Galen Beknighted

Chapter X

"And this brother," the Namer said, waving his hand dramatically in the direction of a fire, low beneath the Sign of the Antelope-a whitened, antlered skull propped on a tall spear, "To what have they carried him, and what awaits him there? It is dark where he is going, but there is torchlight."

He crouched before the fire, passed the strand of metal over it, and resumed the story,

Soon, thought the man on the mottled throne. Soon the stones will be brought into my presence, brought from above like a sweet black rain cascading from the hand of a god.

And why not? he mused, resting his head upon the cool moistness of a sheet of stalactites. Did not the hand of a god guide me here to begin with?

Below him, in the great cavernous hall called the Porch of Memory, white-haired Plainsmen milled about their tasks under the torchlight. Some-stout men, as a rule, their shoulders knotted-pushed wheelbarrows sagging with rubble and sediment, to a place well lit beneath the torches, where folk more dextrous and nimble-young women and smaller men-sifted through the fragments for the opals that had eluded all of them, century by century.

But soon, Firebrand thought, closing his one good eye and smiling blissfully, the rattling, chipping sounds of mining and sorting fading below him into faint sounds he imagined that he only remembered. Soon all this pushing and sifting and hoping will be… outdated. Yes, outdated when the Knight brings the stones to me from his tall castle.

Then I can tell my people that I… found the opals. That a vision told me they would be… where they would be.

For visions have spoken to me before, spoken unerringly out of the silence and the light in these very stones.

He held a silver crown in his right hand. Slowly, with a sort of mad elegance, he placed the circlet upon his head. Between the twining strands of silver, seven opals nested in an irregular, broken pattern.

The crown was still hot from his burning touch.

His eye opened wide as the chanting began beneath him, echoing off the walls of the Porch of Memory until the great room resounded with the voices of children. His eye was as deep and as black and as flickering as the opals above it, and brimming with tears as it focused on a far point and a far time. From beneath the diamond-shaped leather eye patch, tears trickled grotesquely, mixed with soot and the recollection of blood.

The voices poured like dark rain down the walls.

"You pass through these, unharmed, unchanging but now you see them

strung on our words on your own conceiving as you pass from night to awareness of night

to know that remorse is the calm of philosophers

that its price is forever

that it draws you through meteors

through winter's transfixion

through the blasted rose

through the shark's water

through the black compression of oceans

through rock through magma

to yourself to an abscess of nothing

that you will recognize as nothing

that you will know is coming again and again

under the same rules."

Whether he joined in or only listened, Firebrand often wept at this chanting. He shed soft tears on the tenebral necklace he wore, upon each little hooked claw, each little silvered tooth that stood for a vanished, long-dead year the Que-Tana had spent underground. For the Chant of Years was a map of sorrow, a chronicle of time forever wasted in a mission of darkness.

Oh, the Chant of the Men was sorrowful enough, Firebrand could tell you, with its heavy alternation of names and of teeth and the claws of cave bears. And the Chant of the Women was a testament to the terrible ruin of innocence, as the people knelt and prayed, touching leopard tooth, leopard claw, as their hands raced along the necklace and the litany raced along the roll of names.

All were names of those who had died underground, in search of the dark wisdom of the godseyes, of the black glain opals that held five thousand years of memory intact, like a fly preserved for eons in the heart of amber. And the names were mourned indeed, for many of them Firebrand recalled-the faces of the old and of the children, the soft movement of the young women who died beautiful and much too soon, all buried in the search for the stones. The children below him intoned the Chant of Years, the most sorrowful of all, wherein the People recorded the time they had irretrievably lost, while the others-the Que-Shu, the Que-Kiri, the self-important cousin Que-Nara-lived carefree in the light and the wind and the rain.

Quickly he collected himself and reached up to touch the tight collar about his neck, from which the teeth and claws hung.

