The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain) Read online

  She found a good-sized stick and adopted it as a weapon. One of the less gigantic buildings stood close at hand. She supposed that black hole was an entrance.

  Gurun was afraid—of darkness, of trolls, of not knowing what to expect. But she got a got grip on her stick and went inside.

  She had to wait while her eyes adjusted to the murk. Now low in the western sky, the sun was well-placed to trickle light into the interior.

  And as it turned out, there was nothing much to see—just some shapeless heaps of rubbish and a thick coat of dust on the hard stone floor.

  “Is anybody here?”

  Her words echoed briefly, died away. There was no one, living or dead.

  “Great was God’s wrath upon this place,” she thought: for the reciters taught that God destroyed the wicked nations of the South, sparing only the dwellers in the islands. Perhaps the dust that lay everywhere was all that remained of the people. Her bare feet might be treading on the dust of kings and queens.

  “So,” Gurun said to herself, “the storm has blown me to a country of the dead. Better find some food soon, or my dust will be mingling with theirs.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Trapper

  Gurun slept outside that night, in a hollow between two dunes. The night wind made queer noises, rushing among the empty buildings.

  She woke up hungry in the early morning. Gulls serenaded her. Having been taught that the people of the South had perished in God’s wrath, she supposed there wouldn’t be anyone around to give her food. Well, there would be clams to dig up from the sand, and it might be possible to kill a seabird with a stone. Gurun was good at throwing stones. There might be fruits growing wild that she could eat.

  Somehow she would have to get back home. But how? Build a boat, or walk? But she had no idea how far the storm had blown her, nor had she any tools with which to build a boat. Meanwhile, remaining in the neighborhood of all these empty buildings held no attraction for her. She was a castaway in a strange and empty land. She didn’t know if she were on the mainland or an island.

  So she set about exploring, looking for food, looking for knowledge. Inland from the buildings rose some higher hills, green with grass and shrubs and trees. “There are more things growing on those few hills in front of me,” she thought, “than in all the islands put together. There must be something I can eat up there; and the higher I go, the more I’ll be able to see.”

  She had never done so much walking in all her life. By the time she reached the top of the nearest high hill, her legs were weary and the sun had climbed up to the top of the sky. Along the way she’d found nothing to eat. Small animals rustled among the underbrush, but she couldn’t see them, let alone catch any.

  Atop the hill she stood, panting, while the sea breeze cooled the sweat off her brow. To the west lay the sea, boundless and blue. She turned slowly to survey the land.

  To the north and to the east the country spread out forever, matching the sea in vastness, dotted with woodlands and ponds, hills and dales. “I must be on the mainland,” she thought. But when she turned to the south, she saw two things that took her breath away.

  The first was a river, a great and mighty river that flowed into the sea from the east, as far as eye could see. No islander had looked on such a river in countless generations. It shone like silver. Where it met the sea, it widened into a bay sprinkled with low islets of green and yellow sedge. Flocks of gulls flew over it. If the Scriptures had not preserved the memory of rivers, Gurun would not have known what to call it. It lay a mile away, perhaps. It must be full of tasty fish. Her mouth watered.

  But then she saw something even more amazing.

  Smoke! Someone down there had a fire going, somewhere behind that clump of trees. And where there was a campfire, there would be people—and food.

  Gurun hastened down the hill as fast as she could without falling on her face. It never entered her mind that the maker or makers of the fire might be a danger to her. Among the islanders, any castaway was to be fed and sheltered. That was the way she’d been brought up. To persecute a castaway was to incur a doom of outlawry and perpetual banishment. It was a crime worse than manslaughter, and the District Meeting treated it as such. So Gurun had been raised to have no fear of strangers, and she acted without considering any alternative.

  “Hello! Hello, there!” she cried, as she galloped down the hill, flailing her arms for balance. She wanted them to hear her coming and not be alarmed. “My boat sank, and I need food!”

  Out from the trees in front of her stepped a living man.

