The Cellar Beneath the Cellar (Bell Mountain)

by Lee Duigon

  Twelve chieftains sat on stools—or rather, twelve chieftains and a small boy dressed up as a chieftain with a gold chain around his neck and feathers in his hair. But Helki ignored them all, the moment he clapped eyes on someone else.

  “Obst!” he cried, so surprised, he almost dropped his staff. “Well, I’ll be burned!” And he let loose a great bellow of a laugh. “Whoever would have thought you were a man of miracles!”

  Obst rose up from his stool among the chieftains. He’d been expecting Latt Squint-eye. To see Helki in Latt’s place left the old man speechless.

  “Aren’t you going to say you’re glad to see me?” Helki said. “By thunder, I’m glad to see you!”

  “Teacher, do you know this man?” demanded a Wallekki chief.

  “Know him? My chieftains, God is good to us beyond my hopes!” The old man’s eyes filled with tears. He crossed over to Helki and threw his arms around his neck, weeping for joy. Helki patted his back and said, “There, there.” The chieftains waited patiently until Obst collected himself. At last he released Helki and turned back to them.

  “Yes, warlords, I know this man,” he said. “This is Helki the Rod—my friend, and the strongest and most valiant man in all of Lintum Forest.”

  “This is our teacher,” Hlah said; but Helki had already guessed that.

  “What are you doing here, Obst? What happened to those two kids who were with you? I’ve never been so surprised to see anybody, not in all my life.”

  “It’s a long, long story,” Obst said.

  “I like a good story,” said the Abnak chieftain. That was Spider, Hlah’s father.

  But he would have to wait for the story. They all would, because of a distraction.

  Jandra slipped loose from Abgayle, and, with her bird cradled in her arms and glaring red-eyed at everyone else in the tent, she was suddenly walking among the Heathen chiefs. Helki couldn’t see her face, but he could see the chieftains’ faces. They were amazed.

  The whole crowd in the tent fell silent. Abgayle would have rushed after Jandra, but Helki caught her arm. She must have had some experience of Jandra’s spells; she stayed where Helki held her.

  Jandra walked straight up to the boy chieftain and stood before him. Obst cast a wild glance at Helki, but Helki kept him quiet with a look.

  The bird hopped out of Jandra’s arms, spread its clawed wings, and uttered a series of sharp, ringing barks. Its feathers rattled like mail. Then Jandra spoke:

  “I shall give you the throne of Ozias, which I have promised to Ozias, my servant. He shall tread down all his enemies. Have I not held him by the hand, for all his days? Shall I not punish them that persecute him?

  “Their houses shall be made desolate, but Ozias’ house shall I exalt. I shake the earth, but Ozias’ throne shall be established forever.”

  Jandra kissed the boy softly on the lips while he sat frozen in astonishment. Without another word, she turned from him and walked back to Helki. Her face was the face of a child who sleeps with her eyes open, seeing nothing. But then her eyelids fell shut, and Abgayle just caught her before she could fall. Helki helped her.

  “She’s asleep!” Abgayle said.

  “Yes. That’s what usually happens.”

  But the chieftains all stared at the boy. He looked back at them helplessly.

  “What was all that?” demanded the Wallekki chief.

  “Something that needs to be considered very deeply, my lords,” said Obst. “Very deeply indeed—for God is speaking to us, here and now.” And those fierce and warlike men were all afraid.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Old City

  Long before they got there, Jack and Ellayne could see the ruins of the Old City. It was a much bigger place than the present city of Obann, Martis said.

  “It’s hard to believe ordinary people ever lived there,” he said. “I was never in it but I wanted to be out of it as soon as possible.”

  “If it scared you, what’ll it do to us?” Ellayne said.

  They had the road practically to themselves. No one went to the Old City, and the road was in very poor repair. They would have been bumped sick if they’d been riding in a cart. There weren’t any more farms or villages to be seen, although the gently rolling countryside seemed fertile enough.

