by Greg Keyes
“I swallowed the sun,” he muttered. “You would think people would remember that.”
“Oh, we remember,” the Huntress said. “We remember that we had to slit you open before you would give it up.”
“How rude,” Karak said crossly, and, lifting his great wings, flew off into the forest. Perkar could hear the heavy beat of his wings long after losing sight of him.
“Is that true?” Perkar asked. “Did he really do those things?”
The Huntress smiled. “The world was much different in those days. Perhaps they never really happened at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“The only difference between a story and the truth is how often the story is told,” she replied.
Perkar didn’t understand that, either, but he didn’t say so. He was used to gods; they lived everywhere. He was not used to gods who claimed to have created the world or swallowed the sun. That seemed ridiculous, beyond the power of anything. Yet these were the old gods, the gods of the mountain, rarely spoken of, rarely sung about. After all, better to sing about the god of your pasture who would hear you, consider your requests.
These Mountain Gods frightened him, but they fanned a flagging spark, as well. His dreams were not just fantasy. Gods who could swallow the sun would have weapons to match their power. Such weapons could slay other gods, could they not?
The Huntress led them down the steep trail, and eventually to a meadow, nestled deep in the mountainside. The moss there was a carpet; Perkar’s feet sprang upon it as they walked. In the center of the meadow was a tree, its girth greater than that of his father’s damakuta. The tree—it looked like an oak—soared upward, enormous, shadowing out the sun entirely.
“Here,” the Huntress said. “Here we wait.”
Wait they did. Once or twice, Apad made overtures to a conversation, but the words died, eaten by the silence the magnificent tree seemed to cast about itself. Birdsong rang out, but it was far away, the memory of song. The tree seemed to be the still point of the world. So still it was that, despite himself, Perkar began drifting in and out of dozing, his head lolling over onto one shoulder, then jerking awake. Attempting to remain alert, he contemplated the tree, walking over to its spreading base, and gazing up its trunk, trying to count the layers of branches he could see, guess those he could not. Soon enough, however, he returned to sitting, and his eyelids began to droop once more.
All of his companions seemed to be having similar troubles; only the Huntress seemed alert, crouched in the clearing, unmoving as a statue, bright quick eyes darting here and there. The Alwal, Perkar suddenly realized, were nowhere to be seen.
A moment arrived, and Perkar no longer felt sleepy. The tree, the moss, everything around them suddenly unfocused, blurred into colors without much form and no detail. At first he believed the trouble was with his eyes, obscuring vision to trick him into sleep; but then he heard the gasps around him. The world had gone strange, had faded. Perkar wondered if it would return. His mind turned over a conversation his father had had, long ago, with a shamaness who came to visit them, a relative of his mother’s. She said something that reminded Perkar of this blurring. “The world of gods and the world of Humans is the same world,” she said. “They are both like a damakuta; but the world of gods is like the whole damakuta and the world of Humans is the paint on the outside of it. We live in that paint, see only what is painted there. The gods are visible to us sometimes—they are like carvings on the beams of the damakuta, and if the painter painted those carvings we know that they are there. Of course, the gods may choose to paint and then unpaint themselves, when it suits them …”
A god was painting himself, and in doing so he was smearing the paint already present.
This went on for longer than was comfortable, but finally the greens and browns congealed into what they were before: the great tree, the meadow, the surrounding forest and cliffs.
Save that now Balati, the Forest Lord, was among them. He stood where the Huntress had been crouching; she was gone.
At first glance, the Forest Lord was mostly Bear, an enormous shaggy mass reared up on hind legs. But Perkar quickly realized that he was not a bear, but something older than bears or men or Alwat, something that they were all dim reflections of. Huge, furred, with legs and paws like the boles of trees. Like the Huntress he was horned, but these were not horns of wood; they were great elk antlers that measured, from tip to tip, more than Mang’s body length. A powerful smell of black soil and beast permeated the air, nearly overpowered him with its intensity. Equally overpowering was the Forest Lord’s single eye. It was bird and panther, deer and snake, flashing, changeable. Compelling and frightening. Its companion was a dark and empty socket.
