The End of the Game (24 page)

“Well,” I said to myself. “He got something of that.” I thanked the forest for telling him what I needed.

We went southwest, into a part of the forest we had never wandered through. There were vast open tracts there, wide to the sky, meadows of the sort the gobblemoles prefer, where their draggling can be through soft soil. We saw many, but the bunwit didn’t stop. None of them was above average size. I heard sound from the final clearing before ever we came to it, a kind of scrape-chunk, scrape-chunk. From the edge of the trees we could see the earth flying, high on either side of a long, deep trench. It was a great, blind gobblemole, the largest I have ever seen. I came out of the woods to climb upon the draggled bank, remembering what Bartelmy of the Ban had said. Truth in old tales. Rituals of truth.

“What are you draggling away there for, old gobblemole?” I cried, clutching the star-eye in my hand like some luck-piece.

“Draggling for the Daylight Bell, Little Star,” he rumbled, spewing bits of soil all over me. His fur was as close and tight, black as midnight dark, velvet all but his snout and those hard, horn claws. “Draggling for the Daylight Bell.”

“Well then, I’ll help you druggle,” I said, letting go the star-eye to climb down into the trench. It was deep and moist, full of crawly things and ends of root. I pushed in beside the mole and began to druggie, throwing tiny handfuls of earth on either side. I was conveniently placed for him. He caught me in one foot, the horny claws bending around me like so many curved swords, not touching yet, but sharp as any blade might be.

“Now I’ve got you, Little Star,” his voice drummed at me. As he very well did. As the flitchhawk had had me before.

This time I managed a tone of petulance. “Now why did you do that, old gobblemole! just when you caught me there, I caught a glimpse of the Daylight Bell. Right there where you were druggling!”

Then was a long pause, as though the mole didn’t know the words. A long, long pause while Jinian thought she had miscalculated. A long, long time when nothing happened at all and I thought the tale had gone awry or I had not spoken my lines aright.

I was about to give up and resolve to die when it said, “Where, where,” dropping me and starting to druggle again as it had before.

So I put the thong about a back foot and cried out. “Daylight Bell in earthways wan’t be; Daylight Bell in treetop can’t be. Tricksy lie brings tricksy tie, now give me boon or else you die!”

And it said, just as the flitchhawk had, “What boon will you have, child?”

So I told it what needed doing.

“That is not much boon, Footseer,” it rumbled at me. Its eyes were so buried in its thick fur I wondered if it saw me at all, but its claws around me were not threatening. They were huge, hard as stone, and I leaned against them, exhausted, looking up into the great gobblemole face to see a glint of light in those hidden eyes. “We will do as you ask, but a boon is still owed you. Earthways are mine, and things old and buried. If you need help with such things, call on me.”

Then it set me down, and turned back to its druggling, leaving me staggering there, uncertain of my footing or my senses. Bunwit and I went back to the ruin. Next morn early I went to look, and there were a thousand gobblemoles druggling up the earth that covered the road, throwing it to either side, making huge mounds, and leaving the road beneath as clean as old bone. What they didn’t get, the flood-chucks got, and as the days went by, I could walk farther and farther on the Old Road without losing it or having to go barefoot to feel it. It was slow work. The covering hills were monstrous big, but we progressed.

Days would go by during which we got great stretches of the road uncovered, and then a morning would come when the shadow lay everywhere. On every clot of earth. On every stone. Nothing moved in the forest then. No bird, no bunwit. Nothing. The flood-chucks wouldn’t come near us, nor the moles. Everything stopped. On those days, I would lie close to the hearth, the window shuttered, a small fire built, and say the protection words over and over to myself with bunwit and tree rat huddling close at my side and not a sound from the forest. I knew what the shadow could do if it touched me, and I did not want it to happen again.

Then, a morning would dawn with the shadow gone, and we would resume the work as though nothing had happened. After a time, I began to think of the shadow as a kind of traveler which could not be everywhere. So, it came and stopped everything, but while it was here, it could not be elsewhere, and eventually it had to go stop what was happening somewhere else. When it went, we would go on. This was a comforting thought.

