The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain)

  The Last Banquet

  By Lee Duigon

  Published by Storehouse Press

  P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251

  Storehouse Press is the registered trademark of Chalcedon, Inc.

  Copyright © 2012 by Lee Duigon

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Kirk DouPonce (www.DogEaredDesign.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2011933788

  ISBN-13: 978-1-891375-58-3

  ISBN-10: 1-891375-58-X

  Table of Contents

  1. The Castaway

  2. Gurun Explores the Ruins

  3. The Trapper

  4. Another Journey

  5. An Interrupted Journey

  6. The King and His Council

  7. What Can a Blind Man See?

  8. Among the Blays

  9. Helki on the Trail

  10. An Omen of Wrath

  11. The Blays Find a Home

  12. Into the East

  13. Oziah’s Wood

  14. The Blays in Battle

  15. The Legacy of the Temple

  16. Two Angels

  17. A Heathen Prophet

  18. The Village and the City

  19. Helki on the Trail

  20. Hlah’s Holy Man

  21. Lord Reesh’s New Disciple

  22. Cold Wind

  23. Hoe Tim Met the King

  24. Men Like Gods

  25. Hlah and the Rangers

  26. How Gurun Met the King

  27. What Angel Saw, But Could Not Tell

  28. How the King Saved Hamber

  29. How the Animals Fled

  30. The Golden Pass

  31. How the King Returned to Obann

  32. How Orth Received a New Name

  33. To See Without Seeing

  34. Helki and the Town

  35. Gurun and Obst

  36. How Lord Reesh Met the Thunder King

  37. How Some Abnaks Were Tamed

  38. Helki Picks a Fight

  39. Lord Reesh Says a Prayer

  40. A Message from the Thunder King

  41. Of Gallgoid, and Helki

  42. How Ellayne Carried Out Her Plan

  43. How Gurun Received a Gift

  44. How Ootoo Practiced Charity

  45. A Valuable Piece of Rust and Dirt

  46. The Road up the Mountain

  47. The Toddling Prophet

  48. How a Father Got News of His Daughter

  49. A Stranger on the Road

  50. What Galloid Discovered at the Golden Hall

  51. How the Thunder King Prospered

  52. The Last Stage of the Journey

  53. How Chillith Delivered a Message to the Thunder King

  54. How Some Adventures Ended

  CHAPTER I

  The Castaway

  “I think I’ll go fishing,” Gurun said.

  “You should be getting ready for your wedding,” her father answered.

  Gurun was sixteen; this day was her birthday. Tomorrow she would be married to a man named Lokk. He was her father’s friend, and his farm lay next to theirs. To combine the two properties would greatly enhance both families’ political position. The facts that Lokk was twenty years older than Gurun and had a large, unsightly wart on his cheek were unimportant.

  “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” she said. Her father nodded. He knew his daughter didn’t love Lokk, but also knew that she would do what was best for her family. Bertig, son of Flosa, had many troubles that would go away if he had more votes in the District Meeting; and every tenant on the land had a vote. If Lokk’s tenants voted with him all the time, Bertig’s enemies would have their claws clipped.

  He made a noise in his beard. “Go ahead, go fishing,” he said. “I don’t think you will throw yourself into the sea.”

  “Don’t give me ideas,” she said; and he laughed at that.

  Gurun stepped outside. Like all the homes on Fogo Island, her family’s house resembled a low, sprawling hill of sod. Bertig was a wealthy man with a wife, four children, his old mother, and a crew of servants living with him. But there was no better way to build on Fogo Island; no other kind of house would survive the winter winds. Besides, lumber was always hard to come by. Long ago, when people from the south first settled the islands of the northern sea, they quickly learned to fear the winter. Those who survived the first winter only did so by taking shelter in barrows. These had been built to hold the bones of the dead: there was no one living on the islands when the settlers came there. What had become of the natives, no one knew. Only their tombs survived. And so the new arrivals patterned their homes on the houses of the dead.

  But this was a fine and sunny summer morning. You might have thought it brisk and chilly, but to Gurun it seemed a perfect day for fishing.

  Like most of the islanders she was tall and fair, pale-skinned, blue-eyed. She wore a one-piece woolen dress, cinched at the waist with a sealskin belt, and sealskin moccasins. That was all she needed.

  She launched her little skiff into the cove and paddled out to sea. The day was still, without a breeze: no point in raising the sail. When the water was as still as this, it often meant a storm was coming. But the sky was clear of clouds, and it was not quite the season for storms, and Gurun was good with boats. Lokk had promised to take her along when he went whaling.

  All over the horizon rose the peaks of snow-clad mountains. Every island had at least one. No one ever sailed out of sight of the mountains. These northern seas were prone to fog, and you had to be careful not to sail too far from land. In each settlement there were men who blew horns to guide boats overtaken by the fog.

