“
Mark my words, the Eldrik are a curious people. Strife and discord are unknown. They live in harmony with the land, going to great lengths to protect and nurture it. All share in a communal mind called the
gyael-irfa
and they are ruled by the Eldrik Sorcerers Council.”
Orik abruptly leaned across the table, hissing, “Swear
that you will never repeat what I am about to tell you.”
“I
–uh–”
“Swear it!”
“I swear,” said I, taken aback by his ferocity. “I swear upon my honour.”
“And in Mata’s name.”
“And in Mata’s name and by all Her holiness.”
My father was struggling for words, struggling, truly told, to shoehorn the many anna into the too-short space we could afford together. “Good,” he nodded. “The very anna I met Alannah
–your mother–there was a split in the Council. It grew out of a disagreement over–” he lowered his voice, “–the Banishment.”
“Banishment?”
“Hush. Forget you heard that word.” Orik cast a distrustful look about the inn, but seemed satisfied by our distance from the nearest patrons. There was something wild in his manner now, a feyness and an affinity with danger. It frightened me. But I wanted to learn more. I perched on the edge of my seat, leaning close, watching the firelight play across his grave features. No jokes here. This was life … and the white of death.
“Alannah
taught me that the Eldrik have not always dwelled in this utopian state,” he continued in a whisper. “Around sixty or seventy anna ago, as best I can ascertain, a powerful Sorcerer called Lucan rose to the ascendancy in the Eldrik Sorcerers Council. He was determined to modernise Eldoran. He preached a society of perfect harmony and peace. A place for everyone who wanted to contribute. A benevolent leadership. Shared decision-making about the use of resources, commerce, education–”
“
A great leader?”
My father’s hands clenched into fists. “Great, charismatic, and dangerous. Terribly dangerous.”
“How so?”
“Look, Alannah found it painful to talk about her part in the whole affair. As I understand it, this Lucan’s signature policy was to banish from
Eldoran–forever–persons deemed undesirable.”
It was beginning to make sense. “And those opposed headed the lists
…?”
Orik spread his hands. “Lucan created some great magic called the Banishment and these poor people were shipped off
… Mata knows where. Apparently children are tested at the ages of seven and twelve by sinister Warlocks called Interrogators, who analyse the child to determine their talents and future occupation.”
“You mean they can’t choose
for themselves?”
“Not when your elders know best.” He smirked and raised an eyebrow. “It sounds at odds with the Umarik mindset, not so? And I believe this is still the practice.
Mark my words well, Arlak.”
“And if these Interrog
ators identify some undesirable–?”
Orik made a cutting gesture across his neck.
Banished … what a way to govern!
I wondered about the magic Jyla had loosed that diabolical day. Why raise the Wurm and store up such a wealth of power, if not to break the Banishment? Was that her goal? Laudable, even, judging from what I now knew. Although surely, the way she had tortured and killed Janos, and wrecked my life, marked her for evil? Or ambitious to the point of madness? I squirmed on the hard bench. Understand Jyla? Fie! I wanted to hate her, the Nethespawn
Sorceress! This new knowledge of mine might cast her deeds in a very different light.
“The complicating factor,” said Orik, raising his forefinger, “was that Lucan died while they were creating the spells for the Banishment
–right at the climax of their work, he died. It was a great mystery. Now the Eldrik Sorcerers do not know how to unmake their foul work.”
I cared not a fig for Lucan.
I demanded, “Tell me of my mother.”
Orik nodded. “You are her very image. She was as dark as you,
and very slender, with that jet-black hair and your eyes. A true beauty. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.” My father’s gaze was far away, out the window, deep in a different anna. “When I first marked you at Telmak Lodge, my son, I had to draw aside to weep. And how could I communicate to you what rent my heart? Had the Honoria learned who you were, she would have killed you. She’s a hard, hard woman.”
“Ay.”
“But I digress.” He smiled–perhaps at some happy memory–and for the first time, his face softened and I saw a different man. A man who had loved, and suffered, as I. “Alannah was a minor Warlock of the Council. She fled Eldoria when the Council declared the borders closed. I never learned exactly why, but I believe a relative of hers was Banished. And I helped smuggle her out.”