  Wherever the road climbed to the top of a rise, they could see the dark brown mass of ruins hunkered below the silver band of the river. It wasn’t like the ruined cities of the plains, which anyone would take for hills. Here you could still see the outlines and remnants of colossal buildings.

  “What happened to it?” Jack wondered.

  “Who knows?” Martis said. “God destroyed it, say the Commentaries; but they don’t say how. It was built on the site of the first city, which the Heathen sacked and burned. Many of its buildings were of stone with steel skeletons. No one knows how to build things like that anymore. It’s all we can do to turn out enough steel blades and spearheads for the army. Lord Reesh would dearly love to know the secrets of the Empire; but they’ve eluded him.”

  “We were in an ancient tunnel in one of the mounds,” Ellayne said. “It was all full of dead people’s bones!” she shuddered.

  “There’s nothing down there that will hurt us,” Martis said. It wasn’t altogether true.

  The site wasn’t as close as it looked. For two more days they traveled toward it. Soon they could see the New City on the north bank of the river and the hulking obstacles in the water that were all that remained of a gigantic bridge. The whole place might have been built and inhabited by giants, Ellayne thought. There were a few giants in the stories of Abombalbap.

  “Look how beautiful it is—the New City,” she said. It had domes and towers, many of which glinted in the sun, and mighty walls. “I wish we were going there instead.”

  “It is a lot littler, though,” Jack said. It was the greatest of all cities between the mountains and the sea, but four or five of them would have fit comfortably inside the ruins. It was distressing to think of that, somehow.

  One more stretch of decayed road, just a few miles downhill, and they’d be among the ruins.

  “It’s so big!” Jack said. “How are we ever going to find the right cellar? There must be a thousand places to look.”

  “To say nothing of our ‘finding what is lost,’ when we don’t even know what it is,” Ellayne said.

  “It’s a missing book of Scripture: that’s what I think,” Martis said. “And the best place to start would be the ruins of the Temple.”

  “Do you know where, in all that jumble, the ancient Temple was?” Jack asked.

  “Yes—that I do know,” Martis said. “Come on, let’s go. We can be there before the sun sets.”

  Thanks to teams of swift relay riders, the High Council got war news promptly. But the news was not good. Lord Gwyll summoned his colleagues to come secretly, one at a time, to his own townhouse. He didn’t want anyone to know they were meeting.

  “It’s very bad news,” he said, when they were all assembled in his parlor. “Silvertown has been taken, and burned to the ground.”

  “I thought the Heathen withdrew from Silvertown!” cried Lord Davensay, Commerce.

  “This was another army, a bigger one. They had good equipment: armored rams to break the gates, plenty of ladders to keep the defenders busy on the walls—even some primitive engines to hurl stones. Not as good as our own catapults, but good enough. Most of the people are either dead or carried off to slavery.”

  Gwyll paused. He’d been chewing on his beard, and it stood out at odd angles. The other councilors waited for him to continue.

  “We have been invaded by four main armies. South of Lintum Forest—we didn’t expect anything from that direction—there is a Heathen host marching toward Caryllick. We have five thousand men on the way to give battle, in addition to four or five hundred already there.

  “Then there’s this big army coming down from Silvertown. We have no single force strong enough to meet it head-o
n.

  “There was a third army that came down from the north—the one that attacked the town of Ninneburky, but marched away after one unsuccessful and poorly coordinated assault. This army has been destroyed—but not by us.

  “For reasons we’ve been unable to discover, the northern army attacked the first Heathen army—the one that bypassed Silvertown—on the plain, north of Lintum Forest. Those Heathen annihilated that northern army.”

  “If they’re destroying one another, that’s good news,” said Lord Chutt, Taxes and Revenue.

  “Yes, of course it is. But not knowing why they fought among themselves, we can’t count on them doing it again,” Gwyll said.

  “Meanwhile, where are the rest of our armies?” asked the governor-general.

  “In addition to the five thousand on their way to Caryllick, I’ve positioned another five thousand at Cardigal and five thousand more in newly constructed forts along the river.”

