The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain) (2 page)

When the line finally broke, the storm had Gurun’s boat in its teeth. Between the driving rain and the darkness, she could hardly see.

She knew better than to try to fight the storm. All she could do was to wrap herself in the sail and try to stay alive. The boat rushed up the waves and plummeted back down again—up and down, up and down, endlessly. Gurun was used to that: she’d spent much of her life on boats, and she knew this boat would ride the waves. She also knew the rain and the waves were filling the skiff with water, but she was too cold to bail. She knew it would be a miracle if she survived. Her teeth chattered so badly that she couldn’t pray aloud. But her father had built this boat with his own hands, and it would stand much more punishment than other boats.

“It’s all in God’s hands,” she thought. “There’s nothing I can do.”

For how long, or how far, the storm carried her, Gurun had no way to tell. She couldn’t even tell night from day. She huddled in the leather sail and munched on biscuits that she’d brought along. When she was hungry again, she ate raw cod. She might have even slept, although that could have been an illusion.

At some time in the immeasurable future, the rain stopped; the wind died down from a frantic howl to a muted, steady roar; and the darkness lightened. Gurun peeked out from under the sail.

The boat was full of water, a floating island in a sea of fog. With both hands she began to slosh the chilly water overboard.

“Behold, the Lord is with me: I shall not fear the tempests of the earth,” she said, reciting Scripture: one of the songs of King Ozias, from the ancient days. It was a verse dear to the islanders, who knew more about storms and tempests than most people. “Though I be plunged into the depths of the sea, my God shall bring me up again.”

She rested, and finished what was left of the second codfish. It seemed to her that for all the water she’d bailed out of the boat, there was still more in it than there ought to be. That could only mean the boat was leaking faster than she could bail it out. The storm had strained its joints and fastenings more than they could stand.

“At least I won’t have to marry Lokk,” she said to herself. “Although aside from his wart and his boring way of talking, he might not have made such a bad husband after all.”

Yes, this was the end. The boat was riding lower and lower in the water. She now admitted to herself that she should have cut the line when first the wind blew up, and paddled furiously to the nearest island. Under the circumstances, even her father’s worst enemies would have taken care of her: for the storm was the enemy to all.

“Live and learn,” she thought.

In a few minutes the boat would go under. But what was that? She heard something, just ahead of her.

It was the sound of waves lapping. The fog wouldn’t let her see what they were lapping against, but it certainly sounded like a shore. Land! It must be land.

Shedding the sail, Gurun stood up and dove out of the sinking boat. She was already chilled. The water, when it closed over her body, was warmer than the air.

Gurun swam, pausing every few strokes to listen for what she could not see. She was a strong swimmer. In a few minutes her feet touched sand. A few more strokes and she could wade. A few weary strokes brought her to a sandy beach littered with clam shells. She fell to her hands and knees and gasped a prayer of thanks.

Where under heaven was she? Every fiber of her body begged for sleep. But this land looked like tidal flats, and if the tide came in while she was sleeping, she would drown. She had to find higher ground, if there was any. But all around her lay the fog.

She struggled back to her feet. One of her moccasins was missing; she must have kicked it off while swimming. Deciding that one shoe was worse than none, she got rid of the other. The soft sand felt good to her bare feet.

“Hello!” she called; but there was no answer.

For all Gurun knew, she was on a tiny island that would be entirely underwater when the tide came in. She couldn’t stay where she was. Shivering, she turned away from the water and began to walk.

And then, as if by God’s command, a breeze came up and the fog began to lift.

Gurun stood waiting as the fog thinned and melted away. Before long, she saw a dark mass in the distance. A little longer, and the mass resolved itself into stands of shrubbery and low, wind-beaten trees, all perched on rolling dunes.

The sun came out. The foliage turned from grey to green. Beyond the dunes rose hills, and on the hills—

She caught her breath. What were those things up there? Gigantic boxes, cubes, straight lines; they rose above the trees. What were they? You would have recognized them instantly as buildings, but Gurun had never seen an ordinary, above-ground building.

Her mind raced. It churned up verses of Scripture that had to do with houses, palaces, and castles: things from ancient times and far away. Words that had no meaning for the people of the islands, who lived in barrows heaped with turf—what could they know of palaces or castles?

But what else could these enormous objects be but palaces or castles? And where were the people? Inside, perhaps?

Gurun marched toward them to see for herself.

Up the dunes and up she climbed. Now the fog was all gone and the sun high up in the sky. All the chill left Gurun’s body. She soon realized she was hungry and thirsty.

“Where am I?” she wondered. “What country is this? What kind of people live here?”

She went from being warm to being hot. Was she sick, or could it really be this hot?