“And the Honoria
–”
“I was already promised. It was a loveless match, arranged by our parents. I’m afraid that I saw Alannah for many anna thereafter.”
I could not withhold a chuckle. Orik chuckled too. “Ah, I was unwise, son, as foolish a man as ever walked the Fiefdoms. I could not bring myself to let Alannah go. During that voyage back from Eldoria we fell in love, oh, so deeply in love, we floated in the clouds from day to day. Though I was Matabound to the Honoria Telmak, I simply had to keep her too. You understand, don't you …? Alannah lived in a small crofthold not far from here and I would sneak out at night just to catch a glimpse, just to be near her. When she let her hair down, it fell to her waist in a dark river. I could waste a makh just watching her brush it out.”
I nodded. “That’s how I feel
–how I felt–about Rubiny.”
Orik said roughly, “They found her just before you were born. While Alannah was still weak abed, the midwife gave her a poisoned drink. But she could not bring herself to kill the babe. I thought I saw the Honoria’s hand in her murder. Later, though, I found a letter addressed to Alannah from the Council.”
“The Eldrik?”
“Truly told. I believe a number of
Sorcerers and Warlocks fled Eldoria during and after the Banishment. The Council hunted them down like animals, one by one, and killed them all.”
I drew breath and vented a foul curse.
Orik clasped my hands again. “Son, I know how you feel. But you should not let the evil of others corrupt your quoph. That is not Mata’s way.”
“What boon did Mata ever grant me?”
“I know not,” said he, “but I know this–you say you have twice seen the blue condor. Twice, during those times of your greatest extremity. You are marked, Arlak, make no mistake. You are marked and sealed. You are Hers.”
“Would you read my fortune too?”
“So bitter …”
My lip curled in response. “Yes, father, I am bitter at what has happened. Can you blame me?”
“Do you blame me?”
I considered this for a span. “No. No, I do not.”
“And neither do I. How could you have known? You hardly look alike. If there’s fault here, then I must own it. I ought to have stopped you … but I was afraid. So afraid.”
“Were I hitched to wild jerlak that day
…”
“Ay.”
I would not have believed. My antagonism toward him drained away. Orik’s revelations were beginning to penetrate, to make sense of thoughts, feelings, and events that had long haunted me. He had opened for me a casket of treasures and pain. Truly told, and made me a trustee of such intimate secrets as whispered in the wrong ear would cost his life, and the lives of uncountable others.
I added, “So you gave me to your brother to raise. Yes. And your back? What happened there?” I tried a smile. A smile for the truth of my parentage, after all these anna! “And
, before you ask, I am asking as your son.”
The word conjured up all kinds of alien feelings in my breast.
Orik said evenly, “The Honoria had me whipped a hundred strokes with an ulinbarb switch.” I winced. “Ay, I nearly died. I still have the scars, many scars.”
“And you have lived with the pain
ever since?”
Orik inclined his chin. “It healed badly.
The muscles are often in spasm.”
That
was why he always stood so awkwardly, so stiff-shouldered …
No more pain. It was the least I could do, my gift to the man who had given me life, and hope, and shared his story with me. Our story.
Truth! Clues to a destiny undreamt-of, and questions to fill a salcat’s basket of lifetimes. Had Jyla not touched this truth–unwittingly–when she said that my hands might be made for magic? Dear sweet Mata, I was son to a Warlock! I felt as a man sent a second time through the birth canal by the enormity of Orik’s revelations. I knew nought but this: Now I must claim my heritage. I must walk magic’s mysterious paths. Somewhere in the Eldrik part of my parentage, lay the answers I was seeking.
My life had until this point been an expression of
other’s needs, greater than my own, made manifest in me and through me. My parents–my foster parents–trading. Janos, who shared his knowledge and loved me as his own kin. My true father, lost to me all these anna, now found. Jyla, needing me to produce vast lakes of power through the Wurm and her strange Web, that she herself could not generate. I was their tool, driven by their needs. Now it was time to be me.
