Slow Turns The World (26 page)

The Zeris were located.  They were much like the Ummakil, predatory and aggressive, gaining status in their tribe through acts of murderous cruelty.  First the priests gave them trinkets, then delicious sweetmeats, and then the preaching began.  They were told how God, the one true God, greater than all the deities they had worshipped, had chosen them for His great work.  They would be rewarded with fine clothes, with new weapons, with power over the tribes around them.  And now at last, they were told, their long journey would be ended, that they could stay in houses of stone, that slaves and servants would feed and cater to their every need.  

The cases of mail, blades and crossbows were broken open and the contents greedily snatched up.  The Zeris's great enthusiasm for the new weapons was soon explained.  There was another tribe, the Harat, who came from the south and competed with them for game and booty on the plain.  With every turn of the world these rivals met, fought and parted to their separate ways beyond the mountains.  Every third generation fought this battle, saw it drawing closer, as their migration led them to this place.   

The Zeris, newly armed, left the camp chanting and waving their gleaming weapons in the air.  They went ahead of the priests, towards the mountain, seeking their enemies, the Harat.  The convoy followed, moving more slowly than the Zeris could run across the rough terrain.   

A wisp of smoke curled above the horizon and Torrin rode forward to find its source.  He passed many dead barak, shot with crossbow bolts and hacked with swords; very little meat had been taken.  The smoke drew nearer and Torrin saw that it was the remains of a hunter's camp. The tents were ripped and smouldering; bodies lay strewn all around.  These were surely not the Harat but some other tribe, another small community that shared the bounty of the barak herd.  Torrin dismounted and walked amongst the dead, the severed bodies of young and old, the skewered infants and the women raped before the final sword thrust.

The carts rumbled toward him and halted.  He looked at Deacon Gretal and then he stooped and lifted a dead child into his arms.  He thrust the small body onto the Deacon’s lap.

“Here, Deacon, take this token of your work.”

Gretal chanted a verse of the Text over the corpse before he replied.

“It would seem,” he said, “that the Zeris require further teaching in the ways of God.  I pray for these people, heathen though they be, that God will reward them for their sacrifice.”

The bodies were left unburied and the journey resumed.   The ground was marshy and they lagged even further behind the Zeris.  After two cycles of travelling and sleeping they ascended onto a plateau that marked a change in the terrain.  The rocky bones of the world extruded into fins and fingers around them and the trees were sparsely scattered.  The land rose gently ahead to break into clusters of distant craggy hills from which the mountain ridges pushed skywards jaggedly.   The sun, behind them now in this realm of the east, cast a shadowless light upon the vista before them, revealing stark unscalable rockiness.   

Torrin, riding ahead, saw in the distance tiny figures inert upon the ground and guessed that another scene of slaughter would soon be revealed.  Were these then the Harat, lying dismembered on the path ahead, already picked at by the carrion birds?  They drew slowly nearer until he could look down upon the first body and was surprised by what he saw.  The corpse was in pieces, rent apart as if by giant hands; there was no sign of arrow or sword slash.  The head had rolled away, he took a few more paces and he looked into the glassy half-open eyes and at the helmet still fixed upon it; the helmet that bore the emblem of the triangle within the circle.  

These were not the Harat but the Zeris, and the new weapons were still held in their dead hands.   Most of the bodies were in a similar condition, strewn in scattered segments, ripped into hideous bloody offal.   Those more intact seemed to be punctured in many places, Torrin dismounted and probed a wound with blooded fingers until a shard of jagged metal was pulled from the body.

Deacon Gretal stepped down from his cart and walked, disbelieving, amongst the dead.  He managed to collect himself and spoke to Torrin with only a suggestion of doubt in his voice.

“These men have obviously been set upon by beasts.  There are many hunting animals we know of which can do such things.  It is regrettable, but it must not be allowed to deflect us from our mission.”  He turned to the priests, one of whom was retching uncontrollably, and continued.

“Collect together the weapons.  We will take another option that has been considered.  We will find the Harat, and bring them into our service.”

Torrin looked again at the bodies, which showed no wound of tooth or claw, which had been consumed only by the pecking carrion birds.  He felt the shard of metal in his clenched hand, but he said nothing.

