The Flight from Kar (The Emperor's Library

by Frederick Kirchhoff

  “It’s time to go,” Jon said. “I’ll lead and the rest of you follow in a straight line. It will be dark in the forest, but if each one keeps directly behind the one ahead of him we’ll make it safely. And try to move as quietly as possible.”

  They went slowly. Even though the sun had begun to rise, it cast little light beneath the thick canopy of leaves. But as the ground rose near the foot of the mountain, the trees thinned and it was easier to see their way. Then they began the climb. Jon moved slowly, recognizing that the men behind him carried heavy loads.

  “Keep low. Whenever you can see the camp below, remember that they can see you.”

  It was midmorning by the time they reached the summit. Here the men sat to rest and shared the small amount of food they’d been able to carry with them.

  “I think this is the place where I should leave you,” Jon told Alf. “The men are safe now. Even if someone tried to follow you, you’d have a head start. My only worry was getting out of the camp without attracting attention and climbing that first bit of exposed rock.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “It’s what I agreed to do, isn’t it? You’ve done your part, and now I have to do mine.”

  “But look at you,” Alf said. “There’s blood on your shirt. You can’t go back to the camp like that.”

  “I can’t very well wash it here.”

  “But we can trade shirts. That’s the good thing about the clothes Tando gave us—one size fits all.”

  When they’d traded shirts, Jon went back to speak to the men.

  “I’ve done my part in bringing you here,” he told them, “and now Alf will lead you the rest of the way to Bent Lake. I must return to the camp to carry out the other part of the Emperor’s mission.”

  “What’s that?” Gavin asked.

  “To make the Chosen afraid to attack the valley.”

  “I thought you said the Emperor wanted to set a trap for them,” Percy pointed out.

  “Yes, but he’s not ready yet. There are more men coming to join him. He wants the Chosen to hold off their attack until they’ve arrived.”

  “But how will they get into the valley?”

  “By the way we came—and possibly by another route that we know of.”

  Some of the men grumbled. The story Jon was telling them today wasn’t the story he’d told yesterday. But what could they do? They couldn’t go back to the Brotherhood. By now, their absence must have been discovered. To return would be to face certain execution.

  Jon had said enough. “Farewell,” he told them and began his descent. Alf watched him in silence until he disappeared beyond a turn in the path.

  ▲

  As he expected, the camp of the Brotherhood was in turmoil, but this time it wasn’t the Brotherhood he wanted to encounter. Staying clear of their tents, Jon traveled north along the edge of the forest until he approached the place where the South Road joined the River Road. A rider passed, going north. Jon waited until he was out of sight; then, crossing the road, he went east, to the other side of the river, and then south, all the while keeping out of sight of the enemy as best he could.

  When he’d reached a point beyond the southeast corner of the Chosen’s encampment, he returned to the river, wading through the stream and then sitting down on the west bank, where he rubbed mud into his clothes and hair and, using the tip of his knife, carefully scratched his arms and legs in several places. Next, he scrubbed the backs of his hands on the gravel to create abrasions and clutched at the mud with his fingers so that it got beneath his nails and then ran his hands through his hair. Having accomplished this transformation, he rose and walked slowly toward the nearest tents, staggering as if he were exhausted.

  Unlike the Brotherhood, the Chosen had sentries posted on all sides of their camp. Seeing Jon approach, the nearest sentry called out, demanding his name and business.

  “Jonas,” he answered. “A refugee from the Valley of Bent Lake.”

  “The Valley of Bent Lake? How did you get here?”

  “I followed the river.”

  “That’s impossible. The river is a string of falls and rapids. You must mean you followed the road. I know it sometimes lies alongside the river.”

  “No, I followed the river. That’s how I ‘scaped. The entrance to the road’s guarded, but not the river.”

  The sentry eyed him warily. “I find your story hard to believe, but it’s not up to me to say whether it’s true or not. I’m taking you to the Commander of this Square. He'll know what to do.”

  It was exactly what Jon had hoped for.

  “You wouldn’t have anythin’ to eat you could spare a fellow?” he asked. “I haven’t had a bite since yesterday mornin’.”

  “No, I don’t have anything for you to eat. And if you’ve come here looking for a free meal, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  The Square Commander was a clean-shaven man in his early thirties. He was sitting at a table eating an apple, which he’d cut into quarters with a small knife. He didn’t look up when they entered. Instead, he cut away the sliver of core from one of the pieces of apple. Only when he finished this operation did he raise his eyes to where the sentry and Jon were standing.

  “Yes?” he asked wearily.

  “I found this man outside the camp,” the sentry explained. “He claims he escaped Bent Lake Valley.”

  The man put down his knife and looked at Jon intently.

  “What kind of story is that? Surely you don’t expect anyone to believe you.”

  “It’s the truth, sir. I came by the river.”

  “That’s the same as he told me,” the sentry said. “And I told him nobody could have done a thing like that.”

