Come Armageddon

by Anne Perry

  Sardriel came forward. He could not deny that small comfort.

  “Siriom has been here for weeks,” he said quietly. “During that time you have changed your lives. You no longer do anything but sit around and talk and dream. Why?”

  They looked perplexed. “We do all that is needed. You can’t mend a net that isn’t broken, or pull weeds where there are none.”

  Sardriel did not answer. He walked away and went with Helik down to the shore. Together they manned the ship and spent the daylight hours on the sea, returning at twilight with all the fish they could carry. For five days it lasted, and Helik tasted the dregs of loneliness. His friends showed little anger towards him, and behaved as if he were as invisible to them as the slow neglect of nets, the fields, the littered streets, or the unkempt clothes of their own appearance.

  Sardriel went alone to the shell garden on the cliffs to consider what next to do. When he returned he found Helik with the oldest man who had once been his friend. They were standing together in the late sun. He saw them when he was still a hundred yards away, where the path levelled off from the steepness of the hill and the sea grass was worn by the passage of feet.

  The man passed Helik a cup of water and Helik took it with a smile, putting it to his lips and savouring it as if it were wine. Then he passed it back and put his arm around the man’s shoulder.

  They both became aware of Sardriel, even though he had not moved. They turned and looked at him. There was no victory in the older man’s face, simply a blindness. The same blank-eyed stare was in Helik, but the tension had gone out of his body, the anxiety, the pain of being separate.

  “Have some wine?” he called, holding out the cup.

  Anger washed over Sardriel like a breaking wave, and then was gone again, leaving only failure behind. He had asked too much, and asked it of the wrong man at the wrong time. Perhaps it was his fault as much as Helik’s.

  He stood on the shore in the sunset wind, seeing the dark blue of the sea and the bright dazzle of light on the water, the single boat pulled up the sand, the net still across it, unmended. He knew why Helik could not bear the loneliness, because it twisted inside him also, a void impossible to heal. Only he had seen a greater truth, and to let go of it would have been a loss that could never be recovered.

  He would have to begin again, with someone else and be wiser. Time was too short to fail again.

  Chapter XIX

  THIS TIME SARDRIEL CHOSE a family with many members so no one would have to stand alone. The strengths of one would sustain the weaknesses of another. He befriended them one by one, using logic with the father, charm with the mother, tales of history and remembrance of old hardships, bitter winters long past for the grandmother.

  To the daughter, Katina, who was thirteen years old, he told the tales he had heard in Irria-Kand, and shared his feelings of sitting around the campfires on the vast, wind-torn steppes.

  She sat with dark eyes intent on his face as the sun faded in the west and the breeze painted rippling brush strokes across the shining surface of the sea.

  “What did you eat?” she asked him. “If there were no rivers, there can’t have been any fish.”

  Eminently logical. “No,” he agreed. “But there were huge herds of wild beasts, sometimes so vast they darkened the plains, and when they moved the ground trembled.”

  “That sounds terrifying!” she exclaimed, her face eager.

  He smiled. “Yes it was, and wonderful. I hated killing them, but it was necessary for our survival. There were roots of plants and occasional grasses, but not sufficient to feed an army.”

  She regarded him with fascination. “Did you march every day?”

  “Almost. Sometimes there were terrible storms.”

  She frowned. “If there was no sea, what did it matter?”

  He tried to describe for her the thunder that had roared around the horizon on every side and the lightning that had rent the sky with fire, creating walls of flame that raged across miles of land in a matter of hours, leaving it a smoking ruin.

  She sat white-faced, her eyes never leaving his.

  “Were you terrified?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he said frankly. It did not occur to him to lie.

  She leaned over and slid her cool hand over his. “You’re safe now. That never happens here.”

  How could he tell her of the fires of the soul which were infinitely worse? “Good,” he said softly. “I think with the sea we have enough.”

  “We haven’t had a storm for ages,” she replied.

  “We will have,” he said gravely. “There will be terrible storms to come, and it is right that there should be.”

  “Why?” She was guarded, uncertain. “My father says this is good. We have plenty of fish and calm weather, and everything we need.”

  “We need storms as well,” he said carefully, holding her gaze.

  “Why?” It was not contentious. She wanted to know, and she would believe his answer. He must be very careful in what he said and it must be the exact truth.

  “Because we are children of God,” he said. “There is nothing we cannot do, if it is right, but we have to learn strength and courage, we have to learn wisdom and test our faith. Anybody can sail on calm waters, it’s the storms that test us.”

  She shifted a little in the sand, holding her arms around her knees and staring at him. “Men and women both?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re not just talking about wind and lightning, are you.” This was a statement.

  “No. I’m talking about good and evil as well.”

  “Do I have to choose?”

  “We all do. If you haven’t chosen, and the Great Enemy doesn’t know your name, then perhaps God doesn’t know it either.”

  Katina scuffed her fingers in the sand. The scent of the lupins was hanging in the evening wind on the last light. “I can’t think of anything more terrible than for God not to know my name. I think that’s about the worst thing that could happen to anybody.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I think it is.”

  She looked up, “That’s what you’re trying to make us do, isn’t it—my family, all of us—make us look at what’s real, and choose?”