  Gurun baited her hook and let out her line. Inside of ten minutes she had two fine codfish. The waters this year teemed with fish. That was a good thing, for you had to catch more than enough to live on during the summer, and sun-dry the surplus to keep you through the winter. It did not strike Gurun’s people as a hard life. It was the only life they’d known for centuries, and they were happy in it.

  Suddenly the line went taut and the boat lurched forward. Gurun hung on with both hands, bracing her feet against the gunwales.

  “Praise God, it’s a big one!” she cried. A halibut, maybe. She mustn’t lose it. She prayed the Lord to bless her line so it wouldn’t break. When the fish tired of towing the boat, she could begin to haul it in.

  So intent was she on fighting the fish that she didn’t notice the sky darkening overhead and black clouds sweeping in from the north. She didn’t notice anything until the wind began to blow her hair into her eyes. All she could do was shake her head. She didn’t dare let go of the line with either hand.

  “I won’t let go!” she thought. “I won’t lose this one!”

  The fish towed the boat farther out to sea. The wind blew. The clouds piled up, blotting out the sun. Then it began to rain, and Gurun realized she’d been caught by a storm. But still she would not let go.

  When the line finally broke, the storm had Gurun’s boat in its teeth. Between the driving rain and the darkness, she could hardly see.

  She knew better than to try to fight the storm. All she could do was to wrap herself in the sail and try to stay alive. The boat rushed up the waves and plummeted back down again—up and down, up and down,
endlessly. Gurun was used to that: she’d spent much of her life on boats, and she knew this boat would ride the waves. She also knew the rain and the waves were filling the skiff with water, but she was too cold to bail. She knew it would be a miracle if she survived. Her teeth chattered so badly that she couldn’t pray aloud. But her father had built this boat with his own hands, and it would stand much more punishment than other boats.

  “It’s all in God’s hands,” she thought. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  For how long, or how far, the storm carried her, Gurun had no way to tell. She couldn’t even tell night from day. She huddled in the leather sail and munched on biscuits that she’d brought along. When she was hungry again, she ate raw cod. She might have even slept, although that could have been an illusion.

  At some time in the immeasurable future, the rain stopped; the wind died down from a frantic howl to a muted, steady roar; and the darkness lightened. Gurun peeked out from under the sail.

  The boat was full of water, a floating island in a sea of fog. With both hands she began to slosh the chilly water overboard.

  “Behold, the Lord is with me: I shall not fear the tempests of the earth,” she said, reciting Scripture: one of the songs of King Ozias, from the ancient days. It was a verse dear to the islanders, who knew more about storms and tempests than most people. “Though I be plunged into the depths of the sea, my God shall bring me up again.”

  She rested, and finished what was left of the second codfish. It seemed to her that for all the water she’d bailed out of the boat, there was still more in it than there ought to be. That could only mean the boat was leaking faster than she could bail it out. The storm had strained its joints and fastenings more than they could stand.

  “At least I won’t have to marry Lokk,” she said to herself. “Although aside from his wart and his boring way of talking, he might not have made such a bad husband after all.”

  Yes, this was the end. The boat was riding lower and lower in the water. She now admitted to herself that she should have cut the line when first the wind blew up, and paddled furiously to the nearest island. Under the circumstances, even her father’s worst enemies would have taken care of her: for the storm was the enemy to all.

  “Live and learn,” she thought.

  In a few minutes the boat would go under. But what was that? She heard something, just ahead of her.

  It was the sound of waves lapping. The fog wouldn’t let her see what they were lapping against, but it certainly sounded like a shore. Land! It must be land.

  Shedding the sail, Gurun stood up and dove out of the sinking boat. She was already chilled. The water, when it closed over her body, was warmer than the air.

  Gurun swam, pausing every few strokes to listen for what she could not see. She was a strong swimmer. In a few minutes her feet touched sand. A few more strokes and she could wade. A few weary strokes brought her to a sandy beach littered with clam shells. She fell to her hands and knees and gasped a prayer of thanks.

  Where under heaven was she? Every fiber of her body begged for sleep. But this land looked like tidal flats, and if the tide came in while she was sleeping, she would drown. She had to find higher ground, if there was any. But all around her lay the fog.

  She struggled back to her feet. One of her moccasins was missing; she must have kicked it off while swimming. Deciding that one shoe was worse than none, she got rid of the other. The soft sand felt good to her bare feet.

  “Hello!” she called; but there was no answer.

  For all Gurun knew, she was on a tiny island that would be entirely underwater when the tide came in. She couldn’t stay where she was. Shivering, she turned away from the water and began to walk.