How like the tenebral we are, he thought, casting his mind away from the chant as again the hot tears threatened. How like the small, yellowed squirrels that swoop through the subterranean abbey, their leathery wings aglow with the strange lumen, the secretion that burns when touched by the sunlight.

For Firebrand knew what happened to the tenebrals when, by accident, their path of flight took them out of the caverns into a sunlight they had mistaken for the light of torches or for the lumen that glowed in their strange hanging nests. Indeed, one of his men had carried one back to show him-its body shriveled into half its size, the wings also shriveled, ravaged by the phosphorous riding in the clear streams of lumen.

The animal was consumed by its own fluttering heart.

Such things happened quickly, the People maintained. Sometimes it was a matter of only a second.

How like the tenebral we are, Firebrand thought once more. Or at least how like them are my people. For they would burn and dry and wither away in the Bright Lands, in the Nations of Light. Why, even the moonlight blisters the very young.

He shook his head, and the beads and leather thongs braided in his dark locks rattled like the tail of an ancient crotalin snake-the creature who warns before he strikes, but strikes nonetheless. For a moment, the miners below him paused, wan faces lifted to the sound, for judgment and punishment rained down from that throne as suddenly and as unexpectedly as rockslides or cave-ins.

This time they received neither judgment nor punishment. Instead, they saw the dark-haired man, who was always smaller than they remembered him, seated atop the natural chair formed in the Age of Dreams by the continual rush of water over rock. Firebrand's dark eyes were closed now, his face flushed with some strong emotion. His hands each clutched a free stalactite vaguely, as though he lay entranced in the fanged mouth of an enormous beast.

His lips moved along with the chant, but his memory, swayed to the chant of his own years…

There was no Porch of Memory when he came here, flying from the anger of his own unforgiving people. The Que-Tana had built no great halls yet, choosing to tunnel like leaderless termites in their endless, winding search for the godseye. They had built no throne from the rock and the moist darkness. Then there were only small chambers aglow with candles, smelling of tallow and smoke.

He had turned his back on the surface and scurried like a rat into that stinking smoke as he followed the passage that only he knew, down into the darkness, guided by candle and one eye. So had he come out of the sun, alone down narrow dark corridors into the embracing silence, where he was lost for good in the heart of the mountain, prey to accident, or to starvation, or to the long fur claws of the vesper-tile, the huge flightless bats that scour the bottommost recesses of the caverns.

He drank of the stagnant pools, gobbled the small crawling things he stepped upon in the loud blackness, and nothing he ate and nothing he drank could taint or harm him.

For the dark god had a hand in his traveling. That much Firebrand knew from the start, from the moment he put on the Namer's Crown, admiring the dozen flawless black godseyes set in its intertwining silver knots. "Visions," the old Namer had said to him. "The crown will bring visions, then knowledge, then wisdom."

He had held the silver circlet in his two strong hands as the old man spoke. Over the years, he could still remember the last words of his old predecessor.

"Visions, then knowledge, then wisdom," the Namer repeated. "And perhaps long years between each. But do not despair, my boy, and above all, grow not impatient. For it is said that 'sometimes the waiting is the doing.' "

Idle thoughts of a mind in its dotage. He learned later to laugh at the old man, to be glad of his passing.

The god in the stones taught him that, taught him also that prophecy was easy. For after all, was he not the youngest of the Namers? And a Namer among the Que-Nara, where even the infants touched the hem of Mishakal?

For beyond knowledge and wisdom lies prophecy. Of that Firebrand was sure. So he looked into the opals deeply, into the godseyes, and as the name of the stones should have foretold for him, the eye of a god looked back.

"Sargonnas," it called itself. And "Consort of the Dark." Quickly it taught him to prophesy, to leap over knowledge and wisdom straight into the fire and the glamor of things foretellable.

He sat at the edge of the fire, peering into the crown as the others-the simple ones, unskilled in philosophy and lore- busied themselves with the menial things, with setting and striking the camp, and with the gathering of food. There, alone where the firelight stopped at the edge of the darkness, he pondered the mystery of stones, saw the seas roll and the moons wink out.