Arlak. El Shashi. Bringer of the Wurm. Who
was I?
I laid my hands upon my father’s and gripped them fiercely. “Father, I am not for nought the man called El Shashi.”
His eyes registered surprise, fear, hope. Then shock, as my power coursed deep. His mouth opened in a soundless scream. Burying his head in his arms, he shuddered as strongly as a ship caught in a maelstrom.
I held firm until my work was complete.
When my father rose at last, his eyes were wet with tears. But he stood tall. And unbowed.
Research points to an early migration of the Umarite and Eldrik tribes from the north. The Pact of Syrik in the 79
th
anna saw the Eldrik claim the western territories, beyond the Gulf of Erbon, while Umarites turned eastward and began to settle Hakooi, Elbarath, Chasturn and Brephat. The tribes washed up against the great mountain range of Loibrak, and for many a gantul, this was the limit of their advance. But then the First Blood-Fever plague ravaged the lands from anna 456 to 461. A linchpin of Umarik history, those dire anna saw the founding of the first Fiefdoms, the retreat of the monkish orders to remote sanctuaries such as Feelthi, Termik, and Arrakbon, wherein their power and influence, once consolidated, spread swiftly across the weakened, fledgling Fiefdoms, and the first expansion into the virgin forests that would become the demesne of Roymere.
Of the migration, historical record is s
cant. Our ancestors, both Umarite and Eldrik, appear to have colluded in the destruction of all scrolleaf of that time, and even the oral histories were violently suppressed. To what end? Briefly, three common threads emerge from ulules’ conjectures–the presence of giants, a terrible cataclysm in the north, and the vast, evil magic of a being we deify as Ulim the Godslayer. In this account my quim shall not speculate on these unknowns, save to note the mystery of Umarite and Eldrik origins …
Lorimi the Historian
:
Introduction to the Umarite Histories (1
st
Scrolleaf)
During the precious few makh we dared further, Orik convinced me to start my search at the Mystic Library in Herliki.
It
lies eight hundred and fifty leagues west of Telmak Lodge, but that hardly tells the tale. It is a migration worthy of the hardy laughing-swallow. Crossing the great forested breadth of Roymere, the traveller must scale the high passes of the Loibrak Range that divides Roymere from northern Elbarath and marks the northerly border of Hakooi all the way to the Gulf of Erbon, and pass through the broad, rich pastures and riverine lowlands of Hakooi to the coast, crossing many great rivers on the way.
On the strength of his word, my boots tramped every last trin. A whole anna of my life thus consumed. I had to work my passage
–for a man must eat–and though I made every enquiry after my family with weary fortitude, not a crumb of hope fell from Mata’s table.
I wondered, of the myriad lives I touched in passing, how many concealed such a wounding grief as mine? People hide their true selves as behind a stagesmith’s mask. Who would know by sight
alone the barren woman, the man who lost his wife to a tygar, the family riven by the violence of a father always too deep in his cups? Even my astute eye, and an ever-sharpening sense of grephe, failed too often, and–Mata forgive me–how many people had El Shashi simply swept by, not even seen … and no amount of mining those paragons of local gossip, the ulules, could show me all.
My hands touch
ed so few.
How had Jyla condensed the powers of a deity into flesh as weak as any other man? A man yoked to the unceasing demands of seething humanity, like a cart heavy-laden dragged uphill by a half-lame jatha. Too many conditions, too much hurt, too much suffering
… I wanted to scream: ‘Curse you, Jyla! Lift this curse from me!’
Perhaps it was Mata’s mirror, as the yammariks put it, which
showed me how far I had withdrawn from my patients. I was growing cold of quoph, and uncaring, for the accumulated weight of their pain would otherwise slay me.
During
my great journey, the mirror first became apparent in the hidden valleys of Loibrak.
I would not even have known of this route, save
that a man I healed from the bite of a cross-backed adder gifted me an excellent map–compiled by the Feelthi monastic order, nicknamed the ‘Footloose Monks’–an eclectic band of wandering cartographers hailing from the six-hundred anna old fortress of Feelthi. As I followed the marked route deeper and deeper into the thickly-forested Loibrak foothills, I came at length to Soluk Valley, home to the fabled Soluk Mines, the only known source of the fabulous, costly gemstone known as Mataflower. The exact location of the mines has been a secret passed down from father to son for gantuls.
