The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain) (12 page)

“You look a bit glum, Teacher,” the old savage said. He sat down beside him and belched. “At least it’s a sunny afternoon. At our age, that counts for something. Much too nice a day to be indoors. But what’s the matter?”

Obst tried to tell him. “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said. “The people to whom God first delivered His Scriptures have closed their ears to His message; but men who were born Heathen, knowing nothing of God—they listen. Now the seminarians are accusing me, not the First Prester, of betraying the Temple to the Thunder King. I knew nothing about it until I heard it from the lips of prisoners taken in the city. That’s how they got into Obann—through the Temple. Lord Reesh let them in. But it seems fewer and fewer of the people are able to believe it.”

“Why should the prisoners lie?” Uduqu said.

“They’re telling the truth, of course. But the seminarians won’t listen.”

“Take the scalps off a few of them, and the rest will be more attentive.”

“You’ll be First Prester before I will, Chief!”

Uduqu’s throaty chuckle raised Obst’s spirits.

“It’s hard for people to change their ways,” Obst said. “The Temple lies in ruins, but it still rules the people’s minds. All their lives they’ve been taught to believe that only a prester ordained by the Temple can present their prayers to God. There’s nothing about that in the Scriptures—but it’s been a long time since the Temple accurately taught the Scriptures. That’s why I left the Temple and became a hermit. The people were allowed to believe they couldn’t know their God, except through the Temple.”

“But that’s just foolishness,” Uduqu said. “You taught us to pray before we ever set out for Obann. You taught us God would hear us; and we believed you, because we knew that only God could have saved us from our enemies those many times. We all pray to Him now, every day.

“Soon I’ll be able to read the Scriptures for myself—me, an Abnak! If I can, surely all these city people can. What’s the matter with them?”

“Nothing that’s their fault,” Obst said. “But I was counting on those seminarians to make copies of the Scriptures, especially of those that Jack and Ellayne found in the cellars of the First Temple, written in King Ozias’ own hand and missing for so many centuries. Those must be copied as soon as can be.

“The seminarians say we must rebuild the Temple. And so we shall, but not in stone. God’s word itself must be our Temple—preached everywhere, taught everywhere, read and studied everywhere. That’s the kind of Temple that can’t be destroyed.”

Uduqu shook his head. “Even if I’d never seen anything else,” he said, “when I saw that gigantic beast trampling the Thunder King’s army, with little Ryons on its back—why, that would’ve been enough to make me believe. I don’t understand these city people. God makes a miracle to save them from certain death, and they all see it with their own eyes, and all they can do is cry buckets over their cusset Temple—when it was the Temple that betrayed them! Good riddance, if you ask me.”

A few children came walking up the street. When they spied Uduqu, they ran to him, faces shining with delight.

“Uduqu, Uduqu!” they cried. “Two men with one blow!”

The old chief growled and made a ferocious face at them. Squealing with pretended terror, they fled back down the street, laughing, giggling, and growling ferociously at each other. It made Obst smile.

“At least the children are with us!” he said.

“And they’ll be grown up someday,” said Uduqu, “when all these fools are dead and gone.”

By Obst’s direction, Dyllyd taught King Ryons from the Scriptures, reading to the boy until he could learn to read them for himself. “A king must know many things,” Obst said, “but the most important thing for him to know is God’s word and the laws of God. A king who does not submit himself to God’s laws will only be a tyrant.”

Every day Dyllyd read him a fascicle out of the Book of Beginnings and taught him how to write the names of whatever important personages were mentioned in the text. So Ryons learned his letters.

He also learned how God made the heavens and the earth, and all that was in them—the mountains and the trees, sun and moon and stars, all living things, and man himself. “He made the things that are out of things that are not,” Dyllyd read. “He uttered His voice and the sun shone, and gave warmth. He set the limits of the sea, and raised the mountains out of dust.”

Ryons was born a slave among the Wallekki and grew up without even a name to call his own. The masters’ gods were not for slaves, but often he saw the masters burning incense or sacrificing doves to one or another of their gods. It might be a figure carved from wood or stones, or a tree, or a pile of rocks. They asked these gods to increase their herds, to give them many sons, and for revenge upon their enemies. When such gifts were not forthcoming, they would turn to yet another god.

No one taught the slave child about the gods, any more than they would have taught a goat. He was more interested in finding food and avoiding beatings than in learning about the gods. There were so many of them, and it never seemed to him that any of them were very important. He certainly never heard that they created the earth itself. It never came into his head to wonder where the world came from, or anything he saw in it. It was all just there.

But this God was important! This God, Obst said, created him and knew him by his name. This was a God that even a slave could pray to—indeed, that even a slave must love and honor, and fear. And certainly—Obst said so—this God had plucked him out of slavery and made him King of Obann, had saved him from a hundred perils, and had put him atop a giant beast that had no name to save the city at the moment it was about to be destroyed. It made Ryons dizzy just to think of Him.

With his mind awakening to questions that he’d never imagined could be asked, Ryons ventured one to Dyllyd.

“Where did God come from?” he asked. “I mean, if God made the world, and everything else, where could He have been before there was a world?”

Dyllyd smiled. “I used to ask that very same question, Majesty,” he said, “and my teacher told me this: there never was a time when God was not God. Before God created it, there was no such thing as time. God had no beginning, nor will He have an end. He created beginnings and decrees the end of each created thing.