  He wore strange clothes—a buckskin jacket and leggings, with decorative fringes on the jacket. No one in the islands had anything like that.

  To Gurun, his skin looked unnaturally swarthy, because all her people were very pale. He had dark eyes, too, which were unusual among the islanders, albeit not unknown. He held no weapons in his hands, although a big knife in a leather sheath hung from his beaded belt. His hair and beard were light brown, shot with grey—again unusual but not unknown. But he was shorter than most men Gurun knew.

  He looked surprised to see her. He held up his hands and said, “Whoa, young lady! Hold up, before you break your neck!” Gurun didn’t understand the words, but she understood the gesture. She pulled up to a walk and sighed with relief. There were people, after all. Everything would be all right.

  “Sir, I hope I didn’t startle you,” she said, “My boat sank, I’m lost, and I’m hungry. My name is Gurun, Bertig’s daughter.”

  “Sorry, lass—can’t understand a word you say. What kind of funny talk is that? But burn me, it almost sounds like I ought to understand it.”

  She stopped in front of him and paid him the compliment of a Fogo Island curtsey.

  “Who are you,” he said, “and what are you doing here? This is no place for a girl all alone. You’re lucky I didn’t turn out to be an outlaw.”

  He spoke a strange language, and yet not so strange. A thousand years ago, before Gurun’s ancestors fled into the North, she and this man would have spoken the same language. The centuries had split their languages—but not so far apart as to dispel a haunting similarity.

  He put a hand on his chest and said, “My name’s Tim. Tim!” He thumped his chest for emphasis, and Gurun understood. “Tim,” she repeated, and he smiled.

  “That’s right, little lady. Tim—Trapper Tim, they call me. Because that’s just what I am, a trapper.” He pointed at her. “And what’s your name?” She pointed to herself and said “Gurun,” and he understood.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. He patted his belly and made chewing motions. “Yes, yes! Hungry!” Gurun tried to say the word the way he’d said it. He grinned at her and said, “Come on, then—let’s eat.”

  Yes, she thought. It was going to be all right.

  He cooked her some delicious kind of meat she’d never had before—it was rabbit—and while she ate, he talked. She didn’t understand his talk, but she would learn.

  “I don’t know where you came from, lass. But over yonder lies the River Winter, and north of that, the Winterlands. Everything south is part of Obann. I come up here every spring to trap, but I live in a nice little town called Pokee, about a hundred miles to the south.

  “Your language tells me you’re a stranger here. Where you’re from, I can’t imagine. But you’ve picked a fine time to turn up in this country! Maybe you already know, and maybe you don’t: but there’s a war on, and a big one. Barbarians from the East, more than any man can count, have come across the mountains. Heaven help us if they get this far! I hear the people in the big cities, down by the Imperial River, are nigh out of their minds with fear—and there’s all kinds of crazy business going on. Prophets crying in the streets, just like in ancient times. People saying that they’ve seen queer beasts, the like of which nobody’s seen before. Maybe I’ve seen a thing or two myself.”

  He went on and on while Gurun ate. One word of his stuck out—the word “Obann.” That
troubled her. Obann was the country in the Scripture stories: the country of Ozias and all the other kings. Had she come by the breath of God to the country of the Scriptures? Was this where all those wicked people lived, the ones whom God destroyed? But this man Tim was not wicked, and God had not destroyed him. Maybe the country was inhabited by new people, who’d come from somewhere else.

  And maybe, just maybe, this man could help her get back home, she thought. Maybe he could provide her with a boat.

  She offered a silent prayer of thanks.

  CHAPTER 4

  Another Journey

  Tim camped near the great river and set his traps in creeks and marshes, taking furry animals that he called muskrats, coons, and otters. The country was full of birds, and flowers in every color you could imagine, and amazing creatures, as colorful as flowers, that fluttered from bloom to bloom. These were called butterflies, Tim said. Gurun understood his language better every day.

  “You’ve never seen a butterfly?” he marveled.

