He continued to look down at the floor for another long, quiet moment and then lifted his gaze to his son. Raising one hand, he pointed his finger at Naetan. “You, my son – you are a king. You are everything that a king must be. You build, you manage, you administer.”
A single tear overflowed and traced a tangent down his right cheek. “You – you are king, my son – you are the king. Not me.” He lowered his hand. “I am just a lonely man that misses his wife.”
Naetan shook his head in disagreement, even as his own eyes grew moist. “No, father – I can never be what you are.”
At this, Aram’s eyes dried and his voice hardened. “Nor should you wish it – for that would make you less than what you are. Hear me, my son. Do you not think that I have watched you govern in my name while I walked the gardens of the high plains with your mother and whiled the days away wandering those green fields with Thaniel?” His eyes narrowed and his voice grew harsher yet. “You are more than me. Far more. In the years to come, the world will prosper under the wise influence of your mind and your hand.”
He turned away from Naetan and looked once more out the window, down over the city and the valley beyond. His voice, when again he spoke, though drenched with sorrow, was firm. “The world can ask nothing further of me. I have done all I can. I am done here. Without her, I am nothing.”
“Father –”
Aram turned back toward his son and raised his hand, palm outward, silencing him. “Will you find me a sculptor?”
Naetan watched him for some time, and then nodded. “I will, my lord.”
“And see if you can discover where it is that Gorfang has taken himself,” Aram asked him.
Naetan glanced sharply around the room before looking back at his father. “Gorfang is gone?”
“I have not seen him since yesterday,” Aram replied.
Naetan frowned in remembrance. “I heard a wolf howling in the night.”
Aram nodded. “Undoubtedly, it was he. There is no need for him to be alone now. Send the hawks to discover him.”
“At once, my lord.”
But Gorfang let himself be found before the hawks could discover him. On the morning after Ka’en was placed into her grave, the workers constructing her tomb found his body lying atop the freshly turned earth.
Beside him lay another lifeless body, that of a hawk. Cree the Ancient, who along with her first spouse, Kota, were the very first of their kind upon the earth, had abandoned mortality and joined her mistress beyond the borders of death.
On orders from Aram, they were both of them buried next to the queen.
Naetan spent the next several weeks seeking a sculptor who had seen his mother in her life, sending word throughout the kingdom that any artist that met the criteria would be made wealthy indeed. At last, acting upon information given him by Marcus, he found the man.
The sculptor’s name was Parfin, and he came from Vergon. He had met the queen on several occasions when she and Aram had come to the palace of High Prince Marcus at Farenaire. Naetan traveled to Vergon and looked upon the artist’s work and found it surpassing all others. When asked if he could render a likeness of Lady Ka’en, even in her absence, Parfin asserted that he could.
When asked about price, the artist frowned and shook his head. “The honor of rendering the queen’s likeness will be payment enough.”
Naetan smiled at this. “We shall see what my father thinks of that,” he replied.
Informed by Aram himself of that which he wished to see rendered in white stone, Parfin then scoured the land for the finest column of alabaster. Once the raw substance of his vision was in hand, he went into the room off the great hall where Aram had put him, and went to work.
The day came when the artist sent word to the king that the likeness of the queen was ready for his inspection. Aram went into the room and returned an hour later, wiping his eyes. Parfin, he told Naetan, had done “exactly as I wished.”
The next day, at mid-day, Parfin moved his creation out across the great porch and over the walkway to the dais that looked down the grand avenue. The statue was covered with a blue cloth.
The artist waited until Aram went down the stairway out through the gates and then onto the avenue to stand by the bench near Ka’en’s tomb at the edge of the orchard. The entire population of the city had gathered upon the avenue, including many that had come in from the surrounding farms and villages to witness the unveiling.
When Aram was in position and looking up, Parfin reached up and slipped the covering cloth from the sculpture.
A collective murmur of approval arose from the crowd.
It was the image of their departed queen.
Cast in pure white alabaster, the sculpture represented Ka’en standing at the wall, turned slightly to one side with her hand upon the stone, gazing down the grand avenue, just as Aram had seen her all those years ago when their love was first declared.
