Galen Beknighted

Chapter XXV

As the voices choired and swelled in the ancient Que-Tana Song of Firebrand, the one man worthy of the name lifted the Namer's crown. Maimed by fire, and an unlikely hero because of his maiming, he had nonetheless led a people into the light.

Unlike the pretender to his name and his crown, this new Firebrand would treat his calling and the stones with reverence and care. Quietly he placed the crown upon his own head. Now he sang the names of the heroes, and the Plainsmen chanted back a refrain as a thousand voices joined in committing those names to memory.

Going home was a long road, as it always is.

There's some philosophy in that, but lengthening the miles for my little company was the simple fact that our horses were gone. We couldn't have brought them with us underground, where the narrow passages and delicate footing would have jammed them in the rocks, no doubt, or brought a thousand equine pounds down upon one of us.

Still, you couldn't help but regret their absence when the prospect of walking doubled the length of your journey-a journey that had to be long, it turned out, to contain all that I learned.

The dust that the quake had raised did not settle until evening came, until all of us had reached an even thicker cluster of trees at the base of the foothills, spread over a cluster of towering rocks.

From the top of the largest rock, through the parted branches when the moon and the stars emerged, you could see down and east into the foothills and the plains of Solamnia beyond. When the lights winked on in the westmost villages of my adopted country, I was watching with my brother Brithelm, the two of us wrapped in a blanket against weather and wind and night.

"I suppose that one of us will have to tell Father," I observed after a silence. "I mean, about Alfric."

My brother nodded, his eyes still fixed on the country below him. His red hand slipped from under the blanket, its index finger glowing, as he traced aimless designs on the surface of the rock.

"1 just imagine him down there among the rocks," I continued. "Him and Marigold, of course. Beginning some ghostly dance in eternity."

"That's almost poetic, Galen," Brithelm said with a sad smile, "until you remember what kind of dancers they were while alive and breathing."

"It's as though everything came together in misfortune down there, Brithelm," I said and paused.

"Brithelm, I have a confession."

My brother looked at me solemnly.

"I saw Weasel back in those caverns. Not me, but the one I was years ago when all this adventuring began. And I came to the conclusion that I'm not all that different from what I was then about… about this whole knighthood business. I've been lying, Brithelm. Lying to almost everyone about my courage and my principles and the Measure and the Oath, until now and again I almost believe my own stories.

"It's frightening. I've been thinking it's like one of Gileandos's proverbs coming alive, where 'the liar gets trapped in his own stitchery' or some such self-righteous nonsense. Somehow it got us free, though. Got us all out of Firebrand's clutches and here, back on the road to Castle di Caela and home."

Brithelm nodded. "And why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"Oh… I'm not sure. Perhaps I've decided never to lie again."

"I do not think you have decided that," Brithelm replied.

Then solemnly he looked back out over Solamnia.

"I am afraid I have a confession, too," he whispered. "You know when I dawdled the time with Firebrand asking him all those questions about tenebrals? You heard the story from the Que-Tana."

"I remember, Brother. What did you learn about tenebrals?"

"Nothing," Brithelm replied. "Can't say as I care, either. Filthy little animals, tenebrals are. Never liked them to begin with."

I stifled a laugh. "Don't tell me you were lying, too?"

"Not lying as much as… being a good guest, Galen," Brithelm replied soberly, his finger still tracing luminous circles by his feet.

"A good guest?"

I said nothing, hid my smile in the blanket.

"But I feel… well, guilty now," Brithelm said, head bowed. "As if I guided poor Firebrand to misfortune and doom simply by feigning an interest in his surroundings."

"Nonsense, brother," I remarked. "Look at the simple mathematics of the situation. Firebrand had wrestled you down there, was more than willing to put an end to you once he had the opals, and brought me to the caverns of the Que-Tana with all kinds of lies and subterfuge. It all adds up, Brithelm, and your little courtesy does not compare to his malice and weakness and greed."

I discovered I was good at this. Having spent nigh on twenty years in explaining away my own misdeeds, I could explain for others with the skill of a surgeon.

Brithelm relaxed beside me, rose to his feet. All the lights that were to shine in western Solamnia that evening were shining by now.