The approach to Soluk Village meandered through diminutive but lush green fields, which lapped
as a verdant pond up against precipitous fern-trailed cliffs to either side, themselves carpeted with turquoise-flowered olimoss, on a path hugging the banks of a burbling stream. At friendly intervals, small arched footbridges helped the traveller from one side to the other without need to soak his boots. Russet jatha dotted the knee-high sward, chewing their cud philosophically, while twittering purple jathafinches picked ticks and other parasites from the deep folds of their hide. Here I cast myself at the bole of a gnarled bragazzar, and among its roots spent several makh cooling my quoph.
My children played in my memory. Rubiny kissed me. I wept.
At length, travelling on, I came to a place where the broad-shouldered cliffs drew apart, and here in the thrice-cleft conjunction of two further ravines, I found Soluk Village.
I was greeted by a pretty collection of slate-roofed wooden cottages literally besieged by flower beds, flower boxes, wooden trellises festooned with
–ay–more flowers, window boxes filled to overflowing with life and colour, flower pots, flower barrels … everywhere the eye turned, a riot of gay flowers to please the eye and gladden the heart. The paths winding between the cottages had been swept religiously. Hardly a pebble was out of place.
First I marked this, I wondered at their
single-minded devotion to beauty. To me it had the subtlety of a hammer-blow which shapes metal in upon the anvil. But then my eye fell upon a most unfavourable plot, to the left of the beautiful cottages, whereupon stood a dozen or so rude huts abutted by a veritable forest of tall thistles, and a fronted by a mossy carpet spotted with liplin flowers. To this sight my quoph leaned. So there I went.
Mark my words
, during the ten days of my stay in Soluk Village, I found that the villagers suffered from a baffling array of maladies, ranging from hair and teeth loss in young men, to a shocking diversity of birth defects that were so pervasive in a small village population it was hard to spy a healthy man, woman, or child. Never before or again have I observed the like. Twisted or missing limbs, deformities, a boy with two heads, cleft palates … I remember it as though the day were yesterday, so seared are those images in my memory.
Later
, I would wonder if this marked the cost of mining the Mataflower.
But it was a man called Torl, who I discovered in the last and meanest hut, whose plight smote my detachment such a
prodigious blow, that I can scarce recall him without tears.
I called from without
his hut, but heard no response. So I dusted my boots loudly. Ducking beneath the lintel, I advanced into a low, dim room until I barked my shins against a low stool. I heard a stirring at my right hand. My eyes began to adjust to the gloom. I made out a tall, thin man lying abed on a rough wooden cot, and beside him on a pillow what I thought to be a salcat, or some other animal, sleeping beside his head.
The animal moved. It gurgled.
It took me a long, long moment to realise that the man had just spoken to me. I understood not a word. He tried to speak again. I leaned closer.
Mata have mercy! My eyes fixated themselves on his lips with a grim absorption. Each resembled a Hakooi swamp leech
–easily the size of my hand, black and grossly swollen, and completely in the wrong place, as if his entire face had slid sideways and downward from his head. The strange appendages writhed and something with the cadence of speech emerged. But I stood frozen in place as if Ulim himself had pinned me with his dread spear of ice. Was that his tongue bulging out … Ulim’s Hounds! That misshapen slash was his mouth? No animal … at once I realised my mistake and nearly gagged. I realised there was a bulbous mass of flesh drooping across the pillow next to him, a facial tumour, by leagues the worst I had ever seen. His eyes! Lolling in sockets distended by a weight of hanging flesh. Frightened. Helpless. Desperate. His whole face … dear Mata … was there a nose buried in that lumpen pancake of flesh? Could he even lift his head? How did this man yet live?
Most likely by the pity of his neighbours.