After the crowd had finally dissipated, Aram sat down upon the bench in the sun gazing up at the representation of his beloved wife and smiling. Sometime later, he dozed in the warm sunshine, with the smile still upon his face.
It was only when Naetan went out to call his father in to supper that it was discovered that the king had died.
The relentless hunter, Death, had found Aram once again.
And this time Mortality would keep his prey.
The winds – and the eagles and hawks that rode upon them – flashed the news of the king’s passing to all parts of the kingdom. Within three days, everyone from Vergon to Seneca knew that he had died. Shocked and stunned, for most, the everyday exigencies of life ceased upon the moment to matter. Workmen laid down their tools, and merchants closed their places of business, wending their way to their homes or to public houses to stare at one another in disbelief. Farmers stood in their fields, the day’s necessary labor forgotten and abandoned, openly weeping.
The only king that the world had known in ten thousand years was dead. For many, especially those under a certain age, there had ever been only one man who held their daily peace and security in the palms of his capable hands.
And now he was gone?
It could not be fathomed.
As his body was being prepared, people from all parts of the kingdom, princes and citizens alike, packed parcels for the road and began instinctively to wend their way toward Regamun Mediar. Those that were fortunate enough to be mounted had the only real chance of reaching the capitol ere he was put into the ground. Still, mounted or on foot, they came.
For most of those pilgrims, it was simply that they found that they needed to come.
In far-off Seneca, where the distance was much too great, even for a mounted man, to arrive in time for the king’s internment, word came to the grove on the hill at Muldar, brought there by Goldtalon, the grandson of Kipwing. Upon hearing this, Andar, who by now had grown gray and lean and could legitimately claim the title of “eldest”, turned and looked at the other members of his council, seeking out especially Matibar.
“What now?” He said simply.
Matibar, blinking his eyes against an abrupt surge of moisture, nonetheless answered with his usual pragmatism. “Naetan has been effectively administering the kingdom for some time,” he replied. “He will make an able monarch.”
Andar, his own eyes wide with disbelief, nodded at the truth of this. “Still,” he said, “Lord Aram gone – and so soon after the queen. The world is substantially emptier than it was just a moment ago.”
He gazed down at the ground between his feet for a long moment and then, without speaking, rose and went toward the hallway leading out. Matibar came to his feet as well.
“Where are you going, Your Worthiness?”
Andar hesitated and looked back. “To get very, very drunk,” he replied.
Matibar watched him for a moment and then gathered his robes about him. “I will come with you,” he said.
“I am drinking whiskey – not beer,” Andar warned
him. “I am in need of drink stronger than that to which you are accustomed.”
“Yes,” Matibar replied testily, “and I mean to join you.’
Andar frowned. “You have never had a taste for whiskey in the whole of your life, my friend.”
“True,” Matibar agreed. “There was never a reason before.”
And those who were now the old men of Seneca, all of them, as one, wended their way down the hill to the common house where Lord Aram had been wont to stay when he came into the east.
On the day of Aram’s internment, the valley was filled with men and horses. Wolves and bears gathered on uninhabited hilltops and the sky overhead was fairly black with eagles and hawks.
Naetan spoke, as did Marcus, though neither knew exactly the right thing to say in the face of such loss.
Jame, old now and white-haired, tried to speak but failed. He looked down for a long sorrowful moment when the words would not come to him, shook his head, and then simply stepped back into the crowd.
Findaen, old and bent, the hair upon his head as white as sundrenched snow, refused the attempt to express that which was in his heart.
Nikolus and Timmon spoke, each of them expressing their deep sense of loss at the passing of him who had freed their homeland, and indeed the whole of the world.
Thom Sota stood off to one side, tall and erect, martial in every aspect, even in his old age. He shook his head when Naetan looked over at him with raised and questioning eyebrows.
Of the old companions, only Mallet yet lived, and the big man was inconsolable. His great frame shook uncontrollably, and every so often a loud sob escaped him, despite his making every attempt at maintaining decorum.
In the end, Aram the Magnificent was placed into the tomb with a minimum of fanfare amid immense and unbearable sadness.