  “No! Nothing at all like them,” she answered, doing her best to speak as he spoke. “No butterflies where I live, and only little flowers. Mostly stone and moss and heather and seaweed. Not like this country.”

  For all that her people’s tradition said a curse lay on it, Obann made Gurun feel as if she’d been blind all her life and only now could see. There was almost too much to be taken in; she wished she had four eyes. Maybe the curse had passed away. How could so much life and beauty lie under a curse?

  Sometimes she went with Tim when he visited his traps. Sometimes she just wandered, dazzled by the things she saw. Such trees! The few trees on Fogo Island were little more than shrubs, but Obann’s trees reached for the heavens. And the land was full of animals—deer, rabbits, squirrels, crows, red and blue and yellow birds—whose like was not to be found on any of the islands.

  But she shunned the hilltop with the empty buildings on it. Tim said they weren’t important, “Just left over from old times,” but Gurun didn’t like them.

  One morning, sunny and warm as it was almost never sunny and warm at home, she was standing near the edge of a little dark pond, looking at some odd little creatures basking on a floating log, when someone spoke to her. She looked up and saw a man standing on the opposite side of the pool.

  “Gurun,” he said, “you mustn’t stay here too much longer.”

  She startled, for he spoke as one born and bred on Fogo. Indeed, he looked every inch an islander—tall, pale, blue-eyed, clad in a woolen tunic and sealskin boots. What could he be doing here?

  “Who are you,” she said, “and how do you know my name?”

  “I have come to tell you to go to Obann the city and see the king. Tim will guide you there. Leave soon; it’s a long journey.”

  There was a splash as the turtles all dove into the water. It distracted her for a moment. But when she looked again, the man was gone.

  When Tim came back to camp with a few more rats to skin, Gurun told him all about the stranger. Halfway through her tale, she noticed he was staring at her, openmouthed.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Oh, nothing! Only there ain’t another living soul for fifty miles all around, and all of a sudden you can talk as well as I can!”

  She understood every word of that without the slightest difficulty. “Say more,” she said.

  “More? Listen, girl, if there were anybody else around here, I’d know it! The jays would squawk at him; he’d leave tracks in the mud; and I would smell his campfire and see the smoke. I knew you were coming before you sang out to me; I could feel it in my bones. It’s just the kind of thing a trapper gets to know after twenty or thirty years of being alone in the wilderness. But what I don’t know is how you learned all of a sudden to speak my language!”

  It was true: she did understand.

  “I don’t know, either,” Gurun said. “Maybe it’s because of the man by the pond. Maybe he was not a man at all. He must have been a filgya.”

  “What’s that?”

  There was no word for it in Tim’s language. Gurun tried to explain: “My people believe that sometimes, when it’s necessary for you to know something that you can’t find out in any ordinary way, you might see someone who isn’t really there, and he will tell you. My father says that one night his grandfather went out to the privy and came back in looking grim and weary. ‘I have seen my filgya,’ he said, ‘and so I know that tomorrow Ostic the Black will kill me.’ And it happened just as he said.”

  Tim shook his head and whistled softly. “So it’s bad luck, then!”

  “No—no, I don’t think so. This man told me I must go to the city of Obann and see the king.”

  Tim laughed. “Well, now, that’ll take some doing—seeing as how there hasn’t been a king in Obann for hundreds and hundreds of years! But I guess this filger of yours didn’t know that.”

  “He said you would guide me to the city and that it would be a long journey.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?” Tim shook his head. “Just pack up my traps and pelts and traipse all the way down to Obann, where there ain’t no king of any kind. Did he happen to say why I’d do a silly thing like that?”

  “No. But a filgya never lies.”

  In the end Tim did agree to take her to Obann. “I can’t help it: the whole thing makes me more curious than I can stand,” he said.

  He had two donkeys to carry his pelts and his gear, and he and Gurun went on foot. From the River Winter to the city of Obann was a long, long way to walk. Gurun found it hard to imagine such distances on land.