Gurun’s people knew, of course, that there were other countries, other peoples. There must be. They themselves had come from a distant country in the south, ages ago. Occasionally they visited the mainland, although sometimes men who did so never came back. That was the only way they could get real lumber. The shores they visited were as cold as the islands themselves, and uninhabited. There was no sign that anyone had ever lived there.

Bertig’s cousin, Zill, was a reciter—one of the sages who copied and memorized the Scriptures. Books among the islanders were few and far between, so reciters served as living books. The custom had been established a thousand years ago to ensure that the people would never lose their knowledge of the Scriptures.

“A thousand years we’ve been living on these islands,” Zill used to say. “We came here fleeing wickedness, and God hid us away, up here in the North, where we could be safe.

“All those places mentioned in the Scriptures—seats of kings, the sites of famous battles, great rivers, forests, famous cities—they have all passed away. No man will see them anymore. There’s no going back to where we came from.”

The sand gave way to soil; real trees rose up here and there; and Gurun found a path leading uphill to an enormous structure made of stone. Others stood around it and beyond it.

Gurun’s people kept their sheep and cattle underground, bringing them out each day to graze. The deeper they dug into the earth, and the lower they built on top of it, the better. You could dig in the ground and line the hole with rocks, panel the rocks with timber if you could afford it, and insulate with armloads of dried moss. You would need timber to roof it over, and pile turf onto the roof until all the chinks were filled and you were safe from the winter.

Such was the only kind of building Gurun knew. These stone structures, with their straight lines and right angles, which towered over the land like trees—these astounded her.

“Hello!” she called. No human being answered her, only the cries and whistles of some gulls.

The footpath led straight up to a yawning rectangular hole in the expanse of tightly fitted stones. Higher up were several smaller openings, squares of darkness. Had people built this monument—or trolls? What if there were trolls inside, waiting for her in the dark?

“Trolls!” Zill used to say, with a snort. “Who has ever seen one?” But that didn’t stop most islanders from believing in them.

Trolls or no trolls, Gurun had to find some drinking water soon, and food, and something to use as a weapon—she’d lost her fisherman’s knife when the boat sank. She knew she wasn’t going to find any water on top of a hill, so she looked for a way down.

Cautiously she trod among the silent buildings. You might have thought most of them no bigger than ordinary houses, but to Gurun they seemed immense, unnatural, and threatening. There should have been people; it unnerved her that there weren’t any.

Beyond the cluster of buildings, on the other side of the hill, down at the bottom, she found a pool of water nestled in high, luxuriant grass. Around it, frogs croaked. When she approached, a few of them jumped into the pool. Gurun shied away. She’d never seen frogs before, and she didn’t know what they were.

But frogs or no frogs, she was thirsty. She stretched herself on the ground and dipped her face in the water, rubbing away the salt. The water seemed deliciously cool. She drank. It was barely drinkable, with a brackish taint to it, but it would do. She drank slowly, savoring it. She washed her arms and soaked her hair, then lay back, resting. The pool lay in the shadow of the hill, but Gurun was still warm enough to enjoy it.

Not meaning to, she fell asleep. Luckily, something woke her before nightfall.

She climbed back up the hill. Not for a hearty bowl of chowder would she care to spend the night inside one of those buildings! Still, she ought to take a look inside one while there was still some light. It would be cowardly not to. Her three brothers would have laughed at her—little worms.

She found a good-sized stick and adopted it as a weapon. One of the less gigantic buildings stood close at hand. She supposed that black hole was an entrance.

Gurun was afraid—of darkness, of trolls, of not knowing what to expect. But she got a got grip on her stick and went inside.

She had to wait while her eyes adjusted to the murk. Now low in the western sky, the sun was well-placed to trickle light into the interior.

And as it turned out, there was nothing much to see—just some shapeless heaps of rubbish and a thick coat of dust on the hard stone floor.

“Is anybody here?”

Her words echoed briefly, died away. There was no one, living or dead.

“Great was God’s wrath upon this place,” she thought: for the reciters taught that God destroyed the wicked nations of the South, sparing only the dwellers in the islands. Perhaps the dust that lay everywhere was all that remained of the people. Her bare feet might be treading on the dust of kings and queens.

“So,” Gurun said to herself, “the storm has blown me to a country of the dead. Better find some food soon, or my dust will be mingling with theirs.”

Gurun slept outside that night, in a hollow between two dunes. The night wind made queer noises, rushing among the empty buildings.

She woke up hungry in the early morning. Gulls serenaded her. Having been taught that the people of the South had perished in God’s wrath, she supposed there wouldn’t be anyone around to give her food. Well, there would be clams to dig up from the sand, and it might be possible to kill a seabird with a stone. Gurun was good at throwing stones. There might be fruits growing wild that she could eat.