"He says, 'My child, you must travel a long road to find wisdom, for it is not easy to get. You must struggle, and suffer, and speak to all you meet and study their ways, learn what is in their hearts; and even then you will only have begun to find wisdom,' and the woman says back, 'No, no, that can't be right! Can't you give me wisdom?'
"And Luvendashyll says, 'I have a little wisdom, my child, but it cannot be given so easily. You would have to become my disciple, and give all you owned to those who are less fortunate than you are, and travel with me to the ends of the earth, and hear me disputing with other
trevanion;
and perhaps in twenty years I could give you a little wisdom. Or it may be that the wisdom of other
trevanion
would seem better, and you might leave me and apprentice yourself to them for a score of years, in order that they might give you wisdom.'
"And the woman is angry, she says, 'That's ridiculous! Why should I have to do all that to get a little wisdom?' So Luvendashyll is offended, and he says, 'Impatient woman! You do not know what I had to go through for the wisdom I possess. I studied with my master from my earliest childhood, for his wisdom. I spent many days lying in a dark place listening to the Seven Stories of Jish, repeating them for my master until I knew them by heart, to obtain his wisdom. I fasted and prayed and stood on one leg in the bitter cold of winter, that I might be worthy of his wisdom. I walked on cinders and scored my back with a knotted thong, and yet in the end I was granted a little wisdom only, for my master did not like to part with his great wisdom.'
"And the woman says, 'Look, all I want is wisdom, because the one I have has a hole in it and my acorns keep falling out!' "
"Huh?" said Smith.
"The
trevani
Luvendashyll has misunderstood the woman,'' Willowspear explained. "It's a funny story in Yendri, because he thinks she has asked him for wisdom,
trev'nanori,
when all along she asked only for a new basket,
'tren atnori'e."
"Oh," said Smith.
"And your confusion adds a further dimension to the parable, because you don't speak Yendri in the first place," said Willowspear, taking great strides upward in his enthusiasm. "And for the first time, I see the hidden meaning in it!"
"I never thought it was all that funny," said Lord Ermenwyr sullenly, struggling along behind them. "I mean, so the
trevani
is deaf, so what? Or maybe the woman is missing a few teeth."
"The point is that the woman needed a simple thing," said Willowspear, "but the
trevani
did not comprehend simplicity, and so he wasted her time--" He scrambled up on a wide flat landing, and turned back to pull Smith after him, "wasted her time with advice, when what he ought to have done was simply taken reeds and made her a basket! And I, Smith, will make baskets for your people. Figuratively speaking."
He pulled Lord Ermenwyr up as well, and turned to gesture triumphantly at the shoulder of the mountain they had just reached. "When we go up there, Smith, we will look out upon the Garden of Rethkast, and I will show you your future."
"All right," said Smith. He plodded after Willowspear flat-footed, envying the younger man his energy.
"The door is this way," Lord Ermenwyr shouted after them, pointing to a cave.
"One moment, my lord," Willowspear promised. He scrambled up to the crest. "Now, Smith behold the--"
Smith climbed up beside him and stood, gazing down at the wide valley below the mountain. He frowned. Regular lines of green, stretching to the near horizon...
"Those are tents," he pointed out.
"But that was--" began Willowspear, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw the piled mounds of cut trees far below, that which had been the bowers of Rethkast, fast yellowing.
Smith was distracted by a slight sting in his foot. He shifted his weight in annoyance, thinking to kick the wasp away. How had he been stung through his boot? He looked down and saw the tuft of green feathers sticking in his foot, and father down the mountain the Yendri who had shot him, clinging to a precarious handhold. There were others below him, like a line of ants scaling a wall.
He had a rock in his hand before he knew what he was doing, and had hurled it down into the Yendri's glaring face. There was some sort of horrific and spectacular chain reaction then, but he didn't have time to notice it much, because yanking the dart out of his boot took all his concentration. Then Willowspear pulled him away from the edge, and they were staggering back the way they'd come. Lord Ermenwyr was at his elbow suddenly, dragging him into the cave.
