Destiny: Child Of Sky (5 page)

It was small wonder that even travelers from the distant, warm lands of Yarim, Roland's easternmost province, and Sorbold, the arid nation of mountains and deserts to the south, made their way to the inland province of | Navarne to enjoy the wintersport of Lord Stephen's carnival, as did many of the Lirin of Tyrian, at least in better days. Recent acts of terror and violence had begun to diminish the festival's attendance as traveling overland grew more hazardous. As times worsened, the festivities became more of a local celebration than one enjoyed by much of the continent.

The expected diminution of attendance this year would be both unfortunate and fortuitous in Lord Stephen's eyes. He had recently completed the building of a vast wall, a protective rampart more than two men's heights high and similarly thick, that encircled all of Haguefort's royal lands and much of the nearby village and surrounding farmlands as well. This undertaking had almost consumed his every waking moment for the better part of two years, but it was a project he saw as critical to ensuring the safety of his subjects and his children.

Now, as he stood on the balcony beyond the windows of his vast library, Stephen observed the new masonry border he had erected with silent dismay. The once-unbroken landscape was now divided by the ugly structure with its severe guard towers and battlements, the formerly pristine meadows scarred by the construction of it. Instead of the wide, glittering horizon of snow there was a defined and muddy limit to the lands surrounding his keep. He had known when he began the undertaking that this would be the result. It was one thing to know with one's mind, he mused sadly, another altogether to see with one's eyes.

The winter festival would need to adapt to the new reality of Roland and its neighbors, the grim knowledge that violence, inexplicable and unpredictable, was escalating far and wide. The sheer madness of it had scarred more than Stephen's fields; it had rent his life as well, taking his young wife and his best friend, Gwydion of Manosse, in its insanity, along with the lives of many of his subjects and his sense of well-being. It had been five years since Stephen had experienced a restful night's sleep.

Daytime was easy enough; there was an endless stream of tasks awaiting his attention, as well as the time he devoted to his son and daughter. They provided in his life a genuine delight that was as vital to his happiness, his very existence, as sunlight or air. It was no longer the struggle to be happy it had been when Lydia died.

It was only at night now that he felt somber, downhearted, in the long hours after he had tucked his children beneath their quilts of warmest eiderdown, waiting by Melly's bedside until she fell asleep, answering Gwydion's questions about life and manhood in the comfortable darkness.

Each night the questions finally came to an end, replaced by the sound of soft, rhythmic breathing, and the scent of a boy's sweet exhalations becoming the saltier breath of a young man on the threshold of adulthood. Stephen cherished that moment when sleep finally took his son to whatever adventures he was dreaming of; he would rise reluctantly and bend to kiss Gwydion's smooth brow, knowing the time he would be able to do so was coming to an end.

A melancholy invariably washed over him as he made his way back to his own chambers, to the room where he and Lydia had slept, had made love and plans and their own unique happiness. Gerald Owen, his chamberlain, had gently offered to outfit another of Haguefort's many bedchambers for him after the bloody Lirin ambush that had ripped her from his life, but Stephen had declined in the same graciousness with which he always comported himself. How could Owen know what he was asking? His faithful chamberlain could never understand how much of Lydia was there in that room still, in the damask curtains at the window, in the canopy of the bed, in the looking-glass beside her dressing table, the silver hairbrush atop it. It was all he had left of her now, all save memories and their children. He lay there, night after night, in that bed, beneath that canopy, hearing the voices of ghosts until restless sleep finally came.

The sound of childish voices swelled behind Lord Stephen as the library doors opened. Melisande, who had turned six on the first day of spring, ran to him as he turned and threw her arms around his leg, planting a kiss on his cheek as he lifted her high.

'Snow, Father, snow!“ she squealed gleefully; the sound dragged a broad to the corners of Stephen's face. "You must have been rolling in it," he said with a mock wince, brushing the chilly clumps of frozen white powder from his doublet as he set her down, then slung an arm over Gwydion's shoulders. Melly nodded excitedly. After a moment her smile faded to a look of disapproval.