“Lord Balati,” the Kapaka said, and he bowed. The towering figure regarded him impassively.
“Balati,” the Kapaka continued, after a suitable interval, in which Perkar found himself on his knees, as well. “We sing songs of you, down in the pasturelands, in the valleys, in our hill holdings. We remember you well, and the ancient pacts you made with our fathers and their fathers.”
Balati shifted back his shoulders, and a low growl issued from him, so profound that it was more a rumbling in the earth than a real sound. And yet there was sense in it; there were words.
“It is good,” Balati said. “It is good that you remember. Tell me of something. Tell me something you remember.”
There was silence; Perkar saw that all of his companions were bowed down, Eruka on both knees, Apad, grim-faced, on only one. Both looked as frightened as he felt.
“Eruka!” the Kapaka prompted, after a moment. “Sing an Ekar!”
Eruka looked up slowly, as if he were having difficulty understanding his king’s command. Perkar feared he would not sing—that his voice would be as frozen as his body had been when the Wild God spoke to them. But after a moment, Eruka cleared his throat.
Among roots and branches
On and on I dreamed
One day like the next
In the tall birches
In the white rustling aspen
In the deep bottoms
In bright pools
On and on
One day like the next …
Eruka’s voice shook at first, uncertain. But the songs of birds seemed closer now, seemed to fly beneath and between his song, supporting it, lifting it higher. He gathered confidence.
Ages passing, on I dreamed
Hooves and claws
Coming and going
In the hard wind from the ice
Dreaming in the sweet southern wind
Age to age
One age like the next …
It was a song that Perkar had never heard, and it was beautiful, captivating. Eruka sang of Balati in the endless forest, walking about his mountain, of the legions of gods in the forest who were both a part and not a part of him. The song went on like that for many, many stanzas. For hours, it seemed. Then, finally, the words became more familiar, as it told of the coming of the Alwat and finally of Human Beings. After that, Eruka sang of the first meeting of Humans and the Forest Lord, of trees chopped down for pasture, of bargains made. When Eruka finally finished, Perkar found himself still listening, still waiting for an ending. But there was not one, of course. There was no ending. But one verse—a brief, minor thing in the course of the Forest Lord’s Epic—one verse glittered to Perkar like silver to the Crow God. It stayed there, shining, repeating itself:
Dreaming on and on
I watched my brother grow bitter
Grow gluttonous
Humans fed his appetite
Fed his dark, voracious desire
Flowing from the root of our mountain
Our cradle, our birthplace
Bitter my brother, Rivergod, Changeling
Took his hunger seaward
Dreaming on and on
Growing and changing
Each day more ravenous
Than the last
&nbs
p; Dreaming on and on
Even I feared him
And so armed myself …
Brother, thought Perkar. But a brother not trusted, a brother to arm against. Perkar felt something in his grasp, for who could this brother be but the dreadful River, the one that ate her? There was a weapon, and it must be nigh. His enemy and the weapon, here together.
He was scarcely aware when the earth began to rumble with the Forest Lord’s speech.
“It is good,” Balati intoned. “We can add another verse to this song. What will that verse be about?”
The Kapaka stood, spoke a trifle too loudly, a king of instants confronting a lord of epochs. “In the Human lands, more and more sons go landless. We begin to turn on ourselves, and I fear troubled times. The local gods tell us that you have asked them not to bargain, as in days of old. They tell us that we must petition you for new lands and holdings to cherish and worship. So here we have come.”
The Forest Lord seemed to swell larger, like a shadow moving farther from the sun. Above them, the sky darkened with twilight.
“It is good that you heeded my word,” Balati said. “It is good. Many valleys and hills, many gods have I given into your care, and you into theirs. It has been well enough, but Balat is smaller than it was, and I will only give so much. You understand this; you are a lord of your kind.”
“Yes. I understand. But I must request it.”