There was a dark passage running into the heart of the mountain, but not far, because they came at once to a sealed door. Lord Ermenwyr was pounding on it, yammering curses or prayers. Smith could hear Willowspear weeping behind him.
There was a calm voice in Smith's head saying:
Some of the poison may have stayed in the leather of your boot, and after all you survived a much stronger dose, once before, and there is always the possibility you've built up some immunity. On the other hand...
But he was still conscious. He was still on his feet, though events had begun to take on a certain dreamlike quality. For example: When the door opened at last, he beheld the biggest woman he'd ever seen in his life.
She looked like a slightly disheveled goddess, beautiful in a heroic kind of way, gorgeously robed in purple and scarlet. A bracelet like a golden serpent coiled up one graceful biceps. Smith thought she ought to be standing on a pedestal in a temple courtyard, with a cornucopia of fruit under her arm...
"Did you bring him?" she inquired.
An instinct Smith hadn't used in years took over, and he found himself turning and running back the way he'd come, without quite knowing why. At least, he was trying to run. In actuality he got about three steps before collapsing into Willowspear's arms, and the last thing he saw was the young man's tear-streaked face.
Smith was walking along a road. It was winter, somewhere high among mountains, and the hoarfrost on the road and the snow on the peaks above him were eerily green as turquoise, because it was early morning and a lot of light was streaking in under the clouds. There were mists rising. There were shifting vapors and fogs.
He was following his father. He could see the figure Walking ahead, appearing and reappearing as the mist obscured him. He only glimpsed the wide-brimmed hat, the sweep of cloak; but clearly and without interruption he heard the regular ring of the iron-shod staff on stone.
He tried to call out, to get his father to turn and stop. Somehow, the striding figure never heard him. Smith ran, slipping on the patches of black ice, determined to catch his father, to ask him why he'd never....never...
He was lost in a cloud. The gloom enveloped him, and all he could see was a sullen red glow--
He was holding a staff. It rang, struck sparks from the rock as he swung it. He could not stop, he could not even slow down, for he was following True Fire though he could not see her, and she would not wait for him.
You bear my name.
I do? No, I don't, it's an alias. How could you be my father? I never knew my father. My aunt always said he might have been a sailor. This is a dream.
You walk in my footsteps.
You don't leave footsteps! You never leave a trace. Not one shred of proof. Damn you anyway for never being there.
You kill like a passing shadow, just as I had to kill.
Never liked it. Never wanted to. Never had a choice, though.
Neither did I.
Things got out of hand.
Things got out of control.
I just wanted a quiet life. Why can't people be good to one another?
Why didn't they learn? I should have made them better.
Whose fault is it, then?
You bear my fault.
Like hell I will.
Try to put it down.
Smith attempted to fling the staff away, because somehow it had become the fault, but it wouldn't leave his hand. Instead it shrank, drew into his arm, became part of him.
I don't want this responsibility.
It's your inheritance. And now, my son ... you're armed.
He tried to run away, but his feet were frostbitten. The right one, especially. He slipped, skidded forward and crashed into a painful darkness that echoed with voices...
"I didn't know you were
really
in danger!" Lord Ermenwyr was saying.
"Neither did I, until I looked out the window and there they were," a woman was saying in a bemused kind of way. She had an alto voice, a red velvet voice. "Things became rather horrible after that; but until then, I was enjoying myself with the puzzle."
"How the Nine Hells did they know you were here?" Lord Ermenwyr demanded, panic in his voice. "How did they know
it
was here?"
The woman's shrug was audible.
"Spies, I suppose."
"Well, what are we going to do?"
"Hold them off as long as we can."
"Hold them off? You, me, and a handful of monks hold off an army?" Lord Ermenwyr's voice rose to a scream. "They're fanatics who'll stop at nothing to see my head on a pike! Yours too!"
"It's not as though we can't defend ourselves. We're demons, remember?" The woman's voice grew bleak. "The Adamant Wall ought to keep them out for another week. And if the poor man dies, they won't even be able to get what they've come for. Is he likely to die, Willowspear?"
