Click ~*~ to follow a thread.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Pahid's cavalry could not have charged without killing as many of their own footsoldiers as Verloringers, even if they rode good horses. They came into the hollow at full speed, earth trembling, and made the treetops quiver. A few charged straight onto the stones catapulted there. Others were crushed by stones still falling. Most of the rest stampeded across the plain, the riders clinging on with arms around the horses' necks. Of those who were not thrown, about half managed to swing the horses' heads around and turn them off the road before they ran out of the hollow again.

Dismounted cavalry began to reinforce the Defenders in close combat. On both sides, people struck wild and slipped in the mire of blood, dust and sweat. Now and then eyes rolled skyward, imploring help. The sun retired behind blue-grey clouds and tinged them lavender. Stones continued to fall on the road. Horses ran down from the hilltops in a zig-zag path, running around obstacles rather than trying to jump them. Tiyar grasped a rider's elbow as she struck at him, pulled her down with the momentum of her swing, and dragged himself onto her horse. Clinging with his legs, he kept on but could not direct the frightened animal. It carried him to the trees on the southern side of the hollow, then suddenly knelt. He let himself fall just seconds before he was thrown.

Others followed Tiyar's example, and many succeeded in wounding or dismounting a rider. A few got themselves onto horses and scattered around the hollow. They sniped stones at the Defenders from behind bushes or up in trees. Others simply ran.

By nightfall, the horses were back in their riders' control. Clark and Fuego had remained at the catapult, surrounded by wooden shields and firing randomly into the brush to keep people away. The Defenders who erected the machine had left a supply of grease and straw, so they surrounded themselves with a flammable barrier.

Women rode between the falling boulders on the hillside and attacked, jumping off their horses when the beasts tripped or threw them, yelling shrilly and running heavy-footed as a herd of strange animals, their drugged, startled eyes and faces set grim for murder. Clark and Fuego shot stones as fast as they could and the thwack of the ones that missed and struck wood echoed between the rock and the hill like the sound of falling water, but they had to stop firing the catapult when they ran out of stones and then more women came, and men as well. Fuego touched Clark's light knife to the straw. At once a moat of flame protected them. They scrambled over the rocks, rolled down the other side and ran.

The distant sigh Clark had heard in the wind before was louder now. He could hear it even in the uko thicket where he and Fuego buried themselves in rustling leaves.

There were people in the trees around them struggling to stay awake, keep their balance on the branches and shoot stones at the enemy running and riding by. Occasionally someone fell, and then Clark and Fuego crawled over to see how badly the person was hurt and to do what they could with sticks and Expandages and painkillers. They worked through the thicket this way and came to the plain.

After a day's fighting, the field looked like an open sore. Bodies of human beings and horses lay under, on and among rocks of all sizes from which they were hard to distinguish in the darkness. Blood pools splashed up on the rocks left darker shadows than the moons could throw. The ground was runny with clotted mud. And there was motion in this festering place. Some of the bodies twitched or even crawled blindly toward the nearest shadow, leaving twisted trails of blood. Some fighters not wounded crept over the bodies to prey on them, some darted out at others on horseback, and about a score were still battling in wild exhaustion. Birds were screeching.

"We'll have to hide somewhere on this planet until Huey can get us out," Clark said. Fuego did not answer.

The sighing grew louder. People dropped down, playing dead, to listen.

"Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die."

Clark had heard the words before. It was a children's song, fighting words if you were under ten, but these voices, coming closer and closer and finally surrounding the hollow, belonged to adults. Cries of "Fire! Fire! " could be heard.

Attracted by the flames around the catapult, they came first through the western pass. Groups of twelve or fifteen ran backward and forward, breaking apart and rejoining, clustered around torches that bobbed and fell as their carriers swung the fiery ends in circles around them until they were wrestled down and the torches, taken away from them, surfaced elsewhere like bubbles of flame. The crowd seemed to boil over the top of the pass and pour into the hollow still foaming.

The song faded when the Itscriyites came close enough to see the battle. They began to laugh and howl and yell.

"Look, look, look, a claw! He'll shred you with the claw!"

The Verloringer with the field-harrow stood still. Everyone was running away from him.

"A claw! A claw!" There were scores of them, yelling, most of them less than fifteen years old. They know how they sound, Clark thought. The bridge had slowed them, brought them together and intoxicated them with their numbers.

"But it won't do you any good," one taunted. "You're already dead!"

"No good!" the chorus wailed.

"Let's burn things! Give me a torch! Burn! Burn!" They set fire to the grass and trees around them. "I want to break things!" someone shouted, and another called, "I want to kill!"

Red-corded Defenders came running out of the fire around the catapult, whooping and shouting, "Die! Die!"