The weather turned cold. The Season of Storms came on. Tree rat and his friends put on another roof over the first one, and I built a pair of shutters for the window. Someone left me a thick blanket woven of moss, and bunwit carried in stacks of soft, dried grass for my mattress. I didn’t go hungry. Tree rat and bunwit seemed to have a bottomless cache of dried fruits and nuts. Some bird left me eggs every day or so. There were edible fungi and roots. The gobblemoles were still working on the southern road. The eastern one was clear. The flood-chucks had started on the western one. There were a couple of problems, not least the river to the south and west which ran right over where the road should go.

At first it didn’t occur to me to finish up the story. The third creature in the story is a d’bor wife. D’bor are ocean creatures, though sometimes found in very large lakes. They are not river creatures. They are very fearsome, a wild, unfamiliar kind of beast, neither furry nor feathered. I did not like the thought of the d’bor wife. Still, there was that river running half around the forest where it had no business being. Finally, after many many days had gone by, I sat bunwit down and put the problem to him.

“I don’t suppose there are any d’bor in the forest,” I said. Bunwit went on chewing, paying no attention.

“Are there any d’bor?” I asked. It looked at me. I sighed.

“Take me to the d’bor wife,” I said at last, fatalistically. He would or he wouldn’t. Trying to hold back wasn’t doing me any good.

I wasn’t really surprised when he hopped off in his usual errand-running manner. Southeast. Into the deep chasms of that part of Chimmerdong. Dangerous terrain. Leg-breaking terrain, and no Healer closer than Lake Yost. We slipped and slid. Night came on, and we slept under a tree. It was colder than comfortable. Morning came, dim under black clouds. We went on slipping and sliding.

Midday, I heard the sound. A waterfall. Sizable. A constant tumult of water into some deep, forlorn place. We were coming to it along the bottom of a canyon. The canyon opened out, wider and wider, and there the pool was before us. More than a pool, a lake. Across it the pillars of stone loomed up to the top of the sky and water fell in a strong, crashing flow.

And at the edge of the pool, grodgeling in the shallow waters, was a d’bor wife. She was slick and black and hideous. Her flappers were long and hard, shaped like coffin lids. Her one eye peered at me out of her tentacled head, and her jaws clashed their beaky plates together. I stood where I was, going no closer at all, and cried, “Why are you grodgeling away there, d’bor wife?”

She gargled at me. It took a little time before I understood the words. Story words. Oh, yes. Grodgeling to find the Daylight Bell. The lake spray tasted salt. Might be, I thought, it was tied through underground ways far and far to the Western Sea or the Southern Sea or even the Glistening Sea, far to the east. I did not want to go near her. Her mouth smelled of blood.

“Well then,” I cried, voice trembling so I could hardly understand myself, “I’ll grodgel with you, d’bor wife.” And I stumbled forward to bend above the shallow waters and begin grodgeling at it, splash, splash.

And I saw it, there, just sinking away beneath the waters, just the edge, the very edge, golden as dawn, curved, unmistakable, a bell sinking beneath the waves of the lake ...

So when she took me up, I screamed in real surprise and anguish. “I saw it! I saw it! Just then when you took me up, d’bor wife, I saw the Daylight Bell, sinking beneath the water ...”

There was no time to be frightened. She dropped me then, at once, and began trying to find it. I forgot the thong, forgot it all. Only after a long time, as she whuffed away in the water did I come to myself enough to slip the thong around a back tentacle and cry, hoarsely, through my tears, “Daylight Bell in water shan’t be; Daylight Bell in earthways wan’t be; Daylight Bell in treetop can’t be. Tricksy lie brings tricksy tie, now give me boon or else you die!” For I knew then it was too late. We had almost found it, the d’bor wife and I, but we had lost it.

When I told her the boon, she gargled, deep bubbling sounds like fountains at the bottom of the ocean. Her hide was dark as char and hard, half leather, half shell. Her tentacles wove spells before my eyes, and the suckers on them opened and closed like hungry little mouths. “Not a great boon,” she gargled. “I will owe you a boon more, ground-child. The things of the deep are mine, all things washed by ocean or sea. If you have need in such places, call on me.”

Well, you know the way of these stories. The river that blocked the Old Road was changed in its course, for the d’bor wife grodgeled it back where it belonged as her boon to me. The moles finished their work, and the flood-chucks. Each road was opened once more to the gray, and we set fires there that burned and burned in ever-widening arcs. When the Season of Storms was done, so was I. The Forest of Chimmerdong was open to the world on every side.