Five days it took us to get back to Castle di Caela. For the most part, Ramiro served as our guide, the only one among us who had any idea as to the way back.

He had practiced his leadership until it had become almost glamorous. After all, he had guided forth the hundreds of squinting, cowering Que-Tana, many of whom were seeing the moons and the stars for the first time in their benighted lives, into that shadowy grove in the foothills, where they stayed until Longwalker joined them late that evening. There, as the campfires of the Que-Tana glowed warmly, Ramiro, Brithelm, and I took to the plains, leaving behind us a wandering family reunited, a rudderless people brought to a strong and kindly guidance.

A guidance not only Longwalker's. For Shardos had stayed with the Que-Tana, for reasons we did not yet understand. Brithelm wept openly to say good-bye to the old juggler, and Ramiro and I, though trained to be starched, stone-faced models of Solamnic restraint, left with a catch in our throats as the old man sang a song at our parting, its melody cascading down the hillside after us. From Wayreth Forest it was supposed to have come, and Shardos claimed he had pieced it together from the song of the birds there. I do not remember it all, but I remember one part-"Here there is quiet," it went,

"Here there is quiet, where music turns in upon silence

Here at the world's imagined edge, where clarity

Completes the senses, at long last where we behold

Ripe fruit never falling, streams still and transparent

"Where the tears are dried from our faces, or settle,

Still as a stream in accomplished countries of peace,

And the traveler opens, permitting the voyage of light

As air, as the heart in repose this lasting day."

The very next afternoon we saw them, on a rise behind us, in the distance at the feet of the mountains.

The tall form that walked at the head of the column was no doubt Longwalker's. Silhouetted against the western sky, against the rapidly fading sunlight behind him, he waved at us, lonely and elegant on the horizon's edge.

There, after a moment, a short squat form joined him. Dressed in motley it was, and as it waved to us also, a series of bright lights dappled with all imaginable colors issued from its uplifted hands.

"Bottles!" Brithelm breathed beside me. "Incomparable, brightly colored bottles!"

And suddenly the Plainsmen were gone, vanished in the distance and the falling night.

As we neared home, we traveled further and further into the night, and on occasion, when he was on high ground and you were following below him, you could look up and see Sir Ramiro of the Maw blotting out half the stars on the eastern horizon with his sheer bulk and presence.

My dealings with the big Knight softened considerably on the road home. I guess, as usual, it took an earthquake for him to think kind thoughts about me, but if that was what it took, I would gladly accept it. After all, his guidance was somehow heartening in the highlands and onto the soggy plains, for I remembered trolls and raiding Que-Tana and even more horrible things from the years back.

Under Ramiro's care, the last leg of the journey passed rapidly, almost eventlessly. I learned the Solamnic countryside in better detail than I had ever imagined or hoped I would. Each day we walked as far as our leisure would take us-for after all, our guide Ramiro set the pace of the journey.

The first thing you see of home from the west is the banner that flies atop the Cat Tower.

It was welcome, that banner, even with my dread of how to break the news of Alfric to my father.

But those dreads were lost, or postponed awhile, in the excitement of reunions, for it seemed that Castle di Caela had news of its own to tell.

We rode through the western gate to the sound of trumpet and drum. Raphael had spotted us in the distance during a stroll on the walls, and with his general efficiency and good will had arranged a Solamnic welcome by the time we arrived at the castle.

Things seemed in disarray all over. The vending carts that usually milled in the bailey were scattered and broken, evidence that the quake we felt in the Vingaards had reached this far into Solamnia. Indeed, a most forgiving Raphael told me that the first quake had left an enormous fissure underneath the foundation of the castle-I was not to hear the adventure surrounding it until later-and that the second quake, arising from nowhere little more than a week ago, had closed it again altogether.

It seemed like farfetched geology to me, but I had seen stranger things to the west and was inclined to believe him.

Brandon Rus had been preparing to leave eastward on a pilgrimage to the Blood Sea of Istar. Indeed, he had packed for the next morning, but he postponed his departure another night and day so that he could hear the adventures that had befallen us. It was from his account that I began to piece together what had happened underneath the castle while we were away. I went to Enid and to Bayard later for the rest of the story, and got more than I bargained for.