He saw a dark woman rise from a deeper darkness, her hair spangled with ice and winter stars.

All of these were yet to come, the god in the crown told him. He was not sure what they meant, these visions, but they were his, and they foretold something grand and terrible. Of that he was sure, and the god agreed.

And when he had seen them all, the countless visions and portents from that moment three centuries ago to the time in which all things will end, the voice in the stones whispered hauntingly, sweetly:

"Now they will follow you…"

Of course he had thought it was the Que-Nara that Sargonnas meant. But they were a dirty, hide-smelling people for whom a young man's prophecy was raving and ambition. "The future is deadly," the elders warned, "because we expect so much of it."

He scorned them. Their words were the howling of toothless jackals.

So it became the young to whom he prophesied. They came to him with troubles that he thought to be of little consequence, with questions about a flickering romance or the outcome of a first hunt. He told them what they wanted to hear, said, "Yes, the girl loves you" or "Yes, the antelope waits for your spear," and the children liked what they heard and followed him.

Until the gaunt little boy-the youngest son of the Second Chieftain, a lad who had not seen his tenth summer-got it into his head to hunt the wild dogs and came to receive the blessing of the Namer.

He prophesied the best of fortunes and blessed the lad without ever looking up from the opals in the crown. He told himself later that he would not have changed his mind even had he looked up and seen the boy, nine years old and the size of a child of five. When the boy had asked his blessing, he would still have granted it, for the god in the stones was saying, "He is ready, he is ready, let him go…"

They returned the next morning carrying the boy, stretched out on a leather shield, his neck opened by the feeding dogs, his eyes staring blankly into the red moon, and the white, and then into the black moon that only philosophers know. They brought home the boy, and the chieftain, beside himself, had summoned the Namer.

Banishment is simple enough among the Plainsmen. In the center of a circle they placed him. The elders surrounded him and recited his wrongdoings, then the tribe left him. It was the most unceremonious of ceremonies.

Except for the taking of the eye.

Even now, as he sat three miles below and three centuries after, Firebrand remembered the blade, held over the fire till it reached a blue hotness, and how it felt as it passed into his eye, blinding him and searing the wound closed in one motion as the women looked on and chanted the Song of Lost Sight:

"Let the eye surrender, if it offends the People,

Let its last song ride on the blade of the chieftains,

Let it fall like a dark stone into memory,

And in memory let it reside and dwell,

Phantom of light on the wall of the heart

Stored like a dead thing in amber.

Let its last song ride on the blade of the chieftains…"

He remembered the song, and the last sight of the blade, then a dazzlement of stars that preceded the pain and the darkness.

Then the darkness lifted, and he was walking.

It was a rocky country, its farmlands tilled and settled. Just where it lay, he did not know.

Nor did he know how the crown, stripped of all opals but one, had fallen back into his hand.

One gem was all he needed, though. For through it, the dark voice explained everything: how taking the crown was not theft, and the death of the boy not negligence, but both were the tests he had passed to enter the prophecy.

"Enter the prophecy?" he had asked bitterly as he wandered the pastured land like a monster, scrambling painfully over fences, hearing by the distant farmhouses the outcry of wary dogs. "I left a dead boy and a home and a people and even my eye behind me… to enter a prophecy?"

But the stone was silent. There was dark, and daylight, and again dark before it spoke again.

These mountains toward which you are traveling… it whispered as the Namer looked up through the foothills north into the rough, violet rays and above into mist and cloud. The Vingaards. Do you remember the Vingaards?

He remembered the knife. Nothing more. And yet… something the old Namer had taught him…

"The Que-Nara," he said. "Those who dwell under the mountains…"

The stone was quiet. A taut silence played across its surface.

"But the Que-Nara remain the Que-Nara," he protested, kneeling to drink from a creek that tumbled out of the foothills. "They will see that my eye has been taken, and they will turn me away."