Smoke rose in the distance from the summit of a dome shaped hill.  Torrin knew only of one reason to set a fire in such a high place and that was as a signal, or perhaps a lure.  Seeing the plume, Deacon Gretal judged that the Harat were close at hand and ordered the convoy towards its source.

  As they drew nearer a single figure could be seen upon the rocky crest of the hill, a person waiting, summoning them towards him.  Torrin had taken it upon himself to scout ahead for most of the journey, but now, with caution in his heart, he hung back behind the last wagon.   The hill was steep and rose into a rocky tor from which the solitary figure looked down upon them.  They were close enough to see his detail now.  This was not a hunter dressed in skins but a cloaked man standing, arms folded, with an air of menace.  The carts could approach no nearer and the creaking wheels became still.  Deacon Gretal rose from his seat and called up to the watcher above.

“Are you of the Harat?  For we bring gifts of friendship and alliance.”

“You seek the Harat?”  The voice that replied was like a deadly blade smeared with honey. “Well, you shall find them soon enough.”

“Are you of that tribe?” asked the deacon, the tiniest uncertainty in his voice.

“Me, priest?  No, I am like you, from somewhere more distant.”

He let the cloak slip from his shoulders to reveal a leather jacket studded with silver.   Torrin recognised at once what he had seen in the city square of distant Hityil, the uniform of the soldiers of Nejital.

“So, priest, what brings you to this place?”  taunted the officer of Nejital, “could it be a mine of precious metals that Etoradom will use to bribe and buy armies and spread its grip upon the world?  We thought you might be here sooner; so unlike you to delay.  But then we hear your Emperor has become a little strange and you are busy torturing and burning your own kind.”

The little vein pulsed on the deacon's face.

“Heathen!” he shouted angrily, “May you be cursed for your blasphemy against His Supreme Holiness.   You have no right…”

A sneering laugh brought the Deacon to stammering silence.

“You should have come to the Harat first, they are very obliging and hard working.  Already the excavations here are proving most fruitful.  Would you like to meet them?”

Several figures rose into their line of sight around the fire, standing proudly in uniforms of leather and silver.

“I will give you more advice, priest.  Don't murder your cleverest people because they cast doubt upon your precious Text, but do what we do; give them tools and workshops.  It’s remarkable what they can create; see this now…”

He lifted a small metal ball from somewhere by his feet and then took an ember from the fire. Torrin tugged gently on the reins and backed his horse slowly away while watching the gloating figures on the rock above.  He knew that they were being toyed with, that some attack was imminent, but he could not yet guess what form it would take.

“Here, priest, take a look at this and tell me what you see.”

The officer of Nejital touched the ember to a string that emerged from the ball and threw it down to the Deacon.  It landed at his feet.  Gretal picked it up, curiously turning it in his hands, watching the little plume of smoke rise from the fizzing string.  Torrin had already half-turned his mount when the grenade exploded.  The cart erupted in a vivid ball of noise and flame.  A plume of smoke rose to heaven, and the tatters of flesh that had been deacon Gretal rained down to earth.  Laughter and cheering filled the moment of awful silence before more grenades descended.  Every cart became a blossoming flower of gold and red, a thousand flying shards of timber mixed with the torn limbs of man and beast.   Torrin's horse reared in terrified panic, but he clung on, the sounds of thunder deafening his ears, burning debris showering down, and then with a lurch he was carried away, galloping across the rocky plain.

He took a new path that skirted wide of the mountain.  From a high place he could see the excavations and the many mobile dots that were toiling people.  The breeze carried that bitter smell of fumes he had smelt before.  How poisoned would the land be before the sun set again over this portion of the world?  How many lives would be wasted in the service of wealth, of power, in the ambitions of competing empires?  What of his own life?  A long road lay ahead before his debt was paid.  He could see the lands stretching to a far horizon; forest, winding river and mountain peaks that seemed to call and beckon.  It was in his instinct to travel, and all the time at Etoradom that primal urge had been repressed.  He rode on with a lighter heart and left the tainted air far behind.   