“We are flesh and blood, but God is spirit. The whole world ages, but not the God who made it. If you could look down from God’s throne—just in a manner of speaking!—all times would seem like now to you. God never changes, although everything else does.

“So it’s no use to ask where God came from—until God made all places in heaven and on earth, there was no where. I know that’s hard to understand. Most things about God are.”

Ryons wondered what Uduqu would say about a thing like that; he’d skipped his lesson today.

“It’s not hard to understand,” Ryons said. “It’s impossible!”

“It can’t be helped,” said Dyllyd. “It would be easier for a fly to understand what it means to be a human being, than for a human being to understand God. He is unimaginably greater than anything we know. That’s why all Scripture teaches us to love Him, and to trust Him, and to walk by faith and not by sight.”

“What does that mean!” Ryons cried.

Dyllyd rubbed his face and sighed. “Whew! You’ll make a theologian of me yet, Your Majesty! If I can explain these things, and you can understand them, by the time you grow to manhood, we will have both done well. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is learn the Scriptures.”

When he next saw Uduqu, Ryons tried to tell the subchief what he’d learned that day—or rather not quite succeeded in learning.

“I won’t live long enough to wrap my mind around such things,” Uduqu said. “God is God, that’s all I know. It’s good enough for me.”

“Easy for you to say, Chief. You don’t have to be a king.”

“God is wiser than to make a king of me,” Uduqu said.

Helki met a man who’d seen the Griffs pass by. The fellow was a swineherd, but he had no pigs.

“Heathen took ’em, every one,” he said. “Don’t know how I’m going to make it through the winter. They burned my master’s house and made off with his daughters, too. I’ve been hiding out, eating scraps. It’s too dangerous to travel anywhere, and there’s nowhere to go, anyhow.

“But I remember that bunch because they were going east instead of west, and it was before their whole army got chased away from Obann. There was a whole herd of ’em, and they were Griffs, all right. It’s Griffs who do fancy things to their hair. I was up on that little hill, right up there”—he pointed to an isolated hillock crowned with trees—“and they went by right past me, down below. Good thing they didn’t see me!”

“I’m looking for a man and two children,” Helki said, “taken by the Griffs. Did you see them?”

“Clear as day,” the swineherd said. “A man and two kids, with ropes around their necks, poor devils. But there was nothing I could do to help ’em. I don’t see what you could do, either.”

“I’ll think of something,” Helki said.

He now knew he was only a week behind the Griffs; he and Cavall had gained several days. Griffs were pretty tireless walkers, so he was pleased with that. If only he had a horse—but then he’d never learned to ride one. He wished the swineherd luck and went on his way.

There wasn’t much game in this country, and both man and hound had lost weight since beginning their chase. “It won’t hurt me to tighten my belt a bit,” Helki said, the next time he and Cavall stopped for a drink of water. “Life with the army was getting to be too easy, making me soft. If we starve, it’ll be our own fault.” Cavall wagged his tail.

Later that day, they came upon the burned-out shell of a country house. Examining the site, Helki concluded the estate must have been sacked a month ago, at least. House, stables, and sheds were all in ruins.

In the charred skeleton of one of the outbuildings, he found a brown hawk finishing off the remains of a squirrel. The hawk should have flown away as soon as it saw the man and the dog, but this one didn’t. The remains of a leather strap still dangled from one of its legs. Helki whistled at it, and the hawk paused in its feeding to look at him with piercing yellow eyes.

“You’re a tame bird, aren’t you?” Helki said softly. “I reckon this was once your home. Not much of a home anymore, is it?”

He stretched out his arm and made a peculiar kind of high-pitched whistle: a call only known to master falconers, or to someone who’d lived in Lintum Forest all his life and several times raised baby hawks left orphaned by some misfortune to their parents. This hawk flapped its wings noisily, craned its neck, and then flew over to roost on Helki’s forearm. Cavall, who’d lived his life with a solitary crone who made friends of birds and animals, held his peace. He knew how to behave with hawks.

“There, there—good girl!” Helki spoke softly to the bird, and even more softly stroked her head and breast. Her feathers were like silk. He made some other sounds that hawks make to chicks in their nests. The bird shut her eyes.

“You’ll come with us,” said Helki. “I might have need of you. There’s nobody left for you here. And who knows? Maybe someday I’ll present you as a gift to a king.”

The hawk must have been hand-raised and skillfully trained by someone who’d loved her. When Helki and Cavall resumed their hunt, the hawk went with them—sometimes flying overhead, sometimes perched on Helki’s forearm.

He called her Angel.

The mountains loomed in the east, and by now Prester Orth knew he would do anything rather than to cross them into the country of the Thunder King.

Orth had an angel with him, too—not a companion that he desired. He couldn’t escape from it and couldn’t get rid of it. He couldn’t see it, but it was always there.

This was an angel from the Scriptures—from the Book of the Prophet Naiah, to be precise. Naiah saw a vision of a shadowy form, dark, with a slaughter weapon in its hand, and heard a voice from Heaven say, “Behold, a dark angel shall execute my judgment on the cities of the coast, and there shall be none that escape him.” The Scripture never gave the angel’s name; but Naiah prophesied against those ancient cities on the coast, and they succumbed to fire and to plague. This was in the days of King Andrech, an evil king of ancient Obann.