They call themselves Que-Tana now, the stone replied. But whether Que-Tana or Que-Nara, they will take you. Of that be sure.

"But how do I find my way to them?" he asked.

Remember, the stone replied. Remember the old Namer's teachings. And under his damaged sight, a light rose from the center of the opal. Within it, he saw a clearing: four vallenwoods, their branches intertwined above an ancient dolmen and a path running between the stones down a hill into a network of vines, which covered…

A hole in the cliff face. Darkness lay at the bottom of it.

"But even if they take me in, those who wounded me will know, will see it in the stones they took from me."

But you have the crown, the voice soothed. Those who wounded you will see no more than you will let them see.

A raptor wheeled overhead, its feathers black on brown on white. It shrieked and swooped, and in a moment rose out of the tall grass, something small and gray in its talons.

The shriek sounded like a call to the Namer, and for a moment, he mistrusted his senses. But the bird circled above him, drifting lazily westward and westward. He followed it dreamily, losing it once as it passed over a strand of poplar but finding it again weaving among bush and evergreen over higher ground, its prey now motionless in its clutches.

Once he looked down into the opal, and within it saw the fiery image of the same bird passing over the same trees in the same country. There would have been a time years ago when he would have dismissed it as coincidence or illusion or even temptation, but now he had followed the call of the stone too long to question. He took the godseye at its word and followed the design of the dark one within it, as both birds-the real one in the air and the cloudy one in the stone-settled at the same time in the branches of a vallenwood…

One of four vallenwoods, their branches intertwined above an ancient dolmen and a path running between the stones down a hill into a network of vines, which covered…

A hole in the cliff face. Darkness lay at the bottom of it.

It was a dry season in which he found the way to the land of the Que-Tana. The twigs he tied together with dried grass and reed popped and sputtered as he passed his hand over them.

For as if to give him solace at the loss of his eye, the dark god had given him fire in his hands-a slow, flameless burning that had guided him by night when touched to a torch, had warmed him at his solitary campsite when he had touched kindling. But now, as he held the dried grass, the fire passed through it, burning it far too quickly to provide a lingering light.

He was not twenty paces down the passage when the light gave out.

Disheartened, he crouched in the canceling darkness, breathing rapidly and angrily. From somewhere ahead of him, he could hear the distant sound of voices and metal on rock. But he knew sound carried deceptively in the dark, that distance and direction tied themselves into knots. Following his ear alone could lead him over precipices or into the lair of the vespertile.

Fearing to go forward and resolving not to go back, he crouched there for what must have been an hour. Only then did the stone begin to glow.

Soon the godseye gave off enough light to see by. Placing the crown on his head, the Namer descended the narrow corridor. Twice the passage forked, and both times the light fluttered and went out when he followed the path he had chosen, only to rekindle when he retraced his steps and followed the other path.

The walls of the corridor were painted with old designs, scratched with old graffiti. Plainsman was the language, and the drawings were of creatures the Namer knew well- the antelope, the leopard, the wild boar, and the hawk. It was only when he passed the first fork in the passage that the drawings began to change-at first gradually, then rapidly, birds on the wing transformed into strange geometrical swirls, the familiar form of the leopard now no more than the bright play of color on color. The writing changed, too-the phrases and language and finally even the letters.

From the changes, the Namer knew that generation by generation, the Que-Tana in this underground kingdom were breeding away from the memories of their time in the light. Like heartfish, he told himself. Like heartfish in a cavern.

He had heard of the tiny red fish, once river dwellers in the sunlight of the Age of Dreams, who entered the underground and evolved without eyes there in the dark recesses. For the first time, he had seen them in his travels as the passage he had followed crossed by the edge of a slow-moving subterranean brook. A kind of changing, of breeding away, had taken place among the Que-Tana, too, as their history filled with darkness and moisture and endless search for the stones until that story was the only story they had, their brothers in the Bright Lands mythical, almost forgotten, reached only through the magic of the stones for which they searched incessantly.