After evening came and night drew on, driving the last of the mourners to their homes or to other locales where they might nurse their sorrow, Thaniel remained. The great horse stood all night with his head lowered to the earth. When the sun rose in the east, he lifted his head, and gazed for a long moment at the tomb that housed Aram’s remains. Then, without speaking, he turned and went down to the river, climbed the wooded slopes beyond, made his way over the pass, and came back onto the high plains.
Though Thaniel the Warrior lived for almost six hundred years more, he never again left those high plains, nor moved out among the world of men. He never once came back into the valley of the kings; for with the death of this one man, with whom he had shared so much, he felt that something majestic and mysterious had passed forever from the earth, leaving it desolate.
Perhaps a month after his father’s death, when the valley was once again serene, Naetan, finding sleep elusive, arose and walked the great porch in the depths of the night. Only a pale sliver of the moon contended weakly with the stars above. Going out onto the dais, he looked down the avenue.
Something below him and to the right arrested his attention.
A figure, barely discernable in the night, stood upon the pavement before his father’s tomb. The figure was tall, slender, and dressed in robes of silver. He turned and glanced up at the king standing atop the wall and his eyes glowed bronze in the darkness.
Naetan caught his breath, for though he had never seen him, he knew who it was that stood there.
Ferros, the great god who cared for nothing and no one, had come up out of his deep realm to stand for a few moments by the tomb of the man who had changed the world.
10. The Reigns of Naetan I and Joktan II
Naetan became king on the fortieth day following his father’s death, and on this day there was a ceremony. All the princes of the earth were there. Findaen his uncle was chosen to place the crown upon his brow, and thereby declared him monarch.
Naetan was as his father had described him – capable and competent, diligent and driven, always with a sincere concern for the welfare of the people of the world as his guiding principle.
Because he had overseen the general affairs of the kingdom during the last several years of his father’s life, there was effectively no transition period. Other than a pervasive sorrow at the loss of Aram and Ka’en that lingered for some time, the people of the world noticed no difference in the administration of the king’s business. It was during Naetan’s reign that the roads throughout the entirety of the lands under the writ of Regamun Mediar were at last finished.
And because of Naetan the First’s sound management of the kingdom’s wealth, commerce prospered.
King Naetan’s son, Joktan, was more like unto his fierce grandfather than his father in temperament. The young prince was possessed of a fierce disposition and of a quick, hot temper, and seemed daily disappointed that there was no enemy at the gates of the land, no adversary that threatened the kingdom, no insurrection to subdue.
Once, upon hearing that certain elements of the Farlongers had made an incursion into the borders of Seneca, the prince raised a small force and went there to confront the “enemy”. As things were, the “invasion” was simply an attempt by a small group of scoundrels to steal a valuable supply of lumber from a Senecan mill near the frontier.
Andar, being placed in difficulty by the fierce presence of the heir to the kingdom, whose blood was up and hot for conflict, appealed to the throne and the aged General-in-chief, Thom Sota, was dispatched to bring calm to the situation and to carefully disentangle the prince and his temper from the region.
As he aged, Joktan grew calmer, married, and upon the death of his father ascended the throne and ruled wisely and well.
Joktan II lived to the age of one hundred and seventeen, and his reign lasted longer than that of his father or of his grandfather before him, or that of anyone that came after.
It was he that caused the statue to be built and placed upon the Grand Avenue in front of the city that stands there unto this day.
It is of a tall man who bears upon his back a Sword of power. He is flanked by an immense black horse and a large wolf. With his wings spread wide, standing upon the back of the horse, is a great eagle.
The inscription reads thus:
ARAM, SON of CLIF, SON of JOKTAN, SON of RAM
THANIEL, SON of FLORM, SON of ARMON, SON of BORAM
DURLRANG, SON of DURANG, SON of URFANG
ALVERN, SON of SILWING THE FIRST
Honor these names always
For these are they that led the great alliance
Of the free and noble peoples of the earth
That destroyed the tyranny of evil
And brought us peace
THE END
Kelven's Riddle Book Five Page 51
