the weak glow of the horizon. When the mountains gave up at last to the plain, Brone found a small village standing with its face toward that worn-out dusty light, as if it warmed itself against that distant fire. She stood and watched the wooden boards just touched with gold. The shards of windows that had broken with the sudden frost sparked against the gaping dark, as if she looked on the surface of deep, restless waters. She sighed, starving for the rich light of day against the houses, the slanting gold catching dust and seeds on the winds of the fields.
The village was empty of life, the small wooden houses still peeling, still grayly splintering with the memory of sun and of wind and rain. Brone could feel the frozen dead waiting behind the windows and closed doors. For some had not fled. They waited now, these figures of golden marble, for someone to find them, for someone to mourn them. Brone was tired and cold and weak with want. Every mile she had dragged the stone of her own body down from the high peaks, and here, in this deep well of earth, the burning horizon seemed neither closer nor brighter. So Brone went house to house only long enough to find wood and food for her immediate hungers and heeded not the grim sleeping forms. Some time after Brone's fire blazed bright and her belly was warm with good food it struck her that she had found what she sought quickly, for these people had died not of want but of despair. She was weary and longed for rest, so she crept into the bedroom of the house seeking spare, unused blankets to spread beside the fire. Though Brone had no fear of the dead, she had no wish to remove them from their beds or to lay herself beside them.
This bedroom was different from the others. It smelled sweet and strange when Brone opened the door. On the bedside table sat a plate painted with small, smiling animals. On it were a pile of half eaten sweet cakes, but even from a distance Brone could smell the parched, bitter tang of sleeping medicine. In the bright shaft of light that pooled on the bed from her fire, she could see two still figures, each facing the other. One was terribly small, and though Brone's heart knew what she would find there, she walked farther in, her eyes already bleared with grief. They were bundled against the cold, the blankets a moveless shell of warm and final sleep. The child, no more than four, held tight a bright wooden beast, its paint chipped with long use. The child's face, though dappled with the crumbs of a cake, was quiet, a face dropped into a warm sleep and no more. His mother's hand tangled lightly in the hair above his brow.
Her face though, was drawn in weary grief and her face still sparkled with tears that had frozen into small islands of salt upon her cheek, as if she had wept even in her sleep as she froze. Between them lay a child's book, even now opened upon the last few pages. Brone could not read it, for it was in a foreign tongue, but she could see the happy smiles of the fair and elegant people on its pages. Her breath burned and rasped inside her and she said, "And so they lived happily ever after. The End." Brone closed the book and placed it quietly on the bedside table. With a gentle hand she wiped the ice from the mother's cheeks and then drew the blankets over both figures, forever shutting out the terrifyingly empty cold. Brone crept quietly out, her eyes streaming, and silently shut the door. She found instead the child's bedroom and tried to wrap herself in the small bed's quilts. Her children sat heavy and silent inside her. She wondered wearily where the father from this small house was. She looked a long while at the still house and breathing deeply, spread a covering of grass and bramble that pulled the village down and buried it in soft, quiet green. She shuddered and sent a silent wish into the dark. "Don't make me murder my children alone." And longing for Ganit, Brone fell into a fitful sleep, her fire alone blazing in the breathless village.
Chapter 22
Setting the bone had been bad, but Ganit bore it without sound. Both men were bathed in sweat and Ganit had to focus very hard to restrain himself from burning Keram. But at last it was done, though Ganit believed the leg would never hold him as it had. He had time to despair of finding Brone, and so brokenhearted was he that Keram feared an illness would overcome him quickly. He gave Ganit another cool draught of medicine and after his patient was asleep, the silent young man crept out to find both where Hadur had gone and signs of the woman Brone.
For Keram was lonely. He lived alone for months, since before the sun went out, since his village had all run mad after the silver horse. Only Keram, in his noiseless world had not succumbed. Still, if he were not well hidden, the others would have devoured him. He knew this, forced to witness the destruction from his hiding place in the tall grasses of his field. He watched the faces of his neighbors draw up into deep snarls, their hands tighten crookedly into claws or squashed into purple, trembling fists. Keram's friend slaughtered a small woman with the blade of his hoe within feet of Keram's hiding place and then strode off to find others. Men he had known from boyhood, men who wept over scraped elbows as young children, women with whom he had swum in the small river when they were laughing small girls, they had cut each other down with great violence, with loud, bright blood in the pale green fields. But those that were unarmed were worse. Keram had seen them punch and claw and kick, at last biting at each other's throats, grinding and snapping. All that he loved became wild beasts, worse than beasts, twisting into pure insanity and hatred.