  “Yes.”

  She leaned forward quickly and kissed Sardriel on the cheek, her hair brushing his skin.

  He sat motionless, almost as if he dared not acknowledge the gesture in case she denied it.

  The last light splashed fire across the sea and the sky above faded to indigo. A white gull landed close to them and stood still, staring in curiosity.

  “Don’t move!” Katina whispered. “Don’t frighten him!”

  Sardriel obeyed; he would not have moved anyway.

  The bird put its head on one side and regarded them with interest. It took one step, then two and stopped. Sardriel was surprised how large it was. Riding the air the gulls seemed only flashes of movement, a gleam of wing in the light.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Katina said under her breath.

  It was, but the curved, yellow beak was hard and sharp, a considerable weapon, and there was power in the huge span of folded wings. Nature had built it for the wind and the sea. It nested on land, but the ocean and the sky were its realm. Now its curiosity wanted to see what these strange creatures were who sat without moving and seemed to want nothing. It took half a dozen more steps towards them.

  Katina was smiling, her eyes wide with wonder.

  The bird cocked its head to the side again and made a soft, gurgling sound in its throat.

  “Hello,” Katina said very quietly. There was no sound but the rushing of the waves and the barest murmur of wind in the grasses behind them.

  Seconds passed into minutes. The sun slipped beneath the horizon and the spilled gold faded from the water. The bird chunnered softly and bobbed its head, then turned and walked flat-footed a few steps, spread its wings and soared up into the last of the reflected radiance across the arch of the s
ky, growing smaller and smaller until it was only a gleam, a star in the dusk.

  Katina moved a little closer until she could lean against Sardriel’s shoulder and, as if unfeeling of the galling chill, they sat together until the first stars glittered above before rising and going side by side back inland.

  But it was not so easy to deal with her family’s reactions to truth. Fear frayed their tempers and they began to quarrel. Old loyalties broke apart, leaving misery, and blame. They responded to pain with anger, lashing out because the reality was too bitter to acknowledge.

  Sardriel retreated, dazed with guilt for their pain, and because he had forced them all, against their will, to see a truth they could not cope with. Had he been wrong to have done that? Would either wisdom or compassion have stayed his hand?

  He walked alone out on the stone pier. The bright, choppy water was on either side of him, the wind of its surface cold to his skin, the gulls crying overhead, He had been certain when he began that if he could only make a crack in Azrub’s power of delusion he would begin to break it all. The first few people to see the truth would tell others and the web they were caught in would unravel and set them free.

  He had failed with Helik, because he was alone, and he needed acceptance more than he loved any truth. And it seemed he had failed with Katina’s family also, because for all their ties of blood and marriage, in their confusion they turned upon one another.

  He had forced on them a test they were not strong enough to meet. They had looked at the ugliness of Sardriel’s reality, and it had found the weaknesses within them, and they had let it go again, choosing unity and the façade of peace.

  What right had he to do that? If they chose an illusion in which they could achieve at least some virtue, some kindness, had he done them a greater injury by stripping it away?

  It was the last thing he had intended. Could it be that his own passion for truth was actually a kind of pride? Did he imagine himself invulnerable to dreams, to the longing for love, for days when there were no battles to be fought, and it was all right to laugh, to look at beauty without the ache of fear that it would be destroyed?

  Siriom was still an invader. Azrub was still an emissary of the last destruction, but was this the way to fight? Or was he perhaps doing exactly what they would have wanted in forcing people to meet his own standards of truth, and letting them be broken when they could not?

  He narrowed his eyes against the sun off the water, which was so glittering sharp it hurt, and felt it go through him like a darkness that took hold and drove out the light. Everything he knew or could imagine hung in the balance, the whole marvellous, passionate, beautiful world with its power to become a heart to beat in the silent wheel of the stars—for good or evil. They must not lose!

  He must not fail here in the Lost Lands which were his own battlefield. They were small, intimate, bright as a jewel in the sea, but that was irrelevant. In the end it all came to a struggle between one mind and another, elements that barely took up any space at all. This was between himself and Azrub. He must take up the weapons of war again and return to the fight with words of truth.

  Katina worked as well, with the dedicated fierceness of innocence, trying to convince others to let go of the sweet ease and waken to the coming storm. She used Sardriel’s words about choice. Again and again she told them who they were, but they were not willing to hear the meaning it carried.

  Some resisted with smiling indifference, clinging to the visions that danced in their senses as one grasps a dream in the night and refuses to see the daylight. Others reacted with anger and defended their comfort with retaliation.

  It was one of these who had shoved her impatiently when she would not be silent. He had seen only the illusion of green grass and bright sunlight, not the reality of the crumbling cliffs, nor her body overbalancing and sliding helplessly beyond the ledge and over to fall broken and bleeding on the stone below.

  Only one among them even realised what had happened. Reality burst in upon him with desperate horror and he ran, heart pounding, muscles on fire, to find Sardriel. The others heard only the cry of sea birds, and continued in their smiling dream.

  She was still alive when Sardriel reached her, but he knew she had not long. She had little pain because the life was already slipping away from her as he cradled her head in his arms.

