The Flight from Kar (The Emperor's Library

by Frederick Kirchhoff

  When he’d eaten, Helen suggested they go out to meet her father and sister.

  “Is this the first time you’ve left the Valley of Women?” she asked him.

  “Yes—the first time. Unless you count the visits to Bent Lake.”

  “Bent Lake?”

  “Not the village, just the lake itself—the end of it near the Valley of Women.”

  “So Bent Lake is the name you give to the water.”

  “Is there another name for it?” Jon asked.

  “I’ve heard it called South Lake and Big Lake—to distinguish it from the smaller lake in the Valley of Women—but Bent Lake may be a better name. I’ve seen it from above, you see, although I’ve never been there. It’s not in our territory—but there’s no reason for you to know that. Everything here must seem strange to you. You probably never encountered anyone like my daughter Zoë before.”

  “No, Ma’am,” he said. “Not ever.”

  Helen’s smile told him that she understood exactly what he meant.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to her. She’s really a fine girl. And please call me Helen. There are no sirs or ma’ams in our midst.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no reason to apologize. I just wanted you to be comfortable, that’s all.”

  The man and woman they were approaching stopped their work when they saw them.

  “The young man John told us to expect has arrived,” Helen announced.

  “Does he have a name?” the sister asked. She looked a few years older than Zoë’s mother, but the resemblance between them was strong—the same sharply defined features, the same intensely blue eyes—only the older woman’s hair was flecked with gray.

  “I suppose he does, but none of us know it.”

  She’d told him her name, but he hadn’t told her his, Jon realized. How stupid of him to omit such an elementary politeness. Yet, if John had told them to be looking for him, why hadn’t he given them his name?

  “It’s no mystery,” he said. “My name is Jon.”

  “A second John—how will we keep them straight? My name is Ethel. I’m Helen’s sister. Helen’s older sister, to be exact—but also her only one. And this is our father Peter. Papa, John’s friend has the same name as John. Isn’t that a coincidence? I wonder why John never told us.”

  She spoke in a louder voice when addressing her father. He must have been hard of hearing, but that only made sense because Peter was the oldest man Jon had ever seen. Yet he was thin and wiry and obviously still accustomed to physical exertion, and it was easy to see that he was the father of the two women. The family resemblance was unmistakable.

  “Welcome, my boy,” he said to Jon, shaking his hand vigorously. “It’s been years since we had a visitor from the next valley—and then it was a woman, not a man,” he added quietly—almost in a whisper. “But that was ages ago—long before either of my two daughters was born.”

  “Have you visited the Valley of Women?” Jon asked.

  “You’re thinking that if my grandson made the trip I probably did it myself as well, and you’re right. But only once. One time was enough for me. What’s the point of putting yourself in needless danger?” Like the rest of his family, the old man smiled as he talked.

  “However I’ve seen it from above more times than I can count. If you crossed the mountain, you passed the vantage we use to look down at you—the stone bench at the crest, where the four trails meet.”

  “I saw it yesterday. Did you make the trails and the bench?”

  Peter appeared amused by the question.

  “No, no. The trails have always been there—one leading up from our valley, one leading down into yours, and two following the ridge of the Boundary Mountain, one east and one west. The east trail takes you to a place where you have a good view of the next valley, where there’s a lake with a dogleg, but the west trail doesn’t go far—only a bit upslope to nowhere in particular—so we never take it. As for the bench, did you stop to think how heavy the stones are? And did you notice that they’re not of the same rock as the mountain? None of the Foresters made that bench. And, even if we’d cut the stones, how could we have carried them up the mountain? Someone must have done it, of course, but who it was I’ve never been able to discover, and it’s very old. Did you see the inscription?”

  “Yes—there were symbols of some kind.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that; it shows you’re an observant lad. But I bet you weren’t able to decipher them.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Of course not. It’s a writing none of us can read, and I’ll tell you something else—that bench isn’t the only place I’ve seen it. There’s a cliff on the south side of this valley with similar writing all over it—but it’s worn and you might not notice the scribbles if you didn’t know to look. Whoever inscribed those marks lived long ago.

  “But now you know something few in the Valley of Women would guess—that they have neighbors who watch them and once in a while descend into their valley, the way my grandson did when he met you last fall.”

  “Did you meet anyone the time you descended into the valley?” Jon asked.

  Peter seemed reluctant to answer. “Meet anyone? Well that was long in the past. I told you that didn’t I? Still, it led to experiences I’ll never forget. But the sun is hot and I’ve worked enough this morning. Ethel and I can finish our planting this afternoon, or, if not, then tomorrow. We’re early this year. Did you notice that in your valley—that the spring came sooner than usual?”

  Jon shook his head no.

  “Well, perhaps a few miles north or south make a difference. And the mountains block the sun from the Valley of Women. I suspect it’s pretty gloomy there in the winter.”

  “More gloomy than you can imagine.”

  “What are your plans now, Jon?” Ethel asked him.

  “I don’t know. It was so sudden—my leaving, I mean.”