He had felt Hadur coming, somewhere deep in the soles of his feet as he worked in the field. He and his friends were making their slow, comfortable way across the early spring with plows, with hoes and shovels and seed bags. They were busy scattering glittering seeds over the warm, moist earth, shards of life raining from their fingers. The sun glowed bright and warm and Keram could see his neighbor smiling, flirting with the young woman he would kill soon afterwards. Keram felt the irregular shake of Hadur's hooves, muted tremors in the warm soil. It had felt wrong, somehow broken deep beyond fixing. Panic gripped him, as if all the monsters of his childhood's dark nights were rising out of the earth behind him. If he could have cried out, called to his friends, Keram would have been lost. Instead he had been running toward his neighbor, to grab him, to drag him away from that terrible shattered rhythm, but he tripped over his own hoe and lay sprawled in the long grass that had not yet been plowed. His neighbor and the woman had been so busy with one another that they did not notice Keram. The terrible thuds grew strong and shook the ground touching the entire length of his body. His fear caught him there, as if he were snagged against some earthen current and he couldn't move. Instead he watched as it transformed all before him. At last he saw the horse, taller and broader than any beast ought to be, its flanks a cold, shining silver, it's eyes bright and empty as two moons. Keram thought it terribly beautiful, a moving statue, but its hide was spattered with old, dark blood and its nose and teeth were caked with gore. And everywhere Keram felt its perilous, broken song beating against his skin, an infection of insanity trying desperately to find a way into his body. Hadur had flowed past him, a quick, erratic breeze, a tide rapidly receding against the mountains, dragging a wake of deranged beasts behind it. When the hoof beats at lasts died away from the dust, Keram had risen, weeping, ashamed and heartbroken in the wreckage of his home. The early spring sun still shone on the fields, and Keram for the first and only time, wished himself blind as well as deaf. All that day, in timid fits and starts, Keram darted from house to house, crouching in shadows and opening doors slowly, trying to find anyone who might still be alive, who might still be sane. Everywhere the slain lay quiet and nothing moved but the wind in the grass of the unplowed fields.
Keram had slept badly that night, locked away in his own small house, hoping the morning would bring an end to this
sad and frightful dream. But dawn had come and still his village lay a deserted battleground. Keram wavered between going to find help and remaining to warn any passers by and beg assistance. The morning passed slowly and Keram moved the remains of his friends into the town hall, covering them gently with clothes and blankets. Still he had not decided. At last he took down the beautiful paints that had long been his speech to the world. As the afternoon faded into evening Keram painted his warning, a bloody silver warhorse with the mongrel army of former men slavering about it. It hurt Keram to paint his friends faces, ones that had been so warm, so welcoming, in the madness that he had last seen them and the painting lasted far, far into the night. In the early morning, Keram planted the painting on stakes in the center of the dirt road that ran through his small village. He hefted a small pack and armed himself with an old knife of his father's and headed west toward the next town. In growing desperation Keram tore through the next town and the next, no longer cautious. He flung open doors, sprinted through the fields, at last lighting a large bonfire in the central square and still, no one came, not even the ravenous beast men that Hadur had transformed. All was silent and the scene of blood the same. Keram was alone in an empty land. He paused only to paint another warning, quick and terrible this time, and then raced off down the road, weary and terrified to warn the next town. But still, Keram was no match for the speed of the silver stallion and everywhere was the same. A month Keram kept to the road, heading ever west and south, a light and noiseless leaf in the great wake of terror. His days were punctuated with the quick and artless painting of warnings, ringing great temple bells that his chest felt but his ears heard not, lighting fiery beacons that no one saw. His dreams were terrible battles and he no longer expected to find anyone at all left alive in the world. Keram wondered if the slowly growing lonesome madness inside him were not worse than the sudden oblivion of Hadur's evil. He grew grim, no longer trying to race to the next town in warning. Instead Keram tracked Hadur, the gentle, silent young man grown into a hard, relentless hunter. Everywhere across that land his painted silver shadows sprang and would have spoken as clearly of disease and quarantine as any written sign or shouted warning if any had been alive to see.
