by Carol Berg
“I heard it said.”
“He should not have said it. The dwarf and those like him are too eager. You are not the king. You are not to know our business.”
“But now I do, so you may as well explain.”
He considered for so long a while that I was sure he would refuse. But after a time he rose and circled the room again, brushing invisible specks of dust from the plain tables and chairs set about the room. “You have seen a firestorm?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose they are quite common outside the Bounded.” The slightest hint of a question in this statement.
“No. Not common.”
“But you know of them. The Singlars claim you caused one to stop, so you must understand their nature.”
“That was only a coincidence. In fact, I was going to ask you about them. What are they? How often do they occur?”
“Humph. They come from the same place as you, so your question is clearly foolish and deceitful. The storms tell us that those outside the Bounded - maybe you and your uncivil companion - do not care about our survival. The Source prophesies that our king will not allow this destruction to continue, and that he will shape the destiny of all bounded worlds. We do not know how that is to occur. Because of the firestorms, some believe it will be a great violence, and thus our king will be victorious in this conflict.”
“And what do you think?”
He stopped behind his table, directly in front of me, and drew up to his full height. “I think only as the Source commands me. But I have not yet seen our king. So I encourage our people to nurture their fastnesses and wait.”
“Does the Source know the nature of the storms?”
“The Source knows all.”
“Can you take me to the Source?”
“Certainly not!” He ground his thick, knobbed fingers into the edge of the table. “Only the Guardian and the king may visit the Source. I think you’ve asked quite enough questions, traveler. I think you should take your leave of the Bounded.” He pointed to the door.
The Guardian’s fear washed over me like a heavy sea lapping at the sides of a boat. Frightened men were always more dangerous than they might appear, so I didn’t think it wise to push him further. I hadn’t forgotten the two beefy maintainers outside the door.
I stood up to go and bowed respectfully. “I am not your king, Guardian. I have no desire to be a king of anything. I just want to understand about my dreams, and about your world, and how they are related. Nothing more. And so I present you with this proposition. Allow me to stay here for a while. Tell the Source of me and see if it is willing to hear my questions. If not, I promise to go peacefully, leaving you my sincere thanks. And in either case - answers or none - I will grant you the name you desire.”
“You make no claim?” Incredulity dripped from his tongue.
“No claim. I don’t want to rule anyone. Ever. I’m not suited to it. And I have no wish to make my home in the Bounded.”
He dropped into his chair and drummed his fingers while he looked at me. When he made his decision, he leaned forward. “And if I tell you the Source refuses to answer… ”
“… I will present you the name Mynoplas, and then I’ll go. Do we have a bargain?”
“For now you may stay. Until I consult the Source.”
He dearly wanted a name, for he was still very much afraid of me.
CHAPTER 13
It is a strange fact of war and politics that fortunate circumstances can condemn the best of strategies to ruin. Another of Lord Parven’s maxims. I wasn’t sure that I had actually stopped the firestorm on my first day in the Bounded, only that I had kept myself intact, but it happened that no more of them struck in the days following. And because this astonishing and welcome eventuality was associated with my arrival, the people of the Bounded came to believe I was their king.
Whenever I explored their city, they bowed or cheered as I passed. When I attended the Guardian’s daily audiences, the petitioners knelt before me and begged my indulgence or my hearing. They would not attend to the Guardian, even when I insisted they do so. I started sitting in the retiring room behind the gold curtain to listen discreetly, but it only took them two days to find me and come after me again.
And, of course, all this made my bargain with the Guardian go sour very quickly. At first he only grumbled and snarled at me as we sat at meals. Eventually I decided it was politic to stay away from his audience sessions, which annoyed me, as I was learning a great deal about life in the Bounded from listening to its troubles. But even that did not pacify him, and whenever I asked if he had yet spoken to the Source, he turned red and tightened his lips. “The Source has said nothing of you. No answers to your queries have been spoken.” Then he clamped his mouth shut. But he didn’t send me away.
I was no less irritated than he, because seven days had passed, and I’d learned nothing of real importance. I was worried about my mother and worried about what other untoward events my father might be blaming me for. But nothing could be done about either concern, and I didn’t know of anyplace else to look for the truth. So we stayed and tried to learn what we could.
Though the Guardian disapproved of our wandering, Paulo and I spent our days poking about the Blue Tower, also called the King’s Fastness, and the Tower City, trying to discover how the place worked. Everyone in the Bounded seemed to be holding his breath, waiting: waiting for the mythical king, waiting for the next firestorm, waiting for someone to come and give all of them names. Life was dreadfully dull.
The Blue Tower itself revealed little. The lamps lit and darkened themselves in a rhythm quite familiar to those who’d lived in sunlit worlds. You could control them with your fingers, too, in the way of ordinary lamplight. A few other fastnesses in the Bounded had slot windows and lamps like these, and the Singlars watched the lights in those towers to measure their days, passing the information from tower to tower. Besides his maintainers, the Guardian had an army of servants at his beck, a hundred quiet, oddly shaped men and women who wore ruffled collars over the same brown tunics as the other Singlars wore. Neither servants nor Guardian seemed to understand why the lamps behaved in the way they did. It was only one of a thousand things they didn’t know.