In the moons that followed he knew why he had been selected for this task.  He was on foot now; his horse had carried him as far as it was able, until it became thin and often lame.  He let it free on a grassy plain where it could graze and put flesh upon its protruding ribs.  As the beast galloped away, delighting in freedom, Torrin hoped that it would find its own kind for he knew what a burden it was to be alone, separated from friends and kin.

  Yes, he knew why he was chosen for the task.  Who else but a hunter could travel through all the waking time, and then find prey with the arrow's tip?  Who else but a hunter could make fire and shelter in the damp forest when the cold rains lashed down?  As he journeyed on, the sun lowered in the sky until it touched the westward mountain peaks and it was almost as if he had returned to the realm of the Vasagi.  But there was one difference; this was dawn, not sunset.  The sun was behind him, rising, filling the world with warmth and the promise of a new day that would last half a lifetime.

He met some tribes and avoided others.  The pages from the book had good advice on their ways and custom.  He knew which people he was likely to meet and if they welcomed strangers.  But now the world was empty before him, he had passed the last tribe, the most westerly described by the wandering priests of Etoradom.  He crossed another ridge and saw mountains on the horizon glinting in the golden light of dawn but a deep valley filled with shadow lay before him.  He scrambled down out of the sunlight and felt air so chill it cut his flesh like tiny knives.   Not since half a turn of the world had the sun warmed this place and the rocks beneath his feet had a coldness that seeped through the thin, worn soles of his boots.   He looked along the valley sides where crags and pinnacles rose into sunlight.  They were islands of warmth and if he could move between them then perhaps there was a way to survive, to cross this frozen land.  He wrapped the cloak tightly and scrambled on downwards over drifts of hard-crusted snow and later, when shivering racked his body, he struggled up the icy slope onto bright-lit rocks and let the sun warm him as he slept.

Where the sun shone plants thrived and fruited while birds nested in noisy colonies.  So he lived on berries and eggs between his sorties into the shadowy cold.  But the warm refuges were coming to an end and to continue the journey he would need to cross an expanse of the shadow-land until he could gain another sunlit ridge.  It looked too far, too impossibly distant, but the warm honey sun bathed it in enticing light.  Then the wind blew from the south casting cloud across the sun and the air grew suddenly chill.  Somewhere in the sky above rain carried from distant seas mingled with the night-cold air and turned to snow.  Flakes sped past in the growing breeze, then the refuge was no more, and the sun-warmed islands that had brought him there vanished behind a veil of swirling white.  The line of retreat was severed and the way ahead promised no sanctuary, only a hope that if he could reach the ridge, if the blizzard passed, if the sun could shine upon him again….

He slid down the snow slopes to the valley floor and found one crumb of unexpected good fortune; that the winds were less chill than the still air pooled in the valley had been.  Blinded by the snow he trudged on doggedly using the wind to keep his direction as true as he could.  There was no sense of time, only the rhythm of one foot put before another, sinking deep into the cold blanket that covered the land.  He felt the clammy dampness creeping through the cloak and the ice clinging to his beard.  He stumbled many times, and found himself lying upon a soft bed of snow.   It would be so easy to lie for a while; to sleep while the flakes covered him in their nurturing cocoon.  But time and again he struggled to his feet and pushed on until at last he felt the land rising and steepening.  

There were boulders now lying in tumbled heaps and snow-filled gaps between them that trapped his feet and bruised his legs.  Then the rocks were steeper and bare as he scrambled upwards clutching with dead fingers until he came at last to level ground.  He had reached the ridge-top, but the sun had not returned and now his only hope was shelter.  He struggled on blindly and then caught a smell in the wind; an unmistakable scent of wood smoke.   Turning into the storm he fought on, an arm held across his face to fend off the tiny darts of driving snow.  He lost the scent more than once, turned back, caught its whiff again and set off in a new direction.  Then, as his last strength diminished, he found himself on the brink of a steep slope and, between the snow filled gusts, he saw a glimmer of flame.  He blundered forward, falling and tumbling, over and over, until he came to a final rest in the soft yielding snow, and knew the time to sleep had come at last.