"Probably not, my lady." Willowspear was speaking very close at hand, speaking in a voice flat with shock. "He's responding to the antidote."
"That's something, anyway." Lord Ermenwyr seemed to have got up. Smith could hear his pacing footsteps. "As long as we're here, let's have a look at this spell of yours."
"It's a terribly old Portal Lock," said the woman, and she seemed to be rising too, her voice was suddenly coming from a long way up. "That was why I thought of you at once. You were always so much cleverer at that kind of composition."
Their voices were moving away now; with their echoing footsteps. Smith could hear Lord Ermenwyr saying, "Ah, but you were always better at research," and the woman was saying something in a tone of chagrin when the echoes and distance made it impossible to hear more.
Silence, a crackle of fire, breathing; several people breathing. A hesitant male voice; "Brother Willowspear?"
"Who is that?"
"Greenbriar. I made the Black Mountain pilgrimage five years ago. You brought us bedding in the guest bowers."
"I remember." Willowspear's voice still sounded unnatural. "She was teaching Fever Infusions that season."
"Will She come to us, at the end? When we are killed?"
"You must trust Her children's word that we will withstand the siege," Willowspear replied, but he sounded unconvinced himself.
"I don't know how I can face Her," the other man said, with tears in his voice. "We failed Her trust. They came like a grass fire, they wouldn't even talk to us, they just laid waste to everything! Brother Bellflower tried to save the orchard. He stood before the palings and shouted at them. They shot him with darts, then they marched over his body and cut the trees down. Thirty years of work killed in an hour..."
"It's an illusion," said another voice, too calmly. "She will bring the garden back. She can do such things. They have no real power over us."
"They are madmen," said a third voice. "You can see it in their eyes."
"One can forgive the Children of the Sun, but these people..."
"We must forgive them too."
"It was our fault. How could we keep the secret from Her own daughter?"
"Pray!" Willowspear's voice cracked. "Be silent and pray. She must hear us."
They were silent.
Smith was regaining the feeling in his limbs. Surreptitiously, he experimented with moving his fingers. He squinted between his eyelids, but could make out nothing but a blur of firelight and shadow.
He was moving his left hand outward, a fraction of an inch at a time, groping for anything that might serve as a weapon, when he heard the echoing voices returning.
"...right about that. I wouldn't reach in there for an all-expenses-paid week in the best Pleasure Club in Salesh."
"This was probably a bad idea," said the woman, sighing.
"Well, I'm sure our poor Smith would prefer you should get hold of it than the Orphans," said Lord Ermenwyr briskly. "We can make much better use of it."
"I only wanted to study it!"
"My most beloved sister, it's Power. You don't study Power. You wield it. I mean, it pays to study it first, but nobody ever stops there."
"I would have," said the woman resentfully. "You really don't understand the virtue of objective research, do you? Even Mother isn't objective."
"Mother especially," said Lord Ermenwyr. His voice drew close to Smith. There was a pause. "Poor old bastard, he's in a bad way, isn't he? I suppose you can't use him if he's unconscious, either? If all you need is his hand--"
Instinct took over again in Smith, and if it had been able to make his body obey, it would have propelled him out of the room with one tigerlike spring. Unfortunately, his legs were in no mood to take orders from anyone, and he merely launched himself off whatever he was lying on before dropping heavily on his face on the floor.
There was a stunned silence before Lord Ermenwyr asked, "What was
that?
Premature rigor mortis?"
Smith felt Willowspear beside him at once, turning him, lifting him back on the cot in a sitting position. They were inside a cavern whose walls were lined with racks of bound codices. There were hundreds of volumes. He saw the light of a fire, and Lord Ermenwyr and the stately lady standing before it, staring at him. There were robed Yendri in the near background, seated in attitudes of meditation, but even they had opened their eyes and were staring at him.
He glared back at them.
"You lied to me," he told Lord Ermenwyr, in a voice thick with effort and rage.