You see, not only did they grace me with the account of the pendant and the cats and the dangerous dreams and Marigold's shipwrecked hair, but they had exciting news that surpassed even the joy of restoring the castle.

For it seems that on one of those evenings a month or so before I was made Knight in the Great Hall of Castle di Caela, things more quiet and far more momentous were taking place in the upstairs chambers.

It seems as though I was disinherited, or at least pushed a ways down the line of succession.

For the heir of both branches, di Caela and Brightblade, would be welcomed to the world sometime in the early spring. Enid was not altogether as radiant as the mythology surrounding expectant mothers said that she should be. She was sick of a morning and craved pastry all through the day, but to Bayard she was the splendid bright creature he saw from the battlements years ago, and she was more now, here at the start of their greatest adventure together.

Speaking of pastry, Marigold remained a nocturnal factor in the chambers of Castle di Caela. At night, it seemed, her specter haunted the quarters of Sir Robert di Caela, who, having flooded the caverns below the foundation and thereby saved the castle and, by chance, the surrounding continent, was all prepared to dine on the story for years until the ghost took his appetite away. He looked… haunted now, and he jumped at the chance to sleep in the open air again when a band of us gathered to accept Longwalker's invitation to attend the Plainsman Night of Telling in the early fall.

But before the larger and more joyous Telling, there was a telling of my own to go through.

It was the evening after we arrived when I told Father about Alfric.

Of course he knew already. After all, Alfric hadn't returned with us, and when the tale of attack and ambush and underground cave-in unfolded, Sir Andrew concluded the worst. He was resigned when Brithelm and I came to him.

Resigned and expectant.

"I shall save you boys the reliving of this," he said as we entered his chamber, pushing himself away from the desk where, by lamplight, he had been crouched, quill in hand, over a large piece of parchment.

"The simple questions, according to the Measure, will suffice."

Brithelm and I looked at one another.

How like the old man to fall into the arms of the Order when he could not put word or thought around his grief. For there he sat in front of us, eyes brimming. I had never seen my father weep, but come to think of it, I had never seen him with a pen in hand, either.

It was the depths that the armor covered.

"One," he began, his old back rigid. He started to stand, steadying his right leg, injured in a long-past boar hunt. "One. Where did the boy fall?"

"In the heart of the Vingaard Mountains, sir. Into the breast of Huma," I replied, hoping I had the formula right.

"And when did he fall?"

"Elev-ten nights passing, sir. Into the breast of Huma."

And we said it together-that prayer I have heard on solemn occasions, before and since, over old Knights who passed on peacefully in their sleep and over young ones killed by adventure or accident. Over a centaur friend of mine, once in the mountains. And over my brother, who lay beneath those mountains, asleep in the heart of the planet.

"Receive this one to Huma's breast Beyond the wild, impartial skies; Grant to him a warrior's rest And set the last spark of his eyes Free from the smothering clouds of wars Upon the torches of the stars.

"Let the last surge of his breath Take refuge in the cradling air Above the dreams of ravens, where Only the hawk remembers death. Then let his shade to Huma rise Beyond the wild, impartial skies"

The prayer over, the tears shed, the old man looked up at me.

"And tell me one more thing, Galen," he began.

"He fell most bravely, Father," I said. "His last thoughts were heroic."

Brithelm looked at me briefly, but he added nothing, of course. And he always claimed, quite truthfully, that he did not see his eldest brother fall.

But our story must not end without a week in middle autumn, when briskness rode on the wind and the horses' breath misted the air for the first time that season.

We rode together, Brithelm and Danelle and I, along with a mess of Knights and retainers-from Raphael and Bradley all the way to the dog, Birgis-out from Castle di Caela and south, past the Thelgaard Keep and, keeping the Garnet Mountains to our left, into the sacred Telling Ground that Longwalker and Wanderer, the Namer of the Que-Shu, had marked off for the ceremonies at hand.

I would imagine there were ten thousand Plainsmen camped around us, the air filled with smoke and chanting and the smell of leather and grain and memory.

Memory was the richest of those smells. On the first night, we seated ourselves in the immense mile-wide circle that linked tribe to tribe. The ceremonial spears stood anchored in the ground, atop them the tribal totems-the pelts of leopard and bear and fox, the feathers of eagles, and the antlers of the springbok.