  “You must tell us about it.”

  “But not today,” her father interrupted. “We’ll have time for talk on another occasion.” Then he turned to Jon.

  “You’re planning to stay with us at least until my grandsons return, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’d like to see John.”

  “Of course you would. Everybody likes to see John.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Helen said. “John can be difficult—you know that, Father. But if this boy has come here on John’s account, then he’d best stay until John returns.”

  “I’d like to stay, if you’d allow me,” Jon told her.

  “Allow you? Well, I won’t turn you away, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she told him.

  He wanted to reach out and put his arms around this woman at once so beautiful and so kind. She was John’s mother, but he wanted her to be his mother as well. But instead, he simply looked away and pretended to be interested in the chickens, embarrassed by what he was feeling.

  “You shouldn’t talk that way, Helen,” her sister said. “Jon will think we don’t really want him to stay with us.”

  “Talk what way?” Helen asked.

  “You know—in that way you have that makes it sound like nothing means anything to you. I think you must have learned it from my nephew John. You never talked that way when you were a girl, but you do it all the time now.”

  “Ethel, you goose, this young man knows how to take care of himself; and he certainly doesn’t need my fawning over him. He also knows he’s welcome to stay with us as long as he wants.”

  Chapter Five

  Once he’d cleared up the spelling of his name, Jon fell easily into the routine of the Forest House. The Foresters treated him like family and listened to anything he told them about his past. A few days after his arrival, he burst out with an account of what he’d done to Piers and his sentence of death. They agreed it was unjust, but they showed little surprise at the actions of the Mothers.

  “It’s a strange place,” Ethe
l told him. “You can’t expect them to behave like normal people.”

  He started to tell them about Lyla—no one would think her strange—but ended up saying only that one of the Mothers had helped him escape. He expected questions, but what raised their curiosity wasn’t her name but the knife she’d given him.

  “You’re fortunate to have such a weapon,” Peter said, running his forefinger along the blade. “We Foresters have similar daggers—an emperor presented them to us long ago and we’ve passed them down. But they’re not such fine weapons as yours. I saw a comparable knife once—see how sharp it is. No Bridgetown smith can forge steel like this and no merchants bring such goods to the Bridgetown market. I fear the art has been lost.”

  Ethel, too, admired the knife.

  “That red stone is a ruby,” she told him. “If it were perfect it would be worth a great sum, so it must have some flaw or another. Otherwise it would be in the Emperor’s crown or in the treasury of one of the Eastern potentates you hear legends about. That’s where most of the gems come from—far on the other side of the continent. But even with a flaw a ruby like yours must be valuable. Whoever made the knife lavished as much care on its handle as its blade.”

  Jon hadn’t noticed any flaw, but now, looking closely, he made out a faint line of yellow-green running through the center of the stone, although he wouldn’t have considered it a flaw if Ethel hadn’t used the term.

  Helen examined the knife and returned it to Jon without comment, yet it had given her cause for thought. He sensed she was wondering why someone had given him such a gift. But Jon knew she’d never press him for an explanation. What would his life have been like had he grown up with a mother like Helen?

  The only one who badgered him with questions was Zoë, who insisted on treating him like a kid brother. Jon wished she’d been more like Helen or Ethel. But it was unfair to complain, when, Zoë included, they’d welcomed him so warmly.

  The Forest House was a line of rooms with no internal connection, each opening to front and rear porches. In the large central room, the family cooked, ate, and spent their indoor waking hours; on either side of it, three smaller rooms had been built for sleeping, although now only four served that purpose.

  “If you want a room of your own,” Ethel said, “you can take the far one on the right. We’ve been using it for storage, but it’s mostly empty. The beds haven’t been slept in for a good while, so they’re no doubt musty. But I can give you fresh straw for one of the mattresses. Or, if you’d prefer, you can take one of the empty bunks in the second room down, where my nephews sleep. The six side rooms are identical. Each has eight beds, so you’ll have your pick of five. Peter uses the first right-hand room. It’s the prerogative of the oldest male to have quarters of his own, along with his wife, of course, if he has one.”

  Six times eight was forty-eight. The place had clearly been built for more residents than lived here now—a fact that explained the size of the dining table.

  “It sounds like bunking with Zoë’s brothers would be simplest.”

  In fact, he liked the thought of having a room to himself, but it seemed too much to ask.

  The sleeping room Ethel showed him had been laid out with four beds built into each of the two interior walls, two near the floor and two above. Between the beds, cubbyholes provided storage, and hooks on the end walls were used for other clothing. The details had clearly been thought out. Yet, compared to the boys’ cabins in the Valley of Women, the space was almost intimate. Checking out the five empty beds, Jon chose an upper bunk, laying the blanket Ethel had given him over the mattress and using Lyla’s smaller blanket as a cover. It felt strange sleeping there the first night, but by the third he found himself comfortable in a way he’d never known in the Valley of Women. With the brothers’ return things would change, but for the present it was as good as having his own room, and that gave him enormous pleasure.