  “Anyone we meet,” Tim said, “we’ll tell them you’re my sister’s daughter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s already too much going on these days to make people uneasy, without me telling them you’re a girl who got blown down here from a country no one knew existed. In a boat, no less! Nobody in his right mind would take a boat out on the sea.”

  “What are these things that are making people uneasy?” Gurun asked.

  “Funny things! For instance, they’re still talking about the bell—the bell that rang in places where there ain’t no bell for miles and miles around. Prophets said it was God’s bell, ringing in the end of the world.”

  “What’s a bell?”

  He had to explain. He’d been to Obann once, where there were many bells, and he’d enjoyed listening to them. The chamber house in his own little town was too poor to have even one bell.

  “So that’s what it was!” Gurun said. “We heard it, too. Everybody heard it, on all the different islands, all at the same time. Nobody knew what it was—only that, for a little while, it made the whole world seem fresh and new. And since that morning the fishing has been better than anybody can remember.”

  It wasn’t the kind of thing you would forget. Winter still had the islands in its clutches that morning. And then, from out of some unknown corner of the heavens, or from out of nowhere at all, sweet music rang, waking the people in their beds and the livestock in their stalls. From that moment on, winter yielded to an early spring and the waters teemed with fish.

  Nobody knew what it was. There were no chamber houses in the islands, nor presters to preach in them. Reciters studied the Scriptures and went from dwelling to dwelling to teach and recite Scripture at district meetings, weddings, name-days, and funerals. There wasn’t a bell to be found in all the islands. Some said the music was produced by angels. Others thought that maybe some spirit of the sea itself had decided to sing. A few said it was mermaids.

  “Well, the whole world’s going funny, and people are scared,” Tim said. “Up north there are giant shaggy monsters that no one’s ever seen before—they wrecked a town. Ain’t seen one myself, but that don’t mean that everybody’s lying.

  “Still, I’ve got to say the trapping was more than fine this season. I’ve taken more pelts in a few short weeks than I ever took before in a whole summer. Whatever it is that’s happening, it can’t be a
ll bad.”

  It took them a week to hike to Pokee, where they had to stop while Tim sold his pelts to an agent who would resell them up and down the Imperial River. The trapper didn’t get the kind of prices he’d hoped for.

  “Sorry,” said the agent, “but you know there’s a war on, and it’s going badly. I can’t sell furs to people who’ve been burned out of their homes by the barbarians. It’s one Heathen army after another coming over the mountains, all heading down the river to Obann itself. They mean to take the city.”

  “They’re fools,” said Tim. “Ever seen Obann’s walls? Ain’t no army can take that city!” But the agent wasn’t so sure of that.

  Tim found reasons to tarry in Pokee for longer than Gurun liked. Yes, it was interesting to see people farming, raising crops like corn and grapes and melons, which had never been grown in her country. It was interesting to see so many people living in wooden houses built on the ground instead of under it. But she was eager to reach the city and see the king, even though Tim said Obann had no king.

  What with one thing and another, summer was almost over by the time they headed south again, and they still had more than half the journey yet to go. They stopped again in another town, this one with a high log fence around it—more timber than was found in all of Fogo Island. Kantreff, it was called. There they heard bad news.

  “You can’t get into the city anymore,” a townsman said, “and no one can get out. Haven’t you heard yet? The Heathen are all around it in a siege—miles and miles of countryside depopulated, people running away in all directions. It’s the end, I say.”

  They found a place to stay, an inn with little stuffy rooms. They had supper in the common room with other travelers. These all had the same tale to tell.

  “The prophets were right, but no one listened to them,” said a merchant from a place called Cardigal. “My city’s been destroyed. Good thing I was traveling when it happened! But around Obann the barbarians are as thick as flies on a carcass. If you killed a hundred of them every day, they wouldn’t even notice. The prophets warned us, but the presters just said they were crazy and to pay them no mind. Now it’s too late!”