The Woven End Page 19

  "Do you deny that you feel your behavior is justified?"

  "I do not feel justified. I am right, in that there truly are a people called the çephelars who are coming to destroy us. As for the fire, I am not justified, nor am I entirely culpable. The… Great Soul—"

  "You hesitate when you say that. Why?”

  "I think it's the Great Soul. It says it is, and many believe it is, but I have my doubts."

  "You have done all of this on a doubtful premise?"

  "Apar, let me finish, please. The Great Soul instructed me on what to do, and I did it, not knowing that it would end in such a manner. The rain I did without the Great Soul's instruction. I did it to send the people home to consider my words and escape my humiliation. In that, I am not justified."

  "But you feel justified that you, the prince of the Triland, have done something that…that I cannot understand, much less many of the people understand, all because you gave control to another soul than your own? I hardly believe the nonsense, but… but people don't just breathe fire, so I have to believe that there is some truth to what you say. Nevertheless, if you are not in command of your own person, what is keeping others from giving themselves over to this same power? It's a dangerous art if one can breathe fire and rob sight. Where are the limits?

  “Do you expect a king, once a danger is recognized in his kingdom, to just allow it to exist? If anything is possible, and there is no way to regulate it, can you expect that of me? Nay! The people may believe as they wish, but if one spirit is altered by the hands of a soul in your precious Sálverøld, I will see to it that the danger is eliminated.”

  "But—"

  "Nay!" He shouted, turning his back to Nat. "I will hear no other arguments. My reasoning is sound and is the only sound reasoning I am liable to hear in this room at the present moment. Get out of my sight. I do not wish to see you until I send for you."

  Nat stood, bowed—though Persenimos did not see it—and left.

  #

  The people of the Trilands each had their own views on the prince's behavior. Some, the inordinate skeptics, believed nothing. It was either a rumor that the prince stood on the vegetable cart, an imposter, or it was all a trick.

  Some people neither believed nor disbelieved. These did not care for anything except that they and their families were comfortable. They disregarded the story altogether, being certain that, be it an insane prince or true foreign invaders, the king would have it all in hand.

  However, an exceeding large number believed. They were considered dupes to the skeptics, and extremists to the comfortable, but both the skeptic and the comfortable were fools to the believers.

  The believers prepared for the çephelars. They built safety shelters underground and sharpened the weapons they had. They bombarded the palace with letters, and a great crowd assembled at regular hours, outside of the palace gates, to demand the truth and require action of the king.

  No action was taken. The long held view that the Triland was alone would prevail over the false prophecies of the now-illicit art and the mad prince.

  The king would not be made a fool by preparing a mass of men to fight the phantom of a disturbed mind. Nay. They would wait—he was determined—and when the time foretold had passed, there would be no one at the palace gates any longer, and business would resume.

  Some advisors suggested that, at the very least, he prepare the palace guard with repairs to their armor and a more intense training regimen until the three week mark passed.

  Persenimos refused. The days went by in royal silence and common uproar.

  #

  Three Star rises remained before the terrible moment. Many Trilanders would pass the Star rises standing on the shore, waiting.

  A group of four boatmen held their post at the docks of Sathas through the Star fall. It was unusual for Sathas to be so silent at this time.

  Two of the boatmen knew and liked each other well. They were neighbors, and their wives were friends. They chatted to pass the time.

  A new boatman stood, leaning against the old post where his shiny, untried boat was tied with a stiff, clean rope. His arms folded, he cast a frequent and hopeful eye toward the fourth boatman. He was not aware, however, that most boatmen were not friendly. The two fellows to his right were an anomaly that he need not ever hope to reproduce.

  Still, the new boater persisted in his eyeball harassment of the fourth boatman. The fourth boatman looked with a spyglass over the star water dyed white by the full moon.

  The fourth boatman didn't look like someone the new boatman would normally seek out in friendship. He looked rather rough, underpaid, and grim. Not his kind of person at all.