And now the stones had vanished, torn from them by a dark and mysterious hand. There was no explaining it, no consolation but the simple fact that they had seen it coming in the stones for years-that years ago, a voice in the stones had told them the story of Firebrand, of how he would come when the stones were gone and the darkness at its closest about them.

It was the legend they chanted to soothe themselves, and it was that chant that echoed up the hidden corridor, finding its way by coincidence or evil design into the ears of the approaching Namer.

"In the country of the blind," it began, and as he heard it, he marveled at his dark and uncommon luck.

"In the country of the blind,

Where the one-eyed man is king

And the stones are eyes of gods,

Are pathways to remembering,

"There three centuries of gloom

Pass under rending, drought, and wars,

Until the Firebrand comes to us

Upon his brow a dozen stars.

"Out of his wound the stones will speak,

Will lead us from the groves of night

And with the power of life and death

Restore us to forgotten light!'

Circumstance this might have been, he told himself now, eye half-closed, reclining like a basking reptile in the damp and the darkness of the Porch of Memory, his subjects smiling about him on their tireless business. Coincidence, perhaps, that, like the Firebrand of their legends, I had been grievously, unfairly wounded. And that when their stones and their hopes were lost, I descended to them, carrying a stone and the first glimmer of hope reborn.

But if it were only circumstance, only coincidence, why then did the stone flare in the palm of my hand and strike their faces with a fierce and godly light?

And why did I refuse it at first when they bowed to me, saying, "No, good brothers, oh, no," but then consenting to wear the crown-my crown-for the Que-Tana?

And how, in the midst of my visions, could I discover the opals that over these three hundred years have come to replace the ones the Que-Tana had lost? How indeed, unless I am the prophet that the stones have told me I am?

How indeed, unless I am the Firebrand of whom they sing?

Tell me that, if you challenge my place on this throne.

Madly he looked about, his eye wide and its pupil a flashing, stellar black in the torchlight.

"Well, then," he breathed hoarsely, his people continuing at their tasks below him, as accustomed to Firebrand talking to himself as they were to the flights of tenebrals through the caverns, to the musical dripping of water and the vast silences of the black recesses beyond and below them.

"Well, then. I see no challengers."

He laughed a nervous little high-pitched laugh and squinted into the darkness, where torchlight approached and there was the sound of warriors and of triumphant return.

They carried a robed figure, bound and blindfolded. Framed by the torchlight, his wild shock of red hair tumbled in all directions, as though he had been caught somehow in a monstrous wind.

There had been no trouble finding the red-haired man, the messengers had said. Camped not a mile from the entrance, he was in a rickety house on stilts decorated with holly and paper lanterns and an odd, foul-smelling old stuffed parrot that frightened the youngest Que-Tana out of a year's growth.

Other than the simple fright of the boy, there were no wounds, no casualties. It had all been terribly easy.

If this was the man he wanted. The brother of the one with the opals.

He looked like the one in the stones-the flashing image of the cleric in the makeshift camp, high in the mountains amidst the snow. But it seemed too easy.

"Brithelm?" Firebrand asked quietly, repeating a name he had heard while wearing the crown.

The blindfold was lifted from the eyes of the red-haired man, who blinked in amazement as he looked about him.

"Oh, my!" he exclaimed. Then he looked up the cataract of stone to where Firebrand was seated, silver crown blazing on his brow.

"Oh, this is not how I pictured the afterlife!" the man announced, to the bewilderment of his captors. "I always thought it would be less gloomy, a little greener! But at least Gileandos was wrong about the whole thing, and that's gratifying beyond belief!"

He smiled foolishly at the Que-Tana assembled around him. Several of the older men stepped away from him, making the warding sign against madness. He stepped toward the closest of the warriors, extending his hand in that old, Solamnic gesture of acquaintance that Firebrand had learned to despise over the centuries.

"Brithelm Pathwarden, I am!" he announced. "And I suppose we should be friends, seeing as we'll no doubt be here for eons and all!"