The cataclysm t2-2

by Margaret Weis

  "Changed?"

  She nodded, moving toward Father's old strongbox.

  "Then Father lied as well as betrayed?"

  Mother shook her head, brushed her hair back. She opened the strongbox.

  I knew what was inside. Three books, a penny whistle, a damaged harp. I had never asked to see them. I hated poetry.

  Mother held up one of the books.

  It was the story of the times since the Rending, since the world had opened under Istar. The work of the bard Arion, it was, but more. It was his words and the words of others before him: remote names like Gwion and Henricus and Naso, out of the time when Solamnia was in confusion.

  The book was battered, its leather spine scratched and cracked. As Mother held it out to me, it opened by nature to a page near its end, as though use and care had trained it to fall at the same spot, to the same lines.

  She gestured that the lines were in Father's hand. Indeed, the whole book was in Father's hand, for neither Arion nor any of the bards before him had written down their songs and tales, preferring to pass them on to a listening apprentice, storing their songs in the long dreaming vaults of their memories. But Father thought he was heirless and alone, and had written them all — every poem and song and lay, from the edicts to the first shaking of the city, down through the dark years unto this time. A dozen lines or so of one verse he had worried over, scratched out, revised, and replaced, only to go back to the first version, to his first choice of wording.

  I mouthed the lines, then read them aloud:

  "Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:

  Pyrrhus Alecto, the knight on the night of betrayals.

  When a Firebrand of burning had clouded the straits of Hylo.

  Like oil on water, he soothed the ignited country.

  Forever and ever the villages learn his passage

  In the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies.

  They carried him back to the keep of the castle

  Where Pyrrhus the Lightbringer canceled the world

  Beneath the denial of battlements,

  Where he died amid stone with his hovering armies.

  For seventeen years the country of Caergoth

  Has turned and turned in his embracing hand,

  A garden of shires and hamlets,

  And Lightbringer history hangs on the path of his name."

  It was as though Father had never been satisfied. Something had drawn him to these lines again and again, as if changing them would…

  Would straighten the past, make it true.

  " 'Tis here, Mother," I announced, so softly that at first she did not hear, though she was staring directly at me as I read.

  She cupped her ear, leaned forward.

  " 'Tis in the poem. Or, rather, not in the poem."

  Mother frowned. I knew she saw Orestes in me nowpoetic and full of contradictions.

  I tried to be more clear about it.

  "These lines Father wrote and rewrote and worked over are… are the lie. Don't you see, Mother? The druidess said that the past is lies, and lies can always change. These are — " I thumbed through the book, looking early and late " — these are the only lines he has fretted over.

  "It's as though… he was trying to…" I looked at Mother. "… change the lies back to the truth."

  I did not know whether that was so or not. I stepped quietly to the strongbox and took out my father's harp, one thick string missing, and held it for a long moment. It fit my hand exactly and when I put it down, I could not shake away its memory from my grasp. When I looked at Mother again, her eyes had changed. We both knew what I would say next.

  "Yes, I must go, but not because they seek me. I will go because I have to find the lost song," I announced. "Father's words are still hiding something."

  One of the dogs rumbled and rose from the shadows, stretching and sniffing lazily in the dwindling firelight. Then his ears perked and he gave a low, angry growl.

  Mother scrambled to her feet and to the door, a confusion of soundless sobs and flickering hands.

  "I know. They're coming," I said. "I must hurry. Finding the truth is saving my life. The druidess said so."

  I stroked the ears of Mateo, the largest of the dogs, who looked up at me solemnly, his thick shoulders pressing against my legs until I staggered a little at the weight. I had no thought of how small I was — how things far greater would press against me when I stepped across the threshold into the early winter morning.

  Mother moved slowly aside as I passed into the pale sunlight, her fingers brushing softly, mutely against my hair. I gave her a smile and a long hug, and she assured me of her own safety. In the sled lay an old hide bag, big enough for the harp and the book, a loaf of bread, and a wedge of cheese. I tossed everything in and moved off, as quickly and silently as I could.