  “Do we want them spread out like that?”

  “It’s a defensive strategy, Lord Ruffin—the forts are close enough to reinforce one another,” Gwyll said. “What else would you have me do? If the opportunity presents itself, these forces will attack. Otherwise, the orders are to defend the fortified places and let the Heathen bleed away their strength trying to take them.”

  Judge Tombo sighed. “We’re going to have our hands full here in Obann, once the news of Silvertown gets out. How many men have you held back to defend our city, Lord Gwyll?”

  “Enough, my lord—seven thousand, fully trained and equipped. And we can get more if we need them. But Obann’s walls are not to be taken by any power the Heathen can command, and the city is extremely well provisioned. If it ever comes to a siege, they’ll starve before we do.”

  Throughout the discussion Lord Reesh said nothing. Eventually the governor-general noticed it and bade him speak.

  “We’ve all heard rumors that the Heathen have raised up to themselves some new false god, in whose service they invade us. How does the Temple plan to heighten the valor of our people, my lord First Prester? Have you and Judge Tombo found a means to silence the false prophets in our streets—the ones who proclaim the end of the world?”

  Reesh shrugged slightly. “We preach this war as God’s war, and a holy war. It will take some time before we can see the effects of this.”

  “I congratulate you on your discovery of long-lost Scripture so apt to that purpose!”

  So Ruffin saw through that, Reesh thought. It was to be expected. But he doubted Lord Gwyll had seen so deeply. Gwyll believed in God. The governor-general ought to be careful not to disillusion him.

  “We must all keep our tempers, sir,” Reesh said. “Our city is impregnable; so should our hearts be, too.

  “Give the presters time to preach, and the people time to hear them. Meanwhile, my agents are learning all they can about the state of affairs beyond the mountains.

  “We have heard the Heathen’s new false god is a man, who lives somewhere out beyond the lakes. He must be an extraordinary man. Give us time to find out more about him. It may be he has a weakness.”

  Late in the afternoon, Jack, Ellayne, and Martis entered the Old City, first built a thousand years or more before Ozias’ time. A heathen people lived there first, the Kassites. The tribes that would someday become the nation of Obann captured it and made it their city and the seat of their kings. The mightiest of them, Ezkasaiah the Wise, first built the Temple there. And on the ruins of his city an even greater city grew, the greatest city that had ever been.

  The road, the little bit of it that still peeked out from tufts of hard grey grass, led right into it. Even broken by the wrath of God, and battered by a thousand years of weather, pieces of great buildings soared high over the travelers’ heads like cliffs. Broken stone lay everywhere in heaps and hills, enough to make a good-sized mountain. Leathery vines ran down like waterfalls from the tops of roofless structures, and here and there, unseen doves cooed mournfully.

  “It’s bigger than anything else in the world!” Jack cried—and then lowered his voice because he did not like the echoes. “It must be bigger than all the other cities put together.”

  “It very likely was,” said Martis. “This was the heart of the Empire. When it beat, they felt it all the way out to the Great Lakes and beyond. There’s enough stone piled here to build several dozen cities, and very strong walls to protect them.”

  “I don’t like it!” Ellayne said. “There’s bad magic in it.” She was thinking of the stories of Abombalbap, replete with sorcerers and shape-shifters, witches, elves, and goblins.

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” Jack said, and he hoped he was right.

  “It won’t be long before sundown,” Martis said. “We’d better find a comfortable place to camp. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the Temple.”

  “Do you believe in magic, Martis?” Ellayne asked.

  “I never gave much thought to it. Lord Reesh said the men of the Empire could do things that people nowadays would call magic; but he also says that we could do them, too, if only we knew how. It wasn’t magic, he said. Only knowledge—and from knowledge, power.”

  “It doesn’t look like it did them much good,” Jack said.

  From his perch on Ellayne’s shoulder, Wytt launched into a muted string of yips and chitterings.

  “There are Omah here—I guess he can smell them,” Jack said. “But he doesn’t like this place. He’s warning us to be careful.”