"Fight! Fight!" The Itscriyites were jumping up and down. At the first attack, they made way and let the women rush through. Now they were uphill. Each grabbed a flaming stick and they leapt on the Defenders, clubbing, stabbing and painting long firey stripes on their opponents. Wounded, they giggled and kept fighting until they dropped.

When three Defenders of Faith lay dead, the Itscriyites began to retreat, not together but one at a time as they came to the forest's burning margin. They darted through the flames and ran away, laughing, tripping, tumbling and setting fire to trees. Others, attracted by the noise and flame, were still arriving in groups.

Suddenly, at a shouted order, the Defender women turned and fled. The Verloringers ran to the thicket where Clark and Fuego were hiding.

"Let's stone them," Manitey suggested.

"Not yet," Tiyar answered. He was sitting on a downed branch, rubbing a bitter oil on his arms and chest. "These vapors smell bad, but they burn very cooly," he explained to Akiva, who was leaning against a tree while Clark salved his injuries. "I will seem to burn."

"Paula--where--?" Clark tried to ask, tried to restrain himself from asking, and dropped the Expandages.

"Taken."

Clark turned toward the battlefield. He turned back. "Hold still," he said to Akiva.

On the plain, the fires in the trampled grass had gone out quickly. Itscriyites were running over grey stones and black puddles full of blood. Tiyar climbed onto a boulder in the road. He burst into flames.

The Itscriyites, now numbering over two hundred, fell back as silent and still as stones. Tall and thin, clothed in fire, Tiyar looked the embodiment of famine and war.

Someone said, "It's death."

The whisper carried to all of them. "Death! Death!" they called softly. People flocked to the burning man. Some kissed his feet and some climbed up to embrace him, but he pushed away anyone who came too close. The pushed-away slid down in the mud that coated the boulder, down to the ground.

Fuego climbed up. They argued, Fuego bringing his mouth as close to the flaming head as he could. Unable to see, Tiyar groped for him and pushed. Fuego slid down. Tiyar descended slowly.

"Where are my dead ones?" he asked. "Are you dead? Lie down. Lie down and be dead." He urged people down with his hands. Men and women threw their arms around him, but he put off their embraces more gently than Akiva had thought he could do, saying, "Lie down, lie down, my dead."

The people did as he asked them, slowly, without looking at one another. They lay on their backs with their wrists crossed, in the posture of burial. Tiyar chanted the Pravelany funeral song. Then he addressed them in an unshouting voice that yet filled the hollow.

"Now you are dead and everything in life is finished for you. The dead do not forget the past, but weep. They weep for it because it is so far away. The past is gone. It can not reach them and now they weep for it. Weep now, yes, for all you bore in life without weeping."

The greater moon emerged from behind clouds. Nearly all the people lay with their eyes closed. Tears ran down the sides of many faces. A few tentative sighs escaped them.

"Weep freely. Why do you not weep freely?" Tiyar asked. "It is the duty of the dead to mourn themselves. The one now gone who was yourself is worthy of mourning."

Clark groaned. Fuego spoke with him.

Tiyar went on, "You are dead, you are dead. Weep freely, you are dead. Here are your brother and sister dead, we who want nothing, who are always kind. We no longer want or need or fear. You are not alone, however deeply you believed it, you who believed it more deeply than you know. You believed you were alone. As the castout wolf crossing those white crags believes he is the only thing that lives and sings to himself in the dead moon, you sang to yourselves in fire and murder and thought you were alone." He was pointing to the mountains. His fire had dwindled to a glow. "There are others. This you must believe, you must feel. Other people, other families, other villages, provinces and lands. Other temples, other worlds."

Clark was lying face down in the leaves.

"There are others. What divides you from them? Ignorance and weakness of faith, because only faith will remind you that others are as real as you. Only faith convinces you, when you are in a strange land, that you still move among human beings. Now that you are dead and free from the circumstances that robbed you of your humanity, you know this."

Tiyar began to walk along the crowd's edge. Standing alone between the battlefield and the empty predawn sky, he looked very small. "That is the most important thing I have come to tell you. The other truth I know is one of which you have probably had some suspicion, that the temple is no temple, its gods are no gods and its priests are only thieves. Does this surprise you? No, it does not. But we value this truth, because it lends direction. How can we forfend another famine like the last? The first truth impels us to do this. The second truth tells us how. We must destroy the temple of the Lir."

He finished his circuit around the group. "Now I have told you what I know. Know these things, and the world is changed completely. Do you have the courage to join me in this world?"

They seemed to Akiva to sigh all at once, each quietly but together audible. The sound rose from so near the ground that he thought it might have been Earth herself, whispering, "Must I?"

The sky was now light. A flock of small birds flew high above them.

"Sparrows!" Akiva shouted. "They come to your birth. Tell me your new names and I will deliver each one of you, children of Fea beloved to Ayekar." By day he had given names to two hundred.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
CONTINUE.....................

Go to Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
INDEX