  The Square Commander rose slowly from his chair and walked over to Jon.

  “You’re wet and dirty enough, at any rate,” he said. “But anyone can splash in the water and daub mud on his clothes. Tell me, now, just what was it like getting here by way of the river?”

  Jon had thought through his story carefully, and he gave it out detail by detail—how he’d managed to find a toehold in a rock wall along the edge of the water, how he’d let himself carefully down over boulders, how he’d fallen more than once and struggled in the water, losing the bundle that held his extra clothing and food. It was a long and vivid story, and Jon made a point of sounding proud of what he’d accomplished. The officer, initially skeptical, listened with increasing interest.

  “I don’t suppose you could get back up the river the way you came down it?” he asked.

  “No, sir. I don’t think so. It’s easy to slip down but hard to climb up.”

  “But why did you do all this? What made you want to leave the valley? Didn’t you know you’d be caught as soon as you reached the level ground?”

  “That’s what I hoped for, sir—to be caught.”

  The Square Commander was suspicious again. You could tell that from the way his eyes narrowed when he talked.

  “Please tell me why a young man like yourself would want to be caught by an army.”

  “I don’t mean I wanted to be caught. I meant I wanted to ’scape from the other army inside the valley. I wasn’t afraid to be caught by you, sir. I didn’t think you’d do me harm. You’re the Chosen, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course we are the Chosen. And we’re here to fight a war against infidels—we’d be doing it this very hour if something unforeseen hadn’t happened.”

  “What happened, sir?”

  As before, Jon was beginning to enjoy the playacting.

  “Some of our so-called allies deserted us—fifty or more men fled the camp last night. They even killed one of their own comrades who tried to stop them, the murdering swine.”

  “I think I know where they may’ve went.”

  The Square Commander, who’d walked back toward his table, turned abruptly to Jon again.

  “And where might that be?”

  “Up to the valley, sir. I heard people
on the road goin’ up to the valley. On the way to Bent Lake I thought they were. I was down by the water, so they couldn’t see me—I crouched real low like, but I could see their heads—men wearin’ helmets.”

  “Yes, men wearing helmets. And they took the road into the valley without anyone stopping them. It’s incredible to me that no one saw them leave the camp. There’ll be hell to pay for this, believe me. Hell to pay.

  “Come with me. There’s someone else who needs to hear your story.”

  The Square Commander led Jon to the first of the three large tents in the center of the camp. Here, taken before the Commander of the Southern Army, he was requested to repeat his account of how he’d gotten there and what he’d seen on the way. The Commander listened intently, interrupting with no questions.

  “What he says about the renegades sounds believable,” he said to the Square Commander. “They had to have gone somewhere, but who’d have thought they’d desert to the enemy?”

  “I never trusted them, never from the very first.”

  “You never trust anyone, Narvak. That’s why you’re only a Square Commander, while I’m your superior. It’s all a matter of knowing how to judge people and being confident about your own judgment. But the one piece of this fellow’s story I don’t understand is why he was running away in the first place. There’s nobody at Bent Lake to run away from but a bunch of lesbos and outcasts.”

  “There’s the Emperor, sir,” Jon said in his most deferential manner.

  “The Emperor?”

  “You never said anything about the Emperor,” Narvak said angrily, fearing that his reputation as an interrogator was threatened.

  “What nonsense is this?” the Commander asked.

  So now Jon told them the other part of his story—the same that he’d told Gavin and Percy—about the Emperor’s ruse and how he’d managed to send an army to the South and eventually joined it, while the Chosen had been fooled into thinking him dead.

  The Commander folded his arms and looked at him sternly.

  “You’re telling me that the Emperor is still alive and living on the other side of that mountain and has an army with him?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s what I’m sayin’. And he ‘spects everyone to serve him and his army. He ‘spected me to cook and wash dishes for ’em, while they ate the food they’d stolen from my father’s farm. We came to the valley years ago—when I was a little boy—because my father and mother wanted to get away from the Emperor’s taxes. But now he’s come and it’s worse than it was before. They beat my father when he tried to keep what was his own. The beat him right in the middle of the village where all his friends could see it happenin’. It was a terrible disgrace. That’s when I knew I had to get away.”

  The Commander turned to Narvak. “I could credit the first part, but this business about the Emperor is hard to believe.”

  “But it makes a kind of sense.”

  “Do you think so? You may be right. There’s a way in which it makes sense—it fits together and explains why the men might have deserted. But it doesn’t make sense if you try to imagine the Emperor sending an army all the way down to this godforsaken place without anybody noticing it.”

  “There may be other ways to travel besides the River Road. The troops they wouldn’t let into Bridgetown last year found an old road on the other side of the river that none of us had ever heard of. The fact is, nobody knows very much about the Southland. And we do know that there’ve been a lots of people on the road recently.”

  The Commander returned to questioning Jon.