  “He does well to warn us,” Martis said. “I’ve heard of pits suddenly opening in the streets and belching out clouds of poison air. And I saw an ancient structure collapse, once, for no apparent reason but extreme old age. We will indeed be careful.”

  They found a spot sheltered by a bit of broken wall that was crowned by a twisted tree, dead and lifeless, but still rooted in the weathered stone. Plentiful vines, which Martis cut with difficulty, provided inexhaustible fuel for their fire. When the sun went down and darkness fell, owls called to one another and bats fluttered overhead, chirping. Ellayne kept her hat on.

  “What if someone sees our fire?” Jack asked.

  “No one would be fool enough to try to move around in this place by night,” Martis said. “We’re perfectly safe. For us, this may be the safest place in all Obann.”

  CHAPTER 27

  How the Heathen Got a King

  Ryons used to be afraid, most of the time: afraid his master would beat him, or that the other slave-children would gang up on him, or that he would be sold into some barbarous country where even worse would happen to him. He learned to keep to himself and do as he was told, and he became the kind of boy to whom people paid no attention. His fears subsided.

  But then he met Obst, and he began to speak up whenever the spirit moved him, and these past few days had been by far the best days of his life. When he was seated among the chieftains, with feathers in his hair and a golden chain around his neck, he would not have believed life could get any better. Only a very great God could have done such things for him; and so he believed in Obst’s God, who’d saved him from the mardar.

  But now he was afraid again.

  The chieftains sent all of the warriors and subchiefs out of the tent so they could closely question Obst and the big westman with the staff. The woman stayed, too, holding the sleeping girl in her arms; and some kind of monster with both teeth and feathers stood guard over her.

  They all had their eyes on Ryons because it was he to whom the little girl had spoken. He didn’t think it would take much for Shaffur to order him burned: the Wallekki lived in mortal fear of witches. It didn’t seem to matter that there weren’t any.

  Obst tried to explain.

  “King Ozias was the last anointed king of Obann. He lived two thousand years ago. After usurpers drove him from the throne, your ancestors, warlords, burned his city to the ground. Ozias himself fled into exile, no one knows where. But on his way, he climbed Mount Yul and erected a bell on its summit.
That’s how it came to be called Bell Mountain. I was with the two children who climbed the mountain and rang the bell—the bell that Ozias believed God would hear, if someone rang it.

  “But Ozias was more than just a king. God loved him and blessed him. Ozias wrote most of the Sacred Songs that are included in our holy books. We believe God inspired him to write them; that’s why they’re sacred to us. We also believe, because various prophets said so, that God promised Ozias that his kingdom would endure forever: that if it ever departed, it would be restored again. That it might sleep, but would never die.”

  “But this Ozias,” Szugetai said, “did he not die? Or did he become a god and live forever?”

  “Certainly he died! No man can become a god,” Obst said.

  “And you say God used this girl to speak to us—like the Great Man spoke to us through the mardar?”

  Obst shuddered. “No, no—please! The Great Man is only a man, and a very wicked one. But if we could actually hear the voice of God, it would be too much for us. No one has ever seen God; only a chosen few have heard Him. God would choose a little child like this so that we would know that it was really Him speaking to us, and not some clever trickery. This girl is much too young to make up the kind of things she said, or even to learn them by heart. I knew it was prophecy as soon as I heard her.”

  “But she spoke to this boy!” Shaffur said. “Why? Who is he, that God should speak to him?”

  I’m nobody at all, Ryons thought. Besides, he hadn’t understood a word the girl said.

  “Who was your father, Ryons?” Obst asked, gently.

  “I don’t know. I hardly knew my mother. My master sold her away when I was little.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know that, either. I don’t know anything.”

  Obst turned to Helki. “What can you tell us about this girl?”

  “Not much,” the big man said. “I found her wandering the plain, all alone, and I had to take care of her. I reckon her ma and pa were settlers in the hills, and something happened to them. So I took her with me, back to the forest.