On the day of the last sunrise, Keram had at last felt a faint tremor in the road, his toes prickling with sudden cold sweat at the familiar, broken beat. Drawing his weary limbs taut, Keram burst into a run. Hour after hour he ran, pausing now and then to feel that heavy tremor grasp at him and reorient himself. "At last," he thought, "This empty world will be avenged." But the sun was not kind, spending its last heat upon the world in desperate dying rage, and Keram came close to fainting before he caught sight of Hadur's army. At last on the uttermost edge he ran upon the corpses of beastmen slaughtered by their fellows with savagery that made it hard to tell what he was looking at. One of the wild men still fed upon the fallen, his fingers capped with sharp, twisted nails blackened with blood and dust, his hair in sweaty knots about his shoulders, a straggling beard caked with old gore. Keram became sick and almost fell over in weariness when the beast man leapt at him. The slanting light of the evening sun caught the cloud of dust in sharp crimson sparkles as he leapt and made the shadow of blood on the wild man even deeper. The man was on top of Keram now biting with reddened teeth and scrabbling with slim but strong, scratched limbs. Keram struggled to keep him at arm's length and twisted out from beneath him. A cloying, sweaty, iron rich smell of old meat came in a blast from the man as he roared. Though Keram could not hear his rage, the heated furnace of the beast man's foul breath washed over him and again Keram felt sick with hatred. At last, leaping back Keram bought time enough to pull his father's knife from where it hung at his side, dangling from his belt. Twice he missed and at last pulled it forth. Doubt engulfed him then, for still this beast had the face and form of a man, though insanity had twisted both. Yet he knew this thing would kill him if it could. "Might it not be better then, to die away, to leave the world empty, for it must be almost so," Keram thought. Already the loneliness gnawed at him, made him almost as strange as the beast before him. How long would he remain Keram, the silent, gentle painter he had been? He stood, in undecided agony, his hand, chest high, half raised to strike, and the beast man struck for him. It leapt, piercing its chest against the knife in its rage and craving to kill. But Keram hadn't been ready, and the knife, rather than striking true, twisted in his wavering hand and made a trench, shallow and deadly. The beast man howled in pain but his death was coming slowly, a slow leak of blood into his breath and he fell to the ground clutching at his breast. Keram wept, both for the blow the man had caught and because it had not been deadly enough to kill instantly. He stood a moment over the wild man, watching it gasp and his knife hand trembled again. "I'm sorry," he thought, and knelt beside the man. Carefully, he searched the beast man's eyes, looking for any lingering sanity. He plunged the knife into the man's chest to stop his searing breaths. And though Keram looked long, wiping his tears quickly away, he saw nothing but an animal's relief in the man's eyes.