  “How large is this army of the Emperor’s?”

  This seemed a good time to exaggerate.

  “It’s hard to say. Two thousand, maybe three thousand men. I was never much good at countin’ big numbers.”

  “And what are these two or maybe three thousand men doing?”

  “They’re waitin’ for you to come into the valley. At least that’s what I heard. They want to trick you into comin’ to a place where they’ll have you surrounded on all sides.”

  The Commander began walking back and forth.

  “I find what this fellow is telling us incredible, but at the same time, if it’s the truth, then it changes everything. If we go in, and he’s right . . . I think I need to sleep on this news.”

  He called out to a man who had been standing at the opening of his tent.

  “Get word out to the other Square Commanders that the attack planned for tomorrow is put off a day, and that they should meet with me first thing tomorrow morning. And see that this man is held in strict custody.”

  The man at the opening disappeared. Then, a few moments later, two guards came and led Jon to another tent where one of them remained with him. When it grew dark, a second guard replaced the first one and a servant brought Jon a plate of food. After he’d eaten, he lay down on a blanket, and thought through the events of the day. In time he became drowsy, but just as he was about to fall asleep, the Commander appeared, along with another man, whom Jon hadn’t seen before, and a third person, who was holding a lamp and stood behind the other two.

  “I want to go over your story one more time,” the Commander told Jon.

  “Yes, sir. And it’s all true, every word of it. I’d never lie about somethin’ as important as that—not to the Commander of the Chosen.”

  Jon told him the story and then answered a barrage of questions from the Commander and the other man.

  “What does the Emperor look like?” they asked him on two separate occasions, and Jon described the Emperor in precise detail, giving his approximate age and even the way he had of blinking when he was excited, and he stressed the Emperor’s interest in books. He was sure neither of these men had ever seen the Emperor, but they could have heard rumors about him—particularly the part about his being a bookworm. Jon sensed very clearly their worry and confusion. They had no idea whether he was telling the truth, but the only way they could imagine extricating themselves from this quandary was by asking more questions. He almost felt sorry for them.

  Naturally, they wanted to know everything he could tell them about the Emperor’s army and the plan to ambush them. Jon described the entrance to the valley in detail, but invented a hill where there wasn’t one in order to make his story more plausible. He doubted they’d be able to catch him on that one. The Brotherhood, since they made regular trips to Bent Lake, might recognize the falsehood, but not the Chosen, and, under the circumstances, they were unlikely to ask the Brotherhood for advice, much less credit what they said.

  The three men finally left Jon alone with his guard, and Jon fell into a deep sleep. It was well past dawn when he awoke the next morning. He thought he remembered having had a dream about Saash, but what was in the dream was unclear. Someone had left a chunk of bread and a tin cup of water for his breakfast. There was still a guard, but not one of the two who’d been there yesterday. He ate the bread and drank the water. It must be from the river, he thought—water that once flowed down from the mountains into the Valley of Women.

  Then he heard voices. It was the man who’d held the lamp last night, along with two soldiers. Whoever he was, he seemed surprisingly happy.

  “Take him to wash himself,” the man said to one of the soldiers, speaking in a brisk tone of command. “And trim his fingernails—that’s the only way you’re going to get the dirt out from under them. And see to it that he has better clothes—something suitable for travel—and a change of clothes to wear when those get dirty. He’ll have to be presentable. And be quick about it. We have no time to lose.”

  Then he turned to Jon.

  “You have a long trip in store for you, young man. A journey of many days. Do you know how to ride a horse?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you’ll have to learn.”

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “There’s no reason you shouldn’t know. We’re going to Kar. The Commander of the Southern Army has decided to send you to see
the High Commander and tell him your story about the Emperor.”

  “To Kar?”

  “It’s a long way to the North—farther, I’d wager, than you’ve ever imagined you’d go in your entire life.”

  That explained why the man was happy. He’d had been assigned the task of taking Jon to Kar and the thought of this journey filled him with pleasure. Jon, too, was pleased. If he had to go to Kar, he liked the thought of going with this man whose feelings were so transparent. Such a person could be no real threat, and he might be able to learn much in his company. But he’d have to stop playing the yokel. It had worked with the Commander, but it wouldn’t work with this man, for whom appearance was everything.

  So Jon had accomplished his purpose—the Chosen now believed at least in the possibility of the Emperor’s presence at Bent Lake. He’d been uncertain what he would do once his mission was accomplished. He’d realized that, even if he’d wanted to, he might find it difficult to return to the two valleys, and if he left the camp on his own, the Chosen would question the truth of his story. But now the Chosen themselves were taking him to Kar. What happened when he got there was another matter. However, buoyed by success, he looked forward to the challenge.

  Maps

  Further Reading

  Curious about what happens next? The Tritargon traces the separate, very different, lives of all four major characters—Jon, Zoë, Klei, and Alf—in the months following The Flight from Kar.