  At last, he could stand it no longer.

  The new boatman ventured out, "I'm Lameros son of Easelyus. Who are you?"

  "Hm?" The fourth boatman uttered a disinterested grunt of inquiry, his shoulders rising as he did so.

  "Who are you?" Lameros repeated.

  The fourth boatman continued to look out through his spyglass as he answered, "Brádach son of Sannindi."

  "Oh, that's quite a low born name all around, isn't it?" Lameros said, laughing a little. "But, I like it. It's very much a boatman's name. Do you suppose my name is too ostentatious? Oughtn't I to change it for the vocation?"

  "By the stars, I was right… Aye," mumbled Brádach. He collapsed his spyglass and took his hat off the post to put it on his head.

  "Do you suppose Unguh is too affectatious? It's…Well, it's so far in the opposite direction that it might be thought to be so. Don't you think? I would have to change my whole manner to fit it, and I detest affectation. I don't think that I could manage it without seeming affected. Unguh son of—oh, stars fall upon me—I'd have to change my apar's name, too. Unguh son of—"

  Brádach looked at him, annoyed."I think your real name is suitable for you, and it will help your patrons to have mercy on those weak arms of yours. I'll be going now," Brádach rumbled.

  "Weak—weak arms! I exercise on a regular basis, and I can throw a fifteen weight spear. Hardly weak…”

  But Brádach didn't stop.

  #

  The queen amar, dressed against the cool Star fall in a hooded cloak, stood at the edge of a cliff on the eastern coast of Tici. Below her, the waves of the star water crashed against the rocks. Above her, a clear full moon hovered in its corona with its counterpart stars. She stood motionless in body, but her red soul flew to the place she knew they would be. She flew hard and fast until the ships came into view. She dare not come too close, or she might draw the attention of the slytes who would alert their çephelars to a hostile observer.

  The wood of the ships and the fiber of the sails were barely visible through the quivering veil of Slytian presence. In the midst of it all, the souls of the çephelars shimmered here and there on board the ship like colored flames on a patch of moonless Star fall.

  “And that fool of a son won't do anything. Not that I expect him to be compliant, but if there is no defense we shall, almost entirely, be destroyed.”

  She turned back and made haste to rejoin her body. Her eyes lit up with the presence of a soul. She smiled.

  “At least one hundred will feel my teeth before I retreat."

  #

  He had not bothered with a robe, but sat in his gown, bare foot in the chill of early Star rise. Cova scribbled furiously at paper, beads of sweat along his hairline dripped only to the last rumple on his fretting, knitted brow.

  A knock at the door startled him.

  "Enter," he said, not looking up.

  The servant, half asleep, stood in the doorway. "I don't know how long, but they certainly aren't far, sir," the tired servant announced.

  "I wish to send a message to the king, now that we have proof. Here." He handed the paper to the servant. "There is no rush, but there is no good reason to be slow about it either. Thank you.

  The servant tucked the letter into his satchel and took to the mission on swift feet.
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br />   Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ob-Kro stood at the prow of the first ship in the fleet from the east, bare foot and sure. His wide, wild, russet face bore a great scar across it. His dense black eyebrows twitched up and down as he traced thickly ringed fingers along the convex of the spinning clay bowl called a çephel. The constant gritting sound of the spinning clay came to an abrupt stop and then began again.

  The moonlight shone blue on the bare chested man, tattooed from face to foot. He covered his legs with sobish-skin pants. His straight black hair, hanging to his knees, shimmered with tiny spur-like blades as it moved with the current of the wind. His back was scarred and hard.

  Ob-Kro's sister, La-Tom, dressed in the same sobish-skin pants, approached. She wore sobish skin around her chest. Her face was just as wide, her body just as marked, but her features more feminine. Her fingers were well-ringed just as Ob-Kro's, though hers were set with rocks, pieces of metal, and glass.

  Except for their station, these two çephelars were not unlike other çephelars. Their appearance and clothing varied little from person to person, adorned to kill being the key to çephelar fashion.