  One of the dogs barked as I lost the cottage behind a cluster of blue Aeterna branches, and the high wind shivered faintly at their icicles like the vanished notes of a song. Above the hillside nearest my home, four long shadows fell across the trackless snow.

  There were other adventures that led me back to the peninsula — a wide arc of years and travels across the continent, Finn's men at first only hours behind me, then less constant, less menacing the farther south I traveled. I sent the dogs back to Mother soon and traveled alone, sometimes working for a while at jobs where nobody knew me or thought they knew me, where nobody cared that I never removed my hood.

  It was a year, six seasons perhaps, before I realized exactly what it was about the song I was searching for.

  It has long been practice that when a bard travels and sings, his songs are attended, remembered, and copied by those in the regions nearby. If a song is a new one, it carries to still farther regions by word of mouth, from bard to bard, from orator to folksinger to storyteller to bard again.

  It is a tangled process, and the words change sometimes in the telling, no matter how we try to rightly remember. The old lines from Arion's song I heard in Solamnia as THE PRAYER OF MATHERI MERCIFUL GRAMMAR OF THOUGHT

  I had heard in the small town of Solace as THE PRAYERS OF MATHERI MERCY, GRANDMOTHER OF THOUGHT

  and the southern lines made me laugh, distorted like gossip in their passage across the straits.

  For I had the book with me, and within it (he truth unchangeable. As I traveled, I knew I would come to a place when I would hear those scratched and worried lines of my father's — the lines about Pyrrhus Alecto, about Lightbringer and history and glory — but I would hear them in a different version.

  And I would know at last what Pyrrhus Orestes had altered.

  Across the Straits of Schallsea I once stowed away on a ferry. The enraged ferryman discovered me under a pile of badger hides, and he threatened to throw me overboard for evading his fee. He relented when he pushed back my hood and saw the scars from the burning.

  "Firebringer," he snarled. "Only my fear of Branchala, of the curse upon bard-slayers, stays my hand from your murder." I cherished his greeting. It was the first of many such conversations.

  Over the grain fields of Abanasinia I wandered, in a journey from summer to summer and threat to threat. Three times I heard "Song of the Rending" — once from a minstrel in Solace, again in the city of Haven from a seedy, unraveled bard who had forgotten entire passages about the collapse of Istar, whereby his singing lost its sense, and finally from a blind juggler wandering the depths of the plains, whose version was wild and comical, a better story by far than Arion's.

  The minstrel and the juggler repeated Father's altered lines word for word. But the juggler recited them with a curious look, as though he was remembering words contrary to those he was speaking. Although I asked him and asked him again about it, he would tell me nothing. Faced with his silence, I began to believe I had imagined his discomfort, that it was only my hope and dreaming that had expected to find the missing lines.

  And so, back across the straits I sailed, in the summer of my sixteenth year, a
nd again the ferryman called me Fire-bringer, cursing me and spitting at me as he took my money.

  On Solamnic shores once more, I started for home, but discovered that no village would shelter me on the journey. "Firebringer," they called me, and "Orestes the Torch," meeting me on the outskirts of the hamlets with torches of their own, with stones and rakes and long peninsular knives.

  Some even pursued me, shouting that the fires would die with the one who brought them. Like the ferryman, like Finn, they thought I was my father.

  To the north lay the great Solamnic castles — Vingaard and Dargaard, Brightblade and Thelgaard and DiCaela. Each would take me in of a night for the sake of my grandfather. These families would nurse me on occasion, for my scars burned with growing intensity as the seasons turned and the fires to the west raged and the years passed by me. Sometimes the knights let me stay for a week, perhaps two, but the peasants would clamor, would talk of traitors and firebrands, and I would be asked to leave, would be escorted from Solamnic holdings by a handful of armed cavalry.