I sat in my room in the ruin and summoned forest, expecting the small twiggy creature to return. I had not thought, truthfully. It had been a long task, a dirty, endless task, with leagues run every day to spy out all the edges of the road and clear them all. So I summoned, glad it was done, not thinking much, not expecting much.

It came. I was thrust back against the wall, breathless, as all leaf came into the room, all tendril, all bark, ramifications of trunk and twig, fortresses of root, everything in one, in itself, enormous yet contained, all smells, all light, rain and sun, mist and moonlight, stargleam on pond, dawn on marsh, noon on brook, sparkle and splash. Murmur of wind was there, and howl of storm. Quiet of evening was there, and rattle of hail on high limbs against the sky. Moss, fern, tracery of forest, lip of blossom, whir of wing, cry of beak, all, all, all.

Field mint and bergamot, rose and startle-flower, lady lily, zeller flower, Healer’s balm, sweet grass.

Rustle in the underbrush, crash of fleeing prey, howl of predator, shriek of watcher, hum of unconcerned bee creature in the hollow of a stump. All. Wings folding, unfolding like gems; rise of fish from the deeps to make the single, opening ripple that reached, reached, reached outward. Night, morning, noon. High cry of the hawk on gold, low croak of the froggy marsh walker, joined, joined, music, melody, from top to bottom of being, speaking, saying—what?

“Well done ...”

Below hearing. Above hearing.

“Well done ...”

I could not breathe, did not care, died and did not care. Upon my breast the fragment burned within its locket, a heart of fire upon my own. Then it went away all at once, and I lay on the floor where I had fallen, sucking in air like a beached fish. A forest is a very large thing to come into a room that size.

Perhaps I had not really believed in the old gods, not until then.

And yet, though it had been huge, immense, beyond comprehension in its size and complexity, still I had had the feeling it was not a whole thing. A thing made whole, yes, but not a whole thing. There was more, elsewhere. After much thought I decided it was rather as though my foot had spoken to me, a good useful foot without blemish or ill, and yet only a foot for all that. Not a person entire.

And what I thought I meant by that, I was not certain an hour later. On my breast an arrow of fire remained, the skin red and burned. It left a scar there when it healed, but there was never any pain.

On the morning after that, as though carefully timed for my task’s completion, the old dams came singing down the road in the wagon, all five of them, with a cheerfully plain girl of about twelve sitting on the seat beside Cat Candleshy. “Sister,” Cat said, “greet Dodie, who joins us upon the way.”

I knew we were soon to be seven once more.

18

I said hello to Dodie, politely. She greeted me a good bit more eagerly than that, and I looked her over, approving of her. A slightly uncomfortable silence fell.

I broke it. “You took a long time finding me,” trying to keep a whine out of it.

“Well, chile,” said Murzy, “we had word you were doing well enough. Coming to grips, you know, the way we all must. Seemed best to leave you at it.”

“But now,” said Margaret, putting her arms around me and her cheek next to mine, turning the full blaze of Beguilement on me so that she glowed with it like a little furnace and me with it, warming, “we must be with you to celebrate your sixteenth year.”

That was surprising, but of course a year had gone since we’d had cakes and wine in Xammer. More than two years since Joramal had come to Stoneflight Demesne. Three years since I had been to Schooltown. Ah. The thought caught me all at once and I breathed in with a sob, as though I’d been hurt.

“Why, chile, chile, what is it?” Murzy was hugging me and listening to me breathe as though something were broken inside.

“Will you want me still?” I asked. “The Dervish says one can be Wize-ard even without Talent, but oh, I did want something ...”

“Bartelmy!” muttered Cat.

“All the sensitivity of an icicle,” murmured Sarah. “We should have known.”

“Oh, shush,” said Murzy. “Bartelmy is what she can be. Now. You’ve had a hard time, chile, but that’s no excuse for feeling sorry for yourself. Of course we would want you, Talent or no. Once a seven, always a seven, ‘til death breaks us. That’s the way of it, and that’s all.”

“However,” interrupted Cat, “there is no question of that. You have a Talent, according to Bartelmy. A very strong, unusual one. And, quite frankly, I am surprised that a girl as intelligent as you should not have realized it. No!” She held up her hand as Margaret started to speak. “Let her figure it out for herself. It may give her several hours or days—or, by all the old gods, weeks, if her current silliness continues—of honest bewilderment. Which is always good for the soul. Now, let us have supper.”