“You have respect, you honor the memories of your fathers,” Balati said. “We will talk, you and I. We will talk here, tonight, and we will decide. But I will tell you, I cannot give you much. Not much.”
He hunched down, became a hillock of darkness, horned, single eye of flickering foxfire. A nighthawk cried, somewhere.
“Come,” a voice whispered, and a gentle tug at his sleeve. “Come, Ngangata says we must leave them.” It was Atti. The Alwal were visible again, at the edge of the clearing; they seemed to be waiting. Ngangata was already walking toward them, leading his horse.
“Come,” Atti repeated.
“And leave the Kapaka with that?” Apad demanded.
But the Kapaka was waving them away, as well. Perkar rose up reluctantly, went to recover Mang. He let Atti go ahead, lagged back to make sure Apad and Eruka would follow. Behind them, neither the Kapaka nor the Forest Lord spoke; it was clear now that they were waiting for the others to leave.
“I don’t care for this at all,” Eruka said.
“It doesn’t sound good,” Apad said. “Did you hear him? He won’t give us anything. We’ll have to fight, as we planned.”
“Shhh.” Eruka gasped. “We might be overheard. Who knows what gods might lurk here? Or even Ngangata and the Alwal.”
Apad nodded tersely, in agreement, acknowledging his mistake.
But Perkar leaned very close to Apad’s ear. “The caves, Apad. We must look in the caves. We have the time, and we must take it.”
Apad did not meet Perkar’s eager gaze. “Yes,” he answered. “I suppose …”
“Hurry,” Eruka urged. “The Alwal will lose us here if we don’t keep up.”
Perkar nodded and quickened his pace, but he marked everything in his mind, tried to paint a map as they moved away from the clearing. He must find the trail up to the caves, in the dark. With or without his friends.
V
Blindness
The Alwal did not lead them very far from the clearing, only to the base of the valley wall, where the trees climbed steeply up the slope. There, on the gentle rise clinging to the base of the precipitous one, a little fire was burning, a cheerful sight in this web of gods and power. The Fire Goddess was always friendly to Human Beings, always on their side.
The Alwal had also erected shelters, simple lean-tos roughly covered in sheets of birch bark.
“Do they expect rain tonight?” Perkar asked Atti, gesturing at the huts.
“Not tonight,” he answered
“Not tonight? What other night? How long will this take, this negotiation?”
To his surprise, it was Ngangata who answered him. The two of them had not spoken since their fight, and Perkar did not expect to speak to him ever again.
“The Forest Lord has little sense of time,” he said. “It could take a night or many nights. There is no way of knowing.”
“Why did the Forest Lord send us away, then? Why can’t we attend our king?”
Irritation flashed across Ngangata’s broad features, as if his answer to Perkar was meant to be singular, a gift to be accepted but not a precedent to be taken for granted. Perkar felt his face burn, but not with anger. He stepped back from the fire lest it show.
“The Forest Lord doesn’t really understand Human Beings or even Alwat, I think,” he said. “He believes we are like the Huntress, like Karak.”
“He thinks we are gods?” Perkar asked, unwilling to stop now that the half man was speaking
“No. The Raven and the Huntress are gods in their own rights, but they are also aspects of Balati, parts of him. As leaves are parts of a tree. Better yet, they are like aspen trees. Each aspen is a tree itself, but all of the aspen in a forest are part of the same root.”
“And he thinks we are like that? All aspects of the Kapaka?”
“It is his habit to think that way,” Ngangata answered. “Besides,” he went on, “the king is wise, and he has been schooled in this kind of negotiation. We will be allowed to fetch him water and food when need be; Balati will not notice our presence.”
“You say that the king is wise,” Apad said, his voice low and flat. “Do you mean to imply that we are not?”
“I mean only to imply that you are not as wise as the Kapaka,” Ngangata said softly. “That is no insult, only a fact.”
“Who can dispute that?” Atti added, a little too quickly.