Beyond the tasks of serving or protecting the Guardian, the servants in the Blue Tower could tell me nothing of other people’s occupations. The Guardian’s food was grown or raised, fabric was woven and thread was spun, but no one could say who did those things or where. Meat and flour, oil, fruit, fabric, pottery, and all types of goods arrived in the storerooms of the Blue Tower, seemingly without the interference of servants or laborers, and were used as the Guardian desired.
The Singlars had no such luxuries. Their diet consisted entirely of the tappa root, a white vegetable that looked something like a turnip and tasted worse. They boiled it, baked it, or fried it in oil squeezed from its stem. They dried and ground it for flour and baked it into a flat, slightly sweetish bread. They made their clothing from the woven fibers of the tappa and the other stunted shrubs that grew in the dim light, and they made a thin bitter ale by fermenting the tough skin of the tappa root along with its shredded gray leaves. We saw little evidence of commerce or trade, only rudimentary bartering.
Most of our information we gleaned from observation, for the Singlars were too much in awe of me to speak, and I didn’t know how to make them. Frustrated, I asked some of the Singlars where I could find Vroon and his friends. Everyone knew the three Singlars who had been granted names, and they pointed us toward three towers not far from the Blue Tower. One was tall, straight, and gleamed silver in the starlight. One was shaped like a stepped pyramid of ruddy sandstone, and one, Vroon’s, curved upward from a wide base to a crown-like peak.
Vroon, Ob, and Zanore were delighted to accompany us in our explorations, despite the Guardian’s having specifically forbidden them to have contact with me. They said that since I was certainly the king, all would be made right eventually. Eve
ry morning after the lamps came up, the three waited for Paulo and me in a lane near the Blue Tower and guided us about the confusing countryside.
“Tell me, Zanore,” I said, “does anyone know the shape of the Bounded or make maps or charts? Perhaps if we could see a map, we could get some idea of where to go.” The morning was dismal and rainy - morning in name only, as it was still and always night in the Bounded. The constant dark and the wild, fickle weather made it difficult to estimate the size and shape of the land or even to decide if we had been in some particular place before.
After a quick consultation with the other two, Zanore nodded and led us through the muddy lanes to a beehive-shaped fastness. He entered and, after a few moments, poked his head out. “This Singlar will be honored to have you come into his fastness.”
Inside was a single round room, cluttered with stacks of flat stones and wood scraps, some of the stacks taller than my knees. A sputtering wall torch made from damp branches provided smoky yellow light, but revealed no evidence of mapmaking. The Singlar pressed his over-large head to the stone floor.
“Thank you for allowing us to come in,” I said, tilting my head in an attempt to see his face. I’d found no easy way to address people whose heads were on the floor. “I’ll do my best to see you reap no punishment for it. I would like to know about the Bounded… its shape and size. I understand you have made some kind of a chart…”
He didn’t move or answer, except to quiver a bit.
“Are you sure he doesn’t mind us being here?” I whispered to Zanore, who had come inside with me. Paulo and the others waited outside, alert for any maintainers taking an interest.
Zanore pointed his bony black finger around the room and shrugged his shoulders.
At my left hand stood a stack of flat stones, one of the fifty or more such stacks that crowded the little room. The one on the top had lines scribed into it, and when I picked it up to examine it, I saw that the one underneath had a similar pattern, but not quite identical. And the ones below, the same. A quick survey evidenced that every scrap of wood and stone in the stacks had a sketch on it.
“This room… this fastness… the whole thing is your map,” I said, as the clutter suddenly took on new meaning. “Each stack placed in relation to the others. Some stacks tall, some short. Each layer of a stack a new version of that particular area or feature.”
The big-headed Singlar peeped up and grinned.
“Please, would you show me? It’s marvelous.”
Scarcely enough room to walk remained between the tall stacks in the middle, and the sketches on these pieces were quite detailed. Some wider gaps existed between the stacks at the outer margins, and those stacks were very small.
“Out here must be the Edge. Is that right? But I can’t tell which direction is which.”
“The mark on the wall represents the entry of the King’s Fastness,” came a whisper from the floor. “That is Primary.”
The mark was an arrow smudged on the stone wall with a charred stick. I nodded at the man who had now lifted his head slightly. “Come, please, show me the rest,” I said.
I learned a great deal that morning. Where a mapmaker in Leire might labor for three years on a new version of his map, the mapmaker of the Bounded had to create a new one every day, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was never able to finish one map. The place called the Edge was truly the edge of their known world, and it moved outward with every change of the light - every day. The firestorms kept him even busier, for while the Edge always moved outward, changing only the dimensions of his works, the firestorms wiped out clusters of towers, and shifted or erased landmarks, whether roads, ridges, or even mountains. He collected his information from Singlars who moved around in search of tappa or wood or to build new towers and from those who traveled in from the Edge.