  "Send the signal," Ob-Kro muttered.

  La-Tom nodded her head, and with large, lithe steps, obeyed. Within moments a lantern swung side to side at the stern of the ship, followed by a response from nine others behind them.

  Each ship set to make ready for battle. On this foremost ship, the çephelars placed large bone collars about the necks of enormous hairy creatures. The wiggly snouted creatures looked on their masters with no little animosity in their tiny eyes, sunken in their great furred heads. Long claws laced webbed paws the size of a man's skull. They walked on all fours unless they were angry, which some of them were at the moment. One of the furry black creatures stood on its hind legs and swiped at its master with its colossal paw, uttering a thick, dull sort of roar as it did so. The çephelar cursed in Slytian and spun about to chop the creature in the neck with a swift motion of the hand, followed by a slashing of the creature's face with his bladed hair. The creature coughed, screamed, and groaned in pain as blood dripped from its wiggling black snout and face. Properly castigated, he wouldn't rise up to his master again. At least not today.

  Aside from their noisy creatures, each crew observed total silence. No one celebrated the sight of land, although they had been on a very long journey. They said everything about the journey that needed to be said before they ever left their nameless land. Therefore, the silent signal of a swinging lantern was the only necessary communication.

  La-Tom returned to Ob-Kro's side.

  "There. Just a single island. Small thing it is." Ob-Kro pointed.

  "The slytes have assured you that the others are at equal distance from their assigned islands?" La-Tom asked.

  "Yes."

  The direction and manner of the bare foot crew behind them indicated a shift in purpose.

  Woosh. Thud. Woosh, Thud.

  They threw ropes over the flanks of the ship.

  "Such brazen arrogance," La-Tom whispered. "I cannot believe that a people who know how to enter the Sálverøld, rather than merely communicate with it, would fight against the Great Soul."

  "The Great Soul’s beauty should inspire all to obedience," he replied.

  "Why does it not?"

  "Because they want to live forever, and no beauty they see, feel or hear will ever change that. Some are just foolish enough to challenge the inevitable death. The Great Soul abides by its order to its own hurt, in order that the ultimate pleasure will be attained by all."

  "And that is why we exist," she said, lifting her smooth wildflower mead face to the stars. "We are…" she tried to think of an appropriate word.

  "The Great Soul's vengeance," he laughed and proceeded loudly, "What does the Great Soul care if many die now? We shall all die later! The end is ordained," he spoke quietly again. "And if the Great Soul ordained it, then it will be."

  Ob-Kro's crew and their beasts assembled on the deck behind him. They were no longer dressed, but naked, except for sobish-skin loin cloths and women's tops. They stood at the ready, waiting for Ob-Kro's orders.

  The çephel spun, the grit of its clay against the wood surface of the ship arrested the captain's attention. Ob-Kro turned to it and placed his hand into its belly. After several seconds, his head jerked up and he threw his fist into the air and cried out, "If you live you will yet die!”

  The crew cried out in return, "If you live you will yet die!"

  With that, the crew turned to the ropes, crawled down to the water, and silently slipped in. Their beastly counterparts followed them with surprising agility for their clumsy appearance. Like a spearhead, the creatures dove into the sea with very little splash and swam beneath the water. Flaps of skin protected their nostrils from inhaling water. They surfaced to breathe occasionally, then dipped back into the water.

  The creatures preceded their masters on the water's edge, somewhere far from the ship in a sparsely populated, wooded area. Once the çephelars reached the banks of Tici, they mounted their creatures and galloped toward Sathas.

  #

  The ship stopped, but nothing seemed to happen. Nothing unanimously accepted, that is. It was hard to see at such a distance, and even harder to see in the Star fall, with or without a spyglass. A few thought they saw dark figures leaping from the ship, but the rumor didn't take hold of the little army's collective mind. These were the fanatics who stood waiting, watching, and slowly driving themselves mad over the last few Star rises—just in case the enemy arrived early.