  And then, as if by God’s command, a breeze came up and the fog began to lift.

  Gurun stood waiting as the fog thinned and melted away. Before long, she saw a dark mass in the distance. A little longer, and the mass resolved itself into stands of shrubbery and low, wind-beaten trees, all perched on rolling dunes.

  The sun came out. The foliage turned from grey to green. Beyond the dunes rose hills, and on the hills—

  She caught her breath. What were those things up there? Gigantic boxes, cubes, straight lines; they rose above the trees. What were they? You would have recognized them instantly as buildings, but Gurun had never seen an ordinary, above-ground building.

  Her mind raced. It churned up verses of Scripture that had to do with houses, palaces, and castles: things from ancient times and far away. Words that had no meaning for the people of the islands, who lived in barrows heaped with turf—what could they know of palaces or castles?

  But what else could these enormous objects be but palaces or castles? And where were the people? Inside, perhaps?

  Gurun marched toward them to see for herself.

  CHAPTER 2

  Gurun Explores the Ruins

  Up the dunes and up she climbed. Now the fog was all gone and the sun high up in the sky. All the chill left Gurun’s body. She soon realized she was hungry and thirsty.

  “Where am I?” she wondered. “What country is this? What kind of people live here?”

  She went from being warm to being hot. Was she sick, or could it really be this hot?

  Gurun’s people knew, of course, that there were other countries, other peoples. There must be. They themselves had come from a distant country in the south, ages ago. Occasionally they visited the mainland, although sometimes men who did so never came back. That was the only way they could get real lumber. The shores they visited were as cold as the islands themselves, and uninhabited. There was no sign that anyone had ever lived there.

  Bertig’s cousin, Zill, was a reciter—one of the sages who copied and memorized the Scriptures. Books among the islanders were few and far between, so reciters served as living books. The custom had been established a thousand years ago to ensure that the people would never lose their knowledge of the Scriptures.

  “A thousand years we’ve been living on these islands,” Zill used to say. “We came here fleeing wickedness, and God hid us away, up here in the North, where we could be safe.

  “All those places mentioned in the Scriptures—seats of kings, the sites of famous battles, great rivers, forests, famous cities—they have all passed away. No man will see them anymore. There’s no going back to where we came from.”

  The sand gave way to soil; real trees rose up here and there; and Gurun found a path leading uphill to an enormous structure made of stone. Others stood around it and beyond it.

  Gurun’s people kept their sheep and cattle underground, bringing them out each day to graze. The deeper they dug into the earth, and the lower they built on top of it, the better. You could dig in the ground and line the hole with rocks, panel the rocks with timber if you could afford it, and insulate with armloads of dried moss. You would need timber to roof it over, and pile turf onto the roof until all the chinks were filled and you were safe from the winter.

  Such was the only kind of building Gurun knew. These stone structures, with their straight lines and right angles, which towered over the land like trees—these astounded her.

  “Hello!” she called. No human being answered her, only the cries and whistles of some gulls.

  The footpath led straight up to a yawning rectangular hole in the expanse of tightly fitted stones. Higher up were several smaller openings, squares of darkness. Had people built this monument—or trolls? What if there were trolls inside, waiting for her in the dark?

  “Trolls!” Zill used to say, with a snort. “Who has ever seen one?” But that didn’t stop most islanders from believing in them.

  Trolls or no trolls, Gurun had to find some drinking water soon, and food, and something to use as a weapon—she’d lost her fisherman’s knife when the boat sank. She knew she wasn’t going to find any water on top of a hill, so she looked for a way down.

  Cautiously she trod among the silent buildings. You might have thought most of them no bigg
er than ordinary houses, but to Gurun they seemed immense, unnatural, and threatening. There should have been people; it unnerved her that there weren’t any.

  Beyond the cluster of buildings, on the other side of the hill, down at the bottom, she found a pool of water nestled in high, luxuriant grass. Around it, frogs croaked. When she approached, a few of them jumped into the pool. Gurun shied away. She’d never seen frogs before, and she didn’t know what they were.

  But frogs or no frogs, she was thirsty. She stretched herself on the ground and dipped her face in the water, rubbing away the salt. The water seemed deliciously cool. She drank. It was barely drinkable, with a brackish taint to it, but it would do. She drank slowly, savoring it. She washed her arms and soaked her hair, then lay back, resting. The pool lay in the shadow of the hill, but Gurun was still warm enough to enjoy it.

  Not meaning to, she fell asleep. Luckily, something woke her before nightfall.

  She climbed back up the hill. Not for a hearty bowl of chowder would she care to spend the night inside one of those buildings! Still, she ought to take a look inside one while there was still some light. It would be cowardly not to. Her three brothers would have laughed at her—little worms.