I swallowed. This is was no mere road beyond my experience; this was beyond the next Fiefdom! I wanted to turn and run straight out of the doorway, but a strange force stayed my feet. I stood rooted, incapable of speech, while my heart squeezed within to the point of torture. I prayed, ‘Dear Mata, if you want me to heal this man, then grant me the wisdom of the divine!’
At once, breath filled my throat and I was able to rasp, “Friend, I am
the man called El Shashi. May I offer … healing?”
Slow and
inevitable, like the flaming of dawn after the legendary hundred-anna night called Ulim’s Despond, was the dawning of hope in this man’s quoph.
And that is when I began to cry.
Three days I laboured over this man–Torl was his name–in sweat and in tears. The first day, two neighbours stopped to inquire as to my business there. By the third eventide, the whole village stood waiting outside his door.
“I want to see the sun,” said Torl.
I raised his arm over my shoulders and virtually carried him to the door. After fifteen bedridden anna, there was no strength left in his legs.
As we passed beneath the lintel, his whole body began to shake. There was a hush in the crowd. Torl turned his face to the yellow sun, Suthauk
–for no man can look Belion, or whitesun, full in the face and not suffer blindness–and for a long time he stood there, motionless, just bathing in the light and warmth. His visage, never handsome by the common standard, appeared gilded in glory beneath Suthauk’s approving eye. It was a holy moment. Then he opened his eyes, and quietly regarded his friends and neighbours.
“This man,” he declared, “has returned life to me.”
Ay, how I laughed with Torl and his neighbours. Such joy! A font, a wellspring of unadulterated delight to break my stone heart! All I had accomplished was to restore his face to how it should be. It had taken me great labour to find the right form and shape of it, hidden by the tumour’s aggressive distortions.
But what satisfying labour!
I turned to the people. “Thank Mata, not me. Now, who’s next?”
* * * *
I was extracting a rotten tooth at Olimak Lodge, on the outskirts of Hoil Town, in the poor quarter where an itinerant athocary such as I could yet afford lodgings, when I heard a door crash open and woman scream. A man shouted, “Help! Somebody help!”
When she screamed again I recognised the wail of a woman su
ffering the pangs of childbirth, which are unlike any pain a man will experience in his lifetime. Why should Mata give it to women to suffer so, I know not, but I knew at once by the tone of her cry that she was not merely in pain, but in trouble.
I held
up in my pliers a bloody tooth for my patient to examine. “Here’s what was causing your pain. Now, I must go.”
The elderly woman glared at me. “Wait
–what is the charge?”
“No charge,” said I, stuffing the tool back into my pouch.
She clung to my arm with surprising force. “If you’re considering helping that woman, stop!”
“Why?”
“It is Mata’s hand of judgement upon that prostitute and her bastard whelp,” averred the woman, not relinquishing her grip. “You should not interfere or you will be cursed too!”
The other woman screamed again. And I am unable to bear suffering. It cuts me to my quoph. I snarled, “I do not share your crazy Elbarath religion, old woman!” I had heard of this belief, common to the Elbarath foothills, but had not encountered it in person. I threw off her hand. “I don’t care w
ho she is, she needs help.”
I
tried to edge past her, but the old woman surged to her feet, blocking my path. Next moment she struck me across the brow with her cane! I put hand to my forehead, feeling a gash there, and stared stupidly at her. “You hit me.”
“I’ll do that and worse
!”
So help me, I am a rational and educated man, but the hard point of my shoulder sent that old woman spinning and I felt a pang of vi
cious satisfaction at the deed.
I charged out of the inn, casting about for the source of the screams. No-one answered my cries. I
shouted at a passer-by and shook another by the shoulders, but they offered no aid.
But the man kept bellowing, and thus I found my way around the back of a line of houses to a small
carpenter’s workshop. Here I found Falak, his two children, and his startlingly pregnant wife, Izella.
“I’m an athocary!” I flung at the carpenter as I stormed the lad
der up to his house.
“She’s too early!” he cried back. “Too early!”
The carpenter–a vast tygar of a man–flung open his front door, built in the Elbarath style where craftsmen abide above their place of work. Taking my arm, he heaved me bodily into the front room.