The Fugitive Prince (Bell Mountain) (6 page)

Gurun came from a tiny island in the distant North, blown in her little skiff to Obann’s shores by a ferocious storm that should have drowned her. But her people knew the Scriptures; God had given her the gift of understanding diverse languages; and for some reason the citizens of Obann had taken to her. She was tall and fair and only seventeen years old. The Ghols in particular liked her.

She followed Kutchuk to the conference chamber where the chiefs were waiting.

“What is it, Kutchuk?” she said. “You Ghols have been acting like wild men all morning.”

“It’s very bad, honeysuckle.” That was the Ghols’ nickname for her. “King Ryons is gone. We can’t find him anywhere, and no one knows where he went.” No one in the palace but Gurun and old Obst understood the Ghols’ language, so Kutchuk could speak freely and loudly in the halls, and his harsh words rang up and down the marbled corridor.

“Gone?”

“We can’t find him in the building—not even in the cellars.”

Once in the chamber, the chieftains closed the doors and stationed guards outside. All the chiefs were there by the time Gurun arrived—fierce men who’d survived desperate battles and were ready to survive another one. But the king’s disappearance, she could tell by their faces, had badly shaken them.

“Obst should be here, too,” she said, after a curt exchange of greetings.

“He’s been sent for,” answered Shaffur, chief of the Wallekki. He glared at all the others and spoke to them in Tribe-talk, the common language understood by most of them. “I suppose we are all agreed that no one outside of this room must know the king is missing.” Nods answered him. Gurun translated for the two or three who didn’t know Tribe-talk.

“He’s given us the slip before,” said Uduqu, speaking for the Abnaks. “You all know the king’s a special friend of mine. He’s like a son to me. I think he would’ve told me if he had a reason to run away. But he didn’t.” He shook his scarred, tattooed head. Gurun knew him well enough to realize he was hurt—this hard old warrior who’d won fame in Obann by cutting down two enemy warriors with one swing of a giant sword. “So, whatever happened to him, it must have happened suddenly.”

Someone knocked on the door. A guard opened it, and Kutchuk came in and bowed to the chieftains.

“Excuse me!” he said. “We’ve just discovered that the big dog, Cavall, is missing, too. He is not in his kennel and doesn’t seem to be inside the palace, either.”

Gurun translated for the chiefs. “That means King Ryons wasn’t kidnapped,” she added. “He has taken Cavall with him.” The Ghols would be relieved to know that, she thought.

“How could he have done it?” asked Tughrul Lomak, chief of the Dahai. “Could he have climbed out his bedroom window?”

“Not without a long rope,” Chagadai said. “It’s possible he had such a rope, but no one saw it.”

No one could propose a convincing solution to the riddle. By and by Obst arrived, panting because he’d hurried. He was old, thought Gurun, and today he looked it. He loved the boy king and had taught him much. He didn’t speak until the chiefs had told him all they knew.

“He must be somewhere in the city, my lords,” Obst said. “But how can we search the city for him without the whole city knowing about it? And then what will the people do, when they find out their king is missing?”

No one knew. The first time King Ryons left the city on an expedition, when he came back with Gurun, the people closed the gates against him, and there was fighting inside the walls. The people relented when they saw their king’s face again; but what would they do if they couldn’t see him?

Some of the chieftains wished to keep the matter secret. Others said that couldn’t be done and they’d be fools to try. They argued back and forth. Usually King Ryons went out every day so that his people could see him. Today they wouldn’t.

Uduqu suddenly stood up, silencing the discussion.

“I’m too old for so much talk,” he said. “We have to find the king, and that’s all there is to it. The more people we have looking for him, the sooner we’ll find him.

“I think we ought to summon General Hennen back to the city and let him tell the people that the king is missing. They’ll take it better, coming from an Obannese. Let all the people in the city search for Ryons—if he’s here, they’ll find him. Meanwhile, let General Hennen sit in his place, with us advising him; and let Gurun sit on the throne to keep it for the king.”

“It’s not right for me to sit on Ryons’ throne!” Gurun said.

“Someone has to,” Uduqu answered. “It can’t be one of us chieftains—the city would rise up in rebellion. The people like me well enough, but only as a kind of friendly monster. But they think of you, Gurun, as something special. You don’t have to sit on the king’s throne. You can sit next to it. The people will accept you.”

“For a little while, at least,” Chief Shaffur added.

Gurun looked to Obst, but Obst only shrugged. “I think Chief Uduqu is right,” he said. “One thing I’m sure of, Gurun: God brought you to Obann for a reason. Maybe this is the reason.”

“Then I will do my best,” said Gurun. “But we have no kings or queens where I come from. We know about them only through what we read in the Scriptures.”

Obst smiled unexpectedly. “That should be enough!” he said.

Chapter 8

A Sermon in Cardigal

The first day’s trek was hard, but in another day or two Ellayne and Jack had their adventuring legs again and could hike all day without aching.

They had fine weather for the first three days. They passed by Caristun, which had not yet recovered from being looted by the Heathen last summer, and were on their way to Cardigal, where the Chariot River flowed into the Imperial, when rain held them up for a day—not that they minded taking a day of rest.

They’d eaten almost all the food they’d brought from home, and Jack hadn’t bagged anything with his slingshot. Ordinarily they would stop at Cardigal and buy all the food they wanted; but last year the Heathen burned Cardigal to the ground. Someday the town would rise again, the baron predicted. But it hadn’t risen yet.

The children camped under a little knot of trees and sat huddled in their blankets around their campfire. Fortunately it wasn’t raining very hard. Wytt was off looking for birds’ eggs.