  They stood like fools with metal pots on their heads and carving knives in hand. A few were wealthy enough to have been trained in the art of spearing, but even fewer possessed and carried the spears that would make their skill useful. The crowd, almost devoid of women, stood wide eyed, silent and ridiculous. One woman stood among them with her husband. Talua had several children, one of whom was old enough to supervise the others. She would be star-fallen if she let her husband and the men go fight alone. She was strong, she was angry, she was concerned, and she was going to fight.

  The hooves of a furiously ridden trotter broke the tense silence. Every eye and every weapon turned from the ship toward the sound. A man on a very fine trotter stood in the faint light of the street lanterns.

  "This is all of the brave men of Tici? Surely, not!" The man said in a clear, loud voice. Ah, they knew that voice very well. A quiet murmur of relief washed over the group when the rider's identity became clear.

  The king received word of the ship from Cova and conceded, at last, to the necessity of believing his son. The king issued no orders for the common people of the Triland to assemble, but ordered that the royal guard of the governors' households prepare themselves for the foreign visitation.

  Here, the king saw mostly businessmen and their sons. Where were the guards from Atenos' household? The king led the palace guard, which fast approached, numbering about one hundred. If that was all they could expect for the defense of Tici, they would be in great trouble.

  Fifty trotters came from the north.

  The king spoke with the captain of Atenos' guard and turned to address the small mass of people.

  "We have lived in peace because we have lived in ignorance. In my reign I ought not to have allowed the ideas of my predecessors, or even the popular opinion, to keep me from exploring our world and knowing what we might someday face. It is easier to believe what is convenient and hope for the best. Thus, I have failed you," He shouted. "Now, faced with a very real threat, I allowed my skeptic's mind to catch us unawares.

  "I wish for every man to go and be the army of his own home. If you have women and children, I order you to return to them and fight for your own family above all and, if it is possible, to fight for your neighbors. If you have not a family and you know a widow or an elder, then it is for them you must be an army. Go. You will fight like men, but, by the stars, let us hope it is in peace that we receive our guests. Go."


  The motley mass of pan headed fanatics looked at one another and whispered, muttered or fidgeted in silent distress.

  "Who do you think you are?" Shouted one. "You didn't train us, prepare us, or even attempt to assemble a force to fight. A simple apology and nice little speech is going to compel us to follow your orders? As far as I'm concerned, you aren't my king. I'm my own king, thank you."

  There was a small murmur of assent from somewhere in the crowd, but a gasp from another.

  "He's the king," A voice boomed. "And none of you can tell me that you wouldn't have done the same if you had to weigh every decision so heavily for the sake of preserving your reputation among the likes of skovel dung like you!

  "We don't have time to argue with the authority, so I suggest you do what he said, as it is a right sensible thing to do. Take care of your families instead of standing here like a bunch of boyish thrill-seekers with your blasted pots on your head," the man said, smacking the pot off a belligerent businessman, on the verge of opening his mouth to argue.

  He continued, "Besides, we don't know a thing about fighting, but I would say that the smart thing to do, if you were to fight someone, would be to go behind them. That, I suspect, is what these people are going to do if they're here to fight, and I wonder who that leaves unprotected?"

  This thought seemed to resonate with the group. A couple of men broke away at once and disappeared into the dark city. Some thought about it, hesitated, but with nods, farewells, and well wishes to their neighbors, headed into the shadows of the city. Only a few stubborn men remained.

  Persenimos had no time to worry about them. He sent several guards to make their way about the island as lookouts for invaders, but remained where the ship was visible.

  The man who spoke on the king's behalf walked away. The king noticed and prodded his trotter to the man's side.

  "Good man, thank you for your loyalty and persuasion. I am grateful you were with me on the matter."

  "I wouldn't say that I was with you on the journey to the situation as it stands, but I am devoted to reverencing Your Highness and defending the defenseless."