  The knights would apologize there at the borders, and tell me that their hearts were heavy for me… that the welfare of the order and the people took precedence… that, had there been another way, they would have been glad to…

  In all those high places, I asked after Arion's song. Solamnia was, after all, the bard's sanctuary, the harp's haven. All of the schooled poets had retreated to these courts, and all knew the works of Arion of Coastlund.

  I showed around the scratched and amended passage near the poem's end. All the bards remembered it, and remembered no other version. As I sat alone in the vaulted hall of Vingaard Keep, my thickened hands strumming Father's harp in the vast and echoing silence, it almost seemed to me that the walls shuddered with my clumsy music, the one string still and always missing.

  In my seventeenth year, the peninsula had burned clear up to Finn's own holdings.

  Out of the stronghold of his lair in the seaside caverns at Endaf, from which his horsemen could harry the trade routes north from Abanasinia and his notorious ships, the Nuitari and the Viper, could find safe harbor, Finn terrorized the cape and covered the shore with the husks of schooners and brigantines, off course in the smoke from the mainland.

  It was rumored by some that an ancient evil had returned, in those brief years before the War of the Lance. Finn was one of those who harbored them, the populace whispered. For in the depths of his seaside cavern lay an intricate web of still larger caverns, tunnel devolving on tunnel, the darkness slick and echoing. This was the legendary Finn's Ear, where it was supposed that all sounds muttered in shelter of stone eventually and eternally circled and spoke. At the heart of Finn's labyrinth was said to lay a monster, his black scales glittering with cold malice and devouring acid.

  They said that the beast and the bandit had struck an uneasy truce: Finn soothed the monster with the music of well paid but exhausted bards, and, lulled by continual song, the great creature received in turn the company of the bandit king's uncooperative prisoners. And as to the fate of those poor wretches, even the rumormongers were silent.

  In the rough border country between Lemish and Southlund, cooling myself in the high foothills of the Garnet Mountains, I pondered the looming necessity of actually going to Finn's Ear, where the bards were singing and the caverns echoing. It was the only place I had not searched for the song.

  Hooded as always to hide my livid scars, I crossed that border and stalked through the burning peninsula, keeping the towers of Caergoth to the north as I traveled toward the little villages in the west. My route took me within Finn's own sight, had he cared to leave his rocky throne and look west from the beetling cliffs.

  For days I wandered through hot country and distant rising smoke. I would stand outside the village pubs, hooded and shrouded like a highwayman or a self-important mage, and through open windows I heard the nervous talk, the despair of farmer and villager alike.

  Spontaneous fires arose in the dry grain fields, leaving the countryside a wasteland of ash and cinder. In droves the farmers were leaving, no longer able to fight the flames. All this disaster, they claimed, had enraged Finn to the point where, in the search for remedy, he had offered an extravagant bounty to any bard or enchanter who could extinguish the fires with song or incantation.

  Hard words about a curse drifted through one of the windows. I heard the name of my father. It lightened my steps somehow, as I passed through the deserted village of Ebrill in the early morning, then over the ruins of Llun and Mercher, moving ever westward, believing now that my quest would at last be done. Endaf was the last place Finn would look for a far-flung quarry, and my father's name rode on the smoky air.

  It was midmorning when I reached Endaf. I wandered the village for a while, weaving a path amid the deserted cottages and charred huts and lean-tos, all looking like a grim memory of a village. And it was odd walking there, passing the old flame-gutted ruins of the inn and knowing that somewhere in its vanished upper story my father had received the scars I had mysteriously inherited.

  I turned abruptly from the ashes. I was eighteen and impatient, and had come very far for the truth. The old acrid smell of Endaf faded as I walked from the ruins on a rocky and shell-strewn path, and as I trudged west I caught the sharp smell of salt air and heard the faint cries of gulls and cormorants.

  About a mile from the center of the village, Finn's Ear burrowed into a sheer limestone cliff overlooking the Cape of Caergoth. Black gulls perched at its edge, the gray rock white with their guano, loud with their wailing cries.