“Would you… could you… possibly tell me of the places you’ve traveled in the Bounded, mighty one?” he asked, once he’d taken me on a tour of his current work. “Zanore” - his soft voice caressed my guide’s name with wonder - “has a natural ability to find his way, but he lacks greatly at describing what he has seen. But he says… all say… that you see much. If you would honor me… ”
It seemed only fair to tell him what I could. He grew comfortable with me very quickly then, peppering me with questions about where we’d been and what we’d seen, sketching my descriptions with charred sticks on more bits and pieces that he could transfer to his map, exulting whenever he could lay a new chip on the floor to start a new stack in between two others. The Bounded was much larger than I’d imagined, home to thousands of beings in hundreds of tower clusters, scattered across the landscape. Two hours we spent examining his torch-lit stacks.
“I’d like to repay you for your time,” I said, as I stood by the silvery trace that marked his door. Easy to guess what payment the mapmaker would want. Though the Guardian had specifically forbidden me to grant any more names, the mapmaker had already violated the law by allowing me into his fastness, and I certainly hadn’t anything more useful to give him. “A man named Corionus was the most famous mapmaker in my home country. My grandfather collected his maps. Would you accept the name Corionus in thanks for your help?”
I held his arm so he couldn’t put his head on the floor again. I already felt like I was cheating him.
“What next, great Master?” said Vroon, after Zanore and I rejoined the others and told them about the map. “Shall I show you the tappa planting at the Gray Towers?”
“No,” I said. “Take us to the Edge. I’d like to see it for myself.”
Before the horrified dwarf could answer, a huge, leathery hand fell on my shoulder, almost pressing me to the ground. “No.” Ob didn’t need to say it twice. As with all of his rare words, he communicated a great deal more than the simple meaning of the word.
“So what makes it so dangerous to walk there, even just to take a look?”
Before answering my question, Vroon furiously herded us away from the nearby towers into open country. “Before companioning with me, Ob wandered close to the Edge,” he said, more relaxed as we walked down the road toward the Tower City. “For a manylight he watched the land writhe and groan as it grows and pushes the Edge. Not overfearing is Ob, and he came to no harm. But the risk is true - to fall or be crushed or be burned by spewing vapors - as long as the Bounded is incomplete. Too risky for the king.”
“We’ll be careful, then. I want to see it.” I did not intend to be in the Bounded whenever it was finished with its growing.
Paulo, the three Singlars, and I set out early the next day, heading away from the Tower City in the direction Corionus had named Primary, approximately opposite the moon-door - the passage to Valleor. The stacks of stone and wood said it didn’t actually matter a whit which way we went, as the Edge was about the same distance from the City in every direction. But it made sense to see something new along the way.
Unfortunately, for half the day a steady, cold rain kept us from seeing anything more than twenty paces from the track, only the flat ghostly outlines telling us when we passed a cluster of towers. After six or eight soggy hours of walking, Zanore stopped at the top of a small rise and peered steadily into the gloom ahead before directing us to the left, in the first obvious deviation from our straight-line course. Zanore’s amber eyes must have seen more ahead than human ones could. Neither Paulo nor I could see anything that wasn’t gray or wet or immediately under our feet, and thus no reason to turn aside.
“Danger to pass through here,” said Zanore, when I asked him why we were going out of our way. “Strange tales have I heard of this place. Best stay away.”
“What kind of tales?”
The three conferred among themselves and couldn’t come up with anything but the words hurtful and troubled.
“If you’ve no better explanation than that, we’ll go straight,” I said. “I want to get to the Edge today, and I don’t think we’ll want to spend the night there. I won’t
let anything happen to us.” Except for the firestorms, I’d seen nothing of the Bounded or its inhabitants that we couldn’t deal with. I felt safer here than at Verdillon.
The three were afraid to argue, so with many sighs and muttering and shaking of heads, they led us on the downward path and into a wide, rocky gully, where we found ourselves ankle-deep in mud. We soon glimpsed a cluster of perhaps fifty or sixty dreary fastnesses, low, crude things of rocks and mud, none better than the others.
The Singlars who stepped out of the rock piles were mostly naked, all of them thinner than Zanore. If they’d not smiled cheerfully and bowed at our passing, I might have thought them standing corpses from some long finished battle. One of the Singlars stepped forward with his hands raised over his head and spread wide apart - in greeting it appeared - offering the same welcome shown me by all the Singlars, without the speechless groveling that usually accompanied it.
“Greetings, weary traveler. Such happiness you bring to our valley.” The spokesman was a tall, emaciated man with dark skin and a twisted back that left one shoulder higher than the other. He wore nothing but a tattered loin wrapping, yet his shaggy black hair was clean and tied back with a piece of vine, and his air of dignity would not have been out of place in any fine house. His protruding bones vibrated with the rumbling of his voice. “Too rare is our delight in seeing new faces. Will you stop for a while?”
“No, no, no, no,” whispered Vroon, pawing at my arm. “We travel in haste. No stoppings.”
A smile radiated like sunlight from the man’s huge, pale eyes. “To hear a word from the world beyond our fastness would be a joy unmatched. So empty is our experience of travelers; I must think that you are someone of importance, someone who has much to share with us. If we could persuade you to share a dry seat, a morsel, and a sip, you might, in that brief time, provide us a feasting of words to last until the Bounded grows ancient.”
There was no danger here. I could snap this man like a twig.