Apad’s expression said that he might, but he kept his peace. For days, Apad had been trying to goad Ngangata into a fight, following Perkar’s example, but with no success. Ngangata’s answers to him were always couched in words just short of insulting, and Perkar realized now that when Ngangata openly insulted someone, he meant to do so. The fight at the cave had been no accident, no slip of the tongue. The half man had invited Perkar to fight him and then let himself be beaten. Apad and Eruka would never see this—but they had not felt the strength behind Ngangata’s half-hearted blows. What Perkar still didn’t understand was what the little man was up to. What shamed him was the suspicion that it had been some sort of test, one he had failed.
And why did he care about that? Ngangata was not a warrior, had no Piraku. Having his respect gained one nothing.
But he did know one thing; he would rather have Ngangata with him tonight than Apad or Eruka, though he liked the two Human men better.
“I’ll make my offerings now,” he told them. He gave a little incense to the Fire Goddess, then moved off into the shadows crouching about the camp. There he offered to his sword, to Ko who made it. He offered to his armor, too, unfolding it as he did so. To the gods of the mountain, he made no offerings at all; he did not want to attract their attention.
His oblations were hurried, as he began to feel a nagging urgency. If he was going into the caves of the Forest Lord, he must do so now; for all he knew the Kapaka and the Balati were even now concluding an agreement. Best, in fact, not to go back to the fire at all. Ngangata and Atti might become suspicious; if he left now, they would think that he was displaying more piety than usual. It would be a good while before they actually began to look for him, and then it would be too late. Or perhaps they would go to sleep and not realize he had been gone at all. Part of him wanted Apad and Eruka along, but he was forced to conclude that he might be better off without them; after all, he had no intention of seeking battle, save with the Rivergod himself. He had no quarrel with the Forest Lord nor any god in his domain. Nor, he realized, did he really seek glory or a place in some epic. All of that was just his friends talking. It sounded good at the time, but growing fear and apprehension was stripping
it away. After all, he had seen the Forest Lord, knew something of the being from whom he intended to steal; and at the moment, he felt like little Perkar, not like some Giant from one of Eruka’s songs.
He donned his hauberk, and as it settled over his shoulders, a terrible cold fear settled with it. The steel felt hard and unforgiving against his body, too heavy. Almost he took it back off, returned to the fire to wait for the Kapaka. He did not. This was his only chance; if he did not go tonight, he would never go, no matter how long the Forest Lord and the Kapaka negotiated. Because as his fear was stripping away his reasons—Piraku, heroics—it also gnawed at his most basic cause. How often had she told him that there was nothing he could do? How often had she begged him to forget? She was a goddess; she knew so much more of these things than he did.
A goddess, but not a warrior. She did not know what a man with the right weapon might accomplish.
And so he settled the hauberk, donned his steel cap with its plume of horsehair, strapped on his greaves. Then, with a single backward glance, he set off along the base of the valley wall, searching for the trail up, the one that went past the caves.
It soon became terribly dark, though a glimpse now and then showed the Pale Queen to be full. The forest was, fortunately, open and expansive, so that he did not become hopelessly tangled. His progress was anything but the silent stealth he had imagined, however; everywhere there were branches to step on, snags to stumble over, and his armor protested in a metallic chorus each time he tripped. Worse, it seemed impossible to keep his bearings, and he worried that he was traveling in entirely the wrong direction. He thought seriously about lighting a torch, but that would attract the attention of everyone around him—and everything—and so he decided to muddle on without one.
He did not find the trail, and the moon set. Balat became darker than the inside of a coffin, darker than any cave could be. Perkar did try to start a torch then, but could find nothing suitable from which to make one, nothing that would catch fire. Finally, blind, he sank to the cool earth, rested against an unseen tree. He thought he heard people calling his name, after a time, but could not be certain. In any event, he did not call out himself. It would be too humiliating, too stupid, and he could already imagine the condescending expression on Ngangata’s face. His back to the rough trunk, Perkar cursed himself until he dozed.