“Tell me again about Bell Mountain,” Fnaa said, after they’d spent a good chunk of the morning doing it. “I’ve never even seen a mountain,” he said. “Not close up, I mean.”

“We’ve seen a lot of things we never expected to see,” Jack said. “There are giant birds out on these plains—better hope we don’t see one of those close up! One of them killed Martis’ horse and ate it.”

They’d mentioned Martis often, stressing his many services to them, trying to get Fnaa to trust him if Martis ever caught up to them. But Fnaa wasn’t interested in Martis. “I keep thinking of that bell on top of the mountain,” he said. “Is God real, and did He really hear it when you rang it? You thought He would end the world, and He didn’t. Maybe He isn’t going to do anything.”

“Don’t be silly,” Ellayne said. “God hasn’t ended the world. But He has shaken it up, and all kinds of things are happening.”

“Things are always happening,” said Fnaa; and not being theologians, neither Ellayne nor Jack knew how to answer him. All Jack could come up with was this.

“Nobody believed there was a bell up there,” he said, “and yet there was. We know God heard it, because everybody in the whole world heard it. And you wouldn’t be out here with us right now, Fnaa, unless God sent you.”

“I just wish it’d stop drizzling,” Fnaa said.

“He doesn’t believe us,” Jack thought.

They decided to stop at Cardigal after all, if only to see how the people were getting on. Besides, it was the best place to cross the river; and there just might be food for sale.

“If there’s nothing there,” Ellayne said, “we’ll just go on a little ways to Gilmy. That’s a village where Jack and I stayed once. The Heathen never touched it.”

“I passed by Cardigal on my way out,” Fnaa said. “It’s all tents.”

“Then the people in the tents will have food,” Jack said.

They found a ferry taking folk back and forth across the river. You could see the cluster of tents on the north bank. The ruins had all been cleared away, and a few new buildings rose above the tents. The children joined a group of people boarding the ferry raft.

“Is there food for sale anywhere?” Jack asked one of the ferrymen.

“Aye—to them as can afford it,” the man said. “It’s been a good summer hereabouts: plenty of corn and a fine run of fish in the river. You’ll find ’em selling it in Tent Town.”

Cardigal’s stone walls once entitled its chief councilor to be an oligarch; but they hadn’t kept the Heathen out. With catapults the Heathen had hurled fire into the town and swarmed over the walls as the defenders fled to fight the flames.

Now men toiled to build a better wall. Most of the tents were pitched outside it, and most of the building was happening inside. Ellayne wondered how much they could finish before the winter and what people would do who didn’t have proper homes by then.

But in Tent Town on a summer day—a sweetly sunny day, after a whole day of rain—no one seemed worried about the winter. Added to the noise made naturally by people, horses, cattle, and asses were the cling and clang of open-air smithies and the shouts and songs and chants of men and women who had something to sell.

With Ellayne’s money the children bought some meat pasties to eat on the spot, and bread, cheese, and apples to stow in their packs. “These prices really are too steep!” Ellayne said. “My mother would have a fit if they charged prices like this in Ninneburky.”

“The pasty’s mighty good, though,” Jack said. Fnaa had already gulped his down. “For someone who doesn’t eat much—” Jack started to say to him; but he got no further.

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Some wild-eyed fool was making an infernal racket, banging on a flat tin pan. Close behind him followed a tall, solemn-looking man in prester’s robes.

“Here we go again,” said the woman who was selling pasties.

“Attention, attention, good people of Cardigal!” cried the man who banged the pan. Rat-tat-tat! Most of the people in the area stopped talking. “Give ear to Prester Lodivar—hear him, hear him! Prester Lodivar of the Temple that is no more!”

The prester held up his two hands, and out of long habit, the people gave him silence.

“People of Cardigal!” He had a good pulpit voice, which carried. “You go hurriedly about your business, gangs of workmen labor to rebuild your city—but who in all of Obann labors for the Lord?

“The Temple of the Lord is burned and broken. And woe! Woe! The Lord God has withdrawn from you! He has turned His face from you; He abhors your heresy and disobedience. He closes His ears to your prayers, which the apostates in Obann City mis-teach you to make without a prester to lead you.

“Lo, I see a vision! Hear what the Lord Himself has shown me!”

He paused to let his eyes lock with the eyes of the people all around him. You could have heard grass grow, it was so quiet.

“The Lord,” he said, “has shown me a vision of His New Temple—the great, glorious New Temple built to Him not in Obann but far away, among a people who were once His enemies. In Kara Karram by the Great Lakes the Lord God has chosen the place where His spirit shall abide, in the New Temple at Kara Karram. For the Lord has withdrawn Himself from Obann.”

These were terrible words, and terrible to hear. People went pale. One or two dozen of the crowd, it seemed to Ellayne, went pale with anger; but everyone else was sore afraid.

Ellayne was one of the angry ones. “What rot!” she said under her breath. She was one of only a very few persons who knew that the First Prester’s treachery had destroyed the Temple in Obann and that the New Temple in the East was the creation of the Thunder King, who called himself a god. “He’s saying nothing but filthy lies!” She was, indeed, all set to interrupt the prester; but Jack grabbed her elbow and shook her.

“None of that—not here!” he whispered into her ear. “We’ve got to get to Obann, safe and sound. That’s the only reason we left home.”

“But don’t you hear this stinking pack of lies?”

“We’ll tell Obst all about it,” Jack said, “after we get to Obann. He’ll know what to do.”