Too weary to move, Keram had crawled into the ditch beside the road and washed his face and hands in the cold gutter water. He fell asleep in the clean dust of the road side, and when he woke the sun was gone. Like Brone and Ganit, he mistook the hours for a time, thinking he had slept only shortly and though the tremor of Hadur's hoof beats had died away while he rested, Keram dared light no lamp for fear of more beast men. So he waited many hours on the roadside for the morning which did not come. His hunger and the cool of the night grew and at last even he could wait no longer. Lighting his lamp he made his way down the road which wound now into the high peaked western mountains. He carefully picked his way over the corpses of beast men, holding his breath as he came to each, afraid they slept only and would leap upon him in the dark. Never before had he been so acutely aware that though he could not hear, not even his own movements, others could. Keram longed to be assured that he passed noiselessly through the night and ever glanced over his shoulder fearing a predator he could not sense coming. He came at last to a great turning in the road, and though it rankled not to pursue Hadur, not to stop his destruction that very hour, Keram knew he would not find him in the dark unless it be by some terrible chance, and then he would be struck down by an army of wild men before he could strike a blow at their creator. So, with ever greater weariness and grief, Keram had turned aside from the trail, coming high up into the tall hills, hoping to see a far off town still glittering with life when he reached the peaks. Here he found instead the small house where he would bring Ganit, well stocked and hidden deep in the cleft of the mountains. Keram climbed often to the highest peak, it was close, and he was accustomed to the chilled breathlessness of the peak. Ever he looked and looked for signs of life, for firelight, for dawn, but nothing came until Ganit. A month he had been in the house then, filling it with paintings of his memories, the last, over the bed, was the terrible likeness of Hadur and his destruction. It was the first thing Keram saw upon waking or the last upon sleeping in the soft firelight of the house and it built in his heart again, the grim resolve to find and end the beast. In the emptiness, when he had almost decided to scramble through the unending dark to chase the horse or die in the frozen mountains, the west had again grown light. Soft and orange, a deep hearth light, at first no more than a line of light against the horizon, then growing to a pulsing splayed hand spreading over the western sky. Keram knew now where he had to go. The silver horse might fly through the night, a flickering moon in the blank darkness, but Hadur's prey, if any lived would all go west into that warm flicker, as night insects pooling around a lamp. Keram's heart leapt at the thought of finding others. He was warmer, gentler than he had been this ageless month, longing only to protect survivors, the bitter dryness of vengeance forgotten. He had been climbing down one last time after seeking his route when he had turned northward, his small torch lighting his path back to the cottage for one more rest before returning for the road. And
there he had been, the starlit man, swarming with life, flying down the farther slope. Keram had wanted to run toward him, embrace that bright dawn light, but too well he knew the treacherous rocks by now, and even in his joy, his heart doubted and wondered that someone appeared after all this time.
Even now, after carrying Ganit to his home and searching his memory for mending broken bones (for he was no doctor and all that he knew of healing he had read long ago in story books) and using what little medicine he had gathered on his trips through empty towns, Keram would have been suspicious of Ganit. But something happened when Keram had warned Ganit of the silver stallion. One look and Ganit had cringed and said, "He's here?" And Keram knew, though Ganit carried the look and manners of one from far, far away, he too had seen the violent madness Hadur brought. Ganit's light had left a soft sunburn on Keram's cheeks and he smiled tightly as he climbed the peak remembering that warmth. Here was a weapon indeed. He wondered how Ganit had escaped the horse. His world was not silent, for Keram had felt the steady humming throb of Ganit's voice against his chest as Keram had carried him home. Perhaps this power, this dawn that welled inside him protected Ganit. Keram could not know, but he had no doubt that Ganit had indeed seen the terrible beast, had survived and was not the wild beast that he ought to have been. Even had he been a normal man, one lightless and broken on the slope, Keram would have cared for him, full of joy and worry. But Ganit's light, his warmth and the herds of life he had gathered about him, filled Keram with wonder. He was anxious though, fearing what evil thing would see the house bursting its seams with light, leaking warmth through the windows and door jambs, a golden summer day seeping through the cracks and shining far, far against the dark. So, weary as he was, Keram climbed again to his watchpost and searched for any flash of silver, any moving mass of dark beasts racing toward the house. But all was still, both in the eastern midnight and the dusk of the western horizon. Keram sat and thought again of this woman Ganit sought. How had they separated? Or had madness taken Ganit so that he sought in vain for some familiar face long dead in this failing world? Keram sighed. Long had the words of the world been broken, shattered into long separate streams that never crossed. Ganit's words, Keram knew, were not his own. He searched the memory of his childhood years when he had learned the shape of Ganit's language. The mouth shapes were easy, Keram had learned them well and saw them upon the lips of many strangers in his life. The written slope, though, the sharp paint of them, were difficult to recall. But Keram needed to ask Ganit questions, needed to speak with him. Keram wished more had known the soft curves, the slender tree branch pictures of his own words. "Now, maybe," he thought, "I am the only one who will recognize them. Now indeed am I lost in utter silence." Keram sat a while longer upon the peak, and his loneliness smote him so that he wept.
The Jade Seed Page 14