  Steps had been chopped in the steep rock face, whether by the bandits or by a more ancient hand it was hard to tell, given the constant assault of storm and birds. I took my place in the middle of a rag-tag group of beggars, farmers, bards and would-be bandits, each awaiting an audience with King Finn of the Dark Hand.

  As I waited, the bards talked around and over me in their language of rumor. The gold thread at the hems of cape and cloak was tattered, frayed; each wooden harp was chipped and warped, each bronze one dented and tarnished.

  No famous poets these, no Quivalen Sath or Arion of Coastlund. They were courtiers with trained voices and a studied adequacy for the strings. Now, in single file on the rocky steps, each encouraged the other, thereby encouraging himself.

  Being praise-singer to a bandit king was a thankless and shabby job, they said.

  Well, generally.

  But Finn, they said, was different. Of course.

  It was hard to keep from laughing. In the rationale of such men, a bandit, a goblin, even a monster was DIFFERENT when coin and a warm hearth were offered.

  Finn, they claimed, had joined resolutely in the search to lift a curse brought upon Caergoth and the surrounding peninsula years ago by the fire-bringing Solamnics, Pyrrhus Alecto and his son Pyrrhus Orestes. His search had entered its fourth year, his seers and shamans telling him that the curse would last "as long as Alecto's descendants lived," his hirelings telling him always that they had just missed catching Orestes. Desperate, Finn hoped that a transforming hymn would lift the curse with its beauty and magic.

  The bards needled one another cynically, each asking when they would write that certain song, make their fortunes among the bandits. They all laughed the knowing laughter of bards, then fell silent.

  I leaned against the cold rock face, awaiting uncertain audience. Pelicans and gulls wheeled over the breaking tide, diving into the ardent waters as the sun settled over the eastern spur of Ergoth, dark across the cape.

  Carelessly, I touched the strings of the harp, felt in my pockets for the poet's pen and ink. I had traveled hundreds of miles to this stairwell, this audience. The pain of my scars rose suddenly to a new and staggering level.

  The song of the bards around me was skillful and glittering and skeptical… and empty of the lines I sought. I would have to brave the echoing caverns below Finn's lair.

  The druidess had told me that I could find the truth.

/>   And the finding would save my life and make the past unchangeable. The song had to be here, or there was no song. And could the final pain of the monster's acid be any worse than this perpetual burning?

  "You'll have it, Father," I muttered into the dark of my hood. "Redeemed and continued. The past will be unchangeable. Whatever you have, it will be the truth. And whatever I have, it will be better."

  Finn of the Dark Hand sat in a huge chair hewn from the cavern wall. He looked hewn from stone himself, a sleepless giant or a weathered monument set as a sign of warding along the rocky peninsular coast. His right hand was gloved in black, the reason known only to himself.

  Around him milled his company of bandits, rough and scarred like burned villages. They bared their knives as they watched the singers, smiling wickedly one to another, as though keeping a dreadful secret unto a fast-approaching hour.

  I hovered at the mouth of the cave, listening for an hour to the technically brilliant and lifeless songs of the bards. They claimed to play the music for its own sake, for the sake of the glory of song, but they all knew otherwise, for always music serves some master.

  Even Finn knew they were liars. Finn, who had held neither harp nor flute, whose poetry was ambush and plunder. He leaned into the eroded throne, dismissing the pearly singer from Kalaman, the pale lad from Palanthas and the merchant turned poet from Dargaard. Each gathered a heel of bread for his song and turned, grumbling, eastward toward Solamnic cities and the possibility of castles and shelter.

  It was night. Bats rustled in the upper regions of the cavern, and I remembered an old time, a winter time, a cavern and a dry rustling sound. Two last supplicants stood between me and the bandit: a beggar whose leg had been damaged in a field accident, and another bard.

  While the beggar begged and was given a loaf, and while the bard sang and received a crust, I waited in the shadow of the cave.

  None of them had the song. None of them. Neither bard nor minstrel nor poet nor troubadour. Their songs rang thinly in the cave, echoing back to them and to us, throwing the music into a doubling confusion.