We sat beneath the sign of the antelope, totem of the Que-Nara. Longwalker greeted us and with quiet ceremony draped the hides of antelopes over my shoulders and those of Brithelm. A third, smaller hide, well tanned and softened and white and gray like the peaks of the Vingaards, had been saved for the Lady Dannelle.

They smelled of the plains to the south, those hides-of the clean, unchangeable grasslands and the sudden, crisp, metallic smell in the air when winter snows approach. I nestled into the warmth of the fur and watched the smoke rise from the fire that practical Bradley built in an instant before us.

The smoke, caught up in a strong October breeze, eddied toward the southwest, over Coastlund and out to the New-sea beyond it. It curled and surged like a river, and it circled twice over the large central fire of the Telling before gathering itself into a larger, higher current of smoke and bending away over the horizon.

Longwalker sat down in front of me, and the Telling began.

Wanderer spoke first. His tales told of a country to the south, of a people nomadic and tireless, haunted by shifts in the weather and gaps in their memories. Mournfully the young Que-Shu Namer began one telling, then paused, then told another story he seemed to join in midstride, because at the heart of each story was the melancholy phrase, "And this we do not remember…"

He spoke through the first night, and we slept until noontime restlessly. Longwalker woke me when the sun was high, his voice encouraging, a strange gleam in his eyes.

"Take off the mantles of sorrow, Solamnic," he said, his eyes fixed on the central fire, "for tonight you will see the Telling brought out of the darkness. You will see the time redeemed."

And I confess that the smell in the air was lighter, that something arose in the midst of us promising joy and history, and the second night was rollicksome until the new Que-Nara Namer began to speak.

First, it was a night of reunion. Ramiro, it seemed, had made the long journey westward across Goodlund and Balifor and the green lands closer to home, a journey so long that I wondered if he had housed himself under his own roof for more than a night before setting off again. He reclined beneath the autumn sky, staring on high at the stars in the Harp of Branchala. A glass of Thorbardin Eagle rested atop his ample stomach, and his huge head, its long black curly locks spread like a fan, rested in the lap of a Plainswoman I had never seen before, all paint and nose rings and torrid attention.

He was in good hands, it seemed, though hands that might threaten his heart with their energies.

I had spoken to the big Knight and was returning to our campfire when the Que-Nara Namer took his place at the central fire and began his telling. The voice sounded familiar, and at once I stopped and squinted toward the great monumental blaze.

The Que-Nara Namer was a black man dressed in motley, and a long, barrel-chested dog squatted beside him.

"Shardos!" I whispered. Of course it was Shardos. It surprised me how I had missed it all along.

The juggler crouched before the fire as he told of the first days of our adventure. From his patchwork robe, he took some glittering tools and began to speak of Longwalker.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see the big Plainsman standing beside me.

"Here," he said, handing me a thin band of silver. "Take this to the central fire. The juggler has need of it."

At the moment I stepped into the light of the Namer's fire, Shardos's hand was extended. He smiled as I set the silver in his hand, and he began to tell my part of the story as all of the peoples-the Que-Shu, the Que-Kiri, the Que-Nara- listened exultantly.

As my old friend spoke, all the events were set in place, from the banishment of Firebrand in the centuries past down to the Night of Telling and the Namer who seated himself before us. The old man told the stories in the present tense, his hands busy over the fire, twisting yet another piece of silver, which Longwalker himself had brought forth, onto the one I had given him. The Plainsmen nodded around him, their eyes closed as the things he told happened for the first time in their brilliant imaginings.

Shardos brought something from his pockets, and for the first time, I knew fully of what had occurred beneath Castle di Caela, knew of the dark god's plotting and how the thirteenth stone in the crown had shut its wearer in the past, where no voice, human or divine, could reach him through the stones.

But the end of the tale was the best part, for Shardos stood, holding aloft a silver circlet-the restored Crown of the Namer, adorned with twelve opals. Around him, the Que-Tana, robed against the light of the moons and stars, began the Song of Firebrand, the words of which made sense now. For, no longer twisted by that villain beneath the mountain, they found their fitting and proper hero there at the heart of the Telling.