  No one suggested it, but he soon volunteered to join the Foresters in their work. At first, he tired quickly, but as the days passed the exertion became easier and he felt his body changing. Being alive? Yes, that was it. Alive for the first time in his life. He gladly accepted Helen’s offer to shear his hair. Seeing it fall to the floor in greasy strands confirmed his escape from the Valley of Women. She also made him a suit of the dusky green cloth he’d first seen on John, while Ethel made him a set of deerskin pants “for rough terrain” and a deerskin belt with a special sheath for his knife.

  “I shot the deer and tanned the hide last summer. I’m glad to have a use for the leather. Now no one will think you haven’t lived here all your life,” she said.

  “I only wish that were true.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Life has twists and turns, Jon. But as far as I’m concerned you can stay with us forever.”

  ▲

  In the evenings, the family sat together either inside or, when the nights were warm, on the porch, looking down at the meadow and the forest below it. Ethel played a musical instrument that Jon had never seen before—three strings on a long wooden box she stroked with a bow—and some nights, coaxed by her sister or father, she’d bring it out, playing slow, haunting melodies while they listened in silence. And once she and Helen sang a song together about the Foresters and the Emperor, alternating the verses between them. There was no music like this in the Valley of Women; it surprised Jon to discover emotions coming to life this way. Zoë alone seemed impervious to their spell. She’d fidget and scan the darkness, as if expecting something. On occasion deer crossed the far end of the meadow or an owl swooped through the darkness—but Jon knew those were not the object of her searching eyes.

  Days, most of Jon’s time was spent with Peter. Sometimes Ethel joined them, but she often went hunting or left to help Helen with her chores. Zoë, too, occasionally stopped by, but she soon wandered off. She was bored—Jon saw that—but it was her problem, not his.

  Working in the garden, Peter remained silent for long stretches, his attention riveted on the task at hand. Jon marveled at his concentration, but when Peter paused for a break, he’d initiate a conversation, out of nowhere it seemed, and, once started, he found it difficult to stop. The man turned out to be interested in everything around them—in plants and trees, in insects and birds and mice and the yellow-and-black-striped snakes that hunted them.

  “A Forester must know the forest and all its creatures,” he told Jon. And when Jon realized that Peter was teaching him the lore a Forester was expected to master, he knew the old man assumed he’d stay with them permanently. Finding a home outside the Valley of Women had been almost too easy.

  “Come,” Peter said one morning. “We’ve worked enough. Let’s take a stroll in the forest. I want to show you one or two things.”

  The stroll turned into hours of exploration, in which Peter tested Jon on his ability to keep track of his way on rocky, uneven ground or through dense growths of trees and underbrush.

  “If you wanted to return to the Forest House from where we’re standing now, which way would you go?” he asked him from time to time, to see if Jon had kept his sense of direction. At first, under the canopy of leaves, Jon had little more to go on than the general slope of the ground. If they’d been walking uphill, it stood to reason the house was below them, but below them, he learned to expect, was the wrong answer.

  “Aren’t you paying attention to the sun?” Peter finally asked. “Don’t you see the direction of the shadows?”

  No, he hadn’t observed the direction of the shadows, although even under the trees they were evident. However, learning to locate the points of the compass was only part of the lesson.

  “You want to move without leaving an indication of your path,” Peter told him. “And yet you also need to know exactly where you’ve been, and that requires learning from the forest. Every tree is unique, you see. But it’s not enough to identify the species; you have to observe how old a tree is and where it’s growing. The blue o
aks here look different from the blue oaks higher up the mountain, and lower down, near the Great River, they differ in other ways—like the shape of the leaves, which grow narrow where there’s less rainfall and fat in the river bottom. An ignorant man might think they were different trees altogether, but they’re not, for even trees of the same species growing side by side can be dissimilar, and there’s always a way to tell them apart. You have to know what to look for, and you have to train your mind to recall everything you see. Not just trees. One rock is different from another as well. One may have red lichen; another, brown. So you need to note the differences and remember them.”

  “That’s a lot to learn,” Jon said.

  “It’s a lot, but you learn it bit by bit and over time the lessons accumulate.

  “And you have to be quiet—as quiet as possible,” the old man continued. “Every sound alters the forest. If you want to hear what’s going on around you, you can’t make noise of your own. We’ll start with walking. Watch me and see if you can do it the same way. It’s a matter of balance. Holding your body right, you can control every step—even when you’re in a hurry. It’s impossible to run without calling attention to yourself, so a Forester must learn to walk fast in silence. And, once you’ve mastered quiet walking, we can go on to the skills a Forester needs to defend himself.”

  “Do you often have to defend yourselves?” Jon asked, remembering that he’d asked John a similar question.

  “Fortunately, no. But it’s always been part of our training—both for women and for men. But we’ll get to that later. It’s best for us to begin with what’s easiest.”

  What’s easiest turned out to be unexpectedly difficult. Peter had a way of moving his body that defied imitation.