'How ugly it is," she said, pointing over her father's lands to the endless wall that encircled them.

'And it will be uglier still, once the people start rebuilding their homes inside it,"

Stephen said, pulling Gwydion closer for a moment. “Enjoy the tranquillity for what moments more you may, children; come next winter festival, it will be a town."

'But why, Father? Why would people want to give up their lovely lands and move inside of an ugly wall?"

'For safety's sake," Gwydion said solemnly. He ran his forefinger and thumb along his hairless chin in the exact gesture his father used when pondering something.

“They'll be within the protection of the keep."

'It won't be all bad, Melly,“ Stephen said, tousling the little girl's golden curls, smiling at the sparkle that had returned to her black eyes. "There will be more children for you to play with."

'Hurray!" she shouted, dancing in excitement through the thin snow on the balcony floor.

Stephen nodded to the children's governess as she appeared at the balcony doors.

"Just wait a few more days, Sunbeam. The winter carnival will be set up, with so many brightly colored banners and flags that you will think it is snowing rainbows.

Now, run along. Rosella is waiting for you." He gave Gwydion's shoulder another squeeze and kissed his daughter as she ran by, then turned once more to contemplate the changing times.

''Unlike the capitals of Bethany, Bethe Corbair, Navarne, and the other provinces of Roland, the capital city of Yarim had not been built by Cymrians; it was far more ancient than that.

Yarim Paar, the second word meaning camp in the language of the people indigenous to the continent, had been constructed in the midst of the great dustbowl that formed the majority of the province's central lands, hemmed in between the dry winds of the peaks of the northern Teeth to the east and the ice of the Hintervold to the north. Farther west, nearer to Canderre and Bethany, the lands grew more fertile, but the majority of the province was a dry land of scrub and red clay, baking in the cold sun.

Yarim's neighbors, the hidden lands east of the Teeth, were fertile and forested; it was as if the mountains had reached into the sky itself and wrung precious rain from the thin clouds hovering around their peaks. The sea winds swept the continent from the west, carrying moisture as well, endowing the coastal realms of Gwynwood and Tyrian and the near inland provinces with robes of deep green forest and field. By the time those winds had made their way east to Yarim, however, there was little relief left to give; the clouds had expended the bulk of the rain on their more favored children. In especially dry years, Yarim grew little more than dust as a crop.

At one time, a tributary of the Tar'afel River had run down from the glaciers of the frozen wasteland of the Hintervold, mixing with what the early dwellers had called the Erim Rus, or Blood River, a muddy red watercourse tainted by the mineral deposits that caked the face of the mountains. It was at the confluence of these two rare waterways that the village of Yarim Paar had had its birth.

For all that the area had seemed a wasteland to the early inhabitants of the continent, nothing could be further from the truth. A king whose name had long been forgotten smugly referred to the lands of Yarim as the chamber pot of the iceworld and the eastern mountains. There was some unintentional wisdom in those words.

Its spot on the continental divide had left Yarim rich in mineral deposits and, more important, salt beds. Beneath its unassuming exterior skin ran wide veins of manganese and iron ore against the eastern faces of the mountains, with a great underground sea of brine farther west. Finally, as if these earthly treasures were not enough for the area to be seen as richly blessed, the windy steppes were pocketed with vast opal deposits containing stones of myriad colors, like frozen rainbows extracted from the earth. One of the opal mining camps, Zbekaglou, bore the name, in the indigenous language, Rainbow's End, or where the skycolors touch the earth.

So Yarim's eastern mountains gave the province great hoards of manganese and copper, iron ore and rysin, a blueish metal valued highly by the Nain; its wide western fields provided the greatly prized commodity of salt, which was pumped from the earth through shallow wells that vented into the underground ocean of brine and potash, then was spread out in wide stone beds to allow the sun to evaporate the water, leaving the precious preservative behind; its central-eastern steppes produced gems of priceless value.

Yarim Paar, by contrast, was endowed with no mineral deposits to speak of, no brine sea, no fertile farmlands. It was a barren waste of dry red clay. But it was the poor south-central area of Yarim Paar which made all of the province's wealth possible, because Yarim Paar had received one gift from the Creator that none of the other areas of the province had been given—the gift of water.