"In the country of the blind,

Where the one-eyed man is king

And the stones are eyes of gods

And 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."

As he stood amid his newfound and singing people, the juggler held aloft the thirteenth godseye, then handed it to Longwalker beside him, who passed it to Wanderer, who passed it to yet another Plainsman elder.

As the stone approached me from hand to hand, Shardos sang the names of the heroes, and the Plainsmen chanted back a refrain, as a thousand voices joined in committing those names to memory:

"First Bayard Brightblade I give you,

Who rules over Castle di Caela…"

"We remember Bayard Brightblade…"

"And Ramiro of the Maw,

Enormous in yearning and battle…"

"We remember Ramiro of the Maw…"

On he went, through Brithelm and Dannelle and Oliver and my own lost brother, but my eyes lost focus and my heart was peaceful as my own name was reconciled with a new and awaited meaning.

"And Sir Galen, keeper of the one stone,

Whose name in our language means 'healer'…"

"We remember Galen Pathwarden…"

I turned, looking around me as though the celebration would be joined by all my friends and acquaintances, as though they all would be staring straight at me with looks of wonderment and suddenly discovered respect. But all eyes were on the Namer Shardos, who slowly slipped the crown onto his head.

All eyes except for those of Bradley, the young engineer, who was trying his skills on the intricate harnesswork that clothed a young Plainswoman about his age.

There was reconciliation all around me that night.

It spread all over the campsite and lasted the week. I remember the third night, remember Dannelle calling to me as Brithelm replaced me on the watch in early morning. I went to her, expecting that she had remembered at last some other thing she needed to scold me for, but it was not the case at all.

Instead, hers were the suggestions I had pondered making myself those many nights before on the crest of the Vingaards, before we all descended to the dark and the Que-Tana and my captive brother.

Dannelle said she had found the best of spots to bed down, safe but out of sight of the celebrants. That the spot was warm indeed, and surprisingly spacious.

Room enough for two, as she had calculated.

I believed her calculations were correct.

As we joined hands and slipped between brush and high grass to the place and circumstances she had in mind, she whispered to me words that told me the deeds I had dreamt of were preparing to come to pass.

"If you breathe a word of this, to anyone, I'll kill you."

My story ends back at the castle, on a winter night in my firelit chambers.

Tomorrow some of my companions head west, Brithelm back to the mountains, where he will search for his scattered followers-for meteorological old women and insomniac captains and the beautiful night visitors. Together they will raise his abbey yet again and lure down the birds for omens.

Of all things, Father will join his middle son in the life contemplative. The clerical robe seems ill-fitting, ridiculous upon him. But then, my armor looked so on me not a month ago.

Father seeks monastic life, having left the moathouse to Gileandos, of all people. It seems there was an oath that the old man uttered somewhere beneath the foundations of Castle di Caela-something about gladly giving up all his holdings to see Gileandos again. Whatever the circumstances, the old scholar departed two nights ago for the moathouse, intent on returning to his library and his alembic, both of which smell of juniper and must.

I hear he was having trouble sitting in the saddle.

Something, no doubt, that took place underground.

As for me, I shall stay here at Castle di Caela for a while. Bayard is still confined by his injuries, and the Lady Enid will soon be confined under more delicate circumstances. Brandon Rus is gone on his pilgrimage, strangely lighter of heart, and Ramiro is packing his belongings (and the energetic Plainswoman) for a trip back to his castle in the Maw.

Someone will have to run this place in all the absences.

Sir Robert and I have a plan, you see, regarding horse races in the huge bailey yard. There is room for dogs in the restored grounds, and the servants have been put to work gathering up mechanical birds from storage.

Given a couple of months in which nothing dire happens, we will have this place back in order-a proper place in which the heir of Bayard Brightblade and Enid di Caela can grow into his or her inheritance.

Or so I think tonight, as the winter wind swirls around the castle like water or the Namer's smoke, and I prepare to continue what started at the Telling on the Plains of Southlund. It is time, you see, for my nightly journey, swaddled in blankets and desire, into candlelight and perfume and endearments and the presence of the incomparable Dannelle di Caela.

An adventure not without its own wonders and dangers.