  “Sardriel, is that you?” She was struggling to see through the gathering darkness in her eyes.

  “Yes,” he said gently, the ache in his throat choking his voice. “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Am I dying?” she asked.

  He had never told a lie. How could he begin now with Katina? She alone had picked up the weapons of war he had offered them all, and gone forward without hesitation to do battle.

  “I am ... aren’t I?” she whispered. “I can hardly see you ...”

  “I’m here ...” He held her more closely. Moving her broken bones could do no harm now, and she was beyond pain.

  “I don’t want to die yet!” She took a shaky breath and coughed. “I haven’t done all the things I needed to! How will God know if I am any good? I haven’t sailed the storms yet.” She took another breath, shallower this time. “Can’t you help me? You can do so much ...”

  What truth was there now to tell her? His limitations, his fears, his so real humanity? What comfort would that be to her? She was a child, she should have been at the beginning, not the end!

  “No,” he said softly. “I’m just another warrior in the struggle, just as you are. But I shall have to fight without you from now on, for however long I have. Your part is done, and you did it well.”

  “Did I?” She could not see him, her eyes were already blind. “Will God know who I am?”

  “Oh yes ...” He could barely control his voice, and the tears were wet on his face.

  She smiled, but there were no more words. The last silence enfolded her.

  He picked her up and carried her home, stumbling and blind.

  They buried her in a quiet place on the shore with the wind carrying the smell of salt and the call of birds, the ceaseless breaking of water over the rocks. The family was united at last, not so much in the recognition or understanding of reality or the breaking of Azrub’s web, but in anger against what had happened to the Lost Lands that no one shared their grief except Sardriel and the one man who had run to fetch him. The rest were unaware that anything was lost. They wandered on in their dreamlike state, smiling, growing thinner as they ate food they only imagined was there, and let the boats rot, the weeds grow, and dust and the rubbish gather in the streets.

  It was Sardriel who climbed up the steep hill to the Place of Remembrance on the crown of the cliff that overlooked the last ocean, and then dropped the few steps to the ledge where the shell garden nestled above the boom of the surf.

  The priest of the shrine must be dead. Perhaps he was one whose mind Azrub could not reach? Maybe his only hunger had been for truth.

  Sardriel gathered the shells from where they were stored and chose a perfect bivalve of the palest pink, almost translucent. Then in the custom of the Lost Lands he carved Katina’s name on one half and his own on the other. He divided the shell gently. “I covenant to serve your people with the truth, to love them and to mourn with them for their dreams,” he said quietly. “I promise to fight for the world, the best and the worst in it, and to ride the storms, so God will know my name as well.”

  Then he cast Katina’s half into the void of the ocean and the sky, and placed his own in the garden. He chose the place carefully, close to a bone-white piece of driftwood, and saw there another shell with the name “Tamar” on it. Tathea had laid it here over five hundred years ago for her mother, and another for her son, before she had set out to find the sage who had directed her to her journey of the soul.

  Sardriel stared into the blue of infinity. There was no line where the sea met the sky. Grief for Katina consumed him, for that which she could have been had life given her the time. He
bent his head and wept with all the passion in him for the loss of a child dearer to him than he had known or wished, and then for other loves older and deeper, and for the loneliness in his soul.

  Then at last he lifted his face. The sun was dazzling, but he did not turn away from it. White sea birds rose in the air, riding the currents, soaring upwards until they were almost invisible against the burning blue.

  Why had God allowed Katina, or anyone, to be torn from this life before they had had a chance to learn its lessons, or to measure themselves against its glory and its pain, and make all their choices? There must be justice in it ... but where?

  Beneath him the waves roared in and crashed against the cliff base, sending sheets of foam high into the glittering air, hanging for an instant, then falling, diving back into the white spume of the cauldron below.

  Had he wronged Katina in giving her such a bitter choice to make? What of the others who had failed? Should he have shielded them, defended them from the reality? No! No—he had no right to judge who would and who would not succeed—or even what measure of the battle any man could or would fight.

  Then gradually as he cried out to the infinity, demanding to know, peace came to him, and a knowledge as clear as if it were in words. It would be just if men were judged not only according to their acts, but according to their wishes also, for good or ill, all the things they would have done, were they to have had the time and the power. Surely that was the measure of who they truly were? They would have done good, but not had the means, only the love and the courage and the generosity of heart. Or they would have done evil, but were afraid of the consequences, or denied the power. That was just as much the truth of their eternal nature.

  The warmth of the light became part of Sardriel’s being, filling the spaces where doubt had rested before, becoming a certainty of such sweetness he wanted only to rest in it, to remain in this clean and shining place until he belonged to it for ever.

  As he stared into the blue haze where the sea must somewhere meet the sky, he became aware of Katina as if she were with him. He could see her in the distance, just beyond his strength to call, but she knew he was here on an island of time. Eternity was not behind him and yet to come, as he had believed, but an ocean encircling him. Time was man’s perception of a profundity too deep to grasp except in dream. He was simply separate for a necessary space, so that glory and darkness could both come to pass. Without choice there was no meaning to it all, and no purpose.