Even more than the riverhead of the Erim Rus and the Tar'afel tributary that joined it, themselves great watery riches in an arid, thirsty land, Yarim I aar was also the site of Entudenin, a marvel whose name was commonly translated later as the Wellspring. It was more often known as the Fountain Rock or simply the Wonder—the Yarimese had few examples of Nature's artistry to marvel at, and so expended many names on the one they did have-but a more exact meaning of the word in the ancient language would have been the Artery.

In the time when it was named, Entudenin had been a towering geyser spraying forth from an obelisk of minerals deposited over the centuries in ever taller layers.

At its pinnacle the obelisk was twice the height of a man, or perhaps even twice Grunthor, and as broad as a two-team oxcart at the base, tapering up to a narrower, angled shaft.

Even without its miraculous gift of water in near-desert, Entudenin would have been a wonder to behold. The dissolved solid minerals in the runoff that had formed the obelisk were myriad, and had stained the enormous formation with a variety of rich colors, hues of vermilion and rose, deep russet and aqua, sulfurous yellow and a wide stripe of rich earth-brown that teased the sandy red clay on which the huge waterspout stood. The mineral formation glistened in the light of the sun, gleaming with an effect similar to the glaze on sugared marzipan.

Unlike the hot springs rumored to have been the center of the mythic city of Kurimah Milani, an ancient center of culture said to have been built at the desert's edge that one day vanished into the sand without a trace, the water that shot forth from the mouth of Entudenin was cool and clear, though heavy in mineral sediment. The legend of Kurimah Milani told of how the hot springs there had endowed those fortunate enough to have bathed in them or drunk from them with special powers of healing and other magics, derived, no doubt, from the rich mineral slough contained within them. The inhabitants of Yarim Paar did not covet those healing springs—the cool, life-giving water welling forth from Entudenin was magic enough for them.

The discovery of the marvelous geyser in the middle of nowhere prompted the building of an outpost near it that later became a camp, then a village, then a town, and finally a city. With the ready availability of water came construction for function and expansion for form. Great hanging gardens were built, elegant fountains and outdoor statuary museums with quiet reflecting pools as well, transforming the ramshackle little camp into a glorious example of lush desert architecture. Within a few centuries Entudenin was supplying not only the vast amounts of water necessary to maintain this sparkling jewel of a capital city, but all the water to the outlying cities, villages, outposts, and mining camps as well.

In its living time the Fountain Rock was roughly attuned to the cycles of the moon.

At the onset of the cycle a great blast of ferocious furor would rage forth from the Wellspring, spraying sparkling water skyward, showering the thirsty ground. The sound that accompanied the event welled from a deep roar to a glad shout as the torrent surged from the darkness of the Earth's depths into the air and light.

For a full week of the cycle, the water flowed copiously. On the first day of the blast, known as the Awakening, the townspeople would gather to thank the All-God in ritual prayer but refrained from actually drinking or collecting the Wellspring's liquid bounty. Part of this was a sacrificial abstinence in thanks to the Creator, but part of it was the rule of common sense as well; initially, the force of the water rushing forth from Entudenin was similar to a raging rapid, more than sufficient to break a man's back.

Within one turn of day the water flow would subside to a voluminous spray. The legends said that there was a noticeable change in the Wellspring's attitude, from anger to placidity. Once this change had occurred, the people of Yarim Paar and eventually its neighbors would quickly begin harvesting the water, storing it in cisterns that ranged from the enormous fountainbed that had been built at the obelisk's base to the small vessels carried by the town's children on their heads.

The spray that filled the air at the outskirts of the waterspout rained down in a wide sweep, and was used by the townspeople as a public bath.

After the Week of Plenty came the Week of Rest. Entudenin subsided from its joyful shower into a calmer, bubbling flow. The more patient townspeople who had planned ahead and therefore could wait until the second week to obtain their water benefited from their forbearance, because this was the time when the water was said to be the sweetest, purged of the sour minerals that had built up during its sleeping time.